From Cold War to Code Wars: Unpacking America’s Bold AI Strategy

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

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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.

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,

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

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

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.

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.