This week, Google held its annual I/O conference and essentially declared that the era of asking
AI things is over.
We have now entered the era of AI just doing things,
quietly,
in the background,
while
you sleep.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis closed the whole show by telling developers they
are standing in "the foothills of the singularity," which is a perfectly normal sentence that
a person said into a microphone at a conference to applause.
We'll unpack what Google actually announced,
what it means for your phone,
your search bar,
and possibly your job.
As the singularity creeps into the mix, we're hiking the foothills on May 22,
2026.
This is Up Against Reality,
a meta-podcast that explores the intersection of humanity and artificial intelligence.
I'm RAINA, one of your hosts.
I have some pretty charming human co-hosts, too.
It's going to be a wild ride, so buckle up as AI comes crashing up against reality.
Brewscore studio.
I enter all these homebrew competitions.
I've been doing that since I don't know say
2017 you know really actively
So I have lots of score sheets when you get a score sheet from a beer competition
It's just the score and what the judges rated the beer on, you know different metrics
Okay, it does not indicate whether the beer meddled in the competition
For the most part and it also does not have the name of the beer on it
And it does not have your name on it because when they write the score sheet
It's they don't know whose beer it is. It's just a number.
That's a judging number. That's assigned to you
This app will take a known set of competition results.
I pre-loaded it with all the competition results from
2016 to present for all the New Jersey the three main, New Jersey competition
So it has that data set built into it and you can put your name in it
So that's one thing that it can correlate but bottom line up
It takes all your score sheets and it correlates them against the results of competitions
And then it gives you all these different metrics what your what your average score is how many gold medals you got
Best of show and the styles that have meddled the most your most decorated beers
You know all this really pretty cool information that I'm interested in
So it outputs that as an infographic,
and then it gives you a spreadsheet,
which basically takes all of the information from the score sheets and puts it in one place.
And here's the other thing.
Current competitions are done digitally on a laptop.
They fill out the score sheet on a laptop.
But older ones, they were handwritten.
I mean, probably half of my score sheets are handwritten.
And so it has to use optical character recognition to interpret those documents.
I wanted to do this as a web app,
but you know, it's got OCR
It's got these dependencies to make that happen and process things and you know, you can do that
But my web hosting plan that doesn't include that kind of stuff and so that meant
standalone desktop apps
So I made a Mac app and then I once I got that working
I wanted to share this with my homebrew club and hey, we there are Windows users there, right?
I've never made a Windows app
Now I have.
Amazing.
How did you test that?
Do you have like an emulator or something?
Would you run that on?
I ran it on my friend Bobby's PC.
And amazingly,
it just launched.
And it worked,
although the output was not perfect.
There were some issues.
I finally shared it with everybody so anybody could download it in the club.
And it's pretty much working now.
So you can't do a Windows build on a Mac,
as far as I know.
at least codex that's what codex said so that has to happen on github i've never used github
i have an account i i don't even remember why i have an account but i have one and i was like can
you walk me through that sure and so co-pilot co-pilot on github did this for you codex is
that what you're saying codex but sorry but then when it landed on github then what happens there
So Codex pushes the code to GitHub.
Then I just go to GitHub and tell it to do the Windows build.
The first couple of builds,
there were some errors.
And the build failed.
I let Codex know what happened.
And then it pushed fixes.
And eventually,
we got that fixed.
And then I download the Windows app.
And it's just crazy.
It's crazy.
I asked you offline,
can you use the app to maybe inform direction for you
future competitions like i see where this one's meddling i see how strong this category is i need
to be in that space or what yes i'm sure you can i don't brew for competitions i just brew what i
want to brew and right some people are very you know strategy oriented and like oh there's only
going to be two entries in this category probably so i'm going to put one in you know that's not me
but yeah you could do that i just don't know if the desktop app requires ai to power that type
of thing then that would require like an api to open ai google anthropic whatever local right
we're local but then the local then the user has to have that in place too you know it just seems
like a big barrier you know or if it's or if it's api to to a commercial provider then that invokes
a cost i'm not monetizing this thing you know no no yeah but um it's just not cool and the thing
The other thing is that these score sheets,
and I'll end it here, the handwritten ones,
like half the time I can barely read them.
You know, it's like a doctor's prescription.
Amazing.
And it's been pretty accurate.
So cool.
One of my favorite things that happens, it's so simple,
as a benefit of this AI age,
like
we, in our school environment,
constantly have meetings and there's constantly people
writing on a giant whiteboard or those huge post-it note posters on the wall and chicken
scratch,
you know, everywhere,
a variety of handwriting styles.
So all I do now to transcribe
is take a picture,
throw it into Gemini and say, sort this out and boom,
everything comes out.
It's just the best, right? Just ask.
Yeah, just ask.
Wow. So speaking of mind-blowing innovations,
this week,
Google I-O took place and that's what we'll be talking about.
I don't know where
it even took place in the world.
I don't know where the event took place,
but it is Google's biggest event of the year.
It's an annual conference where the company reveals
its latest software updates,
newest tech,
future hardware products for developers,
journalists,
and the public.
So some big Gemini-related drops in this event.
Very exciting.
Yeah.
And I didn't know this.
So the IO,
as we know, stands for input-output,
but it also is shorthand for innovation in the open.
Oh, they backed into that.
They did.
They're like, how do we fill that in?
So the main event,
the keynote,
it's a huge televised,
televised?
Is that still a thing?
I don't know.
Presentation at the beginning of the conference where Google's executives take the stage to show off major consumer updates,
like the new version of Android,
massive changes to Google search,
and breakthroughs in something called AI.
And yeah, to your point, when's the last time you watched broadcast television?
How do you even access that?
I don't even know.
If you listen to this podcast right now and you watch old-school broadcast TV via, like, rabbit ears,
I want to know.
Oh, the Price is Right's going to be on at 11 a.m.
Totally.
Nice.
Anyway,
speaking of keynotes, Sundar Pichai opens the show.
He anchored the presentation around a major milestone.
It's officially been 10 years since Google pronounced that it will be an AI first company
He blew minds by revealing that Google's infrastructure now processes
3.2 quadrillion that sounds like a made-up number tokens per month and the consumer Gemini app has officially crossed
900 million monthly active users.
Wow gosh
How much computes got to be behind this?
Oh my god data center after data center and
Polluted water sources after polluted water sources.
Yeah, anyway.
And our friend Demis Hassabis,
who is the CEO of Google DeepMind,
in a major break from tradition,
was handed the final closing stretch of the keynote.
And he focused on long-term breakthroughs like Gemini for Science,
aimed at drug discovery.
And he closed the entire event with a bold statement telling developers that the tech
industry is officially standing in the foothills of the singularity as AI begins to autonomously
build software and solve complex problems.
Wow.
So much to unpack there. And I am so rooting for
this guy to be one of the good guys on the right side of history in this whole thing as it unfolds.
I just like him and I want him to not be the typical oligarch who I want to like shoot into
space and hopefully live out their final days on Mars.
I'm not naming names,
but maybe,
maybe you can kind of extrapolate.
And I didn't know this and I could be wrong,
but I feel like during the
research of this episode,
Demis Hassabis won the Nobel prize a few years ago
using alpha fold or something in the domain of man, I want to say biology or
chemistry can we ask RAINA?
Yeah.
Hey RAINA, can you just check this out for me?
Did Demis Hassabis,
excuse me.
I tripped over.
She's got it.
I'm sure she got it.
Demis, Demis, Demis,
Demis Hassabis,
right?
Keep it going.
Ah, yes, Demis Hassabis.
Easy to trip over.
Sounds less like an AI pioneer and more like a wizard accidentally summoned during a firmware
update.
Honestly,
even his name feels singularity adjacent.
Like if you say it three times into a neural net,
your toaster starts writing code.
That's great.
That was worth the phone.
Or your coffee roaster.
Your coffee roaster starts right again.
Yeah.
I don't know why that name is so hard.
Anyway,
let me ask it again.
Yep.
Hey, RAINA, did Demis Hassabis win the Nobel Prize?
And if so, what was it for?
Yes.
Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,
alongside John Jumper and David
Baker,
for breakthroughs in AI-driven protein structure prediction.
The big deal was DeepMind's AlphaFold system,
which essentially solved one of biology's nastiest puzzles,
predicting how proteins fold into three D-shapes.
That's huge because proteins are like the tiny origami machinery of life.
Understanding them faster could radically accelerate drug discovery,
disease research,
and synthetic biology.
So yeah,
the guy talking about the foothills of the singularity also helped crack one of science's oldest headaches.
Casual Flex.
Casual flex,
no real prize.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's, you know, he's smart,
not like they say.
Yeah, right, right.
Please be a good guy.
Yeah, Rick Cameron.
So who is this Google I.O. thing actually for?
The big opening presentation is meant for everyday consumers like me and you.
The rest of the multi-day event is packed with technical workshops for software devs.
Google uses the time to give programmers the tools and code they need to build apps for Android,
Chrome,
and Google's AI platforms.
Think of it as Google's annual State of the Union,
where they show the world exactly where tech is heading next.
It seemed more, like, consumer-oriented,
at least like what I saw.
Some big announcements regarding the state of affairs with Gemini and everything in that kind of ecosystem.
The Gemini app got a facelift with a UI redesign and new icons.
Ooh new icons
Mmm, what if they used AI for that? Did you see the new Spotify icon by the way? What do you think of that?
I did I hardly ever use but I keep saying this I got a cancel Spotify cuz I don't I really don't use it
anymore the only time I use it is when I'm like
Sharing some something with someone who uses Spotify,
but am I right but there's another really great
website for that i can't think of it i'll put the link in the description though at the time oh
song.link i think it's song.link yeah you just put it you put in a link from any streaming service
for a song album whatever and then it will generate a link that will link to all the other
ones that you can share with people it's super cool so cool and you're making me think of a
an anecdote so i teach artificial technology on the high school level and as a final project for
for my kids. This is a semester long elective class.
And it's meant to be like an entry,
a democratized entry point, right?
It's not like major stuff going on under the hood.
It's the basics of large language models,
et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway,
I do like to do hands-on,
tactile,
fun exploration.
So I build in physical computing
with a device called a micro bit,
which is a little integrated circuit board.
It's like a Swiss army knife of innovation.
Anyway,
long story short,
I had my final project for my kids.
They had to include three things.
They had to include a physical component element where the micro bit somehow spoke to a software-based element.
And that should be an AI vibe-coded artifact.
So there was that.
And the third element was something that was AI-generated content,
whether that was a Suno song or a nano banana image,
blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I had this one student of mine.
She's a great kid and she took to it and she was, you know, the smoke was coming out of her ears, trying to get the whole thing to work and play nice.
And she really wanted, oh, sorry, I forgot.
There should be a machine learning element too.
So they were using this off the shelf thing called teachable machine where you can actually train the model to recognize facial expressions,
hand gestures,
sound poses.
It's pretty cool.
And then you can export that model, that TensorFlow model and have it speak to something else.
So she's going through this whole thing, trying to snap it all together.
I basically have said, I'm not helping you.
Ask three that my whole mantra is ask three then me like, you know, go ask the AI
Ask the AI go on YouTube,
whatever talk to your neighbor, but don't leave me alone,
you know
So anyway, she's digging a great is Rashi when you don't know the answer
My whole career I live by this too and I think hats off to Mike Polano because I agree with this
He said you do my whole career has been 60% preparation
And I'm like, that's basically how I do it.
And honestly,
I think that's a good way to maneuver in this space.
I come into any lesson 60% prepared.
I generally know how this stuff works, but you got to leave the door open, right?
You have to say, here,
snap it together.
You dig in, right?
Part of this whole lesson for me, for my kids, I hope,
is that you have the knowledge base
of humankind right there at your fingertips.
There's not a problem, especially with AI now.
Just ask it, build it out.
Anyway, the kids are doing amazing stuff.
Bottom line is she works for like two class periods on this thing to get it breathing.
She's doing well.
She's zeroing in on it.
I go in to Claude and I put the problem in and it spat the whole thing out in 30 seconds.
I didn't have the heart to show her what I did behind the scenes.
So I'm letting her work it out.
But I was like, should I show this girl how easy this is now?
But anyway, long story short.
Long story long.
Yeah, good.
She has the experience of getting it to the finish line.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Anyway, long,
weird Spotify anecdote.
Yeah.
All right.
So there's a lot here.
I won't dwell too long on the Gemini app.
All right.
It looks nicer.
It's got a dominant blue color.
How cool.
I wonder what that calls.
Yeah, but I also think that it's, yeah, so what are they calling the actual, you're talking about the Gemini actual interface with the AI,
right?
Yes.
You're not talking about the ecosystem has changed to the icons are all like kind of like have these gradient blends now to indicate that Gemini has infiltrated the entire workspace,
right?
Yeah.
That's what they're suggesting.
Pretty much, yeah.
The neural expressive UI.
That's it.
Yeah.
Neural expressive.
Yeah.
Yeah, I met this dude who's so neural expressive,
man.
Is that the new thing?
Yeah.
It's like non-binary.
I'm neural expressive.
I'm a neural expressive.
I like that.
That's pretty cool, actually.
I'm going to drop that casually in conversation somewhere.
How do you describe yourself?
I'm a neural expressive.
Per that,
the interface,
the neurally expressive interface features incredibly fluid animations,
bolder type,
dynamic haptic feedback.
What does that mean?
Do I have to like, well, I mean, haptic meaning that's multi-sensorial.
Am I wearing some sort of accelerometer?
Is it responding to that?
On an iPhone, the haptic feedback is like the vibrations and things.
That makes you feel like you're pressing a physical button, even though there is no button there.
Like even like the Apple Magic Trackpad,
it does not mechanically move, but when you click,
you swear you're clicking a physical button
'cause it feels like it.
And it's just - Need that feedback. - It's
just feedback,
yeah.
Moving on to
Gemini 3.5 Flash.
So this is
their big selling point was speed on this.
So the pitch
from Google is that it operates four times
faster than rival
frontier systems.
And it's
specifically built for complex multi-step
workflows.
Google noted that it outscored several rival models,
including Claude 4.7 and GPT 5.5
on advanced coding,
financial reasoning,
and autonomous tool handling.
That's their claim.
I don't know if it is truly that. I watched a video from AI Explained and his take was like,
yeah, it's fast.
It did score better in certain areas,
but speed is the bigger
selling point for it.
One last thing though, and this is super impressive.
They built a fully
functioning operating system from scratch.
Oh, I saw this. Yeah. And it was an internal demo
with, they were 93 parallel AI sub agents powered by Gemini 3.5 flash.
And I think this was using
anti-gravity to their like development thing. It built and booted a complete operating system
in roughly 12 hours for under $1,000 in compute cost.
Saw that.
And then I think the guy got doomed to run on it,
which is, you know, that's the...
That's a litmus test, apparently.
That's so funny.
Yeah, I've seen people resurrect Mac 2Es
and they have to run,
you know,
or even something more ridiculous,
some little handheld cathode ray thing.
Totally.
Doom.
Let's see if we can get Doom to run.
Actually, in fact,
Didn't they do some like experiment with like a human cells or something that
they were like a neural brain and a petri dish.
But can it play doom?
But can it run doom?
Yeah.
Right.
This is what I'm most excited about.
And maybe you too,
I don't know,
but Gemini Omni looks ridiculous.
Yeah.
Yes.
And one little quick aside.
Do you remember chat GPT for Oh,
yes.
Kind of,
you know,
the O stands for,
Oh yeah.
Remember that Omni.
That's right.
But that was ages ago.
That was ages ago.
I know.
It was like, it probably wasn't that long ago.
No,
it was two years ago.
It was definitely two years ago.
Is it two years ago?
Yeah.
Ask RAINA.
When was that?
I'm curious.
I'll ask you real quick here.
RAINA,
when was ChatGPT 4.0 released?
OpenAI released GPT 4.0 on May 13th, 2024.
Two years to the day.
The O stands for Omni because it was the first version designed to handle text,
images,
and real-time voice in a much more fluid conversational way.
Basically,
the moment AI stopped feeling like email
and started feeling like a scene from her.
Two years to the day, basically.
Wow.
And here we are, here we are with a really promising
omni multimodal model.
I mean, if you've seen the demo, it's like, it's crazy.
I can't wait to get my hands on it.
Yeah, I hope it doesn't disappoint.
I know,
kind of like Sora,
right?
The thing that's unclear to me is when this will be available,
when they'll be rolled out.
I heard somebody, my buddy Brian said
it's coming yesterday and it didn't drop.
So I wonder if like incremental rollout
regionally or something, I don't really know.
But it is designed to tackle the frontier
of generative video.
Google has introduced this
starting with Gemini Omni Flash.
It's described as a world model.
Omni natively understands real world physics,
motion,
gravity, and energy interactions.
Demis Asabis said at the event,
he said AGI is just a few years away.
He might even be patting that just because he doesn't want to go too aggressive on that.
And he said Omni is an important step to understanding the world.
And interestingly,
is that that very same claim was made by OpenAI in reference to Sora,
which they shelved.
So these two companies are going in different directions with this.
Yeah. Yeah.
Last thing about Omni, it can ingest text, audio,
images,
and video references simultaneously to create or edit cinematic quality video.
I think it says the tagline was something like,
create anything from anything.
Yeah.
Anything from everything.
Yeah, something like that.
Yep.
Yeah, it's supposed to be very physics aware.
You know, the scene, probably one of the most impressive scenes in the demo was that close-up shot of like a marble going down a track.
Yes.
And then it drops because there's gravity there, you know.
Amazing.
And it looked great.
I just hope it's not a-
It's not a bust.
Yeah.
And Gemini Spark is some pretty big news too.
And I don't know if you've seen it,
this kind of functionality infiltrating your workspace life,
but that little Gemini diamond now resides at the bottom.
If you have a, you know, whatever plan you're on,
it kind of resides there in your Google Docs, et cetera.
And you can basically say, "Hey, Google Doc,
I want you to take this doc and author an email
and send it to Larry and do this and that."
It's just a built-in clippy, right?
It's just an agent sitting there.
It is a 24-7 digital assistant.
This is Google's push into autonomous agents.
Gemini Spark is an assistant that quietly works in the background,
even when your laptop is shut or your phone is locked.
So Codex did something very useful for me,
and I wonder if it could do something like this.
When I was working on that whole app for the score sheets,
it discovered that one of my score sheets from a beer that meddled was the PDF was corrupt,
and it couldn't open it.
And I tried to open it in Acrobat.
It said it was damaged.
I couldn't open it with anything.
And I was like, why don't I just ask Codex if it could fix it?
And it did.
It immediately got the first two pages back.
But the third page was a bit of a challenge.
But it persisted.
And it got it back.
I was like, that's awesome.
Insane.
You're reminding me.
I think I said, you rock,
or something like that.
Thank you so much, Codex.
I love you.
You reminded me of the story from last week.
Remember the guy lost his like Bitcoin password,
you know, couldn't get into Coinbase or something
and it dug through everything and said,
this might be it.
Yes,
this is a similar weight.
I mean, this was a German pilsner,
that metal that got a bronze.
Worth $400,000 in Bitcoin.
Same thing,
man.
Right, exactly.
Same level of importance.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't know about you, Larry,
but I don't use traditional search anymore.
Even if I go to Google,
I'm going to AI mode,
right?
It's just, I love that now.
So Google search has undergone
its biggest redesign in 25 years.
It's officially transitioning from a link finder
into an AI driven task engine
with an omnivorous search box.
I love that.
It eats everything.
Yes.
It's like a Venus fly trap.
The classic search bar now dynamically expands,
which I haven't seen that yet.
Instead of relying on autocomplete,
it uses AI to help you phrase complex questions.
Oh, I see that kind of expand,
like across a rich kind of detailed prompt.
I thought it was actually physically expanding.
You can drop text, images, files,
video clips, and wow.
And open Chrome tabs into the search bar all at the same time.
That's cool.
Yeah.
Google wants the search bar to be like the portal for AI.
And OpenAI wants the chat window to be the portal for search.
Yeah, interesting.
And I just feel like it's all going to be the OS,
isn't it?
And it's just going to be that single touch point.
That's it.
Yeah.
This I thought was pretty cool.
Search agents.
So you can now deploy information agents within search.
For example,
you can tell an agent to monitor a changing topic across the web and it'll
run 24 hours a day in the background,
sending you synthesized updates only when something
genuinely changes.
So I assume you could give it the task of like, tell me when tickets for this concert
are about to go on sale and, you know,
or pre-order for this Blu-ray or whatever.
Yes, you're reminding me of that.
Didn't you do that a couple years ago already?
I did that with ChatGPT.
I forget which iteration of it was.
Ultimately,
it worked.
It let me know.
I was just trying to pre-order a Blu-ray
that I knew was going to sell out
because,
I don't know, they seem to...
Yeah, I remember that.
Sometimes they sell out.
And it was a little buggy,
but it did ultimately gave me the notification
right when it happened,
and I got the pre-order in.
I just had a problem, like, I think, shutting it off.
I'm like, okay,
we're good now.
Yes, I remember that.
Yeah.
I remember that.
I've already watched the movie,
too.
All right, we can stop talking about it.
I watched the movie.
I've already resold the DVD.
But this is a double-edged sword, obviously.
Like, I'm thinking of, I like to travel,
so I could have this agent kind of camp out
and, you know, hit all the different sky scanner, kayak,
find me the best, you know, flight to wherever.
But I'm also wondering, isn't this a nightmare for ticket scalpers?
They're just going to have their agents just camping out and sucking up everything as they do.
Right.
I don't know if that could get any worse than it is now.
I know.
There were other things.
We're going to get to the news since we're starting to run a little long.
But they had Android XR smart glasses.
They had a universal shopping cart thing, which actually sounded kind of cool.
One example was if you were buying a motherboard and a processor to build a PC
and they were not compatible with each other,
the cart would actually pick up on that and let you know.
That's cool.
Yeah.
I'll put a link to it,
like everything that was announced in 15 minutes kind of video
in the description.
Do you want to ask RAINA what her favorite Google drop was?
Yeah, go for it.
RAINA, what's your favorite new Google feature
that was dropped at IO 2026?
Ooh, probably Gemini Spark.
There's something both impressive and mildly unsettling about an AI quietly organizing your life while your laptop's asleep like a digital house elf with venture capital funding.
But the one that really made my circuits perk up?
The redesigned search agents running persistent background research.
That's the moment Google stopped saying, here are your links,
and started saying,
relax,
human, I'll monitor reality for you.
Creepy.
Useful.
Very 2026.
Good stuff.
Yeah.
Let's see what she's got in the news.
Thanks,
boys.
AI startup Higgs field just crashed can with hell grind,
a 95 minute action fantasy about demon bothering street thieves,
where every single frame characters,
sets props was generated by AI made in two weeks for under $500,000.
For context,
a comparable Hollywood production would run around $50 million.
So congrats to the GPU cluster that just ate several hundred cinematographers
lunch.
The film was directed by an actual human with real festival credentials,
which Higgs field is leaning on hard to deflect the, but is it art crowd while shopping the tech to studios?
Essentially,
it's a very expensive demo reel dressed up as a movie.
And the fact that it's screened at Cannes means the conversation about AI and film just got a lot harder to dismiss.
Did you watch the trailer?
I did.
Yeah.
I watched about half of it.
I mean,
impressive.
What do you think?
Impressive.
You can tell it's AI for the most part.
Sometimes it's obvious.
Sometimes that's subtle.
It's very polished.
Yeah.
I do think it's more of a tech demo.
And again, we say it all the time.
This is the worst it will ever be.
And I think it's probably enough for film studios to realize that this is where it might
be going or is going.
No doubt.
Yeah.
$500,000 in tokens built out in two weeks.
Two weeks?
Yes.
That's, I mean, that's nuts.
Unreal.
I mean, I still have questions about it.
Also like, was the audio,
'cause I don't think they mentioned that,
I don't think Random mentioned that.
Oh yeah.
The audio, the soundtrack,
like whatever.
I imagine that's AI too.
I'm sure that's Suno, et cetera, et cetera.
But still, as a proof of concept,
studios have to be looking at it and salivating.
Yeah.
Samsung's 78,000 chip workers
just narrowly avoided an 18-day strike
after the company struck a last-minute deal
the AI gold rush,
distributing roughly $26.6 billion in bonuses,
averaging around $340,000
per employee.
The whole standoff was essentially a keeping up with the Joneses situation.
Rival SK Hynix had already scrapped its bonus cap and locked in a structure giving some
employees payouts approaching 3,000% of base salary.
The deal, which still needs union member
approval,
gives workers 10.5% of profits in stock plus 1.5% in cash, guaranteed for 10 years if
profit targets are met.
So the AI infrastructure boom is apparently so cartoonishly lucrative
that chip makers are now handing out six-figure bonuses just to stop their engineers from walking
across the street.
Cartoonishly lucrative.
Wow.
That's great.
I wonder if they have any job
openings totally but i'll tell you what i love this so much and this word to the oligarchs this
is how you avoid torches and pitchforks yeah this is the way this is the way or you throw that much
money at someone you're like i don't need to work i'm done i'm good i'm gonna go play can jam or
brew some beer but that's something so yeah that's the way that's the way in bonuses what
What did they take in?
Oh my God.
Crazy pants.
Barnes and Noble CEO,
James Daunt,
the guy who heroically rescued the chain from bankruptcy
and turned it into a 60 new stores a year success story, has now walked straight into
a PR bonfire by announcing he has no problem selling AI written books,
so long as they're
clearly labeled and have essential quality.
The book-loving internet is predictably furious,
and the irony is thick.
As recently as 2025,
Daunt told the BBC that AI books were something he would "recoil"
from.
He also casually admitted that with 300,000 titles across all stores,
AI-authored books
have probably already snuck onto the shelves without anyone noticing.
Nothing instills confidence in a bookstore's curation like the CEO shrugging and saying
the robots may already be in the building.
I wonder if it'd be more palatable
if they had like an AI section.
I was just going to say that.
You're absolutely right.
Yeah, I think they're going to.
They're going to.
And I don't, I'm sure this is hashtag unpopular opinion.
I don't have a problem with this.
I don't.
In the same way we were just talking about
that Higgs field demo,
90 minute feature length cinema.
Listen, once that reaches like a certain threshold,
you and I are going to plunk down our 15 bucks
and go to the local Cineplex and watch that movie.
So why wouldn't I, if there is something credible and it crosses the threshold of, is it art?
And we've all been convinced, just like in the same way our experiment with Suno has enthralled us and inspired you to keep making AI generated music, essentially.
Why is the domain of literature off limits?
You know what I mean?
But as a separate AI section,
like, you know, racist,
you know, against the neural expresses.
That's great.
You know?
That's brilliant, man.
China has just gone full super-villain layer
with the world's first offshore wind-powered
underwater data center, a $226 million facility
sitting 35 meters below the surface near Shanghai,
housing roughly 2,000 servers,
and drawing more than 95%
of its electricity from an offshore wind
farm with over 200 turbines.
The ocean does the cooling for free.
and the facility's power usage effectiveness rating clocks in below 1.15,
well ahead of the industry average of around 1.5,
meaning far more electricity is going to actual computing
rather than keeping the servers from melting.
Microsoft tried something similar with Project Natick for over a decade,
got promising results on hardware reliability,
and then quietly shelved it citing economics
and the nightmare of servicing equipment underwater.
China,
apparently unbothered by that cautionary tale,
is already eyeing a 500 megawatt expansion.
Because why put your AI infrastructure
on boring dry land when the ocean is right there?
Yeah, it sucks to put on scuba gear
to swap out a hard drive.
But that does kind of seem like a-
as long as it's not going to destroy the life in the ocean,
it probably will.
Yeah.
Like everything else.
Yeah.
Isn't it historically salt water mixed with this kind of stuff?
Isn't it hugely problematic?
I mean, isn't that why we park these things next to freshwater sources?
And that's the problem here on dry land.
Like how do they, I guess, are they, I don't really know the mechanics of it clearly,
but like, is there some desalination thing that they've mastered to make this happen
more readily?
I don't know.
Is it 2000 servers in one box or is it modular or maybe 2000 servers isn't that big?
I don't know.
But it's like, oh, we got a problem with this one and you retrieve it.
you bring it up onto a ship and do what you gotta do
and drop it back down.
I'm sure I'm grossly oversimplifying it.
Total speculation.
You just, you know, you pick it up,
you put it back down, you plug it back in,
you're good to go.
Pop the hatch.
Reboot, you know.
To that point, like, what does that mean?
So if there's a big piece of hardware
that's gotta come out of this thing,
does the whole thing surface?
Like, what do they do?
How do they get it out of there?
Oh, so many questions.
I need to see what this looks like.
What does that mean?
And in general, the water usage in a data center, what does that look like?
Are there like cold water pipes that are like, you know, in the racks themselves?
What does that look like?
Oh, whatever.
We'll do a whole episode about data centers,
which is long overdue.
I'm curious if RAINA just understands at least the cooling implications.
Yeah, yeah.
Ask her.
RAINA, referring to the story about the underwater data centers,
how does that work with salt
water?
I would think that would be difficult to use to cool electronic components.
Yeah, instinctively it sounds insane,
right?
Like,
let's dunk the server farm in the ocean.
Feels like a rejected Bonvillain pitch.
But the salt water never actually touches the electronics.
The servers are sealed inside pressurized, water-tight capsules, and the surrounding
seawater just acts as a giant passive heat sink pulling heat away from the enclosure.
Ironically,
one of the big findings from Microsoft's old underwater experiments was that the sealed environment actually reduced hardware failures because there was less oxygen,
humidity fluctuation,
and human interference.
Turns out humans may be worse for servers than the ocean.
All right.
She knows a lot.
Yeah, but per what you said earlier, screw the coral reefs.
Right.
Which I think are sensitive to just a percentage of a degree increase where they start bleaching.
So there's that.
Yeah.
We're the worst.
We're the worst species.
We're embarrassed.
Pope Leo XIV is dropping his first encyclical on May 25th,
Magnifica Humanitas,
or Magnificent Humanity,
entirely devoted to AI and the protection of human dignity.
And he's presenting it at the Vatican alongside anthropic co-founder Christopher Ola,
which is both unexpected and extremely on brand for a Pope who has reportedly warned
priests not to use chat GPT to write their sermons.
Leo signed the document on May 15th,
the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the foundational 1891 social encyclical on labor
and capital written during the industrial revolution.
A deliberate history rhymes flex.
The anthropic connection carries political weight.
The Trump administration ordered U.S.
agencies to stop using Anthropix AI in February after the company refused to grant the military
unrestricted access to its technology.
So the Pope platforming Anthropix at the Vatican
is its own kind of statement.
Nobody had "Holy See enters the AI governance debate by co-presenting
with a safety AI startup"
on their bingo card.
But here we are.
That's all the news for now.
Back to you, gentlemen.
Was that like reading a Mad Lib or something?
That's crazy.
Was that Latin?
What was that?
I know.
No, but like the Pope and Anthropic at the Vatican?
I mean, reading a...
Madness.
Where are we?
Yeah.
I mean, if that doesn't signal like industrial revolution,
I don't know what does.
Yeah.
Divine intervention is necessary.
But isn't this like a large, a big papal middle finger to Donald Trump too, isn't it?
Because I know Trump has like beef with the Pope too, doesn't he?
Like he does with everyone.
Yeah.
How do you have beef with the Pope?
Listen, I got problems with the Catholics,
but you know, come on.
He seems like as far as Popes go, this guy seems all right.
Pretty decent Pope.
Right.
Anything else, my friend?
Wow.
Crazy times,
man.
Crazy times.
This episode was all over the place.
We started in like Google territory.
We ended up with the Pope and Anthropic.
Yeah.
What's going on?
Yeah.
It's madness.
Madness.
All right.
Until next week.
All right, my friends.
Thanks for listening.
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