Big Companies Start Hiring Again, Anthropic's Open-Weight Position, Zuck Backs AI for All | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Well, Anthropic's responded. We're going to go through that proposal, the facts and the proposal for what happens next in the open open model debate over whether or not they should be banned, restricted, tested, limited in some ways, sued. Oh, there's a whole bunch of different possible outcomes, but we'll take you all through it. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that large companies are beginning to

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  They have a large white pill.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Yes, it is a large white pill.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Has hit the front page of the Journal.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Yes, and I think people have been going back and forth on this. This is a story that's that's just getting digested by the tech folks, like the actual AI lab leaders who had predicted crazy job losses and are now not really seeing that. They're seeing productivity boosts and different diffusion taking time in certain places and there's new capabilities, but it's not exactly a drop in replacement for a coworker, at least in in most scenarios. And that's what the Wall Street Journal is reporting. So let me set the table and then we can debate it a little bit. After roughly a year of cautious hiring, companies across technology, transportation, defense,

• 1:10John Coogan?

  and other industries now say they need more employees to work alongside AI systems. Total victory for both humans and AI. We're working together. Peace is possible. It's an example of Jevon's paradox, Jevon's paradox. When a technology makes something more efficient, demand often rises enough the total use and the need for people actually increases. For roughly the past year, many companies pointed to AI while announcing layoffs. This was a huge thorn in your side. I think you hated this more than anyone else. And you were right to, because it did seem like it was just PR spin, etc.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a way for CEOs and management teams to save their own ass instead of saying, you know, hey, we we overhired or the business isn't doing as well as we would like, and we need to sort of basically settle down for a second and get our mojo back.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, no one wants to say that, but I think one of my favorite posts was the and obviously, these circumstances are never great, but the new CEO of Xbox came out and just was like very honest about the situation.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  And I think that more of that is necessary.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, there's a lot of firms where they, once they get to 10,000, 20,000 employees, they might say, look, 20,000 might be the right number, but the bottom 1,000 people are not performing. We would like to lay them off and then bring in a new 1,000 people that are better fit for the company and the current trajectory that we're on, the current skills that we need. Maybe we need more salespeople.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  And those bottom 1,000 people might be top 10% at another company.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. So the narrative appears to be shifting. Companies like CSX, Alphabet, ServiceNow, Snap-on, and consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton have all recently signaled plans to expand hiring, particularly in areas where employees can use AI to become more productive.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it used to be somewhat of a flex if a company was like, yeah, we put up a role and we got 2,000 applicants.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  It's like, well.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  That's true. And then also, it's a little bit of a sign of like, oh, wow, they have 100 openings. Like, they must be like growing so fast, you know? So, but if it's just a prompt to say, oh, yeah, put up, like, look at my organizational design and add five roles for everyone, because why not? Why not see who comes by? You know, we're not, we don't necessarily have to interview these people. So weird, weird dynamics, but we'll dig into it. So meanwhile, the latest weekly US jobless claims fell to one of the lowest levels in decades, underscoring the resilience of the labor market. The shift also reflects a more realistic understanding of AI's capabilities. Sarah Franklin, CEO of HR platform Lattice, says many companies initially assumed AI agents could replace entry level workers,

• 3:59John Coogan?

  but are now recognizing that human employees remain essential. Just because you have coding agents doesn't mean you're not hiring engineers. She said, adding that Lattice is seeing renewed hiring among many of its customers, including for junior roles. Robert Half, CEO, M. Keith Waddell, said AI's effect on unemployment has been more benign than some had feared, adding that hiring demand continues to improve and market conditions are increasingly more supportive of business. And so I do think there was a little bit of like a successful psy-op with the with the AI is going to be able to do everything, where I do think there are some firms that were like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't hire. Or because like, what if we get it wrong and we hire a bunch of people and then AI really does catch up?

• 4:40John Coogan?

  And we don't need those people. That's silly. We shouldn't go through that like whipsaw effect. And so people are going back and forth on that. Bryce Roberts.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. At least in, at least in our organization, which is unique and and very niche and there's not that many organizations that are running, you know, a niche technology daily show.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  I feel like a lot of what the value that we get out of AI would have historically been done by not super expert level freelancers, right? These sort of like upwork style tasks that you would do historically, like an idea for a funny song, right?

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  I've paid to get a funny song made probably a decade ago online, right? As just like a joke and now you can just go to Souno and and make something like that. And then there's other things like make a funny website, right? I historically would maybe work with freelancers.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  So you're saying that I should, I should take down the five open roles I have for Celtic punk session musicians?

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Because I was going to hire five Celtic punk session musicians to constantly record Dropkick Murphy's covers for us.

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Every day.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm not ready to say that you shouldn't do that.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  I'm actually closer than ever to hiring a full time Celtic punk band to to play music, to recreate songs.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Codexx and Guinness.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yes. I'm closer than ever to doing that, where that was not even on the roadmap a few years ago. Yeah, I don't know. It's a good point. Yeah, there's a lot of things that you are doing that you would never do with a full time employee.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  That just sort of like fills the cracks and allows you to do more different things in your organization, but the core stuff is still like you want a person that's responsible and then you want them using AI. I don't know.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal breaks it all down, but we went through most of that. So Bryce Roberts, he's, he's taking the other side of this. He says, he shares a screenshot of a text message that says, we honestly aren't hiring a ton right now. AI backfilling most roles. Backfilling? Is that specifically, does that specifically refer to when someone leaves the company? You backfill them with AI? So you say, oh, someone quit, like if there's Steve and Jim on two different, on one team, and Steve quits, you say, hey, Jim, can you just, instead of hiring another person, just do twice as much work with AI? Is that what this person's articulating? I mean, obviously, there's some companies that are like, yeah, we're not hiring anyone. We're going for the one person, one billion dollar company. Like, I'm not going to hire anyone. I'm just going to use

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that's rare. Usually, usually when your business is ripping, you're like, I can't hire great people fast enough.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  And sometimes you actually, sometimes you actually don't have time to invest into various hiring processes, but

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I would read into this text, the company's just probably not like ripping.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  That's my, that's my takeaway.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Well, Bryce Roberts says RIP new grads. Matthew Prince over Cloudflare takes the other side. He says, wrong strategy to stop hiring new grads. The right strategy, hire them and insert them into legacy teams to help them better adopt AI.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  And Cloudflare, of course, hired 1,000 interns.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  It was a, it was a crazy number, wasn't it? Up there in like almost 1,000?

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Four digits.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Let's play the latest good work reel. We're just watching reels now.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  This is, oh my God, is Bernie Madoff. Pretty good.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Glowers. That's from the 80s, too. That's good.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I've seen a few of these around before. Up next. Solid Sam Bankman-Fried here. That's nice. That's really nice.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  I like that they actually printed these. I think he made it with balsa wood.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  This is balsa wood?

• 8:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. The acting is so good.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Wait, John? This is a, this is a vintage Zuckerberg.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, 05?

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  This is a vintage 05 Zuckerberg. Let's just check the back really quick. Yeah, there it is. That is a patch from his Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs. You can tell by the smell.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Is that real? What is that referring to?

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  This is on athlete, you know, trading cards. I'll put a piece of the jersey.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Piece of jersey.

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  Sleet this one. Yeah. All right. Up next.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Sleet it.

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  Ooh, okay. Elizabeth Holmes.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  We do have two, I believe. We have two, but a triple Holmes is what every good collector has in their arsenal. All right.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Last card. One, one card left. Three, two, one.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Turn it off. Very funny, very funny.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  It is funny how the, the like business comedy canon has really solidified around like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried, Mark Zuckerberg. There's like a few names.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised they didn't have an Adam Newman rookie card in there.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  I don't know if Adam Newman is like a big enough name relative to.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Sam Bankman Fried and Elizabeth Holmes. It's just interesting, like the different, the different names that have broken out that you can do a comedy sketch that's like, you know, it goes as big as, as Good Work does because they get, you know, I think millions and millions of views.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  All right, pull up this image from Manhattan this morning. We got sent this.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  We've been doing on the ground reporting.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  From one of our on the ground reporters in Manhattan. There's a company called Black Sheep.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Dot I O.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  That got 20 trucks and they're just driving them around Google's Manhattan office.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  Saying, shame on you, Google. Return our $80,000. We had to dig in. We got very curious.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  I had no idea. They make sunglasses?

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  They make $8 sunglasses that beat $350 sunglasses in NBC lab test.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Okay. Are you wearing Black Sheep today?

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  I wish, I wish. So, uh, Black Sheep makes direct to factory.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Okay. Factory direct prescription eyewear. Stop paying $500 for $500.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  This is from their own website. They're saying direct to factory optical disruptor, which is, which is not, this is from their website.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Where are you getting this?

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, on Black Sheep.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  I'm on blacksheep.io as well. It says factory direct, we, direct to factory. Look, I want to send some eyewear to a factory in China.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  Direct to factory.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  I'll be sending it to them.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Direct to factory.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so this company, they say, direct to factory optical disruptor. Black Sheep launches 25 truck guerrilla campaign against Google in Manhattan.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  And then they're, they're sort of like narrating their own guerrilla campaign. A fleet of 25 minimalist LED billboard trucks surrounds Google's Chelsea headquarters. After the tech giant weaponized an organic search glitch to pocket nearly $80,000 in ad spend following Black Sheep's viral NBC Today Show debut. 25 LED trucks deployed, $77,000 drained in 30 hours. And then they're, and then they're just continuing to market their own products. So very interesting strategy here. I think every marketer has had the experience of, of having a campaign go haywire.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  Very fascinating to take, to take this route. Let's see how it works for them. If I were Google, I would say you can have your $80,000 back, but you can never advertise on Google again because I just don't know how.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  I don't think Google would ban them permanently for this. This is ridiculous, but it, you know, there's, there's going to be like any other, like it's a self-serve platform.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  But is it a good campaign?

• 12:14John Coogan?

  But what, what actually happened? So they say, how it unfolded, NBC Today Show segment errors. Uh, they test the retail subscription against Black Sheep's factory direct pair. National search traffic spikes, hundreds of Americans search Black Sheep because they're seeing it on TV. The organic listing breaks. Google's search engine redirected organic brand traffic to a dead end third-party 404 error page. And so with the organic route broken, users were funneled into Google's paid listings. So what is their claim? How is Google responsible for this exactly?

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like user error.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Because I mean, you do, you do have some control over your Google search results based on the webmaster tools. You can index certain things. And then also if you're noticing a 404 page, you could like redirect it quickly. But again, if this is happening all very fast.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  They can user error.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  But I mean, it is interesting because they're probably going to get more than $77,000 worth of organic just from this. I mean, I didn't see the original campaign and I'm seeing this because this is hilarious, but this is like, is this, they, they shared an AI image with tons of these like shame on you trucks, but those are real.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  These are real.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  And are those minimalist or maximalist? Those seem maximalist to me, but maybe they're minimal.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Minimalist, I guess, in the, in the display of the, uh, in the way they actually are leveraging the space on the truck, black and white.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Truly underrated surface area for stunts and advertising. Like, I, this message is sort of like squabbling with Google over this like sort of odd scenario, but you can imagine someone using this for something much cooler and much more positive and not like this, uh, you know, sort of unfortunate situation for them where they're dealing with the, you know, fallout of a Google error.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, we want to interview the truck drivers. So if you're driving a Black Sheep truck around Manhattan today, reach out.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Show. Nick, make it happen.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Ilya said, straight shot to SSI, so they better not be gearing up to release a work agent called Francois.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Francois would be a very good name for a, for an AI agent. I like that. Uh, I do wonder what they're going to be releasing. Has the SSI is going to release? Is that complete rumor? Because all, all Ilya said.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  They just said they would scale their research.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  So that just means they've done a bunch of research. They have some sort of architecture that they like, some sort of flywheel, and they're going to like use more compute. And so that's why they're raising money. I don't think they said like, and we're going to release it publicly.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  But everyone's thinking like probably still LLM or something different. No one really knows.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I think still broadly, like generally LLM based.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  God, like next level. There are levels to vague posting when you live a vague life. It's just like your entire life is vagary. Anyway, uh, in other news, recursive super intelligence signs a $410 compute deal with Amazon. So funny. And it's in the TechCrunch, it's in the, it's in the, the header too. Of course, that is a typo. Uh, it says recursive super intelligence signs 410 million, million dollar compute deal with Amazon. Congratulations to recursive super intelligence.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Throwing safety out the window. That should be the, that should be the, the tagline. Like, because there's already safe super intelligence, but we're just doing recursive super intelligence over here. Um, but of course the company is doing very well. They, uh, merged for itself in May with 650 million in funding focused on building open-ended self-improving systems and potentially compute-intensive approach to AI research. This multi-year deal is meant to provide flexibility as the company looks to scale up those systems. Uh, recursive's $410 million outlay represents the bulk of the company's fundraising to date, but on a call with TechCrunch.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  Hey, hey, hey, they still have a couple hundred million left over.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Founder and CEO, Richard Socher emphasized that he expected it to be the first of many such deals. So is this, I feel like normally when you see a, like a compute deal signed, it's always like more complicated than just like, we're buying this expensive thing. It's usually like, we're, we're paying that. I'm like, I, it's, we, we used to be so like anti circular deal that now I just have come to, I've been so normalized by them that I expect them every time. And I'm like, wait, wait. This is just, there's no circularity here. I would have expected like.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Equity changing.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, like Amazon's investing in you and you're buying Tranium and racking it. And any of you guys do, they're doing new campus and they're investing in this and that, and you're investing in them. Uh, instead it just seems like it's a pretty vanilla deal. It's like, they're just buying a lot of compute from Amazon. Great.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  Seems like it.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Well, good luck to them. Very excited for what they're launching. Um.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, Jason, VP of Startups and VC at AWS says, part of the agreement is that we're going to co-develop him for a purpose built for these types of companies. So fingers crossed, but it seems like we could get some, some circularity.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's hope so. Uh, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, services and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Fingers crossed. Well, well, here's, here's a deal that's somewhat circular. We got Nvidia revealed as a tenant for a $50 billion data center that will use its chips. So they're the tenant of the data center that uses its chips. We'll talk to Take Kim about this. Uh, CEO Jensen Wong deploys balance sheet to backstop growth of AI computing market. Nvidia signed leases worth up to $50 billion for a massive Texas data center. That's very, very big. That's very, very big for a single site. Uh, a previously undisclosed commitment that shines a new spotlight on the chips, on the chip group's growing role in financing AI.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  The nearly $5 trillion company is leasing the entire gigawatt facility that developer Hut 8 is building, which will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units. So you have to imagine that once they have these, they serve something or wind up selling them. Like, these things change hands so many times. There's a lot of different ways that this could play out ultimately. Um, but in the, uh, can we pull up the Nvidia chart? Yeah, there we go. Nvidia, ooh. Big candle today, up 3%, 5.17 trillion. Let's take a look at Apple. 4.99. They crossed five today. Uh, they're down a little bit since they, since they beat, breached that, but they're neck and neck. Uh, Google is sitting at.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Apple running the do nothing win strategy.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Jensen doing thousands of deals.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  They didn't even sign the open letter. Uh, there are three companies that still, I believe still haven't, uh, signed the open letter and.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Only three companies on the entire surface of the earth.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  There are three, there are three major companies that haven't signed that Nvidia open letter about, uh, banning open source, uh, and or not banning open source. Amazon, Apple and Anthropic. Anthropic put out a, uh, a post yesterday, very, very clear response, sort of outlining their view on open source, their stance.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Apple and Amazon haven't signed and they both have like very physical elements in the world in the sense that they're not, uh, they're sort of unslopable. Like you, you can't vibe code in Amazon warehouse. You can't vibe code in iPhone. There are threats to those businesses, of course. And of course, Apple should benefit from open source and so should Amazon because they'll be able to serve open models across AWS, but it's just potentially interesting. I think the Apple standing it, standing back is more just like, look, we're not jumping on with this crazy open letter that everyone is signing. Like we just have our own brand. We're thinking different. We're doing our thing.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  Based on other Apple AI timelines, I would expect them to sign it in maybe a year or two.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Potentially. These glasses have changed you. They turned you into a beast. Let me run through the three Anthropic proposals because it's an important response. So Dario Amadek, Anthropic CEO, responded directly to that letter summarizing, supporting open weight models that circulated over the weekend. So he makes three claims, just to sort of clarify things that I think are important. One, he says Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open weight models. Now, that's a blanket ban. There's obviously like defining what a ban is and what an open weight model, what a distilled model, what a foreign model is, these things all matter. But he has, he has come out and said, look, we never advocated for a total ban on open weight models. Two, he says, undergirding all of this is the US

• 21:00John Coogan?

  must beat authoritarian governments in the AI race. He points to China, but he identifies any authoritarian government. If they get really powerful AI, they'll come over here and steamroll us and you won't be free to do whatever you want to do in America. Three, powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyber attacks or biological attacks. There are, there are risks to having really, really powerful AI, open source systems just running around. So he's worried about those three things, clarifying those three points. But he makes three recommended actions. He makes three proposals. First, he says, let's continue to sanction chips. Let's not sell chips to China. He says, we should not sell powerful chips or chip making equipment to China. So this has been debated for years, like going

• 21:43John Coogan?

  back to the Biden chip controls. Everyone knows every different angle on this, the basics. I mean, there is a pretty good argument for chip controls, even on purely geo-economic competitive grounds, like even if you don't believe in the, the, the risk of authoritarian governments having powerful AI, even if you just think it's like, you know, fancy autocomplete, it's like, well, it's the engine of our economy. And if you can slow down a rival economy, that's beneficial to you, right? And so, and there also seems to be basically unlimited demand for chips in America. So by restricting sales to China, that shouldn't actually hurt American chip companies all that much. But yes.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, they just, like, their argument would be, we fully lose the Chinese market, which is the second largest computing market in the world, right? So, so I think, but, but you're, the counterpoint to that is you were going to lose it anyways.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And a lot of that, it stems from the fact that China has been building an indigenous chip supply for decades. We've talked about going back to a whole bunch of their, you know, state-led, state-funded chip and fab processes. They've always been a few years behind. And so maintaining that gap, all else equal, is an advantage for the United States. The second point Dario makes is, he says, we should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations. This seems totally reasonable. Companies can set their terms of service and they have a right to maintain intellectual property with proper legal consequences for violations. Anthropic's been fighting distillation attacks, but according to them,

• 23:18John Coogan?

  it's not that effective. Dario proposes policy interventions to deter this behavior. And this is where I'm still not clear on what, where that goes next. Like, what is the correct policy intervention? There's a, like, policy intervention is a very, very broad thing. It can mean anything from like a tax, a tariff, a fine, a sternly worded letter, not getting invited to a golf tournament. Like, there's so many different things that policy like covers these days, right? Where, where does this actually go? He says he doesn't want a blanket ban on open weight models, but it does seem like one possible policy intervention would be to sort of like ban, restrict, or pressure open weights models that can be reasonably shown to have been distilled. So if there's someone who's just

• 24:03John Coogan?

  a perfect distillation, it just gets, it just doesn't quite feel right. It's hard to quantify these things. We don't have a binary where you run some sort of algorithm and you say, yes, this was distilled. Because you can distill, you know, half on Opus 5 and then throw in a little GPT 5.6 and then mix in some, some Mistral and like just be distilling from all over the place, fine tune stuff, change the flavor, change the RL environment. There's so many different pieces of it. And Tyler, you were making a point about Tinker or?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, so, so the, the Inkling model from Thing Machines, like, it used some synthetic, synthetic data that was created with, I think, Kimi K 2.5.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  So like, does that count as like, distillation? Like, probably not, when people usually talk about it, but like, it definitely benefited from Chinese open source models.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  So if you're downstream of.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wouldn't call it industrial scale distillation.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  It's sort of downstream of industrial scale.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  There is like some big gray area where like, how do you actually define these things?

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so defining that is going to be what, that's going to be the conversation that plays out in, in DC, like behind the scenes, on the basis of this. And that's where the actual negotiation is going to happen between, you know, the, the position of Nvidia and everyone that signed the letter versus the position of Anthropic and everyone who didn't sign the letter. They're going to sort of just decide, okay, well, if you can prove this, this, and this, and you can show us that your API was getting hit by these different things, and you have a really solid report of what happened, and then the model also, you know, sort of, you know, checks these boxes quantitatively, when we do this eval, then maybe we will pressure it. And then what does that actually mean? You could

• 25:45John Coogan?

  go after the lab that committed the distillation attack with lawsuits, but that seems really difficult, given the international nature of these attacks. So we're sort of back to where we started. Like, what, what can the government do that the lab can't? Like, the lab should be looking at every customer and saying, oh, this seems like someone who's trying to distill. They keep asking for basically what looks like a lot of training data. They, they're not acting like a normal user, just being like, build me a website. Okay. Third, he says, all sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory, mandatory safety testing. So this was recently outlined by Demis Hassabis over at Google DeepMind as well. And, and it seems like the, the two companies are in alignment on

• 26:26John Coogan?

  this in particular. And it's a somewhat reasonable position, although the risk is that small companies who have safe models could, that aren't distilled, could get tied up in a review queue for years before they can release. Like, that would be very, very annoying if you're recursive superintelligence, for example, and you don't have a Washington DC office, and you're like, hey, we want to release our new model. And they're like, yeah, totally. Like, you got to go through the, the, the review process, get in line. And then it's like every, you know, every trillion dollar company is there with a ton of lobbyists being like, we'll review our model first because we want to get out a week before the, the small startup. And that's the frustration of biotech, the FDA, anything

• 27:09John Coogan?

  that goes through approval. We've talked about this with the nuclear stuff. It gets very tricky. And so you want to avoid that and you don't want to wind up slowing down innovation that's happening on small scales and decreasing competition. Dario does do a good job of like acknowledging upfront that, he says, it would protect a US AI companies from competition, but that's never been my goal with anything that he's saying here. And so it's still worth working through what happens in a really adversarial situation. Like, what if a foreign lab distills a bunch of frontier models? They're the most aggressive. They're just distilling everything. Then they jump forward a bunch in capability. They get a bunch of smuggled chips. They take all the restrictions off of cyber, all the restrictions off of bio, and then they just drop the weights on like a torrent. Or they

• 27:53John Coogan?

  put them up on Hugging Face and Hugging Face is like, this is really crazy. No one likes this. There's a lot of pressure to take it down. I don't know. But it's out there. Like, what does the government actually do? Like, the government probably pressures or bans, like hosting the weights, maybe serving the model. You maybe won't be able to run it in American data centers. You go to the NeoCloud and say like, hey, this thing is actually bad. And I think people are divided on this because they see the current models not as actually dangerous, which is totally reasonable to assess that, yeah, it's not that bad. But like, if there was a model that was like, yeah, it's actually just like the killing machine. Like, I think that most people would be like, yes, I'm democratically voting to not serve that because it's just like, it's an annoyance at, at best and like actually bad at worst.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  And then the other big question is like, how much compute do you actually need for it to be dangerous?

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Is, is like, having some GPUs in the back shed going to be enough?

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  Maybe for sufficiently advanced model, yes. Or do you need access to a ton of racks?

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Ton of power?

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  And then you do need to work with a NeoCloud in that case.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  And as soon as you're a US-based company with a real data center, with a bunch of NBL 72s in there, you probably have registration and, you know, all sorts of just like business registrations where the government can reach out to you and say, hey, we're actually really worried about this. Just like, there are other things you can't host in a data center. There's all sorts of stuff that's illegal, even if it's just intellectual property.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's, that's.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Like, you can't, even just, just because you have a data center, doesn't mean that you can like, take an open source, you know.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  You can't, you can't as a data center.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Open source Marvel. Like, they'll be like, no.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  Or even, even a, you know, a CRM company can't knowingly support like a organized cartel, global cartel that is like trafficking narcotics, right? You have, you'd have to imagine like, that they have.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  They have to vibe their own.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Balances.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  So, so, so what's interesting is like, what is the next step of that? So if there is a bad model and, and everyone agrees like, okay, yeah, we got to not host this, not distribute this, like, yeah, the weights are out there. People are trying to like, sort of run it a little bit. But does it go offshore? Do we wind up in like the crypto scenario where there's like these offshore things and people are using VPNs to get access to it? Like, what level of aggression do you see from the US government in that scenario? It probably should be proportionate to like the danger imposed by the model. Like, if it's just a model that's like, that's like annoying or like slightly IP infringes, but like, no one's really being like, I'm not, I'm, I'm canceling my Disney subscription because this new model will generate me Disney IP.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Like, that's probably not like, okay, put up a crazy firewall. But if it is like the ultimate hack machine that's like stealing everyone's money from the banks, then yeah, you are going to put up the firewall and sort of be much more aggressive. So I think the response will be in reaction to whatever the power of the models are. But it'll be interesting to go back and forth. Anyway, all in all, the letter clarifies a lot about the anthroposophy position. So I think it's good that it came out, but it's still worth working through the game theory of like, what happens down the line? Policy interventions is all we got here. And I think it's still too generic at this point. I want to know like, what policy looks like? I want to predict that. I want to understand what's actually being proposed, what people like, what people don't like. And so I think we'll learn more about this in the coming days.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Mark Zuckerberg is in the Wall Street Journal opinion section with a new piece, "The AI Future Is For Everyone." He says, "The history of democracy and economics has proved that centralized power stifles human potential." And it's quite long. I'll go let you guys read it, but let's head into the comment section. Let's get a quick, let's get a quick reaction. Let's get a quick reaction.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  This is the Wall Street Journal. I think it'll be pretty.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  No, it, it looks relatively tame.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  It'll be tame.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, making a, you know, a clear effort to position to, to be the overtly, there was a white space for a guy investing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in AI that is like, says, hey, this is going to be really great for everyone.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  And I'm going to help us get there.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  It is, it is interesting. Facebook does have some monopolies, but like, the competition for attention is constant and there are always sources outside. Like, they've never had a full monopoly on social media even with TikTok and Snapchat and LinkedIn and Twitch and YouTube and Netflix and the podcast feed and SMS and iMessage. Like, there are so many other platforms for distributing information. Like, I, I don't know, I, I, it, it's hard to jump straight to a critique here. But the, the key quote that Andrew Curran pulled out was that he said, "In most cases,

• 32:47John Coogan?

  like cybersecurity, the history of open source software has shown that giving everyone full access to powerful systems will be the best way to protect safety and security over time." So he's firmly on the side of democratizing powerful AI. And he is yet another one. I imagine that they, that they signed the letter. I, I've lost track at this point, but you can imagine that he did. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. The other piece of news is that Apple is launching Apple Upgrade next week, an iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch leasing slash subscription program. They said, "You will own nothing and you will be happy."

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  We're launching our new program. You will own nothing and be happy.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  It's partnering with Klarna to launch in the United States at online and retail stores. It's now official. Leasing prices start as low as $20 or $17.99 per month for iPhone, $11.99 for Apple Watch, $24.99 for Mac and $11.99 for iPad. So interesting, I mean, a lot of people are saying this is a direct reaction to increased prices for memory, increased prices for products. There was a time when an iPhone was a couple hundred dollars and there were incentives to jump on a Verizon plan and you sort of amortize the cost over that. Those days are gone. Like, we're in the world of like a $2,000 iPhone. It's a significant.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  Same thing with our gongs, honestly.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  You want a subscription gong?

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just saying, there was a time when a TVPN gong was $200.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  Now it's in the tens of thousands of dollars, right?

• 34:27John Coogan?

  It's actually so expensive. Somebody, a friend of mine texted me and was like, where do we get the gongs? I need a gong. And I was like, I think you should start small. And this is not like you're, you can't handle the big gong. I was more saying that like, there is a joy to being on the hedonic treadmill of larger gongs. Like, you don't want to jump straight to the biggest gong. You want to start with a small gong.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  And work your way up.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Work your way up because every gong that we've added has been so electric when we get the bigger gong.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  I think it's time for a new one.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  You want an even bigger gong?

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want, I want one that's hanging from the rafters.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  Money never sleeps. You shouldn't either. Call me a gong.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Sign up for the newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Goodbye.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.