Senators Say "Shut AI Down", Mistral Forage, Pentagon AI, Google AI

0:28Welcome to the podcast. intelligence feature that is expanding to all US users and opening eyes expanding their government footprint and seed dance the you know the AI video generated company coming out of ByteDance they actually are getting some serious heat from Congress which is calling on them to shut down over basically a lack of guardrails so we're getting into all of this on the podcast today we're going to do a deep dive on the seed dance story in particular before we get into all of that, I wanted to mention some huge news for my startup, which is AIbox.ai. We have just launched video on our platform.

1:03So in the past, you know that you got access to over 40 of the top AI models all in one place, you could kind of chat with them in a playground. We had image, text and audio and we have officially now added video. So we have two models from ByteDance, they're SeedDance. We have the three different models from Google, VO2, 3Fast and 3. We have two different models from OpenAI, including Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro. And we have Pixiverse V5 from Pixiverse. So there's a ton of amazing video models that are now on open or now on AIbox.ai. If you don't have a subscription already, you can get it for$8.99 a month.

1:37Super cheap, way cheaper than any of the other platforms. You get access to 78 different AI models. Guys, in the past, you've heard me say 40 models a million times. I'm actually kind of stuck in that. But we keep adding new models. And I just counted right now we're at 78 new models on AI box everything from text image audio video more announcements coming tons of new features subscriptions are going crazy and we actually doubled revenue last month which is amazing but if you want to check it out it's linked in the description AI box.ai check out all of the latest new video models it's only$8.99 a month and we have 20 % off if you get an annual plan so I'll leave a link let's get into everything happening in the news today so the first story I want to cover is that Google is expanding their personal intelligence feature.

2:18They're doing this to all of their US users. So basically, they're pushing Gemini a lot deeper into the Google ecosystem. And I mean, I thought it was it was pretty embedded in there. I've actually been impressed because I've been calling on them to do this for like over a year now. But basically, they're going to let it personalize responses using connected data from your Gmail from your Google photos. I think what's interesting here is it's not just kind of this premium user experience. Google is going to widen distribution, they're going to put this capability inside of AI mode in search and on the Gemini app and Gemini in Chrome.

2:48So it's off by default, but the product direction is very clear if you want to get that enabled. I actually appreciate this is off by default because I do think while it's great and cool and personal intelligence is awesome, I don't think everyone's going to appreciate having, you know, their Gmail and their Google Photos automatically opted into AI personalization, let's just say. I think the next phase of consumer AI is not just about better models, but it's about better context. We know, right, if you give ChatGPT better context on what you're asking it to do, aka like if you're trying to get it to write you an article, copy and paste an example of that article or a specific type of document or file, copy and paste an example, that context makes the output way better.

3:28I think Google understands this and the company right now that plugs into your email, your files, your browsing, your history, your photos, they are going to have a massive advantage. This is something that, you You know, ChatGPT had a big advantage because people kind of used them at the beginning. So it had all of that history and it could personalize answers based off of their past ChatGPT history. Google has way more history and data on all of us, for better or for worse. And I think this is going to give Google a really big competitive advantage. And they have, you know, so much distribution.

3:57Now they have this, you know, basically they have a huge AI moat on just data that they have. So this is going to be interesting. The next story I want to cover is that the Pentagon is reportedly building alternatives to Anthropic. This should come as no surprise as the big spat between Anthropic and the Pentagon rolled out earlier in the last couple weeks. There was a obviously very public breakdown in the relationship and the Defense Department is now developing replacements rather than assuming Anthropic is going to remain part of its stack. I think that is following the broader clash over military use, surveillance, and autonomous weapons.

4:31And at the same time, I did see that Congress is pushing to create red lines on what AI could and couldn't be used for. I, for one, think that if we're going to have this stuff regulated, Congress is the place for it to happen. If we're going to make rules about what AI should or shouldn't, you know, be used for, Congress is the place for that to happen. I don't love the feeling that let's say we're, you know, we're going to go and use a model that is perhaps Anthropic, right? Totally cool American model. They make rules that the military doesn't like about what they can and can't do according to the terms of service.

5:00What happens if Anthropic gets as a private company gets purchased by, let's say, a Chinese investor or a Russian investor? And all of a sudden, they can kind of manipulate the terms of service of the company, which is being directly used by the military. So I mean, I'm sure the government would block any sort of acquisition by that. But it just really, I just don't like the companies themselves creating the terms that the government has to follow through. So I appreciate that Congress is looking into this. And I hope that Anthropic doesn't, you know, doesn't get wrecked too hard financially from that decision.

5:32It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future. I know a lot of consumers are kind of supporting the company because they agreed with some of the reasons why Anthropic had a follow up with the Pentagon. So we'll see. I do like Anthropic. I do like Claude. One of my preferred models for really high quality outputs. but I just don't think it's a good precedent for American tech companies to basically make the rules that I think Congress should on military use or what the government should be doing. All right, the next thing I want to cover is that Mistral has just launched what they're calling Mistral Forage.

6:03This is an NVIDIA GTC. It's one of the most important enterprise AI product moves I think that I've seen today. Forge is basically designed to let enterprises and governments build custom models. So it's going to be trained on their own data, not just kind of like lightly fine tuned. I think with all of this, Mistral really is betting that companies want a lot more control, they want a lot more customization, they want a lot less dependencies on someone else's kind of black box roadmap. And so I think right now Mistral is trying not just to win the consumer chatbot race head on, they're going after a part of the market where control governance, kind of like multilingual performance, long term ownership, a lot of that matters more than just raw consumer mindshare.

6:44And I think that's important because if Mistral is really on track to surpass a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue this year, then it's definitely going to be a serious enterprise challenge to kind of having the open AI or anthropic kind of duopoly narrative that we see right now. And of course, I think we just like Mistral isn't going to win, especially not in the United States. This is a French company. So perhaps in France, it's the most popular, but in the United States, this is not the most popular chatbot for consumers. so they really got to focus on going the enterprise route. We've seen this from other players like Kohir.

7:18All right, the next bit of tech drama I have for you is a culture battle for Gary Tan's Claude Code setup. It went viral. It had almost 20 ,000 GitHub stars, had 2 ,200 forks after he basically open-sourced his workflow. A lot of supporters say that like, hey, this is super legit. Haters were saying it's basically just an overhyped prompt package. Something I thought else was interesting, BuzzFeed is launching a wave of AI-powered content apps. They're trying to basically unlock new revenue streams. So they're doing things like quizzes, content generation, a lot of personalized media experiences driven by AI.

7:52This is kind of interesting for me right now because media companies are not debating right now whether to use AI. They're basically just experimenting really aggressively with it in order to survive. So many of these media companies are launching lawsuits against OpenAI and Anthropix saying, look, you guys scraped us. Now people don't need to read our content anymore. And I mean, there's all sorts of arguments that they're trying to make. But at the end of the day, they know that AI and the age of AI is shifting how people read the news, how they get information, how they see ads. I think the problem is that most of the content right now and a lot of the content risks become what the Internet is already complaining about, right?

8:27There's this kind of low quality AI slop. So the business model from BuzzFeed right now and this kind of wave of AI powered content apps isn't very clear, but they're obviously experimenting. It'll be interesting to see if they're able to actually make money off of this. So the biggest story that I've seen today is it's in politics and it's basically a preview of I think what AI regulation is about to look like. There are US senators that are now calling on ByteDance to quote unquote immediately shut down their AI video app SeedDance 2.0. SeedDance basically lets users generate AI video and you can make these videos of real people or you can do things of you know videos of something that is like a licensed character and you know not inspired them by them not kind of loosely based on them.

9:10but you can directly use their likeness. So basically we're talking about, you know, content featuring people like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt. You could do, you know, someone from like Stranger Things, right? And you can basically generate all of that with SeedDance. Now, SeedDance is a big app as it's incorporated straight into CapCut, which is one of the biggest video editors in the world. And by the way, I also have SeedDance. We just launched a video on AIbox.ai. So we have it over there if you want to try it out. But right now they're getting a lot of heat because two senators, one Republican, one Democrat, they both sent a letter to ByteDance saying that this is one of the clearest cases of copyright infringement they've seen from an AI product.

9:47And then basically they're just saying, shut it down and put real safeguards in place. I don't think it's just politicians. I think Hollywood is probably lobbying this pretty hard. The Motion Picture Association apparently sent a cease and desist. There's lawsuits that I think are probably coming from this. And ByteDance right now has already paused the global rollout where they're trying to deal with kind of some of the legal fallout of this. And I'll be honest, I've actually tested Seed Dance 2.0 and I was really impressed with it. I was a little bit shocked that you could, yeah, generate a video of Tom Cruise and like there was, I don't know, no sort of guardrails.

10:20Personally, as a user, I was like, wow, this is super cool. This is the first video model that feels like it should do anything I tell it. But yeah, we're about to get that nerfed a little bit and maybe it's for good and I don't know. For me as a user, it's kind of disappointing, but whatever, maybe that's all good, right? right? AI models are obviously trained on huge amounts of data, and that includes copyrighted materials, right? So when you're sucking in all the video on the planet, you're inevitably going to get tons of clips of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and all these other actors. Up until now, I think most of the debate has been pretty theoretical, because OpenAI doing something like Sora or Google VO3 has been, these are very responsible companies, or at least they're trying to be, in how they do that with, you know, Sora, all of the kind of quote-unquote deepfake videos that you'll see coming out of those are people that are giving their permission generally so you can you know kind of clone yourself and allow yourself to be remixed on Sora 2 if you want to do that but it's not something that I think by default you can do super easily so there's kind of these guardrails that other people have put into place and ZDance evidently did not do it so I think right now on the one side governments do not want to slow down AI innovation especially when you know they're competing with countries we're competing right now with countries like China.

11:33So I think like we are being pretty aggressive on building with AI in the United States right now a lot more than a lot of other countries like Europe that have already put a lot of heavy regulation in there. But on the other side, if we ignore, I think all of the intellectual property and personal rights, I know I kind of complain about it. And I'm like, Oh, man, as a user, it was super fun. But yes, I get it, right? Like we can't have all the intellectual property completely ripped off. That being said, like these Chinese models like C dance, I'd be curious if They put guardrails on just the American models and the Chinese models they just let anyone do anything with.

12:05And it's honestly a very realistic possibility and world that we live in. So I think what we're moving towards is not really this kind of targeted or just kind of like a sweeping AI regulation all at once. We really have this kind of targeted enforcement. If you build a tool and people don't like it, all of the lobbyists yell at the senators and all the senators write letters. And then you like kind of got to shut it down pretty quick. and you have like these pressure campaigns. And anyways, the regulation is really kind of crazy right now and they're trying to move at a breakneck speed. I think right now, ByteDance is going to lose in the short term because their product is now under a lot of scrutiny.

12:41Now they're going to have to delay it. I don't think this is the last time we're going to be hearing about this. I think this is kind of a problem that will be going on for a long time into the future. And also, like, let's just be honest here, whether you agree with not having these copyrights, intellectual property and personal rights inside of the videos. There's going to be a lot of these open source models that will allow you to do this regardless. And there's basically nothing we can stop. They'll come out of China. They'll come out of a lot of, I mean, basically they'll come out of China and you'll be able to make clones of people.

13:12And I think there's all sorts of terrible sides of that. So I'm not really trying to be a doomer, but I mean, I'm trying to be realistic. That's what's going to happen. So I'm curious to see how it plays out. We'll obviously regulate a lot of the major hyperscalers. But beyond that, it's not like the technology is getting bottled up or the regulation is going to, I mean, basically do anything. Even when it comes to like voice cloning, there's the Quen 3 TTS model, which came out of Alibaba. It's an open source model. You throw it on your computer. There's no verification. You upload three seconds of anybody talking and you can clone their voice.

13:41Now, for me personally, I've actually used that model because I'm like, oh, sweet. I can run a voice clone on my laptop. I don't have to pay thousands of dollars to 11 labs. It's like, so as a user, like it's useful, like at what cost, but I mean, it's out there anyways. So I'm just going to use it. But yeah, I mean, I just think it's an important thing. I'm not saying whether that's good or bad. I mean, probably it's bad, but there's nothing we can do about it. So be prepared for a world where the intellectual property rights can get regulated for these big players, but there's going to be the open source models out there for everything.

14:08And there's a lot of implications for that. Thanks for tuning into the podcast, guys. If you want to try out all of the latest models, including all of the new video models that we've added to AI box.ai. Go check it out. There's a link in the description. You can get started for only$8.99 a month, guys. It's cheaper than basically any single AI platform out there. And you get access to 78 different AI models. Now we're going to keep adding more. We're super excited. The platform's growing like crazy. Let us know if you have any feature requests. We're trying to add them like mad men. But yeah, new, we just added music last week.

14:40We added video this week. And we have more exciting stuff coming next week. So stay tuned. Thanks so much for tuning in. and I'll catch you in the next episode.