Welcome, Lewis.
We've got another episode today,
haven't we?
We have.
And, well, first of many,
return of season three.
We have potentially maybe
done some recordings but
not released them,
but shall we discuss...
Contentious point.
Very contentious point.
We'll discuss what we're
going to be talking about today.
So, obviously,
we always pick something from the news,
most relevant things in the week.
I've picked two things.
Agent space from Google,
which I'll talk about and
the benefits of it.
And then another breach by Oracle,
as in like not by Oracle
causing the breach,
but Oracle got breached
after the first cover-up
and then got breached again.
So there's been a second cover-up.
And then a miscellaneous thing,
which we'll do at the very end.
What are your two things?
So...
I'm going to dig into
OpenAI's new AI models,
but a little bit on the
marketing about what
they've said are the major
new capabilities of their models.
And also the Clean Cloud Act,
a bill going through the
Senate in the US.
Oh, very good.
And how have you been?
You've been cursoring, AI-ing,
getting the AIs to write
all your stuff for you yet?
Yeah, I mean,
I'm always on that constant battle,
although I handed it or
shared the little battle
with the crazy machines
with my son at the weekend.
It was Easter,
and normally I'd want to be
on my one wheel or cycling
or snowboarding or doing something,
but we stayed in.
Oh, wow.
We did some vibe coding with
Google's Firebase Studio.
That's pretty cool.
And it worked.
It was.
He enjoyed the outcome more
than the thing.
So that's a no.
I'm guessing that's a no.
He was excited at the end of
the kerb and at the
beginning of the kerb.
Yeah.
But at the middle,
like the bits where it doesn't work, oh,
we've got to upgrade it.
Now we've got to come up
with a really clear and
concise set of instructions
as kind of a plan rather
than just a big wobbly one
paragraph sort of bit
contradictory sort of spiel.
You've got to turn it into
something half decent.
So we got it working.
When all of his friends were
outside saying, Charlie.
Are you coming out?
And you're like, look, Charlie,
join the blinds.
We're not going anywhere
until this code is finished
and we've shipped a release.
You're so cool.
What did you get up to this weekend?
Well, I one-wheeled.
I went out.
I did some snowboarding.
What did I get up to?
I went to Brighton.
um saw some friends um which
is cool because it changed
a bit like got like a a
pool on the beach now an
open air pool on the beach
and a sauna and the um what
do you call it volleyball
courts all kind of near
each other so you can
basically go in the sauna
and people are running into
the sea um and then
obviously people are then
going off for a proper swim
but not in the sea then
swimming into the pool so
it's really it's very warm
So I've kind of found my
love again for Brighton
because I used to live there years ago.
So I was a bit like, actually,
it's such a cool place.
I think being by the seaside is a thing.
Exactly.
But you can't swim in it
because it's too polluted.
And then just caught up with
some other friends, chilled out a bit.
And so I kind of had a bit
of a mixed bag as well.
But talking about the news,
talking about cloud,
talking about AI and how
it's going to take over the world,
I don't know how much you know about this,
but there's agent space.
And it isn't space,
so don't be too disappointed.
It has nothing to do with actual space.
So it's really... Is it
worth continuing then?
I'm not really sure if it is
really worth continuing.
Is it about spies?
Spies in space?
It's about female
celebrities going on a blue
origin trip for humanity
and really... I heard there
is someone called... Is it Kate Perry?
Katie Perry.
I've heard that this person exists.
yeah and that's that's what
this is about so google
have come out with a new
service that helps you be
katie perry um so yeah no
um so yeah so they've got
this new service ish where
it's basically agent to
agent so you can kind of
create agents um and kind
of chain them together but
it's a kind of multimodal
supported thing also has
integrations into lots of
other services like service
now and jira google drive
And actually what you can do
is you can start to plug it in, um,
at the minimum,
probably plug it into
things that you've got in your business.
So if you already use Google, um,
And that's great because
obviously you'll have all
your assets there.
A lot of companies like us
obviously use Confluence and Jira,
so that's quite good.
So it has like native
support for a bunch of like
default tools.
And then you can just start
to have conversations with
it and be like- John,
just to interject a second,
is that why we've got fifty
thousand new Jira tickets?
That was me, yeah.
So what I needed access to
agent space first.
I had to get it to raise the
tickets for it to work
because I couldn't get it to work.
So the pricing,
they do like a free one
where they give you like fifty thousand,
I think fifty thousand
licenses as part of like
the free offering for like fourteen days.
So I was kind of playing around with that.
But then the pricing is quite a lot.
I think it was something
like a hundred and thirty
five dollars a month just
for fifteen licenses,
which I think is very steep on top of,
say,
if you're already using Workspace and
you've got Google and
using Drive and Gmail and other things,
that's already got a user price on it.
So then to spend a hundred
and thirty five pounds for fifteen,
which I think is even more
than your license for Gmail
and Drive itself,
seems a bit
disproportionate for a pricing
model to make your life a bit easier.
I don't know.
What's your thoughts on it?
I don't know.
It seems so.
Is agent space by Google?
Yes, it's a service in Google Cloud.
And you basically could like,
you enable it.
It's a Google Cloud service.
And then you permission it
into the files and things like that.
I see.
So instead of having to rely
on the Gemini button that's
everywhere in Google these
days to do a point thing on
a point bit of data in a
very specific thing with
hardly any tool use,
and it's only just got
access to do anything with
cheats at all useful.
And it's building.
Instead of going it from the tool out,
they've...
aggregate data and have a
flow that moves across your
data sets yeah I think it
was part of their
conference as well they did
a talk they did an
announcement for it um
making about a hundred
announcement per second no
I think that I think I
think they had a conference
you know yeah so um so yeah
so they'll have all the
things from like the key
notice keynotes and things like that but
Yeah, so I think in one of their, I guess,
live demos, they talk about agent space.
And then I think they use it as a bank.
And I can't remember really
what the talk was about,
so I'm kind of plagiarizing badly.
They were like role-playing
around if you're a certain
person in a bank and you
want to kind of get access
to certain details and then
produce a report and then
schedule that into an email.
So essentially it can even
integrate into your calendar,
add the people into the calendar,
send the meeting,
send the email invite and
all these other things.
So it goes beyond just
facilitation on some information.
It's actually a workflow of working.
I think what they're looking
at is don't leave...
It's organized this podcast, yeah.
Which is why this is our
fifth attempt today at trying to do it.
It's still got teething problems.
So create loads of Jira
tickets to create a podcast.
That's what it did.
But did you get any success out of it?
so all I will say is I
haven't actually managed to
use it because google cloud
and it's you know
phenomenal fashion uh it
needed certain permissions
obviously for the service
account needed certain
permissions for me you get
a url essentially that's
then obviously the portal
of the agent I guess the
llm chat um window for the
for the inputs you know the
context of the inputs but um
When I went to do that,
it couldn't validate me as
a user for some reason.
Didn't have some permission
somewhere to obviously be
able to tell whether I am a user,
certainly those permissions.
Discovery permissions is
what it kind of needed.
So it didn't take me too long,
but I hit a few roadblocks
on actually what it really
needs to work from a
permissions perspective.
So then obviously then I had
other things to do and had some meetings,
so I didn't manage to progress.
but do you think you'd use
it if I had it going would
you would you use it uh so
I guess in in my wheelhouse
in development I would want
to plug it very
specifically into very
specific apis or tools
rather than your general
data you know the the
workspace stuff jira maybe I don't know
Yeah, I don't know.
I'd need to... Yeah,
so less on the heavy side,
because you've got other tools for that,
and less on the engineering side,
but on the business side,
probably more on the business side.
I would imagine so, yeah.
Yeah, for me, I thought, I mean,
being more on the business side nowadays,
then I could see how you could, you know,
from our side,
either have contractual elements,
you could have statements of work,
and what you could do is
you could then be like, right,
take this outcome,
take this interview on the drive,
which is like typed up of
the customer success of our engagement,
tally the statement of
workers in what we were trying to solve,
what the commitment was
within the outcome,
and then produce me a case study
you know based on that thing
the end to end you know
what what we said specific
marketing outcomes and like
bits and that's just one
you can break down each bit
and and do it so when
you've got messy text and
no code like software two
point oh ai space seems
perfect yeah or like doing a
you know,
working out if you've got things
in confluence, you know,
are they out of date maybe
with other things that
you're kind of saying in
statements of work?
I can imagine actually from even from a,
I know I'm like rifting on ideas,
but even from like an
administrative perspective,
when it comes to content
it's got a tendency to be
out of date or to have many
versions of that thing
right so I can imagine
actually as a tool to be
like can you find all the
different variant versions
of this kind of context
window and actually can you
find me the most recent and
then can you delete all the
other old ones because
actually it's confusing so
I could imagine actually
doing administrative tasks
to keep your actual data
integrity higher because
you don't have a sprawl of
things through time
would be very useful as a
tool and an assistant to
give you any of the relevant information.
It seems to overlap a lot.
I think it's probably
because of Google's naming conventions.
I put conventions in some
air quotes because they
Some of the news I've heard
about their agent-to-agent protocol,
their agent development kit,
and their Vertex product and Firebase,
they all seem to be coming
out at the same time.
And there's lots of agentic flows
and discussions about the
agent development kit.
So I imagine maybe some of
these products have come
out as use cases of some of
these things and become
services in their own right.
I don't know.
Yeah, no, you're spot on.
I think that's exactly what's happened.
I think agent space,
you can create your own agent even in it,
and it's a low code or no
code experience to create even an agent.
So you can kind of flow
chart the business process.
I mean, obviously, I can't get it to work,
so I've no idea really what
it really does.
All I have to rely on is, you know,
we will get to it.
Next episode,
I will have actually had the
time to have properly used it.
I haven't really had the time to explore.
But from what I've seen,
you can create your own agent.
It doesn't work for you, right?
It's obviously,
I don't know exactly how it
necessarily does it.
So you can plug in your own agent space.
Hence why I imagine the agent-to-agent,
because that's really
essentially what it is about.
It is about agent-to-agent
and the pass-through of
information and leveraging
multi-contextual tooling.
So, yeah,
I think that's really where it's going.
But, yeah, anyway,
I've dominated a little bit
on that one thing.
What's your news?
What's got your interest this week?
So...
I don't know, another thing AI-wise,
it's OpenAI's new AI models.
There was an article in The
Verge talking about
Their models, O-three and O-four,
what's that, O-three mini?
I have to look it up every
time and I get totally confused.
And I think that seems to be
a lot of the discussion that's come out.
So The Verge came out with
an article saying their
O-three model can use
images when reasoning.
So it's kind of multimodal,
but there are specifically reporting on,
and OpenAI have
specifically said that
during its thinking phase,
when you have chain of
thought reasoning and AIs
can show you what they're thinking about.
Right.
OpenAI have said their
O-three model can use
images when doing that reasoning.
Now that just seems like
another way of stating
moti modality in the model I
can't actually see that I
think this is there's a
marketing polish on top of
it because I was trying I
was trying to like get the
concrete statement they did
make a couple of statements
specifically say where we
can think with images and
that you know if you have a
chart of the differences
between the models um one
of the things is you know
these new models can do certain
thinking um while they're
doing reasoning with images
but you look at all of the
information from deep mind
and all the gemini models
from google all boast about
how they do deep reasoning
and are multimodal so have
the context of images
whilst they're reasoning so it's like
is this marketing spin
because obviously we can't
we can't look inside these
closed source models and
see whether they've got a
mixture of experts and part
of it is generative for
images and part of it is
tokens for image pixels or
what you don't you don't
get to find out so all
we've got to go on is the
marketing thing so I think
actually my summary of all that is uh
OpenAI, and actually all of them,
the model naming just
drives me mad because I
can't remember which one
I'm talking about or which
one they're talking about.
And then some of the marketing spin,
they're trying to
differentiate what the
latest thing in their model,
and it's very thin and small.
It's a bit of a rumble.
Yeah, if I was being a guessing person,
I would have assumed...
that if Google were making
those announcements from a conference,
that you might also want to
be PRing your own stuff in
the meantime to take the attention away,
even if there wasn't really
anything too much to really say.
But I'm kind of guessing.
I mean, that's just my cynicism.
Maybe that's not...
Yeah, no,
I think I've got a joint bit of
sense on this.
And I worry a little bit
that the very specific...
When you look at the
feature chart on the OpenAR
website about all the new models,
they've all been updated to
have access to tools,
but some of them are memory
and some of them are other
tools and some of them are
context and some of them
are image reasoning and
some of them are not.
It's all lots of words
And there's not a clear
distinction about which
ones will actually give you
a benefit when you're using them.
Deep thinking and doing
agentic flows for carrying
out deep research,
that seems like a clear thing,
which is distinct from...
one model or the other,
but they're all based on a
whole bunch of where they
place the training so that
they're better at using tools,
better at knowing about tools,
better at knowing about multimodalities.
But it almost seems like the
AIs at this point are right
in their own marketing blood.
It's a little bit like not on our...
But did you see the era of experience,
the white paper,
the research paper that came out by,
I need to have a little look, by Google.
It was by David Silver.
He's like a Google researcher.
And then the computer scientist,
Richard Sutton.
But talking about where
they're basically trained
from their environment.
So essentially they start to
become more environmentally aware,
I suppose you could say,
and actually start to train
themselves rather than
having human data or like
inputted data to train them human driven.
data which is very
complicated and hard to
come by it can you know
train itself I was actually
watching a lecture with uh
uh what's it dem demis uh
habilis the the deep um
deep mind uh ceo right yeah
um talking about um having
reinforced learning is the thing um and
When you've got humans in
the loop doing the training
and the feedback and the whole internet,
it's really muddied and not
that clearly good.
But as soon as you get a
feedback loop where they
can learn on themselves,
then if you can just work
out how to give it clear
signals about good,
you can measure that so the
problem becomes a data
science problem and not an
ai problem but if you can
do that then your ai will
will learn very very
quickly so synthetic paper
data and re and real
reinforcement learning seem
to be the paradigms that
yeah which is really
interesting like learning
from their environment and
taking existing
know information it's kind
of gathering over time and
then using that to actually
train itself on real niched
in I guess specifics like
healthcare where you've got
absolutely yeah so it does
just kind of make a lot of
sense that will be when you
move away from foundational
models that are a large
language model based
mainly yeah yeah and moved
towards deep learning
systems the neural net deep
learning systems that have
been trained on very
specific tasks then those
become very much more um
capable when they're trained
on reinforcement learning
but I think it's coming
full circle and actually
the llms now need to well
they're making large
language models and the
deep seek stuff from china
sort of broke the thing
apart and said actually
they need to learn on their
own and be taught by other
ais but yeah artificial
general intelligence as they uh
on the way agi yeah I mean
that was a bit gentle so my
thing I know we're trying
to do these every week and
we'd like to trying to get
it down to thirty minutes
on the top news but it
needs to be very very
strict um was the oracle
breach um I know you and I
spoke about it before but
for the people basically
they denied having a breach
um said no nonsense no one's
breached oracle um then I
think then the hackers then
I think put something up on
their website or took put
some files somewhere or did
something on the server
that they actually breached
to prove that he actually
had breached it I think then
was then another breach on a
system that was like really
old and then they were then
admitted yes actually but
it was a very old thing not
to do with our cloud even
though it kind of was their
cloud um but some old part
of their cloud with some
unpatched servers um that
were running some like old
software middleware software
and then said that it wasn't recent.
And so it's not the data.
It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
It's not recent.
It's not recent data.
It's a really old server,
even though the data in it
was from twenty twenty four
and had passwords from
twenty twenty four.
But that aside, it's old, like, you know.
So anyway, so that's kind of happened.
So they got hacked.
But they dealt with the news
and it was fine.
They dealt with the news.
It's not really got much airtime.
This is what I find strange,
given the fact that
I kind of feel like if that
had happened to Microsoft or Amazon,
whether it was an old server or not,
or some old middleware service or not,
I really feel they would
have been given a much
harder time in the media.
Whereas for some reason, I don't know why,
but it's not.
There's a second.
I think they leveraged the same breach.
I think it was the same
backdoor or way in through
some like Java.
Java web kind of frontend,
something that probably
didn't get patched, a middleware exploit,
I think, on some Java app.
But anyway, that's mine.
Over to you.
You were saying, I don't know, I heard,
I think I did hear about this.
We discussed it a few days
ago and I think it's to be,
we might have discussed it
last week actually in one
of the attempted podcasts
that one of the AIs organised for us.
But there was a specific
hacker that had actually tried to
sell zero-day exploits on
the back of this.
They tried to extort Oracle,
and they're trying a few
different things.
And then Oracle totally shut
it down and said it's an old system.
And then they started leaking data.
And then some other
customers came forward and said, actually,
that looks legitimate data.
So who knows?
I think my take on it is, you know,
like security is always hard.
And yes,
all the news should be massive
when it's a big vendor.
Yeah, I mean,
when you're providing
services around those
things that you're just, I'm not,
you know, we've only got,
I need to go to your clean
act because I want to know
what that's about.
But just to wrap up,
if you're trusting a
service provider to provide
a service of which those
services are cloud security
and you get hacked,
there is a sense of irony
behind the fact that you're
professing to do cloud security well,
but you're not patching your own stuff.
So, you know, there's a bit of a,
strange.
Yeah, it doesn't bode well, right,
for the external PR view of
your organisation.
Do you think the reason we
don't hear about it from
the bigger vendors is that
they have got their act in order?
I seem to remember a long
time ago thinking
you know,
the surface area of security in
an organization is crazily
hard to keep on top of.
And the possibilities of
like random security
vulnerabilities being
present in production
systems is pretty high.
But if you use the best that
cloud has to offer, then you're
probably going to be maybe a
little bit lower than a rag
bag sort of data center.
There's ways of looking at lenses.
Maybe we can keep track and
talk about those types of
security patterns in the
cloud and what you need to do and
The shared responsibility
model between the customer
and the cloud is obviously
a bit of a bizarre spectrum.
It depends on what it is,
what you're using, how SaaS, how PaaS,
how IaaS, you know,
it's such a broad area.
So yeah, that's a challenge yourself.
But anyway, the Clean Cloud Act.
OK,
we can put the security down because
it's all fine.
There is nothing to worry about.
It is all fine.
So another thing that's all fine.
So there's a bill going through,
being proposed at the Senate in the US,
Clean Cloud Act of twenty
twenty five by US senators
Whitehouse and Fetterman.
It's very early, Bill.
So, you know,
when digging it up as a new source,
it actually seems like, you know,
when it's reported from multiple angles,
it's like, okay, it should be big news.
Four percent of all U.S.
power goes to data centers, apparently.
You know,
there's probably marching error
bars and that's probably
the upper bar of the error bar.
But, you know, within a percent or so,
that's a big number.
And it's projected to get to
twelve percent in the next,
by twenty twenty eight.
This is only three years away.
But this is on the
assumption that they're sharing,
obviously, the energy, you know,
suppliers and they're not
going to go and build
their own renewable energy
or something of their own,
that they own their own
data centres and don't rely
on the grid at all?
Well, I don't know.
The bill specifically talks
about crypto as well as AI.
And it's brought forward by Democrats.
And obviously the current
powers that be may
not think favourably to
progressive measures in this space.
But I think it is, you know,
there's been a lot of news
when OpenAI and all the big tech firms,
including Oracle, actually, and Microsoft,
all got behind the Trump
administration with, you know,
what was it, Project Stargate,
I think it is,
to make the biggest AI data
centres the world has ever seen.
It's going to be the best AI.
The greatest.
The greatest data centre the
world has ever seen.
And they're all announcing,
or they were all announcing
use of nuclear, use of coal,
like some bits of gas and let's just burn,
baby burn.
And it seems like this
little whisper on the side
of a bit of sanity to say, actually,
you know,
we should use this as an
opportunity to build green, you know,
to have on site.
I mean, you know,
organizations that make energy.
as well as maybe cars,
have like dominated in this
space and stand to clean up.
Yet, you know,
the use of AI and the use of
dirty energy in being the
first mover with the
biggest data centres is a contradiction.
I've got the impression they
were investigating, as in like,
was it Google?
was investigating nuclear
plants for their data centres, as in,
like,
basically standing up their own
nuclear plant for energy,
which... I think Microsoft
had an announcement that
they were buying Long
Island or... Ice teas.
Marl Long Island.
Long Island ice teas for all their staff.
Yeah, Long Island ice teas for everyone.
Oh, God, it's not long.
Well,
we know of a place called... What's
the...
The nuclear facility in the
States that had an accident.
Anyway,
there's a legacy nuclear that we're
going to buy and referable and bring on.
Because I think you're not
subject to the same
scrutiny when it's privately done.
And you could do it for, you know,
your own private energy consumption.
I think it's slightly different.
For some reason,
that's why they've been
able to get it passed
through legislation quicker
because it's not, you know,
it's a company deciding,
not a state deciding.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I think, you know,
the... But what is the act?
The act is... The whimper, the act,
is to bring in...
to ensure that emissions are
a hundred percent generated
renewably by twenty thirty
five by amending the Clean
Air Act specifically.
to make sure that data
centers specifically have
to be green um which kind
of makes sense if you're
gonna crypto crypto is
probably where the bill was
born and it's probably been
bumbling along for a decade
and now crypto is not the
thing that we're all owed
about although it is a
thing and it does use a
hell of a lot of energy um
and if it was all
uh green energy then it
would be like okay as long
as it's not taking all the
capacity away from all the
other uses of energy then
yeah fair enough or if it
was local to the compute
then that's good but you
know with ai it's just
accelerating the demand and
anything that could be
actually strongly put
forward and adhered to
would would be good and I
would say you know um
Companies,
organisations and governments
that get behind this stand
to win because guess what?
Things that aren't renewable run out.
You could decide to be ahead
and use this as a lever.
When the Second World War broke out,
we didn't say, oh, well,
haven't got enough factories,
we're going to lose the war.
No,
we built factories and we got extra
workforce and all the women
went to work and we made
all the weapons and we...
and we run the war you know
it's like an urgency thing
I think my my news article
really the summary is it's
it's a it's a little bill
it's a little whimper and
it's by the wrong side of
uh you know the majority in
the state so it will
probably go completely
unnoticed but it is
probably well I find it uh
an interesting and
important yeah it's an
important aspect isn't it really but
Cool.
So we don't really have time to discuss,
because we did so,
we've got to keep it to thirty minutes.
So we're trying our best.
So I guess I'll just have to
leave the old AI hub in
Saudi Arabia and how you
can basically put things in
their data center,
but under your own jurisdiction,
apparently, under your own laws,
even though it's
technically kind of there.
And they'd have no backdoor to that.
No sovereignty at all on
their own land for those purposes.
Exactly.
A bit like storage unit facilities.
You're just using them to store your stuff,
but only you've got access.
I think that's the view.
It's yours and it's under
your jurisdiction.
That's how the world works.
We're not cynical on Cloud Unplugged,
though.
Not cynical on Cloud Unplugged.
Get your data into Saudi Arabia.
No security issues.
Get it over there.
Don't worry about it.
Just set up your own laws.
It'll be fine.
Tell them these are our laws.
This is what will govern buying.
Ship your data over there
and it'll be fine.
Don't worry.
Anyway, that was a good episode.
A few things to pull up on.
Hopefully next one,
I will have more
information about the agent
space where I've actually
managed to get it to work
and keep you posted.
And we shall see you next week.
Adios.
Adios, indeed.