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Martin Scorsese Is Now An AI Filmmaker.
Martin Scorsese is now advising AI image and video company Black Forest Labs, and he is just one of a wave of major filmmakers embracing AI as a tool. This week on AI For Humans, Martin Scorsese has become an AI filmmaker. Well, sort of. The legendary director is now advising Black Forest Labs, joi
Show Notes
Martin Scorsese is now advising AI image and video company Black Forest Labs, and he is just one of a wave of major filmmakers embracing AI as a tool.
This week on AI For Humans, Martin Scorsese has become an AI filmmaker. Well, sort of. The legendary director is now advising Black Forest Labs, joining a growing list of major filmmakers discussing AI as a tool, even as the backlash rages on and cartoonists face death threats. We get into where AI filmmaking goes from here, why Jorge Gutierrez dropped his AI-generated series after backlash, and the genuinely incredible AI creators pushing the form forward right now.
Then: NVIDIA and Microsoft spent three years cooking up the RTX Spark to reinvent personal computing, and Gavin let Codex's goal tool run for 45 hours to make a bear get extra jumpy. It is AI For Humans!
HOLLYWOOD IS GOING AI WHETHER IT LIKES IT OR NOT. WE THINK?
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SHOW LINKS
Martin Scorsese joins Black Forest Labs as an advisor:
https://bfl.ai/martin-scorsese-bfl-advisor
Jorge Gutierrez drops out of Amazon MGM AI-generated series after backlash:
Gossip Goblin's 'Toe Brigade' short:
https://youtube.com/shorts/hB8_vGQ4bhs
Furufuru & The Gorilla (the Japanese creator putting himself into movies):
https://x.com/ai_am_furufuru/status/2061793575000744029
Kavan The Kid's latest, Chronicle of Bone:
Sopranos AI meme:
https://x.com/memechaotic/status/2061170850959647215
jboogxcreative live stream on how to make AI movies (hugely educational):
https://www.youtube.com/live/fCmCqdUjo-Q
NVIDIA's Nemotron 3, the best American open-source AI:
https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2061304911565144230
New MiniMax M3:
https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2061266317815296322
PewDiePie's open-source agentic harness:
NVIDIA RTX Spark claims to reinvent the PC:
https://www.ign.com/articles/nvidia-announces-the-rtx-spark-claims-to-reinvent-the-pc
Gavin's Codex /goal experiment:
https://x.com/gavinpurcell/status/2061639229709652403
Gavin's bear-jump experiment published on Vercel:
https://bear-jump-port.vercel.app/
Transcript
aiforhumanshollywoodaiscorsese
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Kevin Pereira: [00:00:00] Well, Martin Scorsese is now an AI filmmaker.
Gavin Purcell: And this clip is not
Marin Scorsese: AI. I need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Almost medieval. Even the, the streets are narrower.
Kevin Pereira: Scorsese is just one of a number of major filmmakers who are suddenly embracing AI as a tool, while haters continue to send death threats to cartoonists.
Gavin Purcell: But as the YouTube-driven success of The Backrooms movie shows, sometimes the world changes fast. We're gonna dive in today to talk about AI filmmaking, show you some of our favorite creators, and also give you some tips on how to make the best ones. Nvidia
Kevin Pereira: and Microsoft, they cooked for about three years, and they have finally yoinked the future of personal computing out of the oven and dragged it on stage.
Jense Huang: Of course, I gotta show you the most beautiful part, which is video games.
Gavin Purcell: And I let Codex's Slash Gold to cook for about 45 hours, and, uh, ended up with a very fun version of my bear jumping game, if you remember from back in the day.
Kevin Pereira: I understand [00:01:00] what a percentage of those words were, but I also know for certain that this is AI for humans.
Gavin Purcell: Woo-hoo.
Welcome everybody to AI for Humans. This is your twice a week guide to the wonderful world of AI. And Kevin, today we have some crazy news from the AI video space. Martin Scorsese, Marty Scorsese, who his friends call him, I am one of his friends, I know you are his friend as well- Marty Swaz,
Kevin Pereira: that's how he is in my WhatsApp threads
Gavin Purcell: Marty Swaz is an AI- Marty Swaz
filmmaker now. Let's like kind of set the table as to what's going on here. Black Forest Labs, the makers of the Flux models, which we haven't heard a ton from lately, have released a new kind of commercial, I guess, featuring Martin Scorsese. And we do wanna be clear here, this could very well be a paid deal.
This could also be an equity deal. But Martin Scorsese is in this commercial directing an AI, which actually I think is a much bigger deal than you might expect.
Kevin Pereira: And to quote BFL, that's the Black Forest [00:02:00] Labs, "He spent six decades shaping how the world sees stories, and now he's helping us shape visual intelligence with human t- t- t- t- taste and craft-" Ooh
at the center."
Marin Scorsese: So you think Flux actually will storyboard for me?
Human Voice: Well, let's try it, and we'll go from, from what you think.
Marin Scorsese: I need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Almost medieval. Even the, the streets are narrower, cobblestoned. Uh, the main road through the town is twisting and turning.
Put the camera higher, looking down.
Kevin Pereira: Suddenly the, the postman shows up. His, his bobas grow massive, big massive boba milkers. No, that's not what we're
Gavin Purcell: doing, Kevin. The postman.
Kevin Pereira: What? That's
Gavin Purcell: not, that's not Martin Scorsese. Oh, abso- It's probably more like suddenly, suddenly a gun, somebody comes out with a gun and starts shooting everybody.
Right. Which by the way, you cannot very well do in AI video as of yet because there are so many controls on it. True. I would like to see the Martin Scorsese, uh, uncensored AI that would allow me to get Scarface scenes, which is not there yet. But- Oh, I like [00:03:00] that, yeah ... we should talk about this. We should talk about this because we have been tracking this for a while.
There's been this kind of bubbling up amongst Hollywood, and we'll get into d- more detail in a little bit, but I, I think this is probably the biggest filmmaker at large who has come out and basically said they're going to use AI in some form. And what was interesting to me is watching Scorsese direct the AI as he would a cameraman.
Right. I think this is gonna shake a lot of people's like, uh, kind of belief structures because Scorsese is also seen as one of the, I'd say, top five living filmmakers right now. I don't know, when you first saw this, Kevin, what was your first reaction out of it?
Kevin Pereira: It was I couldn't believe the estate let them do this, but you just said that he's actually-
still with... I'm not- He is
Gavin Purcell: still alive. He's, he's still with us- I'm not up on this ... and making great films. He's making amazing films, Kevin.
Kevin Pereira: Martin Scorsese's one of my favorite directors, uh, of all time. Goodfellas, Casino, have posters, had posters in the old casa. So like 100%, and
Gavin Purcell: was a little- Oh, were you a Goodfellas poster person?
I'm learning something. This is some Kevin lore. You were a poster? No,
Kevin Pereira: not only was I a [00:04:00] Goodfellas poster person, but, but, uh, good, uh, shout out Louis Hurtado, good friend back in the day. Sure. Photoshopped myself, him, and my brother as the three faces on the Goodfellas poster. Ooh. And that was hanging in my house for a long time.
Gavin Purcell: drop that in here? Is there, is there a visual of that? Do you have that in your file somewhere? I'm,
Kevin Pereira: you know, I might. I might. I d- I have the physical poster in storage, but-
Gavin Purcell: Okay. All
Kevin Pereira: right ... I digress. Big Martin Scorsese fan. I, and it's, as much as everybody wants to spew vitriol over anybody doing it with AI, I'm sure they won't have a problem attacking- Yes
Marty the same way they- Yes ... did James Cameron, even though these are icons, these are legends, right? They really are. I, I, like, they're, they're still going to, to get all of the hate.
Gavin Purcell: Actually, I have a point on this because I think they're not going to get the hate. Because I think in the same way that when Cameron came out, there wasn't as much hate against what James Cameron said.
And I do think I wanna be careful about how we talk about this a little bit, because what's interesting to me is there's a little bit of a power structure system going on right now. Because [00:05:00] we are also gonna talk in just a second about a follow-up in a story from last week where Jorge, uh, Gutierrez, the creator of that AI series for Prime Video, backed out of his project this week due to the hate- Yeah
he was getting online. And I want to say, I think people are not gonna crap on Scorsese for this, because people love Scorsese, and in some ways I guess there's this level of if you have done enough in your career, you get to kinda do whatever you want, right? Which is why, like, people like Spielberg or Cameron or Scorsese get away with this stuff.
N- I shouldn't say get away with this stuff, because I think it's good.
Kevin Pereira: Let's imagine you're a construction worker, Gavin, and in your little tool belt you got a hammer. What's it made of?
Gavin Purcell: Uh, metal, wood, and, and if I'm lucky- Great ... some sort of very- Great ... fancy, uh, polymer.
Kevin Pereira: Love it. Love it. What about a screwdriver, Gavin?
What's that made of?
Gavin Purcell: Uh, metal, polymer, and maybe a little bit of human blood.
Kevin Pereira: Mm-hmm. And what about an AI tool? Because that's what Martin Scorsese says. You know what that's made of, Gavin?
Gavin Purcell: Human labor,
Kevin Pereira: right? Is that- Stolen dreams.
Gavin Purcell: Yes, you're right. Stolen dreams. Yes. Yeah.
Kevin Pereira: The only [00:06:00] way AI gets to exist is if Martin Scorsese Shang Songs some souls out of all- Yes
of the artist community. Ooh, Shang Songs. And so, yeah, yeah. He sort of, "Your soul is mine." The point is- Yes ... I do think people will, will forgive Martin Scorsese using it as a tool because he is a legend, he is an icon, yes. Yeah. But I don't think he's going to escape that deluge of feedback, right, wrong, or otherwise, that the tool you're using only exists because it, it, it stole the labor, it stole the creative output of millions of people in its wake.
Gavin Purcell: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think that there's definitely... I guess w- we always have to set the table here. We haven't done this for a while, so let's do it. This is, like, our disclosures. We understand that all AI was trained on the creative work of the h- the human history, right? Mm-hmm. Lots of artists got swept into these datasets in the very beginning, but we are now at a stage where the tools are allowing people to make things, and we're gonna get into some really interesting things that we've seen that are remarkable.
And I think the idea that somebody like Martin [00:07:00] Scorsese comes in and says, "Hey, I think these are pretty interesting tools," and this is following up on Steven Spielberg last week saying the same sort of thing. Like, he doesn't want AI to be a writer, but he's okay with using it as a tool in different ways.
Peter Jackson has said this as well. Um, Christopher Nolan even didn't seem like he was that against AI. So you're seeing these kind of very high-level filmmakers start to have this feeling. But then I do wanna talk about Jorge Gutierrez's, uh, dropout of this thing because- Yeah ... this is a follow-up, as we said, to last week's story where he was getting a remarkable amount of crap.
This is a pretty well-known animator, the movie The Book of Life. In fact, I, I realize somebody who's very against AI in the filmmaking community, um, Guillermo del Toro- Yeah, yeah ... was kind of sub-tweeting, uh, to Jorge throughout this process, and maybe was a factor in why Jorge dropped out originally. But I don't know, Kev, there's definitely this feeling right now where there's this, like, almost like a pressure campaign that feels like it's existing in Hollywood for people not- Yeah
to do this stuff.
Kevin Pereira: Y- yeah, it seems like that because there clearly is, and I do [00:08:00] think that, uh, obviously some change can be made by, uh, uh, well, I don't wanna say by threatening the artists behind the creative works, by threatening boycotts of their output certainly. Um, we're s- we're seeing some of that here.
Uh, this was definitely more pointed towards, uh, Jorge Gutierrez himself. Um, I don't... It's tough because o- I, I don't know Jorge's past in term- we talked about this a little bit on the episode last time, that like he had said some pretty negative things about AI in the beginning. Yeah. Now he's saying it's like having sex with a machine-
and they gift you the baby, right? Like- Yes, yes ... so I don't know how much of a turnaround there was for his particular fan base, but I do agree with his statements that, uh, it's becoming harder and harder, if not damn near impossible, to get anything made in the traditional systems, right?
Gavin Purcell: Yes.
Kevin Pereira: Animation has really taken the brunt of that as well.
Um, I do believe that he got excited that he could go from the speed of an idea to the pitch and the acceptance and the green light of a series so quick. Yeah, which is
Gavin Purcell: cool. Yeah.
Kevin Pereira: Yeah. And it's, and it's easy [00:09:00] to bless and anoint and thank the technology for allowing him to get that fast. I do also believe that he was going to work with a bunch of, uh, new and- Yes
seasoned, talented artists to make the full-fledged, full-featured, all singing and dancing- Yes ... series. So on the one hand, like, I felt bad when it, when he withdrew. I kinda thought that was going to happen, but a lot of the damage is already done. The damage, right? There's some fans that no matter what his next piece of work is- They're, yeah
even if he is-
Gavin Purcell: Yes ...
Kevin Pereira: yeah, literally cutting and bleeding on the page for every cell of animation, they are never going to support him again. So on the one hand, you upset them, and on the other hand, you also don't get to make the thing that you were really excited for and provide jobs to, uh, at least some degree of animators out there, right?
Gavin Purcell: Yeah. I, I, I wanna give a little bit of context to this particular moment, and this weekend is a really interesting thing that just happened in Hollywood. If you're not following this that closely, um, The Backrooms and Obsession are two movies that were made by YouTubers. One is a 20-year-old who grew up, uh, with Garry's Mod and did a bunch of stuff and talks about Portal [00:10:00] 2 being his favorite thing.
That's Kane, I think his name is Kane Brown, who made The Backrooms. The other one is Curry Barker, who's 26, that made Obsession. What is so interesting to me about this moment in the mainstream is everybody's like, "I can't believe it. These YouTubers are making films." And by the way, both of these crushed Star Wars movie.
The, The Mandalorian and Gro- and G- and Groku? Is that, what's the name of the little baby Yoda? Grogu? Uh, Grogu. Grogu. Grogu. See, I don't even know . I'm a Star Wars nerd and I don't even know how to say the damn baby Yoda's name. But in the second weekend, uh, Mandalorian and Grogu dropped 69%, which is a massive amount, and Obsession has actually grown over f- each, uh, for this first three weekends.
So all I'm saying here is this moment where people are finally waking up to this kind of like creator world, and all these people who were brought up on YouTube, we are seeing the birth of the next generation of that. And you and I have talked about this for a long time. We've done talks about this, that like things go in cycles.
They flow in cycles, right? And I think what's so interesting about AI filmmaking right now is it's just getting [00:11:00] started, and people, I guarantee you the people who started doing this on YouTube, you know, Kane Brown and all these other people, probably had massive haters who were like, "Screw you, you suck," blah, blah, blah, and they just kinda worked through it.
And I do think it's an important thing to kinda realize that is oh, part of the process, I guess
Kevin Pereira: I don't think our stance has changed much, right? It's sort of like you pick a side and then you wait and see- Yes ... how it goes, and obviously reserve the right to change our minds. But I, I do respect those that say, I, you know, not, not, never AI for me, don't want it.
I don't respect- Sure ... people obviously that, that threaten, uh, uh, creators or their families personally. Like, obviously- Yes ... I, I can't support that. But it will be harder and harder, I think, to toe that line when we go, "Well, what exactly is AI?" Is it, really, is it generative AI, or is it that you used a tool that rotoscoped the green screen for you?
Because that used to be somebody's job to click- Yeah ... and do that. Is it using gen AI to make your storyboards, but on- you have to shoot everything practically in camera? Like, w- those lines are blurring. Have you updated your [00:12:00] sensibilities about that or your opinions on that?
Gavin Purcell: I think so. I mean, I, I, I think always I'm very cognizant of, like, making sure that humans can work, but I do wanna point out something.
The reason I laughed there, Kevin, is 'cause what did you say happens to the line again? What do you do to the line?
Kevin Pereira: It blurs?
Gavin Purcell: No. Go back a little further. Uh, it, it, go- You, you do what- I can't. I don't even- ... when you're on a line, what, you're kind of close to it and you're walking over it, what, but you don't exactly.
What are you doing?
Kevin Pereira: Oh, uh, you're one step closer to the edge- ... and you're about to break. You're Lincoln parking.
Gavin Purcell: No, Kevin. You're towing the line. We're crossing the line. You're crossing the line. You're towing the line. Oh, towing. You're towing the line. Towing. Oh. You're towing the line. Right. And the next thing I wanna talk about is some of our favorite new AI filmmakers.
Why
Kevin Pereira: did you say, "What do you do when you're a little barge or a little boat in the delta and you're towing?" Oh.
Gavin Purcell: The funny, the reason why I wanted to connect those two things is 'cause I do wanna shout out a couple really big, uh, interesting filmmakers that are doing the work of AI right now, and the first one is Gossip Goblin, who we've talked about on this show before.
But he has a three-minute YouTube Short or a, a Instagram Short that just came out called The Tow Brigade. And you would [00:13:00] be not wrong to assume that this has something to do with tows and what you'd expect. But because it's Gossip Goblin, you see this entire world that he has created. And one of the things I love about this is that Gossip Goblin's kind of working in a slightly more realistic world.
But then- Yeah ... there's a kind of a big twist in the middle of it. You should just go watch this. It's two and a half minutes- It's great ... of an artist really at work. Great. And to me, this is a cool thing. Another person I do wanna shout-out is Faru- uh, Faruru- Faru- Faru, who is the g- Japanese guy, if you remember, there was a Japanese guy- Uh, Furufufu
a couple weeks ago. It's, I think it's Furufufu. Furu- Fufu, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Furufufu, who put himself into all these kind of like- I can't wait ... uh, famous movies and changed- I can't wait until
Kevin Pereira: they're announcing these names after opening envelopes. Yeah. I'm like- Gossip
Gavin Purcell: Goblin,
Kevin Pereira: Furufufu ... Oscar just 2037. Yes, exactly.
Gavin Purcell: Yes. So, uh, he has a new video out that he said it cost him 10,000 yen, which is not very much money, obviously. I think that's something like, you know, seven bucks or something in, in, in Japan. Um, and it's just him and a gorilla, and it's like this very charming thing. There's a little few things in it, but you can tell he made this quickly, but it's a good storytelling.
And then [00:14:00] finally, Kevin, uh, this is a guy that actually made something that we talked about forever ago. If you remember the original kinda Dark Knight, uh, AI film that we talked about- Mm-hmm ... the Batman film. Cavin the Kid, who has continued to kind of get better and better at his craft, has a new thing called Chronicle of Bone.
He's sponsored by Magnific. Magnific, you know, bring that sponsor money to us. It just, thank you so much in, in advance. But this is a 20-minute chapter one kind of a show, and I watched the whole thing and it is so good. And this is just what it shows you, like the epic storytelling that is possible when you're able to kind of have an unlimited canvas and you know what to do with these tools, is remarkable.
A-
Kevin Pereira: yeah. And, and listen, three, 3.2 million views in about three weeks, right? Mm-hmm. Um, we know there, there are pockets of YouTube where AI is celebrated, then there's our channel. Yes. Uh- Sorry. Um-
Gavin Purcell: So we just, we exist in the back rooms. We're in the back rooms- I did- ... of AI, AI. We're in the back rooms.
Kevin Pereira: I scrolled down just a little bit, and one of the comments is like, "I don't even care that this is [00:15:00] AI.
This is great." Yes. Right? Yes. "I don't care if this is AI. This is some of the best storytelling I've seen in a while." Exactly. And that was, like, something that you and I were pointing to for, like, a long while. It wouldn't even matter if the models didn't really even improve beyond this. They can make-
Gavin Purcell: Yes
Kevin Pereira: compelling enough visuals that if you, uh, maybe if you're not trying to go ultra photorealistic, if you're stylizing at some point, like, now it's gonna become about your craft, your taste. Yeah. Can you tell a story? Yeah. Can you, can you present it in an interesting way? Do you have killer sound design? How is your editing?
All of that stuff- Yes ... is g- gonna, gonna come into play, and I do think you're gonna s- I mean, again, there's still gonna be the never AI-ers, but I think a percentage of them are gonna go, "Yeah, yeah, that's bad that it's AI. Geez, it's really funny. Oh, that's really good." Yeah.
Gavin Purcell: Well, and you point out there's very...
The memes keep getting better, right? There's an amazing Sopranos AI video that you shared. Do you wanna play a tiny bit of this just so we can get a sense of
what
Kevin Pereira: it sounds like? I, I do, and, and in between the bleeps, you can hear Tony Soprano, uh, working with ChatGPT, and it's-
Speaker 6: Image of the ducks.
Tony Soprano AI: Don't you start with the ducks.
Speaker 6: Image created. Tony, how do you feel now? [00:16:00]
Tony Soprano AI: Jesus, I asked for a shrink, not the Discovery Channel.
Speaker 6: Okay. No images, but your reaction to the image is still
Tony Soprano AI: useful data. Ugh, forget it Let me ask you one thing. Am I a bad person? It's,
Kevin Pereira: it's him being therapized by ChatGPT, and the voice is great. The performances are
Performances is still weird to say to me when you're talking about gen AI. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But the performances are good. It has the Sopra- like, the Tony Soprano mannerisms. I- it just made me giggle. It's a good, good
Gavin Purcell: meme. Yeah, and I will ... You know, one of the things that's so interesting about that is that they're obviously taking somebody that exists.
He's, he's passed away, but he's a real actor and his real voice, and, like, that for a meme is fun, and it's a very complicated conversation about how people use actors. But still super incredible what they're doing. I wanna shout out b- uh, one last thing before we go on. Uh, about a week ago, I watched J Boog's Boo- I don't know how you say his name, but it's J Boog X Creative, uh, I'll, we'll put a link in our show notes, who has been doing amazing videos online for a while.
If you remember, he's also a little spicy sometimes. Like, he did the videos [00:17:00] of all the, like, cartoon eggs that were, like, you know, cracking and ... I'm not even gonna go further into that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But he, he has started to make these animes, uh, that I've seen on Instagram that have done really well, and he did a six-hour live on YouTube going through his process.
And I just wanna say, when I ... I sat there and watched a lot of it, and he has a Patreon which you can join, and he has a lot of very special prompt systems that he's created for, uh, Claude and all these different things, and different ways to prompt it. And, like, there are these people that you can learn from out there who are doing this stuff at a very high level, and they're sharing their stuff.
Now, you know, you have to pay for his, his, um, uh, Patreon to get access to it, but I, like, am going to do it. I believe that, like, he's got, developed the skill set, and I also believe that's kind of part of the game here, is how can you share the stuff that you've learned so that other people can learn and be lifted up from it as well?
Which I do think goes back to the YouTube whole world. Like, YouTube did this in a really cool way. There were a community around people, and that's where these, these cr- these filmmakers came from. I think that's happening with AI video as well, which is very cool [00:18:00]
Kevin Pereira: I love AI and I love community, and when they come together, that's amazing.
I just wish there was a way, like, 'cause we kinda have our own little mini community, Gavin, but- We
Gavin Purcell: do ...
Kevin Pereira: it's still- You're right.
Gavin Purcell: We
Kevin Pereira: do. Yeah, we really do. Yeah. The, the few and the proud, the AI for human heads. Um-
Gavin Purcell: But there's no way to get in touch with us at all. There's no way to talk to us. There's no way to help us-
Kevin Pereira: No, and there's no way-
with what we do ... that they can thank us and help us out, right? There's nothing they can do. Hold on a second. The- I'm getting a call- Hold on ... on this air- air bud. Hold on. Wait. Wait, the producer- No, mom, I'm recording a podcast ... is telling us something because you guys are- Go away ... as our tools. Let me talk to this producer.
He's telling me- That's- ... to tell you to like and subscribe. If there is a bell- That's right ... in your area, Live Mas, baby, click it. Click the gong. Turn on alerts. Hype the video on YouTube, and if you're getting us in the audio only programs, five-star reviews help out immensely, whether that's a Apple Podcast or a Spotify- Yes
or St- Are people still Stitch? Do people Stitch? Well, I heart radio as well. What is
Gavin Purcell: Stitch? I don't even know what Stitch is, so
Kevin Pereira: clearly I'm- Stitcher Pro, it's like a- ... eliminating that
Gavin Purcell: from my brain.
Kevin Pereira: That's fine. Anyway, yes. It doesn't- Also- Whatever platform you're on, knock the dust off and help us out, and leave a comment to juice the algo.
Gavin Purcell: That's right. You can go to our Patreon and, [00:19:00] and, and give us money that actually helps us pay for the show. All sorts of stuff is really great, but we do appreciate it. All right, Kevin, the other cool thing that happened this week is that there's a lot of big open source news, especially coming out of an event that NVIDIA had in Taiwan called Computex, which is...
I don't know why I said it that way, Computex, but it's a- ... it is a big show, and there, Kevin, there's some really cool stuff hardware-wise but also some interesting model stuff that's come out of this, too
Kevin Pereira: Yeah, so everybody's wondering, like, why is NVIDIA doing this? And by this, we mean, like, release these open source, uh...
I think, are, are they even open weight models? Yes. Yeah. Ooh They're open weight models as well.
Gavin Purcell: Are they
Kevin Pereira: open weight? They're, um- Are they
Gavin Purcell: open weight too?
Kevin Pereira: Yeah. New- yeah Yeah. New leader for, uh, US open weights intelligence Nemotron 3 Ultra scores a 48 on the artificial analysis intelligence index. It's well ahead of the next strongest US open weights model, which is Gemma 4 31B.
That was recently released by Google. It's still a little bit behind Kimi K2- Yep ... which is a Chinese-led effort. The Chinese,
Gavin Purcell: yep. Now,
Kevin Pereira: some will say, "Hey, there's benchmarking [00:20:00] going out, going on here," especially with the Chinese models, where they don't actually perform as well, as they say. Some people also point to US models and say that.
But why is NVIDIA doing this, Gavin? Why are they releasing for-free models that, that perform as well as some of the, the, their supposed partners? Oh, wh- oh, okay, you're doing that. You're fanning yourself off. This is the rain
Gavin Purcell: of cash coming down on Jensen. Ah. That's why he's doing this, because to Jensen Huang, who's the NVIDIA CEO, all he wants is this AI world to proliferate across everybody, and one of the best and easiest ways to do that is to make it so that everybody has access to models so that more people need things, especially locally, to generate stuff.
And we're gonna talk a little bit about a very famous- Yeah ... YouTuber, PewDiePie, who is now working on a very interesting local AI harness. But Kevin, I think one of the cool things about this is that NVIDIA is kind of taking up the reins themselves and trying to push open source forward in America, because Americans, I don't think have given up on it, but clearly OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all pushing forward on closed source right now, and even Meta, who was gonna be the leader of this, [00:21:00] mostly because they, I think they believe that they need to make money from it.
And Jensen's just, like, dropping stuff because the money they make is from the shovels that everybody's gotta use to get into AI. So I'm very excited about this. I, I think you had pointed out, and I'm really curious to do this, is I, at some point I want to take a Kimi K 2.5 or, uh, MiniMax 3, M3 just came out as well, which has very good stuff, and try to do the sorts of stuff that I'm doing only locally and just see where we're at.
Yeah. I, I know you've played around a bunch with this. Like, do you feel like- A lot ... we're close enough yet?
Kevin Pereira: Uh, for 90% of things, if you're not, like, coding at the very, very edge of the frontier, like yeah, we're, we're there. Where we're not there is with the compute, with the actual power needed to run these models in a non-super distilled or super nerfed way.
Or you might be able to run them, but the output is gonna be so painfully slow that it could take you five minutes to generate what would take, you know, 45 seconds- Yeah ... if you were running at turbo speeds in the cloud. But we will get to [00:22:00] NVIDIA's answer for that. Surprise, surprise, it's you buying more of their products.
Um- Yes ... but you did mention PewDiePie, which we should, we should talk about for a second to round this out, because he, um, famously built his own local compute rig for like- Yeah ... I think $20,000 or whatever. Yeah. But through that process, he was struggling to find an interface that was palatable to him, one that would let him- Yeah
chat, drop files, um, uh, have it run agentic workflows for him, na- manage his calendar, use image editing, et cetera, et cetera. And so he was sort of vibe coding solutions for himself all along the way, and he got to the point where he's like, "Hey, I feel like this is actually powerful. I should productize this.
I'm gonna go ahead and just release it open source." And so he did. Yeah. PewDiePie, the, the YouTuber, hath released an open source agentic harness called Odysseus.
Gavin Purcell: Yes. A- and I, Kevin, it's so funny you, you talk about him, because it... I see a lot of parallels between you and PewDiePie, and I, you know, I know not financially, and I'm sorry about that.
We can, we can put that in your back pocket for what that means for you. Hey, listen. But, you know, you guys both [00:23:00] started very early making stuff, and you've both kind of folded into this interesting world where, like, you're technically interested and advanced, but PewDiePie, I think, like you, was not brought up a pure coder.
But what's interesting about this is just watching him dive into this, and, like, what's cool is, like, whether or not people use this, by the way, a lot of people seem like they're liking it. There are, like, 10,000 GitHub starbs, uh, GitHub stars on this particular thing. But it is just cool to see somebody in the world who has this big of an audience really dive into open source AI and want to make something interesting for other people to use.
So I do think that alone- Mm-hmm ... is really cool.
Kevin Pereira: Yeah, and a, a special shout-out to the, uh, cookbook portion of the software, which is a major pain point. Um, this is- Yes ... hardware-aware model recommendations. Um, if you get into open source and you try to run- It's a nightmare ... anything on your computer, you will go down this, the, the, the worst rabbit hole ever trying to figure out with my particular hardware, my...
This MacBook with this much RAM or this graphics card running with this CPU, what's the best that I can run? Well, the best [00:24:00] isn't always so cut and dry, and what's the best that you could, what's, what's the best that you can run or best, what's the best- Yeah ... that you can run well? You should run. Those are often- Yes
yeah, and there are so many different answers for that, so a cookbook looks to solve that by analyzing your hardware and recom- uh, recommending a model based off that. So yes, um, you know, it's not a competition with the bank accounts- ... and the commas and the zeros, and I, I hope PewDie's happy with whatever it is he has, and he shouldn't compare it to me.
Gavin Purcell: Yes.
Kevin Pereira: No green screen here. That's a real window, baby. Okay? It's a real window. It looks into- You're right, a real window ... another neighbor's window right across the way. So again, uh, the point is I'm happy for him. I'm glad he released it, and here's the bottleneck. For so many people- Yes ... it's the hardware that you're running- It's the hardware
right now in your homes, and that's why some, so many think that local AI isn't here because it's, again, way too slow, takes forever to download- Do you have six graphics cards- ... the models ... put together? You can't actually run them. No, you don't. Right .
Gavin Purcell: You don't have six graphics cards. I
Kevin Pereira: don't. Yeah.
Gavin Purcell: Yeah.
Kevin Pereira: Turns out I don't. Well, NVIDIA has been trying to change that for a long while. They've been releasing small dedicated [00:25:00] workstations, but I think- Yes ... like the age of consumer era or in your home on-premises AI is, is really starting to get here, and- Yes ... NVIDIA announced their RTX Spark, uh, series, basically the system on a chip era where it's unifying all of the things, all of the memory, special processors that are particularly good with, uh, agentic workflows or with these, you know, with crunching these LLMs.
Now they're coming to laptops which look like MacBook in size but have enough power to run really, really massive open source models like the ones that, uh, NVIDIA just released this week it turns out.
Gavin Purcell: Yeah. I think it's so interesting to me that, I mean, one thing that's tricky about this is you're gonna have to have, like, some new drivers and all sorts of things like that built for these machines 'cause they're doing something differently.
They're unifying it all in one place, and these are particularly for ARM computers right now, and they're, and it'll be a kind of a question of, like, who will develop for them? But the interesting thing right now about open source software in general is, hey, you can eventually build a driver yourself, or you tell the AI to build a driver for you, or [00:26:00] different ways that you can get the AI to do the connective tissue, and I think that's a really interesting thing where the silicon meets the AI, and they can kind of work together is fascinating to me at large.
Kevin Pereira: Yeah. So coming this fall, you will be able to, from multiple providers, but they're really touting the Microsoft relationship right now, you'll be able to buy these, uh, new laptops with this new Spark, uh, uh, hardware built into it, and you'll be able to run, you know, agentic, uh, workflows locally on your computer.
This is gonna become massively important when you're worried about your privacy- Yes ... or you're worried about your, you know, bloated billing costs as these foundational providers start char- charging more and more. You'll just have an agent running on your machine that you can probably talk to, that you can show images to, uh, that you can access with your phone as well while you're remote, and it will do all the compute for you.
You will have your Jarvis in your pocket.
Gavin Purcell: So here's the thing. I wanna jump into talking about OpenAI's /goal tool. So this is within Codex. This is something that you, you type in /goal and it gives a goal to your prompt, which means that [00:27:00] it's going to try to hit a specific goal for what you can do.
There's been versions of this in Claude Code. The- obviously this is kind of, uh, based on the old Ralph Wiggum loop, which we talked a while back again. But this is basically telling your AI, "Don't come back until you've finished something amazing." If you remember on this show, if you're a longtime listener, you remember I made a bear jump game, like about a year ago in Google Gemini's AI Studio.
It was very simple. You type a space bar and you try to hit a percentage of bear jump. I have now made a new version of this bear jump where I only jumped in maybe five to seven times over 42 hours, Kevin. And I just said very- something very simple. I said, "Make this game better. Make it something that you could lose a couple hours in.
Use your image gen tool to create different stuff." And in 42 hours, it's not like... I wouldn't say this is, like, ready to go, but, like, this is a much more robust version of the game. If you're looking at it on the screen here, or maybe Kevin, you can kind of describe what you're seeing, uh, specifically that differentiates it from the last one.
Kevin Pereira: Uh, well, I mean, I'm clicking and holding, and it's giving me a trajectory for where my bear can jump, and it is, uh... [00:28:00] There's, like, a little power bar, like an old, uh, Mortal Kombat break the board mini game. Uh, and you wanna try to release at the right time so that bear will jump, grab coins, grab little power-ups, land on the, uh, the safe landing pad, and then you get rewarded with some honey and some tokens, and you can, uh, buy some little upgrades.
So I'm gonna actually- So- ... crush this high score.
Gavin Purcell: Yeah, so what's interesting here is my old game was very simple, but if you look, there's animations baked into this. There are, uh, level up graphics. There are things that are all built. I didn't do any of that. I let Codex do all that. I said to Codex, I steered it a couple times, but when you- steering means you just kind of put a line or two in there, and you hit, you know, keep going.
I think what's so interesting about this, I'm not saying this is good, but I will put it up, a link in our show notes. It's on Vercel right now. I'm not gonna, like, publish it. I might pub- put it out later when I've done some more work on it. But what's so cool about this is, like, with this Goal tool, it- you can go and give an, a long-term thing, and just let your computer run, and just let it kind of work on this stuff.
I will say, so 42 hours of working [00:29:00] on this, uh, took about, um, 15% of my ChatGPT Pro account for the week, so that's a fair- Something- ... amount of stuff. But isn't that bad, right? Considering, like, how much stuff is there. I didn't spin up a lot in parallel. But I don't know if you've had experiences with Goal, but, like, I do think this is, like, one of those moments where we are really getting closer to agentic AI working for you and what you do.
I see you're zoned in right there. Are you locked in on- Yeah, I don't- You getting, getting locked in on it?
Kevin Pereira: I, I'm gonna have to just fully agree with what you said, Gavin, because I- ... I, I just, at the very end when it was very clear that, like, oh, I need to, like, jump in and have an opinion- ... I literally jumped, and my bear missed the platform.
And so-
Gavin Purcell: Yes ...
Kevin Pereira: my, uh, my fever combo hath been broken, and now I'm crestfallen.
Gavin Purcell: So go try this- So I agree with you ... uh, and, yeah, go try this and, and have some fun with it. Again, this is just another experiment that you can do with AI today. Like, literally, this was not that hard. You can go and use the, the Goal tool.
Go play with it, and we will see you all on Friday. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. This is my new thing at the end of the show. I'm just gonna say bye-bye- Oh, God ... in the weirdest way [00:30:00] possible.
Kevin Pereira: I can't wait to see the retention graph.
Bye-bye.