A.I. Agents: Cute, Cuddly and Maybe Catastrophically Dangerous?

“It’s going to be gnarly for a little while.”

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  There are two things I'm having trouble keeping track of in tech right now. The first is all the new personal assistant agents. There's Meta's Muse.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  So talking to your muse, it's often the fastest way to get things done, and it is also just really fun and cute.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Google's Spark.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  I can just put my phone away and get on with my day. And Spark works in the background for me.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  An agent called Instinct, and, just announced this week, OpenAI's new product, Dots.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Dots are remarkably capable, always-on agents, built to handle really anything you can think of.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  The other thing I'm having trouble keeping track of is all the websites and institutions that have been hacked, illicitly accessed, or otherwise meddled with by rogue agents. The AI platform Hugging Face, of course, plus the Australian government's Medicare data portal, the Education Department, the Commerce Department, the Securities Exchange Commission, an obscure German wiki. All of this culminating in OpenAI deciding not to release its latest model this past week. So right now, two things seem to be true. One, agents are the thing that will make AI useful for regular people. And two, they're maybe going to kill, hack, or otherwise meddle with us all. The president's attitude about this, by the way, is that companies should figure it out themselves. This is Hard For.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I'm Max Reed, and over the next few months, I'm going to be joined by an array of New York Times reporters and other tech experts to discuss some of the biggest stories in tech, AI, and our weird new future. Today, we're talking about rogue agents, helpful agents, cute AI avatars, and whether there's such a thing as self-regulation.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  I'm joined by Mike Isaac, Aaron Griffith, and Eli Tan. Hi, guys.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Before we really get into it, Casey and Kevin left me a scrawled note here in this studio. It says, "Run while you still can." I'm kidding. It says, "Don't forget to disclose that the New York Times is currently engaged in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright violations related to the training of large language models." It also says, "Check to see if your wife works at Anthropic." My wife does not work at Anthropic. I want to start today with an icebreaker question. Tuesday was a big White House AI Summit luncheon. Trump, as he is wont to do, Truth Social'd out a seating chart of it. Can we put the seating chart up so people can see it?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Because what I want to ask each of you is, where would you sit? Imagine you're walking in, you've got your tray, you've got a plate with a little pre-made sandwich and a glass of milk and like a green apple on it. Where do you want to sit?

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Right out the gate, you know, they already are way over their capacity for women with two. So I think that I probably would be like standing somewhere in the corner, you know, off to the side, like not actually at the table.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Eli, where are you sitting?

• 3:39Speaker 05

  I would be sitting awkwardly and quietly between Chamath and Susie Wiles.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I think that's got to be some really good gossip there. I think that's a good, that's a really solid, that's where the tea is. Mike, what about you?

• 3:52Speaker 06

  I'm a coward. I just want to be serving shrimp canapes and going in and out of the room and being the guy everyone is delighted to see because he's bringing food and that's about it.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I know this is a bold choice. I think right in the Jensen, Mark, Trump circle is actually, it's like shooting the moon. It might be the most tolerable lunch that you could have. I think that if they're in a good mood, you probably get some good stories, you can rap with them about whatever's going on. I think it's a little dangerous elsewhere at that table. There's some strange, like, sitting between J.D. Vance and Jeff Bezos, like, what's the vibe there? I don't know. It seems a little scary to me. Unfortunately, none of us were invited, so none of us managed to be at the biggest party of the week. So this was a summit, as we were saying, on Tuesday between the Trump White House and some of the richest and most powerful names in AI, which culminated in a press conference

• 4:47Speaker 01

  featuring Trump and all the CEOs. Can we play a little bit of the Dario laughing and talking in front of the reporters?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Whatever he says is okay. Be careful.

• 4:57Speaker 07

  Slow down to AI. So I just want to hear from you after this big summit, where you are today.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Look, I mean, I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  There's the side talk.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  I've talked about the medical benefits.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  The jokes, the laughing, the smirk.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  As the president has said, whoever wins AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks.

• 5:18Speaker 06

  Reining with Mark.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  And the mechanism of how we address those risks is still under discussion.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  And then we have Trump forcing Mark to say some, to like basically answer a question he does not know the answer to in front of everyone, and don't get it wrong.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Mark had a view that was, I thought, really right down, right down the middle. Mark, you want to discuss what you learned? Sure. I mean, I can kind of summarize what I think we all signed today.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  The upshot of this was that it was a rebranding exercise, right? Like, the kind of, what they got at the end of it was, we're calling AI superintelligence now? That was the big commitment?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Well, right. I mean, Trump, along with the rest of the tech industry, maybe they're the ones who put this idea in his head, knows that AI needs a rebrand, that like, right now, people have pretty negative feelings about it, especially associating with the data centers and then now with everybody in the industry saying, oh, it might kill us too. Not great branding, so change the narrative. Superintelligence.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Well, my read on this scene was that Mark Zuckerberg seems to have quite the influence over the administration right now, from kind of the cordial talking with Trump to even the term "superintelligence." This is something that, you know, Mark's been talking about for the last year. It almost seemed like, reminded me of like a high school friend group where they've invited the new awkward kid, and they're still trying to show that, you know, they've been buddies for a while and...

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, but didn't, it did almost kind of like endear me to Dario a little bit because I'm like, okay, either he hasn't gotten media training or the media training just hasn't stuck. Because like, you know, he's itching in his suit, he's like, kind of like making weird faces. It kind of like, almost made me feel like, okay, like, you know, the rest of these guys are like very polished and buttoned up and kind of like trying to do their like alpha male thing, and here's this guy like, he can't help but be himself. It kind of like won me over a little bit.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I was thinking, I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this observation, but I was thinking that Dario really, we all know that Trump has a kind of central casting problem, that he needs people he interacts with to look like what he expects them to be. And without wanting to be rude about it, I do think Dario, if you are thinking like super intelligent, math genius nerd, like that is good, like Dario is kind of what you're picturing in your head, and I think that maybe won him over to Trump, that Trump was like, I understand this. I think possibly Sundar had the same kind of effect, a sort of taller, ganglier, awkward version. Can we play the Trump, the clip of Trump? This is a, what we're about to hear is Trump complimenting Sundar.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  This guy is a monster, and nobody knows what a great life.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  A monster.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  To be a monster, you not have to go through this. What's your name? Since you just went today. Just all you have to know is Sundar.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  I don't know if I would want to be called a monster in front of everyone. I don't know.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  No, it's monster in the Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj sense. That's the monster he means.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  That was for sure the reference.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so in addition to this being a big exercise in branding, which is like the most Trumpian sort of, you know, after-effect we could have gotten out of it, the other thing was that Trump effectively asked them all to self-regulate. And I want to, I want to focus on this for a second because self-regulation, the word, the concept has sort of been circulating for the last few months as AI safety has come to the forefront of a lot of people's minds. I'm sure you guys all saw Ezra Klein, our colleague, interviewed Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, last week.

• 8:49Speaker 08

  Don't ship products until they're in control. It is really quite that simple.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And speaking of people who are very influential to Trump, Jensen was sitting right next to Trump and has been extremely influential to the way Trump has been thinking about this. And I have to say, and I want to talk about it with you guys, I found Huang's interview to be sort of refreshing is probably taking it too far, but it was a little different from a lot of what we've heard about CEOs sort of directly in the AI industry. He's got a, he's got a very different perspective, and I want to talk about why that is, not just on sort of regulation in general, but how he thinks everyone should think about the dangers of AI. Whitney, can we play the car, the clip about the car, if you've got it?

• 9:34Speaker 08

  Ezra, it's so weird. If a car company, competing with all a bunch of other car companies, which they are, I'm competing with all kinds of companies, which I am. If I believe that I'm about to launch a product that is unsafe...

• 9:54Speaker 08

  It is completely in my ability, my power, and my responsibility, and I'm incentivized to do so to not launch the product.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  So Jensen is sort of saying, look, if you're, if you're creating these things that are, you know, it's super dangerous, crazy, you know, gonna kill people, why don't you just not release them at all? What did you guys make of this interview? Or am I, was it as, as sort of, is this, is it, did it feel new to me because of, because of, from my perspective, or was this a fairly common view in the valley, do you think?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  So it's the like, the tech industry slogan of like, you can just do things, but you can just not do things.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I like that, anti-agency. That's a good, that's, that's great.

• 10:40Speaker 06

  I would argue it's kind of naive and perhaps willfully naive to suggest that everyone is just gonna not do stuff if it may be bad or has the capacity to be bad. And, you know, has that gone well for industry so far over many years? Not necessarily. Like, there's a lot of ways you can release things that may be somewhat dangerous or unintentionally dangerous. But it felt very much like he was trying to shift, as what Aaron was saying before, trying to shift this narrative of it's not, uh, these systems are inherently dangerous, but it's, we are the stewards and the people who should be responsible of shepherding these great systems into the world.

• 11:23Speaker 06

  And if you're not, if you're OpenAI or Anthropic, really, this is targeted Anthropic, then it's a, it's a personal failing of the CEOs for you to release these products. And like, I just, I, I'm very curious why you found it refreshing? Because I felt like, maybe I was being too cynical about it.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  No, I mean, maybe refreshing is the wrong word. I feel like I've spent the last few months, or few weeks at least, hearing a lot of kind of hand wringing about what's happening. I, I find this sort of, the, the, the Dario Altman pose a little, I don't know. It just feels, I mean, I suppose in some ways I have the gen, I have a sort of Jensen-esque like, okay, well, like, why are you, like, okay, so stop. And I know that there's this elaborate scaffolding of rationalization and justification for why you would continue building AI, even if you think it's, it's got a 10% chance of blowing everything up. But I do think that Jensen, in his heart, I'm just calling him by his first name. That's, that's how you can tell I'm captured. I, I want to be clear. I don't, I really disagree with a lot of stuff in this interview.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm not, this is not an endorsement of the take. But I do find him, he's an interesting figure to me because he's not somebody who has come up through the world of machine learning, which has a really specific, as you guys all know, has a really specific kind of culture and a kind of sense of what they're doing and what their building is. I mean, this is a guy who is a graphics card salesman. That is his job. That is what he's been doing, you know, for, for 30 years now. And I, I'm sort of very sympathetic to a, a guy coming around, you know, if we can extend the car metaphor, he's like a guy who sells mufflers or whatever. And all of a sudden Volkswagen's saying, you know, if we build cars, like, they might all blow up on the highway and kill all of us. And he's like, well, you're stopping me, first of all, like, I've been selling these mufflers forever and it's been, I've gotten really rich off of it. It's been great.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Why are you messing up a good thing? But also it's like, they're just cars. Just build the cars. And I thought this was an interesting contrast with the Bill Gates interview that Ezra did this week, which was another end of this sort of spectrum.

• 13:24Speaker 09

  You can't rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it's just insane.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Gates is very pro-regulation. But the place where they both met up was there very much people who see AI as a tool that can be, that needs to be addressed as a tool instead of as a kind of, a potential superintelligence, the, you know, the only sort of, the only way it can be dealt with is by properly, is by like, teaching it to be a good person, basically, instead of like, teaching it through regulation.

• 13:55Speaker 04

  Max, don't you think that you're just like, getting captured by like, a more palatable version of the like accelerationist argument? Or, you know, it's like, it's like the accelerationist, but like, minus the like, and also screw the little guy, you know?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  The slow accelerationist?

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or it's just like, it's like that same argument, but it's just like, a little bit, uh, you know, kind of goes down a little easier because it's, it doesn't have like a menace to it.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I definitely am getting, I'm like, I've like, contrarianed myself into like, a position that I don't actually hold just by like, trying to triangulate my way out of it. But I do think, I mean, the one thing, the one thing I'll say-

• 14:29Speaker 04

  It's tough being a contrarian these days.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  I know, exactly. The one other thing I'll say, I think that there's a real, the value of having Jensen Wong talk like this is that it, it feels to me very often like there's a real echo chamber, uh, in the, in AI world. And I'm not saying that like, adding more wrong opinions to the echo chamber is necessarily gonna somehow produce a right opinion. But it is nice to have, to like, start to, like, to, you know, sort of bounce around some ideas that don't have anything to do with the kind of rationalist-directed, rationalist-oriented, you know, EA-oriented, AI-safety-oriented, um, things. I mean, the end of the day, I, I'm, I think I more agree with Bill Gates than I do with Jensen Wong about, about the need for some kind of like, sector-specific regulation.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  But I also feel like this is such a fast-moving environment. It's really hard to say how we should approach it at all.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  I think it's really weird that they all have been, not all, but many have been begging the government to regulate them and, and force them to slow down. And, and then they all get together and sign this pinky swear that's like morally binding, um, that has no teeth to it, that says like, we're gonna police each other. And then they all sort of like, are like, yay, we did it. Because, because Trump doesn't want actual regulation. And, and is that it? Are they gonna stop asking for real regulation now? Because they've all sort of like, agreed to this very flimsy piece of paper?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  It's a very good question. And I'll just note that the FTC is now looking into OpenAI and Anthropic, which feels a little bit like, does the government want them to self-regulate or does it not? Because the way they seem to want to self-regulate is by effectively forming a cartel. And if the government is gonna, you know, bring antitrust prosecution against them, then that's not, they're not gonna be self-regulating anymore. But I want to follow up, I want to follow that thread a little bit because part of what's at play here that I think gets ignored by the fact that it's all the CEOs at the summit, and these are interviews with Bill Gates and Jensen Wong, is that there's this huge mass of people inside the labs, researchers and workers and engineers, who are themselves trying frantically to pump the brakes or to figure out, you know, exactly what they're doing and how to do it.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  There was a great, our colleague Cher Frankel had a great story this week about people inside OpenAI raising the alarm over lack of monitoring, lack of proper security procedures around a bunch of the, the hacking tests that, um, that have resulted in, in stuff like the hugging face incident. Are you guys hearing, I mean, is this, is this, do I have the right, like, sort of, um, take on this, that there is, there is a fair amount of unrest within these companies? Or if not unrest, at least, um, sort of a sense that the workers are taking it into their own hands?

• 17:19Speaker 04

  I mean, certainly at OpenAI, like, which I think stands out from all of the other frontier lab companies and the number of hacks and attempts and the number of things that they've, they've found that their, their AI agents are doing without their realizing. And, you know, Cher's story is incredible because it focuses on just what her sources call sloppy security practices. It's, it's not just like sloppy for a company that's building really powerful AI tools. It's just like sloppy for any company? Like, there, there's this really great, great quote in there. The guy says, "Why are you using Slack to build your nuclear Manhattan projects?" Because some, some white hat hackers got, got access to like, their Slack logs,

• 18:03Speaker 04

  amongst other things that they got access to. And, and they brought it to OpenAI, which was standard security practice. And OpenAI was just like, oh, whatever. And then later kind of came around to it. But it just seems like a company that's not taking this stuff seriously despite, you know, saying all the right things and talking, telling the government, we want to be regulated and you gotta slow us down. Like, behind the scenes, they're kind of- They're not really that good at security, it seems like, based on this reporting. So the fact that these leaks are coming from OpenAI first doesn't surprise me because of the sheer volume of incidents that they've had.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  I will say, though, that the culture of inside of these companies of employees just like popping off, I think is, and this is not to say that they're wrong, but it's like, it's very, it reminds me of like, back in the day at Facebook or the Web 2.0 companies when anyone was saying anything and they were like, you know, speaking up to the boss and like saying, this is wrong, we shouldn't be doing this, which like, we're in a very different era of Silicon Valley now where that is not the case inside of Apple and Amazon and Google.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  And Google especially, they were, you know, the, the like sort of pinnacle of like employee dissent and message boards and discussions and ultimately culminating in a walkout, ultimately culminating in them shutting that stuff down.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  What about inside Facebook, say, which is a player, a major player in the AI space? Is there, I mean, is it because they're not a frontier lab, there's just less of a sort of employee culture of, of fear and dissent and whatever else?

• 19:37Speaker 06

  I think, I think that the, uh, Facebook does feel, and Eli can talk about this too, but, uh, sorry, Meta does feel a little bit different just in a few ways. One, I think the biggest concentration of, let's see, let's say people who are like alarmed at what AI can do and feel like it's super dangerous is in Anthropic, is probably going to be in Anthropic. Those have also dispersed across OpenAI and DeepMind. And I feel like the folks inside of Meta in general, I'd be curious to hear what you think, Eli, but like, are kind of more like foot on the gas, man. Let's just like, it's open source. Everyone should be able to use this stuff. And like, yeah, there's a few, if we like, you know,

• 20:21Speaker 06

  take out a few power grids along the way, then like, that's the cost of doing business. But I do think in general, they're way more accelerationist compared to the conservatism of some of the, the main labs. Is that right, Eli? I don't know. I feel like that.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's been interesting to watch when Meta, when Mark staffed his new AI lab with all these new researchers, giving them hundreds of millions of dollars a year ago, he was bringing in these, these types of people from companies like OpenAI. And now in the last year, you watch them tweet and they're talking about products and flywheels. It's like they've been totally metafied. And I think their attitudes have changed a little bit, but.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  I'd like to see, I'd like to metafie the three of you. I'd like more products and more flywheels on this, on this call. I want to talk so, but this is all leading somewhere because the other big news, or the big news to me at least this week, was that OpenAI scrapped the release of its newest AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra. The quote that has been ringing in my head is the head of OpenAI Safety Systems, Sachi Jain, says, "GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception. It wasn't always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn't take."

• 21:34Speaker 06

  Sounds like my worst breakup that I've gone through.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  You should have, yeah, well, this is, this is one of those like AI, like they can't not talk in like sci-fi cliches, but also they are building cliched sci-fi, you know, minds. So I guess that's kind of how you have to talk about it. You know, like, I'm interested in this in a bunch of different ways. One is, to what extent do we think this is about this sort of internal, you know, push? Is it, is it that the people at the top at OpenAI might have released this, but they're, they're worried about pushback from inside the lab? Is it more that they're, they're just, they've like brutalized by story after story of the various, you know, hacking, scraping, to use our favorite

• 22:19Speaker 01

  word, meddling with websites that OpenAI agents have done? Aaron, when you read about this, what was your reaction?

• 22:27Speaker 04

  They're pacing the frontier.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  They are. This is in fact them pacing the frontier. I mean, is this self-regulation?

• 22:38Speaker 04

  I guess. I mean, I don't know. I started seeing all the conspiracy theories about like, they're doing this because like they've lost control. I don't believe that, but yeah, they don't want more bad headlines. They don't want more instances of this and they're still finding ones. So maybe a bad idea.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  There's also the fact that that morning Anthropic released a new model, basically, and like, which continues to bring up the question of like, why are you doing this and releasing new models every day if you're freaking out this much? And I do think inside of OpenAI, they like playing for keeps and, and sticking the knife in their competitors whenever they can. So like, positioning oneself as the responsible actor as your main competitor is pushing ahead, I would not put that past how OpenAI thinks about some of this stuff. While also saying, hey, they, there are people inside that do believe this is like dangerous stuff.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  So this is, this is an example of rogue agents. One of the things that I thought the Jensen Huang interview sort of underlined quite well, in fact, was the, the way that part of what we're talking about here is a shift change and just in the last six months, say, where we have a sense of how much more powerful, how much more capable, and in some ways, how much more dangerous these models can be. But one of the funny things about this technology is that the power and the capability and the danger is also overlaps quite a lot with usefulness. So we also have been hearing a lot more recently about useful AI agents, autonomous AI agents that can do things like change your calendar, respond to emails, you know, reschedule your haircuts, whatever else. Eli handed his

• 24:20Speaker 01

  life over to the meta one for the sake of the education of all the rest of us. And after the break, we're going to ask him about that.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell. AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

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• 26:23Speaker 01

  Among the funniest things about this week, in addition to OpenAI apologizing to the Australian government for improperly accessing various websites and announcing that its new model was too scary to possibly release, they also announced that they were going to have a personal assistant called Dots. So Dots joins, among others, Instinct, Google Spark and Meta's newest product, Muse, which has been-

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Also, there's one called Town. No one else seems to have heard of this one. There's-

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Town? Does it do something different?

• 26:51Speaker 04

  No, it's a person, it's just the same. There's a, there's actually a myriad-

• 26:54Speaker 06

  It's from Boston.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Dots joins, yeah, Town, it buys Red Sox tickets and schedules bank robberies for you. Dots joins Instinct, Google Spark, Muse and Town. All of these have been receiving a ton of interest. They're interesting because they are sort of a little bit less freaky and scary than the AI that, you know, hacks things and does all the math problems for you. They do things like monitor your email, check your calendar, they create diet and exercise plans for you. In some cases, they will even make annoying phone calls that you don't want to make. Eli, I want to talk to you about this because you, as I say, turned your life over to Muse for the last few weeks. What has that been like?

• 27:32Speaker 05

  I did, yeah. For our listeners, if they're wondering what kind of agent it is, you know, the helpful agents look kind of like Labubus, these companies have decided. And the ones that hack governments, they have, I guess, little hoods and hacker outfits. But yeah, I turned my life over to Muse. I gave it access to my email, my calendar, my bank accounts. I let it do everything for two weeks. And I wrote about it and I found it to be one of the most helpful AI tools that I've used, was my takeaway.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  So let's, for people who haven't opened Muse, like, tell me what the, like, what's the interface? Like, how do I, like, it's an app on your phone, right?

• 28:09Speaker 05

  It's an app on your phone. You download it from the App Store. You sign in with, you know, your Meta account, Instagram and Facebook, and it looks just like a chatbot. There's like this little avatar at the top who, he starts out like a Labubu, but then he asks you to give him a name. And mine, his name was Vren. He's a tiny little owl. And you talk to him like a chatbot or it like a chatbot. And then, you know, the little owl types on a little keyboard and it can do, you know, all the tasks for you and, you know, sign into all these accounts and kind of walks you through it.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So what kinds of tasks were you asking it to do?

• 28:39Speaker 05

  I had it, uh, order me groceries for pickup at Whole Foods. I had it at some of the, kind of the trial accounts, you know, they have a phone feature where you can, you can use these two personalities, a female voice called Haley and a male voice called Brett, and you can have them make phone calls for you. So I called my-

• 28:59Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  Did you name them? Wait, back up. Who named them?

• 29:03Speaker 05

  I did not name them. These are the names that Meta gave to these personalities.

• 29:07Speaker 06

  Oh, my god.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  So I would have Haley call my-

• 29:09Speaker 04

  And they're posing as humans, right? Like, they're not saying, "I am an AI agent calling." They're saying, "I am Haley, human, calling."

• 29:16Speaker 05

  They say, "I'm Haley, and I'm calling on behalf of Eli." "I had to call my dental insurance." "It gave them my member ID, answered a security question about my birthday, "and then it waited on hold." "And then 10 minutes later, I pick up my phone, "and it's Haley calling and saying, 'I'm about to transfer you to Anthem.'" And I go, "Oh, my gosh."

• 29:35Speaker 04

  But doesn't, like, Anthem already has that service? So, okay, sorry, I'm jumping ahead here, but I want to hear from you. Like, it feels like you're just managing a bunch of interns, like, that you have to then... It makes more work than for you, because you have to then tell them, "Okay, here's all my stuff, here's how to do it, here's what I want." And then, like, if they mess it up, you have to, like, fix it. Like, is it... Did it really save you that much time?

• 29:57Speaker 01

  When you're ordering groceries with it, let me just, to take an example. So you, do you text it, you know, "Can you get me onions, potatoes, peppers, eggs?" You're making a scramble, in this case, I guess, as sort of breakfast? Or are you like, "I need to make breakfast, can you just order me some breakfast stuff?"

• 30:15Speaker 05

  In this case, I gave it a New York Times recipe, and I said, "Can you order me all the ingredients you'd need in this recipe?" Got to keep it in-house.

• 30:20Speaker 06

  Company man.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  But also, the Times app has that feature in Instacart. You can just push a button.

• 30:27Speaker 06

  Wow. She has one up to you, Eli, in promoting New York Times products.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  No, it's true.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  I also would, I also, every time I would order something online, I'd say, "Find the Wirecutter recommended today."

• 30:37Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  Use their referral link, because you want to keep all the, you know, I wanted to keep it in-house, but...

• 30:43Speaker 01

  I mean, one question I have, I had about this, because I downloaded it and I opened it up myself, is the first thing I encountered is just has a long list of things it's suggesting for you to do. Because it's like, this isn't, it's an interesting product where it's not clear, it's not, it wasn't entirely clear to me. And in some ways, still kind of wasn't, even after I read this long list, like, what exactly I need a personal assistant in my life for. So it has everything from, like you're saying, "Order groceries for me, "create an exercise plan for me, create a diet plan for me, break a bad habit."

• 31:15Speaker 06

  You're going through it, Max.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I know. There's a real, there's a sense, at least that I had, and I'd be interested, like, as you interacted with it, that it's the kind of thing that you need to, you need to, like, get in the groove of using it, and then, all of a sudden, the world kind of starts, look, everything in the world starts looking like a problem that your personal agent, that Haley or Brett, might solve for you.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Ren, it's Ren. Ren is managing Haley and Brett.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Ren manages Haley and Brett. I would like to be a fly on the wall for the multi-month Meta meetings where they decided on the names Haley and Brett. Anyway, sorry, tell me more about it, Eli.

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's definitely the type of thing that Meta thinks you'll just use for everything. Personally, after my experiment, I think the thing that I'll use it most for is probably just personal finance, tracking all the things I'm spending. But while I was using it, I mean, it was like, I kind of, I don't want to say I got a little bit of AI psychosis, but like, I was using it for everything.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  Go on.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  At one point, I remember thinking, I went to ask it to, you know, preheat my oven to make the dinner. Like, that's the level of...

• 32:19Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 32:20Speaker 05

  That's like the level of, you know...

• 32:22Speaker 06

  That is rough.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  This is, I think, what's a little bit scary about, and like, what some of the people who are pushing back on the, like, anthropomorphizing of all these AI things is that, once we assign them, like, more human, like, qualities, and like, give them this kind of mystical, magical ability to, like, they know everything, then we just start outsourcing more and more and more of our, like, decision-making and our, even our thinking to them, to the point where, yeah, we're asking it to preheat our oven, and like, or the guy, the tweet that I saw of the guy who, like, pasted a bunch of texts into Claude and said, "How many words is this?"

• 32:54Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  You're just like, uh, people, you know, just turning to it for literally everything without, like, thinking with their brain first. It's like, kind of a little bit scary. That's a side rant, though.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Well, wait, I do want to know, Mike and Erin, you guys, you guys are out there on the bleeding, on the bleeding edge of technology and culture. What, what are people, like, are, is, is the, is the Bay Area absolutely rotten with people using agents to do everything they can?

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I mean, Instinct went super viral before Meta launched. All of VCs were using it and going nuts trying to invest in it, and tweeting about, you know, and some of the, the use cases that they tweet about are genuinely, like, useful, because this thing is so persistent. That's what it has that humans can't do. Like, it's not just like, "Oh, I'm going to tell it to order my groceries, "which I can also just do in an app." It's, "Get me this restaurant reservation," or like, "Go back and forth with Amazon's customer service "to make sure that my refund actually came through." The kinds of stuff that humans just don't have time or aren't organized enough to, like, stay on top of.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  I really do like that restaurant reservations are the number one problem that American technologists are trying to solve at this point. So much so that they're breaking resi, and these apps are getting banned from them. Like, Instinct is the, is the hot one right now. They just raised a billion dollars, they're like, they have a waitlist. I was at a, I was, I was at an event yesterday, and I was speaking for it, and this woman came up after and was like, "Can you get me on the Instinct, off the waitlist and into the app?" But I do think, like, it's a thing out here, and I think they, the way that people think out here is like, this is where it's all going, so, so you just need to sort of get on board with it,

• 34:41Speaker 06

  and, and rather than ask the questions about, "Should, should I hand these intimate parts of my life over to this robot?" They glue, they go, like, full Eli mode and say, "Here is everything I have," and go for it. And, I, I mean, I don't know.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  I don't think that's just an out here thing, though. I think that, I think that, like, handing over your life in exchange for convenience is a thing all across America, because people are busy, and they're, and they're willing to make that, that privacy-to-convenience trade-off. But the thing out here that people think, in my opinion, is that they view every, or I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but many people view every interaction with a human as a, a source of tension that can be solved with technology, rather than just calling a host and be like, "Do you have any tables?"

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Eli, did you make it? I want to know if Eli made any restaurant reservations with, with, with Ren.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  I did make reservations with Ren, and I think, something, think, it's important to remember here, Meta, they're spending $600 billion on this restaurant reservation app. Like, like, yes, it, it's good at restaurant reservations, it's okay at movie tickets. Like, this is a, but this, like, for $600 billion, it should teleport me to the restaurant or something. Like, this is a lot of, yeah, this is a lot of investment for something that's pretty useful at some stuff.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  Which I think we, I think we should remember, right?

• 36:03Speaker 04

  I remember, like, 10 years ago, when we were in the sort of peak of on-demand app mania, when it was like, you know, you have your app for your on-demand butler who's going to go get your dry cleaning, and your on-demand, like, house cleaner, and your on-demand, like, everything was, could be accessed by an app. And it was like this new, you know, millennial lifestyle subsidy utopia. I remember some investor telling me, like, "There will be a time when you don't make any decisions "without first consulting AI, or first consulting an app, "because they will know the best place to get your dry cleaning, "or the best, like, time to order your car, or like, whatever details." Any kind of decision that you make is going to be, like, consulted by AI or by an app. And I remember thinking, like, "That's insane. "That seems like a huge time suck to have to be, like,

• 36:47Speaker 04

  "negotiating back and forth with this app when I just know the decision in my brain." But I, I now think we are moving in that direction, like, and that a lot of people would rather outsource some of these, like, minor day-to-day minutia decisions to an AI that knows them really well and has all their info and can just go ahead and execute it. Like, I, I do really see the appeal there, just to, to argue against myself.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the, one of the things at, at, at stake here is like,

• 37:15Speaker 01

  if everybody has an app, if everybody's got a personal assistant, if everybody has access to the best dry cleaner, the best restaurant, the best whatever, kind of nobody does, because you're just in an arms race against everybody else's personal assistant, everybody else's whatever else, which seems like a, not a great world to live in, in particular.

• 37:31Speaker 05

  It's a question of how many agents do we need? I saw today, I think it was DoorDash, they released an agent in the app. I mean, are we going to go into every app? Am I going to open the Subway app and have a sandwich agent that clicks on whatever I want for lunch?

• 37:43Speaker 06

  It's called a sandwich artist, okay?

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you, Mike.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  How many, how many agents do we need? How many apps do we need? I don't know.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  But that's, that's what happens in eras of tech, right? Like, remember when everyone figured out, okay, now you need, like, not a real AI chatbot, but sort of like a bootleg chatbot at the end, at the bottom of every webpage that eliminates customer service people? And then, those end up being terrible enough that they probably hire them back, and like, everyone kind of does it, and then it washes out over time. I don't know, like, I agree, Erin, that people are more comfortable now making those trade-offs, but I also think we're going to go through this period of, like, messiness, and then something comes out in the wash that people like or don't like or agree upon. I think we're just, like, in that gnarly period right now.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  It's going to be gnarly for a little while. Like, I was talking to this, I was talking to this investor. Yeah. Gnarly for a little while. No, I was gonna say, I was talking to this investor who kind of made this point that I keep thinking about, which is that we spent 20 years trying to prevent bots from being able to transact on the internet. And now we're doing the opposite. We're trying to roll it back and allow bots to like actually buy things on the internet. And like it just, I think about that every time I see these like weird tensions where like, you know, the instinct bots are like breaking the resi site by essentially giving them a DDoS attack by like hammering, looking for reservations like 10 times a minute. And so like, we're gonna, yeah, it's gonna be gnarly. It's gonna, we're gonna see like a lot of, you know, companies have to adapt to a world

• 39:19Speaker 04

  where like agents are roving.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  This is like, one of my favorite things about the various reports that Meter and OpenAI have been producing about all the rogue agents is how much time and how many tokens the agents are putting toward trying to solve CAPTCHAs and like failing at them or trying to like find burner phones or whatever. It's like, it really, I mean, they are like some of the funniest science fiction stories I've read in years and years and years. Robots arguing with each other about how to like, how to like steal Bitcoin from people so that they can find a phone, so that they can register with the Australian Medicare website, so that they can pull some stupid question or whatever. It's really good. I mean, one thing, the other thing about this is, I think one of the big stories in AI over the last few years has been OpenAI in particular, but all the companies have

• 40:03Speaker 01

  been really throwing consumer ideas at the wall, trying to get them to stick. And there are some, obviously, you know, ChatGPT has however many gazillion users, there are consumer uses, but it's really been an enterprise that we've seen the money start to flow in. And the bots feel a little bit like, okay, maybe we're back in a place where regular people are gonna have like this sort of relationship to these things. To that end, this is going somewhere more fun than, than my musings on this. I wanna look at some of the avatars. First of all, I wanna know which one you chose, Eli, for Ren. And I wanna look at them and I want us to see which ones we would choose and which ones we think are the cutest. If we could, if we could have them on the screen, please.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  And the centerpiece of our vision for what we're building

• 40:48Speaker 05

  There he is.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  is Muse.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  What do we think? That's my body type, by the way.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  This is the personal agent that we shipped a few weeks ago.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Joey.

• 40:59Speaker 12

  Chippy. Boba. Bicky. Grumpy. Toodles. Penelope Muse. Frank.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  What do we, so, so, so sorry, Eli, remind me, which one was Ren? Or was Ren not represented here?

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Ren was not represented. So it actually, the name it recommended was Miso. And I said, I'm a, I'm a 28-year-old man, I can't be talking to Miso, you know, to do my groceries. Can we do another name? And it gave me Ren, which was the bird, you know, Ren is a bird, so that's

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:25Speaker 05

  That's what the influence was, so.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh. I mean, they're, they're cute, right? Do you guys feel, you guys feel won over by them?

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, come on, like, everyone's so mad about how ugly the data centers are. And so they're like, so they're like, let's give us, like, let's make it, like, let's make AI cuddly and cute. And also, well, also noting that AI will cure cancer. Like, which one of these little guys is gonna be the one who does it?

• 41:49Speaker 06

  Did anyone else have a Tamagotchi on here?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did have a Tamagotchi.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Does that, does that mean anything to you, Eli?

• 41:56Speaker 05

  I know what Tamagotchis are, yeah, I've heard about them.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Before, before we started recording, we asked Eli if he knew what the Brady Bunch was. And so he's really mad that we're just asking him about things that happened 25 years before.

• 42:08Speaker 05

  When I said my grandma loved the Brady Bunch. She was a big fan.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Things that happened in the 1900s.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Before the invention of electricity. Tamagotchis were in fact the first thing that Edison invented. So if you could describe them to our, our large Zoomer audience, Mike.

• 42:21Speaker 06

  They, I mean, look, this is essentially a Tamagotchi. It was like a little thing that you, although I would say it's a reverse Tamagotchi in that you were essentially a parent to this gourd-shaped egg that could do nothing for itself, that you had to feed and carry around. And this thing is now parenting you by doing everything for you. Look, we

• 42:42Speaker 04

  But Eli, did you

• 42:43Speaker 01

  That's really good.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Did you feel like you, you had companionship with Ren? Or was it fully just business? Like, what can I do for you?

• 42:49Speaker 05

  Unfortunately, unfortunately, there was a little bit of companionship. We developed a couple inside jokes, not, not even joking, like, there was definitely, you know, it has a little bit of a personality, for sure.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  What did Ren think of your article?

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Ren thought it was interesting. I actually did ask it about it. It was

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Who brought it up first?

• 43:13Speaker 05

  I brought it up first. So it was just a part of the article, too. I had it create an AI podcast for me. And more, more AI characters, Maya and Theo were the hosts of that, and it didn't really like how I was kind of making fun of the podcast.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Let me ask one sort of last question, which is, should we trust Meta with this kind of access to everything in our lives? And let me ask it in sort of two ways, because there's sort of two, two questions of trust here. One is, of course, the, the question of privacy and data, which is something that Meta has always had a little bit of trouble keeping track of. The other one is, we started this whole discussion talking about rogue agents and agents that are doing things that we didn't really want them to do and trying to do all kinds of things. So Eli, did you get worried about sort of either of these, any of these things when you were, I mean, you said finances is one of the things that you're handing over to it?

• 44:01Speaker 05

  I did, yeah. One of the lines for me was that I was willing to connect it to my personal email, but not my work email. I didn't want it to go into there. I mean, I'm Gen Z, like, when it comes to privacy, I just don't really have the same issues about it. Like, I just have grown up always assuming, yeah, this data is all of ours, you know, it's

• 44:19Speaker 04

  You're just okay with being so male.

• 44:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, you know, I had a hedge if my bank account got drained, I was gonna be able to write about it and put it in the story.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  So I knew that would be, you know, a potential kicker or something, but, no, I actually, actually wasn't, I actually wasn't as concerned. And also, when it comes to Meta, you know, we talk about history of all the issues this company's had, but, you know, with some of the other agents, it's like, would you rather have a company like Meta with 100,000 people that runs Instagram and Facebook with their data? Or would you rather trust Instinct, which has, I think, less than 20 people and is

• 44:53Speaker 04

  14 people.

• 44:54Speaker 05

  You know, I would not trust Instinct with my banking data personally. But I, I would trust Meta in this case.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Well, there's this, there's, that's the security, like, hacking problem that you're more worried about, but, and there, and Instinct has had some privacy issues, snafus already, where people dug in and they're like, wait, why did they download a whole copy of my entire Gmail inbox that's 20 years to their own servers? Like, that's, I don't want that sitting on a server of a less than one-year-old startup. I kinda see that concern, and, and I can see why I would maybe trust Meta to have better, like, security infra on that. But I also just, I mean, I have a very different perspective than Eli on like my own personal privacy. Like, I don't wish to be further known by these platforms. You know, like, they, they know enough about me when I was like sloppy with my like kind

• 45:42Speaker 04

  of personal data back in the early 2010s when I was signing up for every single app. And like, now I'm like, mm, shut it down. Like, I don't, I think a lot of us, maybe us elders, are like not posting as much, never mind, that's actually not true. Mike posts all the time.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, speak for yourself here, buddy. I do think that every generation has a, this is where I get off sort of thing, and I feel like this is like the stop that I get off on. I'm not, not able to go there. Maybe I'll be left in the dust as you guys are having like Shapenese dinners and I'm shut out of the best reservations, but I can make that trade-off for my life.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  I just got, while we were talking, I just got an alert from my Muse app when it's literally asking me to import all of the data that I have with Claude over to it. It says, help me, help me get to know you better. Already used another AI? I can give you a prompt to bring it over.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  On that note, let's go to another break. Afterwards, I have some very stupid questions about the news that I wanna ask you guys. I wanna talk about Anthropic's S1. I wanna talk about Meta's data center tax breaks. And Eli, I have a really important question about buying flowers for your girlfriend. We'll be back soon.

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• 48:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so before we go, there's a bunch of stuff that happened this week that we haven't even covered. I have some questions. You guys are the experts. I would like you to either answer my questions or redirect them to more fruitful plays. Aaron, I want to talk to you about Anthropic's S1, which leaked this week and showed a bunch of figures from 2025. The thing that stuck out to me, that I was mentioning to you before, was that two unnamed customers make up nearly 25% of their revenue, which for me was like, who? Obviously, one of them is Eli, because he's turned over his whole life to everything. But who's the other one? Is it the DOD? Is it Meta? Is that an interesting question? What should I be thinking about this? What should I know about it?

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Okay, that, I guess, is an interesting question. Sure.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  You're so gentle with me. I love it.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  It would maybe be like my fourth question about it. Like, it is a good question. And I think we know who the Anthropic's biggest customers, which is Facebook. I think the Times has reported that, right?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Right, so I was right. It's Eli. It's Muse is stealing all of Anthropic's data.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  And the second biggest one, I think we could probably take a couple guesses. They have, you know, obviously, a really big partnership with Amazon and others. But I'm sure other reporters who are more enmeshed in this know this, like, for sure. But what is, I think, like, the biggest thing to come out of this S1 leak, which incredible scoop by Echo Wong at Reuters, who also scooped SpaceX's S1 ahead of time. And these things just generally do not leak, so just want to shout out there. That Anthropic, which is about to launch probably the largest IPO of all time, the most valuable and the biggest raise, is selling itself as having the most transformative, you know, product since electricity or the internet or industrialization,

• 50:44Speaker 04

  with a risk factor saying that it could kill us all. Like, buy our stock.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  You might die anyway. It's just like, it's just so remarkable. I think we need to be talking about this. It's just like mind-bending. And then also, the next thing to talk about with this is like their business model, which we're learning about for the first time. There's been all kinds of leaks and blah, blah, blah over the years. But this is the first time we've seen, like, audited financials for 2025, saying, you know, they spent $7 billion on compute last year. They lost $42 billion, which sounds like really, really insane. But if you kind of parse that out, 34 billion of it was like essentially convertible notes that are, you know, controlled. That's not a real loss. It's kind of an accounting thing.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  But yeah, I mean, this business is growing super fast, and it's spending an insane amount of money. They're going to spend $518 billion on like compute infrastructure obligations in the coming years. Like, these are just numbers we've never seen before. So that's what I'm like, wow!

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, thank you, Aaron. I feel vastly more informed, and I'm going to be repeating that at dinner parties all weekend. Mike and Eli, you guys had a great story this week, along with our friends and colleagues, Kashmir Hill and Jesse Trucker, about Meta using AI data centers to avoid federal taxes. So I'm going to try and describe the story for a second. Again, remember, in this segment, I'm just a guy. And I want you to help me figure out exactly how this is working. So basically, Meta's building, we know, is building all these data centers to help power Muse and the various other, Ren, Haley, Brett, all the various MISO, all of our cute little friends.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And they're claiming on their taxes a very specific tax credit for research, that this is for sort of like scientific research, experimental scientific research purposes. Now, do they not have a point? Is this not like, you know, this is, maybe we're in a bubble. They're still figuring out what the uses for AI are. Like, is this not, do they not get a little bit off the top? What's going on there?

• 52:58Speaker 06

  The reason that this is such a big deal is, I think, even internally, folks were like, I don't know if this is going to fly with the IRS if we are audited. And it's in their financials, saying, maybe we get audited by the tax man because this doesn't fly with them. So they essentially had to disclose that. And I think, you know, the average person could probably take issue with our, you know, tens of billions, hundreds of billions at this point in data, in chips, building these data centers. Is that really experimental? Because it feels like it's a little more than a theoretical project.

• 53:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, for listeners, the classic example of this tax credit is that if you're a company developing tires, environmentally-friendly tires, you can expense the rubber that you're using to build the tires. This really takes it to another level. For me, what's interesting is like, the taxpayers, we have none of the upside of these investments, right? I thought back to Trump talking about, oh, maybe we should give people stakes in the AI companies. And in this case, it's like you have all of us taxpayers funding billions and billions of dollars of the data centers. But we don't seem to be, you know, benefiting from it. It seems like companies like Meta are the ones that wouldn't be making a ton of money on it.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  Your upside is Ren.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  And Haley.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  This is a great story. I highly recommend everyone check it out. Eli, you're not off the hook. I have a stupid question for you. In your story, and I know I'm not the only person to ask this, because I've seen the comments on this story. You mentioned that you almost used your AI assistant to buy flowers for your girlfriend, who had recently had surgery. And instead, you bought pottery on Facebook Marketplace. Did you eventually buy flowers for her?

• 54:47Speaker 06

  I did buy flowers for her. And her first question was, did Muse buy these for me?

• 54:56Speaker 01

  She knows you too well, man.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  That's a whole nother wrinkle. Yeah, like, doesn't even mean something if somebody just had their AI assistant do it. Wow.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't hand that over. Okay, guys, this has been so much fun. This has been an incredible discussion. I feel 10 times smarter. I'm going to go get Muse to write you all thank you letters for coming on. It has been a great chat, and we will be back next week to talk more about technology, AI, the weird new future, anything else that comes up. This has been Hard Fork. I'm Max Reed, and I've been joined by Aaron Griffith, Eli Tan, and Mike Isaac.

• 55:56Speaker 10

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoai. That's dell.com/yourwaytoai.

• 56:30Speaker 10

  Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all. Legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only. Availability of products can vary. May be provided by different Ripple entities.

• 57:03Speaker 11

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Irene is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. Irene's AI cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Irene, AI cloud for the next big thing.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  This episode of Hard Fork was produced by Whitney Jones and edited by Viran Povich. With additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin, and Brooke Minter. We were fact-checked by Will Peichel and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemezto, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Jessica Testa, Hui Wangtang, Matty Masiello, and Dahlia Hadad. Over the next few months, we're going to be exploring all aspects of tech, culture, AI, and the weird new future. We're really interested in what you're interested in. If you have questions you'd like us to answer or things you'd like us to look into,

• 58:23Speaker 01

  you can email us at [email protected].