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.

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.