Top Five Tech

Welcome to Top 5 Tech, my weekly show about what to watch, listen to, download, read and

something deep every week.

This week Google had its big Pixel 11 event and announced a bunch of hardware and some

new software features.

If there's one video I think did a great job recapping everything they announced and what

it means as Google and Pixel look forward to the future, I think Mr. Who's the Boss

actually did an incredible job.

Great look at all the devices, you do hear about the specs and also the fold, but stay

till the end as he has some big thoughts about where does Android and Google go with these

On what to listen to, I mentioned last week a reel that I saw from Colin and Samir and

it came from this episode, the cancellation of Hank Green and Why Gen Z Hates AI.

Well, I went and listened to the entire episode.

You can listen to it, I'll link that in Apple Podcasts or you can watch the entire episode.

I'll link that on YouTube as well and I like that they had some of their team members from

different generations, those in their 30s, those in their 20s and then Colin and Samir

all commenting on the use of AI in the creator space.

Now we'll get more into this in the deep section in a moment, but I thought it was a great

episode, a great conversation about what is acceptable, what do you have to disclose,

when do you cross the line, all in context of the Hank Green situation and his admitting

to too much AI use, quote unquote.

It was a great podcast episode, listen or watch at the links below.

On what to read, Jason and I on Primary Tech talked about the AI manifesto that Mark Zuckerberg

wrote earlier this week.

Well, Casey Newton has another great take.

He says super intelligence is a dragon, comparing the rise and growth of AI and where it's going

to be in the future to literally.

from Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, but he has some great points about how Mark

Zuckerberg framed this manifesto, how much of it is self-serving.

And one of the biggest issues is that Mark Zuckerberg talks about the distribution of

AI is what will help solve the inequality.

But Casey points out that we're already kind of past that point where control of certain

models even open AI and Anthropic have lost that control and they were the ones that would

be in the center.

He also talks about how much of this manifesto seemed self-serving, such as

Zuckerberg being positive on distillation of models, well, yeah, because he wants his

model to be able to distill from Anthropic and OpenAI, the frontier models that are the

most advanced right now.

It was a great take on the Zuckerberg Manifesto, highly recommend the read.

On what to download, it's Raycast, an incredible launcher for the Mac.

The free version actually has an incredible amount of features and is a better alternative

to Spotlight.

Then if you want to pay for some of the extra features like syncing across multiple Macs,

unlimited clipboard history, that's either $10 a month or $96 a year.

You do not need to pay for it to be worth it.

I did an entire video on Raycast and how I customized it using both aliases, the hyper

key where the caps lock can then act as basically a shortcut to a bunch of different actions.

I'll link my video about Raycast down below, but also just the link to download Raycast.

Again, free for Mac or Windows.

It's in beta on Windows right now.

Raycast version two is coming out and stay tuned for Mac power users.

Our episode that drops this Sunday as you're listening is all about Alfred versus Raycast

versus Spotlight.

So very in depth on what is capable with these different launchers, which ones you

should consider and Raycast version two, which David Sparks has been using and he has thoughts

on plus my thoughts on the future of the technology that Raycast is using for their version two.

But I still highly recommend it's a free download well worth it.

And on something deep, I'm going to link this economist article that I mentioned in primary

technology as well how to spot AI writing, you can do a free trial and read this article

and then cancel it.

You can also do a free trial in the Apple News app.

hit the share button when you have this

article open in Safari and hit Apple News, but is a ton of research about how AI actually

writes and why it is so recognizable, and what makes it different from actual human

writing.

And I've been thinking a lot about this because ianthropic also announced that they're going

to be watermarking all text generated by Claude, whether it's in the Claude app, whether it's

through the API and shortcuts, which is how I use Claude a lot of the time.

And so I've been thinking a lot about what do I need to make sure that I am writing verbatim

with my fingers rather than

having AI either summarize it

or write for me. I ask

AI for title ideas on my videos to give

me description ideas for YouTube

and I'll always massage those but

sometimes I'll also do an A/B test on YouTube

and copy and paste one of the titles

Claude or Chachabitty gives me

just to see how it performs. And that

copy and pasting with the new tools

that Anthropic is launching will be

watermarked and I'm not sure how YouTube and

other platforms will treat that text

being watermarked itself.

And so I'm rethinking, how am I going to...

What parts of the process am I going to insert it in?

But I'm also curious if you want to respond to the newsletter.

Again, you can sign up to get it delivered every Friday and you can just reply to that email.

Or just click the link in the show notes below and you can send me a message.

What are your feelings about AI usage in the different parts of the creative process?

What about proofreading or summarizing articles that you come across?

Is using some generated text or text that you massage for things like a podcast episode title?

Does that seem okay? Where's the line?

And this goes back to the Khan and Sameer episode I mentioned.

today. I'm thinking a lot about it, especially in light of this Economist article and also what

Cloud is launching with watermarking text. And I'm curious your thoughts on it too. What are

the things that if you heard your favorite creator say they were using AI for would hit you differently

or wrong or that you wouldn't like that they're doing it. So shoot me a message with the link down

below in the show notes or just reply to the newsletter if you got that in your inbox. I'd

appreciate a five star rating and review in Apple podcasts if you could. And you can scan this QR

our code right here or just take a screenshot with your iPhone.

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Hope you enjoy what you watch, listen to, download, read, and something deep every week.

Thanks again for tuning in.