Top Five Tech

Welcome to top five tech my weekly show about what to watch listen to read download and something deep every week

So the iphone duo launch is coming next month

But some creators are actually getting an up close look right now at different places around the world

And so I wanted to link byte review. This is tom. I met him at wwdc last year

So if you want another good look at the iphone duo some great b-roll of it in use

Tom at byte review has a great video on it

So that's linked below and as a bonus what to watch a random youtube account this week uploaded the live

Q a session from the iphone 4 antenna gate press conference

So if you were around back then following apple the iphone 4

The design of the antenna when you held the phone a certain way you could see the cellular bars dropping in signal

So in a rare step apple held a press conference just to address this antenna gate the entire q a which I don't believe

The video has been released previously the press event was released on video years ago, and then apple took it down

But this is the entire 45 minute Q&A event, you'll actually see Steve

Jobs who does most of the talking but Tim Cook is there and Bob Mansfield who

was over iPhone hardware at the time. Just a really fascinating look even just

to hear Steve Jobs answering how good he was in these kinds of press

conferences, thinking about his answers before actually sharing it. Not only is

it kind of a time capsule of Apple and obviously of Steve Jobs but just really

interesting to watch so link that below. And of course you can get this as a

newsletter every Friday with some additional commentary but all the links

in one place easy to get to scan this QR code or the link is down in the podcast

to subscribe to the newsletter version. On what to listen to, my co-host on Mac

Power Users David Sparks actually pointed me to a couple episodes of an

inside look of certain movie making. So there's an Inside Star Wars podcast and

also an Inside Jaws podcast. I'll link both of them down below but it's a fun

look of behind the scenes. They're not long episodes, this one's only about 24

minutes but if you love these movies like I do, hearing some of the behind

the scenes especially on the Jaws episode, hearing how that movie almost

didn't get made, really fascinating. So we'll link the Inside Star Wars and

Inside Jaws episodes down below. On what to read, we talked about this at length

on primary technology but my co-host Jason Aiton installed the Muse AI app on

his Mac and suddenly started witnessing really weird behavior. Basically as he

would ask questions to Muse AI, it started telling him about the messages

he was receiving even though Jason never gave Meta's Muse AI permission of full

disk access to look at his messages or look at his notifications or screen

recording. Now Meta had some privacy jargon that they

applied to him on threads, but have not addressed him directly or have given him on record

responses about what is happening. Jason's articles picked up by the Verge, John Gruber

during Fireball, and of course, we talked about it at length in the podcast. But there's

been a lot of excitement about Muse AI, especially on X, because it's a lot of agentic type workflows

that you can do with this free app that is kind of like open claw, but for normal users.

But the privacy and security implications seem really bad. And what it did was actually

download Jason's entire messages database.

And give it to Muse AI, which again, Jason did not give permission, but he actually has two articles on this.

I'll link both of them down below.

Fascinating read and be careful if you're going to try Muse AI. I want to download Parker Ortolani, who's on X.

He was previously at The Verge, now

he's at Penske Media, which also now kind of owns part of The Verge or something.

He just released his first vibe coded app on the App Store.

It's called QuillQ and it's to help you have prompts that you want to give to AI,

API, maybe prompts that you do regularly, and these prompts can live.

in this app. And then you can use it either as a third party keyboard to quickly send a prompt

to your AI of choice. And now that Siri AI is out for everyone, except EU, sorry, then this is a

great place to maybe save those prompts you use often, and even has suggested prompts, you can

kind of preload in there, whether it's finding a coffee place that's near you, or if you're running

late and drafting an email. And you can create your own custom prompts, of course, and save those

in the app. So you can quickly send them to your AI of choice. It's completely free to download and

you. So check it out.

Finally on Something Deep, last week I talked about not having fear or not being scared

of what's going on with AI right now. And I wanted to append that, maybe not retract

it. But I've been listening to a lot of different podcasts and reading articles about the current

state of AI, what some of these models have been doing to breach cybersecurity issues

and other companies. And I was actually listening to Apple News Today, which I listen some days,

most days of the week, just kind of their 15 minute Apple News show. Well, they had

special the Apple News and...

conversation with Shamita Basu. This was their September 19th episode and I just

started playing it because the title was "AI warnings are getting louder here's

what you need to know" and I had no idea that Neelai Patel was the guest on this

episode. And so as I started listening to it, it's about a 30-minute episode. It's a

really great encapsulation of everything that's been going on, what CEOs are

saying, and I'm not trying to raise alarm or actually get you worried and retract

what I said last week, but I do think there's two things to keep in mind as we

look at what laws are being passed for

and how companies are treating it.

One, there's a term that I've recently become familiar with,

which is neuralese.

When these LLMs are starting to either learn on their own,

like self-improve,

or doing some of these long cybersecurity type tasks,

they will sometimes talk in neuralese,

or in a language that humans can't understand.

They're speaking either to other agents in their workspace,

or just processing on their own.

And a lot of times,

if you use Claude or Chachapiti on your devices,

you can see the thinking process,

and see the questions it's asking itself,

kind of see how it's breaking down the task.

And when these LLMs start speaking in neuralese,

there's no way for researchers,

or people at these AI companies,

to look at what the AI and LLM is doing,

and actually see what's going on,

kind of to peek under the hood.

So I do think there needs to be some measures

where as these models move into self-improvement,

meaning it's not taking researchers,

prompting and changing it,

but that these models can just improve on their own,

maybe even unchecked,

that we maybe instill some.

will be able to do that. I think that's a wise step. And secondly, a lot of the warnings,

like from the researchers that have left these companies recently, because of what they've

seen behind the scenes, it's not so much what the LLM can do today right now, but what might

be possible five to 10 years from now. And they're trying to raise the flag to say we

We need laws and guidance in place today.

To prevent maybe some bad outcomes in the future.

And I don't have full knowledge or understanding of what those possibilities are.

But being that there's been many, multiple AI researchers leaving companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Raising this warning and flag.

Maybe we should just take pause and say let's put safeguards in place.

Whether it's checks and balances outside of these companies.

They get to actually see what the frontier models in Anthropic and OpenAI are doing.

Whatever we need to do to prevent the worst case outcome in five to ten years.

I do say let's do that.

Let's put those guidelines in place. Put those guardrails.

Whatever these AI researchers are trying to raise the flag on.

Let us pay attention to what they're saying and try to steer that in the right direction.

And no more neuralese talk.

Let's have these LLMs be thinking in language and ways we can actually understand and read.

But if you listen to one podcast about this topic.

I do think the Apple News Today show did a great job breaking it down with Nilay Patel.

And that's all the links for today.

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