How Nvidia Came to Rule AI

[Break]

Lauren Goode: All right, Will. What is your recommendation?

Will Knight: My recommendation is this application called WhisperKit, which is from a company called Argmax, which was founded by some Apple developers who left to do their own thing. I think it’s appropriate because it’s a good example of the importance of the edge. This isn’t like sending yourself to the cloud. You can do quite advanced voice transcription, which is obviously important for journalists and other people on your computer using… They use some software that came from OpenAI, but they just optimized it very much for your own hardware. It’s a good example of how… Maybe a lot of AI is also going to happen on the edge, as well as in the cloud.

Lauren Goode: And what are you using it for?

Will Knight: Recording everybody.

[Lauren and Michael laugh]

Michael Calore: Your own home speech recognition applications that you’re running?

Will Knight: Yeah, just all the time. I can just remember everything. I can just settle arguments by winding back the tape and playing what people said.

Lauren Goode: How many arguments do you get into? Will, you don’t strike me as argumentative.

Will Knight: You’d be surprised, but, no, I don’t really use that. I was using one of these cloud platforms for transcription, but I wanted something that wasn’t… I kept running into the limit of how much I could record, which actually is very annoying and they’re quite expensive. I figured it’d be interesting to play with this for transcribing interviews.

Michael Calore: And pretty accurate?

Will Knight: Yeah, it’s pretty accurate. I use this thing called Whisper from OpenAI, which is pretty good. Yeah, you have to go back, make sure you’re not misquoting people, but, yeah, pretty good.

Lauren Goode: How secure is it? Would you use it to process your most sensitive interviews?

Will Knight: Well, it’s all running on my computer. Assuming my computer hasn’t been hacked, which is never a given, it certainly seems more secure than sending it to the cloud.

Lauren Goode: Interesting. Yeah. I use Google’s transcription service, which is pretty darn good. It does it on device, but then I do send it to the cloud. Use Otter, right?

Michael Calore: I use Mechanical Turk. No, I’m kidding. I use Alice.

Lauren Goode: What’s that?

Michael Calore: Alice AI. It’s another one of the front ends for… I think they use Google’s transcription service. But also, I have a Pixel phone, so if I record on my Pixel phone then it just freely translates it.

Lauren Goode: Right. My second phone’s a pixel for all my shady activity.

Michael Calore: Yep.

Lauren Goode: Thank you for that, Will. We’re going to link that in the show notes. Mike, what’s your recommendation?

Michael Calore: Get your garden ready. This is my recommendation. This week, February turns into March and in just a couple more weeks it will be spring. Spring will have sprung and it is time to plant the vegetables and the fruits and the flowers that you would like to be eating this summer. If you live in a slightly warmer part of the country like we do here in California, or if you live in the south, then you can start planting outdoors pretty much now or next week. If you live in a colder part, you will have to use a greenhouse or you can do like I did and get a seedling mat, which is like a heated mat that you put your seedlings on. You can leave them on your enclosed porch or in your basement or your attic and make sure that you can grow healthy plants.