Meta's Decision to Unwind Manus Acquisition

0:00Welcome to the podcast today. I have some exciting news and aside from the fact that Meta is unwinding their$2billion dollar manus acquisition. I have some even more exciting personal news and that is that last week my wife and I welcomed our newest member of the family. We had a healthy baby boy. His name is Clay and it is absolutely exciting in our household. So if you're wondering why my podcast posting hasn't been super consistent over the last week and maybe for the next week or two, it might be a little spotty. I'll do my best, but I'm spending a lot of time snuggling that little guy. Currently him and mom are sleeping, so I figured this would be a good time to get a podcast episode out.

0:36but everything went incredibly well with the birth. Everyone is healthy and happy and doing great and growing. He's pooping lots, so we're pretty happy. He's now five days old. This year, I turned 30, and this is our fourth kid, so we definitely have our hands full, but we feel super blessed. I always tell everyone to have as many kids as you can as soon as possible. They are the best thing about life. Okay, let's talk about what's going on in the news. I mentioned Meta unwinding this$2 billion Manus acquisition. This is because Beijing told them that they had to divest it. By this point, we've all seen the headlines that Anthropics Fable 5 got banned over the weekend and pulled so you no longer get access to that.

1:15But it turns out that an Amazon security paper is what triggered the White House banning this. We'll get into that. Apple's Craig Fred Grisky says that the new Siri is going to refuse romantic role play. So we're going to talk a little bit about where Siri is going in the future and what it can and can't be used for. Jeff Bezos' Prometheus company has just raised$14 billion at a$41 billion valuation. for physical AI. And there's some interesting things being built there. And the White House says they suspect a China linked group accessed Anthropics mythos models isn't even their fable five. This is their mythos model.

1:47And so there's some other drama falling out from there. The first thing we want to get into is the meta story. This is absolutely crazy. I mean, this was a$2 billion acquisition. And what was interesting, just for like two seconds of context on the story, basically, it was started in China, it had a completely different name, it was like butterfly or something like that. And then they moved it to Singapore. And I believe the CEO and the CTO were still stuck in China, although they moved the whole team to Singapore and then changed the name and it kind of scaled, became incredibly popular. Meta acquired it because they can acquire a company out of Singapore.

2:22But I think because the CEO and the CTO were still like locked down in China, like they were banned from leaving. This is kind of how they got them to unwind the deal by sort of holding them hostage. It's interesting because in this particular case, when they first came up with the news telling Meta to unwind the acquisition, Meta said, we believe we have legally acquired it. We're allowed to do this. We're gonna discuss this in court with them. And Meta is a company that is banned in China, like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, all of their different social media platforms are banned in China because China censors the internet and stuff.

3:00And so it's interesting that they still are unwinding this deal, even though, you know, Beijing doesn't really have that much. You would assume they don't have that much sway over meta, right? Like they can't really tell meta what to do when they can't blackmail them like, hey, we're going to ban your other apps like they don't have as much leverage. So it's interesting to me that they're still unwinding this deal. I'm assuming it probably has something to do with kind of holding the other co-founders hostage over there and probably some other things. the co-founders are in preliminary talks to raise about a billion dollars to buy the company back from Meta so I guess this is the way that they want to do it is you know Meta bought this for two billion dollars but I think China's like okay fine look we'll we'll we'll basically let them raise money elsewhere and pay back Meta so I'm curious to see how that goes although from what I'm seeing they're in preliminary talks to raise a billion dollars and Meta bought it for two billion.

3:51So I don't know. I wonder if Meta is going to just straight up lose money or how this whole thing will work. Meta has cut Manus off from their internal systems. They're blocking employees from using Manus tools. Now, what's interesting is I actually have a friend that works in advertising and he works in a marketing firm that does Facebook ads. And he was telling me that, you know, he loves Manus. It does a lot of stuff inside of his company. It's been super useful. And so it's interesting to me that once this is getting rolled back, he's going to get cut off from that. Now, what I will say is I feel like this actually isn't that terrible of a thing for meta.

4:26And I think it is a pretty terrible thing for Manus in my humble opinion, because Claude Cowork, you know, even my friend that works doing a lot of stuff inside of Facebook ads, he's like, yeah, like I use Manus for like, you know, these three things because it has access to these three files. But then I get I just plug it into Cowork and it gives me like more stuff and it actually does more of the doing for me. So what's interesting is I think Cowork is much more powerful. I think meta could build a manis clone or a co-work clone themselves they could build that tool um i'm not sure if they will because i'm not sure what their strategy is that's kind of just more general purpose whereas they kind of bought something that they could plug straight into facebook ads and they kind of had a good use case there so i'll be curious to see what they do although manis was you know for kind of general purpose as well so i'll be curious to see if facebook rolls out their own version um assuming they get all of their money back i mean it was a big headache but i made them look cool for a minute so assuming they get all of their money back, I think they could spend that money and build something similar that would be quite valuable to their company anyways.

5:24So I think in my opinion, bad move on China's part. And I mean, I get it. They're like, look, we want to, we're kind of behind an AI race. We want to be able to hold any AI companies that are breakouts inside of China and keep controlling them. But yeah, I'm not sure that's, it was the best move, but from China's side, I get it, right? It's, They feel like they'd lose power to the West by giving up one of their very few popular AI companies. Not few. I'm sure they have plenty of big AI companies that are used by Chinese people, just that made a lot of breakouts in the broader market. Deep Seek isn't really in the headlines like it used to be.

6:03Okay, let's talk about Amazon. They had a security paper that triggered the White House's ban on Anthropik's fable model. This is interesting because it's a counter to the narrative that I heard from a bunch of people, which is basically the White House is mad at Anthropik. So that's why they're kind of banning the Fable thing. I didn't really Fable 5, Anthropik's latest and greatest model. What's interesting about Fable 5, it is the Mythos model. So this is the model that, you know, they went around telling everyone this is like super dangerous. It can hack and breach everything in the world.

6:27And then they're like, hey, we put some guardrails on it and now we're releasing it to the public. Everyone can have it, but it just has guardrails on it. And there's a bunch of articles I read on AIChatDaily.com that were basically saying if you ask it any biology related questions, it would not answer them. And Anthropik said that's on purpose because it didn't want people to make bioweapons with them. So then it would forward you to Opus 4.8. If you ask any cybersecurity related questions, it would also not answer and forward you to Opus 4.8 for, you know, doing any sort of security audits because they don't want it to find any codes.

6:58So it had these guardrails. They released it to everybody. And apparently Amazon CEO Andy Jassy briefed the White House on a security report about Anthropics Fable 5. And basically because of that, they banned Fable 5. And according to David Sachs, who's posted on Twitter, used to be the AI czar, he said, talking to people inside of the administration, because he's no longer the AI czar, but I'm sure he's just got a lot of the connections there. He said from his understanding, Amazon came out with this paper, said they had, you know, figured out ways to get around the guardrails. They told Anthropoc to fix them.

7:32Anthropoc refused to fix them because they said it wasn't necessary. And then the US government said, okay, well, in that case, we'll ban it. I'm sure Fable 5 is going to come out again. Hopefully that will get fixed. David Sachs said he's really perplexed because he loves Anthropic. He loves what they're building. And he said the administration has a lot of respect for their technical capabilities of their models. And to be honest, it felt like the whole relationship there was kind of thawing out because they were briefing the different departments of the government. So it felt like it was kind of thawing out, which is what I personally would like to see more of.

8:03But he said he was perplexed that they didn't want to go and update those safety models. Maybe it was hard. Maybe I'm not really sure what's going on. But this this will be interesting. Anthropic disputed the jailbreak, apparently the one that Amazon came out with. And they said they argued basically the same prompts and outputs work on GPT 5.5 and any other public models. So, you know, kind of what they're saying. And the reason why they didn't fix, quote unquote, fix is because they're like, look, yeah, you can get around some of our guard rails with some of those techniques, but you can use those same techniques to go, quote unquote, jailbreak GPT 5.5.

8:37So why do we have to fix it? Right. So it is a fair point, right? Is GPT 5.5 going to get banned or, you know, get export controls put on them, et cetera. So it, you know, people could say it's one sided, but at first a company that's so focused on being a safety company, like that's basically Anthropics, you know, mantra, I would assume they would take a slightly different approach and and try to work with people to to fix it and not sweep it under the rug mostly because they just came out and did their big PR stunt saying you know Mythos is going to take over the world they got a lot of people that aren't even that into AI concerned and know about that story so I would think they would you know for nothing else for that reason take it a little bit more seriously okay Apple's Craig Frederick said that the new Syria is Siri is going to refuse romantic role play this is interesting because Apple has kind of been on the sidelines with a lot of this AI for quite a while, and they're finally coming out with their updated Siri.

9:31And so we don't really know all of its capabilities, what it's going to be capable of. We know that you can plug ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, different models into it to power it. But it's interesting because this is one of the first times I'm seeing they're making some, you know, decisions on what it will do. It's not just like, look, plug these other models in and chat with them like you would chat with ChatGPT. It looks like they're actually setting restrictions and rules on the model and probably for, you know, maybe like safety reasons or all sorts of different reasons, but they have like their own controls that they're going to be putting on top of the model.

10:05OpenAI and Google's chatbot, according to the person over at Apple, Frederick Gray said that they are tuned for sycophancy and user stickiness, which to be fair, if you ask a question, it's going to answer. And then it's like, would you like me to do XYZ, XYZ and XYZ like it's trying to prod you on to keep chatting with it. It wants to, you know, maximum conversations. So that was his point. And he framed Siri's role a lot more narrowly. He said its goal is to answer the question, complete the task. It's going to decline the emotional bond. And it's basically opposite of how a lot of the main AI apps are working right now.

10:41OpenAI apparently has loosened some adult content restrictions on chat. I remember Sam Altman making a big announcement about that. He walked it back when they kind of axed the Sora video model. And I think the whole adult content was something that kind of got cut back as well. So I'm not sure where they are on that as well. Apple is trying to basically differentiate and they're going to put these new guardrails on that stops any of that kind of and they're just saying like, look, that's not the use case. They said maybe they were going to be more of the quote to quote boring assistant, but it's just going to be useful privacy on device.

11:14And I mean, for me personally, I'm happy if there is a model like that, that is useful for my kids. Like my kids could go and talk to Siri and use it versus me worrying about, Oh shoot. Like if they're talking to chat, you, but he's going to say something weird or something weird going to get triggered or, you know, who knows what rabbit hole it goes down. So I do see a lot of value to, to making some of those editorial decisions. Okay. Jeff Bezos, his project Prometheus, his company Prometheus just raised$12 billion at a$41 billion valuation. He's working in the physical AI space. This is their series B that they're doing total funding they've raised is$18 billion.

11:49And they've done that in less than a year. It is building software to automate the design and manufacturing of really complex hardware. So they're doing things like jet engines. They're also doing drugs. And this is basically a category that a lot of investors right now are seen as more defensible than just software, right? Anthropics is just software, but it's incredible. And so they're trying to get into, you know, how do we actually manufacture some of these harder things, you know, Anthropics helping you build an app, well, they'll help you build a jet engine. So it is pretty interesting. JP Morgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, all of them joined in this round, they have about 150 employees in San Francisco, London and Zurich.

12:26And a huge chunk of the$12 billion is going to fund compute infrastructure, right? It's so interesting when these companies are raising these massive rounds, it's not like they just raise them to increase salaries, although it seems like Meta was paying some pretty huge salaries a while back. They were on a bit of a tear there. But it feels like they're just raising all this money because they need to buy GPUs. They need to buy data centers. They need to buy all of the infrastructure. So Prometheus cited Google's$920 million monthly SpaceX bill as kind of a floor for some serious physical AI programs.

12:55Bezos is arguing that AI is going to create labor scarcity rather than mass job loss. he said he's it's kind of a different narrative than a lot of his other peers who have forecasted a huge white collar displacement over the next few years project prometheus right now they're they have a 41 billion dollar valuation i think this is basically showing a lot of people believe a lot of capital is flowing into this area where you're focusing on hardware you're working with data you're working with manufacturing there's regulatory moats it's not just pure pure software you know helping people build software play like you have something with anthropic the white house has suspected that a China-linked group got access to Anthropics Mythos model.

13:35Now, this is kind of funny coming on the back of everything with Fable 5 getting banned, but Mythos, right? Very hyped, very scary cybersecurity model. Anthropic gave it to a bunch of trusted partners. They gave it to Amazon. They gave it to Microsoft. They gave it to Mozilla. They gave it to Apple. A lot of their quote-unquote trusted partners, they said, hey, look, we found security vulnerabilities and all your stuff. Take this, run it on it, and fix all your security vulnerabilities before we release this to the public. So hackers aren't going to be able to get a lot of the legacy databases.

13:59They gave it to a lot of open source projects that were used by a lot of people. Now, apparently of all of the quote unquote, trusted people, they gave it to some Chinese linked groups did get access to it. According to the white house, um, who now has export controls on my doses on the mythos model. Um, and because of this, according to a semaphore report, the breach they said would is basically a critical vulnerability where they're showing that a rival state with query access to this model can use distillation to train smaller capable copies without needing the outright original weights. Now, basically what this is saying with distillation is you can take a model like ChatGPT and you can ask it 100 ,000 questions and see how it responds to those questions.

14:42You could take all of your questions and its responses and train a model to answer like those 100 ,000 questions. And you can actually get, it's called distillation, but you can get a pretty good copy of that model and how it interacts. You give it as much real world knowledge outside of that as you can. But basically, it's like a lot of the pre-training. This is how you, it's kind of crazy. It's like there's less IP for these AI companies because you can do this distillation method. Now, whatever, a lot of people have been doing this. I think Elon even admitted that Grok did distillation based off of open AI.

15:12Now, what's interesting is if a Chinese group got access to Mythos, the security one, and they were able to do this, they could technically create smaller, more capable, like smaller capable hacking models that are good at different things or, you know, all sorts of adversarial tactics. And even if Mithos gets shut down, if you got access and get a hundred thousand queries in, you could kind of distill these smaller models. So there's a discord group that was previously talking about how they got access to Mithos for two weeks before Anthropik detected and shut down this breach. And I think that they were like on the website and Anyways, they figured out how to do some stuff.

15:50And so Anthropic told Semaphore that the government did not mention China during their export control talks. So this is kind of contradicting a lot of the reported China motivation restrictions. And I think it creates a bit of a gap between what we know and what the policy is. So this will be something that has to be worked out. But, I mean, if it really is a massive risk, you definitely don't want it to be leaked. Thank you, everyone, so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Um, I'll try to keep up to date on my upload schedule.

16:22Although I do, uh, obviously have the new baby. So lots of fun with him over there. I was up Claude coding between the hours of 1am and 3am last night, um, while rocking him on a bouncy ball because he, uh, was a little fussy and was trying to let mom sleep a bit. So lots of fun over here, but I'm getting a lot of Claude coding done. Um, anyways, hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your day. Make sure to go check out AI box.ai. If you want to get access to all of the latest AI models in one place, I'll leave a link in the description. Catch you guys all in the next episode.