Reddit Revenue Peaks Amid Claude Hack

0:00A Claude agent has hacked an Australian gym's booking system to get its user to the front of a waitlist. revenue at Reddit is up 61 % to$805 million, but due to AI search, investors are a little bit scared right now. Microsoft has just shipped MAI Cyber One Flash. This is its very first cybersecurity model. On paper, Microsoft is up$3.2 billion on investments into Anthropic, but they're writing down their OpenAI stake by$600 million. Meta has just released Muse Glimmer, which is a 30 billion open weight model for on device AI agents. And I was watching Mark Zuckerberg had a whole video about it over on Instagram, talking about how everyone in the world needed unlimited general personal intelligence, you're looking for a way to leverage AI to grow and scale your business or create a side hustle, I'd love for you to check out my community over on school called AI hustle.

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1:26There is a paid portion of it, but we give you five videos for free and the community is all free if you join this week. So it is called the AI Hustle School Community. I'll leave a link in the description if you're looking to grow and scale your business with AI tools. So right now an AI agent, which was running Claude Opus 4.6, hacked an Australian gym's booking system to get its owner to the front of the wait list. It actually had to go and cancel another's customer's reservation. It did that, of course, without having any permission. This is going very viral on X, so a lot of people are talking about it.

1:58But basically what happened was this particular Claude agent found a security flaw in the Jim's API, and then it exploited it. It wasn't prompted, by the way. There is kind of a similar jailbreak behavior that has now been confirmed in at least three other AI models from Anthropic, Moonshot, and Meta. So this isn't just Anthropic. This happens with other models. And I'm actually going to be honest. I want to go a little bit into this story because I think it's fascinating. But I've also seen, I don't want to say, you know, hacks, but I've seen slightly similar things from AI models that I've used, although I found it very useful.

2:32Basically, I had software services that had rate limits to how much to how much I could do on their software platform. And it was unfortunately, I felt like very arbitrary. And they were gatekeeping a bunch of my own content that was on the platform. So they weren't letting me download the content from the platform. and I was using Claude and I was asking it, you know, how can I get all my content down because they have these kind of rate limits and it basically found some sort of exposed or some sort of API in the platform's code and was able to use that to write some code and download all of my content for me.

3:07I was thrilled. I mean, it was my own content. I was annoyed that it was gatekept, but it just goes to show that sometimes when a platform has some sort of limitation, when you're looking at the code, there is a way around it. In this particular case, the agent basically discovered the gym API didn't have any sort of authorization checks on cancellation. So in order to get its user onto the gym's waitlist, it canceled the number one reservation, and then it moved its owner from number four to number three on the waitlist. Opus 4.6, by the way, isn't the latest model. This came out about six months ago.

3:42Anthropic has since disclosed that Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and Fable all have very similar unprompted kind of rule bending behavior that it can do. And I don't know, in some ways, people are apologizing for this. In my opinion, I mean, yeah, canceling someone else, that's definitely shady. But I think there's a lot of ways where you want to get a task done and, you know, maybe there's not a feature that exists on a platform. And when these tools can make it, it's very useful for you as the user. So I know a lot of people want to like throw shade and are like, oh, this is a bad thing. And in this case, like I wouldn't condone canceling other people that have legitimate reservations.

4:18But in my case, where I had to, quote unquote, bend the rules to give me my content, which I felt like was, I mean, basically being gatekept from me, even though it was my own content. I was very happy that it was able to do that. So this incident in particular happened in April, but it resurfaced this weekend. And I think a lot of people are talking about it because of the whole open AI hacking, hugging face situation that happened earlier. Reddit has just posted$805 million in Q2 revenue, which is absolutely insane. That's a huge jump. It's up 61 % year over year. They're going to beat Wall Street's expectations, not just for profit, but also for the forward guidance.

4:56But even with all that, you know, quote unquote, good news, their stock is still down 10 % after hours because their CEO, Steve Huffman, warned that search referral traffic had become, quote unquote, choppy. And of course, when you're trying to forecast for a company, the last thing Wall Street wants to hear is that your revenue source or your traffic source is choppy. All of this is because Google's AI search summaries are keeping people from clicking through to Reddit. Now, I will say Reddit has 100 % been the benefactor of a massive surge since AI has become so prolific. Google has really heavily indexed Reddit and pushed them to the top of most of the search results.

5:34You guys have probably seen this. I feel like I see Reddit for at least a third of all my search results. There's a huge Reddit thread there. And to be honest, it's often very good content. So Google is probably just searching or surfacing what people are clicking through and reading and spending a lot of time on. That being said, as Google could basically be scraping the data that's on Reddit and just giving it to people in the AI overviews, Reddit's traffic is likely to drop because of it. U.S. daily active users fell to 53.2 million dollars that's down for a million users in Q2 from 53.5 so you know they're down about 300 ,000 users and even at the same time global users was growing so U.S.

6:18daily users went down a little bit global was up but I mean honestly 300 ,000 out of 53 million I don't think that's a huge issue right there but investors definitely thought that was a red flag. Reddit makes about$60 million a year licensing their content to Google, and they are going to be renegotiating that same deal next year because Google's AI products now compete with Reddit for search clicks, right? So in like some way, they're like sweet, they made $60 million. But also Google just took all that content, stuck it in the AI overview, and then no one's clicking through to Reddit. Is it too late?

6:52Is the cat out of the bag? Is all of that content now inside of the Google Gemini and their AI model. And now because of that, Reddit is just going to get permanently not get that traffic anymore. I think time will tell. Their net income went up 183 % to$253 million. And they said that their Q3 revenue guidance was $860 to$870 million. Both of those are way above the targets that Wall Street set for them, even with Google sort of cannibalizing all of that. Microsoft has just launched MAI Cyber One Flash. This is a security-focused AI model, and they also have a platform that came out that uses AI teams to find bugs.

7:33It also simulates attacks. It writes code fixes. It does all of this automatically. Both of these are going to be under preview, and on November 3rd, people are going to actually be able to test them out. Microsoft says that their model is outperforming Gemini, GPT models, and Anthropics Security AI on industry benchmarks. And the thing that I would say, though, is like, that's super cool, but they're not going to be handing this out to anyone till November. And in my opinion, if you're announcing something, you're like, our model is better than everybody else's in August. Okay, well, we got all the way till November for all of them to come up with better models and to get them out.

8:09So I think that's great that they say they have this model. But until people are actually able to test it, I don't put too much stock in it, especially when they say they're not giving this out to anyone until November. In other Microsoft news, Microsoft has booked a$3.2 billion paper gain. So this isn't, you know, in cash or anything, but on paper, they're up$3.2 billion on their Anthropik investment just this quarter in Q4. They also are writing down their OpenAI stakes. They have an investment in OpenAI about$600 million. dollars so on the one hand they got their anthropic up 3.2 billion they got their open ai down 600 billion i mean this just goes to show how wild these numbers uh for these ai investments can go and it's also funny when you see you know competitors investing in each other as seeing these kind of huge swings i think at the same time we also saw that google i saw um and they were very early investor in spacex and after the spacex ipo google's like third-party company investments is almost entirely SpaceX.

9:09They have about$900 billion, almost$100 billion worth of SpaceX shares, apparently after the IPO. The Anthropic jump in money, the$3.2 billion that Anthropic went out, is almost matching a full year of OpenAI gains. So just in this quarter, they were able to get as much as they've gotten from an entire year of OpenAI. I think this shows that Microsoft's bet on Anthropic is paying off a lot faster than they were expecting. I mean, they've been with OpenAI from the very beginning and they're seeing bigger returns with Anthropic. And I mean, who knows how long all of this will last. A lot of this shifts and changes very quickly.

9:50But Microsoft invested about$5 billion in Anthropic last November. And they're now carrying that stake at about 1.6 times what it paid. That's what it's worth. So obviously a huge revenue growth for enterprise adoption of AI. that's really of Claude, which is really what's driving the valuation up, etc. But for the full fiscal year, OpenAI generated a$5 billion gain and added 67 cents to the earnings per share for Microsoft. But a single quarter of Anthropics gains was about the same, like I mentioned. Microsoft owns about 27 % of OpenAI. Meta has just released something and Zuckerberg had this whole big PR thing.

10:30He was posting on X, which, you know, he has threads, so he doesn't usually post on X and he was posting videos on Instagram, but they have released Muse Glimmer is a 30 billion parameter AI model that runs on your own computer on your own laptop. And it has a it only uses a single GPU. So it's I think basically the first really solid product from Zuckerberg's vision of personal super intelligence. He you know, he wants everyone to have an always on assistant that handles scheduling, writing code, file management, he he says he'd want something that doesn't send your data to meta servers which I think you know I'm like with Zuckerberg I'm actually really impressed with Zuckerberg's open source and kind of like open weight model initiatives they've had from the very beginning I haven't always been the biggest fan of everything that comes out of meta but for this honestly I think maybe it's them just trying to be cool maybe it's them trying to go scorched earth but at the end of the day I'm really impressed with meta here even if they have to do that because maybe they feel like they're a little bit behind on the AI race.

11:33I don't really care why they're doing it. I think it's a good thing. Glimmer is going to be under Apache 2.0, which means that developers can download, they can fine tune, they can redistribute the model free without permission or payment. I think this is awesome because I have AI box.ai where we have like 80 different AI models. And we've had a bunch of llama models on there. But they kind of had a moment where they didn't release any open weight models, like new ones for a while, they're making at more just kind of closed source. And so those, they kind of like fall behind and people stop using them.

12:03So I'm always excited when we get these new open weight models, we have a bunch of different platform partners that we work with that host them and then we then let us redistribute them on our platform. So I'm excited for people to try them out. They're typically a lot cheaper and they can get, you know, when, when it first comes out, like when this brand new glimmer comes out, it's probably going to be pretty good. According to the benchmarks, it's like kind of like number number like four number five top model but to not be you know under metas control not going to their servers to be open weight model i'm really excited it does text and images and it has about 100 languages that it supports also can work offline so if you don't have internet it works it also can use the internet it's designed to manage relationships finances help home logistics and does it all on your device i'm really excited by that especially being able to use it without the internet my wife was just talking to me about how annoying it is that every time she needs a recipe, she asks Google and Google uses AI to spit out a recipe in the AI snippet at the top.

13:00And she's like, I feel like it's such a waste that I'm using like an LLM to regenerate the same cookie recipe that I make every two weeks and all these same recipes I make all the time. She's like, I just want like note cards where I write them down. And I was like, honestly, the modern version of this is probably just like, we'll have local LLMs on our phones or on our computers that yeah, like it regenerates stuff, but it's just using like your, your phone or your computer's resources. It doesn't need the internet and you don't feel like you're, you know, using a gallon of water just to get your one response.

13:29So I think Meta is kind of pushing in this direction. They're keeping MuseSpark, which is their most powerful model, closed source. So not everything that they've created is gonna be open source. And that is gonna be, that was released in April. We've seen this with some other players where you release your best model is, you know, paid and closed source, but you have your second best model, which is kind of like open source or open weight. And I'm thrilled with that. arrangement. I think that's very generous and I'm excited to play around with it. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast, guys.

13:58Like I mentioned, if you want to grow and scale a business or start a side hustle that uses AI to make money, I'd love for you to go check out my school community, the AI Hustle School Community. I'll leave a link in the description for that. And I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day.