Apple’s iPhone Duo, Meta’s Muse AI Agent, Anthropic Researcher Quits Over AI Doom | 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, Apple has announced the iPhone Duo, their foldable phone separately.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Big question, right away. How is this going to impact screen time? Does your screen time go twice as fast because you're actually locked in on two screens?

• 0:14John Coogan?

  Should you do pixel adjusted screen time too? If you're watching a laptop versus an Apple Watch? If I spend an hour in an Apple Watch, is that like 15 minutes on the laptop? On the triple monitor setup, getting triple the screen time?

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  We have the AirPods with the cameras.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  They didn't.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  They didn't do that.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  They haven't announced those. I don't think they're going to.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Gorman's reporting.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  But when that comes, that could potentially help you add to your screen time by tracking screens out in the real world.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  True.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  That you're seeing.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  True.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  That aren't getting picked up.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  True. Eventually, it's going to be 24/7 screen time. Everyone's looking at a screen everywhere. There's our screen everywhere. You're looking at the windshield of your car. That's the screen.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up some real pictures of the Duo? Here it is.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Here it is, the Duo. So in this video, there is no crease. I'm sure the YouTube tech reviewers will be hunting in all different lighting for creases. But it feels like Apple waited long enough to avoid a crease whatsoever. So you will get no crease in your iPhone.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  That is crazy. Sitting there, boom.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  It's cool.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  It's cool.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  I think this is going to sell like hotcakes. I think people are ready to spend, it's going to be like two grand, maybe three grand when you max it out. I think the Apple buyer, the Apple fanboy is ready for something that actually is a flex beyond like a slight upgrade. You paid 30% more for the Pro. This says you pulled out the big bucks. You dropped two grand.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that's been the thing, the relative to how much value you get out of a phone. Phones have always been incredibly cheap, even the highest priced.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, you spend more time on your phone than you do in your car, and your car is 10 times the price of your phone, always, like, if not more. And so I think this will sell very well. It'll be interesting to see if any new apps come from this, if people need to redesign stuff. Like, we're having Mikey from Suno on the show later today, and Suno has an app that's really full-featured for iPhone. You can make songs, you can scroll a feed of other people's songs. But you do have to pop over to desktop if you want to get into their composer and actually deconstruct the song and shift around different pieces of the song. And then you get a sort of GarageBand interface. Even using a lot of normal iPhone apps on iPads, it usually just doesn't feel quite right scrolling.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  So I think there'll be a couple UI UX opportunities, challenges, both. Interesting little bezel there where you can see the screen is curved, but it's on a blocked out, squared off edge there in the center. Two cameras on the back, one on the front, leaving room for the iPhone Duo Pro with five cameras or something like that.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, it really, it really shows that the phone seems to be, at least the iPhone, is certainly in its final form, right? This feels like the biggest step forward in a long time, and yet it does absolutely nothing new for you.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  A rave review. Until they do the iPhone newspaper that folds out.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  It's moderately, it's moderately exciting because we're all, it's moderately exciting because everyone's addicted to their phone. And it's like, cool, new, new screen. But it does nothing new for you. It doesn't move humanity forward any way at all. Dordi, you're going to be able to watch two reels at once, and they're both going to be vertical.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What do you mean?

• 3:35John Coogan?

  From the demo that I saw, it looked like it was, you put the video up top and then you iMessage or iMessage.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's because that was horizontal video.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  I don't think you'll be able to open two copies of Instagram at the same time.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it'll be more like the iPad OS where you can have different windows.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  So you think you'll be able to do YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels side by side?

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  Ideally, hopefully.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Ideally. Brain rot, final boss over here wants to do it.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  And then you can have the third one on the back.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  It's exciting to see John Turnis get a big win, like, early, like, first thing as the CEO, first major, you know, Apple event. And it's an entirely new product, the foldable phone, something that's been rumored for years. They didn't tee him up just to do a minor bit of range. Exactly. Yeah, it's exciting that he got to come out strong with this. And it's also less of a risk than the Apple Vision Pro. If they'd thrown him there, then he'd be remembered, oh, his first thing was sort of a flop.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think this is going to be a hit, even though it doesn't matter at all.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  I think it's going to sell very well. I think a lot of people are going to buy them for a variety of reasons. But I think it's just a good way to, to kick off a really strong decade-long run. Hopefully four decades. Cook couldn't, couldn't make it to 95 in the seat, but Turnis, I think he got it, what it takes. I want to see Turnis running this place.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  So you're 100% getting the Duo?

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I think I'll get it. I'll need to feel how it feels in my hand. But at one point, I was considering carrying an iPad Mini as my daily driver phone. Because I was like, they, so they come with Wi-Fi.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  6.8.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  6.8, so I have big pockets. And so it would actually fit in my pocket. And I don't like the foamed feature of the phone. I don't like getting phone calls. So you lose that because it doesn't have a cellular connection. So it doesn't have a, so you can never call me.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's not like you need a phone number for anything else besides calls, like logging into pretty much any service.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can do two-factor on an actual authentication app. I think you can get by. You might need to have a Mac Mini hooked up somewhere that has a, has a phone number attached to it that can route you two-factor codes or something. But it did seem doable. Or, you know, you just check your phone, your actual phone with the phone number at home later. But every day, you just have this, you know, iPad Mini that you pull out and it has, it has a cellular connection. I don't know that it can actually get phone calls, but it has a cellular connection. So, so you can get data while you're out and about. So you can be out in the world and scroll reels.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  Data.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  What else do you need? You don't need to make phone calls.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Yeah. I mean, and it really comes down to, look, the phone is, is lighter, thinner.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  It's not lighter. It's not thinner. It is probably faster. It's bigger. This is, this is the opposite of your meme. Typically, they come out and they say, it's lighter, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, 12 times. It's the best iPhone ever. This is actually a different direction. This is exciting.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  This is a response to your joke.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Here's something.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  Would you rather search work in iMessage or be able to get the Duo?

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Search work in iMessage?

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  They're like, search in iMessage.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, you want that to work. Yeah.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I would be excited about functional features of the core software that I use with the iPhone, among, you know, many other things. But Kate over on X says mentally ready for my iPhone to start being slow, laggy, and having a bad battery. You have that to look forward to.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  So did they, they also updated like the normal iPhone, is that right? Did you watch a little bit of the earlier keynote?

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's all the.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  That one is thinner, lighter, faster, better, stronger, all the different things.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  They updated Apple Intelligence a bunch, so.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  There was like all the things that you'd expect.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  I thought they haven't launched it yet. I thought this was the launch of the Siri, like, it's actually going to go out now.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  Correct. Yeah. Yeah. This was in the, in the launch video.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  And also the old iPhone, or not, not the old iPhone, but the new, normal iPhone, 18, they were like, oh, the battery is like much better. So all those things that Dordi, they like said about the new iPhone.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  I don't know. It'll be interesting. I'm excited to get it in hand, see how it works. I don't, it might be too much to open that thing up. I'm thinking like, it's pretty easy just to like swipe up.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  Because you're such a newspaper guy.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  I do like a newspaper.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Put your feet up on the desk and fold your phone open.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  I'm scrolling. Yeah, something like that might make sense. I don't know. I don't know. I was reflecting on Steve Jobs. I saw a viral video about Steve Jobs predicting ChatGPT in 1985. And the video is incredible because he arrives to this talk, he's giving a talk at a university on the future. It's just Steve Jobs' view of the future in 1985, and he arrives on a helicopter with an entourage. And they all get out of this helicopter and they go into this, it's amazing.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  But more of a, where is it? Because the video kind of takes, kind of takes place in a castle. Because you got to watch Steve Jobs in 1985 predict modern AI pretty well.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  And I read this. I became immensely jealous.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  So pause. He's, the lead-in to this, he's saying, I'll just read the transcript. He says, did you know that Alexander the Great's tutor for 14 years was Aristotle? When Alexander the Great had a question, he would just go to Aristotle. I think we can play the clip from the beginning now.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years? You know, Aristotle. And I read this. I became immensely jealous.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  And through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary. And maybe if there's a professor, they can, they can add to that, but at least I can go directly to the source material. And that is, of course, the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Glazing the printing press.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  But I can't ask Aristotle a question. I mean, I can, but I won't get an answer. And so.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Perfectly timed soundboard.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  My hope is that in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind. And so my hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle in a computer. And someday, some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question. And get an answer. And that's what I hope that we can do.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  It's so crazy. He's just like, we gotta, we gotta compress all the data down and be able to give it a conversational interface.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Large language models with a simple interface that anyone can use.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  It's, it's a crazy, crazy prediction, 40, 40-something years ago. Steve Jobs is probably the most famous techno-optimist, the most successful techno-optimist. The bicycle for the mind quote, that one continues to hit constantly. But then you can see his excitement every time he gives a keynote. He'll just be on stage like giddily testing GarageBand. But his delivery there too is something really, really special. I mean, you noticed that, right? Where he, he asks a hypothetical question, then, you know, well, I could ask, but I wouldn't get an answer. And he kind of like lets the laugh lines kind of land and lets the audience, he has really good.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Basically the Mark Gorman of CEOs.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Mark Gurman is the GOAT.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  Journalist.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  And he is the greatest, you know, founder, CEO.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. It just, it's just, it's really, really cool timing.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised it took you that long to.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Because I thought you were talking about Mark Gurman's comedic timing, which is fantastic, but.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Mark Gurman's delivery of Apple truly, he truly has Apple intelligence.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. So, yeah, I mean, you can see Ben Thompson's called this out a few times, but when Steve Jobs introduces GarageBand, he is just so excited about this product. You can see him in this one video introducing GarageBand 1.0 with John Mayer, which is really cool. He has John Mayer come out and just like play some stuff on the guitar.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  This is where I want to show you loops. And I'm going to show you what a non musician can do.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Chilling there on this computer on this stool.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Using this tool. And just doing a live demo. And if you, if you scroll forward about halfway, you'll see John Mayer comes in and plays some songs toward the end. There you go.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  It's a British Invasion.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  He's just having fun. And so, you know, with the, with the power of modern LLMs, like you can ask, you can ask, you know, an AI version of Steve Jobs, what would he think about AI? I did. And I think, I think the answer is somewhat interesting. He said, probably yes, with very strong opinions about what makes Astro, what makes AI worth using. That's speculation, but his own words give us a surprisingly good basis for it. In 1985, Jobs imagined computers capturing a thinker's underlying ideas so that a student could interact with them. You could actually ask Aristotle a question. He was already enthusiastic about something resembling a central promise of conversational AI, but his enthusiasm would come with three demands

• 13:22John Coogan?

  in this hypothetical Steve Jobs analysis. One, you got to give people new abilities, learning, designing, composing, building would probably excite him most. Two, you have to make it effortless. I'd expect him to push for AI that understands what you want with minimal instruction. And three, you have to make something excellent. I suspect he'd value AI's ability to help someone realize an original vision much more than its ability to produce enormous quantities of generic content. He would be anti-slop but pro-AI. Aristotle also had an interesting AI take in this, in this imagined LLM version of Aristotle. He'd care more about what AI does to our character than how intelligent becomes.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  The conclusion of this is Aristotle would favor AI as an instrument of human flourishing while resisting the idea that a life requiring less human effort is automatically a better life. You must continue to create. You must continue to work. You will be unsatisfied if the robots are doing everything.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  More than you consume.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It seems pretty clear that Steve Jobs would be excited about AI or some form of AI, but what would the reaction to that be in the modern era? Because I, I tend to think that there would have been the natural cycle of reaction because of, there's a whole host of things, political polarization, economic stagnation, wealth inequality, negativity bias in social media. There's so many different incentives that the desire, the impetus to tear someone down is, is unavoidable. And so I think we would be in this weird era where a lot of people would be excited about that particular vision for AI.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  And yet there would still be, you know, viral videos complaining about the latest Steve Jobs keynote. But what do you think? Cause you've called for like the, the Steve Jobs of AI, someone who's an optimist, someone who talks about empowering humanity, focus on human flourishing, agrees with the Aristotelian philosophy around AI. But what would the actual reaction be? Is that actually a panacea? Or would it fall by the wayside like, like all other attempts that positivity seem to have fallen by the wayside?

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  I've come around to the technology itself being fundamentally scary, even though it's very cool. And then you factor that in with, with certain actors that are trying to position it as even, you know, more scary than maybe it is, you know, inherently. And I think even if we still had Steve with us, it would still be a mess. And he might be nicely counter positioned, but doesn't stop other people from, you know.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Maybe not.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Poisoning.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Maybe not, maybe not.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Poisoning the discourse.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  What do you think his P doom would be? Over, under 10%?

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  1%.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  He seems like a 1% guy.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  He's the 1%. Wall Street Journal, they didn't talk about math. It made it to the, it made it to the digital version, didn't make it into the paper. Navia Stokes did not make the paper edition of the Wall Street Journal, but Meta and their new personal AI agent did. It's right here. Meta launches.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  The absolute state of traditional media.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Hey, this is probably, it's more profitable as a business perspective, right? What are you going to do? Sell math theories? Navia Stokes was a $1 million prize. You don't think Alex Wang can pull a million bucks out of this?

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  Could be a trillion dollar prize.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  They can get, they haven't monetized it yet, but they got to put ads in this thing. And will they do agentic commerce? What will they do? We were very excited talking to Sufanator yesterday about AGI for small businesses, for folks who run ads on Meta. I still love that idea, but they're going a different direction. They're doing personal super intelligence. Zuck's been talking about this for a year at least. He's put out a lengthy blog post about how he wants AI to diffuse, how he wants everyone to have AI. And now everyone does with the Meta Muse app. That's a separate app that you get that will book restaurants for you. The Wall Street Journal has a little bit of a story here.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Meta Platforms is betting that making AI agents easy to use will get mainstream consumers to start adopting them in their daily lives. The company on Tuesday announced a new personal AI agent that can buy goods online. I think they partnered with Stripe on link. So I don't know if that just means that when link is enabled on a particular checkout, it'll be a little bit smoother. Or if it's like, it's going to try and steer you towards things that are linked. It can respond to emails and, so do you have to link it to your Gmail, I guess, to, to get, to get that working? And complete other tasks users authorize you to, it to do for them.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  The agent called Muse is accessible via dedicated app. Users operate the agent by conversing with it like a typical chatbot and can choose their own names for it. I saw some really funny ones. Tyler called his Mark. I saw someone else that's, someone gave it a really funny name, like they said, like you can pick one. And then the name of the agent was just you can pick one or something like that. A bunch of funny hallucinations always happens with these products. Everyone's going to have fun with them. The new tool is Meta's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments, which are expected to top 130 billion this year. The AI agent is free to access for most of what people need and has two tiers of subscription plans for power users.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  100 bucks a month and $20 a month. Anthropic and OpenAI have quickly built multi-billion dollar businesses around agents capable of performing complex computer tasks. But most of that usage is driven by software coding or other business applications. Consumer adoption of technology lags behind, offering Meta, Apple and other companies potential for catching up. The fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart from lots of other agentic products. Meta's AI chief Alex Wang said in an interview. Ben Thompson was raving about the fact that it gives you a pretty powerful VM. Eight gigs of memory and eight gigs of storage that is yours sequestered.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  And they're also implementing a lot of the security features that they have done with WhatsApp where there's end to end encryption.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they got Moxie pulled into it apparently.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  That's really cool. Moxie's a legend. So great on the recruiting front. Everyone loves Signal and, and great team there.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question is how, it sounds like if there's, they're actually giving every user a computer.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  VM, but yeah.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  It's like virtualized, but yes, the serious computing resources.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. But the cost is going to probably be pretty significant.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  So, so the VM most likely like spins up when you use it and then, you know, taken down when you're not using it. So the actual compute hours that are associated to anyone but a power user. And of course, very quickly you can wind up spending 20 bucks or a hundred bucks. And that's enough to just pay for a virtual machine. But you can go and rent, you know, a, a true virtual machine to like host your website on Digital Ocean for like 20 bucks.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  So Kaz, the CEO of Open Door, went to X and said, posted a screenshot of him asking Meta AI in WhatsApp. And he said, please make WhatsApp the main interface for these things, Alex Wang, please. And he just says, how do I use Muse? And Meta AI responds, Muse is a free AI assistant from Anthropic. You can use it on the web, on mobile, or through their API.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  Go to Claude.ai, create an account and log in. So I'm looking at this post, I'm trying to find, why is nobody talking about how Meta AI thinks that Muse is a product from Anthropic and is telling people to go log in there?

• 21:15John Coogan?

  That is weird that it would hallucinate that Muse is from Anthropic because there's not even any connection between those. It's not like Anthropic ever had a product called Muse that I know of. Very odd, but Meta AI, of course, is running an older LLM. And then I believe you get, you, you still get thrown into a llama model, I think, when you're on Instagram, if you wind up in a, in a LLM chat. And so there's going to need to be unification around all of these different products. And they're going to need to eventually talk to all the same models. But of course, there's like scaling and all sorts of different issues that you need. Because some of these products that they've gotten to scale are pretty significant, even, even if they're not like

• 21:55John Coogan?

  the most talked about, when you are a hyperscaler with billions of users and you vend an LLM into something like, you've deployed that at scale, it's doing a lot. And it's like, you know, the new Gemini 3.7 flash, bunch of great reviews, great benchmarks on things. But like, they can't just stuff that in Google search on day one, like they have to actually scale it up.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question I have is, does this seem like this was something they were working on prior to Instinct gaining traction? Or is this an Instinct clone? I saw one post that was saying, you know, that, that rumor that they tried to buy it, which makes sense.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Arfa Rock says, there's a rumor going around that Meta and others made a 10-figure offer for Instinct. That's a crazy valuation for a what, one-year-old company, something like that. Instinct turned it down. Now Meta has launched Muse.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  And that's literally what the post is. Meta has launched Muse and now the timeline is reacting, it'll be a big deal. Sounds familiar. Yes, Meta was able to win stories. How did they do that? They didn't win by launching a Snapchat clone as a separate app. They, they won by putting it in Instagram, which already had the install base. And so if Muse works its way into Instagram, which a lot of people do use, it'll probably get a lot of adoption. If it's a separate app, it's a little bit trickier. Now, the Threads playbook worked. They routed a lot of people to there. Thread shows up on Instagram, it has an advertising surface area, it's pulled over, what are they at, a couple hundred million?

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds, hundreds of millions of MAUs. And again, it's hard to fully understand the value of that because they, they're counting somebody who clicked through clickbait on, on Instagram.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's that. And then also, there's a political question.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  There's a robust, like, real community of pure Threads users. The other, the other thing that I think about is like Meta has the advantage of being able to, when you open all their apps, just put a huge billboard, they make ad inventory just for themselves.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the Ray-Bans.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  With the specs, where you open around Christmas. Sorry, sorry. Sorry, just a little, little slip there. But when you opened Instagram in Q4, it's like, buy some of our, you know, glasses, right? And so I would expect, I don't think they're going to do that until Muse has like significantly more traction.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Adoptors on and, and figure out all the kinks and stuff.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Growing Daniel came in with.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  John Chu says Meta has been working on Muse for almost a year now. You have to believe that that's true. The Manus acquisition ties into that. The Zuck messaging around personal superintelligence. I mean, when we interviewed him a year ago, we were asking about, oh, am I going to be able to use your AI to actually buy? If I see a pair of shoes, will I be able to just buy it? And he was kind of like, I'm not ready to announce that yet. But it was very clear that that's where this was going. So I don't think it's an Instinct clone. I think it will compete with Instinct. And I think it's tricky because Instinct is pretty early and they are going up against a big company that's been investing and has a lot of resources to go after this very, very hard. At the same time, consumers come to Meta to be entertained. Muse feels like a product for productivity.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  And I'm not sure that people will put them in the same buckets. Like, it's very unclear. At the same time, people do a lot of shopping on Instagram, basically, just scrolling and.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 25:21John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure. Not actually checking, are you joking?

• 25:26John Coogan?

  No, no, no. So, so like.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it's like the most dominant shopping app of all time, positioned as.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  But particularly, people will like go there and not just search things, but just like casually scroll and like linger over things so that they get retargeted, visit websites and then have the, have the ads come to them. And so you, you could imagine that, that on the shopping side, that there's a lot of traction there.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of excitement around this, climbing the chart is currently Muse is number three on the charts. App Store after ESPN Fantasy Sport, Fantasy Sports and more and ChatGPT. Growing Daniel came in with an absolutely brutal ratio.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  What did he say?

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  He quoted Zuck's announcement with a screenshot of the exchange that Zuck had with, with somebody during the early days of Facebook where he said, yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses and student numbers. What, how do you manage that one? People just submitted it. I don't know why, they quote unquote, trust me, dumb Fs. Anyway.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Growing Daniel never forgets.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, Zuck has grown up a lot since then.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  Who punched him in the nose? That's the question Ryan Peterson is asking. Let me find the, you sent me the image, is this true?

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so here's the thing, his nose is starting to look like this guy Murab, who's a UFC champion. Murab has one of the most busted up noses in the UFC. And Murab was the UFC fighter that Zuck was training with on that deck. Pull up this picture of Murab and you can see their noses are starting to look quite similar.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  That's a really, that's a really good sign.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, zoom in there, zoom in there.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Pushing.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Look, their noses, Zuck was like, give me one of them right now. Give me a nose like that right now.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  This tells me that Zuck is going way harder in training than he lets on in the video.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Which I, which I love to see. He's like, he's ready for that Elon fight. He's like, there's a chance I might catch Elon on a good day. He opts in, I gotta be ready. All right, let's talk about Doom.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Doom. An Anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial intelligence industry. Whoa, he didn't just quit the company, he quit the industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems that could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. This was not received well. A bunch of back and forth with another researcher chiming in, saying that they, that they have a P Doom of 10%, which is something that's come up years ago and we kind of went back and forth on. This all started with Jacob Coxon, who said, I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. He is not happy with where things go. And it got 100 million views and 600,000 likes. It's going straight on a Bernie Sanders billboard for sure. I worked on an actual thermonuclear weapons project, Martin Casado from A16Z says, and the dissonance was less bizarre. And so he's comparing it to what it was like working on very scary technology, very different than what's going on today. And Evan Hubinger, who works on alignment science at Anthropic, previously Miri, OpenAI, Google, Ripple.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  He says, Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it's above 10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are clearly not on track to. So everyone's sort of pushing for a slowdown now, but then you go into the regulatory capture thing. I've been seeing, what?

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  Just Buckingham says, bro, got that pip?

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of people were like, are you giving back your equity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Yeah, odd. Lots of people were just going back and forth on everything. Ryan Peterson sees it as a bull case. He says, I need to buy more stock in this company. I've never seen such a commitment to making money regardless of the consequences. Yeah, it is, it is.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  That Dare says, if you publicly assign a greater than 10% probability to human extinction within a decade, you owe people a clear explanation of how you reach that number, plus what would change your mind?

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So, yeah, a lot of people were upset that this felt like a vibe prediction, very like unresearched and, and. He did link, Evan did link to the Anthropic risk report, which you can read in full. They have a reasonable scaling policy and they're talking about pacing the frontier, collaborating with other labs. I'm oddly optimistic that this will happen. Obviously, you know, there's the Sam and Dario can't even hold hands on stage in that India conference. But AI has made strange bedfellows out of people.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Like, if you had said, oh yeah, in, in six months, Elon Musk, the guy who's calling Anthropic misanthropic, will be doing a deal and bring in Sholto to watch rockets take off at Starbase. I would have been like, no way, no way can Elon Musk and Dario become friends. Like, that just seems like impossible. But the funniest outcome is the most likely to quote Elon again.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Believing in your whole heart that things are that serious and then just rage quitting and not leaning in? And trying, like, do you, do you really think that the, the rage quit method is?

• 31:25John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I mean, some of these organizations are really big and if you're at a certain level, it can be very hard to actually get things done in a large organization. It's, yeah, it's weird, weird time. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific sharp. That will be Thursday.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  Hundred, it will be 105 days until.