This Week in Google (Audio)

TWiT

The latest Google and cloud computing news.

  • 2 hours 47 minutes
    IM 810: A Liter of Computronium - Ray Kurzweil, Amazon's Robots, Cheating AI
    • Interview with Ray Kurzweil
    • Liquid eggs? NYC bodegas have new strategy to keep bacon, egg and cheese prices down
    • Google announces Gemini Robotics for building general purpose robots
    • DeepMind's latest AI model can help robots fold origami and close Ziploc bags
    • An audit found that 10 top AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini, repeated false
      claims from a pro-Kremlin disinformation network 33% of the time
    • A study of eight AI search engines found they provided incorrect citations of news articles in 60%+ of queries; Grok 3 answered 94% of the queries incorrectly
    • AI Tries To Cheat At Chess When It's Losing - Slashdot
    • AI Thinks It Cracked Kryptos. The Artist Behind It Says No Chance
    • Pokemon Go is getting a new owner after almost 9 years with Niantic
    • Robots That Don't Walk Are Making Strides
    • Amazon has more than 750,000 robots that sort, lift, and carry packages—see them in action
    • TikTok will play 'calming music' to remind teens to stop using the app
    • FCC chair asks if YouTube TV 'discriminates against faith-based programming'
    • OpenAI says it has trained an AI that's 'really good' at creative writing
    • Bluesky CEO: imagine a 'world without Caesars'
    • The Senate approves Gail Slater, President Trump's pick to lead the DOJ's antitrust unit, by a 78-19 vote; she has been critical of power in the tech industry
    • Times profile of Jessica Lessin
    • Gen-Zers are turning to DVDs instead of streaming their favorite movies
    • Wonder Acquires Media Company Tastemade for $90 Million
    • Denmark postal service to stop delivering letters

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Guest: Ray Kurzweil

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    13 March 2025, 2:41 am
  • 2 hours 54 minutes
    IM 809: Fun Mustache - Gary Marcus, Digg Returns, AI.com
    • Interview with Gary Marcus
    • Turing Award Goes to 2 Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence
    • Meta Discusses AI Data Center Project That Could Cost $200 Billion
    • Satya Nadella Argues AI's True Value Will Come When It Finds Killer App Akin To Email or Excel
    • Google's co-founder tells AI staff to stop "building nanny products
    • 27-Year-Old EXE Became Python In Minutes. Is AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering Next? - Slashdot
    • Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice
    • What to know about deepfakes bill backed by Melania Trump
    • Digg is getting another revival, this time with an injection of AI
    • Google lets Americans delete their search results
    • 'The Brutalist' Director Brady Corbet Responds to AI Backlash
    • Alexis Ohanian Joins Project Liberty's TikTok Bid
    • YouTube Says It Now Has More Than 1 Billion Monthly Viewers of Podcast Content
    • Skype is shutting down after two decades
    • LATimes insights page
    • PDF example from the LATimes
    • Gebru: "🔇🔇🔇 THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AGI AND ATTEMPTING TO BUILD IT IS A EUGENICIST, POWER CENTRALIZATION PROJECT THAT NO ONE SHOULD SUPPORT."
    • The New York City Subway Is Using Google Pixels to Listen for Track Defects
    • Masnick: Announcing Otherwise Objectionable: A Podcast Series About The Most Misunderstood Law On The Internet
    • 18F demolished
    • AI.com Is for Sale. Asking Price? $100 Million
    • Deutsche Telekom and Perplexity announce new 'AI Phone' priced at under $1K
    • Vintage Computer Festival East
    • Mimeartist is watching us on the big tv
    • Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Grounded. The Birds and Dogs of This Texas Town Are Grateful

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Guest: Dr. Gary Marcus

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    6 March 2025, 2:49 am
  • 2 hours 25 minutes
    IM 808: Stephen Wolfram - AI Inspo, Nvidia Signs, Grok Sexy Mode
    • Interview with Stephen Wolfram
    • OpenAI now serves 400M users every week
    • Nvidia's Profit Jumps 80 Percent as Company Rides Tech's A.I. Boom
    • Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa Plus
    • Artists release silent album in protest against AI using their work
    • AI 'inspo' is everywhere. It's driving your hair stylist crazy.
    • Nvidia launches Signs, a new AI platform to teach American Sign Language and create a validated dataset for sign language learners and ASL app developers
    • Here's How Four Major Newsrooms Are Using AI
    • Google sued by Chegg over AI Overviews hurting traffic and revenue
    • Perplexity wants to reinvent the web browser with AI—but there's fierce competition
    • Perplexity releases a censorship-free variant of Deepseek R1
    • To Identify Suspect in Idaho Killings, F.B.I. Used Restricted Consumer DNA Data
    • Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard suggests UK broke agreement in secretly asking Apple to build iCloud backdoor
    • Researchers accuse North Korea of $1.4 billion Bybit crypto heist
    • Y Combinator deletes posts after a startup's "AI for sweatshops" demo goes viral
    • Grok 3's "sexy mode"
    • Grok 3 appears to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Musk
    • When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works
    • Nebraska Man Struggles to Change Daughter's Name From 'Unakite Thirteen Hotel'
    • Touch grass
    • Bracket City

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Guest: Stephen Wolfram

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    27 February 2025, 3:51 am
  • 2 hours 42 minutes
    IM 807: My Life in Tokens - The Founders of Bee.Computer, Majorana 1, Grok 3
    • Interview with the founders of Bee.computer
    • Would Paris or Jeff get a Bee?
    • Scarlett Johansson Urges Government to Limit A.I. After Faked Video of Her Opposing Kanye West Goes Viral
    • Microsoft announces quantum computing breakthrough with new Majorana 1 chip
    • A 'Teleportation' Breakthrough for Quantum Computing Is Here
    • Google's AI Efforts Marred by Turf Disputes
    • Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, releases its latest flagship model, Grok 3
    • Marcus: Elon Musk's terrifying vision for AI
    • Richard Feynman: Can Machines Think?
    • The Humane AI Pin: A $700 Brick of E-Waste
    • AI Notetakers In Meetings Are Making Me Queasy - Bloomberg
    • AI Designs Plastic-Digesting Enzyme
    • Nikola, Electric Truck Maker, Files for Bankruptcy
    • Google Lens powering new 'Screen Search' in Chrome for iOS
    • Extra Finger ring
    • On Probabilism and Determinism in AI
    • My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani
    • A delightful look into the Murdochs' Succession Drama
    • James Murdoch interview
    • Roasted Chicken Thighs With Hot Honey and Lime
    • Leobait: Thermomix cult
    • Australian lamb video with comments section

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Guests: Ethan Sutin and Maria de Lourdes Zollo

    Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines.

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    20 February 2025, 3:53 am
  • 2 hours 23 minutes
    IM 806: I'm Piffed - Musk Vs. Altman, YouTube on TV, WikiTok
    • Elon Musk's Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up
    • Trump plans to nominate Brian Quintenz, a16z Crypto's head of policy to lead the CFTC
    • Annual letter: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says TV has overtaken mobile as the "primary device for YouTube viewing in the US", indicating YouTube is "the new TV"
    • Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US
    • FYI related: Court Unplugs AI Fair Use Defense, But Context Is Key
    • "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right": Meta emails unsealed
    • How Sam Altman outflanked Elon Musk to win over Donald Trump, including by telling Trump in a phone call that the tech industry will achieve AGI during his term
    • Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition "Atrophied and Unprepared"
    • The Strategy Behind Musk's $97 Billion Bid for OpenAI
    • 'Doomers' Review: Hunkered Down, Debating the Peril and Promise of A.I.
    • 25 Years of The Sims Turning Players Into Gods - The New York Times
    • WikiTok
    • BuzzFeed wants to fight AI-driven social media with a platform of its own
    • Tesla sales dropped 60% in Germany

    Hosts: Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau, and Mikah Sargent

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    13 February 2025, 1:52 am
  • 2 hours 45 minutes
    IM 805: Doomers, Gloomers, Bloomers, and Zoomers - Zack Kass Interview, DeepSeek Hype, EU AI Act
    • Interview with Zack Kass, Former GTM for Open AI
    • Why you can deep-six the DeepSeek hype
    • Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone
    • OpenAI has undergone its first ever rebrand, giving fresh life to ChatGPT interactions
    • AI Has Shown Me My Future. Here's What I've Learned.
    • Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek
    • Hugging Face researchers aim to build an 'open' version of OpenAI's deep research tool
    • Anthropic makes "jailbreak" advance to stop AI models producing harmful results
    • WSJ: The Manhattan Project Was Secret. Should America's AI Work Be Too?
    • EU AI Act: Ban on certain AI practices and requirements for AI literacy come into effect
    • Cathy Gellis: When It's Not Just A Coup But A CFAA Violation Too
    • a16z slides on AI and voice
    • Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman poaches three Google DeepMind former colleagues, including two who built NotebookLM's Audio Overviews and worked on Astra
    • Meta's CTO said the metaverse could be a "legendary misadventure" if the company doesn't boost sales, leaked memo shows
    • The Salvadoran Mega-Prison Offering to Take America's Worst Criminals
    • Hilarious analyst on Tesla
    • How the DJI Flip uses AI
    • Marketers will have to market to AI agents
    • AI systems could be "caused to suffer" if consciousness achieved, says research

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Mike Elgan

    Guest: Zack Kass

    Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines.

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    6 February 2025, 2:33 am
  • 2 hours 42 minutes
    TWiG 804: Big Potato - Death Roulette, Influencer Voice, HillmanTok
    • Leo's AI Toys
    • DeepSeek
    • How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions
    • Mark Zuckerberg post re: Llama 4
    • 17th Century Death Roulette ☠️
    • Google says it will change Gulf of Mexico to 'Gulf of America' in Maps app after government updates
    • 23andMe might sell itself as it runs out of money
    • The rise of 'influencer voice': Why this TikTok creator accent is taking over the internet and maybe the world
    • Paris' new TV
    • Scoldy Mastodon
    • Pluralistic: It's not a crime if we do it with an app (25 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
    • Comcast unveils ultra-low lag Internet connection
    • Dr. Barlow and HIllmanTok
    • Philip Low, long-time friend and peer of Elon Musk, posts open letter calling him out for what he is.
    • Why doesn't Siri know what it doesn't know?
    • New Vatican document examines potential and risks of AI
    • Technological puritanism
    • All in the mind? The surprising truth about brain rot
    • By Paris: Before Google's $2.7 Billion Deal With AI Startup, a Stark Warning on Safety
    • The mayor of Merrymac

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Download or subscribe to This Week in Google (and Intelligent Machines) at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google.

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    30 January 2025, 2:04 am
  • 2 hours 30 minutes
    TWiG 803: Dadscrolling - Stargate, SkyTok, Chromebook Facial Control
    • "Stargate" Squares Some AI Circles
    • Old enough to remember Trump's Foxconn factory
    • What Stargate Means and What It Doesn't
    • Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law
    • SkyTok, BlueSky's TikTok, made with Surf on ActivityPub
    • The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers
    • Google will let you control your Chromebook with your face
    • Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200 million debacle
    • Nokia's reaction to the iPhone
    • The Ankler launches standalone trade publication on the creator economy
    • Bassinet backlash reflects debate over adding fees to connected devices
    • Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show
    • The Whole World is Whining
    • Netflix's UK Audience Reach Overtook BBC1 For The First Time Last Year
    • Genrevision podcast

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google.

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    23 January 2025, 1:44 am
  • 2 hours 33 minutes
    TWiG 802: A Sycophant in Your Pocket - Supreme Court Briefs, Leo's New AI Toys
    • Justice Kagan Acknowledges Bluesky, And Other Notes From The TikTok Oral Argument
    • Alito and Playboy
    • A Marriage Proposal Spoken Entirely in Office Jargon
    • Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed
    • Free our feeds fundraising
    • The people should own the town square
    • Lemley's post
    • Google's 'Daily Listen' lab is a personalized podcast based on your Discover feed
    • Leo's AI toys
    • She Is in Love With ChatGPT
    • Jawboning In Plain Sight: The Unconstitutional Censorship Tolerated By The DMCA
    • Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards
    • American Psycho with Huey Lewis and Weird Al
    • Physicists figure out the perfect Cacio e Pepe recipe
    • Cursormania!

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Guest: Cathy Gellis

    Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google.

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    16 January 2025, 2:22 am
  • 2 hours 9 minutes
    TWiG 801: Human Beans - Meta Stops Fact-Checking, Public Domain 2025
    • Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a "community notes" system similar to X
    • (30+) kottke.org: "oh s**t new logo just dropped"
    • Masnick: The Good, The Bad, And The Stupid In Meta's New Content Moderation Policies
    • Social-Media Companies Decide Content Moderation Is Trending Down
    • I watched the Nvidia keynote; can summarize -jj
    • The Bitter Lesson
    • Hank Green's Cripslock Test for AGI
    • Public Domain Day 2025
    • CES 2025
    • New AI powered Samsung refrigerators will allow direct grocery ordering with Instacart
    • Gemini is taking over Google TV - in a good way
    • Google's AI Help Me Read feature
    • Deepseek seems to be a big deal: Chinese model, cheaper to train
    • Altman's latest gospel
    • Choose your Silicon Valley Thinkbro
    • Nicvember Post Mortum
    • The Habermas Machine: AI mediating disagreements
    • VPN Demand Surge in Florida after Adult Sites Age Restriction Kicks In

    Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

    Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google.

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    9 January 2025, 3:03 am
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