# Re:Building Together EP 348 — AI News/Stories

Host: CEELOS (@CEELOSFIGG) with co-host Baked (@Bakedmetax) · Thu, Oct 8 2026 · 1:12:05 · 5 voices (CEELOS, Baked, SLICK RIC, ValerieKates, Donny Ðoge)

## TL;DR
- Baked brought two hardware stories: **Project Valantis** (lasers/photonics replacing copper inside GPUs — reportedly ~$88M raised in 24 hours, chips targeted for next year) and **Project Suncatcher** (Google putting laser-linked, solar-powered compute in orbit so data centers stop eating land, grid power and cooling water).
- CEELOS covered **Norway's proposed temporary restriction on AI smart glasses** in public spaces — schools, playgrounds, gyms, museums, beaches — and the room worked through where the line actually sits.
- The back half was about **AI-native influencers**: fully fake characters pulling 200k+ followers and tens of millions of views, built with motion-control video tools like Higgsfield. CEELOS immediately started scheming a regen-shirted one.
- SLICK RIC is deep in **Claude** — built a playable game in 15 minutes, is scraping local businesses with no websites to pitch them AI-built sites, and offered to FaceTime-screenshare the whole workflow with anyone who wants it.
- Running theme, stated plainly: no gatekeeping. Share the plugins, share the prompts, drag the whole community up a level.
- Donny Ðoge announced regen GIFs incoming; CEELOS plugged the Discord voice channel as the place organic ideas actually happen.

## Highlights

**[15:45] — Project Valantis, or: getting the copper out of your GPU.** Baked opened with the bottleneck everyone hits — speed and memory bandwidth — and the fix: replacing copper and electricity inside GPUs with the same style of IR lasers that unlock your phone with your face. The jump he described is from 8–12 memory chips per GPU to 200+, with training getting faster and dramatically cheaper. CEELOS's response to decommissioned copper everywhere: "I want my pennies back."

**[18:00] — What cheap compute actually buys you.** The practical payoff, in their terms: the $100/month tier of a model becomes the $10 tier. CEELOS did the math live on his Higgsfield plan (~$20/month paid annually) and said if that drops to a couple of bucks he'd happily spend ten or fifteen and just make more. "Bring on the lasers, bro."

**[23:00] — Project Suncatcher: AI goes to orbit.** Baked laid out the three walls data centers are hitting — land, grid power, heat — and Google's answer: satellites with roughly 8x the solar yield of ground panels, linked by the same lasers, with heat simply radiating into vacuum instead of needing water cooling. The claim that space is "open real estate" got gently fact-checked by ValerieKates and the orbital debris trackers [26:03].

**[27:33] — The WALL-E theory of AI.** Baked's standing correction to everyone invoking Skynet: the trajectory looks less like Terminator and more like WALL-E — Earth ringed in our own junk while we chase efficiency upward. CEELOS extended it to the year 3012, spaceship cars, and what happens when aliens tap in and start feeding it information.

**[29:10] — Slick, Claude, and a game in fifteen minutes.** Calling in from a borrowed car with a cracked windshield and no AC, SLICK RIC reported he's made several decent games despite, by his own account, knowing nothing — "but Claude does." Baked, who has spent month-plus stretches getting games to actually function, confirmed the damage at [37:55].

**[36:01] — The anti-gatekeeping bit that's the whole point of the show.** CEELOS on why he doesn't understand hoarding workflows: your ideas are your ideas, and one offhand "oh, I didn't think of doing it that way" compounds across a whole community. Slick's version was concrete — FaceTime, screen share, here's what to download, here's which plugins, the rest is on you.

**[38:29] — Norway's smart-glasses proposal.** CEELOS walked through the proposed temporary ban while the government studies permanent rules, and the group pulled it apart from both ends: Slick on bad actors casing parks and public buildings, Baked on the fact that there's no functional difference between glasses and the phone-camera provocateurs already doing it legally — and his prediction that any law here snowballs fast. Then [45:22]: people are already paying to have the recording indicator lights deactivated and sealed behind tinted lenses.

**[48:45] — The rise of the AI-native celebrity.** The segment that clearly got CEELOS's gears turning: bizarre AI-generated characters with recurring bits, lore and six-figure follower counts appearing in days. The key mechanic isn't generating scenes from scratch — it's motion control, taking an existing performance and swapping who's performing it. Donny Ðoge's answer to why anyone follows a character they know is fake: "Because it's entertaining, right?" Baked's: brain rot, and it's hard to look away [58:06].

**[1:00:36] — The Spaces-to-animation idea.** CEELOS floated what he actually wants built: something like the bot that recaps Spaces, but instead of text it renders the conversation as animated video using each person's PFP as the character — no manual scrubbing for timestamps, ideally auto-posting. Slick's verdict was that years of writing absurdly detailed prompts have already trained him for exactly this.

**[1:03:52] — Slick's offline hustle.** The most grounded use case of the night: scrape local businesses with no website and nothing but Yelp photos, have Claude build the full site and menu board as a spec pitch, show up with it finished, let them name the price, then charge $20–30/month to maintain it — first month free so they can watch foot traffic move.

**[1:08:40] — Otherside is down for maintenance, son.** CEELOS confessed to telling his kid the servers are offline because it's ApeFest and only apes are allowed. The kid's counter-offer: buy an ape. Then: get a mutant. Baked was instructed that if a small child DMs him, the official story holds.

## Topic timeline

| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| [0:47]–[11:42] | Pre-show: pink PFPs for breast cancer awareness, character-consistency gripes, intro music |
| [11:42]–[15:05] | Spooky-season PFP roll call, ValerieKates vs. the Las Vegas heat and two overheating phones |
| [15:45]–[22:26] | Project Valantis: photonic GPUs, cheaper tiers, CEELOS's 10-second edit pipeline |
| [22:26]–[27:05] | Funding, NVIDIA competition, Project Suncatcher and compute in orbit |
| [27:05]–[29:10] | WALL-E futurism, space junk, ants |
| [29:10]–[38:26] | SLICK RIC on Claude, plugins, games in 15 minutes, no-gatekeeping ethos |
| [38:29]–[48:45] | Norway's AI glasses proposal, flock cameras, disabled recording lights, contact-lens endgame |
| [48:45]–[58:06] | AI-native influencers, motion control, Higgsfield, attention retention |
| [59:01]–[1:00:28] | Slick's news dump: SpaceX as carrier vs telecom stocks; seized Bitcoin moved |
| [1:00:36]–[1:07:02] | Spaces-to-animation idea; Claude-built websites as a local business pitch |
| [1:07:02]–[1:12:04] | Two-year mark, Otherside bit, Donny's regen GIFs, Discord voice channel plug |

## Notable quotes

- "I want my pennies back." — CEELOS, on a world with no copper in the GPUs [17:58]
- "Everyone's like, oh, Skynet or Terminator. I'm like, nah... we are getting so much closer to the world of WALL-E." — Baked [27:33]
- "No, the one thing I know is I know nothing at all." — SLICK RIC [38:26]
- "Don't let somebody else's progress impede your own." — CEELOS [36:01]
- "This motherfucker pumped out a game better than all of mine in 15 minutes." — Baked, on Slick [37:55]
- "I'm trying to find 70 different ways to get bread." — SLICK RIC [1:05:22]

## Who said what

- **CEELOS (@CEELOSFIGG)** — host. Ran the room from a moving vehicle and an overheating phone, brought the Norway glasses story and the AI-influencer deep dive, and kept steering everything back to one question: how does this get a regen onto the timeline?
- **Baked (@Bakedmetax)** — co-host and the night's science desk. Delivered Valantis and Suncatcher with the infrastructure context (land, power, heat), plus the WALL-E thesis and the detail about tinted-over recording lights.
- **SLICK RIC (@richj530)** — the field report. Building games and client websites with Claude, evangelizing plugins and FaceTime screen shares, and dropping the SpaceX-carrier and moved-Bitcoin headlines at the end.
- **Donny Ðoge (@DogeDonny2013)** — came in late, immediately clocked the AI influencer as AI ("even if you click his profile, it'll tell you"), gave the cleanest answer on why people follow fake characters, and announced regen GIFs on the way [1:10:24].
- **ValerieKates (@valeriekates_)** — early on, the cautionary tale of running AI generation, streaming and Spaces off two phones in Vegas heat, kept alive on ice packs [12:57].

## Worth a full listen

- **[15:45]–[27:05]** — Baked's uninterrupted run through both hardware stories. The recap gives you the headlines; the stretch itself is where the pieces click together, as the same laser tech turns out to be both the GPU fix and the thing linking satellites.
- **[38:29]–[48:45]** — The smart-glasses conversation is the room at its best: three people turning a proposal over from the civil-liberties side, the bad-actor side, and the "someone's already selling a mod for that" side, with a detour through flock cameras and fossilized McDonald's fries.
- **[1:03:52]–[1:07:02]** — Slick's business pitch, start to finish, including the pricing psychology of letting the client throw out the first number. Fully portable to anyone with a laptop and a list of local restaurants.