Hank Green Faces AI Backlash, Astra Makes 10 Math Advances, Million-Dollar Solo Firms | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:01)
Let's get into the show, what happened over the weekend? Did anything happen over the weekend, John?

**Jordi Hays** (0:05)
There were a couple of things.
The big debate that I was tracking sort of outside of tech, but tech adjacent was the cancellation of Hank Green, the YouTube creator. Not quite a cancellation, more just some backlash. Hard to always put a proper sizing on a mob when a mob comes after a creator. But Hank Green, the YouTuber, and really media entrepreneur, he's grown a huge business, which we can sort of go into, is getting pilloried on social media over using ChatGPT for research. Very controversial these days. Only a billion people do it, and it's the number one app in the app store, but he's getting a lot of backlash from certain members of his audience. I don't want to characterize the whole audience as being part of this, but it's a very silly situation.

**John Coogan** (0:54)
There's at least thousands of people that are really mad about it, and it's always hard to tell.

**Jordi Hays** (0:59)
I mean, thousands of people that are liking a post about it, there's maybe dozens of posts. I don't really know how to put a scale on these things, but Hank Green is definitely going through it, having to sort of apologize or qualify or state that he will adjust things in the future. It's just sort of interesting to hear how he went through this process, what he says is going to change, and where the backlash is coming from, because there's a lot of misunderstandings about it. What's interesting is that he is a science and education creator, and science and education are potentially the most affected by AI right now. And so, it's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math, I'm going to cover science, but I'm not going to touch AI, that AI stuff's bad. Because as we also saw over the weekend, AI is making a bunch of advancements on math. We've been seeing this for a while, but the latest version of the story comes from Gnome Brown, polynomial, over at OpenAI.
An internal version of Astra, OpenAI's next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity and theoretical computer science. The achievements are so, so extreme at this point that I don't even think it's worth us trying to break them down. Like we did that with the human piston problem.

**John Coogan** (2:14)
Tyler is going to run a 5K here in the Ultra Dome to do a little victory lap for the research team.

**Jordi Hays** (2:20)
But not everyone is impressed with it because Gary Marcus says, wake me when Astra solves a significant open world problem that doesn't revolve around formal verification. And of course Daniel Eith says, the goal posts are on a completely separate planet. It is a good point. Obviously AI is doing better in formally verifiable tasks at the same time. Still impressive because there's a lot of things that are useful and verifiable. Like, did this drug cure your cancer or not? Or did this job get done or not? Like, we've been using these recommender systems for lots of things. They're very valuable all over. But it is funny.
The debate over is this AGI, is this ASI, those terms will always be vague.

**John Coogan** (3:03)
Going back to Hank.

**Jordi Hays** (3:04)
Yes.

**John Coogan** (3:05)
So all he did was admit that he used some sort of AI tool for research?

**Jordi Hays** (3:11)
Yes. So I will take you a little bit more through it. So Hank Green, he's an OG YouTuber. He joined YouTube in 2007, I think less than two years after the platform actually launched.
He got a lot of views, but he also built a huge audience and created a real media company around it. So he has Vlogbrothers, like a vlog channel. Then he has Crash Course, which is a really, really huge educational channel. He runs VidCon, which is basically the premier conference around YouTube and the creator economy. I've been, I think, once or twice. It's a lot of fun. Over the last 20 years, he's become one of the most trusted educational creators in the platform. He gets the vibe of YouTube very well because he's been around it so long. Never really stepped back fully, but always been solid audience there. So last Wednesday, he published an episode of a show called Ask Hank Anything. It's an interesting concept for a show. So he brings on a guest, but then instead of just doing the interview, tell me your life story, ask the guest a whole bunch of things. The guest brings questions for him about science or whatever. They have a big long conversation. And if there's something in the show that he can't answer on the fly or he's not prepped for, he will go do the research and then get the actual answer and then cut that into the final episode. So you'll be watching them hang out. They'll talk about some odd thing. He was talking about this. Have you heard this Kiki and Booba thing? There's like two words that one is, basically there's two shapes. One's like a fluffy cloud. The other's like spiky, spiky like star essentially. And if you ask people generally, which one would you assign the word Kiki to? And which one would you assign the word Booba to? People always pick Booba is the cloud and Kiki is the spiky one. And it's like the sound of the word has a shape to it. And this is just something in our language that shows up all over the place. He's like telling the story of this like, just somebody ran a science experiment, they put a bunch of people here, they pulled a bunch of people, they put together this result, and this is what happened. And so he needs to compile all of that quickly because you get off the show, you have the rest of your job, but then you have to go answer these questions and have all the information. And of course he uses all sorts of research tools, but he was accused specifically of using Chia GPT to write the script, which is interesting, because after the episode went up, manager Jojo posted a clip of him from the episode and accused him of using Chia GPT to write the script. The key line is Hank saying, quote, I appreciate the pushback. That's sort of an AI phrase, but that wasn't one of the really trigger AI phrases like you're absolutely right or it's not this, it's that. I appreciate the pushback is something that the AI models say occasionally, but you wouldn't think it would make it into a script, but that's why people jumped on it. They were like, wow, he was so careless that he left in a turn of phrase that was the model talking to him about, I appreciate the pushback. That's not what happens. He's actually responding to the guest pushing back on him and about this concept and then he answers it. But he was just talking, but it feels out of place because he's talking to the camera at that point, even though in the video he's talking to the guest after the fact. The way it's edited is him direct to camera. So him saying, I appreciate the pushback to the camera. What is this? Beans? I don't know.