Refresh Computers Tech Talk
Help and advice are given on a range of technical issues from computers to everything internet-related.
Refresh Computers Tech Talk
05-10-26 Who Should Decide What AI Can Do?
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The government wants a seat at the table before the most powerful AI ships, and Big Tech is starting to say yes. We walk through the news that Google, Microsoft, and xAI plan to let the US Department of Commerce review new frontier AI models ahead of release, supposedly to catch national security and cybersecurity risks. That sparks the bigger question we cannot ignore: where does “safety review” end and information control begin, and how might it change depending on who is in charge?
Then we bring it down to a practical decision you can make today: what computer should you actually buy in an AI world? We make the case that you do not need an expensive, brand-new “AI machine” to use tools like ChatGPT, Grok, or Gemini. A well-built, properly remanufactured refurbished Windows 11 PC can deliver a great experience at a fraction of the cost, especially when it comes with real testing, real support, and a real warranty.
From there, we dig into the next wave: AI agents. Google’s Remy concept inside the Gemini app points toward a 24/7 assistant that can take actions like emailing, booking, ordering, and managing your calendar. That convenience is real, but so are the risks when an agent needs access to your accounts. We close with the money trail behind all this: Samsung hitting a trillion-dollar market cap, the AI chip boom driving demand for memory, and data centers scaling so fast that the costs eventually land on consumers.
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Welcome And What’s Ahead
SPEAKER_01Hey there, welcome to Tech Talk here on WDBO 1073FM and AM580 Orlando's news and talk. I'm Greg Rhodes here with David Levitt, President and Founder of Refresh Computer Superstore, and technician Adam Littlefield. You can contact the Refresh Computer Superstore by calling their free tech support hotline at 407-478-8200. Or if you have a comment during the show, we'd love to hear it. Use an open mic feature inside the WDBO app. You can also check out the website over at Refresh Computers.net or stopping at the Refresh Computer Superstore in Longwood at 820 East State Road 434, just three and a half miles east of I-4 in Longwood. Store hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. And now for the men themselves, David Levitt and Adam Littlefield.
Government Pre-Review For Frontier AI
SPEAKER_02All right. Thanks, Greg, and thanks everybody for listening to yet another edition of Tech Talk with Refresh Computers. You know, this is the Sunday morning edition, and it is different from the edition we did yesterday. This will be a first for us. Usually the show we do on Saturdays repeats on Sundays. We're going to try to do more two-show weekends as much as possible, but it's not always going to be possible to do that. Yesterday we talked about a whole bunch of topics about Google secretly putting in a four gigabyte file on your Chrome browser on your computer for Gemini Nano. We talked about the Canvas breach that you know if you're if you use uh if you're a kid or if you're in school in the unit universities to regular you know public schools systems, the the shiny hunters uh came and took over the the the can the the canvas system which affects the ability for teachers to to do grades, upload grades and stuff. So very important since it's you know the end of the school year coming. And some other topics. If you missed any of those, go to refreshcomputers.net, click on the podcast link in the upper right hand corner, and you'll be able to hear that show in its entirety. Better yet, go scroll down to the bottom of the page, enter your email address, and that'll sign you up to receive email notifications every time a fresh show gets published on the internet. So you'll be able to go right to it and check it out or check it out at your leisure. So today we're gonna talk about you know, Big Brother Meets Big Tech, basically. So the U.S. government is now reviewing AI before you see it. So we're also gonna talk about why a refurbished computer might be the smartest buy you make this year, and we're gonna talk about a new uh AI assistant, better known as an agent that Google is rolling out. Not to be confused with the two things we talked about yesterday, not to be confused with the with the nano model that Google that four gig file. This agent is called Remy, R-E-M-Y. It's a 24-7 personal assistant built into the Gemini app. So Gemini is still there. It's like basically Gemini's the engine. Remy is what is the front facing of the engine, is the driver, right? Which is puts you in the driver's seat. And we're also going to talk at the end of the show how Samsung is yet the latest company, hit a trillion dollars in market value and and why, and what the AI chip boom means for your wallet and what it has been meaning for the last several months, right, Adam? And prices going up and up and up. So let's get to it. So, would you feel better about using an AI tool if you knew the government had it reviewed at first?
SPEAKER_00You know, that's an interesting question, especially coming from you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Everybody, everybody knows I don't want government in my business, and a lot of my friends feel the same way. And so, but you know, it's it's it's happening, and yeah, and not right now, it doesn't appear to be forcefully. It's not like the government saying you have to, but they're volunteeringly doing this. And you know, and that's the way to go. It is. That that is the way to go. I'm kind of glad to see all these companies actually volunteering this because if they didn't, eh, the government's probably going to force them to a little later anyway. Right. I'm surprised they haven't done so already. So I mean it's it's could be the beginning of like the FDA, right, for AI. So it basically could be the beginning of the government really taking control over information. Right. Because that's what AI is all about.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I know, man, uh I think it was a month or so ago, we had uh Claude Mythos, that uh that really large AI model that Claude they or the company that owns Claude, Anthropic, said, Hey, we're not we're not gonna push this to the public because it's too powerful. It was too powerful, right?
SPEAKER_02And and so, and I think that's one of the things that got a lot of congressional attention was when that came out. When Skynet starts turning into possibilities, that's when people start noticing, right?
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02So, and hey, you know what? China, I mean, they're all in. On AI as a national asset, they are all in, they are way and and they could be as advanced or more advanced than we are on this AI stuff. And so what does that mean, you know, for the rest of us? So, and you know, and some people say, hey, well, we regulate cars, we regulate drugs, we regulate food. So why do we wait so long to regulate AI? So, I mean, I'm not on that page, by the way, but some people are asking those questions. So just this week, it was Google, Microsoft, and XAI, which is Elon Musk, which is Grock, basically. They all agreed to let the US Department of Commerce review their new AI models before they're released to the public. So instantaneously, I think it's not going to be so instantaneous.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So the government only slows things down, they don't speed things up. So, okay, they can review all this stuff, it just means a longer period of time if it even gets released. Right. You know, eventually. So the reviews will focus on, supposedly, national security risks, cybersecurity, right? Cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and of course, for potential misuse in areas like bioweapons and chemical weapons and stuff like that. So it, you know, so this it's this has been reported by the BBC, Washington Post, The Guardian, so it's confirmed and it is very significant because you know it's the it goes back to you know, how much freedom do you want to give up for a little bit of safety, right? So we've we've we've heard this analogy used in a lot of different things, and it's coming with AI. So basically the government's now in the room before the AI ships, before it goes out, right?
SPEAKER_00So you make a good point too, saying, you know, how much freedom you're giving with it before, you know, like the control really starts kicking in. And you know, I I feel this is this is you rubbing off on me, Dave, with having this question in my head is you know, what kind of opinions or their personal thoughts are going to go into these models? You know, oh, we don't like how it does this or its opinions of this. The government says, no, you need to make it where the AI thinks differently.
SPEAKER_02And that could be depending on administrations, as we've all learned through the COVID era. Yeah, you know, how you know how things progressed, you know, the the through through like things you look at back today and like, are you kidding? We really let the government do that and dictate that kind of stuff. And so again, you know, the government's saying, well, they'll just look at national security risk and that kind of stuff. But you know what? That always starts off with something like that, and then now it gets deeper into what you're saying, Adam. It'll get deeper. You mark my word, mark this show. What's the day? The 8th of May. And well Dave said on the 8th of May, the government's going to take over AI and it's gonna dictate what can be put in it.
SPEAKER_01Or before you know it, Gemini's reporting everything back that you've asked questions about back to the FBI or something like that. Kind of what we've seen. Uh you mentioned going back, you can even go back to like 9-11 and the processes after that of how things changed where federal wiretapping became a thing and all these different kinds of for the interest of the country, but who's in charge can kind of dictate how it gets used to. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And and I'm I'm not clear on whether or not it's it's like every subsequent update. Like we talked about yesterday, the Chat GPT update, right, to 5.5, and how significant that was. So that was an update. So but what an introduction of a new model or something like that. Yeah. So like frontier AI, they call it. So that you know, it's like the most powerful cutting-edge models, the ones that could theoretically be used for you know, serious harm. Like mythos. It's like yes, like mythos.
SPEAKER_00It makes me kind of wonder about the full scope of AI, because right now we're talking about, you know, like LLM models. Those are your large language models like Grok, ChatGPT, the ones you can conversate to, you know, that we're we're talking about what the government may be looking at. But what other kind of AI things are we gonna see in the future that they're gonna want to fit a hand into? Because we have these bipedal autonomous robots that are gonna be driven by AI. That's right. There's an AI model there that'll have to probably be looked at.
SPEAKER_01We've talked about self-driving all the time.
SPEAKER_00I know already the uh the highway transit authority, they always have their hand in on you know what's allowed on the road and what's not. There's there's gonna be progress, and we I don't know even if it's gonna be steps forward or steps backwards.
SPEAKER_02We I don't think any of us know, but it's been my experience and my many years that when government gets involved, it gets more convoluted. It never gets better, it just gets thicker and deeper. Right. So, and so you know, there's some good, you know, let's play good guy, bad guy, right, for a minute. So, arguments maybe for a government review of these new frontier models, as they call them. Again, we're not talking about upgrades to existing models like the typical upgrades that they do. We're talking about frontier models, new models that are gonna come out that that that are defining the the AI world. So arguments for a government review could be that AI is powerful enough that some oversight makes sense, right? Better to catch problems before they before release than after, right? That's another argument for it, I guess. Could build consumer trust, like a safety label on a product. That doesn't work for me, though, I have to admit. That one. That one. Right.
SPEAKER_01That's a pro-Anicon, right? That's a pro-Anicon. You've got a pro that, yes, maybe it's been reviewed by a government regulation, but also do you agree with those government regulations that are going along with it?
SPEAKER_00So it makes it makes me think one day I'm gonna see an AI model with a sticker on it that says this AI model is known in the state of California to cause cancer, something like that, right?
SPEAKER_02That's coming. That's I'm surprised that's not already a disclaimer when you open up ChatGPT. It's coming though. It's coming out. It's just my guess it's coming. I haven't heard anything that it is, but it probably will be. So, how about some arguments against it, right? Which is probably where more hyleen, like I said earlier, government reviews slows down innovation. It just does.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we've we've talked, you know, shows and shows of AI now, and and we've talked how things have accelerated so fast. Yeah. We get the government hand in that, we don't know how long that's gonna hold things back now.
SPEAKER_02The government can't make things go faster, they only make things go slower. So they could create bureaucratic bottlenecks, right? Or guess what, maybe favor certain companies over others? Right. I wonder if that's a possibility. I think so. And then who watches the watchmen, right? Who watches them? Right. And so government access to AI models, you know, just that alone raises a lot of concerns because who in the government is okay in this and who's watching them?
SPEAKER_01Right. Does that turn into a Senate appointed position, the person that overwatches AI? Does that turn into a cabinet position? Does that turn, you know, how how do these get divvied out is the very important to monitor for sure.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, I mean it's just something that you know we we have to be aware of. This is starting to happen. So maybe some of these greater AI innovations that are on the cusp, you know, the you know, frontier AI, I guess is the right term that they use now, just a little bit slower to roll out, which gets what it does for China, because that's a big deal, right? The China connection, China's just going full heads of steam ahead. Sure. And China doesn't care where they steal it from either. They don't care. They don't care. And they're just going, going, going. So there's no basic interruption of, you know, they're they're they're investing what, another$50 billion into Deepseek, right?
SPEAKER_00It's almost it's almost kind of like when we had the space race many years ago. We're now in the AI race. And the more I think we start pumping the brakes, the the less ahead we're gonna kind of be on this development.
SPEAKER_01But a lot of people thought Russia were way ahead of us when it came to the space race, and then they got a lot of rockets. They did. So it's one of those kind of handoffs. Is there is there a a point where you're moving too fast that maybe yes, the government does need to step in and say, hey, maybe we do need to like let's go back and let's let's take a step back and look at these in a little bit of a different light. Maybe there's something that we should be doing instead. Right, right. You know, right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, Greg. And so another way to look at this, you know, comparing the US, right, with China AI is, you know, in this model, the US is regulating and reviewing, which is delaying things. And the Chinese model, they're investing and nationalizing. I mean, they're going, like I said, full steam ahead. So that's a big, big deal, you know, allowing, you know, all these companies allowing their AI models, their frontier AI models, not their typical upgrades from existing model, I guess I should say, unless that upgrade happens to be so significant that it needs a review.
SPEAKER_00You know, so and who's the who's there to dictate what update is and is not considered for review either? That's another question I have.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Good point. So, anyway, folks, uh, that's all we have time for in this segment. When we come back after the show, we're gonna talk after this uh newsbreak, we're gonna talk about why a refurbished computer might be the smartest buy you make this year.
Refurbished Computers As The Smart Buy
SPEAKER_01You've been listening to Tech Talk right here on WDBO 1073FM and AM580. Hey there, welcome back to Tech Talk here on WDBO 1073FM and AM580, Orlando's News and Talk. I'm Greg Rhodes here with David Levitt, President and Founder of Refresh Computer Superstore, and technician Adam Littlefield. You can contact the Refresh Computer Superstore by calling their free tech support hotline at 407-478-8200. And if you have any other comments during the show, like what we just talked about here with innovation, let us know. Use that open mic feature inside the WDBO app. And now, for the men themselves, David Levitt and Adam Littlefield.
SPEAKER_02All right. Thank you, Greg, and thanks, Adam, for being here also. And thanks everybody for listening to this edition of Tech Talk with Refreshed Computers. In the first segment, we talked a lot about it. Maybe you should take a look at this because I think that might have been as a direct result of anthropics mythos, a tool that they released a month or so ago and then immediately took it back because it was just too powerful.
SPEAKER_00It's too good of an AI tool.
SPEAKER_02I mean, people could build, you know, atomic bombs or something like that with it. And then you just don't want your AI tool to be able to do stuff like that. And it was just going, it was like so powerful. And so now they're gonna be the government looks like you know voluntarily by all of these companies are gonna be given this kind of frontier, you know, edge cutting AI tools for the government review, which is gonna slow down some innovation, but may or may not be worth it in the long run. So if you missed any of that, go to refreshcomputers.net, click on that podcast link in the upper right-hand corner, and you'll be able to listen to this show in its entirety within a few hours typically after the show ends. Uh it'll be there. And if you want to make sure you know when the show is available to listen to, sign up for our emails by going to the bottom of any page at refreshcomputers.net. Just put in your email address, click send, and you will get automatic notifications as soon as the show is out on the air. So in this segment, we want to talk about why a refurbished computer might be the smartest buy you make this year. So we've been talking a lot about AI getting smarter, right? Right. But you don't need the latest AI-powered machine to have a great computer experience. So let's talk about that. So, what does that mean? So, any computer we sell at refresh computers, any computer with Windows 11, let's just use that. So, um, which is like 99% of the computers we sell at refresh computers, refurbished computers, they all can run all your AI models just fine. You don't need any kind of super AI chip and you know in your computer to run, you know, Chat GPT or Grok or Claude or any of your favorite agents, we call them. Especially when Chrome downloads four gigs of it on the back end of your folder. Right. Exactly. Exactly, which we talked about yesterday. And so, but so any one of these computers, you know, and and we have Windows 11 computers starting around the$200 range. Yeah. And which are you know refurbished, quality refurbished.
SPEAKER_00And so it's it's really hard to beat that kind of price in this market, especially with how we've seen AI just extrapolating all of like our our pricing, as far as like consumer-wise, you and I.
SPEAKER_02And our prices are great. I mean, they are really good. But you know, when somebody comes in and asks, hey, do you price match your computers? Well, if you shop, you know, yeah, you know, our computers are going to be very competitively priced. But the question I like to come back with is, well, or or the statement is it's almost impossible to price match on a refurbished computer without talking about quality match. Because anybody can sell a quote unquote refurbished computer. You can get them on and and you don't, but you just don't know. You don't have the support behind it. You don't know what they really did to refurbish the computer. Wiping down the keyboard with a disinfecting wipe. Right. It's a refurbished computer, right? That could be. But a refresh computers are I like the the term remanufactured is probably a better term for the way we handle the computers at refresh computers because everything is taken completely apart. Brand new thermal paste on the CPU, everything completely tested, brand new CMOS batteries on all the motherboards. I mean, you know, you know, when you walk out of the store with a refresh computers, refurbished computer, you get a quality, remanufactured machine. And 95% of our computers are all going to be business class, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
SPEAKER_00And unlike a lot of other refurbished computers that you can find just almost anywhere on the internet, you know, we back ours with a warrant. We have confidence in those machines.
SPEAKER_02And we're right there. Right. So if you ever should need anything, we're right there. And you know, we have that free tech support hotline anybody can use, which is 407-478-8200. So just think about that, folks. And we're gonna have to break for the news here. And when we come back, we're gonna be talking a lot about a new tool made by Google. It's called uh their new agent called Remy.
Google’s Remy Agent And Real Risks
SPEAKER_01Right here on Tech Talk on WDBO 1073FM and AM580. Welcome to Tech Talk here on WDBO 1073FM and AM580, Orlando's news and talk. I'm Greg Rhodes here with David Levitt, President and Founder of Refresh Computer Superstore, a technician Adam Littlefield. And you can contact the Refresh Computer Superstore by calling their free tech support hotline at 407-478-8200. Or if you have a comment during the show, we'd love to hear it. Use that open mic feature inside the WDBO app. You can also check out the website over at RefreshComputers.net or stopping at the Refresh Computer Superstore in Longwood at 820 East State Road 434, just three and a half miles east of I-4 in Longwood. Store hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. And now back to David and Adam.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, Greg, and thanks everybody for listening to yet another edition of Tech Talk with Refresh Computers. If you missed the first part of the show, we were talking a lot about how the government is now starting to look at a lot of these frontier AI models that all of these AI companies are coming out with in order to make sure, hey, there's nothing in there that's going to affect national security. And we talked about whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing and some of the other things that we might be suspicious of if the government had their hands in some of this stuff. If you miss any of that, you can listen to the show in its entirety by going to refreshcomputers.net, click on that podcast link in the upper right hand corner, and you'll be able to hear the show. If you want to be notified when the show airs, go down to the bottom of the any page at refreshcomputers.net, put in your email address right there and click send. That's all we ask for is your email address, and you will be notified. As soon as this show is published, it'll come right out into your email, letting you know with a link and also with a summary in the email of the things that we talked about. So kind of a cool feature. And guess what? Yes, we did use AI to build that for us. So that was kind of cool. So in this segment, we're going to talk about Remy. So Remy is a new agent from Google. And we talked in the past about the difference between agents and chatbots and these kinds of things. So when you are using any of these AI tools, ChatGPT, Cloud, you're actually using a chatbot that's that's there. And that chatbot's using multiple agents to go out and get information for you. But you can have your own agent if you want. And Google is doing that with a device or with a utility called Remy, R-E-M-Y. So it's a 24-7 personal assistant, right? Built into the Gemini app that doesn't just answer questions, it takes actions for you. So at the same time, Meta is coming out with a one called Hatch, its own personal AI agent, and you know, just about all of them have an agent now. Right. And so what can an agent do? An agent can send emails on your behalf, they can book appointments for you, fill out forms, search the web, and compile results. It can manage your calendar for you, it can order products for you. You can have it set up. And you can do it in a way that is safe or relatively safe, I should say. I don't want to say completely safe, but you you can set it up in a way that it'll only do the things that you want it to do, basically, and nothing nothing else. And all without lifting a finger once you have it set up anyway. So think of it as having your own personal assistant that never sleeps, never takes a lunch break, and has all access to your accounts, which could could be a scary thing. That's a lot of stuff.
SPEAKER_00That's got to be like your email, calendar, probably your contacts, probably even your location, actually, thinking about it.
SPEAKER_01You're buying stuff for me, all of my credit cards and banking information.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's this this raises actually a lot of questions to me of how secure this is gonna end up being, because a lot of AI agent work is done kind of in the back end. It's never in front of you, right? You never you never have any input, it's just done. What happens when it starts going off the rails and buying you 10,000 rolls of toilet paper? Because it hallucinated. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Right. And it may not be I you know, I I would not trust it myself. You know, I'm just informing you what's available, what is out there. What's coming? This this is there, coming out. And but I will tell you and I will stand on the ground that within a very few short years, we're all gonna be in this mode anyway. Right. I mean, we're just going to because things move so fast, and look how technology fast, it'd be almost like people saying, I'm not gonna buy a car because I still have my horse and buggy. I mean, it's gonna be kind of like that. So you are going to be on this page one way or another, more likely within the next just the next few years. So basically, it's like you know, we we already let Google Maps know where we are, a lot a lot of people do, 24-7. So is it really any different than that? I mean, it's it know it's knowing uh things about you. And there's a lot of companies in this AI agent race, which is probably why you're hearing a lot more about agents now. And I use an agent, I use a couple agents from a company called Zapier. Maybe you've heard heard of them. And Zapier has a built-in agent tool where you can go in and have it perform different tasks for you and it and and it does it in a way that and I I don't share my bank accounts or my and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_00Nothing, nothing vital to you.
SPEAKER_02No, no, but I do share things like my email account. I give it access to my email because I want to want it to pick out things or alert me of things. It'll text me of something that comes across that I need to get addressed right now. And before my agent, I would have had to always be checking my emails, right? Oh, am I going to get it? And then sometimes you get an email you're not expecting. That's very important. And you might get it three hours after you you might look at it three hours after you it's after you got it, and then maybe by then it's too late, or maybe you're waiting to hear from a customer, you know, that that that you want to make sure they get really good attention to, like all of our customers get. And so you can train this agent to hone in on those kinds of emails and immediately text you and let you know not just that you got the message that the email, but basically a little short description in the text what the email is about. Yeah. And so, and you can program the agent to pull out any information that come in that that came in that email, for example. This is just one example, right? So, look, for example, if there's a phone number, hey, I need to talk to you right away. Here's a phone number you can you can call me at, and this came in your email, but you saw, you know, typically you might see your email four hours later, maybe it's too late, or hey, I have this hot stock tip, but you gotta hack now.
SPEAKER_00There's something like that. There's a lot of irony to me with the name Remy that Google gave it because it makes me think of a lot of the rat from Ratatouille. You know, he he snuck in, it takes total control behind the scenes, cooks up all these incredible results, and you know, it to you, you you're you're just left there like linguine in the movie. It's like you did everything, but it was not you. You know, that's that's just the way I keep thinking about it. But I just hope it doesn't start demanding fancy French wine and better, you know, computer internals because of what it's doing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and you know, like I said, like it or not, I think we're all gonna be geared towards using some type of agent in one fashion, one way or another, whether we know it or not, even whether we like it or not. You may be already using an agent today, and you don't even know you're using an agent to do stuff for you. And so again, I'll you know it's the horse and buggy in cars. You know, I don't want to get a car because I still have my oars, you know. I don't want to get a smartphone because I still have my flip phone. You know, it it's it's you know, this kind of an analogy. This is what's coming with AI agents, and so they are a really, really big deal, and you might want to check it out. Now, as far as Remy, the one from Google is concerned, you know, they're they're testing it now, and so you should be able to access it soon, and it's gonna be you know rolled into the Gemini AI system. So it's like you know, the Gemini AI. When you click on Gemini, right, you are accessing a chatbot. And then Remy is going to be an agent that's gonna act on your behalf within that chatbot, I guess is another way to put it, and to you know, just to kind of frame it. And you can like with Zapier, like I said earlier, I use Zapier for my agents. With Zapier, they have a tool where I can have more than one agent do several different things and even believe it or not, discuss things among themselves, my two agents to do compare and contrast situations. And so it's it's it's it's a lot of fun. It's it's uh a little scary that something like this is out there, you know, but it's available, but but it's also the reality of what we're what we're going towards in the very, very near future, whether whether we like it or not, you know, because this is it's this the convenience, for example, the convenience of having a smartphone so you can look up stuff anywhere. We we anytime, no matter where you're at, as long as you have cell phone service or Wi-Fi service. I think we've all pretty much become accustomed to that. Right. Always on environment. Environment. I think we've all become pretty much accustomed to that. And and and wouldn't even be able to think like, geez, how did I ever get by before? You know, yeah, I couldn't respond nearly as quick enough. Well, AI agents takes that to the next level. So it's the kind same kind of analogy, right? Except it's gonna be the next thing. It's gonna be more automated because now you still have your smartphone, but you've told your smartphone or your computer how to react in certain s situations, and that's what the agent is going to be doing for you. It's gonna be doing it automatically, but it will do what you tell it to do and nothing else, theoretically.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right. Theoretically. Hopefully, no hallu hallucinations that we talked about before. But we I think this that really is like the next logical step for AI to take is to get involved in these day-to-day activities that you can have scheduled and planned, and it can complete tasks for you moving forward. We've gone through the the stage of it making funny videos. I think we've got kind of gotten past right. That is not that that was the that was the testing ground that was to introduce you to. These are the steps that we've been anticipating, the things that it's gonna be able to do for businesses, the thing that it's gonna be able to do for managing your schedule and creating a more efficient society is the whole idea behind all of this. But the I guess the concern is it making everything so much more efficient, how much more are we relying on it to a point that we don't have access to what we think we have access to anymore?
SPEAKER_02Well, hopefully we uh we will always have access to to our own data that it's not hiding it from us because the agent is going to use what you tell it to use. So you give it access to your calendar, you give it access to your email, right? Um who reads that small print, right? Right. But pretty soon you'll be given it access to your bank, you'll be given it access to your credit card, you'll be given it access to your Amazon account. Heck, Amazon already has an agent that they're rolling out now in Amazon Web Services. They just launched their uh feature letting AI agents operate virtual desktops like a human employee would. So that's so it's there. So they're preparing for this. And again, I'll go back to the smartphone. The smartphone made us, you know, in a lot of ways smarter, and a lot of ways not so smart. Yep. But it's a tool that we all rely on now. And but you know, it's advanced so much. And and how many of you feel like this where it's like this is so much going on, I can't handle it all. I can't, it's just too much to to to soak in. It's too much. It's it's like this technology is going crazy. Well, agents are designed to alleviate that stress, that kind of stress. So it can automate a lot of these things that we're worried about over time and and can automate them for you on your behalf. And so, and today you can even use them, you can set them up in let's say a draft mode, right? So you can tell your agent, look, I want you to do all this, but as one final step, just show me a link that I can click on so I can approve it, so I can take a look at what you're doing. I mean, so you and you can even do that. So it's here, it's coming, and it's it's going to change. It definitely is going to change how you act with interact with technology more than ever, ever since the smartphone came out. This is going to be the next thing, AI agents that's going to automate your life, gonna simplify things in your life. And if you you know, and if you don't use it, I mean remember when smartphones came out, when people made the iPhone, I knew people was like, Ain't no way I want to use something like that. You know, too much technology, this and that. And now everybody's using it. And so the same thing with agents. I bet you there's probably more of you listening now than not that are of the mindset, I am never going to bow to something like that. That is just too crazy, that's too far out there. But it's coming, and to a certain extent, you already are. If you're using some of these tools, you just don't know it. You just don't know that it's these agents doing that work for these other companies to get you the information that you're looking for. Right.
Samsung Hits Trillion And Chip Costs
SPEAKER_01No, we've talked about it already being integrated in so much of Microsoft systems. If you're using Microsoft Outlook, you're utilizing an AI tool. You are. You just don't even realize it. So kind of stuff to keep monitoring. This is the direction AI is going. And we'll keep talking about it here on Tech Talk. Coming up, we're going to continue our conversation as Samsung now hits a trillion dollars. We'll talk about what that means to you and the chip shortage that we're currently in. You've been listening to Tech Talk right here on WDBO 1073FM and AM580.net. And now back to David and Adam.
SPEAKER_02All right. Thanks, Greg, and thanks everybody for listening to Tech Talk with Refresh Computers. You know, we're talking about all this information and this tech world that's advancing so fast. You know, we just talked about AI agents and what they're doing and how you're using them now, and you probably don't even know you are, and how they're going to be used in the future, whether you you like them to or not, and and how that's going to make things a lot easier. But at the same time, as with all technology, it also things you have to watch out for in the meantime. So we talked about a lot of that stuff. If you want to recap any of it or if you miss it, go to refreshcomputers.net, click on that podcast link. You can hear the show in its entirety. And better yet, go down to the bottom of the page, enter your email address, click send. That's all we ask for is your email. Click send, and you will be signed up automatically to receive an email notification as soon as the show is able, is able to be listened to. And in that email notifications will be bullet points with the topics that we talked about. So uh in this segment, we want to talk about a few newsy things, you know, to complete the show with Samsung being another company that hit a trillion dollar mark, right? And market cap. And that's basically what the AI chip boom did for Samsung because Samsung became just the second Asian company in history after TSMC to hit a trillion dollar market valuation. Their stock surged more than 15% in a single day. And that's actually on track for its largest single-day gain ever. And the reason, well, you guessed it, AI, specifically the massive global demand for the memory chips, the power AI systems. And guess who makes a lot of those memory chips? Samsung. Yeah. So, and at the same time, you know, AMD's latest forecast, AMD is another chip maker, they sparked a rally across the entire semiconductor sector. So, you know, things, what does that mean in plain English? It means that uh all systems, Chat GPT, Google Gemini, every AI tool you use. We just talked about agents, those agents, they all require enormous amounts of specialized chips to run. And Samsung makes the memory chips, right? The high bandwidth memory chips they're called, that go inside AI servers. So the world is building AI infrastructure at a pace never seen before. And then Samsung is supplying the raw materials. Good for Samsung. That's how they make their money. Bad for us, but great for Samsung. Well, yeah, well, I mean, you can think of Samsung, right, as the steel company during the railroad railroad boom, right? So the infrastructure behind the infrastructure is what they are. And so there is some more, some more news I want to touch on here, real quick, to close the show. A company called HUT 8. They signed a$10 billion lease for a new 352 megawatts of computer power building, basically, uh a data center. That's enough to power a small center uh city. So the AI infrastructure tools like massive buildings, massive power consumption, massive investment, these are all in play with this deal. And you guess what? Someone has to pay for all of this, and eventually that cost comes to us.
SPEAKER_01It trickles down eventually. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about that because recently Governor Ron DeSantis here in Florida signed a new bill that will restrict the utility companies from passing some of those costs on to consumers. Wanted to hear your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_02Well, down in Indian Town, there was a big data center that was being proposed that they the backers of that data center, which was the largest in Florida, are going to be the largest in Florida. And the backers of that data center pulled out after all the opposition that came from, well, the folks around Indian Town. So, you know, who little old Indian town. That's that's I think somewhere west of Stewart, Florida, somewhere down there, and it's uh near Lake Okeechobee in that area, and it's and it's a nice little quaint community, and you know, was going to be basically transformed into some mega data center that they just didn't want. And so that's not going to go there now. So I think that's a that's a good thing. So, and another quick news tip Microsoft dropped its co-pilot AI feature from the Xbox this week. They just took it out because guess what? Just really wasn't relevant enough to use an Xbox. So they're figuring stuff out as they go, obviously. And and we have run out of time, it looks like. And so I appreciate everybody listening to Tech Talk with Refresh Computers. Don't forget we have a free tech support hotline. It's 407-478-8200. Calls about anything tech, and we'll be happy to answer any of your questions or give us give us uh our best technical shot at helping you figure out what you can't figure out. So we'll be talking to you again next week. This is David Levitt with Refresh Computers. Thank you for listening.
