Chapter 1: How is AI perceived by the public in 2026?
Aloha! It is March 11th, 2026, and I am joined by Andy, Beth, and I'm Junmi, and this is The Daily AI Show. Today, we're going to cover a whole bunch of AI news, and then I've got a little bit of an AI in science story for you. So let's dive in really quickly, and Andy, what story do you have for us today? Well, I want to lead off with the question of just how popular is AI?
Chapter 2: What is Yann LeCun's new venture in AI?
We see the huge numbers of people who are using it. But a new just this month poll by NBC News of 1,000 registered voters showed that there are only two items on their list with lower negative net ratings than AI. And so I'm sure you're just wanting to know what those two things are.
Chapter 3: What humorous insights are shared about AI token costs?
They are Iran and the Democratic Party. Those two have had the biggest difference between the number of positive people who are people who are voting positive on that particular subject and people who are voting negative. But there's some others around that same cluster at the bottom of the list that I thought were interesting. One of them is ICE.
Chapter 4: How is Andre Karpathy advancing AI research with open-source projects?
And that doesn't surprise you. You know, it's way down there. But AI is below ICE. You know, ICE has a negative 18 difference and AI has a negative 20. So, wow. Okay, but the neutral, there was a big chunk of neutral feelings about AI where there wasn't so much about the war or ICE, I thought. But yes, in the absolutely no. Yeah, so yeah, lies, damn lies and statistics. Here we go.
Chapter 5: What advancements are being made in self-improving AI agents?
So the poll does require further interpretation. Frankly, I like AI. I don't know what they're talking about. A lot of it has to do with the lack of knowledge about what the positive benefits are of using the full range of, frankly, inscrutable tools that are available to us and the threats to society and otherwise. So I can see why overall for voters, AI is a negative issue.
Well, it could also see, for me, my experience of people who are younger than we are. It feels very wrapped in, like the dislike, absolutely not. It feels very wrapped into climate and what it's doing to the environment, right? Which is... Also, a runaway story.
So the idea of what it's doing to the environment has a seed of truth, but is interpreted, I think, more than it actually turns out to be. That doesn't mean that it won't turn out to be that. Right. But but it feels a little more like they're they're pretty clear on what the benefits are. That's wrong.
If you're not using it every day, you're not clear on what the benefits, but that the, the pushback isn't about the benefits. The pushback is about environment.
Chapter 6: How do multi-model workflows enhance AI capabilities?
I think just stepping back, it's interesting in my lifetime that, you know, if, if we looked at a snapshot of what the important voter issues were, both positive and negative across the, you know, the, the decades, um, I didn't foresee that artificial intelligence was going to be so omnipresent in the news and in the dialogue around what's happening in the world. It's really front and center.
Whether it's in respect of war and the application of AI to war, or it's in the context of the significant income disparity that's emerged since the 1970s and so on, and being accelerated by AI, all of those things. AI is touching on every one of those things now, and it's really centered. It's a centerpiece in my life, frankly, now, and I didn't see that coming. No.
And you saw all kinds of things coming, Andy. I thought I did, but I certainly wasn't able to take advantage of them. Right, right, right.
Chapter 7: What role does Zephyrus play in AI and climate science?
Beth, do you have a story that's of particular interest? I do. So we have shared Yann LeCun's vision or pushback on AI and large language models many times on this show, right? Like he's fairly famous saying that the large language model isn't as smart as your cat because your cat has a sense of the world.
And he also, this war was recently that he left Meta, right, that confirmed leaving after the scaled person came and took over AI at Meta, not Brian's scaled person. Alex Wong, yeah.
Chapter 8: How could conversational access to scientific data reshape research?
So, Leon LeCun's advanced machine intelligence just emerged, so that's his company, with 1.03 billion seed round. He's a Turing Award winner. I'm reading this from the rundown. So he left in November after 12 years with FAIR, telling Mark Zuckerberg he could build world models faster, cheaper, and better on his own. So the seed round is... It's significant at $1 billion, basically.
But the other significance is that it's the biggest seed round and investment in Europe at this point. Yeah, he's over in France. He moved from Meta's headquarters, I think, or maybe he was working for Meta from France, but he's a French guy. Yes.
And by the way, the valuation that the investors gave that company, which hasn't done anything yet, although behind the scenes I'm sure they've got a lot, it's $3.5 billion. So it's a unicorn before it ever starts. It's a unicorn in the money provided as the seed funding. How do you spend a billion dollars on developing world models? Well, NVIDIA can tell you.
because they're building world models, and they've spent way more than that. And NVIDIA is part of the backers. NVIDIA, Samsung, Bezos, Expeditions, Eric Schmidt, and Mark Cuban are among the backers. The headquarters is in Paris, and that's interesting because we had a little tour when Brian was in Paris of an incubator that
That was in a it was like in a it was a converted railway station of firemen. So that's right. I'm not saying that he's there, but I'm not saying he's not there. And that would be very cool. And we're starting to see posts of people saying, hey, I've I'm pleased to announce that I'm going to be working with Yann LeCun at Advanced Machine Intelligence. So very cool. Yeah.
uh carl's joined us so carl do you feel i'll throw you into the deep end do you have a story that you want to talk about today uh i oh yes i do hold on give me one second um there was something that i posted yesterday to the chat and i thought it was very funny um oh i'm just gonna let's see if i can play it yeah Okay, so I want to play this and you let me know what you all think of it. Okay.
How many tokens a year is my employer getting from me in terms of productivity? Let me run the math real quick. Assuming you're a full-time human, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that's about 2,000 hours. If we figure your brain's doing 20,000 tokens a day, like we talked about, that's roughly 100,000 tokens per workweek. Multiply by 50, 5 million tokens a year.
So yeah, your boss is basically getting 5 million little thoughts, decisions, emails, and why is this spreadsheet broken again moments for whatever they're paying you. Kind of makes you wonder who the real bargain is, huh? So 5 million tokens a year they get from me. What is the cost of getting 5 million tokens with AI right now? Right now, March 2026, prices have dropped hard since last year.
For 5 million tokens? Depends on the model, but let's keep it real. With something like OpenAI's GPT-5.2, their current top dog, you're looking at about $9 for input-heavy work. If it's half and half, call it $12 to $15 total. Cheaper options? Brock's fast tier from XAI is stupid cheap, like $1 or less for 5 mil if you're mostly prompted, not generating null.
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