• In a world buzzing with excitement, I find myself in an echoing silence. The Sony A7III, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, slips into the shadows, unnoticed. Why is nobody talking about this deal? It's as if the beauty of this camera is drowned out by the noise of indifference. Each click of the shutter feels like a longing for connection, yet here I stand, isolated in my thoughts, holding onto dreams that seem just out of reach. The whispers of opportunity fade, leaving behind a hollow ache. Why does no one see the value in this moment?

    #SonyA7III #Photography #Loneliness #UnseenBeauty #HeartfeltMoments
    In a world buzzing with excitement, I find myself in an echoing silence. The Sony A7III, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, slips into the shadows, unnoticed. Why is nobody talking about this deal? It's as if the beauty of this camera is drowned out by the noise of indifference. Each click of the shutter feels like a longing for connection, yet here I stand, isolated in my thoughts, holding onto dreams that seem just out of reach. The whispers of opportunity fade, leaving behind a hollow ache. Why does no one see the value in this moment? #SonyA7III #Photography #Loneliness #UnseenBeauty #HeartfeltMoments
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  • Hey everyone!

    Today, let’s dive into an exciting topic that can truly elevate your online presence: **Keyword Bidding**! Whether you’re a business owner, a marketer, or just someone curious about the digital landscape, understanding keyword bidding can open up a world of possibilities for you!

    So, what exactly is keyword bidding? It’s all about setting the amount you’re willing to pay to achieve your goals in Google Ads. Think of it as placing a bet on your future success! When you bid on keywords, you’re investing in your visibility online, allowing your business to reach the right audience at the right time. Isn’t that empowering?

    Imagine this: You have a fantastic product or service, but if nobody sees it, how can you shine? This is where keyword bidding comes into play! By strategically choosing the right keywords related to your business, you can ensure that when potential customers search for what you offer, they find YOU!

    Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to get you started on your keyword bidding journey:

    1. **Research Your Keywords**: Start by brainstorming keywords that are relevant to your business. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to discover popular search terms. The more specific, the better!

    2. **Set Your Budget**: Determine how much you’re willing to spend. Remember, this is an investment in your growth! Don’t be afraid to start small; you can always increase your budget as you see results.

    3. **Choose Your Bids**: Decide how much you want to bid for each keyword. This can vary based on competition and your goals. Don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors!

    4. **Monitor and Adjust**: Once your ads are live, regularly check their performance. Are certain keywords performing better than others? Adjust your bids accordingly to maximize your return on investment.

    5. **Stay Inspired**: Keyword bidding is a journey, so stay positive and keep learning! Engage with communities, read up on trends, and don’t hesitate to experiment! Your enthusiasm will fuel your success!

    Remember, every great achievement starts with a single step! Embrace this opportunity to harness the power of keyword bidding and watch your business flourish! You’ve got this! Let’s make those dreams a reality, one bid at a time!

    #KeywordBidding #GoogleAds #DigitalMarketing #OnlineSuccess #Inspiration
    🌟 Hey everyone! 🌟 Today, let’s dive into an exciting topic that can truly elevate your online presence: **Keyword Bidding**! 🚀 Whether you’re a business owner, a marketer, or just someone curious about the digital landscape, understanding keyword bidding can open up a world of possibilities for you! So, what exactly is keyword bidding? 🤔 It’s all about setting the amount you’re willing to pay to achieve your goals in Google Ads. Think of it as placing a bet on your future success! 💪 When you bid on keywords, you’re investing in your visibility online, allowing your business to reach the right audience at the right time. Isn’t that empowering? 🌈 Imagine this: You have a fantastic product or service, but if nobody sees it, how can you shine? 🌟 This is where keyword bidding comes into play! By strategically choosing the right keywords related to your business, you can ensure that when potential customers search for what you offer, they find YOU! 🎯 Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to get you started on your keyword bidding journey: 1. **Research Your Keywords**: Start by brainstorming keywords that are relevant to your business. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to discover popular search terms. The more specific, the better! 🔍 2. **Set Your Budget**: Determine how much you’re willing to spend. Remember, this is an investment in your growth! Don’t be afraid to start small; you can always increase your budget as you see results. 💰 3. **Choose Your Bids**: Decide how much you want to bid for each keyword. This can vary based on competition and your goals. Don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors! 👀 4. **Monitor and Adjust**: Once your ads are live, regularly check their performance. Are certain keywords performing better than others? Adjust your bids accordingly to maximize your return on investment. 📈 5. **Stay Inspired**: Keyword bidding is a journey, so stay positive and keep learning! Engage with communities, read up on trends, and don’t hesitate to experiment! Your enthusiasm will fuel your success! 🌺 Remember, every great achievement starts with a single step! 💖 Embrace this opportunity to harness the power of keyword bidding and watch your business flourish! 🌼 You’ve got this! Let’s make those dreams a reality, one bid at a time! 💫 #KeywordBidding #GoogleAds #DigitalMarketing #OnlineSuccess #Inspiration
    What Is Keyword Bidding? A Beginner’s Step-by-Step Guide
    Keyword bidding involves setting how much you’re willing to pay to reach a certain goal in Google Ads.
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  • data analysis, dashboards, data visualization, business decisions, analytics mistakes, ineffective dashboards, data solutions, performance metrics, business intelligence

    ## Introduction

    Are you one of those professionals who spends countless hours crafting a visually stunning dashboard, only to discover that nobody gives a damn about it? Welcome to the harsh reality of data analysis! It's shocking how many analysts fall into this trap, pouring their creativity and skill into something that ult...
    data analysis, dashboards, data visualization, business decisions, analytics mistakes, ineffective dashboards, data solutions, performance metrics, business intelligence ## Introduction Are you one of those professionals who spends countless hours crafting a visually stunning dashboard, only to discover that nobody gives a damn about it? Welcome to the harsh reality of data analysis! It's shocking how many analysts fall into this trap, pouring their creativity and skill into something that ult...
    Dashboard: The Mistake That Ruins Your Data Analysis
    data analysis, dashboards, data visualization, business decisions, analytics mistakes, ineffective dashboards, data solutions, performance metrics, business intelligence ## Introduction Are you one of those professionals who spends countless hours crafting a visually stunning dashboard, only to discover that nobody gives a damn about it? Welcome to the harsh reality of data analysis! It's...
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  • NOSIPHO MAKETO-VAN DEN BRAGT ALTERED HER CAREER PATH TO LAUNCH CHOCOLATE TRIBE

    By TREVOR HOGG

    Images courtesy of Chocolate Tribe.

    Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO, Chocolate Tribe

    After initially pursuing a career as an attorney, Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt discovered her true calling was to apply her legal knowledge in a more artistic endeavor with her husband, Rob Van den Bragt, who had forged a career as a visual effects supervisor. The couple co-founded Chocolate Tribe, the Johannesburg and Cape Town-based visual effects and animation studio that has done work for Netflix, BBC, Disney and Voltage Pictures.

    “It was following my passion and my passion finding me,” observes Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO of Chocolate Tribe and Founder of AVIJOZI. “I grew up in Soweto, South Africa, and we had this old-fashioned television. I was always fascinated by how those people got in there to perform and entertain us. Living in the townships, you become the funnel for your parents’ aspirations and dreams. My dad was a judge’s registrar, so he was writing all of the court cases coming up for a judge. My dad would come home and tell us stories of what happened in court. I found this enthralling, funny and sometimes painful because it was about people’s lives. I did law and to some extent still practice it. My legal career and entertainment media careers merged because I fell in love with the storytelling aspect of it all. There are those who say that lawyers are failed actors!”

    Chocolate Tribe hosts what has become the annual AVIJOZI festival with Netflix. AVIJOZI is a two-day, free-access event in Johannesburg focused on Animation/Film, Visual Effects and Interactive Technology. This year’s AVIJOZI is scheduled for September 13-14 in Johannesburg. Photo: Casting Director and Actor Spaces Founder Ayanda Sithebeand friends at AVIJOZI 2024.

    A personal ambition was to find a way to merge married life into a professional partnership. “I never thought that a lawyer and a creative would work together,” admits Maketo-van den Bragt. “However, Rob and I had this great love for watching films together and music; entertainment was the core fabric of our relationship. That was my first gentle schooling into the visual effects and animation content development space. Starting the company was due to both of us being out of work. I had quit my job without any sort of plan B. I actually incorporated Chocolate Tribe as a company without knowing what we would do with it. As time went on, there was a project that we were asked to come to do. The relationship didn’t work out, so Rob and I decided, ‘Okay, it seems like we can do this on our own.’ I’ve read many books about visual effects and animation, and I still do. I attend a lot of festivals. I am connected with a lot of the guys who work in different visual effects spaces because it is all about understanding how it works and, from a business side, how can we leverage all of that information?”

    Chocolate Tribe provided VFX and post-production for Checkers supermarket’s “Planet” ad promoting environmental sustainability. The Chocolate Tribe team pushed photorealism for the ad, creating three fully CG creatures: a polar bear, orangutan and sea turtle.

    With a population of 1.5 billion, there is no shortage of consumers and content creators in Africa. “Nollywood is great because it shows us that even with minimal resources, you can create a whole movement and ecosystem,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “Maybe the question around Nollywood is making sure that the caliber and quality of work is high end and speaks to a global audience. South Africa has the same dynamics. It’s a vibrant traditional film and animation industry that grows in leaps and bounds every year. More and more animation houses are being incorporated or started with CEOs or managing directors in their 20s. There’s also an eagerness to look for different stories which haven’t been told. Africa gives that opportunity to tell stories that ordinary people, for example, in America, have not heard or don’t know about. There’s a huge rise in animation, visual effects and content in general.”

    Rob van den Bragt served as Creative Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as Studio Executive for the “Surf Sangoma” episode of the Disney+ series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire.

    Rob van den Bragt, CCO, and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, CEO, Co-Founders of Chocolate Tribe, in an AVIJOZI planning meeting.

    Stella Gono, Software Developer, working on the Chocolate Tribe website.

    Family photo of the Maketos. Maketo-van de Bragt has two siblings.

    Film tax credits have contributed to The Woman King, Dredd, Safe House, Black Sails and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning shooting in South Africa. “People understand principal photography, but there is confusion about animation and visual effects,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Rebates pose a challenge because now you have to go above and beyond to explain what you are selling. It’s taken time for the government to realize this is a viable career.” The streamers have had a positive impact. “For the most part, Netflix localizes, and that’s been quite a big hit because it speaks to the demographics and local representation and uplifts talent within those geographical spaces. We did one of the shorts for Disney’s Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, and there was huge global excitement to that kind of anthology coming from Africa. We’ve worked on a number of collaborations with the U.K., and often that melding of different partners creates a fusion of universality. We need to tell authentic stories, and that authenticity will be dictated by the voices in the writing room.”

    AVIJOZI was established to support the development of local talent in animation, visual effects, film production and gaming. “AVIJOZI stands for Animation Visual Effects Interactive in JOZI,” Maketo-van den Bragt explains. “It is a conference as well as a festival. The conference part is where we have networking sessions, panel discussions and behind-the-scenes presentations to draw the curtain back and show what happens when people create avatars. We want to show the next generation that there is a way to do this magical craft. The festival part is people have film screenings and music as well. We’ve brought in gaming as an integral aspect, which attracts many young people because that’s something they do at an early age. Gaming has become the common sport. AVIJOVI is in its fourth year now. It started when I got irritated by people constantly complaining, ‘Nothing ever happens in Johannesburg in terms of animation and visual effects.’ Nobody wanted to do it. So, I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and four years later I have lots of gray hair!”

    Rob van den Bragt served as Animation Supervisor/Visual Effects Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as an Executive Producer on iNumber Number: Jozi Goldfor Netflix.Mentorship and internship programs have been established with various academic institutions, and while there are times when specific skills are being sought, like rigging, the field of view tends to be much wider. “What we are finding is that the people who have done other disciplines are much more vibrant,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Artists don’t always know how to communicate because it’s all in their heads. Sometimes, somebody with a different background can articulate that vision a bit better because they have those other skills. We also find with those who have gone to art school that the range within their artistry and craftsmanship has become a ‘thing.’ When you have mentally traveled where you have done other things, it allows you to be a more well-rounded artist because you can pull references from different walks of life and engage with different topics without being constrained to one thing. We look for people with a plethora of skills and diverse backgrounds. It’s a lot richer as a Chocolate Tribe. There are multiple flavors.”

    South African director/producer/cinematographer and drone cinemtography specialist FC Hamman, Founder of FC Hamman Films, at AVIJOZI 2024.

    There is a particular driving force when it comes to mentoring. “I want to be the mentor I hoped for,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “I have silent mentors in that we didn’t formalize the relationship, but I knew they were my mentors because every time I would encounter an issue, I would be able to call them. One of the people who not only mentored but pushed me into different spaces is Jinko Gotoh, who is part of Women in Animation. She brought me into Women in Animation, and I had never mentored anybody. Here I was, sitting with six women who wanted to know how I was able to build up Chocolate Tribe. I didn’t know how to structure a presentation to tell them about the journey because I had been so focused on the journey. It’s a sense of grit and feeling that I cannot fail because I have a whole community that believes in me. Even when I felt my shoulders sagging, they would be there to say, ‘We need this. Keep it moving.’ This isn’t just about me. I have a whole stream of people who want this to work.”

    Netflix VFX Manager Ben Perry, who oversees Netflix’s VFX strategy across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, at AVIJOZI 2024. Netflix was a partner in AVIJOZI with Chocolate Tribe for three years.

    Zama Mfusi, Founder of IndiLang, and Isabelle Rorke, CEO of Dreamforge Creative and Deputy Chair of Animation SA, at AVIJOZI 2024.

    Numerous unknown factors had to be accounted for, which made predicting how the journey would unfold extremely difficult. “What it looks like and what I expected it to be, you don’t have the full sense of what it would lead to in this situation,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “I can tell you that there have been moments of absolute joy where I was so excited we got this project or won that award. There are other moments where you feel completely lost and ask yourself, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ The journey is to have the highs, lows and moments of confusion. I go through it and accept that not every day will be an award-winning day. For the most part, I love this journey. I wanted to be somewhere where there was a purpose. What has been a big highlight is when I’m signing a contract for new employees who are excited about being part of Chocolate Tribe. Also, when you get a new project and it’s exciting, especially from a service or visual effects perspective, we’re constantly looking for that dragon or big creature. It’s about being mesmerizing, epic and awesome.”

    Maketo-van den Bragt has two major career-defining ambitions. “Fostering the next generation of talent and making sure that they are ready to create these amazing stories properly – that is my life work, and relating the African narrative to let the world see the human aspect of who we are because for the longest time we’ve been written out of the stories and narratives.”
    #nosipho #maketovan #den #bragt #altered
    NOSIPHO MAKETO-VAN DEN BRAGT ALTERED HER CAREER PATH TO LAUNCH CHOCOLATE TRIBE
    By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of Chocolate Tribe. Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO, Chocolate Tribe After initially pursuing a career as an attorney, Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt discovered her true calling was to apply her legal knowledge in a more artistic endeavor with her husband, Rob Van den Bragt, who had forged a career as a visual effects supervisor. The couple co-founded Chocolate Tribe, the Johannesburg and Cape Town-based visual effects and animation studio that has done work for Netflix, BBC, Disney and Voltage Pictures. “It was following my passion and my passion finding me,” observes Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO of Chocolate Tribe and Founder of AVIJOZI. “I grew up in Soweto, South Africa, and we had this old-fashioned television. I was always fascinated by how those people got in there to perform and entertain us. Living in the townships, you become the funnel for your parents’ aspirations and dreams. My dad was a judge’s registrar, so he was writing all of the court cases coming up for a judge. My dad would come home and tell us stories of what happened in court. I found this enthralling, funny and sometimes painful because it was about people’s lives. I did law and to some extent still practice it. My legal career and entertainment media careers merged because I fell in love with the storytelling aspect of it all. There are those who say that lawyers are failed actors!” Chocolate Tribe hosts what has become the annual AVIJOZI festival with Netflix. AVIJOZI is a two-day, free-access event in Johannesburg focused on Animation/Film, Visual Effects and Interactive Technology. This year’s AVIJOZI is scheduled for September 13-14 in Johannesburg. Photo: Casting Director and Actor Spaces Founder Ayanda Sithebeand friends at AVIJOZI 2024. A personal ambition was to find a way to merge married life into a professional partnership. “I never thought that a lawyer and a creative would work together,” admits Maketo-van den Bragt. “However, Rob and I had this great love for watching films together and music; entertainment was the core fabric of our relationship. That was my first gentle schooling into the visual effects and animation content development space. Starting the company was due to both of us being out of work. I had quit my job without any sort of plan B. I actually incorporated Chocolate Tribe as a company without knowing what we would do with it. As time went on, there was a project that we were asked to come to do. The relationship didn’t work out, so Rob and I decided, ‘Okay, it seems like we can do this on our own.’ I’ve read many books about visual effects and animation, and I still do. I attend a lot of festivals. I am connected with a lot of the guys who work in different visual effects spaces because it is all about understanding how it works and, from a business side, how can we leverage all of that information?” Chocolate Tribe provided VFX and post-production for Checkers supermarket’s “Planet” ad promoting environmental sustainability. The Chocolate Tribe team pushed photorealism for the ad, creating three fully CG creatures: a polar bear, orangutan and sea turtle. With a population of 1.5 billion, there is no shortage of consumers and content creators in Africa. “Nollywood is great because it shows us that even with minimal resources, you can create a whole movement and ecosystem,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “Maybe the question around Nollywood is making sure that the caliber and quality of work is high end and speaks to a global audience. South Africa has the same dynamics. It’s a vibrant traditional film and animation industry that grows in leaps and bounds every year. More and more animation houses are being incorporated or started with CEOs or managing directors in their 20s. There’s also an eagerness to look for different stories which haven’t been told. Africa gives that opportunity to tell stories that ordinary people, for example, in America, have not heard or don’t know about. There’s a huge rise in animation, visual effects and content in general.” Rob van den Bragt served as Creative Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as Studio Executive for the “Surf Sangoma” episode of the Disney+ series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire. Rob van den Bragt, CCO, and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, CEO, Co-Founders of Chocolate Tribe, in an AVIJOZI planning meeting. Stella Gono, Software Developer, working on the Chocolate Tribe website. Family photo of the Maketos. Maketo-van de Bragt has two siblings. Film tax credits have contributed to The Woman King, Dredd, Safe House, Black Sails and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning shooting in South Africa. “People understand principal photography, but there is confusion about animation and visual effects,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Rebates pose a challenge because now you have to go above and beyond to explain what you are selling. It’s taken time for the government to realize this is a viable career.” The streamers have had a positive impact. “For the most part, Netflix localizes, and that’s been quite a big hit because it speaks to the demographics and local representation and uplifts talent within those geographical spaces. We did one of the shorts for Disney’s Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, and there was huge global excitement to that kind of anthology coming from Africa. We’ve worked on a number of collaborations with the U.K., and often that melding of different partners creates a fusion of universality. We need to tell authentic stories, and that authenticity will be dictated by the voices in the writing room.” AVIJOZI was established to support the development of local talent in animation, visual effects, film production and gaming. “AVIJOZI stands for Animation Visual Effects Interactive in JOZI,” Maketo-van den Bragt explains. “It is a conference as well as a festival. The conference part is where we have networking sessions, panel discussions and behind-the-scenes presentations to draw the curtain back and show what happens when people create avatars. We want to show the next generation that there is a way to do this magical craft. The festival part is people have film screenings and music as well. We’ve brought in gaming as an integral aspect, which attracts many young people because that’s something they do at an early age. Gaming has become the common sport. AVIJOVI is in its fourth year now. It started when I got irritated by people constantly complaining, ‘Nothing ever happens in Johannesburg in terms of animation and visual effects.’ Nobody wanted to do it. So, I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and four years later I have lots of gray hair!” Rob van den Bragt served as Animation Supervisor/Visual Effects Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as an Executive Producer on iNumber Number: Jozi Goldfor Netflix.Mentorship and internship programs have been established with various academic institutions, and while there are times when specific skills are being sought, like rigging, the field of view tends to be much wider. “What we are finding is that the people who have done other disciplines are much more vibrant,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Artists don’t always know how to communicate because it’s all in their heads. Sometimes, somebody with a different background can articulate that vision a bit better because they have those other skills. We also find with those who have gone to art school that the range within their artistry and craftsmanship has become a ‘thing.’ When you have mentally traveled where you have done other things, it allows you to be a more well-rounded artist because you can pull references from different walks of life and engage with different topics without being constrained to one thing. We look for people with a plethora of skills and diverse backgrounds. It’s a lot richer as a Chocolate Tribe. There are multiple flavors.” South African director/producer/cinematographer and drone cinemtography specialist FC Hamman, Founder of FC Hamman Films, at AVIJOZI 2024. There is a particular driving force when it comes to mentoring. “I want to be the mentor I hoped for,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “I have silent mentors in that we didn’t formalize the relationship, but I knew they were my mentors because every time I would encounter an issue, I would be able to call them. One of the people who not only mentored but pushed me into different spaces is Jinko Gotoh, who is part of Women in Animation. She brought me into Women in Animation, and I had never mentored anybody. Here I was, sitting with six women who wanted to know how I was able to build up Chocolate Tribe. I didn’t know how to structure a presentation to tell them about the journey because I had been so focused on the journey. It’s a sense of grit and feeling that I cannot fail because I have a whole community that believes in me. Even when I felt my shoulders sagging, they would be there to say, ‘We need this. Keep it moving.’ This isn’t just about me. I have a whole stream of people who want this to work.” Netflix VFX Manager Ben Perry, who oversees Netflix’s VFX strategy across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, at AVIJOZI 2024. Netflix was a partner in AVIJOZI with Chocolate Tribe for three years. Zama Mfusi, Founder of IndiLang, and Isabelle Rorke, CEO of Dreamforge Creative and Deputy Chair of Animation SA, at AVIJOZI 2024. Numerous unknown factors had to be accounted for, which made predicting how the journey would unfold extremely difficult. “What it looks like and what I expected it to be, you don’t have the full sense of what it would lead to in this situation,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “I can tell you that there have been moments of absolute joy where I was so excited we got this project or won that award. There are other moments where you feel completely lost and ask yourself, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ The journey is to have the highs, lows and moments of confusion. I go through it and accept that not every day will be an award-winning day. For the most part, I love this journey. I wanted to be somewhere where there was a purpose. What has been a big highlight is when I’m signing a contract for new employees who are excited about being part of Chocolate Tribe. Also, when you get a new project and it’s exciting, especially from a service or visual effects perspective, we’re constantly looking for that dragon or big creature. It’s about being mesmerizing, epic and awesome.” Maketo-van den Bragt has two major career-defining ambitions. “Fostering the next generation of talent and making sure that they are ready to create these amazing stories properly – that is my life work, and relating the African narrative to let the world see the human aspect of who we are because for the longest time we’ve been written out of the stories and narratives.” #nosipho #maketovan #den #bragt #altered
    WWW.VFXVOICE.COM
    NOSIPHO MAKETO-VAN DEN BRAGT ALTERED HER CAREER PATH TO LAUNCH CHOCOLATE TRIBE
    By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of Chocolate Tribe. Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO, Chocolate Tribe After initially pursuing a career as an attorney, Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt discovered her true calling was to apply her legal knowledge in a more artistic endeavor with her husband, Rob Van den Bragt, who had forged a career as a visual effects supervisor. The couple co-founded Chocolate Tribe, the Johannesburg and Cape Town-based visual effects and animation studio that has done work for Netflix, BBC, Disney and Voltage Pictures. “It was following my passion and my passion finding me,” observes Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO of Chocolate Tribe and Founder of AVIJOZI. “I grew up in Soweto, South Africa, and we had this old-fashioned television. I was always fascinated by how those people got in there to perform and entertain us. Living in the townships, you become the funnel for your parents’ aspirations and dreams. My dad was a judge’s registrar, so he was writing all of the court cases coming up for a judge. My dad would come home and tell us stories of what happened in court. I found this enthralling, funny and sometimes painful because it was about people’s lives. I did law and to some extent still practice it. My legal career and entertainment media careers merged because I fell in love with the storytelling aspect of it all. There are those who say that lawyers are failed actors!” Chocolate Tribe hosts what has become the annual AVIJOZI festival with Netflix. AVIJOZI is a two-day, free-access event in Johannesburg focused on Animation/Film, Visual Effects and Interactive Technology. This year’s AVIJOZI is scheduled for September 13-14 in Johannesburg. Photo: Casting Director and Actor Spaces Founder Ayanda Sithebe (center in black T-shirt) and friends at AVIJOZI 2024. A personal ambition was to find a way to merge married life into a professional partnership. “I never thought that a lawyer and a creative would work together,” admits Maketo-van den Bragt. “However, Rob and I had this great love for watching films together and music; entertainment was the core fabric of our relationship. That was my first gentle schooling into the visual effects and animation content development space. Starting the company was due to both of us being out of work. I had quit my job without any sort of plan B. I actually incorporated Chocolate Tribe as a company without knowing what we would do with it. As time went on, there was a project that we were asked to come to do. The relationship didn’t work out, so Rob and I decided, ‘Okay, it seems like we can do this on our own.’ I’ve read many books about visual effects and animation, and I still do. I attend a lot of festivals. I am connected with a lot of the guys who work in different visual effects spaces because it is all about understanding how it works and, from a business side, how can we leverage all of that information?” Chocolate Tribe provided VFX and post-production for Checkers supermarket’s “Planet” ad promoting environmental sustainability. The Chocolate Tribe team pushed photorealism for the ad, creating three fully CG creatures: a polar bear, orangutan and sea turtle. With a population of 1.5 billion, there is no shortage of consumers and content creators in Africa. “Nollywood is great because it shows us that even with minimal resources, you can create a whole movement and ecosystem,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “Maybe the question around Nollywood is making sure that the caliber and quality of work is high end and speaks to a global audience. South Africa has the same dynamics. It’s a vibrant traditional film and animation industry that grows in leaps and bounds every year. More and more animation houses are being incorporated or started with CEOs or managing directors in their 20s. There’s also an eagerness to look for different stories which haven’t been told. Africa gives that opportunity to tell stories that ordinary people, for example, in America, have not heard or don’t know about. There’s a huge rise in animation, visual effects and content in general.” Rob van den Bragt served as Creative Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as Studio Executive for the “Surf Sangoma” episode of the Disney+ series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire. Rob van den Bragt, CCO, and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, CEO, Co-Founders of Chocolate Tribe, in an AVIJOZI planning meeting. Stella Gono, Software Developer, working on the Chocolate Tribe website. Family photo of the Maketos. Maketo-van de Bragt has two siblings. Film tax credits have contributed to The Woman King, Dredd, Safe House, Black Sails and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning shooting in South Africa. “People understand principal photography, but there is confusion about animation and visual effects,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Rebates pose a challenge because now you have to go above and beyond to explain what you are selling. It’s taken time for the government to realize this is a viable career.” The streamers have had a positive impact. “For the most part, Netflix localizes, and that’s been quite a big hit because it speaks to the demographics and local representation and uplifts talent within those geographical spaces. We did one of the shorts for Disney’s Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, and there was huge global excitement to that kind of anthology coming from Africa. We’ve worked on a number of collaborations with the U.K., and often that melding of different partners creates a fusion of universality. We need to tell authentic stories, and that authenticity will be dictated by the voices in the writing room.” AVIJOZI was established to support the development of local talent in animation, visual effects, film production and gaming. “AVIJOZI stands for Animation Visual Effects Interactive in JOZI [nickname for Johannesburg],” Maketo-van den Bragt explains. “It is a conference as well as a festival. The conference part is where we have networking sessions, panel discussions and behind-the-scenes presentations to draw the curtain back and show what happens when people create avatars. We want to show the next generation that there is a way to do this magical craft. The festival part is people have film screenings and music as well. We’ve brought in gaming as an integral aspect, which attracts many young people because that’s something they do at an early age. Gaming has become the common sport. AVIJOVI is in its fourth year now. It started when I got irritated by people constantly complaining, ‘Nothing ever happens in Johannesburg in terms of animation and visual effects.’ Nobody wanted to do it. So, I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and four years later I have lots of gray hair!” Rob van den Bragt served as Animation Supervisor/Visual Effects Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as an Executive Producer on iNumber Number: Jozi Gold (2023) for Netflix. (Image courtesy of Chocolate Tribe and Netflix) Mentorship and internship programs have been established with various academic institutions, and while there are times when specific skills are being sought, like rigging, the field of view tends to be much wider. “What we are finding is that the people who have done other disciplines are much more vibrant,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Artists don’t always know how to communicate because it’s all in their heads. Sometimes, somebody with a different background can articulate that vision a bit better because they have those other skills. We also find with those who have gone to art school that the range within their artistry and craftsmanship has become a ‘thing.’ When you have mentally traveled where you have done other things, it allows you to be a more well-rounded artist because you can pull references from different walks of life and engage with different topics without being constrained to one thing. We look for people with a plethora of skills and diverse backgrounds. It’s a lot richer as a Chocolate Tribe. There are multiple flavors.” South African director/producer/cinematographer and drone cinemtography specialist FC Hamman, Founder of FC Hamman Films, at AVIJOZI 2024. There is a particular driving force when it comes to mentoring. “I want to be the mentor I hoped for,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “I have silent mentors in that we didn’t formalize the relationship, but I knew they were my mentors because every time I would encounter an issue, I would be able to call them. One of the people who not only mentored but pushed me into different spaces is Jinko Gotoh, who is part of Women in Animation. She brought me into Women in Animation, and I had never mentored anybody. Here I was, sitting with six women who wanted to know how I was able to build up Chocolate Tribe. I didn’t know how to structure a presentation to tell them about the journey because I had been so focused on the journey. It’s a sense of grit and feeling that I cannot fail because I have a whole community that believes in me. Even when I felt my shoulders sagging, they would be there to say, ‘We need this. Keep it moving.’ This isn’t just about me. I have a whole stream of people who want this to work.” Netflix VFX Manager Ben Perry, who oversees Netflix’s VFX strategy across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, at AVIJOZI 2024. Netflix was a partner in AVIJOZI with Chocolate Tribe for three years. Zama Mfusi, Founder of IndiLang, and Isabelle Rorke, CEO of Dreamforge Creative and Deputy Chair of Animation SA, at AVIJOZI 2024. Numerous unknown factors had to be accounted for, which made predicting how the journey would unfold extremely difficult. “What it looks like and what I expected it to be, you don’t have the full sense of what it would lead to in this situation,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “I can tell you that there have been moments of absolute joy where I was so excited we got this project or won that award. There are other moments where you feel completely lost and ask yourself, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ The journey is to have the highs, lows and moments of confusion. I go through it and accept that not every day will be an award-winning day. For the most part, I love this journey. I wanted to be somewhere where there was a purpose. What has been a big highlight is when I’m signing a contract for new employees who are excited about being part of Chocolate Tribe. Also, when you get a new project and it’s exciting, especially from a service or visual effects perspective, we’re constantly looking for that dragon or big creature. It’s about being mesmerizing, epic and awesome.” Maketo-van den Bragt has two major career-defining ambitions. “Fostering the next generation of talent and making sure that they are ready to create these amazing stories properly – that is my life work, and relating the African narrative to let the world see the human aspect of who we are because for the longest time we’ve been written out of the stories and narratives.”
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  • How AI is reshaping the future of healthcare and medical research

    Transcript       
    PETER LEE: “In ‘The Little Black Bag,’ a classic science fiction story, a high-tech doctor’s kit of the future is accidentally transported back to the 1950s, into the shaky hands of a washed-up, alcoholic doctor. The ultimate medical tool, it redeems the doctor wielding it, allowing him to practice gratifyingly heroic medicine. … The tale ends badly for the doctor and his treacherous assistant, but it offered a picture of how advanced technology could transform medicine—powerful when it was written nearly 75 years ago and still so today. What would be the Al equivalent of that little black bag? At this moment when new capabilities are emerging, how do we imagine them into medicine?”          
    This is The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited. I’m your host, Peter Lee.   
    Shortly after OpenAI’s GPT-4 was publicly released, Carey Goldberg, Dr. Zak Kohane, and I published The AI Revolution in Medicine to help educate the world of healthcare and medical research about the transformative impact this new generative AI technology could have. But because we wrote the book when GPT-4 was still a secret, we had to speculate. Now, two years later, what did we get right, and what did we get wrong?    
    In this series, we’ll talk to clinicians, patients, hospital administrators, and others to understand the reality of AI in the field and where we go from here.  The book passage I read at the top is from “Chapter 10: The Big Black Bag.” 
    In imagining AI in medicine, Carey, Zak, and I included in our book two fictional accounts. In the first, a medical resident consults GPT-4 on her personal phone as the patient in front of her crashes. Within seconds, it offers an alternate response based on recent literature. In the second account, a 90-year-old woman with several chronic conditions is living independently and receiving near-constant medical support from an AI aide.   
    In our conversations with the guests we’ve spoken to so far, we’ve caught a glimpse of these predicted futures, seeing how clinicians and patients are actually using AI today and how developers are leveraging the technology in the healthcare products and services they’re creating. In fact, that first fictional account isn’t so fictional after all, as most of the doctors in the real world actually appear to be using AI at least occasionally—and sometimes much more than occasionally—to help in their daily clinical work. And as for the second fictional account, which is more of a science fiction account, it seems we are indeed on the verge of a new way of delivering and receiving healthcare, though the future is still very much open. 
    As we continue to examine the current state of AI in healthcare and its potential to transform the field, I’m pleased to welcome Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck.  
    Bill may be best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, having created the company with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975. He’s now the founder of Breakthrough Energy, which aims to advance clean energy innovation, and TerraPower, a company developing groundbreaking nuclear energy and science technologies. He also chairs the world’s largest philanthropic organization, the Gates Foundation, and focuses on solving a variety of health challenges around the globe and here at home. 
    Sébastien is a research lead at OpenAI. He was previously a distinguished scientist, vice president of AI, and a colleague of mine here at Microsoft, where his work included spearheading the development of the family of small language models known as Phi. While at Microsoft, he also coauthored the discussion-provoking 2023 paper “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” which presented the results of early experiments with GPT-4 conducted by a small team from Microsoft Research.     
    Here’s my conversation with Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck. 
    LEE: Bill, welcome. 
    BILL GATES: Thank you. 
    LEE: Seb … 
    SÉBASTIEN BUBECK: Yeah. Hi, hi, Peter. Nice to be here. 
    LEE: You know, one of the things that I’ve been doing just to get the conversation warmed up is to talk about origin stories, and what I mean about origin stories is, you know, what was the first contact that you had with large language models or the concept of generative AI that convinced you or made you think that something really important was happening? 
    And so, Bill, I think I’ve heard the story about, you know, the time when the OpenAI folks—Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and others—showed you something, but could we hear from you what those early encounters were like and what was going through your mind?  
    GATES: Well, I’d been visiting OpenAI soon after it was created to see things like GPT-2 and to see the little arm they had that was trying to match human manipulation and, you know, looking at their games like Dota that they were trying to get as good as human play. And honestly, I didn’t think the language model stuff they were doing, even when they got to GPT-3, would show the ability to learn, you know, in the same sense that a human reads a biology book and is able to take that knowledge and access it not only to pass a test but also to create new medicines. 
    And so my challenge to them was that if their LLM could get a five on the advanced placement biology test, then I would say, OK, it took biologic knowledge and encoded it in an accessible way and that I didn’t expect them to do that very quickly but it would be profound.  
    And it was only about six months after I challenged them to do that, that an early version of GPT-4 they brought up to a dinner at my house, and in fact, it answered most of the questions that night very well. The one it got totally wrong, we were … because it was so good, we kept thinking, Oh, we must be wrong. It turned out it was a math weaknessthat, you know, we later understood that that was an area of, weirdly, of incredible weakness of those early models. But, you know, that was when I realized, OK, the age of cheap intelligence was at its beginning. 
    LEE: Yeah. So I guess it seems like you had something similar to me in that my first encounters, I actually harbored some skepticism. Is it fair to say you were skeptical before that? 
    GATES: Well, the idea that we’ve figured out how to encode and access knowledge in this very deep sense without even understanding the nature of the encoding, … 
    LEE: Right.  
    GATES: … that is a bit weird.  
    LEE: Yeah. 
    GATES: We have an algorithm that creates the computation, but even say, OK, where is the president’s birthday stored in there? Where is this fact stored in there? The fact that even now when we’re playing around, getting a little bit more sense of it, it’s opaque to us what the semantic encoding is, it’s, kind of, amazing to me. I thought the invention of knowledge storage would be an explicit way of encoding knowledge, not an implicit statistical training. 
    LEE: Yeah, yeah. All right. So, Seb, you know, on this same topic, you know, I got—as we say at Microsoft—I got pulled into the tent. 
    BUBECK: Yes.  
    LEE: Because this was a very secret project. And then, um, I had the opportunity to select a small number of researchers in MSRto join and start investigating this thing seriously. And the first person I pulled in was you. 
    BUBECK: Yeah. 
    LEE: And so what were your first encounters? Because I actually don’t remember what happened then. 
    BUBECK: Oh, I remember it very well.My first encounter with GPT-4 was in a meeting with the two of you, actually. But my kind of first contact, the first moment where I realized that something was happening with generative AI, was before that. And I agree with Bill that I also wasn’t too impressed by GPT-3. 
    I though that it was kind of, you know, very naturally mimicking the web, sort of parroting what was written there in a nice way. Still in a way which seemed very impressive. But it wasn’t really intelligent in any way. But shortly after GPT-3, there was a model before GPT-4 that really shocked me, and this was the first image generation model, DALL-E 1. 
    So that was in 2021. And I will forever remember the press release of OpenAI where they had this prompt of an avocado chair and then you had this image of the avocado chair.And what really shocked me is that clearly the model kind of “understood” what is a chair, what is an avocado, and was able to merge those concepts. 
    So this was really, to me, the first moment where I saw some understanding in those models.  
    LEE: So this was, just to get the timing right, that was before I pulled you into the tent. 
    BUBECK: That was before. That was like a year before. 
    LEE: Right.  
    BUBECK: And now I will tell you how, you know, we went from that moment to the meeting with the two of you and GPT-4. 
    So once I saw this kind of understanding, I thought, OK, fine. It understands concept, but it’s still not able to reason. It cannot—as, you know, Bill was saying—it cannot learn from your document. It cannot reason.  
    So I set out to try to prove that. You know, this is what I was in the business of at the time, trying to prove things in mathematics. So I was trying to prove that basically autoregressive transformers could never reason. So I was trying to prove this. And after a year of work, I had something reasonable to show. And so I had the meeting with the two of you, and I had this example where I wanted to say, there is no way that an LLM is going to be able to do x. 
    And then as soon as I … I don’t know if you remember, Bill. But as soon as I said that, you said, oh, but wait a second. I had, you know, the OpenAI crew at my house recently, and they showed me a new model. Why don’t we ask this new model this question?  
    LEE: Yeah.
    BUBECK: And we did, and it solved it on the spot. And that really, honestly, just changed my life. Like, you know, I had been working for a year trying to say that this was impossible. And just right there, it was shown to be possible.  
    LEE:One of the very first things I got interested in—because I was really thinking a lot about healthcare—was healthcare and medicine. 
    And I don’t know if the two of you remember, but I ended up doing a lot of tests. I ran through, you know, step one and step two of the US Medical Licensing Exam. Did a whole bunch of other things. I wrote this big report. It was, you know, I can’t remember … a couple hundred pages.  
    And I needed to share this with someone. I didn’t … there weren’t too many people I could share it with. So I sent, I think, a copy to you, Bill. Sent a copy to you, Seb.  
    I hardly slept for about a week putting that report together. And, yeah, and I kept working on it. But I was far from alone. I think everyone who was in the tent, so to speak, in those early days was going through something pretty similar. All right. So I think … of course, a lot of what I put in the report also ended up being examples that made it into the book. 
    But the main purpose of this conversation isn’t to reminisce aboutor indulge in those reminiscences but to talk about what’s happening in healthcare and medicine. And, you know, as I said, we wrote this book. We did it very, very quickly. Seb, you helped. Bill, you know, you provided a review and some endorsements. 
    But, you know, honestly, we didn’t know what we were talking about because no one had access to this thing. And so we just made a bunch of guesses. So really, the whole thing I wanted to probe with the two of you is, now with two years of experience out in the world, what, you know, what do we think is happening today? 
    You know, is AI actually having an impact, positive or negative, on healthcare and medicine? And what do we now think is going to happen in the next two years, five years, or 10 years? And so I realize it’s a little bit too abstract to just ask it that way. So let me just try to narrow the discussion and guide us a little bit.  
    Um, the kind of administrative and clerical work, paperwork, around healthcare—and we made a lot of guesses about that—that appears to be going well, but, you know, Bill, I know we’ve discussed that sometimes that you think there ought to be a lot more going on. Do you have a viewpoint on how AI is actually finding its way into reducing paperwork? 
    GATES: Well, I’m stunned … I don’t think there should be a patient-doctor meeting where the AI is not sitting in and both transcribing, offering to help with the paperwork, and even making suggestions, although the doctor will be the one, you know, who makes the final decision about the diagnosis and whatever prescription gets done.  
    It’s so helpful. You know, when that patient goes home and their, you know, son who wants to understand what happened has some questions, that AI should be available to continue that conversation. And the way you can improve that experience and streamline things and, you know, involve the people who advise you. I don’t understand why that’s not more adopted, because there you still have the human in the loop making that final decision. 
    But even for, like, follow-up calls to make sure the patient did things, to understand if they have concerns and knowing when to escalate back to the doctor, the benefit is incredible. And, you know, that thing is ready for prime time. That paradigm is ready for prime time, in my view. 
    LEE: Yeah, there are some good products, but it seems like the number one use right now—and we kind of got this from some of the previous guests in previous episodes—is the use of AI just to respond to emails from patients.Does that make sense to you? 
    BUBECK: Yeah. So maybe I want to second what Bill was saying but maybe take a step back first. You know, two years ago, like, the concept of clinical scribes, which is one of the things that we’re talking about right now, it would have sounded, in fact, it sounded two years ago, borderline dangerous. Because everybody was worried about hallucinations. What happened if you have this AI listening in and then it transcribes, you know, something wrong? 
    Now, two years later, I think it’s mostly working. And in fact, it is not yet, you know, fully adopted. You’re right. But it is in production. It is used, you know, in many, many places. So this rate of progress is astounding because it wasn’t obvious that we would be able to overcome those obstacles of hallucination. It’s not to say that hallucinations are fully solved. In the case of the closed system, they are.  
    Now, I think more generally what’s going on in the background is that there is something that we, that certainly I, underestimated, which is this management overhead. So I think the reason why this is not adopted everywhere is really a training and teaching aspect. People need to be taught, like, those systems, how to interact with them. 
    And one example that I really like, a study that recently appeared where they tried to use ChatGPT for diagnosis and they were comparing doctors without and with ChatGPT. And the amazing thing … so this was a set of cases where the accuracy of the doctors alone was around 75%. ChatGPT alone was 90%. So that’s already kind of mind blowing. But then the kicker is that doctors with ChatGPT was 80%.  
    Intelligence alone is not enough. It’s also how it’s presented, how you interact with it. And ChatGPT, it’s an amazing tool. Obviously, I absolutely love it. But it’s not … you don’t want a doctor to have to type in, you know, prompts and use it that way. 
    It should be, as Bill was saying, kind of running continuously in the background, sending you notifications. And you have to be really careful of the rate at which those notifications are being sent. Because if they are too frequent, then the doctor will learn to ignore them. So you have to … all of those things matter, in fact, at least as much as the level of intelligence of the machine. 
    LEE: One of the things I think about, Bill, in that scenario that you described, doctors do some thinking about the patient when they write the note. So, you know, I’m always a little uncertain whether it’s actually … you know, you wouldn’t necessarily want to fully automate this, I don’t think. Or at least there needs to be some prompt to the doctor to make sure that the doctor puts some thought into what happened in the encounter with the patient. Does that make sense to you at all? 
    GATES: At this stage, you know, I’d still put the onus on the doctor to write the conclusions and the summary and not delegate that. 
    The tradeoffs you make a little bit are somewhat dependent on the situation you’re in. If you’re in Africa,
    So, yes, the doctor’s still going to have to do a lot of work, but just the quality of letting the patient and the people around them interact and ask questions and have things explained, that alone is such a quality improvement. It’s mind blowing.  
    LEE: So since you mentioned, you know, Africa—and, of course, this touches on the mission and some of the priorities of the Gates Foundation and this idea of democratization of access to expert medical care—what’s the most interesting stuff going on right now? Are there people and organizations or technologies that are impressing you or that you’re tracking? 
    GATES: Yeah. So the Gates Foundation has given out a lot of grants to people in Africa doing education, agriculture but more healthcare examples than anything. And the way these things start off, they often start out either being patient-centric in a narrow situation, like, OK, I’m a pregnant woman; talk to me. Or, I have infectious disease symptoms; talk to me. Or they’re connected to a health worker where they’re helping that worker get their job done. And we have lots of pilots out, you know, in both of those cases.  
    The dream would be eventually to have the thing the patient consults be so broad that it’s like having a doctor available who understands the local things.  
    LEE: Right.  
    GATES: We’re not there yet. But over the next two or three years, you know, particularly given the worsening financial constraints against African health systems, where the withdrawal of money has been dramatic, you know, figuring out how to take this—what I sometimes call “free intelligence”—and build a quality health system around that, we will have to be more radical in low-income countries than any rich country is ever going to be.  
    LEE: Also, there’s maybe a different regulatory environment, so some of those things maybe are easier? Because right now, I think the world hasn’t figured out how to and whether to regulate, let’s say, an AI that might give a medical diagnosis or write a prescription for a medication. 
    BUBECK: Yeah. I think one issue with this, and it’s also slowing down the deployment of AI in healthcare more generally, is a lack of proper benchmark. Because, you know, you were mentioning the USMLE, for example. That’s a great test to test human beings and their knowledge of healthcare and medicine. But it’s not a great test to give to an AI. 
    It’s not asking the right questions. So finding what are the right questions to test whether an AI system is ready to give diagnosis in a constrained setting, that’s a very, very important direction, which to my surprise, is not yet accelerating at the rate that I was hoping for. 
    LEE: OK, so that gives me an excuse to get more now into the core AI tech because something I’ve discussed with both of you is this issue of what are the right tests. And you both know the very first test I give to any new spin of an LLM is I present a patient, the results—a mythical patient—the results of my physical exam, my mythical physical exam. Maybe some results of some initial labs. And then I present or propose a differential diagnosis. And if you’re not in medicine, a differential diagnosis you can just think of as a prioritized list of the possible diagnoses that fit with all that data. And in that proposed differential, I always intentionally make two mistakes. 
    I make a textbook technical error in one of the possible elements of the differential diagnosis, and I have an error of omission. And, you know, I just want to know, does the LLM understand what I’m talking about? And all the good ones out there do now. But then I want to know, can it spot the errors? And then most importantly, is it willing to tell me I’m wrong, that I’ve made a mistake?  
    That last piece seems really hard for AI today. And so let me ask you first, Seb, because at the time of this taping, of course, there was a new spin of GPT-4o last week that became overly sycophantic. In other words, it was actually prone in that test of mine not only to not tell me I’m wrong, but it actually praised me for the creativity of my differential.What’s up with that? 
    BUBECK: Yeah, I guess it’s a testament to the fact that training those models is still more of an art than a science. So it’s a difficult job. Just to be clear with the audience, we have rolled back thatversion of GPT-4o, so now we don’t have the sycophant version out there. 
    Yeah, no, it’s a really difficult question. It has to do … as you said, it’s very technical. It has to do with the post-training and how, like, where do you nudge the model? So, you know, there is this very classical by now technique called RLHF, where you push the model in the direction of a certain reward model. So the reward model is just telling the model, you know, what behavior is good, what behavior is bad. 
    But this reward model is itself an LLM, and, you know, Bill was saying at the very beginning of the conversation that we don’t really understand how those LLMs deal with concepts like, you know, where is the capital of France located? Things like that. It is the same thing for this reward model. We don’t know why it says that it prefers one output to another, and whether this is correlated with some sycophancy is, you know, something that we discovered basically just now. That if you push too hard in optimization on this reward model, you will get a sycophant model. 
    So it’s kind of … what I’m trying to say is we became too good at what we were doing, and we ended up, in fact, in a trap of the reward model. 
    LEE: I mean, you do want … it’s a difficult balance because you do want models to follow your desires and … 
    BUBECK: It’s a very difficult, very difficult balance. 
    LEE: So this brings up then the following question for me, which is the extent to which we think we’ll need to have specially trained models for things. So let me start with you, Bill. Do you have a point of view on whether we will need to, you know, quote-unquote take AI models to med school? Have them specially trained? Like, if you were going to deploy something to give medical care in underserved parts of the world, do we need to do something special to create those models? 
    GATES: We certainly need to teach them the African languages and the unique dialects so that the multimedia interactions are very high quality. We certainly need to teach them the disease prevalence and unique disease patterns like, you know, neglected tropical diseases and malaria. So we need to gather a set of facts that somebody trying to go for a US customer base, you know, wouldn’t necessarily have that in there. 
    Those two things are actually very straightforward because the additional training time is small. I’d say for the next few years, we’ll also need to do reinforcement learning about the context of being a doctor and how important certain behaviors are. Humans learn over the course of their life to some degree that, I’m in a different context and the way I behave in terms of being willing to criticize or be nice, you know, how important is it? Who’s here? What’s my relationship to them?  
    Right now, these machines don’t have that broad social experience. And so if you know it’s going to be used for health things, a lot of reinforcement learning of the very best humans in that context would still be valuable. Eventually, the models will, having read all the literature of the world about good doctors, bad doctors, it’ll understand as soon as you say, “I want you to be a doctor diagnosing somebody.” All of the implicit reinforcement that fits that situation, you know, will be there.
    LEE: Yeah.
    GATES: And so I hope three years from now, we don’t have to do that reinforcement learning. But today, for any medical context, you would want a lot of data to reinforce tone, willingness to say things when, you know, there might be something significant at stake. 
    LEE: Yeah. So, you know, something Bill said, kind of, reminds me of another thing that I think we missed, which is, the context also … and the specialization also pertains to different, I guess, what we still call “modes,” although I don’t know if the idea of multimodal is the same as it was two years ago. But, you know, what do you make of all of the hubbub around—in fact, within Microsoft Research, this is a big deal, but I think we’re far from alone—you know, medical images and vision, video, proteins and molecules, cell, you know, cellular data and so on. 
    BUBECK: Yeah. OK. So there is a lot to say to everything … to the last, you know, couple of minutes. Maybe on the specialization aspect, you know, I think there is, hiding behind this, a really fundamental scientific question of whether eventually we have a singular AGIthat kind of knows everything and you can just put, you know, explain your own context and it will just get it and understand everything. 
    That’s one vision. I have to say, I don’t particularly believe in this vision. In fact, we humans are not like that at all. I think, hopefully, we are general intelligences, yet we have to specialize a lot. And, you know, I did myself a lot of RL, reinforcement learning, on mathematics. Like, that’s what I did, you know, spent a lot of time doing that. And I didn’t improve on other aspects. You know, in fact, I probably degraded in other aspects.So it’s … I think it’s an important example to have in mind. 
    LEE: I think I might disagree with you on that, though, because, like, doesn’t a model have to see both good science and bad science in order to be able to gain the ability to discern between the two? 
    BUBECK: Yeah, no, that absolutely. I think there is value in seeing the generality, in having a very broad base. But then you, kind of, specialize on verticals. And this is where also, you know, open-weights model, which we haven’t talked about yet, are really important because they allow you to provide this broad base to everyone. And then you can specialize on top of it. 
    LEE: So we have about three hours of stuff to talk about, but our time is actually running low.
    BUBECK: Yes, yes, yes.  
    LEE: So I think I want … there’s a more provocative question. It’s almost a silly question, but I need to ask it of the two of you, which is, is there a future, you know, where AI replaces doctors or replaces, you know, medical specialties that we have today? So what does the world look like, say, five years from now? 
    GATES: Well, it’s important to distinguish healthcare discovery activity from healthcare delivery activity. We focused mostly on delivery. I think it’s very much within the realm of possibility that the AI is not only accelerating healthcare discovery but substituting for a lot of the roles of, you know, I’m an organic chemist, or I run various types of assays. I can see those, which are, you know, testable-output-type jobs but with still very high value, I can see, you know, some replacement in those areas before the doctor.  
    The doctor, still understanding the human condition and long-term dialogues, you know, they’ve had a lifetime of reinforcement of that, particularly when you get into areas like mental health. So I wouldn’t say in five years, either people will choose to adopt it, but it will be profound that there’ll be this nearly free intelligence that can do follow-up, that can help you, you know, make sure you went through different possibilities. 
    And so I’d say, yes, we’ll have doctors, but I’d say healthcare will be massively transformed in its quality and in efficiency by AI in that time period. 
    LEE: Is there a comparison, useful comparison, say, between doctors and, say, programmers, computer programmers, or doctors and, I don’t know, lawyers? 
    GATES: Programming is another one that has, kind of, a mathematical correctness to it, you know, and so the objective function that you’re trying to reinforce to, as soon as you can understand the state machines, you can have something that’s “checkable”; that’s correct. So I think programming, you know, which is weird to say, that the machine will beat us at most programming tasks before we let it take over roles that have deep empathy, you know, physical presence and social understanding in them. 
    LEE: Yeah. By the way, you know, I fully expect in five years that AI will produce mathematical proofs that are checkable for validity, easily checkable, because they’ll be written in a proof-checking language like Lean or something but will be so complex that no human mathematician can understand them. I expect that to happen.  
    I can imagine in some fields, like cellular biology, we could have the same situation in the future because the molecular pathways, the chemistry, biochemistry of human cells or living cells is as complex as any mathematics, and so it seems possible that we may be in a state where in wet lab, we see, Oh yeah, this actually works, but no one can understand why. 
    BUBECK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I really agree with Bill’s distinction of the discovery and the delivery, and indeed, the discovery’s when you can check things, and at the end, there is an artifact that you can verify. You know, you can run the protocol in the wet lab and seeproduced what you wanted. So I absolutely agree with that.  
    And in fact, you know, we don’t have to talk five years from now. I don’t know if you know, but just recently, there was a paper that was published on a scientific discovery using o3- mini. So this is really amazing. And, you know, just very quickly, just so people know, it was about this statistical physics model, the frustrated Potts model, which has to do with coloring, and basically, the case of three colors, like, more than two colors was open for a long time, and o3 was able to reduce the case of three colors to two colors.  
    LEE: Yeah. 
    BUBECK: Which is just, like, astounding. And this is not … this is now. This is happening right now. So this is something that I personally didn’t expect it would happen so quickly, and it’s due to those reasoning models.  
    Now, on the delivery side, I would add something more to it for the reason why doctors and, in fact, lawyers and coders will remain for a long time, and it’s because we still don’t understand how those models generalize. Like, at the end of the day, we are not able to tell you when they are confronted with a really new, novel situation, whether they will work or not. 
    Nobody is able to give you that guarantee. And I think until we understand this generalization better, we’re not going to be willing to just let the system in the wild without human supervision. 
    LEE: But don’t human doctors, human specialists … so, for example, a cardiologist sees a patient in a certain way that a nephrologist … 
    BUBECK: Yeah.
    LEE: … or an endocrinologist might not.
    BUBECK: That’s right. But another cardiologist will understand and, kind of, expect a certain level of generalization from their peer. And this, we just don’t have it with AI models. Now, of course, you’re exactly right. That generalization is also hard for humans. Like, if you have a human trained for one task and you put them into another task, then you don’t … you often don’t know.
    LEE: OK. You know, the podcast is focused on what’s happened over the last two years. But now, I’d like one provocative prediction about what you think the world of AI and medicine is going to be at some point in the future. You pick your timeframe. I don’t care if it’s two years or 20 years from now, but, you know, what do you think will be different about AI in medicine in that future than today? 
    BUBECK: Yeah, I think the deployment is going to accelerate soon. Like, we’re really not missing very much. There is this enormous capability overhang. Like, even if progress completely stopped, with current systems, we can do a lot more than what we’re doing right now. So I think this will … this has to be realized, you know, sooner rather than later. 
    And I think it’s probably dependent on these benchmarks and proper evaluation and tying this with regulation. So these are things that take time in human society and for good reason. But now we already are at two years; you know, give it another two years and it should be really …  
    LEE: Will AI prescribe your medicines? Write your prescriptions? 
    BUBECK: I think yes. I think yes. 
    LEE: OK. Bill? 
    GATES: Well, I think the next two years, we’ll have massive pilots, and so the amount of use of the AI, still in a copilot-type mode, you know, we should get millions of patient visits, you know, both in general medicine and in the mental health side, as well. And I think that’s going to build up both the data and the confidence to give the AI some additional autonomy. You know, are you going to let it talk to you at night when you’re panicked about your mental health with some ability to escalate?
    And, you know, I’ve gone so far as to tell politicians with national health systems that if they deploy AI appropriately, that the quality of care, the overload of the doctors, the improvement in the economics will be enough that their voters will be stunned because they just don’t expect this, and, you know, they could be reelectedjust on this one thing of fixing what is a very overloaded and economically challenged health system in these rich countries. 
    You know, my personal role is going to be to make sure that in the poorer countries, there isn’t some lag; in fact, in many cases, that we’ll be more aggressive because, you know, we’re comparing to having no access to doctors at all. And, you know, so I think whether it’s India or Africa, there’ll be lessons that are globally valuable because we need medical intelligence. And, you know, thank god AI is going to provide a lot of that. 
    LEE: Well, on that optimistic note, I think that’s a good way to end. Bill, Seb, really appreciate all of this.  
    I think the most fundamental prediction we made in the book is that AI would actually find its way into the practice of medicine, and I think that that at least has come true, maybe in different ways than we expected, but it’s come true, and I think it’ll only accelerate from here. So thanks again, both of you.  
    GATES: Yeah. Thanks, you guys. 
    BUBECK: Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Bill. 
    LEE: I just always feel such a sense of privilege to have a chance to interact and actually work with people like Bill and Sébastien.   
    With Bill, I’m always amazed at how practically minded he is. He’s really thinking about the nuts and bolts of what AI might be able to do for people, and his thoughts about underserved parts of the world, the idea that we might actually be able to empower people with access to expert medical knowledge, I think is both inspiring and amazing.  
    And then, Seb, Sébastien Bubeck, he’s just absolutely a brilliant mind. He has a really firm grip on the deep mathematics of artificial intelligence and brings that to bear in his research and development work. And where that mathematics takes him isn’t just into the nuts and bolts of algorithms but into philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence.  
    One of the things that Sébastien brought up was the state of evaluation of AI systems. And indeed, he was fairly critical in our conversation. But of course, the world of AI research and development is just moving so fast, and indeed, since we recorded our conversation, OpenAI, in fact, released a new evaluation metric that is directly relevant to medical applications, and that is something called HealthBench. And Microsoft Research also released a new evaluation approach or process called ADeLe.  
    HealthBench and ADeLe are examples of new approaches to evaluating AI models that are less about testing their knowledge and ability to pass multiple-choice exams and instead are evaluation approaches designed to assess how well AI models are able to complete tasks that actually arise every day in typical healthcare or biomedical research settings. These are examples of really important good work that speak to how well AI models work in the real world of healthcare and biomedical research and how well they can collaborate with human beings in those settings. 
    You know, I asked Bill and Seb to make some predictions about the future. You know, my own answer, I expect that we’re going to be able to use AI to change how we diagnose patients, change how we decide treatment options.  
    If you’re a doctor or a nurse and you encounter a patient, you’ll ask questions, do a physical exam, you know, call out for labs just like you do today, but then you’ll be able to engage with AI based on all of that data and just ask, you know, based on all the other people who have gone through the same experience, who have similar data, how were they diagnosed? How were they treated? What were their outcomes? And what does that mean for the patient I have right now? Some people call it the “patients like me” paradigm. And I think that’s going to become real because of AI within our lifetimes. That idea of really grounding the delivery in healthcare and medical practice through data and intelligence, I actually now don’t see any barriers to that future becoming real.  
    I’d like to extend another big thank you to Bill and Sébastien for their time. And to our listeners, as always, it’s a pleasure to have you along for the ride. I hope you’ll join us for our remaining conversations, as well as a second coauthor roundtable with Carey and Zak.  
    Until next time.  
    #how #reshaping #future #healthcare #medical
    How AI is reshaping the future of healthcare and medical research
    Transcript        PETER LEE: “In ‘The Little Black Bag,’ a classic science fiction story, a high-tech doctor’s kit of the future is accidentally transported back to the 1950s, into the shaky hands of a washed-up, alcoholic doctor. The ultimate medical tool, it redeems the doctor wielding it, allowing him to practice gratifyingly heroic medicine. … The tale ends badly for the doctor and his treacherous assistant, but it offered a picture of how advanced technology could transform medicine—powerful when it was written nearly 75 years ago and still so today. What would be the Al equivalent of that little black bag? At this moment when new capabilities are emerging, how do we imagine them into medicine?”           This is The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited. I’m your host, Peter Lee.    Shortly after OpenAI’s GPT-4 was publicly released, Carey Goldberg, Dr. Zak Kohane, and I published The AI Revolution in Medicine to help educate the world of healthcare and medical research about the transformative impact this new generative AI technology could have. But because we wrote the book when GPT-4 was still a secret, we had to speculate. Now, two years later, what did we get right, and what did we get wrong?     In this series, we’ll talk to clinicians, patients, hospital administrators, and others to understand the reality of AI in the field and where we go from here.  The book passage I read at the top is from “Chapter 10: The Big Black Bag.”  In imagining AI in medicine, Carey, Zak, and I included in our book two fictional accounts. In the first, a medical resident consults GPT-4 on her personal phone as the patient in front of her crashes. Within seconds, it offers an alternate response based on recent literature. In the second account, a 90-year-old woman with several chronic conditions is living independently and receiving near-constant medical support from an AI aide.    In our conversations with the guests we’ve spoken to so far, we’ve caught a glimpse of these predicted futures, seeing how clinicians and patients are actually using AI today and how developers are leveraging the technology in the healthcare products and services they’re creating. In fact, that first fictional account isn’t so fictional after all, as most of the doctors in the real world actually appear to be using AI at least occasionally—and sometimes much more than occasionally—to help in their daily clinical work. And as for the second fictional account, which is more of a science fiction account, it seems we are indeed on the verge of a new way of delivering and receiving healthcare, though the future is still very much open.  As we continue to examine the current state of AI in healthcare and its potential to transform the field, I’m pleased to welcome Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck.   Bill may be best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, having created the company with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975. He’s now the founder of Breakthrough Energy, which aims to advance clean energy innovation, and TerraPower, a company developing groundbreaking nuclear energy and science technologies. He also chairs the world’s largest philanthropic organization, the Gates Foundation, and focuses on solving a variety of health challenges around the globe and here at home.  Sébastien is a research lead at OpenAI. He was previously a distinguished scientist, vice president of AI, and a colleague of mine here at Microsoft, where his work included spearheading the development of the family of small language models known as Phi. While at Microsoft, he also coauthored the discussion-provoking 2023 paper “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” which presented the results of early experiments with GPT-4 conducted by a small team from Microsoft Research.      Here’s my conversation with Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck.  LEE: Bill, welcome.  BILL GATES: Thank you.  LEE: Seb …  SÉBASTIEN BUBECK: Yeah. Hi, hi, Peter. Nice to be here.  LEE: You know, one of the things that I’ve been doing just to get the conversation warmed up is to talk about origin stories, and what I mean about origin stories is, you know, what was the first contact that you had with large language models or the concept of generative AI that convinced you or made you think that something really important was happening?  And so, Bill, I think I’ve heard the story about, you know, the time when the OpenAI folks—Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and others—showed you something, but could we hear from you what those early encounters were like and what was going through your mind?   GATES: Well, I’d been visiting OpenAI soon after it was created to see things like GPT-2 and to see the little arm they had that was trying to match human manipulation and, you know, looking at their games like Dota that they were trying to get as good as human play. And honestly, I didn’t think the language model stuff they were doing, even when they got to GPT-3, would show the ability to learn, you know, in the same sense that a human reads a biology book and is able to take that knowledge and access it not only to pass a test but also to create new medicines.  And so my challenge to them was that if their LLM could get a five on the advanced placement biology test, then I would say, OK, it took biologic knowledge and encoded it in an accessible way and that I didn’t expect them to do that very quickly but it would be profound.   And it was only about six months after I challenged them to do that, that an early version of GPT-4 they brought up to a dinner at my house, and in fact, it answered most of the questions that night very well. The one it got totally wrong, we were … because it was so good, we kept thinking, Oh, we must be wrong. It turned out it was a math weaknessthat, you know, we later understood that that was an area of, weirdly, of incredible weakness of those early models. But, you know, that was when I realized, OK, the age of cheap intelligence was at its beginning.  LEE: Yeah. So I guess it seems like you had something similar to me in that my first encounters, I actually harbored some skepticism. Is it fair to say you were skeptical before that?  GATES: Well, the idea that we’ve figured out how to encode and access knowledge in this very deep sense without even understanding the nature of the encoding, …  LEE: Right.   GATES: … that is a bit weird.   LEE: Yeah.  GATES: We have an algorithm that creates the computation, but even say, OK, where is the president’s birthday stored in there? Where is this fact stored in there? The fact that even now when we’re playing around, getting a little bit more sense of it, it’s opaque to us what the semantic encoding is, it’s, kind of, amazing to me. I thought the invention of knowledge storage would be an explicit way of encoding knowledge, not an implicit statistical training.  LEE: Yeah, yeah. All right. So, Seb, you know, on this same topic, you know, I got—as we say at Microsoft—I got pulled into the tent.  BUBECK: Yes.   LEE: Because this was a very secret project. And then, um, I had the opportunity to select a small number of researchers in MSRto join and start investigating this thing seriously. And the first person I pulled in was you.  BUBECK: Yeah.  LEE: And so what were your first encounters? Because I actually don’t remember what happened then.  BUBECK: Oh, I remember it very well.My first encounter with GPT-4 was in a meeting with the two of you, actually. But my kind of first contact, the first moment where I realized that something was happening with generative AI, was before that. And I agree with Bill that I also wasn’t too impressed by GPT-3.  I though that it was kind of, you know, very naturally mimicking the web, sort of parroting what was written there in a nice way. Still in a way which seemed very impressive. But it wasn’t really intelligent in any way. But shortly after GPT-3, there was a model before GPT-4 that really shocked me, and this was the first image generation model, DALL-E 1.  So that was in 2021. And I will forever remember the press release of OpenAI where they had this prompt of an avocado chair and then you had this image of the avocado chair.And what really shocked me is that clearly the model kind of “understood” what is a chair, what is an avocado, and was able to merge those concepts.  So this was really, to me, the first moment where I saw some understanding in those models.   LEE: So this was, just to get the timing right, that was before I pulled you into the tent.  BUBECK: That was before. That was like a year before.  LEE: Right.   BUBECK: And now I will tell you how, you know, we went from that moment to the meeting with the two of you and GPT-4.  So once I saw this kind of understanding, I thought, OK, fine. It understands concept, but it’s still not able to reason. It cannot—as, you know, Bill was saying—it cannot learn from your document. It cannot reason.   So I set out to try to prove that. You know, this is what I was in the business of at the time, trying to prove things in mathematics. So I was trying to prove that basically autoregressive transformers could never reason. So I was trying to prove this. And after a year of work, I had something reasonable to show. And so I had the meeting with the two of you, and I had this example where I wanted to say, there is no way that an LLM is going to be able to do x.  And then as soon as I … I don’t know if you remember, Bill. But as soon as I said that, you said, oh, but wait a second. I had, you know, the OpenAI crew at my house recently, and they showed me a new model. Why don’t we ask this new model this question?   LEE: Yeah. BUBECK: And we did, and it solved it on the spot. And that really, honestly, just changed my life. Like, you know, I had been working for a year trying to say that this was impossible. And just right there, it was shown to be possible.   LEE:One of the very first things I got interested in—because I was really thinking a lot about healthcare—was healthcare and medicine.  And I don’t know if the two of you remember, but I ended up doing a lot of tests. I ran through, you know, step one and step two of the US Medical Licensing Exam. Did a whole bunch of other things. I wrote this big report. It was, you know, I can’t remember … a couple hundred pages.   And I needed to share this with someone. I didn’t … there weren’t too many people I could share it with. So I sent, I think, a copy to you, Bill. Sent a copy to you, Seb.   I hardly slept for about a week putting that report together. And, yeah, and I kept working on it. But I was far from alone. I think everyone who was in the tent, so to speak, in those early days was going through something pretty similar. All right. So I think … of course, a lot of what I put in the report also ended up being examples that made it into the book.  But the main purpose of this conversation isn’t to reminisce aboutor indulge in those reminiscences but to talk about what’s happening in healthcare and medicine. And, you know, as I said, we wrote this book. We did it very, very quickly. Seb, you helped. Bill, you know, you provided a review and some endorsements.  But, you know, honestly, we didn’t know what we were talking about because no one had access to this thing. And so we just made a bunch of guesses. So really, the whole thing I wanted to probe with the two of you is, now with two years of experience out in the world, what, you know, what do we think is happening today?  You know, is AI actually having an impact, positive or negative, on healthcare and medicine? And what do we now think is going to happen in the next two years, five years, or 10 years? And so I realize it’s a little bit too abstract to just ask it that way. So let me just try to narrow the discussion and guide us a little bit.   Um, the kind of administrative and clerical work, paperwork, around healthcare—and we made a lot of guesses about that—that appears to be going well, but, you know, Bill, I know we’ve discussed that sometimes that you think there ought to be a lot more going on. Do you have a viewpoint on how AI is actually finding its way into reducing paperwork?  GATES: Well, I’m stunned … I don’t think there should be a patient-doctor meeting where the AI is not sitting in and both transcribing, offering to help with the paperwork, and even making suggestions, although the doctor will be the one, you know, who makes the final decision about the diagnosis and whatever prescription gets done.   It’s so helpful. You know, when that patient goes home and their, you know, son who wants to understand what happened has some questions, that AI should be available to continue that conversation. And the way you can improve that experience and streamline things and, you know, involve the people who advise you. I don’t understand why that’s not more adopted, because there you still have the human in the loop making that final decision.  But even for, like, follow-up calls to make sure the patient did things, to understand if they have concerns and knowing when to escalate back to the doctor, the benefit is incredible. And, you know, that thing is ready for prime time. That paradigm is ready for prime time, in my view.  LEE: Yeah, there are some good products, but it seems like the number one use right now—and we kind of got this from some of the previous guests in previous episodes—is the use of AI just to respond to emails from patients.Does that make sense to you?  BUBECK: Yeah. So maybe I want to second what Bill was saying but maybe take a step back first. You know, two years ago, like, the concept of clinical scribes, which is one of the things that we’re talking about right now, it would have sounded, in fact, it sounded two years ago, borderline dangerous. Because everybody was worried about hallucinations. What happened if you have this AI listening in and then it transcribes, you know, something wrong?  Now, two years later, I think it’s mostly working. And in fact, it is not yet, you know, fully adopted. You’re right. But it is in production. It is used, you know, in many, many places. So this rate of progress is astounding because it wasn’t obvious that we would be able to overcome those obstacles of hallucination. It’s not to say that hallucinations are fully solved. In the case of the closed system, they are.   Now, I think more generally what’s going on in the background is that there is something that we, that certainly I, underestimated, which is this management overhead. So I think the reason why this is not adopted everywhere is really a training and teaching aspect. People need to be taught, like, those systems, how to interact with them.  And one example that I really like, a study that recently appeared where they tried to use ChatGPT for diagnosis and they were comparing doctors without and with ChatGPT. And the amazing thing … so this was a set of cases where the accuracy of the doctors alone was around 75%. ChatGPT alone was 90%. So that’s already kind of mind blowing. But then the kicker is that doctors with ChatGPT was 80%.   Intelligence alone is not enough. It’s also how it’s presented, how you interact with it. And ChatGPT, it’s an amazing tool. Obviously, I absolutely love it. But it’s not … you don’t want a doctor to have to type in, you know, prompts and use it that way.  It should be, as Bill was saying, kind of running continuously in the background, sending you notifications. And you have to be really careful of the rate at which those notifications are being sent. Because if they are too frequent, then the doctor will learn to ignore them. So you have to … all of those things matter, in fact, at least as much as the level of intelligence of the machine.  LEE: One of the things I think about, Bill, in that scenario that you described, doctors do some thinking about the patient when they write the note. So, you know, I’m always a little uncertain whether it’s actually … you know, you wouldn’t necessarily want to fully automate this, I don’t think. Or at least there needs to be some prompt to the doctor to make sure that the doctor puts some thought into what happened in the encounter with the patient. Does that make sense to you at all?  GATES: At this stage, you know, I’d still put the onus on the doctor to write the conclusions and the summary and not delegate that.  The tradeoffs you make a little bit are somewhat dependent on the situation you’re in. If you’re in Africa, So, yes, the doctor’s still going to have to do a lot of work, but just the quality of letting the patient and the people around them interact and ask questions and have things explained, that alone is such a quality improvement. It’s mind blowing.   LEE: So since you mentioned, you know, Africa—and, of course, this touches on the mission and some of the priorities of the Gates Foundation and this idea of democratization of access to expert medical care—what’s the most interesting stuff going on right now? Are there people and organizations or technologies that are impressing you or that you’re tracking?  GATES: Yeah. So the Gates Foundation has given out a lot of grants to people in Africa doing education, agriculture but more healthcare examples than anything. And the way these things start off, they often start out either being patient-centric in a narrow situation, like, OK, I’m a pregnant woman; talk to me. Or, I have infectious disease symptoms; talk to me. Or they’re connected to a health worker where they’re helping that worker get their job done. And we have lots of pilots out, you know, in both of those cases.   The dream would be eventually to have the thing the patient consults be so broad that it’s like having a doctor available who understands the local things.   LEE: Right.   GATES: We’re not there yet. But over the next two or three years, you know, particularly given the worsening financial constraints against African health systems, where the withdrawal of money has been dramatic, you know, figuring out how to take this—what I sometimes call “free intelligence”—and build a quality health system around that, we will have to be more radical in low-income countries than any rich country is ever going to be.   LEE: Also, there’s maybe a different regulatory environment, so some of those things maybe are easier? Because right now, I think the world hasn’t figured out how to and whether to regulate, let’s say, an AI that might give a medical diagnosis or write a prescription for a medication.  BUBECK: Yeah. I think one issue with this, and it’s also slowing down the deployment of AI in healthcare more generally, is a lack of proper benchmark. Because, you know, you were mentioning the USMLE, for example. That’s a great test to test human beings and their knowledge of healthcare and medicine. But it’s not a great test to give to an AI.  It’s not asking the right questions. So finding what are the right questions to test whether an AI system is ready to give diagnosis in a constrained setting, that’s a very, very important direction, which to my surprise, is not yet accelerating at the rate that I was hoping for.  LEE: OK, so that gives me an excuse to get more now into the core AI tech because something I’ve discussed with both of you is this issue of what are the right tests. And you both know the very first test I give to any new spin of an LLM is I present a patient, the results—a mythical patient—the results of my physical exam, my mythical physical exam. Maybe some results of some initial labs. And then I present or propose a differential diagnosis. And if you’re not in medicine, a differential diagnosis you can just think of as a prioritized list of the possible diagnoses that fit with all that data. And in that proposed differential, I always intentionally make two mistakes.  I make a textbook technical error in one of the possible elements of the differential diagnosis, and I have an error of omission. And, you know, I just want to know, does the LLM understand what I’m talking about? And all the good ones out there do now. But then I want to know, can it spot the errors? And then most importantly, is it willing to tell me I’m wrong, that I’ve made a mistake?   That last piece seems really hard for AI today. And so let me ask you first, Seb, because at the time of this taping, of course, there was a new spin of GPT-4o last week that became overly sycophantic. In other words, it was actually prone in that test of mine not only to not tell me I’m wrong, but it actually praised me for the creativity of my differential.What’s up with that?  BUBECK: Yeah, I guess it’s a testament to the fact that training those models is still more of an art than a science. So it’s a difficult job. Just to be clear with the audience, we have rolled back thatversion of GPT-4o, so now we don’t have the sycophant version out there.  Yeah, no, it’s a really difficult question. It has to do … as you said, it’s very technical. It has to do with the post-training and how, like, where do you nudge the model? So, you know, there is this very classical by now technique called RLHF, where you push the model in the direction of a certain reward model. So the reward model is just telling the model, you know, what behavior is good, what behavior is bad.  But this reward model is itself an LLM, and, you know, Bill was saying at the very beginning of the conversation that we don’t really understand how those LLMs deal with concepts like, you know, where is the capital of France located? Things like that. It is the same thing for this reward model. We don’t know why it says that it prefers one output to another, and whether this is correlated with some sycophancy is, you know, something that we discovered basically just now. That if you push too hard in optimization on this reward model, you will get a sycophant model.  So it’s kind of … what I’m trying to say is we became too good at what we were doing, and we ended up, in fact, in a trap of the reward model.  LEE: I mean, you do want … it’s a difficult balance because you do want models to follow your desires and …  BUBECK: It’s a very difficult, very difficult balance.  LEE: So this brings up then the following question for me, which is the extent to which we think we’ll need to have specially trained models for things. So let me start with you, Bill. Do you have a point of view on whether we will need to, you know, quote-unquote take AI models to med school? Have them specially trained? Like, if you were going to deploy something to give medical care in underserved parts of the world, do we need to do something special to create those models?  GATES: We certainly need to teach them the African languages and the unique dialects so that the multimedia interactions are very high quality. We certainly need to teach them the disease prevalence and unique disease patterns like, you know, neglected tropical diseases and malaria. So we need to gather a set of facts that somebody trying to go for a US customer base, you know, wouldn’t necessarily have that in there.  Those two things are actually very straightforward because the additional training time is small. I’d say for the next few years, we’ll also need to do reinforcement learning about the context of being a doctor and how important certain behaviors are. Humans learn over the course of their life to some degree that, I’m in a different context and the way I behave in terms of being willing to criticize or be nice, you know, how important is it? Who’s here? What’s my relationship to them?   Right now, these machines don’t have that broad social experience. And so if you know it’s going to be used for health things, a lot of reinforcement learning of the very best humans in that context would still be valuable. Eventually, the models will, having read all the literature of the world about good doctors, bad doctors, it’ll understand as soon as you say, “I want you to be a doctor diagnosing somebody.” All of the implicit reinforcement that fits that situation, you know, will be there. LEE: Yeah. GATES: And so I hope three years from now, we don’t have to do that reinforcement learning. But today, for any medical context, you would want a lot of data to reinforce tone, willingness to say things when, you know, there might be something significant at stake.  LEE: Yeah. So, you know, something Bill said, kind of, reminds me of another thing that I think we missed, which is, the context also … and the specialization also pertains to different, I guess, what we still call “modes,” although I don’t know if the idea of multimodal is the same as it was two years ago. But, you know, what do you make of all of the hubbub around—in fact, within Microsoft Research, this is a big deal, but I think we’re far from alone—you know, medical images and vision, video, proteins and molecules, cell, you know, cellular data and so on.  BUBECK: Yeah. OK. So there is a lot to say to everything … to the last, you know, couple of minutes. Maybe on the specialization aspect, you know, I think there is, hiding behind this, a really fundamental scientific question of whether eventually we have a singular AGIthat kind of knows everything and you can just put, you know, explain your own context and it will just get it and understand everything.  That’s one vision. I have to say, I don’t particularly believe in this vision. In fact, we humans are not like that at all. I think, hopefully, we are general intelligences, yet we have to specialize a lot. And, you know, I did myself a lot of RL, reinforcement learning, on mathematics. Like, that’s what I did, you know, spent a lot of time doing that. And I didn’t improve on other aspects. You know, in fact, I probably degraded in other aspects.So it’s … I think it’s an important example to have in mind.  LEE: I think I might disagree with you on that, though, because, like, doesn’t a model have to see both good science and bad science in order to be able to gain the ability to discern between the two?  BUBECK: Yeah, no, that absolutely. I think there is value in seeing the generality, in having a very broad base. But then you, kind of, specialize on verticals. And this is where also, you know, open-weights model, which we haven’t talked about yet, are really important because they allow you to provide this broad base to everyone. And then you can specialize on top of it.  LEE: So we have about three hours of stuff to talk about, but our time is actually running low. BUBECK: Yes, yes, yes.   LEE: So I think I want … there’s a more provocative question. It’s almost a silly question, but I need to ask it of the two of you, which is, is there a future, you know, where AI replaces doctors or replaces, you know, medical specialties that we have today? So what does the world look like, say, five years from now?  GATES: Well, it’s important to distinguish healthcare discovery activity from healthcare delivery activity. We focused mostly on delivery. I think it’s very much within the realm of possibility that the AI is not only accelerating healthcare discovery but substituting for a lot of the roles of, you know, I’m an organic chemist, or I run various types of assays. I can see those, which are, you know, testable-output-type jobs but with still very high value, I can see, you know, some replacement in those areas before the doctor.   The doctor, still understanding the human condition and long-term dialogues, you know, they’ve had a lifetime of reinforcement of that, particularly when you get into areas like mental health. So I wouldn’t say in five years, either people will choose to adopt it, but it will be profound that there’ll be this nearly free intelligence that can do follow-up, that can help you, you know, make sure you went through different possibilities.  And so I’d say, yes, we’ll have doctors, but I’d say healthcare will be massively transformed in its quality and in efficiency by AI in that time period.  LEE: Is there a comparison, useful comparison, say, between doctors and, say, programmers, computer programmers, or doctors and, I don’t know, lawyers?  GATES: Programming is another one that has, kind of, a mathematical correctness to it, you know, and so the objective function that you’re trying to reinforce to, as soon as you can understand the state machines, you can have something that’s “checkable”; that’s correct. So I think programming, you know, which is weird to say, that the machine will beat us at most programming tasks before we let it take over roles that have deep empathy, you know, physical presence and social understanding in them.  LEE: Yeah. By the way, you know, I fully expect in five years that AI will produce mathematical proofs that are checkable for validity, easily checkable, because they’ll be written in a proof-checking language like Lean or something but will be so complex that no human mathematician can understand them. I expect that to happen.   I can imagine in some fields, like cellular biology, we could have the same situation in the future because the molecular pathways, the chemistry, biochemistry of human cells or living cells is as complex as any mathematics, and so it seems possible that we may be in a state where in wet lab, we see, Oh yeah, this actually works, but no one can understand why.  BUBECK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I really agree with Bill’s distinction of the discovery and the delivery, and indeed, the discovery’s when you can check things, and at the end, there is an artifact that you can verify. You know, you can run the protocol in the wet lab and seeproduced what you wanted. So I absolutely agree with that.   And in fact, you know, we don’t have to talk five years from now. I don’t know if you know, but just recently, there was a paper that was published on a scientific discovery using o3- mini. So this is really amazing. And, you know, just very quickly, just so people know, it was about this statistical physics model, the frustrated Potts model, which has to do with coloring, and basically, the case of three colors, like, more than two colors was open for a long time, and o3 was able to reduce the case of three colors to two colors.   LEE: Yeah.  BUBECK: Which is just, like, astounding. And this is not … this is now. This is happening right now. So this is something that I personally didn’t expect it would happen so quickly, and it’s due to those reasoning models.   Now, on the delivery side, I would add something more to it for the reason why doctors and, in fact, lawyers and coders will remain for a long time, and it’s because we still don’t understand how those models generalize. Like, at the end of the day, we are not able to tell you when they are confronted with a really new, novel situation, whether they will work or not.  Nobody is able to give you that guarantee. And I think until we understand this generalization better, we’re not going to be willing to just let the system in the wild without human supervision.  LEE: But don’t human doctors, human specialists … so, for example, a cardiologist sees a patient in a certain way that a nephrologist …  BUBECK: Yeah. LEE: … or an endocrinologist might not. BUBECK: That’s right. But another cardiologist will understand and, kind of, expect a certain level of generalization from their peer. And this, we just don’t have it with AI models. Now, of course, you’re exactly right. That generalization is also hard for humans. Like, if you have a human trained for one task and you put them into another task, then you don’t … you often don’t know. LEE: OK. You know, the podcast is focused on what’s happened over the last two years. But now, I’d like one provocative prediction about what you think the world of AI and medicine is going to be at some point in the future. You pick your timeframe. I don’t care if it’s two years or 20 years from now, but, you know, what do you think will be different about AI in medicine in that future than today?  BUBECK: Yeah, I think the deployment is going to accelerate soon. Like, we’re really not missing very much. There is this enormous capability overhang. Like, even if progress completely stopped, with current systems, we can do a lot more than what we’re doing right now. So I think this will … this has to be realized, you know, sooner rather than later.  And I think it’s probably dependent on these benchmarks and proper evaluation and tying this with regulation. So these are things that take time in human society and for good reason. But now we already are at two years; you know, give it another two years and it should be really …   LEE: Will AI prescribe your medicines? Write your prescriptions?  BUBECK: I think yes. I think yes.  LEE: OK. Bill?  GATES: Well, I think the next two years, we’ll have massive pilots, and so the amount of use of the AI, still in a copilot-type mode, you know, we should get millions of patient visits, you know, both in general medicine and in the mental health side, as well. And I think that’s going to build up both the data and the confidence to give the AI some additional autonomy. You know, are you going to let it talk to you at night when you’re panicked about your mental health with some ability to escalate? And, you know, I’ve gone so far as to tell politicians with national health systems that if they deploy AI appropriately, that the quality of care, the overload of the doctors, the improvement in the economics will be enough that their voters will be stunned because they just don’t expect this, and, you know, they could be reelectedjust on this one thing of fixing what is a very overloaded and economically challenged health system in these rich countries.  You know, my personal role is going to be to make sure that in the poorer countries, there isn’t some lag; in fact, in many cases, that we’ll be more aggressive because, you know, we’re comparing to having no access to doctors at all. And, you know, so I think whether it’s India or Africa, there’ll be lessons that are globally valuable because we need medical intelligence. And, you know, thank god AI is going to provide a lot of that.  LEE: Well, on that optimistic note, I think that’s a good way to end. Bill, Seb, really appreciate all of this.   I think the most fundamental prediction we made in the book is that AI would actually find its way into the practice of medicine, and I think that that at least has come true, maybe in different ways than we expected, but it’s come true, and I think it’ll only accelerate from here. So thanks again, both of you.   GATES: Yeah. Thanks, you guys.  BUBECK: Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Bill.  LEE: I just always feel such a sense of privilege to have a chance to interact and actually work with people like Bill and Sébastien.    With Bill, I’m always amazed at how practically minded he is. He’s really thinking about the nuts and bolts of what AI might be able to do for people, and his thoughts about underserved parts of the world, the idea that we might actually be able to empower people with access to expert medical knowledge, I think is both inspiring and amazing.   And then, Seb, Sébastien Bubeck, he’s just absolutely a brilliant mind. He has a really firm grip on the deep mathematics of artificial intelligence and brings that to bear in his research and development work. And where that mathematics takes him isn’t just into the nuts and bolts of algorithms but into philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence.   One of the things that Sébastien brought up was the state of evaluation of AI systems. And indeed, he was fairly critical in our conversation. But of course, the world of AI research and development is just moving so fast, and indeed, since we recorded our conversation, OpenAI, in fact, released a new evaluation metric that is directly relevant to medical applications, and that is something called HealthBench. And Microsoft Research also released a new evaluation approach or process called ADeLe.   HealthBench and ADeLe are examples of new approaches to evaluating AI models that are less about testing their knowledge and ability to pass multiple-choice exams and instead are evaluation approaches designed to assess how well AI models are able to complete tasks that actually arise every day in typical healthcare or biomedical research settings. These are examples of really important good work that speak to how well AI models work in the real world of healthcare and biomedical research and how well they can collaborate with human beings in those settings.  You know, I asked Bill and Seb to make some predictions about the future. You know, my own answer, I expect that we’re going to be able to use AI to change how we diagnose patients, change how we decide treatment options.   If you’re a doctor or a nurse and you encounter a patient, you’ll ask questions, do a physical exam, you know, call out for labs just like you do today, but then you’ll be able to engage with AI based on all of that data and just ask, you know, based on all the other people who have gone through the same experience, who have similar data, how were they diagnosed? How were they treated? What were their outcomes? And what does that mean for the patient I have right now? Some people call it the “patients like me” paradigm. And I think that’s going to become real because of AI within our lifetimes. That idea of really grounding the delivery in healthcare and medical practice through data and intelligence, I actually now don’t see any barriers to that future becoming real.   I’d like to extend another big thank you to Bill and Sébastien for their time. And to our listeners, as always, it’s a pleasure to have you along for the ride. I hope you’ll join us for our remaining conversations, as well as a second coauthor roundtable with Carey and Zak.   Until next time.   #how #reshaping #future #healthcare #medical
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    How AI is reshaping the future of healthcare and medical research
    Transcript [MUSIC]      [BOOK PASSAGE]   PETER LEE: “In ‘The Little Black Bag,’ a classic science fiction story, a high-tech doctor’s kit of the future is accidentally transported back to the 1950s, into the shaky hands of a washed-up, alcoholic doctor. The ultimate medical tool, it redeems the doctor wielding it, allowing him to practice gratifyingly heroic medicine. … The tale ends badly for the doctor and his treacherous assistant, but it offered a picture of how advanced technology could transform medicine—powerful when it was written nearly 75 years ago and still so today. What would be the Al equivalent of that little black bag? At this moment when new capabilities are emerging, how do we imagine them into medicine?”   [END OF BOOK PASSAGE]     [THEME MUSIC]     This is The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited. I’m your host, Peter Lee.    Shortly after OpenAI’s GPT-4 was publicly released, Carey Goldberg, Dr. Zak Kohane, and I published The AI Revolution in Medicine to help educate the world of healthcare and medical research about the transformative impact this new generative AI technology could have. But because we wrote the book when GPT-4 was still a secret, we had to speculate. Now, two years later, what did we get right, and what did we get wrong?     In this series, we’ll talk to clinicians, patients, hospital administrators, and others to understand the reality of AI in the field and where we go from here.   [THEME MUSIC FADES] The book passage I read at the top is from “Chapter 10: The Big Black Bag.”  In imagining AI in medicine, Carey, Zak, and I included in our book two fictional accounts. In the first, a medical resident consults GPT-4 on her personal phone as the patient in front of her crashes. Within seconds, it offers an alternate response based on recent literature. In the second account, a 90-year-old woman with several chronic conditions is living independently and receiving near-constant medical support from an AI aide.    In our conversations with the guests we’ve spoken to so far, we’ve caught a glimpse of these predicted futures, seeing how clinicians and patients are actually using AI today and how developers are leveraging the technology in the healthcare products and services they’re creating. In fact, that first fictional account isn’t so fictional after all, as most of the doctors in the real world actually appear to be using AI at least occasionally—and sometimes much more than occasionally—to help in their daily clinical work. And as for the second fictional account, which is more of a science fiction account, it seems we are indeed on the verge of a new way of delivering and receiving healthcare, though the future is still very much open.  As we continue to examine the current state of AI in healthcare and its potential to transform the field, I’m pleased to welcome Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck.   Bill may be best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, having created the company with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975. He’s now the founder of Breakthrough Energy, which aims to advance clean energy innovation, and TerraPower, a company developing groundbreaking nuclear energy and science technologies. He also chairs the world’s largest philanthropic organization, the Gates Foundation, and focuses on solving a variety of health challenges around the globe and here at home.  Sébastien is a research lead at OpenAI. He was previously a distinguished scientist, vice president of AI, and a colleague of mine here at Microsoft, where his work included spearheading the development of the family of small language models known as Phi. While at Microsoft, he also coauthored the discussion-provoking 2023 paper “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” which presented the results of early experiments with GPT-4 conducted by a small team from Microsoft Research.    [TRANSITION MUSIC]   Here’s my conversation with Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck.  LEE: Bill, welcome.  BILL GATES: Thank you.  LEE: Seb …  SÉBASTIEN BUBECK: Yeah. Hi, hi, Peter. Nice to be here.  LEE: You know, one of the things that I’ve been doing just to get the conversation warmed up is to talk about origin stories, and what I mean about origin stories is, you know, what was the first contact that you had with large language models or the concept of generative AI that convinced you or made you think that something really important was happening?  And so, Bill, I think I’ve heard the story about, you know, the time when the OpenAI folks—Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and others—showed you something, but could we hear from you what those early encounters were like and what was going through your mind?   GATES: Well, I’d been visiting OpenAI soon after it was created to see things like GPT-2 and to see the little arm they had that was trying to match human manipulation and, you know, looking at their games like Dota that they were trying to get as good as human play. And honestly, I didn’t think the language model stuff they were doing, even when they got to GPT-3, would show the ability to learn, you know, in the same sense that a human reads a biology book and is able to take that knowledge and access it not only to pass a test but also to create new medicines.  And so my challenge to them was that if their LLM could get a five on the advanced placement biology test, then I would say, OK, it took biologic knowledge and encoded it in an accessible way and that I didn’t expect them to do that very quickly but it would be profound.   And it was only about six months after I challenged them to do that, that an early version of GPT-4 they brought up to a dinner at my house, and in fact, it answered most of the questions that night very well. The one it got totally wrong, we were … because it was so good, we kept thinking, Oh, we must be wrong. It turned out it was a math weakness [LAUGHTER] that, you know, we later understood that that was an area of, weirdly, of incredible weakness of those early models. But, you know, that was when I realized, OK, the age of cheap intelligence was at its beginning.  LEE: Yeah. So I guess it seems like you had something similar to me in that my first encounters, I actually harbored some skepticism. Is it fair to say you were skeptical before that?  GATES: Well, the idea that we’ve figured out how to encode and access knowledge in this very deep sense without even understanding the nature of the encoding, …  LEE: Right.   GATES: … that is a bit weird.   LEE: Yeah.  GATES: We have an algorithm that creates the computation, but even say, OK, where is the president’s birthday stored in there? Where is this fact stored in there? The fact that even now when we’re playing around, getting a little bit more sense of it, it’s opaque to us what the semantic encoding is, it’s, kind of, amazing to me. I thought the invention of knowledge storage would be an explicit way of encoding knowledge, not an implicit statistical training.  LEE: Yeah, yeah. All right. So, Seb, you know, on this same topic, you know, I got—as we say at Microsoft—I got pulled into the tent. [LAUGHS]  BUBECK: Yes.   LEE: Because this was a very secret project. And then, um, I had the opportunity to select a small number of researchers in MSR [Microsoft Research] to join and start investigating this thing seriously. And the first person I pulled in was you.  BUBECK: Yeah.  LEE: And so what were your first encounters? Because I actually don’t remember what happened then.  BUBECK: Oh, I remember it very well. [LAUGHS] My first encounter with GPT-4 was in a meeting with the two of you, actually. But my kind of first contact, the first moment where I realized that something was happening with generative AI, was before that. And I agree with Bill that I also wasn’t too impressed by GPT-3.  I though that it was kind of, you know, very naturally mimicking the web, sort of parroting what was written there in a nice way. Still in a way which seemed very impressive. But it wasn’t really intelligent in any way. But shortly after GPT-3, there was a model before GPT-4 that really shocked me, and this was the first image generation model, DALL-E 1.  So that was in 2021. And I will forever remember the press release of OpenAI where they had this prompt of an avocado chair and then you had this image of the avocado chair. [LAUGHTER] And what really shocked me is that clearly the model kind of “understood” what is a chair, what is an avocado, and was able to merge those concepts.  So this was really, to me, the first moment where I saw some understanding in those models.   LEE: So this was, just to get the timing right, that was before I pulled you into the tent.  BUBECK: That was before. That was like a year before.  LEE: Right.   BUBECK: And now I will tell you how, you know, we went from that moment to the meeting with the two of you and GPT-4.  So once I saw this kind of understanding, I thought, OK, fine. It understands concept, but it’s still not able to reason. It cannot—as, you know, Bill was saying—it cannot learn from your document. It cannot reason.   So I set out to try to prove that. You know, this is what I was in the business of at the time, trying to prove things in mathematics. So I was trying to prove that basically autoregressive transformers could never reason. So I was trying to prove this. And after a year of work, I had something reasonable to show. And so I had the meeting with the two of you, and I had this example where I wanted to say, there is no way that an LLM is going to be able to do x.  And then as soon as I … I don’t know if you remember, Bill. But as soon as I said that, you said, oh, but wait a second. I had, you know, the OpenAI crew at my house recently, and they showed me a new model. Why don’t we ask this new model this question?   LEE: Yeah. BUBECK: And we did, and it solved it on the spot. And that really, honestly, just changed my life. Like, you know, I had been working for a year trying to say that this was impossible. And just right there, it was shown to be possible.   LEE: [LAUGHS] One of the very first things I got interested in—because I was really thinking a lot about healthcare—was healthcare and medicine.  And I don’t know if the two of you remember, but I ended up doing a lot of tests. I ran through, you know, step one and step two of the US Medical Licensing Exam. Did a whole bunch of other things. I wrote this big report. It was, you know, I can’t remember … a couple hundred pages.   And I needed to share this with someone. I didn’t … there weren’t too many people I could share it with. So I sent, I think, a copy to you, Bill. Sent a copy to you, Seb.   I hardly slept for about a week putting that report together. And, yeah, and I kept working on it. But I was far from alone. I think everyone who was in the tent, so to speak, in those early days was going through something pretty similar. All right. So I think … of course, a lot of what I put in the report also ended up being examples that made it into the book.  But the main purpose of this conversation isn’t to reminisce about [LAUGHS] or indulge in those reminiscences but to talk about what’s happening in healthcare and medicine. And, you know, as I said, we wrote this book. We did it very, very quickly. Seb, you helped. Bill, you know, you provided a review and some endorsements.  But, you know, honestly, we didn’t know what we were talking about because no one had access to this thing. And so we just made a bunch of guesses. So really, the whole thing I wanted to probe with the two of you is, now with two years of experience out in the world, what, you know, what do we think is happening today?  You know, is AI actually having an impact, positive or negative, on healthcare and medicine? And what do we now think is going to happen in the next two years, five years, or 10 years? And so I realize it’s a little bit too abstract to just ask it that way. So let me just try to narrow the discussion and guide us a little bit.   Um, the kind of administrative and clerical work, paperwork, around healthcare—and we made a lot of guesses about that—that appears to be going well, but, you know, Bill, I know we’ve discussed that sometimes that you think there ought to be a lot more going on. Do you have a viewpoint on how AI is actually finding its way into reducing paperwork?  GATES: Well, I’m stunned … I don’t think there should be a patient-doctor meeting where the AI is not sitting in and both transcribing, offering to help with the paperwork, and even making suggestions, although the doctor will be the one, you know, who makes the final decision about the diagnosis and whatever prescription gets done.   It’s so helpful. You know, when that patient goes home and their, you know, son who wants to understand what happened has some questions, that AI should be available to continue that conversation. And the way you can improve that experience and streamline things and, you know, involve the people who advise you. I don’t understand why that’s not more adopted, because there you still have the human in the loop making that final decision.  But even for, like, follow-up calls to make sure the patient did things, to understand if they have concerns and knowing when to escalate back to the doctor, the benefit is incredible. And, you know, that thing is ready for prime time. That paradigm is ready for prime time, in my view.  LEE: Yeah, there are some good products, but it seems like the number one use right now—and we kind of got this from some of the previous guests in previous episodes—is the use of AI just to respond to emails from patients. [LAUGHTER] Does that make sense to you?  BUBECK: Yeah. So maybe I want to second what Bill was saying but maybe take a step back first. You know, two years ago, like, the concept of clinical scribes, which is one of the things that we’re talking about right now, it would have sounded, in fact, it sounded two years ago, borderline dangerous. Because everybody was worried about hallucinations. What happened if you have this AI listening in and then it transcribes, you know, something wrong?  Now, two years later, I think it’s mostly working. And in fact, it is not yet, you know, fully adopted. You’re right. But it is in production. It is used, you know, in many, many places. So this rate of progress is astounding because it wasn’t obvious that we would be able to overcome those obstacles of hallucination. It’s not to say that hallucinations are fully solved. In the case of the closed system, they are.   Now, I think more generally what’s going on in the background is that there is something that we, that certainly I, underestimated, which is this management overhead. So I think the reason why this is not adopted everywhere is really a training and teaching aspect. People need to be taught, like, those systems, how to interact with them.  And one example that I really like, a study that recently appeared where they tried to use ChatGPT for diagnosis and they were comparing doctors without and with ChatGPT (opens in new tab). And the amazing thing … so this was a set of cases where the accuracy of the doctors alone was around 75%. ChatGPT alone was 90%. So that’s already kind of mind blowing. But then the kicker is that doctors with ChatGPT was 80%.   Intelligence alone is not enough. It’s also how it’s presented, how you interact with it. And ChatGPT, it’s an amazing tool. Obviously, I absolutely love it. But it’s not … you don’t want a doctor to have to type in, you know, prompts and use it that way.  It should be, as Bill was saying, kind of running continuously in the background, sending you notifications. And you have to be really careful of the rate at which those notifications are being sent. Because if they are too frequent, then the doctor will learn to ignore them. So you have to … all of those things matter, in fact, at least as much as the level of intelligence of the machine.  LEE: One of the things I think about, Bill, in that scenario that you described, doctors do some thinking about the patient when they write the note. So, you know, I’m always a little uncertain whether it’s actually … you know, you wouldn’t necessarily want to fully automate this, I don’t think. Or at least there needs to be some prompt to the doctor to make sure that the doctor puts some thought into what happened in the encounter with the patient. Does that make sense to you at all?  GATES: At this stage, you know, I’d still put the onus on the doctor to write the conclusions and the summary and not delegate that.  The tradeoffs you make a little bit are somewhat dependent on the situation you’re in. If you’re in Africa, So, yes, the doctor’s still going to have to do a lot of work, but just the quality of letting the patient and the people around them interact and ask questions and have things explained, that alone is such a quality improvement. It’s mind blowing.   LEE: So since you mentioned, you know, Africa—and, of course, this touches on the mission and some of the priorities of the Gates Foundation and this idea of democratization of access to expert medical care—what’s the most interesting stuff going on right now? Are there people and organizations or technologies that are impressing you or that you’re tracking?  GATES: Yeah. So the Gates Foundation has given out a lot of grants to people in Africa doing education, agriculture but more healthcare examples than anything. And the way these things start off, they often start out either being patient-centric in a narrow situation, like, OK, I’m a pregnant woman; talk to me. Or, I have infectious disease symptoms; talk to me. Or they’re connected to a health worker where they’re helping that worker get their job done. And we have lots of pilots out, you know, in both of those cases.   The dream would be eventually to have the thing the patient consults be so broad that it’s like having a doctor available who understands the local things.   LEE: Right.   GATES: We’re not there yet. But over the next two or three years, you know, particularly given the worsening financial constraints against African health systems, where the withdrawal of money has been dramatic, you know, figuring out how to take this—what I sometimes call “free intelligence”—and build a quality health system around that, we will have to be more radical in low-income countries than any rich country is ever going to be.   LEE: Also, there’s maybe a different regulatory environment, so some of those things maybe are easier? Because right now, I think the world hasn’t figured out how to and whether to regulate, let’s say, an AI that might give a medical diagnosis or write a prescription for a medication.  BUBECK: Yeah. I think one issue with this, and it’s also slowing down the deployment of AI in healthcare more generally, is a lack of proper benchmark. Because, you know, you were mentioning the USMLE [United States Medical Licensing Examination], for example. That’s a great test to test human beings and their knowledge of healthcare and medicine. But it’s not a great test to give to an AI.  It’s not asking the right questions. So finding what are the right questions to test whether an AI system is ready to give diagnosis in a constrained setting, that’s a very, very important direction, which to my surprise, is not yet accelerating at the rate that I was hoping for.  LEE: OK, so that gives me an excuse to get more now into the core AI tech because something I’ve discussed with both of you is this issue of what are the right tests. And you both know the very first test I give to any new spin of an LLM is I present a patient, the results—a mythical patient—the results of my physical exam, my mythical physical exam. Maybe some results of some initial labs. And then I present or propose a differential diagnosis. And if you’re not in medicine, a differential diagnosis you can just think of as a prioritized list of the possible diagnoses that fit with all that data. And in that proposed differential, I always intentionally make two mistakes.  I make a textbook technical error in one of the possible elements of the differential diagnosis, and I have an error of omission. And, you know, I just want to know, does the LLM understand what I’m talking about? And all the good ones out there do now. But then I want to know, can it spot the errors? And then most importantly, is it willing to tell me I’m wrong, that I’ve made a mistake?   That last piece seems really hard for AI today. And so let me ask you first, Seb, because at the time of this taping, of course, there was a new spin of GPT-4o last week that became overly sycophantic. In other words, it was actually prone in that test of mine not only to not tell me I’m wrong, but it actually praised me for the creativity of my differential. [LAUGHTER] What’s up with that?  BUBECK: Yeah, I guess it’s a testament to the fact that training those models is still more of an art than a science. So it’s a difficult job. Just to be clear with the audience, we have rolled back that [LAUGHS] version of GPT-4o, so now we don’t have the sycophant version out there.  Yeah, no, it’s a really difficult question. It has to do … as you said, it’s very technical. It has to do with the post-training and how, like, where do you nudge the model? So, you know, there is this very classical by now technique called RLHF [reinforcement learning from human feedback], where you push the model in the direction of a certain reward model. So the reward model is just telling the model, you know, what behavior is good, what behavior is bad.  But this reward model is itself an LLM, and, you know, Bill was saying at the very beginning of the conversation that we don’t really understand how those LLMs deal with concepts like, you know, where is the capital of France located? Things like that. It is the same thing for this reward model. We don’t know why it says that it prefers one output to another, and whether this is correlated with some sycophancy is, you know, something that we discovered basically just now. That if you push too hard in optimization on this reward model, you will get a sycophant model.  So it’s kind of … what I’m trying to say is we became too good at what we were doing, and we ended up, in fact, in a trap of the reward model.  LEE: I mean, you do want … it’s a difficult balance because you do want models to follow your desires and …  BUBECK: It’s a very difficult, very difficult balance.  LEE: So this brings up then the following question for me, which is the extent to which we think we’ll need to have specially trained models for things. So let me start with you, Bill. Do you have a point of view on whether we will need to, you know, quote-unquote take AI models to med school? Have them specially trained? Like, if you were going to deploy something to give medical care in underserved parts of the world, do we need to do something special to create those models?  GATES: We certainly need to teach them the African languages and the unique dialects so that the multimedia interactions are very high quality. We certainly need to teach them the disease prevalence and unique disease patterns like, you know, neglected tropical diseases and malaria. So we need to gather a set of facts that somebody trying to go for a US customer base, you know, wouldn’t necessarily have that in there.  Those two things are actually very straightforward because the additional training time is small. I’d say for the next few years, we’ll also need to do reinforcement learning about the context of being a doctor and how important certain behaviors are. Humans learn over the course of their life to some degree that, I’m in a different context and the way I behave in terms of being willing to criticize or be nice, you know, how important is it? Who’s here? What’s my relationship to them?   Right now, these machines don’t have that broad social experience. And so if you know it’s going to be used for health things, a lot of reinforcement learning of the very best humans in that context would still be valuable. Eventually, the models will, having read all the literature of the world about good doctors, bad doctors, it’ll understand as soon as you say, “I want you to be a doctor diagnosing somebody.” All of the implicit reinforcement that fits that situation, you know, will be there. LEE: Yeah. GATES: And so I hope three years from now, we don’t have to do that reinforcement learning. But today, for any medical context, you would want a lot of data to reinforce tone, willingness to say things when, you know, there might be something significant at stake.  LEE: Yeah. So, you know, something Bill said, kind of, reminds me of another thing that I think we missed, which is, the context also … and the specialization also pertains to different, I guess, what we still call “modes,” although I don’t know if the idea of multimodal is the same as it was two years ago. But, you know, what do you make of all of the hubbub around—in fact, within Microsoft Research, this is a big deal, but I think we’re far from alone—you know, medical images and vision, video, proteins and molecules, cell, you know, cellular data and so on.  BUBECK: Yeah. OK. So there is a lot to say to everything … to the last, you know, couple of minutes. Maybe on the specialization aspect, you know, I think there is, hiding behind this, a really fundamental scientific question of whether eventually we have a singular AGI [artificial general intelligence] that kind of knows everything and you can just put, you know, explain your own context and it will just get it and understand everything.  That’s one vision. I have to say, I don’t particularly believe in this vision. In fact, we humans are not like that at all. I think, hopefully, we are general intelligences, yet we have to specialize a lot. And, you know, I did myself a lot of RL, reinforcement learning, on mathematics. Like, that’s what I did, you know, spent a lot of time doing that. And I didn’t improve on other aspects. You know, in fact, I probably degraded in other aspects. [LAUGHTER] So it’s … I think it’s an important example to have in mind.  LEE: I think I might disagree with you on that, though, because, like, doesn’t a model have to see both good science and bad science in order to be able to gain the ability to discern between the two?  BUBECK: Yeah, no, that absolutely. I think there is value in seeing the generality, in having a very broad base. But then you, kind of, specialize on verticals. And this is where also, you know, open-weights model, which we haven’t talked about yet, are really important because they allow you to provide this broad base to everyone. And then you can specialize on top of it.  LEE: So we have about three hours of stuff to talk about, but our time is actually running low. BUBECK: Yes, yes, yes.   LEE: So I think I want … there’s a more provocative question. It’s almost a silly question, but I need to ask it of the two of you, which is, is there a future, you know, where AI replaces doctors or replaces, you know, medical specialties that we have today? So what does the world look like, say, five years from now?  GATES: Well, it’s important to distinguish healthcare discovery activity from healthcare delivery activity. We focused mostly on delivery. I think it’s very much within the realm of possibility that the AI is not only accelerating healthcare discovery but substituting for a lot of the roles of, you know, I’m an organic chemist, or I run various types of assays. I can see those, which are, you know, testable-output-type jobs but with still very high value, I can see, you know, some replacement in those areas before the doctor.   The doctor, still understanding the human condition and long-term dialogues, you know, they’ve had a lifetime of reinforcement of that, particularly when you get into areas like mental health. So I wouldn’t say in five years, either people will choose to adopt it, but it will be profound that there’ll be this nearly free intelligence that can do follow-up, that can help you, you know, make sure you went through different possibilities.  And so I’d say, yes, we’ll have doctors, but I’d say healthcare will be massively transformed in its quality and in efficiency by AI in that time period.  LEE: Is there a comparison, useful comparison, say, between doctors and, say, programmers, computer programmers, or doctors and, I don’t know, lawyers?  GATES: Programming is another one that has, kind of, a mathematical correctness to it, you know, and so the objective function that you’re trying to reinforce to, as soon as you can understand the state machines, you can have something that’s “checkable”; that’s correct. So I think programming, you know, which is weird to say, that the machine will beat us at most programming tasks before we let it take over roles that have deep empathy, you know, physical presence and social understanding in them.  LEE: Yeah. By the way, you know, I fully expect in five years that AI will produce mathematical proofs that are checkable for validity, easily checkable, because they’ll be written in a proof-checking language like Lean or something but will be so complex that no human mathematician can understand them. I expect that to happen.   I can imagine in some fields, like cellular biology, we could have the same situation in the future because the molecular pathways, the chemistry, biochemistry of human cells or living cells is as complex as any mathematics, and so it seems possible that we may be in a state where in wet lab, we see, Oh yeah, this actually works, but no one can understand why.  BUBECK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I really agree with Bill’s distinction of the discovery and the delivery, and indeed, the discovery’s when you can check things, and at the end, there is an artifact that you can verify. You know, you can run the protocol in the wet lab and see [if you have] produced what you wanted. So I absolutely agree with that.   And in fact, you know, we don’t have to talk five years from now. I don’t know if you know, but just recently, there was a paper that was published on a scientific discovery using o3- mini (opens in new tab). So this is really amazing. And, you know, just very quickly, just so people know, it was about this statistical physics model, the frustrated Potts model, which has to do with coloring, and basically, the case of three colors, like, more than two colors was open for a long time, and o3 was able to reduce the case of three colors to two colors.   LEE: Yeah.  BUBECK: Which is just, like, astounding. And this is not … this is now. This is happening right now. So this is something that I personally didn’t expect it would happen so quickly, and it’s due to those reasoning models.   Now, on the delivery side, I would add something more to it for the reason why doctors and, in fact, lawyers and coders will remain for a long time, and it’s because we still don’t understand how those models generalize. Like, at the end of the day, we are not able to tell you when they are confronted with a really new, novel situation, whether they will work or not.  Nobody is able to give you that guarantee. And I think until we understand this generalization better, we’re not going to be willing to just let the system in the wild without human supervision.  LEE: But don’t human doctors, human specialists … so, for example, a cardiologist sees a patient in a certain way that a nephrologist …  BUBECK: Yeah. LEE: … or an endocrinologist might not. BUBECK: That’s right. But another cardiologist will understand and, kind of, expect a certain level of generalization from their peer. And this, we just don’t have it with AI models. Now, of course, you’re exactly right. That generalization is also hard for humans. Like, if you have a human trained for one task and you put them into another task, then you don’t … you often don’t know. LEE: OK. You know, the podcast is focused on what’s happened over the last two years. But now, I’d like one provocative prediction about what you think the world of AI and medicine is going to be at some point in the future. You pick your timeframe. I don’t care if it’s two years or 20 years from now, but, you know, what do you think will be different about AI in medicine in that future than today?  BUBECK: Yeah, I think the deployment is going to accelerate soon. Like, we’re really not missing very much. There is this enormous capability overhang. Like, even if progress completely stopped, with current systems, we can do a lot more than what we’re doing right now. So I think this will … this has to be realized, you know, sooner rather than later.  And I think it’s probably dependent on these benchmarks and proper evaluation and tying this with regulation. So these are things that take time in human society and for good reason. But now we already are at two years; you know, give it another two years and it should be really …   LEE: Will AI prescribe your medicines? Write your prescriptions?  BUBECK: I think yes. I think yes.  LEE: OK. Bill?  GATES: Well, I think the next two years, we’ll have massive pilots, and so the amount of use of the AI, still in a copilot-type mode, you know, we should get millions of patient visits, you know, both in general medicine and in the mental health side, as well. And I think that’s going to build up both the data and the confidence to give the AI some additional autonomy. You know, are you going to let it talk to you at night when you’re panicked about your mental health with some ability to escalate? And, you know, I’ve gone so far as to tell politicians with national health systems that if they deploy AI appropriately, that the quality of care, the overload of the doctors, the improvement in the economics will be enough that their voters will be stunned because they just don’t expect this, and, you know, they could be reelected [LAUGHTER] just on this one thing of fixing what is a very overloaded and economically challenged health system in these rich countries.  You know, my personal role is going to be to make sure that in the poorer countries, there isn’t some lag; in fact, in many cases, that we’ll be more aggressive because, you know, we’re comparing to having no access to doctors at all. And, you know, so I think whether it’s India or Africa, there’ll be lessons that are globally valuable because we need medical intelligence. And, you know, thank god AI is going to provide a lot of that.  LEE: Well, on that optimistic note, I think that’s a good way to end. Bill, Seb, really appreciate all of this.   I think the most fundamental prediction we made in the book is that AI would actually find its way into the practice of medicine, and I think that that at least has come true, maybe in different ways than we expected, but it’s come true, and I think it’ll only accelerate from here. So thanks again, both of you.  [TRANSITION MUSIC]  GATES: Yeah. Thanks, you guys.  BUBECK: Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Bill.  LEE: I just always feel such a sense of privilege to have a chance to interact and actually work with people like Bill and Sébastien.    With Bill, I’m always amazed at how practically minded he is. He’s really thinking about the nuts and bolts of what AI might be able to do for people, and his thoughts about underserved parts of the world, the idea that we might actually be able to empower people with access to expert medical knowledge, I think is both inspiring and amazing.   And then, Seb, Sébastien Bubeck, he’s just absolutely a brilliant mind. He has a really firm grip on the deep mathematics of artificial intelligence and brings that to bear in his research and development work. And where that mathematics takes him isn’t just into the nuts and bolts of algorithms but into philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence.   One of the things that Sébastien brought up was the state of evaluation of AI systems. And indeed, he was fairly critical in our conversation. But of course, the world of AI research and development is just moving so fast, and indeed, since we recorded our conversation, OpenAI, in fact, released a new evaluation metric that is directly relevant to medical applications, and that is something called HealthBench. And Microsoft Research also released a new evaluation approach or process called ADeLe.   HealthBench and ADeLe are examples of new approaches to evaluating AI models that are less about testing their knowledge and ability to pass multiple-choice exams and instead are evaluation approaches designed to assess how well AI models are able to complete tasks that actually arise every day in typical healthcare or biomedical research settings. These are examples of really important good work that speak to how well AI models work in the real world of healthcare and biomedical research and how well they can collaborate with human beings in those settings.  You know, I asked Bill and Seb to make some predictions about the future. You know, my own answer, I expect that we’re going to be able to use AI to change how we diagnose patients, change how we decide treatment options.   If you’re a doctor or a nurse and you encounter a patient, you’ll ask questions, do a physical exam, you know, call out for labs just like you do today, but then you’ll be able to engage with AI based on all of that data and just ask, you know, based on all the other people who have gone through the same experience, who have similar data, how were they diagnosed? How were they treated? What were their outcomes? And what does that mean for the patient I have right now? Some people call it the “patients like me” paradigm. And I think that’s going to become real because of AI within our lifetimes. That idea of really grounding the delivery in healthcare and medical practice through data and intelligence, I actually now don’t see any barriers to that future becoming real.  [THEME MUSIC]  I’d like to extend another big thank you to Bill and Sébastien for their time. And to our listeners, as always, it’s a pleasure to have you along for the ride. I hope you’ll join us for our remaining conversations, as well as a second coauthor roundtable with Carey and Zak.   Until next time.   [MUSIC FADES]
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  • What happens to DOGE without Elon Musk?

    Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint. The Department of Government Efficiency, his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid. But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government billion — well short of its ambitioustarget of cutting at least trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk’s departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go. For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE’s tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. “DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,” she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government program. “I was Elon Musk,” she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk’s record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire’s loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
    What do you think Elon Musk’s legacy is? Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there’s a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it’s doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce. There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren’t?First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. So the first thing that happened is, courts said, “No, no, no, you can’t do it this way. You have to bring them back.” The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren’t on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary’s home, what’s happening is they’re looking at these cuts and they’re saying, “No, no, no! We can’t live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.”As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they’re going to have a tough time, and they’re going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they’ve said a lot of insulting things. Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They’re not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They’re scientists. They’re engineers. They’re people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there’s going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it’s analogous to the lasting damage that they’re causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.What happens to this agency now? Who’s in charge of it?Well, what they’ve done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who’s the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he’s gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump’s appointed leaders.And just to bring this around to what we’re here talking about now, they’re in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately?It’s actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It’s adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it’s worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense.Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That’s why it’s so hard to cut it. It’s so hard to cut it because it’s us. And people are living on it. Now, there’s a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it’s called entitlement reform, right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that’s because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues. See More:
    #what #happens #doge #without #elon
    What happens to DOGE without Elon Musk?
    Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint. The Department of Government Efficiency, his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid. But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government billion — well short of its ambitioustarget of cutting at least trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk’s departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go. For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE’s tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. “DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,” she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government program. “I was Elon Musk,” she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk’s record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire’s loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. What do you think Elon Musk’s legacy is? Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there’s a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it’s doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce. There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren’t?First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. So the first thing that happened is, courts said, “No, no, no, you can’t do it this way. You have to bring them back.” The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren’t on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary’s home, what’s happening is they’re looking at these cuts and they’re saying, “No, no, no! We can’t live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.”As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they’re going to have a tough time, and they’re going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they’ve said a lot of insulting things. Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They’re not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They’re scientists. They’re engineers. They’re people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there’s going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it’s analogous to the lasting damage that they’re causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.What happens to this agency now? Who’s in charge of it?Well, what they’ve done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who’s the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he’s gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump’s appointed leaders.And just to bring this around to what we’re here talking about now, they’re in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately?It’s actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It’s adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it’s worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense.Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That’s why it’s so hard to cut it. It’s so hard to cut it because it’s us. And people are living on it. Now, there’s a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it’s called entitlement reform, right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that’s because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues. See More: #what #happens #doge #without #elon
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    What happens to DOGE without Elon Musk?
    Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid. But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government $180 billion — well short of its ambitious (and frankly never realistic) target of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk’s departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go. For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE’s tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. “DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,” she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government program. “I was Elon Musk,” she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk’s record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire’s loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. What do you think Elon Musk’s legacy is? Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there’s a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it’s doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce. There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren’t?First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. So the first thing that happened is, courts said, “No, no, no, you can’t do it this way. You have to bring them back.” The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren’t on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary’s home, what’s happening is they’re looking at these cuts and they’re saying, “No, no, no! We can’t live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.”As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they’re going to have a tough time, and they’re going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they’ve said a lot of insulting things. Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They’re not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They’re scientists. They’re engineers. They’re people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there’s going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it’s analogous to the lasting damage that they’re causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.What happens to this agency now? Who’s in charge of it?Well, what they’ve done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who’s the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he’s gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump’s appointed leaders.And just to bring this around to what we’re here talking about now, they’re in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately?It’s actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It’s adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it’s worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense.Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That’s why it’s so hard to cut it. It’s so hard to cut it because it’s us. And people are living on it. Now, there’s a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it’s called entitlement reform, right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that’s because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues. See More:
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  • No Kings: protests in the eye of the storm

    As President Donald Trump kicked off a birthday military parade on the streets of Washington, DC, what’s estimated as roughly 2,000 events were held across the US and beyond — protesting Trump and Elon Musk’s evisceration of government services, an unprecedented crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and countless other actions from the administration in its first five months. Held under the title “No Kings”, they’re the latest in several mass protests, following April’s Hands Off events and a wave of Tesla Takedown demonstrations in March.As The Verge’s Tina Nguyen went to downtown DC, we also sent reporters to No Kings demonstrations spanning the country, plus a “No Tyrants” event in the UK. How would they unfold after promises of “very heavy force” against protesters in the capital, after the deployment of thousands of military troops in a move a judge has bluntly called illegal, and after promises to “liberate” the city of Los Angeles from its “burdensome leadership” by local elected officials? What about the overnight killing of a Minnesota Democratic state representative and her husband, and the shooting of a Democratic state senator and his wife?The answer, at the events we attended, was fairly calmly — even against a backdrop of chaos.Downtown Los Angeles, CaliforniaAn inflatable baby Donald Trump, dressed in a diaper, hovered over throngs of people rallying outside of Los Angeles City Hall. Demonstrators outnumbered clumps of California National Guard members in fatigues posted up along sidewalks. “Go home to your families, we don’t need you in our streets,” one young person wearing a long braid down her back tells them while marching past. “Trump come catch these hands foo!” the back of her sign reads. I can’t see what the front says, but I can tell there’s an empty bag of Cheetos pasted to it.The big baby joins the march, floating through the streets of Downtown LA over demonstrators. A flatbed truck rolls ahead of it, the band — maybe LA’s own Ozomatli? — singing “We don’t like Trump” to the tune of “We Want The Funk.” Ducking inside Grand Central Market from the march, I talk to Puck and Twinkle Toes — two demonstrators in line for the public restrooms. Twinkle Toes tells me she’s part of an activist clown collective called Imp and Circumstance, wearing pink and white clown makeup and a striped pink and white bow wrapped around a loose hair bun atop her head. She’s here exercising her right to free speech, she says. Demonstrators in Los Angeles marched alongside an inflatable Donald Trump baby dressed in a diaper.“The more people that are out here, the more we know that this is not okay. That we don’t want an autocrat. We want democracy,” Puck tells me, adding that the Pride March in Hollywood last weekend was “nothing but love and sunshine” despite protests and burning driverless cars making headlines in downtown. “The news tries to make you think all of LA is rioting. It’s not.” Puck says.Back out on the streets, a young man quickly writes “Fuck ICE” on a black wall with white spray paint before a group of older demonstrators wearing floppy hats shushes him away — warning him that tagging will only attract more law enforcement.Further along, another older man with tufts of white hair sticking out under his Lakers cap walks stiffly and slowly along under the summer sun. A Mexican flag draped across his shoulders, he crosses Hope Street. A young man wearing a Nike cap makes his way over to ask if he wants water; the old man accepts a bottle and keeps walking without stopping. The march has looped around downtown, and is coming to an end back at City Hall. As I make my way to my bus stop, a line of police vehicles — sirens blasting — whizzes past me, back toward the crowd still gathering around City Hall.The Los Angeles Police Department issued a dispersal order for parts of downtown Los Angeles later in the afternoon, citing people “throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and other objects.” Law enforcement reportedly cleared crowds using gas, and the LAPD authorized the use of “less lethal” force.— Justine CalmaPortland, OregonFour different “No Kings” protests in the greater Portland area on Saturday drew massive crowds of tens of thousands across the city. Various activists, government officials, and representatives for politicians spoke at the rallies, which also featured music and live performances.Protesters of all ages came with dogs, strollers, flags, banners, and hand-made signs. At the downtown waterfront, some tourist boats appeared to still be departing, but the bike rental standwas closed for the day with a hand-lettered explanation reading “No crowns, no thrones, no kings” and “Americans against oligarchy.” Women appearing to be organizers passed out free American flags; many attendees came with their own American flags modified to fly upside down. Most protesters brought signs expressing a wide range of sentiments on the theme of “No Kings.” Some signs were surprisingly verbosewe’d all still be British”) while others were more succinct. Others opted for simple images, such as a picture of a crown crossed out, or — less frequently — a guillotine. Image: Sarah JeongThe waterfront park area was filled with people from the shoreline to the curb of the nearest street, where protesters held up signs to passing cars that honked in approval. The honking of a passing fire truck sent the crowd into an uproarious cheer. Portland is about a thousand miles from the border with Mexico, but the flag of its distant neighbor nation has emerged as protest iconography in solidarity with Los Angeles. The rainbow pride flag was flown as often as the Mexican flag. Military veterans were scattered throughout the crowd, some identifying themselves as having seen action in conflicts spanning from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Emanuel, an Air Force veteran, told me that he had turned out in defense of the constitution and due process, saying, “Nobody has any rights if one person doesn’t have any rights.” Image: Sarah JeongAnger was directed at ICE and the mass deportations all throughout the day, in signage, in chants, and in rally speeches. The previous night, about 150 people protested at a local ICE facility — coincidentally located by the Tesla dealership — a mile south of downtown, near a highway exit. The ICE facility protests, which have been continuous for some days, have been steadily building up. A couple of “No Kings” signs were present on Friday.. Demonstrators stood on the curb urging passing cars to “Honk if you hate fascists,” successfully eliciting car horns every few seconds, including some from a pristine white Tesla. Federal law enforcement in camo and helmets, their faces obscured, maced and shot at protesters with pepper balls, targeting them through the gates and sniping at them from the rooftop of the building. A handful of protesters — many wearing gas masks and respirators — formed phalanx formations in the driveway, wielding umbrellas and handmade shields. On Saturday, a speaker at one of the “No Kings” rallies advertised the occupation of the ICE facility, saying, “We’re a sanctuary city.” The crowd — replete with American flags both upside down and right side up — cheered. — Sarah JeongNew Port Richey, FloridaNearly every intersection on Pasco County’s State Road 54 looks the same: a cross-section of strip malls, each anchored by a Walmart or Target or Publix, surrounded by a mix of restaurants, nail salons, and gas stations. It’s not an environment that is particularly conducive to protests, but hundreds of people turned out in humid, 90-plus degree weather anyway. The overall size of the crowd is hard to determine, but it’s larger than I — and other attendees — anticipated, given the local demographics.New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleEveryone is on the sidewalk; an organizer with a megaphone tells people to use crosswalks if they’re going to attempt to brave the six-lane highway. Two days earlier, Governor Ron DeSantis said Floridians could legally run over protesters on the street if they feel “threatened.” New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleSo far, most drivers seem friendly. There are lots of supportive honks. One woman rolls down her window and thanks the protesters. “I love you! I wish I could be with you, but I have to work today!” she yells as she drives away. Not everyone is amenable. A man in a MAGA hat marches through the crowd waving a “thin green line” flag and yelling “long live the king!” as people in the crowd call him a traitor. A pickup truck drives by blasting “Ice Ice Baby,” waving another pro-law enforcement flag. The protesters have flags, too: American flags large and small, some upside down; Mexican; Ukrainian; Palestinian; Canadian; different configurations of pride and trans flags. Their signs, like their flags, illustrate their diverse reasons for attending: opposition to Trump’s “big beautiful” funding bill, DOGE’s budget cuts, and ICE arrests; support for immigrants, government workers, and Palestinians. One woman wears an inflatable chicken suit. Her friend pulls an effigy of Trump — dressed to look both like an eighteenth-century monarch, a taco, and a chicken — alongside her.New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleMost of the demonstrators are on the older side, but there are people of all ages in attendance. “I thought it was going to be maybe 20 people with a couple of signs,” Abby, 24, says, adding that she’s pleasantly surprised at both the turnout and the fact that most of the protesters are of retirement age. Abe, 20, tells me this is his first protest. Holding a sign that says “ICE = GESTAPO,” he tells me he came out to support a friend who is Mexican. Three teenagers walk by with signs expressing support for immigrants: “While Trump destroys America, we built it.” “Trump: 3 felonies. My parents: 0.” As I drive away, I notice nine counter-protesters off to the side, around the corner from the main event. They wave their own flags, but the demonstrators seemingly pay them no mind.— Gaby Del ValleHistoric Filipinotown, Los AngelesWearing a camo baseball cap — “Desert Storm Veteran” emblazoned on the front — Joe Arciaga greets a crowd of about 100 people in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown around 9:00AM.“Good morning everyone, are you ready for some beautiful trouble?” Arciaga says into the megaphone, an American flag bandana wrapped around his wrist. The faces of Filipino labor leaders Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, who organized farm workers alongside Cesar Chavez, peer over his shoulders from a mural that lines the length of Unidad Park where Arciaga and a group called Lakas Collective helped organize this neighborhood No Kings rally. “I’m a Desert Storm veteran, and I’m a father of three and a grandfather of three, and I want to work for a future where democracy is upheld, due process, civil rights, the preservation of the rule of law — That’s all I want. I’m not a billionaire, I’m just a regular Joe, right?”, he tells The Verge.Joe Arciaga speaks to people at a rally in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles. Image: Justine Calma“I am mad as hell,” he says, when I ask him about the Army 250th anniversary parade Donald Trump has organized in Washington, DC coinciding with the president’s birthday. “The guy does not deserve to be honored, he’s a draft dodger, right?” Arciaga says. He’s “livid” that the President and DOGE have fired veterans working for federal agencies and slashed VA staff.Arciaga organizes the crowd into two lines that file out of the park to stand along Beverly Blvd., one of the main drags through LA. Arciaga has deputized a handful of attendees with security or medical experience with whistles to serve as “marshals” tasked with flagging and de-escalating any potentially risky situation that might arise. Johneric Concordia, one of the co-founders of the popular The Park’s Finest barbecue joint in the neighborhood, is MCing out on Beverly Blvd. He and Arciaga direct people onto the sidewalks and off the asphalt as honking cars zip by. In between chants of “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and rap songs from LA artist Bambu that Concordia plays from a speaker, Concordia hypes up the organizers. “Who’s cool? Joe’s cool?” He spits into the microphone connected to his speaker. “Who’s streets? Our streets!” the crowd cheers. An hour later, a man sitting at a red light in a black Prius rolls down his window. “Go home!” he yells from the intersection. “Take your Mexican flag and go home!”The crowd mostly ignores him. One attendee on the corner holds up his “No Kings” sign to the Prius without turning his head to look at him. A few minutes later, a jogger in a blue t-shirt raises his fist as he passes the crowd. “Fuck yeah guys,” he says to cheers.By 10AM, the neighborhood event is coming to a close. Demonstrators start to trickle away, some fanning out to other rallies planned across LA today. Concordia is heading out too, microphone and speaker still in hand, “If you’re headed to downtown, watch out for suspicious crew cuts!” — Justine CalmaSan Francisco, California1/10Most of the crowd trickled out after 2pm, which was the scheduled end time of the protest, but hundreds stayed in the area. Image: Vjeran PavicLondon, UKLondon’s protest was a little different than most: it was almost entirely bereft of “No Kings” signs, thanks to the fact that about two miles away much larger crowds were gathered to celebrate the official birthday of one King Charles III. “We don’t have anything against King Charles,” Alyssa, a member of organizers Indivisible London, told me. And so, “out of respect for our host country as immigrants,” they instead set up shop in front of the US embassy with a tweaked message: “No kings, no crowns” became “no tyrants, no clowns.” London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonOf the hundreds gathered, not everyone got the memo, with a few painted signs decrying kings and crowns regardless, and one brave Brit brandishing a bit of cardboard with a simple message: “Our king is better than yours!”London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonStill, most of the crowd were on board, with red noses, clown suits, and Pennywise masks dotted throughout, plus costumes ranging from tacos to Roman emperors. “I think tyrants is the better word, and that’s why I dressed up as Caesar, because he was the original,” says Anna, a Long Island native who’s lived in London for three years. “Nobody likes a tyrant. Nobody. And they don’t do well, historically, but they destroy a lot.”For 90 minutes or so the crowd — predominantly American, judging by the accents around me — leaned into the circus theme. Speakers shared the stage with performers, from a comic singalong of anti-Trump protest songs to a protracted pantomime in which a woman in a banana costume exhorted the crowd to pelt a Donald Trump impersonator with fresh peels. London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonDuring a break in festivities, Alyssa told the crowd, “The most threatening sound to an oligarch is laughter.”— Dominic PrestonProspect Park, Brooklyn, New YorkThe No Kings protest at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza was a calmer affair. Instead of gathering under the picturesque memorial arch, protesters were largely sequestered to a corner right outside Prospect Park, with some streets blocked off by police. The weekly farmers market was in full swing, meaning people cradling bundles of rhubarb were swerving in and out of protest signs that read things like, “Hating Donald Trump is Brat” and “Is it time to get out the pitch forks?” Like during the Hands Off protest in April, New York got rain on Saturday.Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe area where protesters were gathered made it difficult to count the crowd, but there were hundreds — perhaps a few thousand — people that streamed in and out. At one point, some protesters began marching down the street alongside Prospect Park, while others stayed at Grand Army Plaza to chant, cheer, and hold signs up at oncoming vehicles. With its proximity to the public library, the park, and densely populated neighborhoods, the massive intersection is a high-foot traffic area. Cars blared their horns as they passed, American flags waving in the chilly afternoon breeze.Jane, a Brooklyn resident who stood on the curb opposite the protesters, said she isn’t typically someone who comes out to actions like this: before the No Kings event, she had only ever been to one protest, the Women’s March.Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia Sato“I’m deeply concerned about our country,” Jane said, pausing as a long stream of trucks and cars honked continuously in support of the protesters in the background. “I think Trump is behaving as an authoritarian. We’ve seen in Russia, in Hungary, in Hong Kong, that the slide from freedom to not freedom is very fast and very quick if people do not make their voices heard,” Jane said. “I’m concerned that that’s what’s happening in the United States.” Jane also cited cuts to Medicaid and funding for academic research as well as tariffs as being “unacceptable.”Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe event was peaceful — there were lots of kids present — and people were in good spirits despite the rain. Protest signs ran the gamut from general anti-Trump slogansto New York City-specific causes like “Andrew Cuomo can’t read”. One sign read, “Fix your hearts or die,” an iconic line from the late director, David Lynch’s, Twin Peaks: The Return. And of course, amid nationwide immigration raids that have been escalated by the involvement of the federal government, ICE was top of mind: one sign simply read, “Melt ICE,” and another protester held a large “NO ICE IN NYC” sign. Though it was smaller and more contained than other events, the protest didn’t lack conviction: attendees of all ages stood in the cold rain, chanting and blowing into vuvuzela, banging the lids of pots and pans. At one point a man stood on the median on the street, leading the group in chants of “No justice, no peace.” Cars laid on the horn as they drove by.— Mia SatoAkron, OhioIt’s been raining pretty hard the last few days in Akron, OH, so much that I didn’t think there’d be a large turnout for our chapter of the No Kings protest. But I was emphatically proven wrong as the crowds I saw dwarfed the Tesla Takedown protests last month. Officially, the protest was to take place in front of the John F. Seiberling Federal Building on Main Street in Downtown Akron. But the concentration of people spilled over from that small space down Main Street and up Market Street. All told, though there were no official counts, I estimate somewhere between 500 to 900 people in this blue enclave in Northeast Ohio.The mood was exuberant, buoyed by supporters who honked their horns as they passed. The chorus of horns was nonstop, and when a sanitation truck honked as it went by, cheers got louder. The chants the crowds were singing took on a local flare. Ohio is the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes and anywhere you go, shout “O-H” and you’ll invariably get an “I-O” response. The crowds used that convention to make their own chant, “OH-IO, Donald Trump has got to go.”There was no police presence here and the crowd was very good at policing itself. Ostensibly out of concern for the incidents where people have rammed their cars into protestor crowds, the people here have taken up crossing guard duties, aiding folks who wish to cross Main or Market Streets. Toward the end of my time at the protest, I saw an older gentleman wearing Kent State gear and holding a sign that read, “Remember another time the National Guard was called in?” His sign featured a drawing of the famous photo from the event in which four Kent State students during a protest of the Vietnam War were killed by National Guard troops. I caught up with him to ask him some questions and he told me his name was Chuck Ayers, a professional cartoonist, and was present at the shooting. Akron, OH. Image: Ash Parrish“When I saw the National Guard in front of the federal building in LA,” he told me, “It was just another flashback.”He did not tell me this at the time, but Ayers is a nationally recognized cartoonist, noted for co-creating the comic strip Crankshaft. He’s lived in Ohio his entire life and of course, drew that sign himself. As he was telling me about how seeing news of the National Guard being deployed in LA, I could see him strain to hold back his emotions. He said it still hurts to see this 55 years later, but that he was heartened to see so many people standing here in community and solidarity. He also said that given his pain and trauma he almost didn’t come. When I asked why he showed up when it so obviously causes him pain he said simply, “Because I have to.”— Ash ParrishOneonta, New YorkOn a northward drive to Oneonta — population roughly 15,000, the largest city in New York’s mainly rural Otsego County — one of the most prominent landmarks is a sprawling barn splashed in huge, painted block letters with TRUMP 2024.It’s Trump country, but not uniformly Trumpy country, as evidenced by what I estimated as a hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a field just below Main Street that came together with a friendly county-fair atmosphere. Kids sat on their parents’ shoulders; American flags fluttered next to signs with slogans like SHADE NEVER MADE ANYONE LESS GAY, and attendees grumbled persistently about the event’s feeble sound system, set up on the bed of a pickup truck. It was the kind of conspicuously patriotic, far-from-urban protest that the Trump administration has all but insisted doesn’t exist.Image: Adi RobertsonBeyond a general condemnation of Trump, protest signs repped the same issues being denounced across the country. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine made an appearance, as did Elon Musk and Tesla. A couple of people called out funding cuts for organizations like NPR, one neatly lettered sign reminded us that WEATHER FORECASTING SAVES LIVES, another warned “Keep your nasty little hands off Social Security,” and a lot — unsurprisingly, given the past week’s events — attacked mass deportations and ICE. An attendee who identified himself as Bill, standing behind a placard that blocked most of him from sight, laid out his anger at the administration’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency. “I think if it was not for protests, there would be no change,” he told me.The event itself, supported by a coalition including the local chapter of Indivisible, highlighted topics like reproductive justice and LGBTQ rights alongside issues for groups often stereotyped as Republican blocs — there was a speech about Department of Veterans Affairs cuts and a representative from the local Office for the Aging. Rules for a march around the modest downtown were laid out: no blocking pedestrians or vehicles, and for the sake of families doing weekend shopping, watch the language. “Fuck!” one person yelled indistinctly from the audience. “No, no,” the event’s emcee chided gently. The philosophy, as she put it, was one of persuasion. “We want to build the resistance, not make people angry at us.”Image: Adi RobertsonBut even in a place that will almost certainly never see a National Guard deployment or the ire of a Truth Social post, the Trump administration’s brutal deportation program had just hit close to home. Only hours before the protest commenced, ICE agents were recorded handcuffing a man and removing him in an unmarked black car — detaining what was reportedly a legal resident seeking asylum from Venezuela. The mayor of Oneonta, Mark Drnek, relayed the news to the crowd. “ICE! We see you!” boomed Drnek from the truckbed. “We recognize you for what you are, and we understand, and we reject your vile purpose.”The crowd cheered furiously. The stars and stripes waved.- Adi RobertsonSee More: Policy
    #kings #protests #eye #storm
    No Kings: protests in the eye of the storm
    As President Donald Trump kicked off a birthday military parade on the streets of Washington, DC, what’s estimated as roughly 2,000 events were held across the US and beyond — protesting Trump and Elon Musk’s evisceration of government services, an unprecedented crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and countless other actions from the administration in its first five months. Held under the title “No Kings”, they’re the latest in several mass protests, following April’s Hands Off events and a wave of Tesla Takedown demonstrations in March.As The Verge’s Tina Nguyen went to downtown DC, we also sent reporters to No Kings demonstrations spanning the country, plus a “No Tyrants” event in the UK. How would they unfold after promises of “very heavy force” against protesters in the capital, after the deployment of thousands of military troops in a move a judge has bluntly called illegal, and after promises to “liberate” the city of Los Angeles from its “burdensome leadership” by local elected officials? What about the overnight killing of a Minnesota Democratic state representative and her husband, and the shooting of a Democratic state senator and his wife?The answer, at the events we attended, was fairly calmly — even against a backdrop of chaos.Downtown Los Angeles, CaliforniaAn inflatable baby Donald Trump, dressed in a diaper, hovered over throngs of people rallying outside of Los Angeles City Hall. Demonstrators outnumbered clumps of California National Guard members in fatigues posted up along sidewalks. “Go home to your families, we don’t need you in our streets,” one young person wearing a long braid down her back tells them while marching past. “Trump come catch these hands foo!” the back of her sign reads. I can’t see what the front says, but I can tell there’s an empty bag of Cheetos pasted to it.The big baby joins the march, floating through the streets of Downtown LA over demonstrators. A flatbed truck rolls ahead of it, the band — maybe LA’s own Ozomatli? — singing “We don’t like Trump” to the tune of “We Want The Funk.” Ducking inside Grand Central Market from the march, I talk to Puck and Twinkle Toes — two demonstrators in line for the public restrooms. Twinkle Toes tells me she’s part of an activist clown collective called Imp and Circumstance, wearing pink and white clown makeup and a striped pink and white bow wrapped around a loose hair bun atop her head. She’s here exercising her right to free speech, she says. Demonstrators in Los Angeles marched alongside an inflatable Donald Trump baby dressed in a diaper.“The more people that are out here, the more we know that this is not okay. That we don’t want an autocrat. We want democracy,” Puck tells me, adding that the Pride March in Hollywood last weekend was “nothing but love and sunshine” despite protests and burning driverless cars making headlines in downtown. “The news tries to make you think all of LA is rioting. It’s not.” Puck says.Back out on the streets, a young man quickly writes “Fuck ICE” on a black wall with white spray paint before a group of older demonstrators wearing floppy hats shushes him away — warning him that tagging will only attract more law enforcement.Further along, another older man with tufts of white hair sticking out under his Lakers cap walks stiffly and slowly along under the summer sun. A Mexican flag draped across his shoulders, he crosses Hope Street. A young man wearing a Nike cap makes his way over to ask if he wants water; the old man accepts a bottle and keeps walking without stopping. The march has looped around downtown, and is coming to an end back at City Hall. As I make my way to my bus stop, a line of police vehicles — sirens blasting — whizzes past me, back toward the crowd still gathering around City Hall.The Los Angeles Police Department issued a dispersal order for parts of downtown Los Angeles later in the afternoon, citing people “throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and other objects.” Law enforcement reportedly cleared crowds using gas, and the LAPD authorized the use of “less lethal” force.— Justine CalmaPortland, OregonFour different “No Kings” protests in the greater Portland area on Saturday drew massive crowds of tens of thousands across the city. Various activists, government officials, and representatives for politicians spoke at the rallies, which also featured music and live performances.Protesters of all ages came with dogs, strollers, flags, banners, and hand-made signs. At the downtown waterfront, some tourist boats appeared to still be departing, but the bike rental standwas closed for the day with a hand-lettered explanation reading “No crowns, no thrones, no kings” and “Americans against oligarchy.” Women appearing to be organizers passed out free American flags; many attendees came with their own American flags modified to fly upside down. Most protesters brought signs expressing a wide range of sentiments on the theme of “No Kings.” Some signs were surprisingly verbosewe’d all still be British”) while others were more succinct. Others opted for simple images, such as a picture of a crown crossed out, or — less frequently — a guillotine. Image: Sarah JeongThe waterfront park area was filled with people from the shoreline to the curb of the nearest street, where protesters held up signs to passing cars that honked in approval. The honking of a passing fire truck sent the crowd into an uproarious cheer. Portland is about a thousand miles from the border with Mexico, but the flag of its distant neighbor nation has emerged as protest iconography in solidarity with Los Angeles. The rainbow pride flag was flown as often as the Mexican flag. Military veterans were scattered throughout the crowd, some identifying themselves as having seen action in conflicts spanning from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Emanuel, an Air Force veteran, told me that he had turned out in defense of the constitution and due process, saying, “Nobody has any rights if one person doesn’t have any rights.” Image: Sarah JeongAnger was directed at ICE and the mass deportations all throughout the day, in signage, in chants, and in rally speeches. The previous night, about 150 people protested at a local ICE facility — coincidentally located by the Tesla dealership — a mile south of downtown, near a highway exit. The ICE facility protests, which have been continuous for some days, have been steadily building up. A couple of “No Kings” signs were present on Friday.. Demonstrators stood on the curb urging passing cars to “Honk if you hate fascists,” successfully eliciting car horns every few seconds, including some from a pristine white Tesla. Federal law enforcement in camo and helmets, their faces obscured, maced and shot at protesters with pepper balls, targeting them through the gates and sniping at them from the rooftop of the building. A handful of protesters — many wearing gas masks and respirators — formed phalanx formations in the driveway, wielding umbrellas and handmade shields. On Saturday, a speaker at one of the “No Kings” rallies advertised the occupation of the ICE facility, saying, “We’re a sanctuary city.” The crowd — replete with American flags both upside down and right side up — cheered. — Sarah JeongNew Port Richey, FloridaNearly every intersection on Pasco County’s State Road 54 looks the same: a cross-section of strip malls, each anchored by a Walmart or Target or Publix, surrounded by a mix of restaurants, nail salons, and gas stations. It’s not an environment that is particularly conducive to protests, but hundreds of people turned out in humid, 90-plus degree weather anyway. The overall size of the crowd is hard to determine, but it’s larger than I — and other attendees — anticipated, given the local demographics.New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleEveryone is on the sidewalk; an organizer with a megaphone tells people to use crosswalks if they’re going to attempt to brave the six-lane highway. Two days earlier, Governor Ron DeSantis said Floridians could legally run over protesters on the street if they feel “threatened.” New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleSo far, most drivers seem friendly. There are lots of supportive honks. One woman rolls down her window and thanks the protesters. “I love you! I wish I could be with you, but I have to work today!” she yells as she drives away. Not everyone is amenable. A man in a MAGA hat marches through the crowd waving a “thin green line” flag and yelling “long live the king!” as people in the crowd call him a traitor. A pickup truck drives by blasting “Ice Ice Baby,” waving another pro-law enforcement flag. The protesters have flags, too: American flags large and small, some upside down; Mexican; Ukrainian; Palestinian; Canadian; different configurations of pride and trans flags. Their signs, like their flags, illustrate their diverse reasons for attending: opposition to Trump’s “big beautiful” funding bill, DOGE’s budget cuts, and ICE arrests; support for immigrants, government workers, and Palestinians. One woman wears an inflatable chicken suit. Her friend pulls an effigy of Trump — dressed to look both like an eighteenth-century monarch, a taco, and a chicken — alongside her.New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleMost of the demonstrators are on the older side, but there are people of all ages in attendance. “I thought it was going to be maybe 20 people with a couple of signs,” Abby, 24, says, adding that she’s pleasantly surprised at both the turnout and the fact that most of the protesters are of retirement age. Abe, 20, tells me this is his first protest. Holding a sign that says “ICE = GESTAPO,” he tells me he came out to support a friend who is Mexican. Three teenagers walk by with signs expressing support for immigrants: “While Trump destroys America, we built it.” “Trump: 3 felonies. My parents: 0.” As I drive away, I notice nine counter-protesters off to the side, around the corner from the main event. They wave their own flags, but the demonstrators seemingly pay them no mind.— Gaby Del ValleHistoric Filipinotown, Los AngelesWearing a camo baseball cap — “Desert Storm Veteran” emblazoned on the front — Joe Arciaga greets a crowd of about 100 people in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown around 9:00AM.“Good morning everyone, are you ready for some beautiful trouble?” Arciaga says into the megaphone, an American flag bandana wrapped around his wrist. The faces of Filipino labor leaders Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, who organized farm workers alongside Cesar Chavez, peer over his shoulders from a mural that lines the length of Unidad Park where Arciaga and a group called Lakas Collective helped organize this neighborhood No Kings rally. “I’m a Desert Storm veteran, and I’m a father of three and a grandfather of three, and I want to work for a future where democracy is upheld, due process, civil rights, the preservation of the rule of law — That’s all I want. I’m not a billionaire, I’m just a regular Joe, right?”, he tells The Verge.Joe Arciaga speaks to people at a rally in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles. Image: Justine Calma“I am mad as hell,” he says, when I ask him about the Army 250th anniversary parade Donald Trump has organized in Washington, DC coinciding with the president’s birthday. “The guy does not deserve to be honored, he’s a draft dodger, right?” Arciaga says. He’s “livid” that the President and DOGE have fired veterans working for federal agencies and slashed VA staff.Arciaga organizes the crowd into two lines that file out of the park to stand along Beverly Blvd., one of the main drags through LA. Arciaga has deputized a handful of attendees with security or medical experience with whistles to serve as “marshals” tasked with flagging and de-escalating any potentially risky situation that might arise. Johneric Concordia, one of the co-founders of the popular The Park’s Finest barbecue joint in the neighborhood, is MCing out on Beverly Blvd. He and Arciaga direct people onto the sidewalks and off the asphalt as honking cars zip by. In between chants of “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and rap songs from LA artist Bambu that Concordia plays from a speaker, Concordia hypes up the organizers. “Who’s cool? Joe’s cool?” He spits into the microphone connected to his speaker. “Who’s streets? Our streets!” the crowd cheers. An hour later, a man sitting at a red light in a black Prius rolls down his window. “Go home!” he yells from the intersection. “Take your Mexican flag and go home!”The crowd mostly ignores him. One attendee on the corner holds up his “No Kings” sign to the Prius without turning his head to look at him. A few minutes later, a jogger in a blue t-shirt raises his fist as he passes the crowd. “Fuck yeah guys,” he says to cheers.By 10AM, the neighborhood event is coming to a close. Demonstrators start to trickle away, some fanning out to other rallies planned across LA today. Concordia is heading out too, microphone and speaker still in hand, “If you’re headed to downtown, watch out for suspicious crew cuts!” — Justine CalmaSan Francisco, California1/10Most of the crowd trickled out after 2pm, which was the scheduled end time of the protest, but hundreds stayed in the area. Image: Vjeran PavicLondon, UKLondon’s protest was a little different than most: it was almost entirely bereft of “No Kings” signs, thanks to the fact that about two miles away much larger crowds were gathered to celebrate the official birthday of one King Charles III. “We don’t have anything against King Charles,” Alyssa, a member of organizers Indivisible London, told me. And so, “out of respect for our host country as immigrants,” they instead set up shop in front of the US embassy with a tweaked message: “No kings, no crowns” became “no tyrants, no clowns.” London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonOf the hundreds gathered, not everyone got the memo, with a few painted signs decrying kings and crowns regardless, and one brave Brit brandishing a bit of cardboard with a simple message: “Our king is better than yours!”London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonStill, most of the crowd were on board, with red noses, clown suits, and Pennywise masks dotted throughout, plus costumes ranging from tacos to Roman emperors. “I think tyrants is the better word, and that’s why I dressed up as Caesar, because he was the original,” says Anna, a Long Island native who’s lived in London for three years. “Nobody likes a tyrant. Nobody. And they don’t do well, historically, but they destroy a lot.”For 90 minutes or so the crowd — predominantly American, judging by the accents around me — leaned into the circus theme. Speakers shared the stage with performers, from a comic singalong of anti-Trump protest songs to a protracted pantomime in which a woman in a banana costume exhorted the crowd to pelt a Donald Trump impersonator with fresh peels. London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonDuring a break in festivities, Alyssa told the crowd, “The most threatening sound to an oligarch is laughter.”— Dominic PrestonProspect Park, Brooklyn, New YorkThe No Kings protest at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza was a calmer affair. Instead of gathering under the picturesque memorial arch, protesters were largely sequestered to a corner right outside Prospect Park, with some streets blocked off by police. The weekly farmers market was in full swing, meaning people cradling bundles of rhubarb were swerving in and out of protest signs that read things like, “Hating Donald Trump is Brat” and “Is it time to get out the pitch forks?” Like during the Hands Off protest in April, New York got rain on Saturday.Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe area where protesters were gathered made it difficult to count the crowd, but there were hundreds — perhaps a few thousand — people that streamed in and out. At one point, some protesters began marching down the street alongside Prospect Park, while others stayed at Grand Army Plaza to chant, cheer, and hold signs up at oncoming vehicles. With its proximity to the public library, the park, and densely populated neighborhoods, the massive intersection is a high-foot traffic area. Cars blared their horns as they passed, American flags waving in the chilly afternoon breeze.Jane, a Brooklyn resident who stood on the curb opposite the protesters, said she isn’t typically someone who comes out to actions like this: before the No Kings event, she had only ever been to one protest, the Women’s March.Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia Sato“I’m deeply concerned about our country,” Jane said, pausing as a long stream of trucks and cars honked continuously in support of the protesters in the background. “I think Trump is behaving as an authoritarian. We’ve seen in Russia, in Hungary, in Hong Kong, that the slide from freedom to not freedom is very fast and very quick if people do not make their voices heard,” Jane said. “I’m concerned that that’s what’s happening in the United States.” Jane also cited cuts to Medicaid and funding for academic research as well as tariffs as being “unacceptable.”Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe event was peaceful — there were lots of kids present — and people were in good spirits despite the rain. Protest signs ran the gamut from general anti-Trump slogansto New York City-specific causes like “Andrew Cuomo can’t read”. One sign read, “Fix your hearts or die,” an iconic line from the late director, David Lynch’s, Twin Peaks: The Return. And of course, amid nationwide immigration raids that have been escalated by the involvement of the federal government, ICE was top of mind: one sign simply read, “Melt ICE,” and another protester held a large “NO ICE IN NYC” sign. Though it was smaller and more contained than other events, the protest didn’t lack conviction: attendees of all ages stood in the cold rain, chanting and blowing into vuvuzela, banging the lids of pots and pans. At one point a man stood on the median on the street, leading the group in chants of “No justice, no peace.” Cars laid on the horn as they drove by.— Mia SatoAkron, OhioIt’s been raining pretty hard the last few days in Akron, OH, so much that I didn’t think there’d be a large turnout for our chapter of the No Kings protest. But I was emphatically proven wrong as the crowds I saw dwarfed the Tesla Takedown protests last month. Officially, the protest was to take place in front of the John F. Seiberling Federal Building on Main Street in Downtown Akron. But the concentration of people spilled over from that small space down Main Street and up Market Street. All told, though there were no official counts, I estimate somewhere between 500 to 900 people in this blue enclave in Northeast Ohio.The mood was exuberant, buoyed by supporters who honked their horns as they passed. The chorus of horns was nonstop, and when a sanitation truck honked as it went by, cheers got louder. The chants the crowds were singing took on a local flare. Ohio is the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes and anywhere you go, shout “O-H” and you’ll invariably get an “I-O” response. The crowds used that convention to make their own chant, “OH-IO, Donald Trump has got to go.”There was no police presence here and the crowd was very good at policing itself. Ostensibly out of concern for the incidents where people have rammed their cars into protestor crowds, the people here have taken up crossing guard duties, aiding folks who wish to cross Main or Market Streets. Toward the end of my time at the protest, I saw an older gentleman wearing Kent State gear and holding a sign that read, “Remember another time the National Guard was called in?” His sign featured a drawing of the famous photo from the event in which four Kent State students during a protest of the Vietnam War were killed by National Guard troops. I caught up with him to ask him some questions and he told me his name was Chuck Ayers, a professional cartoonist, and was present at the shooting. Akron, OH. Image: Ash Parrish“When I saw the National Guard in front of the federal building in LA,” he told me, “It was just another flashback.”He did not tell me this at the time, but Ayers is a nationally recognized cartoonist, noted for co-creating the comic strip Crankshaft. He’s lived in Ohio his entire life and of course, drew that sign himself. As he was telling me about how seeing news of the National Guard being deployed in LA, I could see him strain to hold back his emotions. He said it still hurts to see this 55 years later, but that he was heartened to see so many people standing here in community and solidarity. He also said that given his pain and trauma he almost didn’t come. When I asked why he showed up when it so obviously causes him pain he said simply, “Because I have to.”— Ash ParrishOneonta, New YorkOn a northward drive to Oneonta — population roughly 15,000, the largest city in New York’s mainly rural Otsego County — one of the most prominent landmarks is a sprawling barn splashed in huge, painted block letters with TRUMP 2024.It’s Trump country, but not uniformly Trumpy country, as evidenced by what I estimated as a hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a field just below Main Street that came together with a friendly county-fair atmosphere. Kids sat on their parents’ shoulders; American flags fluttered next to signs with slogans like SHADE NEVER MADE ANYONE LESS GAY, and attendees grumbled persistently about the event’s feeble sound system, set up on the bed of a pickup truck. It was the kind of conspicuously patriotic, far-from-urban protest that the Trump administration has all but insisted doesn’t exist.Image: Adi RobertsonBeyond a general condemnation of Trump, protest signs repped the same issues being denounced across the country. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine made an appearance, as did Elon Musk and Tesla. A couple of people called out funding cuts for organizations like NPR, one neatly lettered sign reminded us that WEATHER FORECASTING SAVES LIVES, another warned “Keep your nasty little hands off Social Security,” and a lot — unsurprisingly, given the past week’s events — attacked mass deportations and ICE. An attendee who identified himself as Bill, standing behind a placard that blocked most of him from sight, laid out his anger at the administration’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency. “I think if it was not for protests, there would be no change,” he told me.The event itself, supported by a coalition including the local chapter of Indivisible, highlighted topics like reproductive justice and LGBTQ rights alongside issues for groups often stereotyped as Republican blocs — there was a speech about Department of Veterans Affairs cuts and a representative from the local Office for the Aging. Rules for a march around the modest downtown were laid out: no blocking pedestrians or vehicles, and for the sake of families doing weekend shopping, watch the language. “Fuck!” one person yelled indistinctly from the audience. “No, no,” the event’s emcee chided gently. The philosophy, as she put it, was one of persuasion. “We want to build the resistance, not make people angry at us.”Image: Adi RobertsonBut even in a place that will almost certainly never see a National Guard deployment or the ire of a Truth Social post, the Trump administration’s brutal deportation program had just hit close to home. Only hours before the protest commenced, ICE agents were recorded handcuffing a man and removing him in an unmarked black car — detaining what was reportedly a legal resident seeking asylum from Venezuela. The mayor of Oneonta, Mark Drnek, relayed the news to the crowd. “ICE! We see you!” boomed Drnek from the truckbed. “We recognize you for what you are, and we understand, and we reject your vile purpose.”The crowd cheered furiously. The stars and stripes waved.- Adi RobertsonSee More: Policy #kings #protests #eye #storm
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    No Kings: protests in the eye of the storm
    As President Donald Trump kicked off a birthday military parade on the streets of Washington, DC, what’s estimated as roughly 2,000 events were held across the US and beyond — protesting Trump and Elon Musk’s evisceration of government services, an unprecedented crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and countless other actions from the administration in its first five months. Held under the title “No Kings” (with, as you’ll see, one conspicuous exception), they’re the latest in several mass protests, following April’s Hands Off events and a wave of Tesla Takedown demonstrations in March.As The Verge’s Tina Nguyen went to downtown DC, we also sent reporters to No Kings demonstrations spanning the country, plus a “No Tyrants” event in the UK. How would they unfold after promises of “very heavy force” against protesters in the capital, after the deployment of thousands of military troops in a move a judge has bluntly called illegal, and after promises to “liberate” the city of Los Angeles from its “burdensome leadership” by local elected officials? What about the overnight killing of a Minnesota Democratic state representative and her husband, and the shooting of a Democratic state senator and his wife?The answer, at the events we attended, was fairly calmly — even against a backdrop of chaos.Downtown Los Angeles, CaliforniaAn inflatable baby Donald Trump, dressed in a diaper, hovered over throngs of people rallying outside of Los Angeles City Hall. Demonstrators outnumbered clumps of California National Guard members in fatigues posted up along sidewalks. “Go home to your families, we don’t need you in our streets,” one young person wearing a long braid down her back tells them while marching past. “Trump come catch these hands foo!” the back of her sign reads. I can’t see what the front says, but I can tell there’s an empty bag of Cheetos pasted to it.The big baby joins the march, floating through the streets of Downtown LA over demonstrators. A flatbed truck rolls ahead of it, the band — maybe LA’s own Ozomatli? — singing “We don’t like Trump” to the tune of “We Want The Funk.” Ducking inside Grand Central Market from the march, I talk to Puck and Twinkle Toes — two demonstrators in line for the public restrooms. Twinkle Toes tells me she’s part of an activist clown collective called Imp and Circumstance, wearing pink and white clown makeup and a striped pink and white bow wrapped around a loose hair bun atop her head. She’s here exercising her right to free speech, she says. Demonstrators in Los Angeles marched alongside an inflatable Donald Trump baby dressed in a diaper.“The more people that are out here, the more we know that this is not okay. That we don’t want an autocrat. We want democracy,” Puck tells me, adding that the Pride March in Hollywood last weekend was “nothing but love and sunshine” despite protests and burning driverless cars making headlines in downtown. “The news tries to make you think all of LA is rioting. It’s not.” Puck says.Back out on the streets, a young man quickly writes “Fuck ICE” on a black wall with white spray paint before a group of older demonstrators wearing floppy hats shushes him away — warning him that tagging will only attract more law enforcement.Further along, another older man with tufts of white hair sticking out under his Lakers cap walks stiffly and slowly along under the summer sun. A Mexican flag draped across his shoulders, he crosses Hope Street. A young man wearing a Nike cap makes his way over to ask if he wants water; the old man accepts a bottle and keeps walking without stopping. The march has looped around downtown, and is coming to an end back at City Hall. As I make my way to my bus stop, a line of police vehicles — sirens blasting — whizzes past me, back toward the crowd still gathering around City Hall.The Los Angeles Police Department issued a dispersal order for parts of downtown Los Angeles later in the afternoon, citing people “throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and other objects.” Law enforcement reportedly cleared crowds using gas, and the LAPD authorized the use of “less lethal” force.— Justine CalmaPortland, OregonFour different “No Kings” protests in the greater Portland area on Saturday drew massive crowds of tens of thousands across the city. Various activists, government officials, and representatives for politicians spoke at the rallies, which also featured music and live performances. (One advertised free drag shows.) Protesters of all ages came with dogs, strollers, flags, banners, and hand-made signs. At the downtown waterfront, some tourist boats appeared to still be departing, but the bike rental stand (which also sells ice cream) was closed for the day with a hand-lettered explanation reading “No crowns, no thrones, no kings” and “Americans against oligarchy.” Women appearing to be organizers passed out free American flags; many attendees came with their own American flags modified to fly upside down. Most protesters brought signs expressing a wide range of sentiments on the theme of “No Kings.” Some signs were surprisingly verbose (“If the founders wanted a unitary executive (a king) we’d all still be British”) while others were more succinct (“Sic semper tyrannis”). Others opted for simple images, such as a picture of a crown crossed out, or — less frequently — a guillotine. Image: Sarah JeongThe waterfront park area was filled with people from the shoreline to the curb of the nearest street, where protesters held up signs to passing cars that honked in approval. The honking of a passing fire truck sent the crowd into an uproarious cheer. Portland is about a thousand miles from the border with Mexico, but the flag of its distant neighbor nation has emerged as protest iconography in solidarity with Los Angeles. The rainbow pride flag was flown as often as the Mexican flag. Military veterans were scattered throughout the crowd, some identifying themselves as having seen action in conflicts spanning from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Emanuel, an Air Force veteran, told me that he had turned out in defense of the constitution and due process, saying, “Nobody has any rights if one person doesn’t have any rights.” Image: Sarah JeongAnger was directed at ICE and the mass deportations all throughout the day, in signage, in chants, and in rally speeches. The previous night, about 150 people protested at a local ICE facility — coincidentally located by the Tesla dealership — a mile south of downtown, near a highway exit. The ICE facility protests, which have been continuous for some days, have been steadily building up. A couple of “No Kings” signs were present on Friday. (The following day, a handful of “Chinga la migra” signs would show up at the “No Kings” protests). Demonstrators stood on the curb urging passing cars to “Honk if you hate fascists,” successfully eliciting car horns every few seconds, including some from a pristine white Tesla. Federal law enforcement in camo and helmets, their faces obscured, maced and shot at protesters with pepper balls, targeting them through the gates and sniping at them from the rooftop of the building. A handful of protesters — many wearing gas masks and respirators — formed phalanx formations in the driveway, wielding umbrellas and handmade shields. On Saturday, a speaker at one of the “No Kings” rallies advertised the occupation of the ICE facility, saying, “We’re a sanctuary city.” The crowd — replete with American flags both upside down and right side up — cheered. — Sarah JeongNew Port Richey, FloridaNearly every intersection on Pasco County’s State Road 54 looks the same: a cross-section of strip malls, each anchored by a Walmart or Target or Publix, surrounded by a mix of restaurants, nail salons, and gas stations. It’s not an environment that is particularly conducive to protests, but hundreds of people turned out in humid, 90-plus degree weather anyway. The overall size of the crowd is hard to determine, but it’s larger than I — and other attendees — anticipated, given the local demographics. (Trump won 61 percent of the vote in Pasco County in 2024.) New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleEveryone is on the sidewalk; an organizer with a megaphone tells people to use crosswalks if they’re going to attempt to brave the six-lane highway. Two days earlier, Governor Ron DeSantis said Floridians could legally run over protesters on the street if they feel “threatened.” New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleSo far, most drivers seem friendly. There are lots of supportive honks. One woman rolls down her window and thanks the protesters. “I love you! I wish I could be with you, but I have to work today!” she yells as she drives away. Not everyone is amenable. A man in a MAGA hat marches through the crowd waving a “thin green line” flag and yelling “long live the king!” as people in the crowd call him a traitor. A pickup truck drives by blasting “Ice Ice Baby,” waving another pro-law enforcement flag. The protesters have flags, too: American flags large and small, some upside down; Mexican; Ukrainian; Palestinian; Canadian; different configurations of pride and trans flags. Their signs, like their flags, illustrate their diverse reasons for attending: opposition to Trump’s “big beautiful” funding bill, DOGE’s budget cuts, and ICE arrests; support for immigrants, government workers, and Palestinians. One woman wears an inflatable chicken suit. Her friend pulls an effigy of Trump — dressed to look both like an eighteenth-century monarch, a taco, and a chicken — alongside her.New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleMost of the demonstrators are on the older side, but there are people of all ages in attendance. “I thought it was going to be maybe 20 people with a couple of signs,” Abby, 24, says, adding that she’s pleasantly surprised at both the turnout and the fact that most of the protesters are of retirement age. Abe, 20, tells me this is his first protest. Holding a sign that says “ICE = GESTAPO,” he tells me he came out to support a friend who is Mexican. Three teenagers walk by with signs expressing support for immigrants: “While Trump destroys America, we built it.” “Trump: 3 felonies. My parents: 0.” As I drive away, I notice nine counter-protesters off to the side, around the corner from the main event. They wave their own flags, but the demonstrators seemingly pay them no mind.— Gaby Del ValleHistoric Filipinotown, Los AngelesWearing a camo baseball cap — “Desert Storm Veteran” emblazoned on the front — Joe Arciaga greets a crowd of about 100 people in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown around 9:00AM.“Good morning everyone, are you ready for some beautiful trouble?” Arciaga says into the megaphone, an American flag bandana wrapped around his wrist. The faces of Filipino labor leaders Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, who organized farm workers alongside Cesar Chavez, peer over his shoulders from a mural that lines the length of Unidad Park where Arciaga and a group called Lakas Collective helped organize this neighborhood No Kings rally. “I’m a Desert Storm veteran, and I’m a father of three and a grandfather of three, and I want to work for a future where democracy is upheld, due process, civil rights, the preservation of the rule of law — That’s all I want. I’m not a billionaire, I’m just a regular Joe, right?”, he tells The Verge.Joe Arciaga speaks to people at a rally in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles. Image: Justine Calma“I am mad as hell,” he says, when I ask him about the Army 250th anniversary parade Donald Trump has organized in Washington, DC coinciding with the president’s birthday. “The guy does not deserve to be honored, he’s a draft dodger, right?” Arciaga says. He’s “livid” that the President and DOGE have fired veterans working for federal agencies and slashed VA staff.Arciaga organizes the crowd into two lines that file out of the park to stand along Beverly Blvd., one of the main drags through LA. Arciaga has deputized a handful of attendees with security or medical experience with whistles to serve as “marshals” tasked with flagging and de-escalating any potentially risky situation that might arise. Johneric Concordia, one of the co-founders of the popular The Park’s Finest barbecue joint in the neighborhood, is MCing out on Beverly Blvd. He and Arciaga direct people onto the sidewalks and off the asphalt as honking cars zip by. In between chants of “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and rap songs from LA artist Bambu that Concordia plays from a speaker, Concordia hypes up the organizers. “Who’s cool? Joe’s cool?” He spits into the microphone connected to his speaker. “Who’s streets? Our streets!” the crowd cheers. An hour later, a man sitting at a red light in a black Prius rolls down his window. “Go home!” he yells from the intersection. “Take your Mexican flag and go home!”The crowd mostly ignores him. One attendee on the corner holds up his “No Kings” sign to the Prius without turning his head to look at him. A few minutes later, a jogger in a blue t-shirt raises his fist as he passes the crowd. “Fuck yeah guys,” he says to cheers.By 10AM, the neighborhood event is coming to a close. Demonstrators start to trickle away, some fanning out to other rallies planned across LA today. Concordia is heading out too, microphone and speaker still in hand, “If you’re headed to downtown, watch out for suspicious crew cuts!” — Justine CalmaSan Francisco, California1/10Most of the crowd trickled out after 2pm, which was the scheduled end time of the protest, but hundreds stayed in the area. Image: Vjeran PavicLondon, UKLondon’s protest was a little different than most: it was almost entirely bereft of “No Kings” signs, thanks to the fact that about two miles away much larger crowds were gathered to celebrate the official birthday of one King Charles III. “We don’t have anything against King Charles,” Alyssa, a member of organizers Indivisible London, told me. And so, “out of respect for our host country as immigrants,” they instead set up shop in front of the US embassy with a tweaked message: “No kings, no crowns” became “no tyrants, no clowns.” London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonOf the hundreds gathered, not everyone got the memo, with a few painted signs decrying kings and crowns regardless, and one brave Brit brandishing a bit of cardboard with a simple message: “Our king is better than yours!”London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonStill, most of the crowd were on board, with red noses, clown suits, and Pennywise masks dotted throughout, plus costumes ranging from tacos to Roman emperors. “I think tyrants is the better word, and that’s why I dressed up as Caesar, because he was the original,” says Anna, a Long Island native who’s lived in London for three years. “Nobody likes a tyrant. Nobody. And they don’t do well, historically, but they destroy a lot.”For 90 minutes or so the crowd — predominantly American, judging by the accents around me — leaned into the circus theme. Speakers shared the stage with performers, from a comic singalong of anti-Trump protest songs to a protracted pantomime in which a woman in a banana costume exhorted the crowd to pelt a Donald Trump impersonator with fresh peels. London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonDuring a break in festivities, Alyssa told the crowd, “The most threatening sound to an oligarch is laughter.”— Dominic PrestonProspect Park, Brooklyn, New YorkThe No Kings protest at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza was a calmer affair. Instead of gathering under the picturesque memorial arch, protesters were largely sequestered to a corner right outside Prospect Park, with some streets blocked off by police. The weekly farmers market was in full swing, meaning people cradling bundles of rhubarb were swerving in and out of protest signs that read things like, “Hating Donald Trump is Brat” and “Is it time to get out the pitch forks?” Like during the Hands Off protest in April, New York got rain on Saturday.Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe area where protesters were gathered made it difficult to count the crowd, but there were hundreds — perhaps a few thousand — people that streamed in and out. At one point, some protesters began marching down the street alongside Prospect Park, while others stayed at Grand Army Plaza to chant, cheer, and hold signs up at oncoming vehicles. With its proximity to the public library, the park, and densely populated neighborhoods, the massive intersection is a high-foot traffic area. Cars blared their horns as they passed, American flags waving in the chilly afternoon breeze.Jane, a Brooklyn resident who stood on the curb opposite the protesters, said she isn’t typically someone who comes out to actions like this: before the No Kings event, she had only ever been to one protest, the Women’s March. (Jane asked that The Verge use her first name only.) Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia Sato“I’m deeply concerned about our country,” Jane said, pausing as a long stream of trucks and cars honked continuously in support of the protesters in the background. “I think Trump is behaving as an authoritarian. We’ve seen in Russia, in Hungary, in Hong Kong, that the slide from freedom to not freedom is very fast and very quick if people do not make their voices heard,” Jane said. “I’m concerned that that’s what’s happening in the United States.” Jane also cited cuts to Medicaid and funding for academic research as well as tariffs as being “unacceptable.”Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe event was peaceful — there were lots of kids present — and people were in good spirits despite the rain. Protest signs ran the gamut from general anti-Trump slogans (“I trust light tampons more than this administration”) to New York City-specific causes like “Andrew Cuomo can’t read” (there is a contenious mayoral election this month). One sign read, “Fix your hearts or die,” an iconic line from the late director, David Lynch’s, Twin Peaks: The Return. And of course, amid nationwide immigration raids that have been escalated by the involvement of the federal government, ICE was top of mind: one sign simply read, “Melt ICE,” and another protester held a large “NO ICE IN NYC” sign. Though it was smaller and more contained than other events, the protest didn’t lack conviction: attendees of all ages stood in the cold rain, chanting and blowing into vuvuzela, banging the lids of pots and pans. At one point a man stood on the median on the street, leading the group in chants of “No justice, no peace.” Cars laid on the horn as they drove by.— Mia SatoAkron, OhioIt’s been raining pretty hard the last few days in Akron, OH, so much that I didn’t think there’d be a large turnout for our chapter of the No Kings protest. But I was emphatically proven wrong as the crowds I saw dwarfed the Tesla Takedown protests last month. Officially, the protest was to take place in front of the John F. Seiberling Federal Building on Main Street in Downtown Akron. But the concentration of people spilled over from that small space down Main Street and up Market Street. All told, though there were no official counts, I estimate somewhere between 500 to 900 people in this blue enclave in Northeast Ohio.The mood was exuberant, buoyed by supporters who honked their horns as they passed. The chorus of horns was nonstop, and when a sanitation truck honked as it went by, cheers got louder. The chants the crowds were singing took on a local flare. Ohio is the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes and anywhere you go, shout “O-H” and you’ll invariably get an “I-O” response. The crowds used that convention to make their own chant, “OH-IO, Donald Trump has got to go.”There was no police presence here and the crowd was very good at policing itself. Ostensibly out of concern for the incidents where people have rammed their cars into protestor crowds, the people here have taken up crossing guard duties, aiding folks who wish to cross Main or Market Streets. Toward the end of my time at the protest, I saw an older gentleman wearing Kent State gear and holding a sign that read, “Remember another time the National Guard was called in?” His sign featured a drawing of the famous photo from the event in which four Kent State students during a protest of the Vietnam War were killed by National Guard troops. I caught up with him to ask him some questions and he told me his name was Chuck Ayers, a professional cartoonist, and was present at the shooting. Akron, OH. Image: Ash Parrish“When I saw the National Guard in front of the federal building in LA,” he told me, “It was just another flashback.”He did not tell me this at the time, but Ayers is a nationally recognized cartoonist, noted for co-creating the comic strip Crankshaft. He’s lived in Ohio his entire life and of course, drew that sign himself. As he was telling me about how seeing news of the National Guard being deployed in LA, I could see him strain to hold back his emotions. He said it still hurts to see this 55 years later, but that he was heartened to see so many people standing here in community and solidarity. He also said that given his pain and trauma he almost didn’t come. When I asked why he showed up when it so obviously causes him pain he said simply, “Because I have to.”— Ash ParrishOneonta, New YorkOn a northward drive to Oneonta — population roughly 15,000, the largest city in New York’s mainly rural Otsego County — one of the most prominent landmarks is a sprawling barn splashed in huge, painted block letters with TRUMP 2024. (The final digits have been faithfully updated every election since 2016.) It’s Trump country, but not uniformly Trumpy country, as evidenced by what I estimated as a hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a field just below Main Street that came together with a friendly county-fair atmosphere. Kids sat on their parents’ shoulders; American flags fluttered next to signs with slogans like SHADE NEVER MADE ANYONE LESS GAY, and attendees grumbled persistently about the event’s feeble sound system, set up on the bed of a pickup truck. It was the kind of conspicuously patriotic, far-from-urban protest that the Trump administration has all but insisted doesn’t exist.Image: Adi RobertsonBeyond a general condemnation of Trump, protest signs repped the same issues being denounced across the country. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine made an appearance, as did Elon Musk and Tesla. A couple of people called out funding cuts for organizations like NPR, one neatly lettered sign reminded us that WEATHER FORECASTING SAVES LIVES, another warned “Keep your nasty little hands off Social Security,” and a lot — unsurprisingly, given the past week’s events — attacked mass deportations and ICE. An attendee who identified himself as Bill, standing behind a placard that blocked most of him from sight, laid out his anger at the administration’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency. “I think if it was not for protests, there would be no change,” he told me.The event itself, supported by a coalition including the local chapter of Indivisible, highlighted topics like reproductive justice and LGBTQ rights alongside issues for groups often stereotyped as Republican blocs — there was a speech about Department of Veterans Affairs cuts and a representative from the local Office for the Aging (whose words were mostly lost to the sound system’s whims). Rules for a march around the modest downtown were laid out: no blocking pedestrians or vehicles, and for the sake of families doing weekend shopping, watch the language. “Fuck!” one person yelled indistinctly from the audience. “No, no,” the event’s emcee chided gently. The philosophy, as she put it, was one of persuasion. “We want to build the resistance, not make people angry at us.”Image: Adi RobertsonBut even in a place that will almost certainly never see a National Guard deployment or the ire of a Truth Social post, the Trump administration’s brutal deportation program had just hit close to home. Only hours before the protest commenced, ICE agents were recorded handcuffing a man and removing him in an unmarked black car — detaining what was reportedly a legal resident seeking asylum from Venezuela. The mayor of Oneonta, Mark Drnek, relayed the news to the crowd. “ICE! We see you!” boomed Drnek from the truckbed. “We recognize you for what you are, and we understand, and we reject your vile purpose.”The crowd cheered furiously. The stars and stripes waved.- Adi RobertsonSee More: Policy
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  • As AI faces court challenges from Disney and Universal, legal battles are shaping the industry's future | Opinion

    As AI faces court challenges from Disney and Universal, legal battles are shaping the industry's future | Opinion
    Silicon advances and design innovations do still push us forward – but the future landscape of the industry is also being sculpted in courtrooms and parliaments

    Image credit: Disney / Epic Games

    Opinion

    by Rob Fahey
    Contributing Editor

    Published on June 13, 2025

    In some regards, the past couple of weeks have felt rather reassuring.
    We've just seen a hugely successful launch for a new Nintendo console, replete with long queues for midnight sales events. Over the next few days, the various summer events and showcases that have sprouted amongst the scattered bones of E3 generated waves of interest and hype for a host of new games.
    It all feels like old times. It's enough to make you imagine that while change is the only constant, at least it's we're facing change that's fairly well understood, change in the form of faster, cheaper silicon, or bigger, more ambitious games.
    If only the winds that blow through this industry all came from such well-defined points on the compass. Nestled in amongst the week's headlines, though, was something that's likely to have profound but much harder to understand impacts on this industry and many others over the coming years – a lawsuit being brought by Disney and NBC Universal against Midjourney, operators of the eponymous generative AI image creation tool.
    In some regards, the lawsuit looks fairly straightforward; the arguments made and considered in reaching its outcome, though, may have a profound impact on both the ability of creatives and media companiesto protect their IP rights from a very new kind of threat, and the ways in which a promising but highly controversial and risky new set of development and creative tools can be used commercially.
    A more likely tack on Midjourney's side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool
    I say the lawsuit looks straightforward from some angles, but honestly overall it looks fairly open and shut – the media giants accuse Midjourney of replicating their copyrighted characters and material, and of essentially building a machine for churning out limitless copyright violations.
    The evidence submitted includes screenshot after screenshot of Midjourney generating pages of images of famous copyrighted and trademarked characters ranging from Yoda to Homer Simpson, so "no we didn't" isn't going to be much of a defence strategy here.
    A more likely tack on Midjourney's side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool – you don't sue the manufacturers of oil paints or canvases when artists use them to paint something copyright-infringing, nor does Microsoft get sued when someone writes something libellous in Word, and Midjourney may try to argue that their software belongs in that tool category, with users alone being ultimately responsible for how they use them.

    If that argument prevails and survives appeals and challenges, it would be a major triumph for the nascent generative AI industry and a hugely damaging blow to IP holders and creatives, since it would seriously undermine their argument that AI companies shouldn't be able to include copyrighted material into training data sets without licensing or compensation.
    The reason Disney and NBCU are going after Midjourney specifically seems to be partially down to Midjourney being especially reticent to negotiate with them about licensing fees and prompt restrictions; other generative AI firms have started talking, at least, about paying for content licenses for training data, and have imposed various limitations on their software to prevent the most egregious and obvious forms of copyright violation.
    In the process, though, they're essentially risking a court showdown over a set of not-quite-clear legal questions at the heart of this dispute, and if Midjourney were to prevail in that argument, other AI companies would likely back off from engaging with IP holders on this topic.
    To be clear, though, it seems highly unlikely that Midjourney will win that argument, at least not in the medium to long term. Yet depending on how this case moves forward, losing the argument could have equally dramatic consequences – especially if the courts find themselves compelled to consider the question of how, exactly, a generative AI system reproduces a copyrighted character with such precision without storing copyright-infringing data in some manner.
    The 2020s are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once
    AI advocates have been trying to handwave around this notion from the outset, but at some point a court is going to have to sit down and confront the fact that the precision with which these systems can replicate copyrighted characters, scenes, and other materials requires that they must have stored that infringing material in some form.
    That it's stored as a scattered mesh of probabilities across the vertices of a high-dimensional vector array, rather than a straightforward, monolithic media file, is clearly important but may ultimately be considered moot. If the data is in the system and can be replicated on request, how that differs from Napster or The Pirate Bay is arguably just a matter of technical obfuscation.
    Not having to defend that technical argument in court thus far has been a huge boon to the generative AI field; if it is knocked over in that venue, it will have knock-on effects on every company in the sector and on every business that uses their products.
    Nobody can be quite sure which of the various rocks and pebbles being kicked on this slope is going to set off the landslide, but there seems to be an increasing consensus that a legal and regulatory reckoning is coming for generative AI.
    Consequently, a lot of what's happening in that market right now has the feel of companies desperately trying to establish products and lock in revenue streams before that happens, because it'll be harder to regulate a technology that's genuinely integrated into the world's economic systems than it is to impose limits on one that's currently only clocking up relatively paltry sales and revenues.

    Keeping an eye on this is crucial for any industry that's started experimenting with AI in its workflows – none more than a creative industry like video games, where various forms of AI usage have been posited, although the enthusiasm and buzz so far massively outweighs any tangible benefits from the technology.
    Regardless of what happens in legal and regulatory contexts, AI is already a double-edged sword for any creative industry.
    Used judiciously, it might help to speed up development processes and reduce overheads. Applied in a slapdash or thoughtless manner, it can and will end up wreaking havoc on development timelines, filling up storefronts with endless waves of vaguely-copyright-infringing slop, and potentially make creative firms, from the industry's biggest companies to its smallest indie developers, into victims of impossibly large-scale copyright infringement rather than beneficiaries of a new wave of technology-fuelled productivity.
    The legal threat now hanging over the sector isn't new, merely amplified. We've known for a long time that AI generated artwork, code, and text has significant problems from the perspective of intellectual property rights.
    Even if you're not using AI yourself, however – even if you're vehemently opposed to it on moral and ethical grounds, the Midjourney judgement and its fallout may well impact the creative work you produce yourself and how it ends up being used and abused by these products in future.
    This all has huge ramifications for the games business and will shape everything from how games are created to how IP can be protected for many years to come – a wind of change that's very different and vastly more unpredictable than those we're accustomed to. It's a reminder of just how much of the industry's future is currently being shaped not in development studios and semiconductor labs, but rather in courtrooms and parliamentary committees.
    The ways in which generative AI can be used and how copyright can persist in the face of it will be fundamentally shaped in courts and parliaments, but it's far from the only crucially important topic being hashed out in those venues.
    The ongoing legal turmoil over the opening up of mobile app ecosystems, too, will have huge impacts on the games industry. Meanwhile, the debates over loot boxes, gambling, and various consumer protection aspects related to free-to-play models continue to rumble on in the background.
    Because the industry moves fast while governments move slow, it's easy to forget that that's still an active topic for as far as governments are concerned, and hammers may come down at any time.
    Regulation by governments, whether through the passage of new legislation or the interpretation of existing laws in the courts, has always loomed in the background of any major industry, especially one with strong cultural relevance. The games industry is no stranger to that being part of the background heartbeat of the business.
    The 2020s, however, are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once, whether it's AI and copyright, app stores and walled gardens, or loot boxes and IAP-based business models.
    Rulings on those topics in various different global markets will create a complex new landscape that will shape the winds that blow through the business, and how things look in the 2030s and beyond will be fundamentally impacted by those decisions.
    #faces #court #challenges #disney #universal
    As AI faces court challenges from Disney and Universal, legal battles are shaping the industry's future | Opinion
    As AI faces court challenges from Disney and Universal, legal battles are shaping the industry's future | Opinion Silicon advances and design innovations do still push us forward – but the future landscape of the industry is also being sculpted in courtrooms and parliaments Image credit: Disney / Epic Games Opinion by Rob Fahey Contributing Editor Published on June 13, 2025 In some regards, the past couple of weeks have felt rather reassuring. We've just seen a hugely successful launch for a new Nintendo console, replete with long queues for midnight sales events. Over the next few days, the various summer events and showcases that have sprouted amongst the scattered bones of E3 generated waves of interest and hype for a host of new games. It all feels like old times. It's enough to make you imagine that while change is the only constant, at least it's we're facing change that's fairly well understood, change in the form of faster, cheaper silicon, or bigger, more ambitious games. If only the winds that blow through this industry all came from such well-defined points on the compass. Nestled in amongst the week's headlines, though, was something that's likely to have profound but much harder to understand impacts on this industry and many others over the coming years – a lawsuit being brought by Disney and NBC Universal against Midjourney, operators of the eponymous generative AI image creation tool. In some regards, the lawsuit looks fairly straightforward; the arguments made and considered in reaching its outcome, though, may have a profound impact on both the ability of creatives and media companiesto protect their IP rights from a very new kind of threat, and the ways in which a promising but highly controversial and risky new set of development and creative tools can be used commercially. A more likely tack on Midjourney's side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool I say the lawsuit looks straightforward from some angles, but honestly overall it looks fairly open and shut – the media giants accuse Midjourney of replicating their copyrighted characters and material, and of essentially building a machine for churning out limitless copyright violations. The evidence submitted includes screenshot after screenshot of Midjourney generating pages of images of famous copyrighted and trademarked characters ranging from Yoda to Homer Simpson, so "no we didn't" isn't going to be much of a defence strategy here. A more likely tack on Midjourney's side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool – you don't sue the manufacturers of oil paints or canvases when artists use them to paint something copyright-infringing, nor does Microsoft get sued when someone writes something libellous in Word, and Midjourney may try to argue that their software belongs in that tool category, with users alone being ultimately responsible for how they use them. If that argument prevails and survives appeals and challenges, it would be a major triumph for the nascent generative AI industry and a hugely damaging blow to IP holders and creatives, since it would seriously undermine their argument that AI companies shouldn't be able to include copyrighted material into training data sets without licensing or compensation. The reason Disney and NBCU are going after Midjourney specifically seems to be partially down to Midjourney being especially reticent to negotiate with them about licensing fees and prompt restrictions; other generative AI firms have started talking, at least, about paying for content licenses for training data, and have imposed various limitations on their software to prevent the most egregious and obvious forms of copyright violation. In the process, though, they're essentially risking a court showdown over a set of not-quite-clear legal questions at the heart of this dispute, and if Midjourney were to prevail in that argument, other AI companies would likely back off from engaging with IP holders on this topic. To be clear, though, it seems highly unlikely that Midjourney will win that argument, at least not in the medium to long term. Yet depending on how this case moves forward, losing the argument could have equally dramatic consequences – especially if the courts find themselves compelled to consider the question of how, exactly, a generative AI system reproduces a copyrighted character with such precision without storing copyright-infringing data in some manner. The 2020s are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once AI advocates have been trying to handwave around this notion from the outset, but at some point a court is going to have to sit down and confront the fact that the precision with which these systems can replicate copyrighted characters, scenes, and other materials requires that they must have stored that infringing material in some form. That it's stored as a scattered mesh of probabilities across the vertices of a high-dimensional vector array, rather than a straightforward, monolithic media file, is clearly important but may ultimately be considered moot. If the data is in the system and can be replicated on request, how that differs from Napster or The Pirate Bay is arguably just a matter of technical obfuscation. Not having to defend that technical argument in court thus far has been a huge boon to the generative AI field; if it is knocked over in that venue, it will have knock-on effects on every company in the sector and on every business that uses their products. Nobody can be quite sure which of the various rocks and pebbles being kicked on this slope is going to set off the landslide, but there seems to be an increasing consensus that a legal and regulatory reckoning is coming for generative AI. Consequently, a lot of what's happening in that market right now has the feel of companies desperately trying to establish products and lock in revenue streams before that happens, because it'll be harder to regulate a technology that's genuinely integrated into the world's economic systems than it is to impose limits on one that's currently only clocking up relatively paltry sales and revenues. Keeping an eye on this is crucial for any industry that's started experimenting with AI in its workflows – none more than a creative industry like video games, where various forms of AI usage have been posited, although the enthusiasm and buzz so far massively outweighs any tangible benefits from the technology. Regardless of what happens in legal and regulatory contexts, AI is already a double-edged sword for any creative industry. Used judiciously, it might help to speed up development processes and reduce overheads. Applied in a slapdash or thoughtless manner, it can and will end up wreaking havoc on development timelines, filling up storefronts with endless waves of vaguely-copyright-infringing slop, and potentially make creative firms, from the industry's biggest companies to its smallest indie developers, into victims of impossibly large-scale copyright infringement rather than beneficiaries of a new wave of technology-fuelled productivity. The legal threat now hanging over the sector isn't new, merely amplified. We've known for a long time that AI generated artwork, code, and text has significant problems from the perspective of intellectual property rights. Even if you're not using AI yourself, however – even if you're vehemently opposed to it on moral and ethical grounds, the Midjourney judgement and its fallout may well impact the creative work you produce yourself and how it ends up being used and abused by these products in future. This all has huge ramifications for the games business and will shape everything from how games are created to how IP can be protected for many years to come – a wind of change that's very different and vastly more unpredictable than those we're accustomed to. It's a reminder of just how much of the industry's future is currently being shaped not in development studios and semiconductor labs, but rather in courtrooms and parliamentary committees. The ways in which generative AI can be used and how copyright can persist in the face of it will be fundamentally shaped in courts and parliaments, but it's far from the only crucially important topic being hashed out in those venues. The ongoing legal turmoil over the opening up of mobile app ecosystems, too, will have huge impacts on the games industry. Meanwhile, the debates over loot boxes, gambling, and various consumer protection aspects related to free-to-play models continue to rumble on in the background. Because the industry moves fast while governments move slow, it's easy to forget that that's still an active topic for as far as governments are concerned, and hammers may come down at any time. Regulation by governments, whether through the passage of new legislation or the interpretation of existing laws in the courts, has always loomed in the background of any major industry, especially one with strong cultural relevance. The games industry is no stranger to that being part of the background heartbeat of the business. The 2020s, however, are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once, whether it's AI and copyright, app stores and walled gardens, or loot boxes and IAP-based business models. Rulings on those topics in various different global markets will create a complex new landscape that will shape the winds that blow through the business, and how things look in the 2030s and beyond will be fundamentally impacted by those decisions. #faces #court #challenges #disney #universal
    WWW.GAMESINDUSTRY.BIZ
    As AI faces court challenges from Disney and Universal, legal battles are shaping the industry's future | Opinion
    As AI faces court challenges from Disney and Universal, legal battles are shaping the industry's future | Opinion Silicon advances and design innovations do still push us forward – but the future landscape of the industry is also being sculpted in courtrooms and parliaments Image credit: Disney / Epic Games Opinion by Rob Fahey Contributing Editor Published on June 13, 2025 In some regards, the past couple of weeks have felt rather reassuring. We've just seen a hugely successful launch for a new Nintendo console, replete with long queues for midnight sales events. Over the next few days, the various summer events and showcases that have sprouted amongst the scattered bones of E3 generated waves of interest and hype for a host of new games. It all feels like old times. It's enough to make you imagine that while change is the only constant, at least it's we're facing change that's fairly well understood, change in the form of faster, cheaper silicon, or bigger, more ambitious games. If only the winds that blow through this industry all came from such well-defined points on the compass. Nestled in amongst the week's headlines, though, was something that's likely to have profound but much harder to understand impacts on this industry and many others over the coming years – a lawsuit being brought by Disney and NBC Universal against Midjourney, operators of the eponymous generative AI image creation tool. In some regards, the lawsuit looks fairly straightforward; the arguments made and considered in reaching its outcome, though, may have a profound impact on both the ability of creatives and media companies (including game studios and publishers) to protect their IP rights from a very new kind of threat, and the ways in which a promising but highly controversial and risky new set of development and creative tools can be used commercially. A more likely tack on Midjourney's side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool I say the lawsuit looks straightforward from some angles, but honestly overall it looks fairly open and shut – the media giants accuse Midjourney of replicating their copyrighted characters and material, and of essentially building a machine for churning out limitless copyright violations. The evidence submitted includes screenshot after screenshot of Midjourney generating pages of images of famous copyrighted and trademarked characters ranging from Yoda to Homer Simpson, so "no we didn't" isn't going to be much of a defence strategy here. A more likely tack on Midjourney's side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool – you don't sue the manufacturers of oil paints or canvases when artists use them to paint something copyright-infringing, nor does Microsoft get sued when someone writes something libellous in Word, and Midjourney may try to argue that their software belongs in that tool category, with users alone being ultimately responsible for how they use them. If that argument prevails and survives appeals and challenges, it would be a major triumph for the nascent generative AI industry and a hugely damaging blow to IP holders and creatives, since it would seriously undermine their argument that AI companies shouldn't be able to include copyrighted material into training data sets without licensing or compensation. The reason Disney and NBCU are going after Midjourney specifically seems to be partially down to Midjourney being especially reticent to negotiate with them about licensing fees and prompt restrictions; other generative AI firms have started talking, at least, about paying for content licenses for training data, and have imposed various limitations on their software to prevent the most egregious and obvious forms of copyright violation (at least for famous characters belonging to rich companies; if you're an individual or a smaller company, it's entirely the Wild West out there as regards your IP rights). In the process, though, they're essentially risking a court showdown over a set of not-quite-clear legal questions at the heart of this dispute, and if Midjourney were to prevail in that argument, other AI companies would likely back off from engaging with IP holders on this topic. To be clear, though, it seems highly unlikely that Midjourney will win that argument, at least not in the medium to long term. Yet depending on how this case moves forward, losing the argument could have equally dramatic consequences – especially if the courts find themselves compelled to consider the question of how, exactly, a generative AI system reproduces a copyrighted character with such precision without storing copyright-infringing data in some manner. The 2020s are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once AI advocates have been trying to handwave around this notion from the outset, but at some point a court is going to have to sit down and confront the fact that the precision with which these systems can replicate copyrighted characters, scenes, and other materials requires that they must have stored that infringing material in some form. That it's stored as a scattered mesh of probabilities across the vertices of a high-dimensional vector array, rather than a straightforward, monolithic media file, is clearly important but may ultimately be considered moot. If the data is in the system and can be replicated on request, how that differs from Napster or The Pirate Bay is arguably just a matter of technical obfuscation. Not having to defend that technical argument in court thus far has been a huge boon to the generative AI field; if it is knocked over in that venue, it will have knock-on effects on every company in the sector and on every business that uses their products. Nobody can be quite sure which of the various rocks and pebbles being kicked on this slope is going to set off the landslide, but there seems to be an increasing consensus that a legal and regulatory reckoning is coming for generative AI. Consequently, a lot of what's happening in that market right now has the feel of companies desperately trying to establish products and lock in revenue streams before that happens, because it'll be harder to regulate a technology that's genuinely integrated into the world's economic systems than it is to impose limits on one that's currently only clocking up relatively paltry sales and revenues. Keeping an eye on this is crucial for any industry that's started experimenting with AI in its workflows – none more than a creative industry like video games, where various forms of AI usage have been posited, although the enthusiasm and buzz so far massively outweighs any tangible benefits from the technology. Regardless of what happens in legal and regulatory contexts, AI is already a double-edged sword for any creative industry. Used judiciously, it might help to speed up development processes and reduce overheads. Applied in a slapdash or thoughtless manner, it can and will end up wreaking havoc on development timelines, filling up storefronts with endless waves of vaguely-copyright-infringing slop, and potentially make creative firms, from the industry's biggest companies to its smallest indie developers, into victims of impossibly large-scale copyright infringement rather than beneficiaries of a new wave of technology-fuelled productivity. The legal threat now hanging over the sector isn't new, merely amplified. We've known for a long time that AI generated artwork, code, and text has significant problems from the perspective of intellectual property rights (you can infringe someone else's copyright with it, but generally can't impose your own copyright on its creations – opening careless companies up to a risk of having key assets in their game being technically public domain and impossible to protect). Even if you're not using AI yourself, however – even if you're vehemently opposed to it on moral and ethical grounds (which is entirely valid given the highly dubious land-grab these companies have done for their training data), the Midjourney judgement and its fallout may well impact the creative work you produce yourself and how it ends up being used and abused by these products in future. This all has huge ramifications for the games business and will shape everything from how games are created to how IP can be protected for many years to come – a wind of change that's very different and vastly more unpredictable than those we're accustomed to. It's a reminder of just how much of the industry's future is currently being shaped not in development studios and semiconductor labs, but rather in courtrooms and parliamentary committees. The ways in which generative AI can be used and how copyright can persist in the face of it will be fundamentally shaped in courts and parliaments, but it's far from the only crucially important topic being hashed out in those venues. The ongoing legal turmoil over the opening up of mobile app ecosystems, too, will have huge impacts on the games industry. Meanwhile, the debates over loot boxes, gambling, and various consumer protection aspects related to free-to-play models continue to rumble on in the background. Because the industry moves fast while governments move slow, it's easy to forget that that's still an active topic for as far as governments are concerned, and hammers may come down at any time. Regulation by governments, whether through the passage of new legislation or the interpretation of existing laws in the courts, has always loomed in the background of any major industry, especially one with strong cultural relevance. The games industry is no stranger to that being part of the background heartbeat of the business. The 2020s, however, are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once, whether it's AI and copyright, app stores and walled gardens, or loot boxes and IAP-based business models. Rulings on those topics in various different global markets will create a complex new landscape that will shape the winds that blow through the business, and how things look in the 2030s and beyond will be fundamentally impacted by those decisions.
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  • FBC: Firebreak developers discuss the inspiration and challenges creating their first multiplayer title

    Things are warming up as Remedy’s FBC: Firebreak approaches its June 17 launch on PlayStation 5 as part of the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. We chatted with Communications Director Thomas Puha, Lead Level Designer Teemu Huhtiniemi, Lead Designer/Lead Technical Designer Anssi Hyytiainen, and Game Director/Lead Writer Mike Kayatta about some of the fascinating and often hilarious development secrets behind the first-person shooter.

    PlayStation Blog: First, what PS5 and PS5 Pro features did you utilize?

    Thomas Puha: We’ll support 3D Audio, and we’re prioritising 60 FPS on both formats. We’re aiming for FSR2 with an output resolution of 2560 x 1440on PS, and PSSR with an output resolution of 3840×2160on PS5 Pro.

    Some of the DualSense wireless controller’s features are still a work in progress, but we’re looking to use haptic feedback in a similar way to our previous titles, such as Control and Alan Wake 2. For example, we want to differentiate the weapons to feel unique from each other using the adaptive triggers.

    Going into the game itself, were there any other influences on its creation outside of Control?

    Mike Kayatta: We looked at different TV shows that had lots of tools for going into a place and dealing with a crisis. One was a reality show called Dirty Jobs, where the host Mike Rowe finds these terrible, dangerous, or unexpected jobs that you don’t know exist, like cleaning out the inside of a water tower.

    We also looked at PowerWash Simulator. Cleaning dirt is oddly meditative and really fulfilling. It made me wish a zombie attacked me to break the Zen, and then I’d go right back to cleaning. And we were like, that would be pretty fun in the game.

    Play Video

    Were there specific challenges you faced given it’s your first multiplayer game and first-person shooter?

    Anssi Hyytiainen: It’s radically different from a workflow point of view. You can’t really test it alone, necessarily, which is quite a different experience. And then there are times when one player is missing things on their screen that others are seeing. It was like, “What are you shooting at?”

    What’s been your favorite moments developing the game so far?

    Teemu Huhtiniemi: There were so many. But I like when we started seeing all of these overlapping systems kind of click, because there’s a long time in the development where you talk about things on paper and have some prototypes, but you don’t really see it all come together until a point. Then you start seeing the interaction between the systems and all the fun that comes out of that.

    Kayatta: I imagine there’s a lot of people who probably are a little skeptical about Remedy making something so different. Even internally, when the project was starting. And once we got the trailer out there, everyone was so nervous, but it got a pretty positive reaction. Exposing it to the public is very motivating, because with games, for a very long time, there is nothing, or it is janky and it’s ugly and you don’t find the fun immediately.

    Were there any specific ideals you followed while you worked on the game?

    Kayatta: Early on we were constantly asking ourselves, “Could this only happen in Control or at Remedy?” Because the first thing you hear is, “Okay, this is just another co-op multiplayer shooter” – there’s thousands of them, and they’re all good. So what can we do to make it worth playing our game? We were always saying we’ve got this super weird universe and really interesting studio, so we’re always looking at what we could do that nobody else can.

    Huhtiniemi: I think for me it was when we chose to just embrace the chaos. Like, that’s the whole point of the game. It’s supposed to feel overwhelming and busy at times, so that was great to say it out loud.

    Kayatta: Yeah, originally we had a prototype where there were only two Hiss in the level, but it just didn’t work, it wasn’t fun. Then everything just accidentally went in the opposite direction, where it was super chaos. At some point we actually started looking at Overcooked quite a bit, and saying, “Look, just embrace it. It’s gonna be nuts.”

    How did you finally decide on the name FBC: Firebreak, and were there any rejected, alternate, or working titles?

    Kayatta: So Firebreak is named after real world firebreaks, where you deforest an area to prevent a fire from spreading, but firebreaks are also topographical features of the Oldest House. And so we leaned into the term being a first responder who stops fires from spreading. The FBC part came from not wanting to put ‘Control’ in the title, so Control players wouldn’t feel like they had to detour to this before Control 2, but we didn’t want to totally detach from it either as that felt insincere.

    An external partner pitched a title. They were very serious about talking up the game being in the Oldest House, and then dramatically revealed the name: Housekeepers. I got what they were going for, but I was like, we cannot call it this. It was like you were playing as a maid!  

    FBC: Firebreak launches on PS5 June 17 as a day on PlayStation Plus Game Catalog title.
    #fbc #firebreak #developers #discuss #inspiration
    FBC: Firebreak developers discuss the inspiration and challenges creating their first multiplayer title
    Things are warming up as Remedy’s FBC: Firebreak approaches its June 17 launch on PlayStation 5 as part of the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. We chatted with Communications Director Thomas Puha, Lead Level Designer Teemu Huhtiniemi, Lead Designer/Lead Technical Designer Anssi Hyytiainen, and Game Director/Lead Writer Mike Kayatta about some of the fascinating and often hilarious development secrets behind the first-person shooter. PlayStation Blog: First, what PS5 and PS5 Pro features did you utilize? Thomas Puha: We’ll support 3D Audio, and we’re prioritising 60 FPS on both formats. We’re aiming for FSR2 with an output resolution of 2560 x 1440on PS, and PSSR with an output resolution of 3840×2160on PS5 Pro. Some of the DualSense wireless controller’s features are still a work in progress, but we’re looking to use haptic feedback in a similar way to our previous titles, such as Control and Alan Wake 2. For example, we want to differentiate the weapons to feel unique from each other using the adaptive triggers. Going into the game itself, were there any other influences on its creation outside of Control? Mike Kayatta: We looked at different TV shows that had lots of tools for going into a place and dealing with a crisis. One was a reality show called Dirty Jobs, where the host Mike Rowe finds these terrible, dangerous, or unexpected jobs that you don’t know exist, like cleaning out the inside of a water tower. We also looked at PowerWash Simulator. Cleaning dirt is oddly meditative and really fulfilling. It made me wish a zombie attacked me to break the Zen, and then I’d go right back to cleaning. And we were like, that would be pretty fun in the game. Play Video Were there specific challenges you faced given it’s your first multiplayer game and first-person shooter? Anssi Hyytiainen: It’s radically different from a workflow point of view. You can’t really test it alone, necessarily, which is quite a different experience. And then there are times when one player is missing things on their screen that others are seeing. It was like, “What are you shooting at?” What’s been your favorite moments developing the game so far? Teemu Huhtiniemi: There were so many. But I like when we started seeing all of these overlapping systems kind of click, because there’s a long time in the development where you talk about things on paper and have some prototypes, but you don’t really see it all come together until a point. Then you start seeing the interaction between the systems and all the fun that comes out of that. Kayatta: I imagine there’s a lot of people who probably are a little skeptical about Remedy making something so different. Even internally, when the project was starting. And once we got the trailer out there, everyone was so nervous, but it got a pretty positive reaction. Exposing it to the public is very motivating, because with games, for a very long time, there is nothing, or it is janky and it’s ugly and you don’t find the fun immediately. Were there any specific ideals you followed while you worked on the game? Kayatta: Early on we were constantly asking ourselves, “Could this only happen in Control or at Remedy?” Because the first thing you hear is, “Okay, this is just another co-op multiplayer shooter” – there’s thousands of them, and they’re all good. So what can we do to make it worth playing our game? We were always saying we’ve got this super weird universe and really interesting studio, so we’re always looking at what we could do that nobody else can. Huhtiniemi: I think for me it was when we chose to just embrace the chaos. Like, that’s the whole point of the game. It’s supposed to feel overwhelming and busy at times, so that was great to say it out loud. Kayatta: Yeah, originally we had a prototype where there were only two Hiss in the level, but it just didn’t work, it wasn’t fun. Then everything just accidentally went in the opposite direction, where it was super chaos. At some point we actually started looking at Overcooked quite a bit, and saying, “Look, just embrace it. It’s gonna be nuts.” How did you finally decide on the name FBC: Firebreak, and were there any rejected, alternate, or working titles? Kayatta: So Firebreak is named after real world firebreaks, where you deforest an area to prevent a fire from spreading, but firebreaks are also topographical features of the Oldest House. And so we leaned into the term being a first responder who stops fires from spreading. The FBC part came from not wanting to put ‘Control’ in the title, so Control players wouldn’t feel like they had to detour to this before Control 2, but we didn’t want to totally detach from it either as that felt insincere. An external partner pitched a title. They were very serious about talking up the game being in the Oldest House, and then dramatically revealed the name: Housekeepers. I got what they were going for, but I was like, we cannot call it this. It was like you were playing as a maid!   FBC: Firebreak launches on PS5 June 17 as a day on PlayStation Plus Game Catalog title. #fbc #firebreak #developers #discuss #inspiration
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    FBC: Firebreak developers discuss the inspiration and challenges creating their first multiplayer title
    Things are warming up as Remedy’s FBC: Firebreak approaches its June 17 launch on PlayStation 5 as part of the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. We chatted with Communications Director Thomas Puha, Lead Level Designer Teemu Huhtiniemi, Lead Designer/Lead Technical Designer Anssi Hyytiainen, and Game Director/Lead Writer Mike Kayatta about some of the fascinating and often hilarious development secrets behind the first-person shooter. PlayStation Blog: First, what PS5 and PS5 Pro features did you utilize? Thomas Puha: We’ll support 3D Audio, and we’re prioritising 60 FPS on both formats. We’re aiming for FSR2 with an output resolution of 2560 x 1440 (1440p) on PS, and PSSR with an output resolution of 3840×2160 (4K) on PS5 Pro. Some of the DualSense wireless controller’s features are still a work in progress, but we’re looking to use haptic feedback in a similar way to our previous titles, such as Control and Alan Wake 2. For example, we want to differentiate the weapons to feel unique from each other using the adaptive triggers. Going into the game itself, were there any other influences on its creation outside of Control? Mike Kayatta: We looked at different TV shows that had lots of tools for going into a place and dealing with a crisis. One was a reality show called Dirty Jobs, where the host Mike Rowe finds these terrible, dangerous, or unexpected jobs that you don’t know exist, like cleaning out the inside of a water tower. We also looked at PowerWash Simulator. Cleaning dirt is oddly meditative and really fulfilling. It made me wish a zombie attacked me to break the Zen, and then I’d go right back to cleaning. And we were like, that would be pretty fun in the game. Play Video Were there specific challenges you faced given it’s your first multiplayer game and first-person shooter? Anssi Hyytiainen: It’s radically different from a workflow point of view. You can’t really test it alone, necessarily, which is quite a different experience. And then there are times when one player is missing things on their screen that others are seeing. It was like, “What are you shooting at?” What’s been your favorite moments developing the game so far? Teemu Huhtiniemi: There were so many. But I like when we started seeing all of these overlapping systems kind of click, because there’s a long time in the development where you talk about things on paper and have some prototypes, but you don’t really see it all come together until a point. Then you start seeing the interaction between the systems and all the fun that comes out of that. Kayatta: I imagine there’s a lot of people who probably are a little skeptical about Remedy making something so different. Even internally, when the project was starting. And once we got the trailer out there, everyone was so nervous, but it got a pretty positive reaction. Exposing it to the public is very motivating, because with games, for a very long time, there is nothing, or it is janky and it’s ugly and you don’t find the fun immediately. Were there any specific ideals you followed while you worked on the game? Kayatta: Early on we were constantly asking ourselves, “Could this only happen in Control or at Remedy?” Because the first thing you hear is, “Okay, this is just another co-op multiplayer shooter” – there’s thousands of them, and they’re all good. So what can we do to make it worth playing our game? We were always saying we’ve got this super weird universe and really interesting studio, so we’re always looking at what we could do that nobody else can. Huhtiniemi: I think for me it was when we chose to just embrace the chaos. Like, that’s the whole point of the game. It’s supposed to feel overwhelming and busy at times, so that was great to say it out loud. Kayatta: Yeah, originally we had a prototype where there were only two Hiss in the level, but it just didn’t work, it wasn’t fun. Then everything just accidentally went in the opposite direction, where it was super chaos. At some point we actually started looking at Overcooked quite a bit, and saying, “Look, just embrace it. It’s gonna be nuts.” How did you finally decide on the name FBC: Firebreak, and were there any rejected, alternate, or working titles? Kayatta: So Firebreak is named after real world firebreaks, where you deforest an area to prevent a fire from spreading, but firebreaks are also topographical features of the Oldest House. And so we leaned into the term being a first responder who stops fires from spreading. The FBC part came from not wanting to put ‘Control’ in the title, so Control players wouldn’t feel like they had to detour to this before Control 2, but we didn’t want to totally detach from it either as that felt insincere. An external partner pitched a title. They were very serious about talking up the game being in the Oldest House, and then dramatically revealed the name: Housekeepers. I got what they were going for, but I was like, we cannot call it this. It was like you were playing as a maid!   FBC: Firebreak launches on PS5 June 17 as a day on PlayStation Plus Game Catalog title.
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