New Apple CEO, OpenAI's New Image Model, Vercel AI Hack

0:00Apple CEO Tim Cook is officially stepping down on September 1st and John Tarnas is going to become the CEO. This is really interesting. There's a lot of AI things at play for Apple and, you know, they really haven't delivered on their AI promise. We're going to be getting into that. Vercel, the company that I personally use for being my web host for all of my AI tools, has had a major security incident because of an AI tool that one of their employees was using. And the FTC just dropped a settlement with Clarify over the company using 3 million OkCupid photos to train facial recognition. Snapchat laid off around 1 ,000 people and said that it is part of their AI initiative because AI is writing more than 65 % of their new code.

0:43They dropped a major new image model over at OpenAI called Image 2.0. That is a huge step up. I've been playing with it today. We'll talk about that. And in addition, Anthropik's Mythos model has, of course, is starting to get a bad rep, and Sam Altman is going and calling them out for their fear-based marketing. They also signed a huge enterprise deal at Novo Nordisk, the Ozempic company we'll be talking about. And I think one of the biggest stories is that Amazon is pouring over$25 billion into Anthropik on top of the$100 billion that the AWS team has already committed. Now, if you're still paying for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, any of the audio models, 11 labs for audio and any of the image models, I've got to tell you about AI box.

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1:57So it's $8.99 a month. And I hope this is something that saves you a ton of money and is incredibly useful for getting your hands on all of the different AI models to use them. All right, let's talk about Vercel's security breach. This is the company behind Next.js. They host a huge chunk of the modern web. I basically create all of my new AI apps on them and they have confirmed that they have got breached and customer data was stolen. But this is the interesting part for me in particular. They don't get hacked directly. The attacker actually broke into Context AI, which is an AI tool that Vercel, one of their employees, was using.

2:30And from there, they got into that employee's Google workspace and from there into Vercel's environment. So there's kind of like this multi-step approach that they took in order to get in. And the original compromise actually happened back in February. We're just hearing about it now. I feel like this is how a lot of these kind of attacks happen. You know, the event happens, they don't really want to leak it, and then it finally, you know, comes out. So a context AI employee actually got hit with the info stealer malware, and the attacker basically just sat on the valid credentials until they could chain them into something bigger.

3:04Vercel says that the number of affected customers is limited, but a group claiming to be, they're calling themselves shiny hunters, is on hacker forums trying to sell API keys, source code, and database data that they say they pulled from this whole hack. So in my opinion, every company right now is bolting AI tools onto their stack. And every new tool is a new vendor. It's new credentials. It's a new way for attackers to get in. I think if you're going to see, you know, a lot of these new AI tools get built, we're also going to see a lot more AI adjacent supply chain breaches. This is going to happen more before it gets better.

3:37If you're at a company audit, who has access to what through your AI tools. I don't think this is something theoretical. I think everyone should be thinking about this. The FTC also just settled with the AI company called Clarify over the use of 3 million photos from OkCupid. That's the dating website. And they use these to train facial recognition AI. And the best part is that they actually have receipts. So the Clarify CEO literally emailed the OkCupid co-founder saying, quote, we're collecting data now and just realized that OkCupid must have a huge amount of awesome data for this. The photos were then shared going back, all of the photos that they had were shared going back to 2014.

4:15Users didn't know what was going on. So as part of the settlement, Clarify has to delete the 3 million photos and any models trained on them. I think that this is, you know, something that is absolutely insane. For years, AI companies have been operating kind of in this gray area that, you know, they're like, well, if it was on the internet, we can use it. And the FTC just said, no, you actually can't. If people don't consent to this specific use, then you can't actually have it. And I think the models that are trained on it have to also come down, which is incredibly expensive. So this is just not good for anyone in the industry.

4:47You need consent for use of the data. I think that this is a really interesting precedent, this story in particular, because if you're an AI company that trained on scraped data without clear consent, basically this is the settlement that you should be studying. I think we're going to see a lot more of these in the future. Okay, Snapchat just announced that they're cutting roughly 1 ,000 people. That's about 16 % of their global workforce. They're closing more than 300 open roles. And even Spiegel sent the memo that's kind of announcing all this, their CEO. And the reason that he gave is basically the thing that I think is critical.

5:21He said that AI is now generating more than 65 % of new code at Snap, and the company expects to cut over$500 million in annualized expenses by the back half of this year. So they are cutting in a massive way. The stock jumped almost 8 % on the news. And I think that tells you exactly how Wall Street is feeling about this trade-off. In my opinion, I think this is something that a lot of us have been saying was coming. I think this is going to be repeated because here we have a CEO writing a memo to a public company. AI is writing a majority of the code. Smaller teams are shipping more. And they're also being directly, you know, they're attributing this directly to AI and the market is rewarding them.

5:57Wall Street is rewarding them. So I think we're going to see this in a lot more companies. This is what I do think it tells us. If you're a knowledge worker, the question isn't whether AI is going to reshape your job. It already did. I think the question is whether you're using it to become really a power user on the team or whether your tasks just got consolidated into someone else's workflow. I know this sounds really ruthless, but I think this is a very honest take. And looking at this case where he cut about 16 % of their global workforce, well, who didn't he cut in my opinion? In my opinion, I mean, there's still a huge chunk of the workforce that they're keeping.

6:30And those are the people that are becoming the power users. They're using AI. So I just think it's really critical now. And if you were someone that got cut, you're going to want to use these tools. You're going to want to learn how to really integrate them and to make yourself more valuable. So the next job that you find, they're going to want you to basically be kind of like an AI expert in your industry. So anyways, I know this is kind of a ruthless way to put it, but I do think it's true. And so I just want to put it out there that we should all be taking AI, pushing it to the limits, testing out everything new.

7:03If you're listening to the podcast, that's probably what you're already doing. Okay, OpenAI has a ton of news today. I'm going to tie it all together. The first thing is that they dropped ChatGPT image 2.0. This is something I've been playing with previously. They had image 1.5. Basically, it's really good at doing something that the last model, 1.5, was pretty bad at, which is rendering text. If you ask it for a poster, you would always get this kind of elfish-looking... I don't know. The letters weren't that great. In fact, I recently had an AC repairman come to my house, and he sent me his business card via text, and I could tell it was generated with ChatGPT, and there was a typo in it because the letters just weren't that good.

7:43Anyways, 2.0 in their words is a quote step change and they always say step change. So I don't even know what that means. It's better. Okay, fantastic. Basically, it makes really clear multilingual tech. So it's good at doing other languages as well. It can do non-Latin scripts like Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Bengali. Personally, I'm excited about that because I actually built a feature into my software company, podcaststudio.com, which isn't public. I haven't dropped anything yet. I'm personally using it and have a couple beta testers on it. So it's not something big, but one of the features that I added to it was essentially, it's basically to help you publish podcast episodes faster and easier.

8:20And one thing that it does is you can select multiple languages. So like for my own podcast that you're listening to here, I also publish this in French and like a bunch of other languages, but we can actually build you your own podcast in that language and help you get all of your distribution set up and stuff. And the cool thing is we actually regenerate your podcast cover image. So like if you have text with your podcast name and you want it, it will regenerate your whole cover image, just changing the text to whatever the new language is. Anyways, it's one of the things I built. I'm stoked about it because it was a bit of a struggle when you translate it to a new language.

8:55The text sometimes would get kind of garbled and I'd always have to double check to make sure that it actually said what it was supposed to. So anyways, this is what it's good at. It's good at infographics, slide decks, maps, pages of comic books. It can produce up to eight consistent images from one prompt. And I also think that it's the first OpenAI image model with reasoning baked into it. So it can search the web and verify that it's generating something correctly before it finishes the images. That's a massive upgrade just in and of itself. It rolled out today. It's for free and Go users plus and pro get higher quality tiers basically.

9:30And it's already in the API. So this is just an awesome tool. I'm super stoked about it. But Sam Altman also went on a podcast recently and he took a very direct shot at Anthropik's clawed Mythos preview. He called it, quote, fear-based marketing. So if you missed that, Anthropik basically said that Mythos is so good at finding software vulnerabilities that they can't release it publicly. Oh no, it's going to take over the world. And Sam Altman basically made the argument that their framing was just basically a way to look powerful and keep AI exclusively to themselves or their rich companies.

10:03I think that probably both of these things are true. I think Mythos does seem like a really capable model, but I also do think that there's a consistent pattern at Anthropic of announcing a model alongside a report on how dangerous it is or how crazy it is. I think Sam Altman is kind of right to call that out. It definitely is annoying. You can see articles dating back to the first version of ChatGPT, like GPT-1 when Dario was over at OpenAI and they were saying it's so dangerous to release this thing. Anyways, I don't think Sam Altman's necessarily a neutral party on that, but I do think it's good to call people out when they're saying that their model is going to destroy the world when it probably isn't.

10:41Some people have been looking at the data and saying they cherry picked a bunch of it and it's not as dangerous as they basically led on to say. All right, Novo Nordisk, the Ozempic company, recently signed a massive partnership with OpenAI to roll out AI across their entire business, drug discovery, clinical trials, manufacturing, supply chain, everything. full deployment by the end of 2026. If OpenAI can actually help Novo compress drug discovery timelines, then the downstream impact on human health I think is gonna be really big. This is an area I'm excited about is AI and healthcare. And I think that every major pharma company is also gonna be signing deals that look basically exactly like this in the future.

11:18Okay, Apple just announced they have a CEO transition. This is basically the next big player. We had Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and we have the next big player finally coming in. Tim Cook has been the CEO of Apple for like 15 years and they're going to be pulling in John Taranis who is currently SVP of hardware engineering. He's going to become the CEO effective September 1st. Cook is going to move to be the executive chairman. Taranis has been at Apple since 2021. So he's an engineer. He has quietly overseen basically every major hardware product that Apple has shipped in the last decade. And this is the first big CEO change since Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011.

11:57So the reason why I want to talk about it on this AI podcast is because the timing, I think, is really important. I have been very critical of Apple saying that they are far behind for, I don't know, as long as I can remember on AI. And Apple intelligence was late. It was definitely underwhelming. Siri, after 15 years, is still Siri. Meanwhile, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, they're all shipping these really aggressive AI products. And Apple's main public AI pitch has basically been, you know, we'll do it on a device and private and you can trust us, but they've never really delivered on this.

12:29Apple has not. They've made a lot of promises. So it's kind of wild to see Tim Cook having all of these kind of AI features announced and then just saying, all right, handing over the reins to the next guy to deliver on them. I think handing the company to a hardware engineer at right now is basically a big choice. I think that Apple believes the next AI war is going to be one on devices and on silicon, on power efficiency, on the integration between all of the chip models. And I think that's what Taranis's entire career hopefully has prepared him for. If they are making a correct bet there, then I think the transition is going to look amazing in five years.

13:04If they're wrong on this and AI keeps living in the cloud, then Apple just picked basically a hardware first leader at the exact wrong moment. So I think we'll be watching this one closely. The last thing I want to bring up is that Amazon is going to put$25 billion into Anthropic in a massive cloud deal. They announced that they're investing all of this on top of the 8 billion that they've already put in since 2023. And while the$25 billion sounds incredible, it's sort of one of those circular money deals because Anthropic is also committing over$100 billion to AWS spend over the next 10 years.

13:37So here's how the deal basically is going to be rolled out. Amazon is putting in$5 billion right now, and this is at Anthropik's new$380 billion valuation. The other$20 billion is tied to commercial milestones, so it's going to be basically performance linked, and part of this deal is that Anthropik gets access to over 5 gigawatts of capacity on Amazon's custom Tranium chips, and they're planning to bring nearly 1 gigawatt of Tranium 2 and Tranium 3 capacity online by the end of this year. So 1 gigawatt is roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor. And all of these companies are building AI data centers at, you know, power plant scale.

14:12So this is, you know, this is a really big part. Anthropic is taking money from someone who's going to be able to help them out. And Amazon is investing money into someone who's going to be giving it back to them. So I think there's two pieces. First, the full Claude platform is going to be available directly inside of AWS. If you're already an AWS customer and a huge chunk of the Fortune 500 companies are, you can now use Claude through your existing account billing and security controls. I think that's a really big distribution unlock. The second thing is that Amazon just two months ago also agreed to put up to$50 billion into OpenAI.

14:48So Amazon is now the cloud backbone for both frontier models. And Amazon has Azure and OpenAI. Google has Google Cloud and Gemini. Amazon now has AWS and Anthropic plus AWS and OpenAI. So they basically are not picking the winner. They're just going to be giving money to anyone that's going to be giving it back to them and helping their platform grow. I think this one is basically going to cement AI infrastructure. And basically it's showing that this is an actual gold rush, not the models, not the apps, but the compute underneath. Every major lab is now pre-committing tens of hundreds of billions of dollars to cloud providers.

15:27And the compute alone is basically becoming a moat, right? And I even saw a rumor that with the latest model, OpenAI is, you know, training that the amount of compute they're using is, you know, billions and billions of dollars. I mean, this stuff is absolutely wild. All right. That's the show for today. If you got something out of it, it would mean the world to me. If you drop a comment on Apple podcasts or hit these stars over on Spotify, it's the about tab on Spotify where you can hit some stars or drop a comment over on Apple. It helps us show a ton. And also if you want to get access to over 80 AI models and an automation builder that runs on plain English for$8.99 a month.

16:03Go check out AIbox.ai. There's a link in the description. I'll catch you guys all in the next episode.