#229: Q3 Trends Briefing - The Pope's AI Encyclical, AI Agents Hack Hugging Face, Fable 5 vs. Washington, and the Battle Over Open Weights

**Paul Roetzer** (0:00)
So, agents have this amazing potential when they become really reliable, and we've figured out how to govern their autonomy, because most enterprises have no idea how to govern the autonomy of these things. Like, if we're going to turn them loose and let them do all these things, how do we actually know they're doing what we want them to do?
Welcome to The Artificial Intelligence Show, the podcast that helps your business grow smarter by making AI approachable and actionable. My name is Paul Roetzer. I'm the Founder and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'm your host. Each week, I'm joined by my co-host and SmarterX Chief Content Officer, Mike Kaput, as we break down all the AI news that matters and give you insights and perspectives that you can use to advance your company and your career.
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**Mike Kaput** (0:56)
Welcome to episode 229 of The Artificial Intelligence Show. Today's episode is a special episode of the podcast where we're doing something a little different than usual. Today, we are going through one of our quarterly trends briefings. This is a live event. We run each quarter for our AI Academy Mastery members. What we do in these briefings is we count down the top 10 trends that matter most in AI. This quarter, based on what we've been tracking and covering over the last few months on the podcast. These trends briefings started as exclusive only for members of our AI Academy. They quickly became very, very popular, so we're bringing them to the podcast as a regular part of the feed. Now, we are recording this live right now with an audience of our AI Academy Mastery members. They're seeing it first, so if you're a member listening on the podcast, you can jump back into AI Academy to hear the exclusive Q&A that followed this Trends Briefing. What we're going to do here is I'm going to tee up each trend, similar to how we tackle topics on the podcast normally each week. Then we're going to get Paul's take on the bigger picture implications of each one, so you can basically get fully briefed on what's happening this quarter in AI. Spoiler, it's a lot.
One final note, if you are listening to this episode, you are not yet an AI Academy member, go to academy.smarterx.ai to see all the incredible benefits that individuals and teams get with their memberships including live access to these briefings, days or week in advance, and plenty of exclusive private Q&A afterwards, as well as tons of other courses and benefits as part of that membership.
All right, Paul, let's get into it. Top 10 AI trends this quarter. We count down in order of importance, though all of these alone could be the biggest news item in another industry for a year, I think. But we're going to start at number 10 And we are going to start with beginning our countdown with a little bit of a question here, which is how do you know AI has a public opinion problem? And the answer to that question is when the Pope himself decides to write 43,000 words about it. So back in May, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical called Magnifica Humanitas. It runs more than 43,000 words. And it is about, basically all about AI. He wrote that technology is never neutral. AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. He called on the world to disarm AI, which he defined as freeing the technology from monopolistic control. And that message went out to more than 1.3 billion Catholics. In fact, anthropic co-founder Chris Ola spoke at the Vatican unveiling and told the room the industry needs outside critics who are willing to say hard things. Now, be careful what you wish for, Chris, because we have been tracking in addition to the Pope's encyclical, huge backlash to AI all quarters. So, of course, we saw graduation crowds booing former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona when he brought up AI. Gallup has found only 18 percent of young people ages 14 to 29 feel hopeful about it. And of course, data centers. Gallup found 71 percent of Americans oppose a data center in their local area. These data centers are thus less popular than nuclear power plants. And we covered more recently that New York Governor Kathy Hatchell announced a one-year moratorium on new data centers of 50 megawatts or more, the first state to do that.
In the past few weeks, we had a group called Humans First, co-founded by a former Tea Party leader, coordinating 142 protests across 42 states against data centers.