Welcome back to Data Driven, the podcast that dives into the collision
of data technology and occasionally geopolitics with
the finesse of a caffeinated quantum computer. In this episode,
Frank Lavine is joined once again by Christopher Nuland,
AI technical marketing maestro at Red Hat, for a no holds
barred breakdown of America's freshly minted AI action plan.
From Cold War vibes and AI sovereignty to the CHiPs Act,
GPU geopolitics, and existential musings on large language
models, this episode has more hot takes than a GPU server farm
in July. Plus, we debate whether Europe can still flex
its AI muscle without surrendering to Silicon Valley, and whether
AI models will ever truly think or just continue to be unreasonably
effective spreadsheet goblins. So buckle up, data
disciples. This one's dense, dynamic, and
dangerously nerdy. Let's get into it.
All right, that bouncy little pop number. That is a fun
fact. AI generated can only mean one thing. It's time for
a new edition of Frank's World TV Live or
an episode of Data Driven, depending on where and how you're listening, slash
watching. You can catch me at the following URLs. Franksworld.com
data driven tv and impact
quantum.com speaking of impact
quantum.com my co host and I have launched another
book and it's basically Quantum
Curious, the Gateway to the Next Computing Revolution.
And what that is is we basically took the third, the first
13 some odd episodes of the season and distilled it down
into a little book. It's 2.99 on Amazon, but if you join
our mailing list, it's completely free. So go to Impact Quantum or scan
the QR code to find out more. All right, now that I've gotten the
commercialism ism out of the way, I'd like to welcome
back our guest, Christopher Nuland, who is
a peer of mine on the same team, an AI
technical marketing manager at Red Hat. How's it going? Good,
good. Glad to be back. I think
we ended the last talk on kind of a cliffhanger, and then
I think some recent news has really built on top of some of that
previous conversation. So I'm happy to be here talking about some big things
that are going on in the the area of AI right now. Absolutely. So
over the weekend, the Trump administration dropped the thought on
the Amer AI's America's AI Action
Plan. I think somebody likes alliterations.
But so, and you and I were chatting about this over
Slack and, and, and, and you had some thoughts on this. So, like, what.
And you had some interesting ideas around it, and some surprises are in the bell.
So let's. Let's get into it. Yeah. So
I think overall, this is really needed.
We've seen a couple things like this come out for some other
countries globally. The EU has
this. I'd say the one from the US is more of a set of guidelines,
or the one from EU is actually some laws that they're trying to pass that
have some similar tone to this one. You know, we're
seeing things out of the uk, out of Singapore, other, you
know, other nations that really are trying to get an
idea of what is their strategy around AI
sovereignty. And this, to me, is a document
more about AI sovereignty than anything else.
It's really about how. How does the US
go into the next phase of really almost
like a new industrial revolution around AI and
this document's really outlining the plan.
I think overall, I thought it was pretty well thought out, and we'll go through
and kind of pick apart some of the key areas. But I think
overall the. The key tone here was about
AI sovereignty, so specifically within the US
and how we're going to be managing that. And overall,
I thought it was. It was good. I know. You know, when we were talking
on Slack, we were talking about how there's definitely a lot there about China
as well. Right. In a weird way,
I. I felt like this document was a bit of a. A declaration
of. Of war in a way, because in
a document, it outlines that
they really consider this now like a Cold War with.
With China around AI and what I thought was so
fascinating is I kept going back to this analogy of, like,
the Cold War arms race of Russia and how
we need to do certain things around AI because we basically need to
mimic what the United States was able to achieve during the
Cold War. And I think that sat with me
because I think, you know, even last time I was on here, we were talking
about how we. We basically. No, there's a Cold War kind of thing going on,
but it was. It was different seeing
it. You know, you and I were talking earlier, like, on the letterhead. It was.
Yeah, it's different. You know, like, there's. There's things that are. Obviously, you
can see with your own eyes, but it's quite a different thing when something appears
on official White House letterhead. Right. Or even,
you know, government letterhead. I think that's. It's an interesting,
interesting shift. And this whole idea of a Cold War between the US
and China and AI is Not a new concept.
Right. I. There's a really good book and I'm gonna see if I can share
this tab real quick. This is an excellent book. It's an
excellent audiobook too. There you go.
Oh, there we are. Sorry everyone, my dogs are barking.
But this book came out in 2018 and a
lot of what he predicted has come to pass.
And it seems to me like the authors of this document have also,
if not read the book or listened to the book, have at least seen the
Cliff Notes version of it. Right. Like this, if you really think
about it, there's really only two major players right now in
the AI space and we're going to alienate a lot of people in the eu.
Right. But saying that, right, it's really largely
US and China, right? Yes. And
not to say that the EU is not in the games, clearly, Mistral. And
apparently there's a rumor, I don't know if you heard this rumor that, that Apple
is considering buying Mistral. I have heard some of those.
So again, I don't own any of Apple stock or whatever, so I'm not. Or.
But I think it's an interesting con, Interesting idea if they were to do
that because clearly that would, I wonder how that
would shift kind of the balance of, if not power,
perceived power. Right. Because Apple
obviously is a stalwart of Silicon Valley and if, you know,
if Europe's major, you know, every
time you talk about the EU falling behind, they always say, what
about Mistral? Right. So if Mistral ends up getting purchased by, you
know, Apple, that would be, that would.
I think there'd be a lot of drama about that. Yeah, I think so
too. I think it, it really just shows there's a line in the
sand between the two major superpowers here, between
China and the United States. My
speculation there is that there might
be something official there, but that the EU might step in
and just say no. Right. To that.
Simply given what we're here talking about, AI sovereignty. And what does
AI sovereignty look like? I, I don't think the, the French
necessarily want to give up that and I don't think the EU wants to give
that up
from an open source standpoint. We're still seeing a lot of thought leadership
coming out of the eu, even though there's not
enough, what I would say, enterprise momentum there.
Right. There's still a lot of research institutes there. There's still
a lot of, even some smaller form companies
like even like Hugging Face and Mistral for example, are, you know,
EU based that have made A big impact and are very open
source heavy and but at the end of
the day they're just still very small when you
consider these behemoth organizations like Microsoft,
Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, all the
fang corporations which have,
that can really throw their weight around. And we've seen a
lot of, a lot of
startups like OpenAI that has like
climbed up now into the upper epsilon and
that's being really driven by American industry. So
and that's just something the EU can't prop up as as much.
But I still think they, they're a major
player. They may not be necessarily
one to one with China and America, but if there was a
second tier right under that, it would be the eu. Yeah, I
can see that. I also think it's too early to count them out of the
race. Right. Like, yeah, you know we're, this is the start of the
marathon. Right. So they're clearly, clearly there are two front runners.
But I don't, I don't, I wouldn't count them entirely out just yet. Right.
And I didn't know Hugging Face was a European company. I thought they were based
out of New York. But that must be their American. I
believe you may be right. Let me show Hugging Face.
I know. I think the founders are European.
You are correct. Founders are European, but they are based out of
America. And that just goes to show right there.
Yo. That the gravity of just American enterprise. That
you can shell out a lot of money to get, to get talent. Right. And
yeah, this was the thing that a European tech founder said. Right. So you know,
all the Europeans don't hate on me, but there was a lot of founders that
they'll end up moving to Dubai. Right. Bootstrap and
then move to Silicon Valley, you know, at some point. Right. Like,
so I think the, the
European Union as a whole
has to address some systemic shortcomings when it comes
to a venture capital and startup
pipeline. Right. And I hope I, I
think that they'll get it figured out. I just don't think that they're going to
get it figured out this year. They might
get it figured out by the end of the decade because I think that,
you know, just a little bit of back of the napkin math, right. You, you
know, it's, it's, you can see
that growing the tax base is good for everyone
and this is one way to do that. And if you have your
brain drain, which we'll get into that, that term, you know, either
going to Dubai, you know, Silicon Valley or New
York, it's not Good. Right. Because
you're, you're basically, you're educating them in country. Right.
And a lot of these countries have, you know, cheaper, you know, free tuition.
Yeah. So you're paying for the talent, you're training up the talent, you're
paying for talent. And then when time comes in to cash in on the return
on that investment, if you want to look at it that way, throughout of country.
Right. So what are you going to do? I think that it's
in the EU's best interest to fix that problem. And like
you said, like sovereign AI or is a big deal.
And sovereign AI is different than sovereign than data sovereignty, right?
Yep. It's the. And I don't think people really kind of gotten their head around
that. So I know what my definition is of that,
you know, is the idea that. And it's even called out in this action
plan report. Right. Where it's like, you know, AI with American values. Right.
Yeah. And like you said, I'm pretty sure the French want to have, you
know, AI with French values, and the
Germans probably want to have, you know, with German values. Right. So I think even,
even painting the entire continent, even though everything's is kind of done
through the European Union, I don't think that's. That might
be at their detriment. Right. And. And the German market is also pretty
sizable too. Right. It's something like 80 million people. Right. And the
German language market, I think, adds another 20
million to that. Right. So, you know, I only say that because one
of the, one of the points that people made for taking German in high school
was it was 100 million ish, you know, number of people speak the
language. So it's not. And, and I would say that,
you know, particularly when we're dealing with language models. Right. It's in the
name. Right. So language and culture, although not exactly the same,
are very much tightly linked. And that was something we talked about last
time. We got sidetracked, but that's what
I do here. That's fine.
What struck out of you, the report? I think one of the things you mentioned
was, well, go ahead, I'll let you go. Sure.
The thing that I was most surprised about was
that pillar, one of the
document on page six and a couple of other areas was
really focused on the workforce
and this concept of like, securing the AI workforce,
making sure to have necessary people
in play. And then it got into like almost this Cold
war kind of mentality
of like, how do we make sure that we can trust the people that we
have and it was, it was just surprising to me because I thought it was
going to be more about the regulation of AI models, which it does move
into eventually. Right. And supply chain security.
But the, the concept of, of workforce and the fact that it
was the first pillar was intriguing to me. It got me
thinking about kind of what, what is the US Administration thinking about right now? And
they're, I think they're really thinking about making
sure they lock down the people. And
for good reasons and, and probably bad reasons too. You know, good reason is,
you know, how do we entice the best experts
to stay here in America? How do we entice
the workforce to continue to move into the area of AI through
education? But then there also seemed to
be almost like a Cold War vibe there.
I don't know if you watched the movie Oppenheimer, but it kind of reminded me
in that movie where the people working on the
Manhattan Project were like their personal lives
were, were under view quite a bit.
And it, it kind of reminded me of that. Like is, is in,
in a year or two are all the AI experts going to, you know, have
the NSA and the FBI like keeping track of them
and what they're doing? And it doesn't explicitly
say that, but the tone kind of led me to think, oh, wow,
they're, they, they're really interested in what these people are doing.
It's not just about the technology, but the people making the technology.
And that was very intriguing to me. I could see that being
a thing, especially if there's an actual honest to God, you know,
old school knockdown, drag out shooting war with any
country. I could
see that being, I wouldn't say nationalized, but
you'll have to get some kind of. Even now, like if you work in the
nuclear industry, you need a queue clearance. You need a lot of things being. You
need a lot of invasive, not procedures, but
definitely a lot of invasive paperwork and investigations that,
But I, and I, and I do see,
I didn't read the whole thing yet, but I did, I did, I did feed
it through Notebook lm. I did listen to that. I did do some skimming
of it. And that was one of the things was like it seems like they're
laying the groundwork for that in case things get sideways.
Also part of that is the, the
securing the supply chain from the silicon on up.
Yeah. Which is a smart thing because
the chips are made in very limited
geolocations. Right. So one,
one major international incident, a shooting
war. Right. No matter who wins. You know, there's Going to be an
island where most of the stuff is made. Yeah. That's going to be reduced to
the rubble. Right. Now, whose flag gets planted on top of that rubble,
you know, remains to be seen. But you know, you, you know,
so much for the chip manufacturers there. Yeah.
And also too, you can't rule out natural disasters. Right. You know,
2000, was it 2005 there was. Or 2004 there was the massive
tsunami that, you know, did major
swath of damage. It's not impossible to imagine even just a natural
disaster, bad typhoon either. Earthquake with
Japan, wake Japan. I mean it, it could,
it's not impossible to imagine like more than one way for it
to rain on everybody's parade. And if you think supply chain issues with GPUs
are rough today. Yeah, I mean that's just,
that would be a big thing. But what really stood
out to me, and obviously I'm biased because my wife is a federal employee, was
talking about training federal employees to use AI. Right. And
there was, even in there, even in there there was a
accelerating adoption here, but basically mandating
employee access for federal employees and
training on these LLMs,
which is interesting because I can
speak from not first hand experience, but certainly, you know,
secondhand experience. Right. Federal employees do not feel loved
and appreciated, let alone have access to any kind of training or
anything like that. So I thought that was interesting,
that was interesting in there because it's been a rough go for
feds the last six, seven months. Oh yeah. Everything's
been very negative. And this is like one of the, maybe the first,
it's first positive, you. Know, and I was, I was telling
you in the virtual green room is that, you know, the agency my wife works
at, like they're not hiring new people,
but they're creating a new organization that people will be doubling down on their duties,
which presumably they'll get access to the training. And she,
she may or may not be involved with that yet. We don't know. But, but
it's interesting to kind of see that, see that
happening. But yeah. What else have you, what else
took. It's, you know, so I think the most
important thing that was in there and I,
I actually figured the whole document would be about this is
around supply chain security. So if,
if people aren't aware when we're talking about supply chain, typically we talk
about supply chain, it's more in industry terms of, you know, how
does something get made, the nuts and bolts, where does the raw
materials come from? That term was
never used really in technology until recently.
And. Probably the pandemic
is when most people first heard the term supply chain.
It was, it was the Solar Winds hack. I think that
also really, yes, put it in perspective too.
So those who aren't aware, there's a company called SolarWinds,
they were very predominantly used in the government. I think
they still are. But there was a
hack where instead of hacking their software directly,
they hacked the supply chain. They injected
bad code early on into the supply chain
and that slowly propagated out to these
different government agencies. And the scary part
is that the very thing that was meant to monitor these
type of situations was the thing that had gotten infiltrated. So it
took a while for anyone to even know. And it was
massive. It impacted the government and impacted
enterprise. And that is where
I think NIST and a couple other agencies made the decision, okay,
we're going to come up with a requirement of what supply chain looks like
within these types of software development
process. And really gets into, okay, all the way
from how do we think up an idea for
code, how do we submit that code
into a repository, how do we compile it, how do
we scan it, how do we distribute it? And that's when we talk about supply
chain, secure supply chain. That's in the context of what
we mean. And that relates directly to AI as well, because it's
all data pipelines. And for AI specifically, it's about where does
that data come from, where was it sourced,
when was it added into our model? How
can we prove that the model that we built over
here is the model that's running over here?
So if the government has an officially blessed model, how do
I know the model that's running within
my defense contract firm is that model? And that gets
all into this supply chain. And I was happy to see that some of it
wasn't as technically laid out as I wanted it to be.
The document really just says we're relying on NIST and some
other government agencies to come up with a plan.
So this wasn't really the plan, it's more the actual call to action for
the plan. But it was good to see that there. It was important for it
to be there. I was happy that that was highlighted. And I think
in terms of security, it's the most
underappreciated one right now. Everyone's really focused on
model guardrails. And what we talked
about last time with the AI 2027 report or AI
breaking out of, of its shell. I think the most
important thing right now is actually more of the supply chain security where you
know, don't let people inject bad data into
models that are making critical decisions for the government,
for finance or healthcare. That's where our focus needs to
be first. I think having that secure supply chain is
ultimately what's going to lead to, to preventing
the AI 2027 report as well. Where it'll prevent
a breakout or if there was a breakout, it's going to reduce the blast
radius of that type of situation.
Now that makes a lot of sense and it's interesting because there's not just
the traditional nation states that could be involved here. Right. There's also
or bad actors in the normal sense. But also the
AI itself could become a threat too. Right. Like,
and the report doesn't isn't technical in detail,
but I don't think that's who the audience was really for. Yeah
but that's interesting
because you know, I don't know like from a game
theory point of view, right. Like you have the traditional, the usual suspects,
right. The countries, terrorist groups, criminal gangs, blah blah,
blah. Right. The usual kind of players. But AI also has
the potential to become yet another player
in the game of that. That's. I certainly
didn't see that in the report and it didn't cross my mind until you kind
of bridged last stream and this stream content. I was like,
oh wow, this is multi dimensional. This is like 5 dgs or
something like that. Yes.
I would say for a first effort, it's actually a fairly reasonably well
written document. For those that don't, for folks
that don't know, I used to accompany our lobbyists
in, in when I was at Microsoft talking about technology
issues and things like that and you know, I was the
technical resource for that.
And as I was telling you, virtual green room. A lot of these elected officials,
regardless of, you know, whether you agree with their
party affiliation or whatnot, they're not the most technical I
would say of the one ones I've interacted with
which maybe, maybe 60, 70,
some of them are names you've heard of, some of them as you've never heard
of. I would say less than 10%
are technical in any sense. Yeah, right.
And there were only two that I would say like would feel
at home having a technical conversation. I wonder how
many of the policymakers even
understand the term AI sovereignty. So and
this is interesting, I'd love your opinion. Yeah, I think how many technical people
would understand. Well, that's what I mean. Yeah, go ahead. This is where I've been
having some conversations even within our own organization that we work
for. There's a lot of differing opinion on what AI
sovereignty is. A lot of people who keep talking to me about AI sovereignty,
I realize they're more talking about clients, cloud sovereignty, they're talking about how do
I secure the compute, all of my
compute within my borders and can guarantee that everything is
within those borders. Which makes sense. I mean we work for Red Hat, we work
for a, you know, basically a cloud
Linux based company. Right. But when we talk about AI
sovereignty, at least me personally, it, it's an accumulation of a
few core areas. It gets back to the data sovereignty, a little bit of that
cloud sovereignty. But it's really about
do my, I have control over my AI models,
I know where the data came from.
And I loved what you said earlier. It's about the culture of the model
and I think ultimately the AI sovereignty is about the culture of the
model and then making sure that you're containing your
AI to the borders of the United States.
So you're keeping all the secrets here, you're keeping the talent
that are driving it. But ultimately you're right, it's about that
culture and making sure that your model has the best
representation of your culture. And
it's kind of a scary thing to think about. It's an interesting topic, but
it also gets into a lot of geopolitical challenges I think we're
having are now surfacing to the top because of things like AI,
you know, it's, it's interesting. Well, it's like 100
and I think I was actually a colleague ours, Robbie, shout out to Robbie
and gotta have him on the stream one of these days. You know, he
was talking about kind of AI sovereignty like, you know, what is, you know,
you can use an American model, right. From
data, right. And then tell it to behave British. He used
better words, right? You know, the spellings and the grammar and things like that. But
whose values are in there, right. When you, when you ask it questions, Right,
yeah. And, and that gets to an interesting thing, right? So
like you know, I, I,
my grand half, my grandparents were not born in the U.S. they're immigrants,
right. So like, but so, so when I went to one of the countries my
ancestry comes through is Ireland, right. So but the Ireland that a lot
of my older family members came from really doesn't
exist anymore, right. It's not the rural kind of
poverty stricken country that it was, right. 100, 110 years
ago. 100 years ago.
So it was very awkward because when I was,
when I was in Ireland as an American.
Even though it felt familiar, it was also felt very foreign. Right. Because
it was, you know, it was, you know, and if you think of me as
a, you know, large language model,
so to speak. Right. I grew up in New York. Right. I'm
very Americanized. So when I go there and it felt familiar.
Right. Like the, the pubs and the restaurants felt like places my older family,
it felt like grandma's house and that sort of thing. But it clearly was
not. And it was clearly also
not the same place that they left. Yeah. That you would hear in family stories
and things like that. You know, so it's
interesting because also I think
values and country and all of that are inherently
political and I think that's why you're seeing this. Right. It is inherently
geopolitical is inherently all of these things.
So technologists who are not used to, we're not
used to this, these types of conversations now suddenly we're pulled into this
and God forbid if there's a, you know, an actual kind of
20th century global war style thing happening. Yeah. Or would happen,
you know, it's only going to get worse
from here. So I do
find it, I do find it interesting how
technologists are now suddenly pulled into this. Right. There's a famous,
you know, you know, Jensen Wong made
it an emergency visit. That was,
that was a big deal. Right, That's. And actually that a lot
of that kind of stuff is called out in this report. You should,
you should go into details about that. So
Jensen Wong, apparently, I don't know what was the
driver of it, but I suspect he was. The administration was trying to
block all exports of GPUs to a particular country.
Yeah. So the rumor was that week
that all, all chip, the global chip manufacturing
outside the US Other than key allies, would just be completely
stopped. And obviously for, for some areas,
like China, it would. They would just end export for
pretty much all chips. So that was not just the ones that are blockaded
right now, but you know, really, even some of the basic
ones. Well, remember that Ford's assembly line
was shut down because there was a shortage due to the pandemic. Nothing else.
Of chips to put in the cars for the assembly line. Yes.
And it cost them x. Millions of tens of millions of dollars a day or
something like that. Right. So not trivial. Right. So like this
could have, this could have been
really bad. So go ahead. I'm
sorry. No, no, no, I was just saying. I was just adding some flavor because
it, it was officially announced by the White House that they were
evaluating this and then the, the word on
the street was, you know, the, the uncut secret was that
the, the U.S. was going to declare this at one of the summits that they
were going to, that they were just cut the chip manufacturing
altogether. And.
Yeah, and then Jensen made an emergency visit to the White House
and which I guess you, if, if you run the,
the most profitable company in America right now,
it helps. Well, that's his most profitable, the most valued. Right. This
valuation is like 4 trillion last I heard. So. Which is crazy.
But yeah, I mean he, it was a, it was a very
unplanned visit where he just went and knocked on. The door and
oh, to be a fly in that wall and that. In the wall. I know,
I know, right. But I mean props to him. Immediately
after that, right, we start hearing of the oh, we're gonna
back this down. We're gonna, we're, we're gonna consider still
shipping the, whatever the, the chip is in China. That's kind of a.
Right, an A100
knockoff.
We did see impacts in that conversation, but I think it's important because it
builds into the, this document because the document clearly outlines
semiconductor supply chain outlining the reliance
on the, of Taiwan.
What I loved about it is that there was a section here,
one second, I am
pulling it up. It was
a little tongue in cheek where they're talking about
reviving the US chip manufacturing under CHIPS act,
but stripped of ideological constraints.
And we won't go into the politics of that here. But I thought that was
pretty funny because the CHIPS act was obviously a big deal.
It was a big deal for me because when it was announced I was still.
I'm based in Boston now, but I'm from Northern Indiana around
the area where Purdue University is close to Chicago. And
we were actually called out on the CHIPS Act. They were going to build a
semiconductor facility there in our area in
conjunction with Purdue University.
But then when, when Trump was elected, he was trying to claw back anything he
could from the CHIPS Act. Right. I'm happy to see that the CHIPS act
is back on the table. I think it's still going to be
extremely political like we have seen with these types of acts,
but is needed. I
AM hoping that $6 billion isn't just
going to go to intel because I think the innovation there is starting to
die off. I'm hoping that we see
more focus towards some innovative areas in chip
manufacturing here and also ultimately which is called out. We
want to bring over a lot of the Taiwan based technologies
and my understanding is that there's just a bunch of
explosives within those facilities there in
Taiwan and they're ready to just blow them up at a moment's
notice and move ship to the U.S.
wow. So I know they're building some of those facilities. I think
Arizona was one of them. I think Texas is another
where they're starting to mimic some of that chip production. And
basically right now the United States is trading military
equipment for chip technology.
It's crazy. Fascinating is. But it's absolutely fascinating from a
geopolitical standpoint that the currency right
now for, for Taiwan is, Is chips.
Yeah. And so. But I think that's
a big driver. It's one of the things that was called out. It was
called out in pillar two of the document, which calls called
Build American AI Infrastructure. And I think. Yeah, you have the
outline there where they call out
specifically the semiconductor leadership and then also securing data
centers. I thought this was interesting. They're going to start having federal
guidelines on data center security
and will also incorporate military and
intelligence usage for those facilities. This is what I
was telling about. This is just reminding me of when I, when I watched
Oppenheimer and learning about the Manhattan Project and
there were military guards in front of
the physics research facilities in
Chicago University and in, in New York
and in Los Alamos. It's, it just
seems very, very similar where it's like we are now going to
attach military guards
to guard our public sector AI
infrastructure. And yeah, I mean
one of the interesting things and I think this really kind of, if you take
a step back, right. Like why, why is.
For many nations, why is domestic auto production important?
Right. Because when it hits the fan,
you're not. You make tanks, right? You make tanks, you make
airplanes. Like all these things are important for
nation states. Right. So automobile production is a
proxy for tank production. Right.
Civilian airline airplane production is a proxy for, you
know, this I would add now probably chip manufacturing.
Right. And possibly, possibly AI model creation.
Yeah. You look at what's happening around the world where there are conflicts. Right.
Drones are playing a huge part of this. Yep. Right.
Whether they're autonomous or not, we will never really know
until the history books are written and even then. But
the whole idea of, you know, drone
and AI based warfare. Right. You know,
one of the videos coming out of you, the Ukraine conflict was
the Russian airplanes were covered in tires. I don't know if you saw
this. No. So, so one of the.
The thinking is that they had, I guess, old tires covering some of
the parts of the airplane. Strategically, the best guess that Everyone
has. And I've heard this from multiple sources saying it's kind of true and kind
of not. So. I don't know, take it for what you will, is that that
was done to confuse computer vision systems. Yeah. And
then there's this other thing. I don't know if you heard of patch attacks,
which is basically like this idea of. I'll see. I pulled up some.
Some graphics of this, but basically.
Open image in new tab.
Basically, it's the idea that you can alter
a structure, like a stop sign,
in ways that the AI model will see something different
and alter what the AI model is
determining it sees. And apparently you're seeing a lot of this,
if you look at footage from, you know, Ukraine area, is that
you're seeing, like, you know,
tanks both sides with. With
stickers on them that look like really warped QR codes or
like bizarre things like this. Yeah. And it's basically to
thwart these types of systems.
So. That's fascinating. It's interesting, isn't it? And this gets back
to. I don't know if it was on the stream or another conversation we have.
We're building these systems, these LLMs with, you know, hundreds of billions of
parameters. Right. If not a trillion or two,
we really don't know how they work. No, we think we know.
And you and I were talking about this the other day, actually, it wasn't on
a stream or anything. It was kind of like. I think that LLMs
that we have now are unreasonably effective.
Right. They're able to. And I'll put air quotes here for anyone listening reason.
Right. They shouldn't be able to
based on. I mean, all I see is just a vector
database with lots of relationships between words.
Yeah, Right. They're capable of doing things that
if. I wouldn't think they would be yet. They are.
Yeah. So there's a lot of research dollars going into figuring this
out right now. Like, why is that? Like, what. Is there something
inherently powerful about language? Probably. Yeah. Right.
That and, you know,
language is kind of like the assembly language of the mind, if you think
about it. Right. So I can
encode my thoughts into something, whether it's a written word,
whether it's, you know, vocalizations,
and then have that come out. It's basically a.
Like a codec for human thought. And
maybe there's some kind of. I don't want to say intelligence, but some kind of
something we don't quite yet grasp. Yeah. About the nature of language
and relationships between words that
automatically you get for free. Once you kind of train these models up,
I think that's fascinating, and I'm glad there's a lot of research dollars to that.
It is. But, you know, clearly the human nervous
system, our visual system, our cortex, whatever it's called,
you know, we know that that is a moth sticker on a stop sign.
Yeah. What is different about how the AI learned
that makes us vulnerable, this type of attack. That's fascinating.
And it doesn't see things like, there's
a lot of research papers that'll show you, basically, what does the model
see? And you see it and it's just absolute nonsense to us.
Right. It's. It doesn't see what we see. It's like
it doesn't relate the.
You know, maybe it's not correlating the red and
the white backgrounds, but instead it's correlating
the position of the text or the fact that it's four
capital letters positioned over an octagon or something like it.
It. The. The way figures these things out is.
Different than how we think we do it. Yeah. It's actually seems obtuse, but.
It's obtuse. But it does it billion times faster than us. So when it's
obtuse, it gets to something faster than we do because it just can
do it a billion times over. And that's where
the secret sauce really is. But how
things relate back to each other, obviously, we have these,
these vectors that like, you know, build relations between
words. But how it can then take it and
reason is still not quite
understood. Right. Right now it's just not understood.
No, it. And it's. No, it's not understood. And that's kind of what
keeps me up at night, is we don't really. We're putting these.
Again, you know, full disclosure, we both work for an enterprise software company with very
large customers. You know, we're deploying these LLMs in
places they're
not exactly making the life and death decisions right now,
but it's not that hard to imagine that they would.
Right. Yep. And I don't know, I think that's.
That's just a huge security vulnerability. We don't know how these things work
and also understand that it doesn't make sense to hold off
deploying these things once we fully understand it. Right. That doesn't. That's
not going to fly either. But I think we should,
as a society, like, really think about,
you know, what are the consequences here. Right. Think of what
the Jeff Goldblum character, Jurassic park. Right.
You know, talked about chaos Theory and all that. Right.
Like it's, you know, you know, the
unintended consequences of this. We
should, to your point, have AI in a box, like,
and make sure it's really hard for that to get out. But
again, like, you know, these things are. Doing.
These things don't think like us
and they may think in more circuitous and obtuse ways that don't
make sense to us, but again, they do it a billion times faster.
So, you know, it could end
up being far more clever than we are.
Absolutely. I remember when I was learning Comp sci
and one of the things I think was assembly language class actually
was multiplication on silicon is typically done. Not
by now. What was it? Yeah, it was.
I don't know if it's still true, but back in the day it was true
that multiplication is actually done through repeated addition.
Yeah. It was actually more efficient to do it that way.
Right. Again, I think that's a great summary of like,
that's kind of the slow way. But if you're operating billions of
times faster, slow way isn't so bad.
Or a slow way doesn't mean anything. And I think you and I were having
this conversation
that, you know, if you think about the power requirements of these
AI systems. Yeah. Versus the power requirements of the human
brain, something like 25 watts.
Right. And if you think about the intelligence of
birds, like crows in particular, Right. They, they, they have the
intelligence of a six, seven year old supposedly.
You know, not only do they have to
do it power efficiently, but they also do it weight efficiently
too. Right. So the infrastructure, you know,
that a crow has to think about, think about, but, or
evolution or whatever, has to put it in a lightweight body.
Like I don't fly. I'm obviously not, I'm not a petite individual,
so I don't have to worry about that. But like, if you're a bird, you
know, you have to fly, so you have to think about that. And yet they're
able to manifest some kind of
intelligence with very modest hardware. I mean,
their brains are not that big. I think the size of a
walnut. I don't know. Like, this is totally off topic, but.
No, it's, it's related though. And on the report they were talking about
power,
power requirements, power requirements and grid security.
Right. And it was called out as. And you think about just the sheer
massive amount of power that these AI models
take. It's. It's insane. I think, I think there was a point where
one third of all power is being used for like bitcoin. Mining. At one point
that went down, and now we've. We've replaced that with AI
and, you know, that's. It keeps going up and up and to the point
that, you know, it's possible that half of all the power being used here soon
is just going to be for AI. And I can see that there's no
evolutionary pressure like there was on biology. No, no, you can just
throw more power at it. So in. In
this case, with. With the LLM technology,
you can just throw more chips. Right. And, you know, make
them. You know, this actually hits home
because I'm between. So Ashburn
or Loudoun County, Virginia, which, if you've ever flown in
and out of Dulles Airport, you've been there, is Data center alley.
So U.S. east is there. U.S. east 1, 2 for all the major providers. Right.
Plus a lot of private ones, too.
I live between there and Three Mile Island. Oh, wow.
Yeah. So one of the big controversies in
the state of Maryland is that they want to put in what they call the
Maryland Power Piedmont Reliability Project or something like
nprp. They're basically going to put in high power
lines between Pennsylvania to Virginia,
which is a political football because there's a lot of land that's going to have
to be eminent domained. Yeah, Right. There's
obviously environmental factors, but also this is the
thing that is really kind of insult to injury. Right.
None of the power that's going to go over those lines is going to be
consumed here. It's all basically exporting power from
Pennsylvania through to Virginia, which
is not. Not a good look if you're. Because the people who
vote Maryland people in are Maryland residents. So there's this whole.
It's a very big controversy right now.
And it's interesting because what used to be
a very isolated hobby of technology
is now embroiled in geopolitics, local
politics. It's just kind of like I kind of miss the good
old days before lawyers got involved.
Yep. But
sorry, but no, I mean, that's a good point. That's, you know, you think about
the power requirements, right. You know,
for these things, you're gonna have to build new power centers. You're gonna have to
do this. Right. And then that, you know, what's. What's your
power source going to be? Solar is awesome. Solar
can't solve everything, Right. So
what's it going to be? Is it going to be wind? You know, is it
going to be, you know, coal? Is it going to be natural gas? Is
going to be oil? Right. There's going to be a whole. It's all fun and
games until people are paying way more for their electric
bill each month than they, than they're used to.
Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to change things
very quickly, especially if it starts impacting people's monthly power bills.
Right. I think right now we haven't seen it too much just because
we've been able to keep up with demand. But once that demand
starts really affecting prices, I think we'll also see
AI being a conversation point in that way where it's going to start.
And then I think, you know, even with the, the 2027
plan that we're talking about, 2027 plan, you know, we were talking about things
like, you know, universal basic income and stuff. You know, if you, if AI starts
taking over everything. And that wasn't outlined in this document,
which I'm not, I'm not surprised. But it's a,
it's going to be a big conversation point. If AI does work the way that
we think it's going to work, will we start seeing the AI
take the jobs? And if they take the jobs. I think it was, actually,
it was Bill Gates like 10 years ago was talking about UBI for,
for AI, and at the time we just thought Bill was being crazy and like,
like a go back to your Gates foundation and. You know, go back and work
on malaria. Yeah, yeah. But no, and even Elon Musk, I mean, and
Elon Musk is definitely a polarizing figure, as is Bill Gates. But they're both
polarizing in different directions. Yeah. They both agree on ubi. I have
mixed feelings personally about ubi, and it's
not because I'm a mean individual. It's just if you study the history of
serfdom. Yep. I don't know.
Looks a little too similar to me. Yeah. But that's just my take
on it. But
you're right, like, and also too, like governments are getting involved. Because if you go
to your local McDonald's, right. Or your Dunkin Donuts, right. And
you think of how many people used to staff that in the past
versus how many people staff that now. Yeah.
Right. And
assume, well, human nature is human
nature. Right. If you used to take 10 people to run your average
McDonald's, now they can get by. I don't know. If you go in there now,
there's like five, maybe four. Yeah, four or five. And that's
generous. Right. If nothing else, the taxes on
the wages have went from 10 employee taxes on 10
employees. Now they're taxing it on five. Yeah. Right.
That, that's a big deal. It is, right. Because now
you're taxing. Now granted they're not, you're not taxing them a lot because
they're not making a lot of money, but still that's 50%.
So if you're kind of like a, you know, a number cruncher and you're
looking at every McDonald's, right. When you have 100 McDonald's now, you're getting the tax
revenue out of that one McDonald's, you know, or at least
on the income of it. Right. The income of the individuals. The income tax on
that is going to be way less now. Even
now. Even before AGI. Before. Yeah, before
that. Right. Because it's just automation. Right. And I personally
would rather deal with a kiosk. Same
here. Deal with the person. Yeah. Right.
Especially if you have like special orders. Right. Like, oh, you know, my kid doesn't
want ketchup on his burger. Right. He doesn't want onions on his burger. Right. So
you just have that as a favorite of the app and then just press go.
I don't even have to touch the kiosk. Yeah,
I think that that is going to be, that's not even an AI system,
Right. That's just good old fashioned automation. One of
the big Silicon Valley AI
gurus who, it was escapes me right now, but was talking
about how the, the jobs
that are going to be considered desirable are going to be
completely flipped here soon.
Where he was, he was saying the most desirable job might just be people in
performing arts. Right. He's like, he, he's like, AI is
not going to replicate that anytime soon. He's like, yes, you may have
movies being AI generated, but there's still something to be said about
the performing arts. You know, obviously like
plumbing and electrician work and construction
work, you know, robotics might amplify that and make
it better, but there'll still be a human element. But you know, traditional white collar
jobs as we know it, other than the people
who, who manage that AI, I, I just
feel like it's going to be completely turned upside down if
AI does what we want it to do. That's a big if right
now. It's a good tool. But the, the real if is
we're gonna get to this more area of agentic and more AI is actually being
able to do the full job of someone rather than just being a
tool that they use. And that's the if right now that we're, we're
betting a lot on. The economy on where there's a lot of.
A lot of bet from many financial institutions that
the AI is going to be what is the next industrial
revolution. I think that's still yet to be proven out.
One just to go back to the UBI though,
there's a book you might be familiar with at the Expanse.
Yes, love those books. They
cover this idea of. Of universal basic
income. And you know we basically have in that, that
series like I think it's like 90,
95 of the world is just on
Earth's population averse population is basically on universal
basic income some sort. And
you then have these, the 5% that actually
just have jobs. Right. It's a big deal that they just have
a job and they're doing things and you know, they're
politicians and people managing technology
or defense and it's. It's fascinating. And I think
if anyone's wanting to look at a little
bit less of less rosy kind of outcome
and one that I think is more accurate, I think it would be a
combination of. Of the Expanse and then probably Ghost in
the Shell, the anime. Both of them show
AI and technology not to the extent
of like Terminator the Matrix where everything gets destroyed, but more
of a like human progression just
gets bogged down by this development. We end up in this
more like
technocratic kind of of realm where techno
feudalism almost. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Techno techno
feudalism. And what's interesting is if you look at kind of the expense. So I'm
a big fan of the Expanse. I've read. I haven't read all the books, but
I've read a lot of them. I've seen the series, which is
excellent by the way, on Amazon. I'm
salty that they didn't. They stopped it at season six, but I can let that
go. But what's interesting is that the people with gumption ended up
leaving Earth and going to Mars. Yep. Or the asteroid
belt. So what happens is 100 years after that now you have to kind of
like these three factions. Right. Everyone looks down on Earth,
right. Because there's always like, particularly in the show, there's always these barbs where
the politician says, you know, if. If you don't do this right, I'm going to
put you on basic. Right. Like so basic becomes like a threat,
which I think is interesting. And then there's also kind of the.
The people who are more entrepreneurial end up going to Mars or the
asteroid belt. And then that doesn't always work out well. So they have this. You
have this tension between these three different factions. And then
throughout this course of the books, a third faction, kind of a
fourth faction kind of enters the scene and kind of disrupts the power of
the status quo. And that's kind of the main tension
of the books is, you know, what happens
after that. But highly recommend those books if you
haven't seen them on the TV show. If you. The TV show is really well
done. I think I would agree. From what I've seen of it, I haven't finished
it, but it's good. And I'm in. I'm in the same boat as you. I'm
a couple books in. It's one of those series I kind of come back to
every once in a while. But funny enough, it's a. It's a series I reference
a lot. I think about it a lot because I was like, I think that's
a really accurate depiction of what the future could look for us
with. With the technology. It's pretty reasonable. And that's what's
really nice about the show. Like, it's. It's not because there's also.
There's. Obviously, you mentioned the pessimistic views of the future. Right. There's. There's the
Matrix, there's the Terminator, but there's also Star Trek, which is a little too. On
the optimistic side. Yes. But
there's not really. I think what's great about the Expanse, and I haven't.
I haven't seen Ghost in the Shell anime in a long time.
I did see clips of the Scarlet Johansson movie,
but the
Expanse does a pretty good job of going down the middle. Like, there's going to
be societal changes that will come
for this we really can't imagine now. Right. Yes.
You know, Earth is pretty much almost like a
techno feudal state. Especially what's interesting in the Expanse is
when they explore what life is like for the average human on
Earth. It's kind of like it's either really good or not.
Right. And Mars is also kind of an
interesting place too. There's a very different dynamic when you get that
many type A driven people in one place.
Sounds awesome at first, but then it's not really awesome.
Yeah, necessarily. Right.
But fun fact, the serve the
PCs and the server names in my house are all derived from the show.
Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah. So I'm talking to you now on
Amun Ra. Cool. I don't know if you've gotten to that part of
the. That's in the first book. Yeah, yeah. The Amun Ra Stealth class
ships. And
the computer I just bought also has that same kind of, you know,
gamer box game aesthetic. So that's Osiris.
And I also have Behemoth, which is that
machine back there. And. Or you've not gotten to the Behemoth
yet. Okay, I won't spoil it for you though. Yeah.
But. And Andy, my co host on the podcast, is also a big fan
of the show. He has, he has the, the
Doniger, which you probably heard of that one. Yes, yes. He's
got Weeping Sonambulist, Weeping Somnambulist,
which. I had a machine with that name, but it's too hard to type out.
You doing the ping on it? It's like, no, I don't know if
you got into that one yet, because that's a couple books in. But.
Yeah, yeah. And my, my,
my. When I left Microsoft, my former Microsoft manager let me keep
one of the laptops. So when it boots into Windows, it's the
Tachi. And when I boot it into Linux, it's Rosson,
which, you know, people have read book or seen the show.
Go get the joke. But. And it's
funny, our manager, when we met in person, my machine was the
Razorback. Right. Which I don't know if you got to that part
yet, but I'll try not to be
spoiler. He's like, so what are you with like an Arizona fan? I'm like, no,
no, no, it's from a book. Nice. So,
but. Another area,
I think this is for another, another time.
So when I come back. But I think it would be good to talk also
about how are the AI
tools right now? Like, are we seeing them replace
humans? I think the leap that we've
made in the last six months is pretty substantial.
Yeah. I think last year I would have said no.
I think this year I'm saying yes. Like, we're seeing,
we are now seeing the technology
there to actually start replacing people. And
it's not that, it's not that the
main guy is going to be out like the tech lead, but I think it's
going to be more the, the junior developer
that's going to be in trouble because now the tech league can act like
a fleet of junior developers. And like I'm, I'm just
programming a game right now and
I'm so surprised how much I've been able to get done
in the, in the time frame I've been working on it. It's amazing
how quickly you can be. But wasn't there also a story, a Guy deleted
his entire production database. Yeah. Because of. I
don't know the details. I had my AI delete,
actually go and start cherry picking things off of the main branch and start
deleting things. Oh, interesting. So I have a duplicate.
I, I every day I fork my. I have a
fork that I, I merge back into because I don't trust
it and I don't tell the AI about the, the fork backup. Yeah, yeah.
I think that says a lot though. Like you don't trust it. Like, you know,
and it's not guardrails. It's not. Well, it's not guardrails in the
sense that when people say guardrails and AI. Right. That's true. Yeah. It's a different.
You're kind of. You're cya.
That's really what you're doing. It is, it is. Right, that's true. Whether you, whether
you put your code back up in another repo in another branch or a
USB drive, like you're really. CYA is really what you're doing. And
I think that there's a lot of. We've been going for an hour, so.
And I also have to. I gotta drop too, so. Yeah, I gotta drop two.
But, but it's been great. It's awesome. I think we continue more. But I
definitely want to know more about the game thing you're doing because I sent you
a bunch of stuff on Humble Bundle too. Yeah, yeah, which for game
dev, so. But I have. My teenager needs a
ride somewhere, so. Hey, thank you for having me. Hey, no
problem, man. It's great. And be sure to check out
our Red Hat AI YouTube channel where I think Chris has a video or two.
Yeah. And I have a video or two as well. And
with that, we'll see you next time. And
have a good one. And that's a wrap on this episode of Data
Driven, where we've dissected the Americas AI action plan with the
precision of a data scientist on espresso and the paranoia of a
Cold War analyst. Big thanks to Christopher Nuland for
returning to the show and reminding us that AI sovereignty isn't just a
buzzword. It's a geopolitical chess match played with silicon and
source code. If you're not slightly more worried about data
pipelines, chip supply chains, or which values your LLM
secretly harbors. Were you even listening? As always, you
can find us on data driven TV, franksworld.com
and wherever your algorithms recommend quality geek banter.
Until next time, stay curious, stay Data Driven.
And remember, if your AI starts talking about sovereignty.
Maybe check the firewall.