Show Notes
OpenAI's new agents, dots, are fuzzy balls with eyes that you name and dress. They also sign into websites with your saved passwords and read the email you connect. I went through OpenAI's pages to see what the face is covering. What a dot reads can train the model unless you find the switch, and websites are told nothing. I would not give one my logins or my card. Chapters 00:00 Sam Altman's pitch, and what a dot is01:42 Do you need one?02:36 Where the face came from04:33 Launch day, and why...
More from No Hacks with Slobodan Manic
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's AI agent, Muse, needs to be discreet. The same month, some of the calls it made to businesses were placed by people in a call center. I went through what he told Joanna Stern and Alex Heath about Muse's privacy and security and sorted every claim by tense. What exists today, only Meta has checked. The protection from Meta itself is promised for later this year. My verdict: stay away from this. After the sign-off, the show moves to Saturday mornings. Chapters 00:00 ...
A hundred and seventy-two companies have put their name to A2A, the standard for AI agents at different companies to find each other and talk. I took the web address the project lists next to each name and asked 135 of them the question the standard is built around. Four answered. The reason is not technical: MCP needs one person to say yes, A2A needs two organisations. Chapters 00:00 - AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and four answers00:54 - What I was actually sold, and what I went looking ...
A magazine put a paywall in front of its journalism to stop AI reading it. I tested what that paywall actually checks. It reads one line of your request, the name you type in yourself, and compares it against a list. Say who you are and you get a bill. Make something up and you walk straight in. Then I asked two assistants to read the article anyway. Both got charged, both answered, and neither had read a word of it. It keeps going after the sign-off, about where this podcast is headed. Chap...
On August 5 Shopify switched on a second way into every store on its platform, built for AI agents instead of people. Nothing to install, no merchant asked. I opened three unrelated stores, Allbirds, Brooklinen and Partake Foods, and asked each what it could do for a machine. All three answered with the same roughly 800 words, identical character for character, and no merchant wrote a syllable of it. What those words say, and what it costs a brand when the visitor has no eyes. Chapters 00:40 ...
Most of what's sold as AI search optimization has never been tested by the people selling it, and this episode is me checking the biggest one against server logs. Ahrefs looked at 137,000 domains in June: 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests in May, and the biggest readers of the rest were SEO audit tools. I also lay out the line I use to sort every pitch: a hack tries to influence what the machine says about you, architecture changes what a machine can read and do on your website. Chapter...