The Immersive Lens Podcast

Paul Engin | Dave Ghidiu | Jeff Kidd

Episode 17: Outlier Models

Cover art for podcast episode.  

This episode dives into the rapidly shifting landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), moving beyond the "Big Three" to examine the specialized tools carving out their own niches. From the enterprise-ready integration of Microsoft Copilot to the citation-heavy search capabilities of Perplexity, the hosts analyze why these "outlier" models are essential for specific workflows in 3D design, coding, and academic research. The conversation also touches on the tactile world of 3D printing and the legal pressures currently facing social media giants over user safety.

Paul and Dave weigh the practical benefits of these platforms against significant ethical and legal hurdles, including recent high-profile lawsuits involving Meta and YouTube regarding negligence and mental health. They provide a unique look at the "LLM Arena" rankings and discuss the trade-offs between closed-system reliability and the raw, uncurated power of open-source models. Ultimately, they conclude that while the tech is advancing toward a "No UI" future driven by voice and intent, the winner of the AI race will be determined by which model can most seamlessly integrate into our daily digital lives.




Key Topics

The Rise of "Vibe Coding" and Seamless Integration: Google's latest move to unify Stitch with AI Studio and Firebase represents a shift toward "vibe coding," where developers can build applications through intuitive, high-level intent rather than manual syntax. This level of integration simplifies the tech stack, allowing creators to bridge the gap between design and data storage automatically, effectively "landing the plane" on complex app development with minimal friction.

"No UI" is the Next Frontier of User Experience: A central theme of this episode is the theory that the most intuitive user experience is actually the absence of a traditional interface, replaced by direct verbal interaction. By leveraging LLMs to act as agents that pull data directly into a user's context, the need for navigating traditional headers, banners, and menus could soon be replaced by a single, invisible thread of conversation.

Navigating the Ethical Minefield of Frontier Models: While models like Grok and DeepSeek offer high performance and real-time data access, they also carry baggage ranging from a lack of safety guardrails to potential censorship concerns. The hosts stress that users must balance the efficiency of these tools—such as DeepSeek's lean training methods—against the transparency of the data sets used to train them and the legal battles over unauthorized web scraping.

The Power of Open-Source and Local LLMs: Meta’s Llama models stand out for being "downloadable," allowing developers to run powerful AI locally to maintain data privacy and avoid subscription limits. This open-source approach fosters a different kind of innovation, providing a "sandbox" environment that is often more flexible for specialized media creation and research than the more restrictive, cloud-based alternatives.





Transcript

Click here to view transcript
Paul Engin Are you good?

Dave Ghidiu I was born ready. Oh man. Actually that was... that was on the episode this morning... I was born ready things.

Paul Engin You're right. All right. I think we're testing.

Dave Ghidiu Welcome to the Immersive Lens, the podcast exploring the technologies reshaping how we live, work, and learn.

Paul Engin From AI and virtual reality to creative media and design, we are diving into the tools and ideas shaping our connected world. My name is Paul Engin, join us as we uncover the people and ideas driving the next wave of interactive experiences.

Dave Ghidiu And I'm Dave Ghidiu, this is the Immersive Lens.

Paul Engin So Dave uh how are you doing you looking tan.

Dave Ghidiu Uh yes I as you recall I was at the uh global headquarters southeast version in Florida for the last uh week and uh got a actually stepped away from AI for a little bit.

Paul Engin What? It's a you can't. You don't you don't you can't do that.

Dave Ghidiu Oh it's like riding a bike though I got sucked right back in.

Paul Engin What'd you do last week?

Dave Ghidiu Uh nothing much played with some uh some tools did some 3D printing, you know, I'm a geeky guy.

Paul Engin 3D printing? All right. Yeah. All right. Good for you.

Dave Ghidiu So um it was uh it was interesting I uh I like doing stop motion so I was looking for 3D uh 3D rigs for like a character rig so you can articulate joints and stuff.

Paul Engin Yeah so you're talking about like nightmare before Christmas type stuff.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah yeah so I was just trying to do that and I started doing a print and it just was all over the place and I I'll revisit it when I have more time.

Paul Engin Is this for fun?

Dave Ghidiu Oh yeah I just want to start doing I haven't done stop motion in a while other than teaching it I want to actually do some stop motion for myself so I'm just in the works of like setting everything up.

Paul Engin Yeah I really appreciate the like in this especially like you and I are you know bleeding edge technology and you're like stepping back and saying like oh I want to go back like old school and like practice my craft. That's really admirable.

Dave Ghidiu Thank you. I I just love the tactile aspects of it. So I think that that's something that I want to visit maybe a sabbatical in the future. Who knows? We'll see. We'll see.

Paul Engin Um, but then uh, I heard the sad news. Did you hear it?

Dave Ghidiu There was a number of sad news over the last week. Which one are you talking about?

Paul Engin Uh, one of them was uh, Sora.

Dave Ghidiu The that's the video from ChatGPT?

Paul Engin Yeah where it's all AI there's no real footage it's all uh just AI driven. Um, and uh, they're shutting that down.

Dave Ghidiu Shutting it down? They're shuttering it. Uh did they say why?

Paul Engin Um, I don't think that they got the traction that they were hoping for and um, I think uh, it's one of those things where it was using a lot of resources and uh not getting much return because that's a lot of processing of videos.

Dave Ghidiu And they had that social media setup for it too right?

Paul Engin Right that's the whole yep. Um, and you had talked about how Disney had been part of that right?

Dave Ghidiu Right, and it was uh, because of the social platform, they Disney bought into it, thinking, you know, they'll they'll invest a billion dollars into it or something crazy. And then they pulled it all out because they were shutting shutting the social platform down. So.

Paul Engin Oh man. Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu That's a bummer.

Paul Engin So I didn't create much in it so it didn't hurt.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah and there's still like so you can still use Meta, they have video generation, and Google Veo and Flow and all that stuff, right?

Paul Engin Right, and I think, you know, I think they're still going to, and I guess I need clarity on this. I thought that the Sora model is the video model is still going to be available. They're shutting down the social media Sora app. Um, so it's just the app that's being shut down I believe. But I'll have to look into that. You brought up a good point because they're both Sora, but yeah.

Dave Ghidiu I'm pretty sure it's a social media app. How about you? I'm going to look into this while you're giving us some hot takes.

Paul Engin Yeah, so as you know I'm an advocate of Vibe coding, which is just using AI to code. In fact, at the college, I think we've talked about this on the show before, we have a vibe coding course here at the college. So it's designed to make applications web pages things like that without knowing anything about coding. And we think it might be one of the first Vibe coding courses for non-majors in the world.

Dave Ghidiu Oh, really?

Paul Engin Oh, that's awesome.

Dave Ghidiu It is, it's really cool. And some of the stuff that they're doing in this class is just blowing me away. It's really a web technologies class. Uh, I don't want to get too nerdy about it, but it's really, really fun. Uh, if you want to make apps and stuff, you should totally take it in the fall. But, the reason I bring this up is because over the last week, Google pushed Stitch, which you have talked about before, for making like user interface, user experience type websites and things like that. They've they've now codified the tech stack, so and the tech stack in nerd speak is the tools that you use in in agreement with each other to achieve a final result. So now Stitch is is kind of in this tech stack with Google's AI Studio, which is their online tool to create apps. And now they're linking that automatically with Firebase, which is their database. So now you have like Stitch, AI Studio, and Firebase, and and quite frankly like there's nothing you can't make with with those three. So it's it's very, very exciting.

Paul Engin That's interesting. So basically now rather than having these different things you're logging into you can go into AI Studio, do your Stitch, once you pick one you like, now you can use it directly in the same framework so it's more integrated into everything.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah I don't know if they've made it that seamless quite right now, but that that's kind of their plans, that's how I understand it. Um, and this Firebase thing, so having the database, that does happen kind of automagically. Like you don't see it, it's awesome.

Paul Engin That's awesome. And I haven't used Firebase with uh any AI, have you had it I haven't

Dave Ghidiu I have, we did that in the vibe coding course. And it kind of sets up all the things automatically, which is good, except usually when you're dealing with databases you want to be really particular with like what stuff is public, what stuff is private, how do you need to authenticate. So there there is some some education and learning that needs to be done there because it will, you know, much like AI will really get you into that ballpark, but you you really got to land the plane yourself.

Paul Engin Gotcha. Got ya.

Dave Ghidiu All right, so clarity on Sora.

Paul Engin Uh, so it it looks like it's the app. Um, but it might also be the I I have Sora discontinued and they're they referred to the app, but they're not referring to the um the actual Sora platform, but I assume it's all connected. So, um, I wonder if it is they're going to shut down the entire video Sora stack, they're not going to do I bet you it's just going to be integrated into their chat.

Dave Ghidiu Much like in in Google, oh this is another thing that Google, so when you go into Gemini, you can hit the button create images and invokes Nano banana or create video and it invokes Veo. So it's probably going to be more streamlined like that.

Paul Engin That's what I'm thinking.

Dave Ghidiu That's good because it was always really bothersome to me that I had to go to some whole new website just to generate video.

Paul Engin Yeah. And then it gave you all those watermarks and yeah. Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu And Google, Gemini just integrated their music generation right into Gemini chat as well. So now in addition to creating an image or video you can create music. Which is like Suno AI it's it's awesome.

Paul Engin Yeah, so they're really integrating every- I mean this is right they they do all these little test things and then they're like okay now we can integrate it. Um, and uh, I think that the other thing that I want to talk about we talked about Stitch and Stitch is basically something where you can say like I want an app and I want it to look like this I want it to be sleek I want it to be modern and um I was using it a little bit this weekend and it gives you now color palettes that you can change up and and then it'll redo the color palettes and fonts.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah they really amped it up, right?

Paul Engin Yeah. Um, it's interesting because for some reason I will say slick, I will say modern, I will say I want it um retro, but I don't know why it maybe I'm looking at too many of it, but they seem very similar in structure and they have like you can see that there are like some hierarchy things that they always put in there and you're like this isn't diff I want it to be more diff like I think you really have to think about how you can break the default template mold.

Dave Ghidiu And my guess is because if they've looked at structures from, you know, best practices, there I think of like square website, a lot of them look the same, they have the same structure. So that you would imagine that we're seeing the reflection of that in in this.

Paul Engin 100% and it's interesting because for web students I say, you know, you always got to do research. I can with with high probability tell you that most sites will have some type of header or navigation, some type of hero banner, then you're going to have a your secondary tier of uh information, and then you're going to have footer with uh copyright and, you know, call to action or a form. And it and it's like it's just everyone does it. Yeah. So it's just like something like you said, I wonder if that's what they're trained on but yeah.

Dave Ghidiu Yes it's just the the like regression to the mean. And we're seeing that in other things too. So for instance a big study was done in uh college entrances um letter like the personal letter that college person Oh yeah yeah yeah. And they're saying like you really stand out now if you don't use AI because all the other ones kind of sound the same.

Paul Engin So now you have to tell your AI to not sound like AI and give uh incorrect uh grammar. Um, but so what I wanted to do is so that creates the UI. So here is a thought, are you ready for this?

Dave Ghidiu Yeah I'm yeah, hit me with it.

Paul Engin What if the future is no no UI, and no UI is the new UX.

Dave Ghidiu What?

Paul Engin So in the future, think about what would be the need of websites if you could just And UI is the user interface.

Dave Ghidiu User interface. And UX is the experience.

Paul Engin Yes.

Dave Ghidiu And a lot of people kind of conflate those two.

Paul Engin Right. So you a lot of times um you want a great user experience so you design your UI, your user interface, to be intuitive. But what if the most intuitive user experience is no UI? So everything is all verbal code like through like verbal discussion. So your website no longer has an interface, it just has hooks for LLMs to come back with with something. So, um, you know, "Oh I want to see uh Paul Engin's uh video on so and so" and rather than taking you to the site, it goes to the site, pulls back something, and then it just shows you the video.

Dave Ghidiu And we've seen kind of ChatGPT is doing that with say Canva or other things, but you're saying like the whole operation is going to be flipped on its head.

Paul Engin Right, so there is no more it's literally the it's a a prompt, or a touch if you're wearing glasses, and everything else is just it's just audio, you're talking now, you're gonna say, you know, you don't have to go to uh to have a navigation in a traditional sense.

Dave Ghidiu And that's kind of when you go to Google right now, you get the search generative experience, so it will pull that information and you're saying this is more intentionally designed so it is exactly that.

Paul Engin Right, and it's a I mean I I don't know when this would happen, if it would happen, but it it's the logic of, you know, maybe everything is verbal. There's no more there's no more looking things up, you're just talking in a in a prompt and there's no more need for interfaces. Typing is for chumps, man. Right? You don't need to move files, you don't need to do anything, it literally just it does it all for you in the back end. You don't have to worry about it.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah. I worry about now sites that rely on like ads because they'll never be going to the ad, although maybe the ad will come back with whatever content they're asking for.

Paul Engin Right, or right, it would be it's even more focused, but...

Dave Ghidiu So no UI, more UX.

Paul Engin You heard it here first, folks.

Dave Ghidiu Maybe. You heard it here first.

Paul Engin Maybe, we'll see. Everything you talk about seems to come come to fruition, so.

Dave Ghidiu Maybe, we'll see. All right. Um, so then uh the other thing which is uh not great news or good news is um and it's interesting, but um Meta and YouTube lost uh two lawsuits. Um, one in um Los Angeles and one in New Mexico. Um, one is for um YouTube and Meta in Los Angeles, uh lost a lawsuit on um negligence, um that they weren't aware of that they were causing harm to the plaintiff that was suing them. And uh they found that uh Meta was 70% negligent and YouTube was 30% negligent. And uh it was I mean for them it's nothing, but it was a $3 million and I think it sets a precedent.

Paul Engin Yeah, so this will be and this is part of the section 230 um conversation, but the just to be clear so Meta is the it used to be Facebook and now they rebranded to Meta. And I know you said this is sad news, and it's not sad news because we're in the corner rooting for Meta or YouTube. It's sad news because people were harmed.

Dave Ghidiu Correct.

Paul Engin Correct. That good clarification, thank you. Well and then on the other the other side of this is also Meta got sued for a larger sum, it was a civil uh lawsuit for 375 million, and this was because it was um uh it was uh what was it uh Was this the mental health and the like body image?

Dave Ghidiu Yes. Yes. Um, so there is a it was a bigger lawsuit on um platforms affecting young people's mental health. So uh they lost that lawsuit too and uh so it's interesting because now you're seeing this huge uh this huge change um as far as uh the the whole the landscape really.

Paul Engin The landscape or how social media is being used and it's it's like is this cigarettes? Is this where cigarettes... This is the cigarettes of the generation.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah. And I am not surprised by this. I mean, the number of lawsuits that Meta has lost or appealed because there's internal memos that are, you know, three years saying like, oh we have to be careful because we're we're causing body image issues, and they never come to light until like three or four years later. Like this happens every day. So the the fact that Meta is still even exists is just baffling to me.

Paul Engin Yeah, and so it's it's so irresponsible.

Dave Ghidiu I think that this will push more responsibility to those companies. Um, but it's interesting because like we talked about this, there's no age gating yet. There's age gating in other countries, they're more diligent about it, but we'll see. Yeah. Um, anything else or are we ready for our deep dive?

Paul Engin Yeah, let's let's do a deep dive.

Dave Ghidiu All right, well, so uh continuing this is the last part of our series, uh we've been talking about um frontier models for LLMs. And uh we talked about open AI, using, you know, ChatGPT, Google with Gemini, and we talked about um Claude. And um we're going to do what we're going to call these the frontier model outliers. And um these are very popular and these are big platforms, but we don't feel I think just between you and I, we don't feel they're the top three. I think the top three are the three that we spoke about.

Paul Engin Yes. Do you is that sound right as far as these outliers that we're going to talk about today?

Dave Ghidiu Yeah, so when we talk about frontier models we favor Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. And but there is Grok, there's Microsoft Copilot, there's Perplexity, there's a a few others, Meta is out there. And so we'll talk about those. But I do want to say this is not just our opinion, although I think that we're aligned with the world in this one. There's a website you can go to called arena.ai. And the way that this website works is it's kind of the the diet Coke diet Pepsi blind taste test. You can go there and you can do a new chat and it will serve up two different answers and you vote which one you like better. And under the hood it's different models. And so it could be one response might be from ChatGPT, one might be from Grok. And it will um you get to choose which one is better. So and then it they have these votes, right? So if you look at the leaderboard, I'm just going to read off the leaderboard for text right now: Claude Opus 4.6 number one, Claude Opus 4.6 number two, Gemini 3.1 Pro number three. Grok does come in at four, but Gemini again at five, ChatGPT at six, Grok at seven, ChatGPT. And and so if you go down this list and they have different categories, so for for code, get a load of this, numbers one through five are all different versions of Claude and then ChatGPT and then Gemini. So you can go to this website and kind of see at any given time who's on the leaderboard. And I I mean you're looking at the computer with me right now, it is either Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and occasionally Grok. Um, and then there's like these one or two kind of like outliers that you don't see.

Paul Engin Right, right. So so it's not just us, we've been validated by the by arena.ai.

Dave Ghidiu That's really cool, that's a great find I I didn't even know that existed.

Paul Engin Yeah it's fascinating they have different categories for like vision, documents, text to image, image edit, but the results are generally going to be, you know, those big three uh are are up there.

Dave Ghidiu And so a few things that I want to say about uh some of these models is um obviously I'm not as familiar as I am with the other models. Um, but I think that uh these models can be good uh for whatever tasks you're doing. And um I want to jump in with Copilot first because um this is Microsoft's AI. Um, I was using it for quite a while on my PC and I loved it because I was able to just speak to it, it was able to see my screen right away, I was it felt nicely integrated when I started using it. Oh that's good. Um, and it did everything I needed to do. Um, I know I've spoken with other people that use like PowerPoint and um Excel and they love the way that Copilot has been integrated into it. And um they even find it, and this is somebody who is very Claude, who loves Claude, okay? They said that it works better when they're in PowerPoint than than like Claude. And Claude doesn't necessarily have an extension for it. Yeah. But they use it and they're like it just gives me more information, it fills out what I need, it redesigns it. And so they're they're much happier with Copilot when they're doing that type of stuff.

Paul Engin And Copilot does have a saving grace. And and I I the one thing I really appreciate about Copilot, and we have it here, so you are some in some ways bound to it if you're a Microsoft house, like we are here. Uh, but it protects your data lake. So if you have the enterprise version of it, and we do, if you look in the upper right hand corner it's got like a green shield, which means it doesn't train on our data, and it kind of sanitizes it. So the, you know, theoretically you could put personally identifiable information in there. I I still wouldn't, and you're kind of guaranteed that the sanctity of that. So that's one thing that I like about it. One thing I don't like about it is, so I I was at that N-A-A-I-C conference, which is the National um Applied AI conference. And I went I went to a session from Microsoft, and they're like when you're in in Outlook, you can click here to launch Copilot. But you can also click here. It's on the same screen, there's two different ones, they're like it launches two different models. And it will give you two different responses. I was like who no one's asking for this. Like I want it to be easy. That's bad usability. It is. Yeah, speaking of UX. Um, and and for a long time the web versions were not aligned with the desktop versions, so it came into the web ones first, which is nice. So they they've always just Microsoft's always had this disjointed AI or disjointed experience across the board and this is just like yes, okay, history is repeating itself, I see that their AI experience is no less disjointed than the rest of whatever they do.

Dave Ghidiu Now I will say that one other thing that I was, we alluded to it in the last episode is I was using GitHub.

Paul Engin Mmhmm. Which is owned by Microsoft.

Dave Ghidiu It is now, yes. And um they have Copilot integrated into it.

Paul Engin Mmhmm. And you can use other models? Nope. No? They just changed that.

Dave Ghidiu They did. Oh let me rephrase that. No that's not true, for the education they did, um, and they decreased the limits and it's made a lot of people mad.

Paul Engin Well that was the thing is I I started setting it up, I was like this is great it was building repositories for me, it was doing everything online, I was able to preview it online I was like, in my head I was like this is how Dave works. It is. This is how Dave works. But within I think my first prompt, and I was using the free version I assume, I was done. I I hit the limit and I can't do like I can't do anything until April. Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu It's it and so yes you can bring in because you and I both bring in say Claude or ChatGPT codex into uh GitHub which is fine, you can do that. Um I misspoke it was a student version. But yeah, the free version is not very powerful and you don't get a lot.

Paul Engin Yeah. But at first I was like this is in my head I was like maybe I should pay for Copilot because this is this it was it was rocking it when I was when I when I could use it. But then you know, so I guess what I wanted to say is I don't want to dismiss Copilot because Copilot might be that little secret The one in GitHub? Or Copilot in general? Copilot in general.

Dave Ghidiu I'll say here's here's my per- First of all I'm on AI arena right now, arena.ai. Microsoft's number one ranking is clocking in at 96 on the list. So their own AI isn't even in the top 50. Uh New York Times uh Hard Fork they downgraded it from a front uh frontier model, like it doesn't even count anymore. So they're not regarding it as that. Um and to be fair, they're not using their own AI for Copilot a lot of times. It's using I think like older versions of ChatGPT, I think it's like ChatGPT 4 or something like that.

Paul Engin Oh, okay, interesting.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah. I think it's fantastic if you are embedded in the the Microsoft ecosystem and you're using Excel, I think it's fantastic if you want to protect your data lake. I have not found it to be very helpful, productive, or fun in in the work I do.

Paul Engin Right. And it's interesting because here's my take on it. It's the only other platform outside of Google that could do what Google is doing, which is it's got the dispersed applications and it's integrating it. I mean, they are falling way behind. But technically with all of the platforms, their office platforms, they're I mean they did Visual Studio Code, right? VS Code is Microsoft and everybody uses that. And like so it's just an interesting, they have the potential if if they do it.

Dave Ghidiu Yes, they've had potential for 50 years as far as I'm concerned and they haven't really delivered on their promise.

Paul Engin So uh I think that that's one of the platforms. The other platform um that I'm really intrigued about is uh Perplexity. Um, it's a platform that I was just looking into more and it's very similar to Claude, it's very similar to ChatGPT to me. It has a lot of the same features. Um, it has things that are even similar to Open Claude which they call Computer. Yeah. And they operate in a sandbox similar to what Nvidia is starting to do. Um, but I've also heard rumblings that their controversy really is um the ethics of how they do web scraping.

Dave Ghidiu Yes. Well and to be fair that's probably every company has that that ethical issue. Perplexity does do one thing that I really like, they were the first ones to say like if you ask me a question, here's the response and let me bring receipts. And they'll have like all the annotations of where they've gotten stuff from, so it's easier to fact check.

Paul Engin Oh, okay. That's really nice.

Dave Ghidiu Also it's it's I believe their model is backed by Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT. So I don't think that they have their own model, maybe they've been working on one, they might have one now, but for a long time when you asked a question it was just using different models to to get a response.

Paul Engin Yes, that was my that was my understanding as well that um it was built um off of other platforms. And um so whether it's again I don't know I don't know all the nuances of it, but um it seems like a decent model. Um I I haven't used it but it has all the same features as the other the other models. It's got um uh Comet which is a web browser.

Dave Ghidiu They were the first one to have that AI powered web browser too I think. Yes. Yeah.

Paul Engin And it's interesting because I didn't know this, but Nvidia backs it, is one of their big backers and so is Jeff Bezos. But ironically, there's a lawsuit with Amazon and Perplexity, so. What?

Dave Ghidiu Stuff like that is we get all sorts of weird like alliances and uh and and kind of arguments with all these companies.

Paul Engin So I'm gonna I'm gonna position this with you, I wanna get your take on this. So Amazon was blocking the Comet browser because what Comet was doing is it was going through all of Amazon and trying to find the best deals, circumventing Amazon. Sure. Now they would still use Amazon but they would they would be going through all the content. So the sponsored deals or maybe some of the prime deals that are inflated don't surface.

Dave Ghidiu Exactly. Yeah. So uh so what I I saw the CEO speak about this and what the CEO said is it's equivalent to you taking a friend to a store and having your your friend look up other prices for you and give you tell you their suggestions and their recommendations versus just going by yourself and taking whatever Target is giving you. And I'm I'm just using Target as an example, but sure. And and I think part of the problem is so I I guess I have two thoughts on this. One, that AI should respect websites' wishes. So like if if it says don't scrape or don't use Comet or an agential browser, they should respect that. And we're seeing that that's actually a big issue right now for online learning as well, as you can imagine. Like why not set Comet to open up Brightspace every day, look for the assignments that are due, do the assignments and submit them. So that's an issue. But the other issue is typically you violate the terms of service of websites when you uh have like all this scraping and this thing going on. So there there there actually might be some legal ground for Amazon right now because they're like you're violating our terms of service by doing this.

Paul Engin Right. And it's it's interesting because viewing it, how does it it's so I understand the scrape the the scraping, but at the same time it's um I don't know, I go back and forth about this because it it would be it truly would be equivalent to somebody else kind of like clicking through everything and checking it for you. Yeah. Um, but what this is what they're they're saying is it's also capturing data and information.

Dave Ghidiu Oh like ratings or price history?

Paul Engin Yes and storing it. And so that's what they're saying is the the the real issue I believe is that that data.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah and I think the part of me wants to say like hey whatever's best for the consumer is what we should do. So it's it's tough to kind of have a a super strong opinion on this because I kind of see both sides.

Paul Engin Yeah. So Perplexity is definitely something um I think I might explore a little bit. I think it's got a lot of um it's got a lot of interesting elements to it that um you know, you can kind of look through it, definitely go visit it, see if it's something that might interest you, it seems like um you can do a lot of similar things to the other platforms. Um it's got skills, it's got uh academics, um so it it really does have an it reminds me almost like a web portal, I don't know if you've seen the um like like you can do academics and then you can just get more academic-based Yeah. you know. Again, you probably could do something similar in the other platforms.

Dave Ghidiu Well yeah, and Claude actually just rolled this thing out in where you can say hey I want to learn about sailing, it will build in the chat an interactive web app. And so it'll have like an illustration of a sailboat and like sliders so you can like increase the the speed of the wind and the direction of it and it will show you these animations. So I think all these tools are getting into these niche um markets of like education learning like using it to explore, which I think is great because I think that's great modeling because that's what we want people to do is use AI to learn, not just tell you the answer.

Paul Engin Agreed, agreed. So um so definitely I think Perplexity uh right now out of these I think that uh Copilot I think is something that people can feel good using, but maybe not the same results as the other.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah, but there is something cool that Copilot is doing that no one else is doing yet, I think I just read today that Gemini is starting to do this, where they are rolling out agents to the general population. So they're making it easier to build an AI agent to do work on your behalf.

Paul Engin Oh nice. Yes. Okay. So I I again, I think that's the one that could be a sleeper that like, I know you're I know it took 50 years and But yeah, and I I'll say I mean my opinion is for me, it's not for anyone else, like I don't I think everyone's gonna have their own views and experiences. And I really think that like don't listen to like Paul and I, we're just clowns like we we have our favorites. Like find a tool that works for you and your workflow. Like if you work in Excel and you find Copilot is fantastic, use it. Don't let us sway your opinion. And this is true for technology in general. I I use a Chromebook, which most people scoff at, but I love it because I I love the experience on it and you use a Mac because you love that experience, but that doesn't make one better than the other other than the fact that Chromebooks are better than Macs. So.

Paul Engin Wait, what? Did he say something, what you say something, sorry my uh. Um, so yeah absolutely, uh that's a great point and so uh the other one um you mentioned Grok.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah, so maybe we just round out talking about Meta and Grok real quick. So the Meta AI, I find there's this there's this term in AI called temperature and that's kind of how creative it can be. If you have a really low temperature then it's almost it's very stringently going to give you kind of the same results, but if you increase that temperature it will like think a little bit more outside the box. And I think Meta tends to be the most creative. Um and it also has it's just so easy and fast to make videos and images with Meta. I typically don't use it for anything other than images and video, it's great for media. Uh and then Grok, which is owned by X, which is owned by Elon Musk, uh is out there and and like I said when we're looking at the uh LLM arena, that it it does perform very good. Uh it doesn't get as much exposure and it's been in the news for a lot of bad things lately. Uh there were some white supremacist uh behavior that Grok was exhibiting, there was openly like during the chats of X, which is Twitter, you could say hey take this person and put them in a bikini. So it was doing all these deep fakes and some of the people were were minors so it was really troubling and it took it took X AI like a long time to kind of fix that issue, it was almost as if they didn't care. Um and then there were some researchers who were looking at like how Grok renders a response and they went through the reasoning and for some politically charged conversations one of the last final steps is like before providing this response, check across all of Elon Musk's tweets about this topic. So it seemed like it was being um the the flavor of the text the response was going to be a little bit um skewed by Elon Musk's texts.

Paul Engin That's interesting. That's really, you know.

Dave Ghidiu For better or for worse.

Paul Engin Right.

Dave Ghidiu That being said, I don't use X, I don't use Twitter, and I don't use social media.

Paul Engin So um I think that it's and Grok was one of the top 10 on some of these lists, so it's definitely I don't know if it was for coding, maybe it's really good for coding.

Dave Ghidiu It's peppered through all of them. So when you look at the different leaderboards, like Grok appears once or twice in um probably in in all of them. Like the text, I see it in the text, I see it uh in the uh where else do I see it? I oh yeah it's in the image edit, it's in the text to image. So it's it's up there.

Paul Engin And you can see with text to image and image edit, without constraints, now what you're saying is that you can take copyright material and you can do different things to it.

Dave Ghidiu Oh yeah, Grok doesn't care about copyright material.

Paul Engin Right, which I'm assuming is the reason why it might be elevated a little bit more.

Dave Ghidiu Oh that's interesting, I haven't thought about that.

Paul Engin Um, because they have that freedom. Yeah. So um, you know, I haven't used it enough where I'm I can really say much about it, but it is interesting that it's up there. Um, and then um, you know, uh what about uh Deep Deep Seek?

Dave Ghidiu Yeah there's other models out there. Uh and and Deep Seek is fine. One of the things I appreciate about Deep Seek is they've really theoretically, and I don't think this has been proven, but this is well established um thought is that in the industry, they are doing some really innovative things to make the environmental impact a little bit like they're training a lot leaner and so it's not quite as bad. Um and they they have like they published a white paper a few months ago I'll put it in the show notes and it is like here's the three things we're doing that are make our training better and they were they were good. They they were doing it they had good results.

Paul Engin And I believe when they came out, everyone so it was OpenAI and a little bit of Gemini, and then Deep Seek came out and they found a way to make an efficient they they cut the I don't know if it was the training or the access or the mechanism in in the training in half almost.

Dave Ghidiu Well yeah, so what they did, two of the things that I thought were really innovative and other companies are starting to do this now, where they would not have everything trained in one model, they would have experts. So there might be a legal expert and a so the general one would invoke these other ones as needed. But the other thing is and so a token is kind of like a word, so when you type in a question each word is a token. And it generally kind of ruminates over each token and I think Deep Seek was like you know what, we're gonna ruminate over every two tokens. So they kind of cut that in half. And they found something like it went from 98% um effective to like 96%. Those numbers are made up but it was the amount of savings they had was just astronomical for a teeny tiny little hit in performance.

Paul Engin Yes. And um so I think that that started like a re-evaluation of everybody's like and so you I think you need that level of competition sometimes. Um and this is a is this a uh China based?

Dave Ghidiu Yeah, so much like TikTok I am a little concerned about maybe the national security. Like I don't know why we're not having conversations about Deep Seek because we're sharing a lot more stuff with Deep Seek than we might be with say TikTok.

Paul Engin Right.

Dave Ghidiu But the it it is allegedly very very very good. And I I agree with your assessment that they've really been pushing other companies to to rethink how they're doing it. So that's a good thing.

Paul Engin And this is where it's kind of you can actually run Deep Seek locally.

Dave Ghidiu Yes. You can.

Paul Engin And so but I'm in the same premise as you, you would definitely need to maybe run another chatbot to look at its code to see if there are things that you might not be aware of because

Dave Ghidiu There certainly are. So they've had researchers that looked at it and if they could determine what country you were in or what nationality or what culture, they would return and this is this was found in say programming. Like if you're using it to program, it would return less safe, less secure code based on what your relationship was with um China.

Paul Engin See, yeah. And and so that's not good.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah, and I figure that um I believe there's some connection with the government so they have to have some mechanism that the government can control. And so I wonder if there's code in there that

Paul Engin Yeah, I'm sure it's very censored. I'm sure if you looked at like Tiananmen Square and the dataset, it would be very minimal.

Dave Ghidiu Right, right. So um, but I heard it's very good, it's very fast, it is um again change the mindset of how other LLMs are are training or processing.

Paul Engin Yeah, which is good. That's a net positive. Although there has been some speculation that all that stuff was faked and they just they used distillation which is basically like taking the model from say ChatGPT and repackaging it. And I don't know if they ever were able to confirm that, but that was certainly one of the theories is that it was a distilled version of other companies.

Dave Ghidiu Interesting. Oh.

Paul Engin Interesting. And and it could be, it could be. Who knows.

Dave Ghidiu Um, so I think that one of the things that uh we really want you to take away from these outliers is that um if they work for you, then they're the perfect fit for you.

Paul Engin That's so good. We should get that on a t-shirt. We're going to start selling swag.

Dave Ghidiu Because I think that uh it's important to realize that if you live in the X world and Grok is what you like using, then that is perfect for you. If you are in a Microsoft environment and it's integrated exactly the way you want it to with no additional cost, then that's perfect for you. If you love Meta and you you like the way it creates assets and images, then that's great for you. And if you like the um more frontier models we talked about earlier, then then use those. I think that whatever tool is best for you and the situation you're you're you're doing, then that's what you should be using. I know mine switch all the time. So you know, if I'm gonna do something with video I go to Flow now. I don't use Sora at all. I use Gemini. If I'm doing code, it's probably going to be Claude or it's going to be ChatGPT, and right now it's Codex because that's the one I have.

Paul Engin That's the ChatGPT one. Yeah. So how about you? Any takeaways?

Dave Ghidiu I I agree 100% with what you said. I co-sign that uh unequivocally. I believe that whatever people find is best for them is best for them. I personally use Gemini as my daily driver when I need to do quick things or or things that don't require a lot of thought. But whenever I'm doing deep deep work, I'll use Claude. So that's for instructional design and coding is is usually where I'll lean. So I'll always have both of them open all day.

Paul Engin Yeah and I do feel there is a tone associated with these. So like I think Claude has um the the nice tone to when it when it writes things. Um, so uh since this is the last part of our series, I'm going to let you do your rankings, starting with your top if you had to pick one that you couldn't live without.

Dave Ghidiu Claude. Oh what no it would be Gemini. Gemini because I'm I'm so entrenched in the Google ecosystem with Google Docs and everything. Uh it would be Gemini and Claude is a close close close second. I could get away without Claude but I really love Claude. Uh and then ChatGPT, I'm almost ready to dump my subscription, uh and the rest of them I don't really use.

Paul Engin So you know as far I'm in the same boat, but I would use Google because they have such a plethora of of apps that that like you're saying is working together. Like Stitch was like its own thing and you can see how it's going to be integrated and um it's got Flow, it's got a lot of resources and things that I I need that Claude doesn't have. But right now it's it's Gemini and then it goes to ChatGPT, but I'm in your boat, I might be switching just to Claude because

Dave Ghidiu I want to revisit this in like six weeks and see where you are, if ChatGPT is still above Claude.

Paul Engin Yeah, well the only reason why it's above Claude is just because I keep hitting limits and so I have a feeling I've been using the more I use it the more I'm like I gotta go back to this because it produces I think it produces better code. I I had the same prompt on both in Claude and then I put it in Codex and it created a I just wanted a cool little web-based animation that was like uh neon borders and neon graphics, right? And uh the output was much more visually pleasing on Claude than it was in and it was more techn- it was weird to say but it was more technical and like it wasn't as visually pleasing in uh the Codex.

Dave Ghidiu And that's yeah, I same exact thing. I co-sign that too.

Paul Engin Yeah. So um I could see myself shifting and again, we this is what we're talking about, right? If whatever works for what you're you need or what you're doing.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah. I I might be a big Copilot fan the next time we talk.

Paul Engin There there you go. And I I still use Copilot. Copilot is a solid number four for me. But I don't use Meta much. I was using Meta for a chatbot which is easy to do in Meta. Okay. Um you could do like I could upload all the information um about a course and I could just it could create a like a custom GPT. Yeah, very fast. But now you could do that with with just about every platform so.

Dave Ghidiu Gemini does it, uh yeah. So.

Paul Engin All right, well that's all the time we have today. Uh my name is Paul Engin.

Dave Ghidiu And I'm Dave Ghidiu. If you enjoyed the conversation today please be sure to smash that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Paul Engin And share it with a friend or enemy.

Dave Ghidiu Oh. Or enemy? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Spread the love, man.

Paul Engin Let's be careful out there. Um and share it with a friend or colleague. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and thanks for looking through the immersive lens with us.

Dave Ghidiu This episode was engineered by Jeff Kidd and I think Hugh Laird.

Paul Engin Yes. I think it was Hugh and I hear Jeff in there now.

Dave Ghidiu Recorded at Finger Lakes Community College Podcast Studios located in beautiful Canandaigua, New York in the heart of the Finger Lakes region. Offering more than 55 degrees, certificates, micro-credentials, and workforce training programs.

Paul Engin Thank you to Public Relations and Communications, Marketing, and the FLX AI Hub.

Dave Ghidiu Eager to delve into passion, discover exciting and immersive opportunities at flcc.edu.

Paul Engin How many W's? Oh, see, I just took them out. I thought that That actually would work. That's a safe bet. That's a safe bet.

Dave Ghidiu Uh, and new to the offerings is our AI Integration Specialist micro-credential. We'll have to put that in the in the show notes here.

Paul Engin Along with the Vibe coding.

Dave Ghidiu Yeah. As part of our mission at FLCC, we are committed to making education accessible, innovative, and aligned with the needs of both learners and employers.

Paul Engin The views expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts, guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Finger Lakes Community College.

Dave Ghidiu Music by den from Pixabay.

Paul Engin This is The Immersive Lens.

Dave Ghidiu Wow. Okay. That's... man. It's getting worse.

Paul Engin All right. And that's a wrap.


full-width