METR and AI Regulation, Zuck Pushes Back on AI Slowdown, Fed Hikes Rates | Diet TBPN

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

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Well, we have a fantastic show for you today, folks. I made it to San Francisco and back since the last show. This is a new thing. I like this. Being able to get out from the show, go do something in San Francisco, get back. Very excited for it.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Why didn't you want to stay?

• 0:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. I like doing the show. It's pretty simple. Good to be here in the TVP in El Tridom. We have a great show. We have a bunch of great folks coming on the show. What was on my mind last night? I was listening to China Talk. Jordan Schneider was talking about evaluators, third-party evaluators, and I was noticing this discourse around, it feels like we funneled into like very clear camps, super, super quickly, and it feels like, I don't know, too calcified for how fast it happened. Like, the Dario essay comes out, and, you know, he throws out Meter, says he's bringing in Meter, and the backlash is like immediate. The New York Post is crashing out, saying like, these are handpicked AI watchdogs.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Martin Casado, Martine Casado over at A16Z, he's pushing for the Department of Energy. He's like full nationalization now. And, you know, both of those have their advantages, disadvantages. They both do good work. They are the extremes. And so I was just, I was just sort of wondering a few things, like first, what other regulatory bodies can actually work? How do they work in other industries? It's very interesting because like the revolving door is something that's common. Like, in financial regulation, you get people that work at banks, and then they go and work at the regulator, and then they go back and forth. I mean, this is the, this is the story of many people in the crypto industry, where the regulators who are regulating it, they go back and forth. Like revolving doors exist,

• 1:38John Coogan?

  but I think the pushback to Meter is very much like, the door is like too revolving, or it's too, it's too close, I guess. But the, but the more interesting question to me is, is...

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the defensive meter is that I don't know many groups that are qualified at all to even, to even understand what's going on at the frontier, right? And so...

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Is that true, though? I see, that's the thing I disagree with.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  I would say that there's, there are not that many groups that have been this invested in, in understanding frontier model behavior for this long, right? It's just a small group right now.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  That's a separate thing. So I think there's two separate things. There's one, which is like super forecasting, seeing the future, predicting what's going to happen. I think that's important. I think taking that seriously is important. But then there's the other side, which is like doing the work, reading the logs and being like, this violated this rule, this hack happened, here's how it happened. And I think that those are actually two separate disciplines, two separate jobs. And you can just tell the regulator, if it's someone, you don't need to tell, like, if you hire someone, and they are able to get up to speed on how these systems work and, and evaluate them, and look at logs of different incidents, see what's happening, assess the risk level, assess the liabilities. If you can get those people up to speed, and you can just be like, it is your mandate to take this seriously.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  And the example that I'm pulling from is like, you can be 22 years old, not graduate from college, go into the Navy, enlist in the Navy, not even in the officer's training program, and in 18 months, you can be responsible for the security of a nuclear power plant on a summer. You do six months in Nuclear Field A school, about six months of nuclear power school, and then six months of hand-on, hands-on prototype training before arriving in the fleet. Nuclear power school covers math, nuclear physics, reactor principles, health physics, materials, thermodynamics, electrical systems, and reactor technology. There's no part of that that's like, you need to really, at a deep level, understand that like nuclear annihilation is bad and could happen. You don't need to be able to forecast out like,

• 3:37John Coogan?

  well, what happens if China and geopolitics and Iran gets the bomb, and then these people, and then Pakistan? Like, you don't have to understand that to just know, like, don't let it blow up. That's your job. Here's how you don't let that happen. We've created a plan for you. You're 22 years old, but we know that you can do this job, and you are enlisted to do this job. And it doesn't matter if you think nuclear war is impossible, or doesn't matter if you think it's going to happen tomorrow. Your P doom on nuclear is completely irrelevant to you doing this job, right?

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  And I think that that's something that is maybe being missed here a little bit. There's like, there's like, well, you have to take it seriously. You have to have seen it coming. And I actually think that like, super forecasting, super important, awesome, also just like fun read, really cool. And if you take it seriously, you make a lot of money, you work on interesting stuff, you get amazing technology. There's so many things that come downstream of that that are really, really positive, really important, but I don't necessarily know that it's actually a prerequisite. And then the other thing is, yeah, Tyler.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  I mean, like, Meter, they're not the ones putting out those forecasts, though. Those are other groups. If you look at like Meter research, it's like, you know, very complicated benchmarks and like these kinds of things.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, I'm, I'm sort of collapsing the Meter criticism from like the New York Post perspective. And, and I think that is...

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Overall, I think generally, if people are going to, like, if, if, if there's a third-party regulator, it seems like it has to be an entirely net new group, because I don't think anyone has, like, whether or not Meter, Meter could be operating, and their actions could reflect that of a fully independent group, but the financing structure, the history of the, of the various parties there just makes it so that people don't have any trust that they would act like that.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  Sure. The interesting thing is that there is actually a distinction in the history of nuclear regulation, which is a, there's a difference between advisors in the, before the NRC, it was the Atomic Energy Commission, and the AEC was created to oversee nuclear development. And many of the scientists who did forecast the importance of riskiness of the technology were involved. Interestingly, like Einstein writes this letter and says like nuclear war, he basically describes like what nuclear annihilation could look like. There's a whole bunch of other scientists that actually run the numbers, and they're like, this is what could happen if all the nuclear bombs go off. They do all the calculations. There's some that go a little bit too far, but in general, like, the scientists were the ones who got to it earlier.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  But the scientists didn't actually wind up being the regulators. They wound up being the advisors. So Oppenheimer became the chair of the AEC's General Advisory Committee, which had enormous, enormous influence, but didn't actually issue licenses. So the actual work that was being done, it was like, okay, Oppenheimer, in this advisory role, says like, well, we need to have a security guard here with a gun that makes sure that no one can steal the nuclear material, right? But he's not the one doing it. He's not the one actually hiring that person. That's just like an engineer who's qualified for that job. And I think that actually takes a lot off of it, because you could say, oh, there's all these like conflicts of interest here or there, or there, whatever.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  But if you just say, well, they're just putting, putting out a proposal, that then people are going to go and implement. But then the actual people that are doing the implementation are, are much less conflicted, because they're just drawn from the broad pool of engineers and scientists and mathematicians and physicists and whoever else we have in, on, in, in America who can do this type of work. It gets a lot less complicated, in, in my mind. There, there's a whole bunch of other interesting details from the AEC history. And so today, the regulators, like nuclear regulators are talented and hardworking, but these are not like the most elite jobs. Like, you can, you can just be a nuclear engineer, mechanical engineer, material scientist, physicist, health physicist, geologists,

• 7:27John Coogan?

  probabilistic risk analyst, cybersecurity professionals they hire for this, emergency preparedness. They hire lawyers. They hire inspectors. Pay for some of these jobs ranges between 125,000 and 187,000 for many NRC technical staff roles. The machinery did have to get sort of described by the scientists, but then the implementation of that machine, of that regulatory structure, is actually done by really hardworking, really talented Americans, but not head in the clouds, not thinking about the future in some, you know, bizarre way. That's enough to happen at the democratic level, and then it gets implemented. And I think that that might, might eliminate a little bit of this like, okay, well, this person who's really tied to you is now like inside actually the one with the keys,

• 8:10John Coogan?

  the one with the, with, with the role overseeing you. I don't know. What do you think about this, Tyler? You have some pushback?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, I know that Casey, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, like, I think that they've had a hard time like staffing.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Getting funded, yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's like, like, they're having a hard time like finding people who, who will come from the labs. Like, maybe they should just broaden who they're looking for, but it seems like it's still, the ways that we detect if a model is safe or not are not like set in stone yet. Like, it's still like, that's what the role of Meter, that's kind of what they're doing right now. So I think it is still different than like, you know, there are predetermined accounting practices, and you can just kind of check the box and like follow the rules.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Like, they're still like, yeah, it's like a moving field, you know?

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there is, there is the question of like, with, particularly with like agent swarms perpetrating cybersecurity violations that don't directly cause economic harm. I didn't tell it to hack you. It hacked you, but it didn't knock your payment system offline. So you didn't lose a dollar of revenue. It's like very hard for you to prove that I acted wrong, and then also economic damages. So there's a whole new level of like tort battles that need to be battled out in the court of law to see like, what exactly do I owe you? Because I shouldn't have done that, but what do I owe you? What's the damage? What's the, what's the problem there? And then, and then you can go and say, okay, well, you know, how, how do we measure that? How do we prevent that? And how do we work through that?

• 9:34John Coogan?

  But the discourse is getting like more and more, more and more polarizing by the day. We'll see. I think there will, I think there will be the, the, the big sit-down between the lab leaders. I wonder how important it will be to have Jensen with a beer alongside Sam, Dario, Elon with beers. Because the clear proposal, there's going to be beers involved. That's what we know from the interviews. Everyone's asking, why can't they just sit down and get beers?

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Six months of this could have been on the Cheeky Pine Podcast.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  It really should. That, that, that is sort of neutral ground, too, because Elon's an investor in Stripe. What happened there? Elon's an investor in Stripe. He's a co-founder of OpenAI. And Sam's, I think, an investor in Stripe. And then Elon's working with Dario on compute stuff. So maybe Cheeky Pine is like the perfect neutral ground. I think it'll probably be on national TV, actually, but we shall see. We'll, we'll follow it here.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Quickly jumping in, we have a rate hike.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yes, tell me about that.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Worscht hiked 25 bips.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was...

• 10:39John Coogan?

  First time in three years.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Priced in. Calc, she had it, I think, at like 89% this morning, so not a huge surprise. I wanted to head over to Joe Weisenthal's feed and just kind of read his reaction if he has one.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Well, you pull that up. I'll give you the highlights from the Wall Street Journal. The NASDAQ react positively, up 6 point, 0.67%. This is the Wall Street Journal. They need a JavaScript plugin that changes it to 0.669 or something.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Most officials penciled in one more increase this year and energy shock and a surge of AI investment have reshaped the inflation outlook. We talked about the Fed interest rates yesterday a lot, but the Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday for the first time in three years, a sharp reversal that began taking back cuts as it made last year implicit and implicitly undercut the White House's insistence that inflation is not a concern. The Fed is saying, eh, it kinda isn't a concern. The increase approved unanimously will raise the benchmark Fed funds rate by a quarter point to between three and three quarters point and 4%. The vast majority of officials penciled in one more hike this year in interest rate projections released after their meeting. So they think there's going to be more rate hikes. Chairman

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Kevin Warsh vowed shortly after taking office in May to end an overshoot of the Fed's 2% target now in its sixth year and followed through with an increase that had been widely anticipated in recent days. The rate hikes scrambled an account of the White House had offered of the man tapped by the president for the for the job in January. Trump and his allies had cast pressure to raise rates as coming from a committee hostile to Warsh, who last year said he would have cut rates sooner than the Fed ultimately did. It also followed a lost year in the Fed's inflation fight. The central bank has made no progress towards this 2% goal since mid 2025, including after cutting rates three times last year

• 12:40John Coogan?

  to guard against labor market slowdown. Instead, the Iran war has lifted energy prices and the AI boom has driven an investment surge that has buoyed the economy and markets today. Policy action will support a timelier return to the committee's 2% goal, the rates that the committee said in a policy statement. Analysts said that despite intense focus of late on monthly inflation data, the biggest change to the outlook has come from a run-up in energy and commodity prices. It's the fact that the war in Iran has re-intensified and the energy price shock is getting bigger again, said William Dudley, the former New York Fed president. What you got for me, Jordy?

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  I was just reading through a bunch of different reactions on Bloomberg itself. Let me pull them back up, but they have a live blog. Some people are saying this is more hawkish than expected, given that the Fed took away next year's cut. Big changes in the dot plot line, the Fed's September dot plot. We now have four officials expecting to raise rates two more times.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Two more times?

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  It had previously just been one at that level, a whopping 12. Policymakers see rates going up once more before the end of the year and the remaining two see holding rates at their new 3.75 to 4% level. Reminder that in June, the last time we got these forecasts, half of the committee expected the Fed to hold or cut rates. And again, it looks like Warsh did not submit a dot, so he's going dotless here. Kind of a statement in itself. Yeah, it's so, so far, the AI trade, the build out, everything has been overwhelming, even in the face of headwinds like rising rates and...

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the mood from Silicon Valley was like, ah, we're definitely not booming until we go back to zero interest rates. Like, this whole tech thing, it only works when the interest rates are zero. So like, we'll just wait it out and...

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the reality is there was a bunch of ideas and investing styles that only worked when rates were near zero. But yeah, it was specifically when you look at the companies that that really boomed in that era, there wasn't a lot of net new, like really truly innovative stuff outside of financial products, which benefited from from low rates.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Some of them benefit from high rates, though, right? If it's like a savings product, the spread's higher. But if they have to borrow a lot of debt...

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, but again, I'm thinking of like lending companies like Pipe, right? Pipe was a company that at the time went from incorporation to billion. I forget what their peak valuation was, but...

• 15:11John Coogan?

  And it makes a lot of sense because they're basically borrowing at 0%, then they're lending to a company at 5% or something. You know, whatever their spread is, like, is actually justifiable to a to an earlier piece of the market. But that's what it breaks down when you have to go to a company and say, hey, you want you want money at 12% or something like that for an early-stage company?

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's head over to Who Man. Daria, we should pump the brakes on the frontier. Sam, yeah, let's all slow down together. Meanwhile, Zuck.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  The funny thing is, yeah, I mean...

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's let's talk about what Zuck wrote. He said, "Last month, I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone." This is when Zuck said, "I really want people to understand my values before we come out with our most powerful AI ever." And I at least felt like we already had a good understanding of Zuck's values. But he wrote yesterday, "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its model safely and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens." The reality is, people don't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and don't do what they ask. So labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned. Right away, you know, starting out with this point, it's like the safety debate

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  has not been like around the idea of, oh, they're going to create personal agents that are going to be misaligned to the users. Like, this is not at all, this is just a point that doesn't matter.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  No, no. I mean, there is, there is a, like, it's not the safety crowd, but the whole like social media is brain rot addiction. Like, that is something that, there is a separate crowd that does critique that and says, like, I don't want the addictive flywheel of maximizing screen time to be brought to AI.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  Totally separate debate.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. It's not, it's not the true AI safety debate.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  But it is a debate.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate. Again, like, this is not relevant to the current safety debate. Obviously, people want to make products that do what their customers want them to do. No one has been worried that you can't make a model that in the near term or in the medium term or even over long-running tasks can generally do what the user wants. The concern is that if you leave models and and give them a task that that is more expansive, that they can start to do things like hacking hugging face, right? So again, nobody is sitting here saying...

• 17:49John Coogan?

  The main thing is that this this is talking past the X-risk question. It is completely dismissing this discussion, which Daria is like laser-focused on. And so this feels like it's a rebuttal, but it's actually like talking past it in the sense that he's like, labs face significant liability. And it's like, well, in the X-risk scenario, the liability doesn't matter. That's the whole point, is that like, no one's going to come and...

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  And here's the best, here's the best line. "Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security."

• 18:18John Coogan?

  That's actually very rational and important because...

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  Every company delays their products for months. That's just called building a good product to make it safe and secure, like, period. This is what Meta's been doing forever. You have to do it. You have billions of users. You got to make sure they're safe and secure, every single product. Again, I felt like he was...

• 18:40John Coogan?

  But you, so...

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of things in here that are rational.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  He's taking a victory lap on not taking a victory lap. Don't you realize that? He says, "We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing to do."

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  And again, every single company already does all of these things. Every single company that makes AI products already does.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  But all the other companies take victory laps while they're doing it. He's taking a victory lap for not taking a victory lap. It's not that complicated. Says, everyone else says, like, we're taking safety seriously. We want to pat on the back before we delay the product. And he's saying, I want the pat on the back after I delay the product.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I just think it's, I just think it's very...

• 19:20John Coogan?

  No matter what, there's a lot of back patting going on.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's, I think it's, I just think it's very funny to, I think it's funny how much, all these points are fine. They generally are rational and they make sense. But I think it's funny that people are giving him so much credit for this note, given that he's totally missing the main point that everyone else is focused on.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  X-risk?

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Like, intentionally missing the point. In order to get brownie points from people that don't even understand the current debate.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  No, to get brownie points from other people that have a P doom of zero. Who are like, yeah, and, and you can see who's, who's supporting this. They're like, yeah, thank you. Like just do put, put the, put the agents in the bag, you know, make the tokens free and, and just make the products. Like, I'm not worried about that at all. And for that crowd, they're like, thank goodness you didn't like fall in the hole of like stooping to this P doom debate that I don't take seriously. That's the side.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  I just wish that he would come out and say, I have a P doom of zero.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  That's what he's saying.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  No, he's not. He's not. He's trying to position, he's saying he's not being explicit about that. He's trying to let people say, we care a lot about safety. We slowed down our development because we care about safety. Trust and alignment are important, right?

• 20:34John Coogan?

  He should definitely come out and say P doom zero, because if it's not zero and it happens and we all go extinct, no one's going to be able to dunk on him, right? So it's pure upside. Pure upside to be P doom zero guy. Why has no one considered this? The Oregon is so high.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would respect it a lot if he just came out and said what he actually thinks, which I, I do believe you're right.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  P doom zero.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Which I, he has a P doom of zero and, and his P abundance is.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  High. I mean, that's what he said in the, in the, in the previous essay. He was, he was basically like, I don't think the, he, he, he even, he even was gesturing towards like the, the fear-based marketing, the doom-based marketing is just a marketing tactic. I don't think it's rational. And also I don't think it's good for people to be in that headspace.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  And it's like, info.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing. One of, one of the last lines, committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. Look, like there's absolutely zero shot that Zuck walks into MSL and like gathers the researchers and says, look, I don't want to make models that make our models better. I don't want to do it. I want you guys just focus. There's zero, zero chance. So again, like this to me is just like, he is being disingenuous with his positioning of almost every single point here.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Ah, I don't know. I do think that there is a trade-off right now between uh, making models good at things that are not on the RSI path and those that are. And so like the, the race to become really, really good at coding is super aligned with uh, RSI. The race to do image generation is not, and image generation does not seem to be on the RSI critical path. Although I, I think DeepMind put out something where they're using world models and they think they have a breakthrough there. I don't know if I, if I saw that accurately, but um, but maybe they're wrong, but at least like the bet at, at least Anthropic has been like, we don't need to be world-class at image generation to get where we want to go.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Because we just need to be really good at coding. Coding teaches us, teaches the model how to train new models. And then we get, you know, and then, and then, and then that, that final model, we can ask it to spin up an image generator if we want. Zuck is saying the opposite. He's saying like, yeah, we will actually go and try and build a tool just to help you book a dinner reservation. Uh, and that's a good use of compute, probably not on the RSI path. And, and that's like a reasonable trade-off. That feels, that feels real to me. I don't know. Uh, what, what do you think about engaging independent evaluators? Is this like?

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and again.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  He says it's already industry best practice. Is he talking about benchmark stuff? Or is he talking about like actually like the, you have Slack access, you have a desk, you have a badge, like you don't work here, but you're allowed to just go wherever you want. Um, I think that that's the next step. And I think he's maybe talking past that a little bit.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And he's talking past this again, engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. It's like, other labs also do that too, also do that already.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Well, as of last week, Anthropic does this with meter. Like they said that they were going to do that immediately. So they were doing badge and Slack access.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  He's not saying that he's doing that. He's saying, he's saying that he's doing the thing that every group that's making model has, has been doing for the most part.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Prior era.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  For a long time.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  The new thing is badge and Slack access and desk, even though you don't work at the company. And that's what everyone's like, whoa, that's crazy because these organizations are very, very secretive. And you're really going to let this nonprofit come in? It's like sort of a wild move. And that's why people are like, oh wait, like how aligned are they? And like, what is the, what's the knock-on implication? Like, can these people not leak? Can they not, can they be trusted? Are they going to go to a cocktail party and be like, oh yeah, the new model is actually really bad or whatever. Like, there's so many things that are like, like Meta deals with leaks all the time. And so the prospect of bringing in a non-employee who is there explicitly to whistleblow effectively

• 24:48John Coogan?

  and like is allowed to talk about anything and like is, is, you know, third-party evaluator, like that is a huge step. And I think that's why people are like, whoa, this is a big deal. This is a big proposal. Like if this was not a big thing, i- i- if Anthropic was just like, oh yeah, we're going to do a benchmark with meter. Everyone would be like, yeah, that's fine. Cool. Do that for sure. Awesome. But like, people are like, wow, okay, like meter's going to have a, have Slack access at Anthropic? And you're asking other people to do that? Like that's, we gotta know who these people are. We gotta make sure that this is like the right team for this. This is sort of a crazy thing. This is sort of unprecedented. This doesn't happen a lot. Like this is new. And, and so, yeah, the newness is not fully embraced here. Um, and I think, I, I think that's a little bit of like, okay,

• 25:30John Coogan?

  you're not really engaging with like what's coming down the pipe, which is like maybe a government employee in your building. That's not happening right now. Maybe, maybe a nonprofit from Berkeley. Do you like that, Mark? How do you feel about that? Are you cool? It seems like you're cool with it, but I don't know if you're actually going to be cool with it. Uh, cause it is a little, it is a little wild, right? It's a different thing. It's a new thing, but uh, it's a, it's a modern, it's a modern.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this image.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  What image are we pulling up?

• 25:57John Coogan?

  This, this meme's been applied to like seven different people this week.

• 26:01Jordi Hays?

  I know, but I think it's, I think it's particularly relevant because you have, you have Elon, Demis, Dario, Sam. All these people from different factions that are at.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  I've seen this applied to Theo. I've seen this applied to Co here. I've seen this applied to DeepMind, Gemini. I've seen this applied to MSL. People are just, whatever shot they want to take, they're applying this. It's not, it's a, it's too broad at this point.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  There's people.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  I think it's the inverse. It's all clowns and there's one tactical soldier.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  There's groups that are at the frontier. They're on the battlefield and they're deeply concerned.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  And you have Zuck coming in here saying, yeah, like I built a cool personal agent. It's, it's aligned. What's there to worry about? Nothing to worry about. You're not really in, you're not really on the battlefield yet. And I'm not saying with Watermelon, they can't get there and Muse seems like it's, and Muse is getting amazing reviews. It's, it seems like an amazing product. Again, I, I thought the whole post was silly, just like I thought the last post was silly.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  What happened to the, to the uh, Callshi uh, AI price tracker? Did you see this? We, we talked to Tarek when this launched and I was like, oh, this is cool. This will allow you to understand like basically a proxy for the AI build-out. Like how are, how are GPUs trading?

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Banned.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Banned apparently. US Commerce Department last month ordered Callshi to take down one of its products, tracking the price of AI compute, the crucial power from data centers that's driving the artificial intelligence boom. If you didn't know what AI compute was. Commerce officials cited national security concerns. And that's what stuck out to me. I was like, there's so many different uh, prediction markets that I can easily trace through. Like, oh, you have a flight delay one and you could have somebody that calls in and, and tries to get the flight delayed. That could be very disruptive. FAA could have a problem with that. But this one, I wasn't, I wasn't worried about it all. We talked, we talked to Tarek about it and we were like, yeah, this one seems sort of informative and interesting.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  So the product pulls together data from several markets that allow users to bet on the cost to rent Nvidia chips to create an overall picture of where AI compute costs are heading. Quiet, uh, Callshi quietly complied, though many of the underlying markets remain open for trading. Separately, Commerce has pushed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction and future markets to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for 60 days. And so even though some of the contracts are still open and will close, maybe in 60 days, there won't be any compute prediction market futures, which is very interesting. Callshi declined to comment while a Commerce spokesperson said the department, quote, "has never once asked Callshi to take down this market or any other markets." Interesting. So uh, the Commerce spokesperson said,

• 28:44John Coogan?

  "This story is false to Semaphore." So lots of people going back and forth. Uh, it's unclear why the Commerce, why Commerce is worried about the nascent market, which aims to do for AI computing what oil futures do for crude, let buyers and sellers of compute lock in prices and give traders a way to bet on where those prices go. One potential reason floated to Semaphore by market participants is that compute futures could be manipulated to show a sharp drop in the cost of older chips, which might destabilize AI stocks and debt markets. Some of these markets are thinly traded, which could lead to volatility even without bad actors. So you're trying to wipe out situational awareness. You're short the Callshi prediction markets on AI compute futures.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Everyone thinks, oh, AI is bust. The market trades down for a couple of days. You clean up and then you buy back in or something like that. I guess that's what the, the rumor is here that Semaphore is reporting on. Uh, the cost of compute has become one of the most important numbers in the US economy. One side of the debate fears that older chips, which serve as collateral for billions of dollars of borrowing by Neo clouds. On the other, on the other are concerns from big companies adopting AI that shortages of power and infrastructure will send prices of tokens soaring. Uh, that uncertainty has given rise to futures market that was starting to take off this summer. The CFTC's 60-day pause could delay plans by exchange operators like CME and NYSE uh, in parent Intercontinental Exchange, along with upstarts like Architectural Financial Technologies

• 30:11John Coogan?

  to list two-sided, two-sided betting parlors. Interesting. Get that flashbang ready. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow. Throwing flashbang. Boom.