The AI can do spreadsheets now

You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app. If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

The Race To Build Clippy 2.0

Right after OpenAI launched GPT-4o this week, Google popped up with an I/O presentation pretty much entirely dedicated to AI. We also got somewhat fresh (self-reported) data this week about how many people are using these services. Which is useful for getting a sense of whether AI technology is actually breaking through. According to OpenAI this week, ChatGPT has more than 100 million weekly users. While Google went with a different metric, writing in a blog post yesterday that Gemini is being used by 1.5 million developers. Ok, sure.

If you, like me, are having a tough time remembering which companies are offering what, here’s a brief breakdown of where the AI arms race currently sits.

OpenAI’s new GPT-4o, or “omni,” model is free. It can now communicate in voice, text, and vision. It can also sing, giggle, and laugh, for reasons that probably have nothing to do with the fact OpenAI is trying to crack ethical AI-generated porn. There’s also a ChatGPT web app coming to Mac, Microsoft investment be damned. OpenAI has a video generator called Sora, as well, but it’s not open to the public yet. And there are rumors that an OpenAI search engine is coming.

Google has had AI-generated search running for a while now, as well as a ChatGPT-like chatbot called Gemini, which are, in my experience, both terrible. But Google’s investing a lot of energy in AI agents, or little generative-AI flourishes to their existing suite of products. Here’s a good thread about the ones they announced yesterday at I/O, but they include things like an email agent, a beefed up AI search agent, and a Google workspace agent. There’s also Project Astra, which essentially turns your smartphone into an AI personal assistant. Oh, and Google is also working on a video generator called Veo and, possibly, a new version of Google Glass.

Though, the thing I was most interested in yesterday was musician Marc Rebillet performing a great and very unhinged set at the conference. He also put out a demo using loops generated by Google’s AI. “I know this is a weird upload, lol. Don’t hate me,” Rebillet wrote on his subreddit. “The song is mostly me with a dash of AI prompting that I mixed in there.”

On the surface, OpenAI is trying to create a brand new grammar for how we’re supposed to interface with this technology, while Google is following the same path as Adobe, and just jamming it into whatever they have laying around. Or as The Information wrote this morning, “OpenAI is stepping into more daring terrain with its AI and Google is taking a more cautious path.” Meta is sort of straddling both paths, putting their AI into random products, while also releasing interesting open source models. (I’m not sure what the heck Apple is doing anymore.)

But if you really drill down into OpenAI and Google’s competing visions of AI, you start to see that they’re more or less the same. They’re both about trying to repackage what already exists into something either users, developers, or investors will care about. With OpenAI, they’re literally just trying to jam everything we already do online into a new interface that they own. All while promising us that if they can commit just a bit more copyright infringement, they’ll build computer God. While Google is just trying to repackage what Google already does and are calling it “AI” because no one would care if they said they were building Clippy 2.0. Yesterday, AI evangelists were losing their minds over Google’s new AI agent that can generate a spreadsheet of receipts in your Gmail inbox. I mean, do you hear yourselves?

A Great Way To Learn How To Count In Vietnamese

@gullahgritstv

#duet with @Learn Vietnamese Online #levion

Cable’s Back, Baby (Not Really)

There are two new streaming bundles coming soon. The first is Disney+, Hulu, and Max and the second is Netflix, Apple TV+, and Peacock. And, yes, the impulse would be to call these cable packages — without residuals, of course. But that’s not entirely accurate. The cable comparison, the residuals thing is absolutely true.

As my friend and excellent reporter Julia Alexander wrote this week, “Please, stop calling it cable.” And Peter Kafka, over at Business Insider, made a similar point, writing, “The ‘bundles’ people are announcing now are marketing campaigns.”

I also don’t think it’s an accident that all these bundles are appearing a year after the strikes in Hollywood last summer. What this is really about is managing churn. Many of these services are realizing they don’t have enough content to keep people paying a monthly subscription and are willing to accept a lower monthly subscription price if it means a lower amount of churn.

The Influencer That Licked A Toilet Seat Got The Portal Shut Down

I’ll give you a second to process that headline.

Ava Louise, an influencer and OnlyFans model that previously went viral during the pandemic for licking a plane’s toilet seat, was the woman who flashed the New York/Dublin portal this week and got it shut down.

At first, I wasn’t sure if Louise was lying about being the flasher for clout because that just seemed like a thing someone like her would do. But I found a longer video of the portal flashing incident and it definitely seems like it was her. No, I’m not linking.

The portal hasn’t been shut down for good, it’s going to relaunch with a bunch of safeguards, including a gate around it and a new feature that will let organizers blur what’s on the stream.

I’ll be honest, I had expected the Dublin side would end up being the reason this thing was taken offline. I mean, they were literally doing coke in front of it. But I suppose an American OnlyFans model ruining a wholesome tourist attraction with a viral stunt does paint a pretty accurate portrait of what the vibe in New York is like right now.

Speaking of women generating viral outrage as part of a content marketing funnel…

Guys On X Found A New Woman To Be Outraged About

Silicon Valley’s favorite race science expert Richard Hanania shared a video this week of a woman describing how she went on a date with a guy, decided to stay at his place, asked him not to make a move on her, and then felt “ugly” and disappointed when he respected her boundaries.

Hanania described this video as “mandatory viewing for all boys on the brink of puberty,” going on to write, “Wanting to make everything explicit is the trap that the ‘affirmative consent’ freaks fall into. Makes everything sterile.”

This whole video reeked of bait — and it is — but before we get to that, let me just lay out what Hanania is doing here. There’s a whole bunch of right-wing reactionaries, now mostly corralled on X, that do this on every platform. They use TikToks as strawmen for whatever culture war thing they’re obsessed with. This is Libs Of TikTok’s whole deal. Find a video of random person, use them as a stand in for an entire minority group or gender or political ideology, and then dogpile them. It works because, frankly, I think the human mind is just not evolved enough to watch this much video content.

Anyways, like I said, this is bait. The woman in the video is Sienna Hubert-Ross, she has almost 200,000 followers on Instagram, and she’s one of those comedians that makes skits about dating and goes on those weird video podcasts where people from New Jersey sit on couches and spew weird reactionary stuff about men and women and debate what a woman’s bodycount says about her or whatever.

Here’s Why You Might Being Seeing Memes About A Gas Pump Right Now

Ok, so, if you don’t understand why this post on X has over 5,000 shares, congrats. You’re living a good and healthy life. If you want to continue to live that, just keep scrolling. But, on the off chance, you have started to notice references to gas pumps online, well, read the next paragraph, and I will explain what’s going on here.

Earlier this week, a video went viral on both Reddit and X of a man in Italy, uh, taking the nozzle of a gas pump and… filling himself up with it, so to speak.

But here’s one interesting(?) tidbit about how this video has gone viral. So, yeah, there’s a ton of memes flying around about it, but I’ve also seen OnlyFans models on X dueting with the video? Like splicing footage of themselves at a gas station and pretending like they’re watching the guy. Which definitely feels like a bizarre evolution in X’s uncontrollable porn spam problem.

This Threads Post Has Been Stuck In My Feed For Four Days Now

A post from Glitch CEO Anil Dash has been near the top of my Threads feed for days now and according to the replies, I’m not the only one seeing it. Though, now I’m thinking this is becoming a bit of algorithmic self-fulfilling prophecy, like when my friend Katie Notopoulos posted a recipe for overnight oats on Facebook that got stuck at the top of everyone’s feeds for months.

Meta’s algorithms, no matter the platform, seem to love comments. And as long as something is getting fresh engagement, they’ll keep promoting it. I’ve long suspected this is Meta’s cheat for prioritizing long-tail evergreen content. It’s also why everyone is now commenting “Amen” on Facebook.

Some Good British Content

Some Stray Links

• Someone is finally doing a podcast about the Midwest Furfest gas attack

• “The Blank Slate of Barron Trump”

• “Fabio and the Goose”

P.S. here’s a bunch of Bad Bunny songs sung in English.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***