Are AI Glasses Over?, Big Technology Audience Questions, Alex Stamos on AI Cybersecurity

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news LIVE from Big Technology AI Summit. We cover: 1) Do Snapchat Specs signal the end of AR glasses 2) What should an AI device do? 3) Audience questions from the Big Technology AI Summit! 4) How should companies plan for such fast moving technology? 5) What's the ideal AI device form factor? 6) Can AI models be more useful for biology? 7) Can the U. S. and China get along on AI? 8) What responsibility do AI companies have to society? 9) Ex-Meta CSO Alex Stamos joins us to talk Fable's cyber-risks 10) Is it marketing or is it material? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Though for many of you, he needs no introduction. Let me introduce Ron John Roy. I first started reading Ron John Roy's writing in 2021. He had written this newsletter called Margins, and I thought it was a terrific newsletter. I saved it. I spent my winter break reading it. I DM'd him. By that January, we had decided to do an emergency podcast about a crazy financial situation. And then Ranjan and I kept talking more and more. And then by January 2023, I wrote to him and said, hey, don't you want to just come and do this every week? And lucky for me and lucky for us, with anyone involved with Big Technology Podcast, Ron John said yes. And so getting a chance to speak with Ron John every Friday is an absolute joy.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  It's definitely one of the highlights of my week. And today, we're thrilled to be able to do our Friday show live here with you, with your audience questions. And then we'll just run it tomorrow like a normal podcast. So I hope you're ready. We definitely need your participation. And please join me in welcoming Ron John Roy.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  I got him on. I'm going to take these off, though. We'll get into the Snap spectacles. This is a medium-risk maneuver because I have this microphone on, so.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Those are the Snapchat spectacles.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  These are the Snapchat spectacles. They're the original developer beta edition, though, so. They're not the new ones, but I had them in 2021.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Now everyone knows how cool you are. All right, should I start the show?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  I'm as cool as Evan Spiegel.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Is he still cool, though?

• 1:36Speaker 00

  All right, let's do it. How would I start it?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Did I throw you off?

• 1:42Speaker 00

  No, no, no, I didn't even write this down. Okay, I'll try to do it. All right. Snapchat comes out with new spectacles, and we take your audience questions. That's coming up right after this on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, recorded on Thursday. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentik AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience. And what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We're joined, as always, by Ranjan Rai, who is here with us, not in studio, live with the Big Technology AI Summit audience. Audience, let's hear you.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  The way this is going to work is Ranjan and I will break down one story, and then we definitely welcome your questions, your prompts, your arguments with us. If you don't have anything, we have plenty to do, but we'd love to have your participation. You can line up at either of the mics there to ask us a question. Let's start with our top story this week. I promised myself when this summit was being planned that I would not be mean to Snapchat. However, Snapchat has left me with no choice. Jon, let's roll. Image C, please.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Listeners, if you are listening on the podcast, you'll see what we're looking at at the audience here is an image of Evan Spiegel on CNBC, wearing the latest Snap specs. The headline is "Snap Stock Falls After AR Spec's Debut."

• 4:10Speaker 00

  "Almost 20 years since the launch of the iPhone, people are ready to think about computing differently," Spiegel said in an interview with CNBC. "The market reacted differently." Ranjan, let me just go to you quickly. Do you think that Snapchat and Meta and all these other companies have been trying to build this AI device of the future for years? And this is what we're looking at. This is what we're looking at. You kind of ruined my surprise. Can we go to D, please? I mean...

• 4:41Speaker 01

  I brought them. I had to bring them after sending Alex that photo.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Is it time for us to finally accept that we're not going to have an AR device?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Interesting. So, so these, again, I got these in 2021. It's actually a very cool technology. Like, it's, no, I'm serious. Augmented reality. If you ever used Magic Leap in the 2010s, like, being able to paint throughout your room and walk around that painting, being able to play games where you're chasing zombies. Again, my seven-year-old son actually is probably the only fan of Snap Spectacles in the world right now. He still loves using them. He also likes to watch YouTube on them, which is kind of amazing. But I think that form factor and the experience is amazing. Vision Pro has not quite captured it. I don't think what we just saw on Evan Spiegel's face is going to capture it. I

• 5:33Speaker 01

  think eventually maybe Apple or someone will, but I don't think we're there yet, but I think we will be. I still am betting on AR eyeglasses of some sort.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Here's some of the social media reaction. Does anyone, anyone that works at Snapchat have the guts to tell leadership that these things are ugly? That feeling when your glasses are so heavy, they give you cauliflower ear? Snap is the best brand in the world when you're 16 and the worst brand to be associated with when you're 21. The people who actually buy $2,000 AI glasses aren't teenagers. If you think you really want to wear always on camera, around in public, it should have to look like this with the picture of Evan Spiegel. Let me make the case that this, it's over.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Good, because I'm going to take the other side.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  I think that the iPhone series that we just saw, so, does anyone here listen to Ron John on Fridays?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Do we have listeners? All right.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  So you'll know which direction this might go.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  What's this guy been begging for, for like, since he came on the show the first time? Better Siri.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Better Siri.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  I think they actually did it. Like, the new Siri, if you look at the videos, looks terrific. And so, maybe this idea of we have to wear the computing on our face is something that like, kind of sounds good in concept, but model after model, it's not. And the AI device is the iPhone.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Okay, that's, I, that is an interesting direction to take it. I still think the form factor, do, do any of the audience have like Meta Ray-Bans or any other device like that? I see a few. Like, you start to feel, as you're walking around, as you're kind of interacting in the real world, stuff can happen that's not just maybe eventually Siri talking to you and using a traditional AI model to actually, you know, give you kind of information. So, I don't know. I'm still, I still think AR as a form factor via glasses is going to happen. I think, you have Meta Ray-Bans? You enjoy them?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  You know, I, I didn't want to say this publicly, but I have not used them.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Really?

• 7:38Speaker 00

  I, I mean, I have, but I don't, I used them for a bit, and like I said on our show recently, I was on a hike, it was cold, I was ready to get to the summit and put those glasses on, and the battery started blinking red. And I couldn't use them, had to use my old phone. And let me say this, like, you know, they, they haven't taken off as a mainstream consumer device, and if you look at the stock of every single company that's pursuing them, it's not good. Snapchat, like we just said, is, is struggling. Meta, as we know, has its problems. No one's looking at these, these Ray-Bans to save Meta.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Well, no, but to me, the Apple Vision Pro is like the more direct correlated product versus Meta Ray-Ban.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Do you want to know what the best thing about the Vision Pro was?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Fine Vision Pro, yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  They put the person on Vision Pro on Siri, and he fixed it.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Mike Rockwell.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  So.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  I would not have guessed that the person who made the Vision Pro would be the one to fix Siri after all these years, but I guess if that's the case, that's exciting.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  He did it.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  So you're gonna still, you're gonna, can you put those glasses on one more time?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Again, I was told backstage this might destroy my microphone, but I'm gonna try. Do I look cool?

• 8:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Do I? No, no. I mean, even, we were joking that Evan Spiegel is going to the Met Gala with his model wife. Like, this is like the coolest person in the world. And how bad they made him look that if it was like when Zuck wore a Project Orion, no one really cared that much. But I think because Evan Spiegel is such a cool looking dude, that's why it looks so egregious. That's my take.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  So your answer on the way to make those things work is just be less handsome?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  That's it. That's it.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  We'll write to Spiegel and let him know. No questions? Okay, all right, great.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  All right.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, don't be shy.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  It's on? Yes, it is on. Hey, guys.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  If you're willing, let us know who you are.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  This is Sirgji Johal, actually, industry analyst flew from New York a day earlier to join US.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Welcome. Let's give him a welcome.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Thanks for doing this.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Ask away.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Good question about, actually, it's an observation. I wanted to get your take on this. When companies have this gap between what people need today and what they're working on, which is like in future, it can be two plus years out. So they lose that traction from the investor's point of view as well as employees and partners. So do you see that that's happening to Meta and others? Like, it happened to IBM and they were living in future with Watson X, for example. So what's your take on that? It can be B to C or B to B examples.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Okay, thank you for the question.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, that's a great question. I do think, like, if we're talking about kind of how the interface for how you interact with a computer, I have been begging for something else other than me holding my phone, looking at it. And we haven't really gotten anything for a long time. I mean, Humane tried with the PIN. I still think maybe some kind of PIN is going to be around. Johnny Ive's PIN at OpenAI, maybe, maybe at some point.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Well, Greg Brockman is coming, so we'll put it.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  We gotta ask him about that.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  We'll talk about that advice.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  But I think, like, being able to interact with all of this information, now being able to, like, process information so much more reliably with AI. Just, I don't want to have to keep looking at my phone and just looking at it on there. But even actually on the phone, I'm guessing, do a lot of people here dictate more to their phone right now? Like, that's completely changed. In the past, like, I would have felt weird just talking to my phone, and now I'm constantly using Whisper Flow and just talking to whatever, so...

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Tell us a story about you and your wife.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I know, okay. I don't know if this is the most depressing thing, or, and my wife is not here and hopefully won't kill me if this is being livestreamed right now.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  No, we're going to broadcast this.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  So I am constantly dictating to my computer, to my phone. And the other day, it was like Friday night, we had put our son to bed. We're both on our laptops, and I'm on one side of the couch dictating, and then I look over and she's also has her laptop open and is kind of whispering to her computer too, and I'm like, is this the future of tech? But it's a new computing interface, so I'm happy about it.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Right, I look, I think the gentleman brings up a great question, which is that things are moving so fast, how do you plan right now? And honestly, I don't know how you do it, because every day there seems to be a new capability, then the capability's taken off the table. Like Fable, for instance, I mean, the tweets about Fable, where like people are adding Dave Sacks, and they're like, please, I'll do anything for Fable back. Just bring it back, and he won't bring it back. But it's just like, I don't understand how any company does that, and I think that actually would be a good topic for us to sort of get into on a future show.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Okay, let's go this way.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Hi, thank you for taking my question. I was curious your views on in the next like five years as air glasses evolve, whether like the chunky spectacles is the way to go, or thinner glasses with like upward compute, like either wireless to your iPhone, or like the Vision Pro, like cable down to the battery pack and compute. Well, it's a battery for a Vision Pro, but it could also have compute onboard. So I'm curious like the next five years where you think...

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Consumers will gravitate towards?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  No, it's a, it's a great question, because if you ever use Magic Leap, there was like a

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Puck.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Puck, that's what it was.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Here's my hot take, anything, any device that requires a puck, not working.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Well, how about this, though?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  What if, what if the puck is your iPhone?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Oh shit, alright.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Exactly, so, which gives Apple, Apple an opportunity that like, if the compute is taking place on the phone in your pocket, it allows you to be much slimmer from a power perspective. You don't want like a lightning cable connected to your face, but like, it's still, I think there is a, it makes me think Apple still has a good chance in this space, because the iPhone can do all of the heavy lifting versus this thing on, that is really heavy on your head.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Can I, can I ask, so what's your name?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  I'm Kyle.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Kyle, so what do you want to use a, like, face computer for?

• 13:52Speaker 03

  That's a good question.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  See, I told you, Ron John, this stuff is not happening.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  No, no, no, Kyle's got something.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Alright, let's give Kyle an opportunity here.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  What do you think for like?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  I didn't mean to put you on the spot, but thank you for helping me prove my point.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  I think one cool thing would be like, a shared, like, TV or something, like, like, imagine Vision Pro, and you have just a shared, just like, movie theater, you're on a plane with your family or something, and you just have like, the shared experience, but it's just glasses.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  I'd like that.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  I like that, like, for me, one of the coolest things, I always like, because, you know, as you get older, you move further away from your friends, and it would be cool to like, be in the Vision Pro.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Watching the Knicks final together?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, sit at, sit at half court, watch the Knicks, next to Timothy Chalmers, maybe we're just in the Vision Pro. But you know what's interesting? Apple never advertised that as a social device. All the marketing was just, you're sitting alone at home, and all you're doing is the Vision Pro, nobody else exists.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  The other big one, sorry to interrupt.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  No, no, please, please.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Say, the other big one for me is just having a lot of monitors around when I'm working, like, even though I have like, an ultra wide, or like, three monitors, I feel like sometimes I could have more, so just being able to like, interact with AI to pull up the exact page I'm looking for out of like, I'm one of those people that has like a thousand tabs, so, just being able to pull up the thing, and I just say, open up that tab, and it just pops up, would be pretty cool.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Would eight thousand individual tabs in a giant planner's space be better?

• 15:24Speaker 00

  I like what Kyle is going with this.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  No, no, but I do agree like that being able to do more open scaled work and like look at different charts and I think there's that still and I know like I have friends who own the Vision Pro who use it for that.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Still?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  No. But did.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Did. They had a nice time. All right. Thank you, Kyle. Let's go here.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  Hey, hey, what's up? This is Sasha.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Hey.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  From Yale University doing research on AI agents for finance. First of all, love you guys, listening to you guys chat on my way to work has been my routine. I think this is a sentiment shared by not just me, but many people in the audience. So thank you so much.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Appreciate that. And thank you for coming. Did you fly in?

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Uh, yes.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Thank you for coming. It's great to see you.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Uh, it's worth it. And I appreciate your sharp line of reasoning and questioning. So what's your view on the meter benchmarks of how long the AI agents can work independently being saturated? Are we at that point that of them being at infinite work number of hours working yet? Or are we reaching that soon? And what is the world gonna be looking like after we hit that infinite mark?

• 16:38Speaker 00

  That is an excellent question. So first of all, there is some controversy about the meter monitoring, but I think it's kind of directionally accurate, right? Like, I showed the meter chart at the very beginning of of our event today, that like you saw these models, they could not code autonomously for more than 30 minutes in 2023, and now they can code autonomously for the human equivalent of 18 hours, right? So what happens if they just kind of blow past that limit and then they can code all the time? That is an excellent question. Do you have any thoughts?

• 17:11Speaker 04

  So I I felt that with the goal mode and automation mode, it practically felt that they are already doing this autonomously forever.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  I want to want them to send me reports. My prompt would be, if you find something interesting, send me an email.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  When I see it, I will come back and intervene. I felt that for many tasks, it's already at that mark.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, a perplexity computer will basically do that. So that's definitely something that's happening. But I'll just say one more thing and then we'll go to Ron John. Greg Brockman, who will be here later, has this like idea of a compute-powered economy. Where like, you know, you sort of, once you get these bots working the way that you explained, you just, maybe he'll say this later. You just kind of throw them at any problem and then they just kind of work autonomously through it. Now, we don't, we've never seen what the world looks like when you can do something like that. But I do think, given the progress that we've seen with the models, you would imagine that something substantial will come at a certain point.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  So, my day job, I work at a company, Writer. We're an enterprise AI company. And when, and the goal mode was asked about recently, again, the idea that you just provide the goal, the agent will iteratively loop and keep doing work until it finds the right solution. In the real world, that is, like, the benchmarks versus the real world, I still think there's such a massive gap in terms of what does the data look like? What, what is the actual problem? Does the customer or the person actually understand the goal in a clear enough way that they're able to define it to kind of push that loop forward? So, I think it's an interesting, I think with a lot of AI,

• 18:47Speaker 01

  again, even around the benchmarking, like, again, versus real-world understanding of how to use it, what's happening and what's available for it to use, there's still a lot of work to be done.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  I mean, you can do these goal modes for like, less complicated tasks.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  What have you goal modded?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  So I worked with perplexity computer recently to, to try to like have it find a hotel discount for me.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  No travel stories. I, I, I've been on a, this has been for like two years. Every time, I remember like Sundar, actually, it was, I don't know if people remember, in 2019?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Let me finish my example.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, no, no, I'm just saying. Why does everyone, when they talk about a Gentic, talk about travel? I get.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Because travel is such a pain in the ass.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  But it's, I don't know, okay, go on, go on.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  I'm sheepish now.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  No, no, no, hotel discount, hotel discount.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  It just looked at the hotel every hour and when it dropped behind a, below a certain threshold, emailed me. So that was pretty good.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a clear goal. I'll give you that as a clear goal.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  I think you're right that we definitely need better examples than.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  It's a pet peeve. It's just for some reason, every Apple, the original ridiculous Bella Ramsey commercials around Apple Intelligence, of course, everything is flight booking and again, like.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  You have killed that Bella Ramsey commercials so often.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  That one.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  They're gonna, the creative agency is just gonna write to you.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  And I loved The Last of Us and I loved Bella Ramsey, but those commercials still irked me.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  What happened in those commercials?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  One of them, she's sitting at someone that she can't remember who that person is and in real time asks Apple Intelligence, like, "Tell me about this person, my interactions." Which again, is just such a weird thing, like, "I'm so much better than you that I don't know who you are and I need to remember who you are and have AI tell me," but, and it didn't even come close to working with Apple Intelligence, so. That was, that was the worst one.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  You know what would be good for that, actually?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  What, goal mode?

• 20:47Speaker 00

  AR glasses.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Oh, AR glasses. There's the real world use case.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Or the fact that that commercial was so bad, just again proves my point that AR glasses aren't gonna work. Okay, sorry. Thank you so much for the question.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  And we'll go over here.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Okay, fine. We'll go here.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Okay, hi.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Hey.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  Gerald Harris. I'm on the board of the Commonwealth Club here and I run some programs for the club and I have a small scenario planning consultancy. But here's my question that I think hasn't come up here. What should we be concerned about in terms of using the AI models, them building a database on us and then turning that into advertising? So the advertising potential revenue from some, from users, do you think the AI companies will ever go after that revenue or use that information for advertising purposes?

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Ooh, that's a good one. So will will AIs build an amazing sort of profile of you based off of all the personal data and then use that for ads? Most certainly. Someone left one of the companies and wrote about that in the New York Times. Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah, that's that's coming. I I think that advertising is obviously going to be one use where we're going to start to see some of the problematic stuff here. But actually, if you look at the ads that OpenAI gave you, it's sort of like more of a and obviously, they they always come out with the high-touch brand, and then they will like get you on the direct response, like super-targeted stuff, once they realize they can't make money on brand. But like, it looks pretty good. Like, if you're sorry to go

• 22:28Speaker 00

  with the travel example again, but if you're like researching travel on ChatGPT, like you can go into an advertising chat experience and it will help you. But I think that like, we have never had technology ever to collecting this much information about us. Has anyone here like talked to like ChatGPT or Claude and say, can you psychoanalyze me? If you're not, or give me any any insight about myself? Just like five of you, the rest of you have done it. I admit it. It's scary. And and we're and that's the like gated stuff. And we're giving this all this information to to companies. And it's a a trust thing that we don't really know where it's going to go.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's interesting because, again, OpenAI originally ads are going to be a big part of the business. Now they pivoted away from that a bit, but are still releasing ad products. At least Anthropic is not. I mean, I don't think they're going in that direction at all. Google and Gemini, obviously, 100% will. And like, you probably will get a really good ad experience. I mean, the more it knows about you, the types of questions you're asking. But it is like, you know, like thousands and tens of thousands of three to five-word Google searches are a lot different than entire thought partnership therapy, like research exploration. These models will know everything about you. And

• 23:53Speaker 01

  it is, it's terrifying.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Have you done the psychoanalyze me prompt?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  No, but I did. So I use like Claude. And ChatGPT Gemini, I'll kind of go through the three of them and cycle around. So it is funny. So I have asked, like, what do you know about me? Like, what would you ask back? And they all have very different, kind of like jagged, jarring aggregations of who I am. Like, I don't know, they're, uh, I, I, I don't have one that just knows me through and through.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  I, I've done it.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  To diversify them.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  I've done it with ChatGPT.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  It's pretty good.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  And then like, it will first give you a answer that's like, kind of sanitized. And then you say, go a little deeper. And then you say, get a little darker.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Oh dear.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  I have not red teamed ChatGPT.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I challenge you all to give it a shot.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Or don't go darker.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Don't do that.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Don't go darker.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  But if you really want to.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Okay, thank you. Over here. And thank you for the question.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Let's move on. Let's move on.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  Thank you, guys, and really appreciate all the work that you all do on the podcast and YouTube. Your conversations go so deep and still very broad, so I really appreciate that.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Thank you. We appreciate it. You're a listener or viewer?

• 25:05Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  All right.

• 25:06Speaker 06

  Both.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 25:07Speaker 06

  Depends on where I am.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Amazing. Appreciate it.

• 25:09Speaker 06

  Um, and, you know, my name is Saaji. I'm a advisor for startups in the AI space. Um, and I've been in product management and go-to-market strategy. Um, my question for you, somewhat related to the gentleman before. You know, there's a lot of coverage on agents and what agents can do and a little bit about the governance and cost control. What I don't see a lot about, um, you know, is, you know, agents do drift. Probably why we don't have better examples than travel. Um, and, you know, over the period of time, they don't get better at the specific, uh, you know, uh, understanding of the, the people and the business context and the operating model they're working in.

• 25:51Speaker 06

  Um, and, you know, learn from it. And I was wondering, is there, is there a lot of conversation that you guys are seeing around, uh, the learning of, uh, the learning layer in the agents? And is it too early or, you know, um, for that to happen? And the conversation is mostly around governance and cost and access?

• 26:13Speaker 00

  It's actually a good question for Ron Jon.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so again, like, working in this all day, and thank you for the question. I think what's gonna happen, and I'm already starting to see, is like, six to 12 months ago, the approach was just jam as much information into whatever system you can, and we were kind of promised that it would just work. And AI is just gonna, and like, there's, you know, you'd get this feeling that, oh, wait, 100-page PDF, it actually could parse, and I can get information out of. But then, when you're doing that at any kind of agentic scale, it doesn't. And I think, already, like, how information gets chunked up, and like, distributed in different ways, and context windows, everyone would see, like, 1 million token context window, but we didn't really know what it meant.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And now, more and more, like, and I actually think this is gonna be one of the most interesting, like, professional opportunities, and areas to be an expert in going forward, is like, being able to kind of, it's funny, like, it is as much art as science right now, but I think, like, the more you can start to grab a hold of how information flows through these agents, and how you actually get it reliable, it's gonna be a really, really interesting space. It's not, it's no one job right now.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  Okay, thank you for the question. All right, we have seven minutes, three questions. Let's see if we can keep the questions brief, and we'll keep the answers brief, and we'll get to everybody.

• 27:34Speaker 07

  I'll try to be quick.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 27:36Speaker 07

  Hey, everyone, a big fan of the pod, by the way.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 27:38Speaker 07

  Chris of Wayhe, I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Virus Watcher, I'm here.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:43Speaker 07

  My colleague.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 27:44Speaker 07

  Flew in from Dallas, he flew in from Austin.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 27:47Speaker 07

  Big fan.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  We got a couple Dallas folks here today.

• 27:50Speaker 07

  Oh, who's Dallas? Shout out Dallas.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Doing.

• 27:52Speaker 07

  Okay. Go Matt.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Hey. Oh, yeah, we're big in Texas.

• 27:57Speaker 07

  I'm gonna go in a different direction with my question, is, I wanna know, kind of, what y'all's thoughts, and honestly, if you can ask this kind of later on with Greg Brockman and others, what is the thought on using AI models and AI, you know, technology for biological intelligence, biosurveillance, and public health for emerging risk detection with infectious diseases? It's a very interesting project that we're working on, we have a lot of epidemiologists on our team. We were just at the UN two weeks ago with the World Health Organization. And trying to discuss these problems and how we can use the technology to to kind of detect these things early on. So I kind of want to get you guys thoughts on that.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Can I ask you a question back? And if you could give a brief answer, that'd be great.

• 28:39Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Are you a believer in the bio capabilities of these models like Fable? Like, do you think Anthropic made the right decision by gating them?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Wait, wait. Bio capabilities, meaning like you're talking about biological weapons. He's talking about like disease.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Correct. But I think that.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Always going to biological weapons.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  His answer will give us insight into the.

• 28:58Speaker 07

  I mean, I think it's a it's a very touchy. You know, it's a there's no right answer, I don't think. But I do think it probably did more harm, you know, than, you know, not allowing everyone to kind of take advantage of the.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  So you're not you're not basically worried that today's cutting edge models could cause like new bio threats?

• 29:20Speaker 07

  No, I I am. But I think there's also a lot of positives that could come out of it as well.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Let everybody use it, though.

• 29:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, I just, you know, it doesn't even have to be a Fable style model. It can be, you could take a frontier model, distill a more.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:34Speaker 07

  Custom model. Yeah, safety was, you know, safety standards involved. But sorry, I don't want to be too long. I just wanted.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  No, no, no. Great question. Ron, John?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  I in terms of the first part of it, I do think, again, like, and it's one of the underappreciated things that I feel in the AI industry, like, disease prevention and scenario modeling around virus, like, we don't talk about that stuff enough, or whoever is trying to talk about it, it does not get listened to enough. So I love the kind of work you're doing. And like, those kind of stories would bring the AI industry a little bit better reputation, I think.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I agree.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  You're thinking about biological weapons.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  No, I think that that if well, if you can do one, then you could certainly do the other. Am I what?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Is one like, but okay.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  I actually have no idea.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Why are you giving me these problems here? No, I hope that we can.

• 30:25Speaker 07

  Sorry, I know it's a very, no, no, no.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  We're going to speak with Bill. We'll hopefully have some time to talk about health with Brockman.

• 30:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I would love. Yeah, if you can.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Okay. Thank you for the question. Over here.

• 30:38Speaker 08

  My name is Heidi.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Hi Heidi.

• 30:39Speaker 08

  I'm your LinkedIn online friend.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 30:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, thank you for me.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  You messaged me yesterday, yes.

• 30:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Thank you for being here.

• 30:45Speaker 08

  Thank you for me chance to join this event, see each other in person. My question about, before you with a different speaker mention about China. So I'm Chinese. I curious about why you think China is important business partnership with USA special high tech. Second question about rain. So you mention a lot L M, larger large model. So my question about Gemini, to the GDP and cloudy and Allison, which one you prefer? Think about in future is more stronger, smarter in the future. Thank you.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Thank you, thank you for the question. Well, the question on China is, is, sorry, what's the question on China?

• 31:32Speaker 08

  No, no. Why you think it's important business relationship with USA? So, yeah, thank you.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  You know, all right, I will, I will take that question and then Ranjan will answer which model he likes better. You know, I, I think that we're obviously in this competition. The US and China are in this competition and there's like a lot of suspicion on both ends. And, you know, I've said in the past that like it would be great if there was better cooperation between the two countries. And people have told me that I'm naive, but I'm not gonna, you know, lose that hope. I think that if, if, I mean, in some ways competition is good, right? Because then you'll just have everybody striving to build a better thing. But, you know, we just talked about AI for health. If the countries were able to work together, maybe on specific initiatives, that would be much welcome.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  I, I think the most interesting part of like US versus or US with China in terms of AI. In the last few months, the conversation around moving towards deep seek and adding it into your agentic process or adding Chinese models did not exist in any conversation. I was in 12 months ago and now is in almost every conversation, at least as an option, because cost has become such a. Larger part of the conversation. So I think, I think it's a good thing. I think the more integration there is overall across these systems, the better.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, but watch out for la châton fat.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Oh, la châton fat. Mistrà.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  The cat holding the hands with Dario and Sam is my favorite meme the whole year. Okay, we have one minute left, but let's see if we can do it in a minute.

• 33:05Speaker 09

  All right, I'll go through this quickly. Hi, Maria Sarah Roberts. I'm in business management consulting.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Hi.

• 33:10Speaker 09

  My question's a little bit different. As we are evolving into or entering or in a world already where endless possibilities are available, where and how do you see the evolution of the responsibilities that big tech companies have in supporting making this world better? Not the product and our engagement and how we interact with all the screens better, but rather like the real big problems that the world has. And not because they should, but because they can. So how do you think about like the evolution of that as we step into this world?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  I'll answer that. Or do you want to answer? Go ahead.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I just, we had a backstage, we had a long rant because I'd forgotten that Anthropic is a PBC, Public Benefit Corporation, but I still think there is a responsibility. I don't actually see it happening in any kind of way because competition is so fierce now. I wish it would, but I don't see it happening.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a good answer.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  We have, I want to make people, make sure everybody gets to coffee. Oh, no, screw it. I'll answer it. So Jeff Bezos, so I think they have an obligation to do good for the world. And I don't know if, and I know people within the companies are, you know, are very serious about that. So they have their own side projects. But I think, you know, as a society, maybe we can't expect them to do it out of the goodness of their own hearts. Jeff Bezos was recently doing an interview and he said, he said, I think what I do in the private sector is going to outweigh whatever I could do charitably. I disagree with that. And I think that that's just the mindset of a lot of people at the top of these companies. And so like everybody else needs to be aware of that and not count on it, even though it

• 34:55Speaker 00

  would be nice. So that's my perspective. All right. Ron Jam, will you come back with us after the break and speak with Alex Stamos and I about whether this mythos and fable stuff is material or marketing?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  You know, I would love to.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  You guys want to get a coffee break? Yeah. You guys are amazing.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 35:15Speaker 00

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• 37:15Speaker 00

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• 37:59Speaker 00

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com/bigtech. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash big tech. So you may have heard that AI is in some trouble in Washington. And that story has led to a lot of guessing. People have guessed, are these models actually that dangerous? How much better are they than previous generations? And do they deserve to be restricted by the federal government? We've certainly done a lot of guessing. And I think the only way to get to the bottom of this is to speak with somebody who is deep in the weeds on the cybersecurity aspects of AI models.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Someone who secures them and someone who has spent a career working in security. And that would be Alex Stamos. Alex Stamos is the former chief security officer at Meta, and he's the current chief product officer at Corridor. Ranjan and I have this debate all the time. Is what's going on with Mythos marketing or material? Well, let's get to the bottom of it. Ranjan will come out and be my co-interviewer for this one. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Stamos and once again, Ranjan Roy.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 39:17Speaker 10

  Hey, thanks, man.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Alex, boring times in your industry.

• 39:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's an honor to be here. I am by far the poorest person in the afternoon lineup. It's like I bring down the mean net worth by a comma, I believe. So I do appreciate being here.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Well, Alex, I don't want to queue you into Podcaster Finances, but I think you're good.

• 39:38Speaker 10

  Of the guests, I guess, yeah, yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  So talk a little bit about, we're obviously at this moment where the government has pulled down, or basically forced Anthropic to pull down Fable or Mythos, its frontier model.

• 39:50Speaker 10

  Right, both of them, yes.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  What happened?

• 39:52Speaker 10

  Right, so just for recap for everybody, last Friday, what happened was the White House became aware of research that Amazon had did, had done. It is not unreasonable for Amazon to do this work, right? So, Amazon hosts Anthropic's models in what they call Bedrock. This includes in all of the classified spaces, so if the NSA is using Anthropic's models, it is running in AWS secret cloud or top secret cloud. And so, Amazon is doing security testing. I expect this is part of getting ready to host Fable in Bedrock, and found some things that they wanted to complain about with Fable's protections

• 40:37Speaker 10

  that make Fable different than Mythos. I guess we can talk about the exact ones. Amazon had sent over these results to Anthropic. There was some disagreement between Anthropic and Amazon during the week of how serious they were. Now, I don't have the exact details here, but somehow, apparently Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, mentions this to somebody at the White House, and the White House freaks out, and according to reporting, calls Anthropic and is not happy with how quickly they can get Anthropic on the phone. Anthropic is asking for more technical details. They're not able to get details from the White House of what the White House wants, so the White House orders them to take Fable down.

• 41:21Speaker 10

  Anthropic says, "No, we can just fix these issues. Why don't we work it out together?" And as a result, instead of working it out together on Friday afternoon, something around 5:00 PM Pacific Time, the Commerce Department signs an order saying that the models are designated export-controlled and that no foreigner, including the foreign citizens who worked and actually built the models themselves, can touch them. Whether or not the administration actually has that legal power is disputed, but Anthropic decides to actually follow through instead of immediately getting a temporary restraining order. And because they have no ability to make sure that no foreign citizen is seeing the models, actually pulls them down.

• 42:04Speaker 10

  Both Mythos, which was privately accessible, as well as Fable, which was publicly available.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  Now, you've spent a career working in security.

• 42:12Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Rajan and I, for months now, have had this debate about whether all of this talk of doom and super-powerful models from Anthropic, like, for instance, Mythos, a model so powerful that you can't access it, whether that represented a real capability increase

• 42:33Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  or whether that was just marketing. And it's a step change, not really a step change in capabilities. So I actually want to toss it to Rajan, who is firmly on the marketing side of this thing, just to make the argument of why you think this is marketing, and Alex can address that.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think trying to understand, like, what is that capability, new capability that is so dangerous? What is that step change? I think the reason I get so suspect on it is how perfectly coordinated a lot of the marketing and communications are around how they roll these out. Like, again, Mythos is the most dangerous thing. There's someone eating a sandwich in a park that actually got, like, where the model broke out of containment was like a PR release. It was a very coordinated thing. So what is that danger that they're trying to kind of bring to the world? Like, what is it really? What does it look like, feel like, or what is it actually going to be a problem?

• 43:28Speaker 10

  So how much money do you guys have writing on this?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Well, how would we even play this?

• 43:33Speaker 10

  I don't even know.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Like as a bet?

• 43:34Speaker 10

  As a bet, like is there a polymarket? Oh, yeah. Because we're trying to see what my angle is here. Apparently I have.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Well, you are the person that knows.

• 43:43Speaker 10

  You're a Trump action.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  You know the answers here. And we have just been kind of like debating on vibes.

• 43:48Speaker 10

  We just argue on. So, okay, so it's actually, it's actually a little bit of a complicated answer. So Mythos is almost, it is the best bug finding model that we know about, for sure. It is most likely the best bug finding model in the world. And I say most likely because we do not know what the Chinese secretly have in their labs. But for all the stuff for which we have open, known, security evaluations for, it scores the best. Now, is it the avenging cyber god that Anthropic makes it out to be? I personally don't think so.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Yes. You're not, yes, Sarah, you're not right yet.

• 44:31Speaker 10

  But, but it is, it is really good. It is really good at finding bugs. But from my perspective, the like Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, a bunch of other models are here, and Mythos is here. At bug finding. At bug finding and exploit development. And it is not here, which is kind of where you would think from reading all this stuff. The other thing is that everybody pretends that Mythos was the breakthrough, but that is not true. For people in the security world who have been paying attention, this Rubicon was crossed well last year with the Opus 4 series, with the GPT 5 series. That is when the models became better or as good or better than the best human bug finders. And not just as good as the best bug finders.

• 45:14Speaker 10

  And there's like 50 or 100 of these people, and I know a couple dozen of them. The problem is those people are very expensive, right? And they don't scale. You can't just throw water on them and make them multiply like gremlins. That would be nice. I mean, certainly the NSA would love that. But models can, you can just scale them as much as you want with money and power and GPUs. And so that last year was a huge deal. Because all of a sudden, you saw these amateur bug finders. Imagine you went to a high school track meet and every single kid is posting Olympic world record times. You'd be like, man, they're juicing, right? That's something that happened. That is what last year was like, like mid to late last year.

• 45:57Speaker 10

  In the vulnerability discovery world is the kids started juicing, right? And it's because the models hit this point where they could find everything. And so, yes, Mythos is really good at finding bugs. It's really good at writing exploits. Fable is not. And so that is what the whole point of Fable is. It is the same model weights as Mythos. But Anthropic put a protection in place to keep it from doing the really nasty stuff that Mythos will do. And Amazon has some complaints about that. But what happened is the complaints Amazon has. A number of us have looked at them and then Anthropic has pushed back. Even with the jailbreaks that Amazon has, you cannot get Fable to do things that you can't do

• 46:41Speaker 10

  with the OPUS series, with GPT-5, and even with a bunch of Chinese models. So that is why the actions by the Trump administration make absolutely no sense. Because those models will not refuse at all. You can just ask GPT-5 to go find these bugs and it will go do it for you. You can just ask Kimi, which is an open source Chinese model, it will go write you these exploits. And so, yes, you can trick Fable into doing certain things, but you can't trick it into doing the really powerful Mythos stuff, which is like grind on the Linux kernel for all day and find a bunch of bugs, which will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, it turns out, if you pay the full price. And those have not been jailbroken. And so there's no real good reason for what happened. So yes, Mythos is really powerful.

• 47:23Speaker 10

  It has only been accessible to a very small number of companies. It is not magically powerful. The other thing you have to remember here is like, bugs are cheap. Exploits are like, we're now drowning in bugs because these models are so good at finding. And we have so much bad software. We've been writing bad software forever. And it turns out that like, writing, human beings writing code in C and C++ especially, was a really bad idea, that like, we should not have been writing like... Building our entire lives like based upon memory unsafe languages. And then in the presence of these superhuman bug finders, not just Mythos, but all of them. That was not a good idea.

• 48:04Speaker 10

  And so if you're pedestrian and you get hit by a F-150 at 80 miles per hour, or a McLaren at 200 miles per hour, you don't really care. You're dead, right? And that's the difference here is like the Mythos is the F-1.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Mythos is the F-1.

• 48:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly. And Kimi or GLM52 is the F-150. And so you could take the McLaren off the market, but all you've done is actually hurt the defenders who want to have full coverage, right? Who want to be able to find all the bugs. An attacker only needs one or two bugs to string together to actually pull off the attack. And so that's why, you know, so about 150 of us wrote this open letter and signed it, saying this is really stupid because all you're doing is hurting defenders and you're also really hurting the US AI industry.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Okay, I think Ron John wins the debate.

• 48:58Speaker 10

  Well, no, Mythos is real. It's not all marketing, but it's not all marketing. But like, I just want to say like Mythos is really powerful, but doesn't really matter because there are so many bugs out there that you can use any of these models to find them. What I'd like to do is I'd like to shift the debate one away from finding bugs. Because the other problem here is like, we cannot set the standard that US AI models can't find bugs. That is a terrible, terrible, terrible standard. If you have a, if you are writing software with an LLM, it has to be able to understand what a bug looks like so it does not write those bugs. It has to. And that is, that's the trick actually Amazon used, was they tricked it into basically finding bugs in individual lines of code

• 49:42Speaker 10

  because it has to be able to do that to write secure code. If... If our, if American LLMs know nothing about security, they will create more security flaws. So we cannot create a standard where American LLMs are dumb about security. That would be a humongous own goal. And that is one of the possible outcomes here of, of this whole brouhaha. That would be really stupid. And so, uh, you know, Mike, I think, yes, I, I don't think either one of you wins. I mean, as the referee here, I think Ron John has a little bit of a, you have a point. But Mythos is really good. It just, it doesn't, Anthropic has played it up too much. Um, OpenAI is rumored to be releasing something that's Mythos quality really soon.

• 50:26Speaker 10

  Um, and I doubt that they're gonna like follow, they'll just give it a number. Like, uh, I think they've learned from Anthropic, you don't call your thing like the cyber Gorgon.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  That actually would sell.

• 50:38Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, yeah, it sells a little too well, right?

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:42Speaker 10

  Maybe as a Greek with the Odyssey coming out, I'm getting a little sensitive about the, the marketing here. But like, like, you know, let's, let's like back off on, on the naming scheme and move back to numbers. Uh, uh, but like, I, I think a, a big part of this is we just have to like, reset the standard of like, not bug finding, but the actual creating and creation of exploits and then other kinds of offensive operations, of which there's a bunch of other things you can do offensively with these models. Those are the things that we should call off limits, not bug finding, because that is something that we have to do much more quickly than we're doing right now.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  Can I, I just want to try to articulate my point, which is, you know, this is, all right. So when we talk about as Mythos material or as Mythos marketing, um, my argument would be like, wouldn't, if something was material, it would look a lot like what we're seeing today, right? Like, at a certain point, these models are increasing in capabilities. You're gonna wanna put some safeguards on them. And so is what Anthropic is doing that different from like where you'd wanna be? If you actually had these concerns?

• 51:39Speaker 10

  I mean, I think both Anthropic and OpenAI have a path in which they have like a KYC model now.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Know your customer.

• 51:46Speaker 10

  Know your customer, yeah. So OpenAI actually has a couple of levels. They have a public one where you can basically say, I want access to cyber capabilities. And then they have a private one. I believe Anthropic only has the private one, right, to get access to Mythos. But I do think it's reasonable to have some level of gating. But in the case of Glasswing, I think it was honestly, I thought it was not widespread enough. I know of like critical infrastructure companies that don't have access to Mythos right now.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Nobody does right now.

• 52:15Speaker 10

  Well, not right now, before last week. Like, people who should have had access did not have access. Now, seeing what happened here, you can see why they were so careful. But from my perspective, as defenders, we are in a race against time, right? We have all of these bugs that need to be fixed. And we also have this weird thing where we're like, this whole conversation is predicated on the idea that like the American labs are years ahead of our adversaries. And that is just not true, right? So while Fable was shut down, on Tuesday of this week, GLM 5.2 was shipped, right, from Zeta AI, which is a Chinese lab. This is an open weight model. It is MIT licensed.

• 52:58Speaker 10

  So any of you can go not just download the weights from Hugging Face, but you can include it in your own product and you can retrain it. It is within percentage points of the top closed models from Anthropic and OpenAI in a bunch of things, a bunch of evals. We don't know how good it is at bug finding yet, so there hasn't been any good testing here. But encoding and a bunch of other intelligence tasks, it's almost as good as the best the United States has. And that's the best Chinese model we know about, right? Unlike American labs, the Chinese are not going to announce their Mythos, right? And so the idea that we should be doing everything in the United States to just be playing defense is we're playing like a defensive model here, that is stupid from my perspective.

• 53:42Speaker 10

  We need to be accelerating our capability to do these things and not just playing defense.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Well, now I am sufficiently scared, even though I've thought that the Mythos was pure marketing. But what do we do about it? Like, how do we, what is that? Like, and I think I share that Glasswing, again, why it felt like marketing to me. It was this kind of exclusive club that people were invited to. And I actually spoke with people who are using it. And they spoke about it almost like it was a club. Like, oh, yeah, we got access to Mythos. We're spending a ton of money. Like, I think, what should it look like, this kind of rollout to actually help us?

• 54:16Speaker 10

  And Glasswing, I mean, they're fixing real bugs. They have found like 10,000 bugs. Now, one of the problems with Glasswing is they've found like 10,000 bugs, but they've only fixed 1,000, right? So like, you do not want a 10 to 1 ratio of the bugs you found to fixed. We just joined a thing called Project Athena, which Chain Guard is running, which is all about fixing specifically open source bugs, right? So Glasswing is, a lot of that is closed source with inside commercial companies. We are part of this coalition that is using Mythos to fix open source bugs, which is a huge challenge, because like, just finding the people who have access to that source code, commit access is difficult. So that's going to be like a huge push. So it's not like just totally BS.

• 54:59Speaker 10

  I do think that one of the things that's going on here is that if these companies ran any modern AI security tool against their code base, they'd find 80% of those bugs. They don't have to use Mythos.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:09Speaker 10

  So it's just that they've never looked, right? It's, they're like-

• 55:13Speaker 01

  That's concerning.

• 55:14Speaker 10

  Yeah, right. And so they've, they're like, oh, yeah, I've got this old crappy code. And they look for the first time and they, all of a sudden, they find-

• 55:21Speaker 01

  And they could have done it a year ago or six months ago and found some number or some percentage.

• 55:26Speaker 10

  I had this conversation with a CEO this morning, who's like, how do I get into Mythos? Alex, who can you call? And I said, don't wait. Here you go. Here's an API key for Opus right now. It works today, because do not wait for the Trump administration to figure out what they're doing with Mythos. Use Opus 48 right now, and I guarantee you'll get 70% of the bugs you care about.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  Alex, you're a security researcher. One of the stipulations about getting Fable back, so by the way, Anthropic has said they expect Fable to come back on soon. But one of the stipulations that's been talked about to do that is that they have to prevent it from being able to be jailbroken. Is that possible?

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw you did "jailbreak" in air quotes.

• 56:06Speaker 10

  Yeah, no.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  So we have two minutes left, so talk a little bit about why that's not possible.

• 56:10Speaker 10

  No, there's actually a paper from NIST, it's like a kind of a Goldilocks completeness theorem kind of paper that basically says it's impossible to make a model that is completely not jailbreakable. Like I said, Fable needs to be able to understand what security flaws are to be able to do its job. I think what Anthropic might, what Anthropic might, the game they might be playing here is redefine what jailbreak is back to what their system card says. So their system card says redefine different levels of cyber capability and finding a couple of bugs and knowing what a bug is is okay, but we won't let you like build exploit chains and do lots of long-term stuff. And so if they can define back to their system card what a jailbreak is, then they're fine, right?

• 56:54Speaker 10

  What would be terrible for the entire American AI and cybersecurity industries is if the Trump administration defines a jailbreak as having any ability to find any vulnerability in code, because then all of us have to go to Chinese models.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Really?

• 57:08Speaker 10

  That's it, yes. Like, that would be a terrible, terrible outcome. And that might happen, because unfortunately, one of the news that broke just in the last couple of hours is Politico is reporting that Anthropic and the Trump administration are negotiating what the AI safety standards should be. So, like, I don't know, it's like Howard Lutnick writing an eval right now? Like, I find that a little terrifying. So, I am hoping that Anthropic, obviously there's very smart people at Anthropic working on this, I am hoping that they are able to come up with something reasonable that moves stuff towards exploitation, not bug finding. Like, we have to have the ability as defenders to find and fix flaws. The other thing I just want, because we don't have a lot of time. The other real own goal here was that this injected a type of political instability

• 57:51Speaker 10

  and political risk into the USAI industry that did not exist. There are a bunch of companies that are now going to be, have to use open weight models, because at any time on a Friday afternoon, it's good thing that Fable is only out for a week, because people didn't have time to work into their critical path. But if Fable had been out for a month... And at 5:00 PM on a Friday, all of a sudden it got yanked. Then pagers across the country would have gone off because everybody's systems would have fallen over. And so now, this week, CIs and CTOs are signing contracts to have open weight models on different hosts, on US hosts, they're not using Chinese hosts, but they're using Chinese models as backups through LLM routers because political risk is now a risk of using AI companies. That is a massive own goal.

• 58:35Speaker 10

  The United States of America does not need to do that. We should not do that again. That is incredibly stupid at a moment of maximum pressure from the People's Republic of China. And so I can't stress enough, like, we lost a war this weekend. Like, let's not lose another war by making it unreliable to utilize the United States for AI.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  Alex, will you come on the show for a longer conversation about this?

• 58:58Speaker 10

  Absolutely, I'd love to, yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Alex, damos, and Ron, don't run.

• 59:01Speaker 10

  Thank you.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Thank you.

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