Grok, deepfakes and who should police AI

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Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I am Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley, back from my winter break. Welcome back.

Good to talk to you. I am Katie Prescott in the city, in the city of Cambridge today, actually. Cambridge?

Yeah, our own little cauldron of Silicon Valley, churning out tech companies, that's right, and center. I can't wait to hear how your break was, because it's been ages since we spoke.

It feels like it's been a million years since- It does. Yeah, we took a big, big, big family holiday to South Africa for like two weeks.

It's the first two-week vacation, two-week holiday we've taken since our honeymoon. Oh, that's special. It was very, very, very cool.

We did safari and saw all the big animals uncomfortably close to our safari jeep. Oh, it sounds like a holiday of a lifetime territory. It really was.

What about you? Did you do anything fun? I did nothing, actually. It was just very, very nice to have two weeks off

doing nothing with the family and just hunkering down at home while everyone else was off as well. It doesn't happen often happen with this gig.

Usually when you're off, everybody else is still working or vice versa. We have like an asynchronous kind of type of job. Exactly.

The news doesn't stop, the newspaper doesn't stop. But you know what wasn't stopping? You guys out in Silicon Valley, you might have stopped. Jensen Huang signed a deal with Grock.

He did an Aqua Hire on his machine. I know. I think, you know, come on. I know.

Well, he did say, he always says, he's like, yeah, I have great work-life balance. I wake up, I think about work, I work all day.

I work through dinner. And then when I go to bed, I'm thinking about work. I have great work-life balance. So he hired all of the important people at GROC,

this rival chip startup, and licensed its technology. Cool 20 billion. And it made me think, oh yeah, Silicon Valley just, just doesn't sleep.

Well, on that note, and I'm sure people want to hear about our holidays for the next 45 minutes, but maybe we shouldn't move on. So we spoke last week in our episode,

which we obviously had prerecorded, looking ahead to tech this year. And obviously, as you say, Silicon Valley does not sleep, things keep happening.

And what's funny is you kick off the year every year with CES, the big tech gadget Boondoggle in Las Vegas, where 200,000 people show up. Boondoggle, straight out of the Christmas.

Correct, and it's always like, come to CES, look at all our stuff, and every year, literally every year. you cannot imagine how many new kind of tech gadgets

are on display. 95% of them feel like complete nonsense. And my favorite always, always is the smart toilet. There's always a smart toilet.

And this year's no exception. I've not really, well what was it? Yes. I think particularly smart about it.

There's a smart toilet this year that analyzes your urine to see how hydrated you are. Useful. So that's super useful.

I think we all need it. Yeah, yeah. I've ordered one. I hope you have.

I hope that they're giving you a freebie to test. Mark Selman goes for us from the times and he was talking about a penguin on a skateboard following people around.

So I'm not quite sure what that was all about. It's the weird little world of the US. That's what we need. But it is like this kind of jolt of kind of techno optimism

which is very American, very West Coast, but different vibes, different vibes on your side of the pond. It's just some excitement here.

So, Amazon has started testing drone deliveries in Darlington. Hmm. Hmm. Excited by that?

Yeah. Very soon the people of Darlington will have packages dropped into their gardens about two hours after they've ordered something from Amazon. Useful.

Well, I was going to say, I'm just looking, Bezos 60 minutes drone delivery. He said this in 2013, I think. So wouldn't we? 13 years ago, it was just around the corner.

We're now trialing it here, just trialing it. Well, you don't want to recognize it. The drone can go around, you know, and then all being well.

Is that how it goes? No, it is. Actually, I was researching this in my column this week. In Dublin, they already have these drones

that are delivering tape weights, believe it or not, on strings rather than dropping packages. It's slightly different. Lots and lots of complaints on the Facebook pages

Dublin residents about the noise and little videos of people sitting on the balconies of their flats with these kind of things. This is why I love this job because you're like I gotta I gotta do a deep dive into the Dublin community Facebook pages to see about complaints about the drone company that disputes

that that it's a problem but actually that is not the big news in the UK it It's big news. It could be the buzzing, but it's actually what's been going on with Grog. Yeah. Elon Musk's AI that has been undressing people, I say people, mainly women, digitally undressing

and putting them in all sorts of, can I use the word saucy clothes? Is that the right word? You can use that word. and stuff, but, you know, bikinis and lingerie and stuff without asking them. And for the

UK, really, this puts us in uncharted waters. Because as you know, Ofcom, the media regulator, traditionally responsible for looking after things like radio and television, has recently been put in charge of the internet and regulating it through what's called the online safety bill. So essentially protecting people, especially kids from seeing inappropriate stuff and also

making sure that websites treat people with respect. And so while they have already announced