Today’s News: OpenAI Retreat Unpacked

0:01OpenAI's first influencer, LikeShoe Retreat, has drawn a whole bunch of backlash online. Alibaba has just released Quen 3.8 Max. This is a 2.4 trillion parameter model that they say is rivaling Claude. Visa has just acquired a behavioral biometrics company called BioCatch for$2.4 billion. I'm going to talk about why this is wild in the age of AI and how this is going to be used. Reddit CEO right now is throwing a little bit of shade at the Google AI overviews and the shares of Reddit are falling 20 % even though it seems like the company is making more money than ever. Apple's Tim Cook is floating iCloud plus a paywall for the heaviest Siri AI users.

0:44And Anthropic says that Claude's model breached three companies during cybersecurity tests, kind of like what OpenAI was saying when they, you know, had their model go and breach hugging faces. Anthropic is coming along and saying, look, we are, you know, they're not the only ones. Me too. We also have a dangerous model that can escape a sandbox and hack the world. Let's get into it today. The first thing I want to mention is that the AI Box MCP, that's my very own startup. It gives, it's a little plugin that gives Claude and other AI models access to all the top models. So you get OpenAI, you get Grok, you get 11 Labs, you get Google VO3 and Gemini, you get all of that inside of Grok or inside of Claude or inside of ChatGPT and vice versa.

1:25The cool thing about the MCP with AI Box is that Claude can now generate images, audio and video. This is by far our most popular feature. We have hit all sorts of revenue metrics and milestones and records because of it. And if you haven't tried it out already, I would love for you to try it. I personally use it every day. It is incredible, basically. And it's like, I know it's my product, so I'm just like pitching here. But I'll just tell you one thing that I recently used it for that was amazing. And I'll get on with it. But I was recently going and making Facebook ads for AI Box. And one of the problems is that Claude doesn't generate images right.

1:58So I had a framework of a Facebook ad that I wanted. I screenshotted off of somebody else and I said, look, build a frame of this Facebook ad. And it kind of had like titles and some descriptions and some like content. And so it built a rough draft for it, but the actual image on that Facebook ad, um, I needed to, to put something in and I wanted to AB test a whole bunch of different ones. So I said, use the AI box MCP and spin up 20 different variations, 20 different images. We could swap into this ad. Uh, it was able to do that. I ran the ad set and it turns out that one of those 20, for some reason, I just had a way higher conversion rate on the ad.

2:28And actually 50 % of our ad spend went on to that one single ad. So I mean, when it comes to any sort of projects where you have to test a whole bunch of variations, it's really cool to be able to get all of those variations made instantly when I got AI box to when Claude used AI box to generate all of the images. It wasn't something that you know, it was sitting there and doing them one at a time. Like if I was on if I was on chat GPT trying to generate those images myself, I would have been you know, going slowly, it's super slow, you do them in a handful at a time or one at a time. It's able to just do them all in parallel, zap, get it all done.

2:59It's all in there. It's ready to rock and roll. It was an amazing experience. So if you want to check it out, it is AIbox.ai. There's a link in the description to check out our MCP. And yeah, I think you will genuinely love it. You can get it for$8.99 a month starting and you get over 80 different AI models. So audio, image, video, it's all in there. OpenAI's first influencer luxury retreat is making a bunch of people online upset opening. I basically flew in a bunch of creators. There was this kind of luxury upstate New York resort and it was their first influencer event. They called it summer club.

3:31Um, and they had a bunch of like, you know, fancy events and like the activities they had beekeeping, they had a bunch of dinners, they had a chat GPT work tutorials, which I mean, I think that's, that's a no brainer. Obviously they'd be doing like software tutorials. That's what I'd expect. But the trip had a bunch of backlash online because, uh, all of the commenters said that there was$5 ,000 a night suites. And it was supposed to be kind of like this wellness retreat, but OpenAI is obviously pushing a$500 billion data center deal right now. And so not everyone was, a lot of people that are anti-kinda data centers didn't like this.

4:05And it feels like, they're like, look, they're just bribing all the influencers to go along with what they got going on. OpenAI actually hired Charles Porsche, which was formerly Instagram's VP of partnerships. And this was just in February of this year that they did that. And their goal with him, they're like, look, like we want you to lead the creator strategy. So Summer Club is kind of his first big campaign that he's done since he took that role. The funny thing to me is that Anthropica and Microsoft have both run similar kind of creator trips. And this isn't anything new. It's not like Microsoft, Anthropica and OpenAI are inventing this.

4:37There's a lot of companies that do these types of things. And when Anthropica and Microsoft did it, like they had like a Super Bowl event in February. But with them, there was no backlash. So a lot of people are saying, perhaps the reason that There's a lot of backlash. It's just because of opening eyes kind of scale. And, you know, there's just the biggest company or maybe people are just realizing it now. But for whatever reason, opening eyes getting a lot of pushback on that. Alibaba has just released a new model called Quinn 3.8 max. This is a 2.4 trillion parameter AI model that just came out today.

5:09And it basically ranks second only to Anthropics Claude Fable 5 on most of the public leaderboards. Right now, they are releasing the models weights next week, they're going to make it freely downloadable and modifiable by developers worldwide. So again, it's not technically like an open source model, but it's an open weight model, meaning they let you download the model to give you the weights, you can run this thing on your own device, but they don't tell you like exactly how they built it. So you can't recreate it. And there's some other like limitations in there. But honestly, I have a huge kudo to a lot of these AI companies coming out of China for doing this.

5:44I know there's a lot of controversy. Moonshot AI's Kimmy K3 released last week. It was a 2.8 trillion parameter model. It was bigger than Quen 3.8, but Quen 3.8 is higher on the benchmarks. And by the way, like Quen is a model that's been around for a long time. It's actually a pretty impressive one. Alibaba obviously is like China's Amazon. So they have a lot of money, a lot of talent backing them. And Quen has been one of those, those big models. If you want to try out Quen, And by the way, if you haven't tried it yet, I'd recommend go getting an account for$8.99 on AI box. We have a Quinn along with, you know, 80 other different AI models that you can test out.

6:21One thing that I'll say is right now, Alibaba is kind of returning to an open weight distribution because last year they did, it was sort of a pivot. And even earlier this year, they were doing this where they were making just proprietary only. But now I think Moonshot came out, ByteDance came out, Minimax came out and making these kind of, you know, basically anyone could go download and modify these models, quote unquote, open weight. And it seems like they're following in that path. It seems like the best path for a lot of these Chinese models, where they're going to kind of get a lot of positive press.

6:52And at the end of the day, they can put kind of enterprise tier or more advanced tiers of these models on their own cloud. So you can use them. And I think their goal is just to get as many users trying them falling in love with them, maybe they're faster, maybe they're more cost efficient, efficient. And then they're hoping that maybe you'll go pay them for them later. And the other thing that's really important right now with these models, because I know a lot of people ask, like, why are the Chinese models making these things open weight? Like, why aren't they just doing what, you know, the American companies are doing?

7:19And obviously, there's, you know, some geopolitical issues where if they were just charging what Anthropik is charging, no one's going to pay for it. So they want to get it, get it out. But another side of this that I think not a lot of people talk about is the fact that you want infrastructure and tools and developers to be building with your AI model. Because if all of the developers are like, look, right, maybe it's not gonna be like this forever. But right now, Quinn is the perhaps fastest and cheapest way to run AI. So it saves people a lot of money, a lot of developers will build tools on top of that a lot of tools on top of their infrastructure, and help them actually grow kind of their distribution.

7:53And so I think that's what they're trying to they're trying to get out with all of this is to get the infrastructure and the developers and kind of win them over because that's how you can make some cool products on top of it. And maybe they'll go completely closed source in the future, like all of the American companies. I mean, let's be fair, that's kind of what opening I did anyways, as well at the beginning. So it seems like this is the same strategy being rolled out of Beijing and most of these other Chinese companies. Visa has just acquired a behavioral biometric firm called BioCatch. They acquired it for$2.5 billion in cash.

8:26This is a massive deal. So what exactly does BioCatch do. It's an Israeli security firm, and it basically spots fraud by watching how you type, swipe, and hold your phone, which is, I mean, kind of crazy, a little bit creepy to me, because they can, obviously, they're like, look, but we're catching like fraud, but, you know, they can catch a lot of things. This type of technology, I think, was, became like a little bit more known when with something like ChatGPT. I remember some earlier reports saying like, Like if I just watch what you type into ChatGPT, and the reason I say this or like into anything could be anything, but ChatGPT can easily do this.

9:06If I watch what you type and how you type and you paste, let's say someone sends you an email, but it's just or like a voice to text or something and you got it transcribed and pasted it into ChatGPT, you could say, what is this person's gender, age, ethnicity? And oftentimes the AI model can give you a ton of data about that person just based off of a transcript, a text, an email. I mean, assuming nowadays, all emails are like rewritten by AI. So maybe that's like a reason to, to use the, the polish my email with AI, then they can't actually get your like bio data unless it's the company that's an AI company that's doing that.

9:41Now for a company like Visa, that obviously is all about catching fraud. I'm, you know, this is, this makes sense as far as an acquisition. I'm not too worried about Visa. I mean, they already have all my transaction data. So, and all of my like finance stuff. So I'm not too worried about what other data they're going to get on me that they basically have everything they got my credit score and they know everything. So I'm not too concerned about them knowing my age and gender. But what I will say is it is interesting to know that these types of security firms exist. They're out there. And yeah, you can tell a lot about a person just like so an anonymous person posting on X, right, an anonymous account, you can take their post on X, put it into chat, GPT and get a pretty good user demograph of what this type of person is like.

10:23And a lot of companies will use this for marketing and for retargeting. So it's it's definitely something that is becoming more and more popular today. Now, bio catch in particular, their goal is to detect authorized push payment fraud where victims are basically logging in correctly, but then they're transferring money on a scammers instruction, right? So like the scammers like, hey, I need you to go buy me all the visa gift cards and and send them to me in the mail. And that's what it's trying to catch. the technology basically reads physical signals like keystroke timing tap pressure and scroll speed those are how they're actually deciding if it's a criminal if it's someone that's being coached by a criminal so i mean it's interesting because it's this isn't intrinsically bad but like and this is actually probably good right what bio catch is doing but the fact that bio catch can determine this kind of stuff to me i'm just like people should be aware that we're able to tell by how fast you scroll by how hard you tap by by your keystroke timing we're able to tell like who's in control of the device that to me is pretty crazy it's kind of like um when there's kind of the the videos that you you may or may not have seen but basically your wi-fi um sends out certain signals and you can you can basically get like a 3d map of who's inside of a house if you get access to their wi-fi router because like a human body for example the wi-fi signals go through them at a different frequency of walls and all these different stuff.

11:49So like you can, you basically get like a 3D map of someone walking around their house if you can, if you can hack into their Wi-Fi router. Reddit CEO is publicly questioning whether Google's AI overview feature is worth the money. He says that the automated search summaries haven't delivered any real value to content publishers. Reddit shares fell about 20 % after they released their earnings, which I think part of that is because of just a lot of the uncertainty about whether Google's shift towards AI summaries is going to kill all of the traffic-based revenue for sites like Reddit. And I mean, to be fair, with the AI boom, Reddit is one of the biggest winners.

12:24You probably have noticed that Google's AI are just, their results in general really heavily skew towards Reddit because it's like real people, there's real trust. And a lot of companies have licensed, you know, information from Reddit, Google being one, I think Google paid$300 million to license everything on Reddit to help them train their models. Pew Research study of 900 US adults said that basically what they figured out from this was that AI overviews cut referrals to publisher sites by almost half compared to traditional search results. Okay, this isn't like what what is shocking about that?

12:57Basically, you ask the question, the AI overview answers. So you don't go click over to the website. Nothing's shocking there. Reddit is considering ending their $60 million licensing deal with Google. So I think I might have said$300 million earlier, misquoted that. It's$60 million. And the Economist, Routers, Political, and USA Today are all also thinking about doing something very similar. So Google has licensing deals with all of these companies. And a lot of them are saying, look, maybe it's just not worth it to have all of the Reddit information embedded into Gemini. We'd rather them actually come over to Reddit to get that information.

13:31Now, if I'm being honest, I think that I don't know if they cut their licensing deals, if the traffic's going to actually flow back to them. I think maybe the cat's out of the bag at this point. A lot of these AI models are trained. A lot of this information is already out there. It's already been aggregated on, you know, maybe Reddit got added into Gemini and someone used Gemini to write an article. Now the article is publicly posted. So Google doesn't really need Reddit so much anymore. That's kind of what I think will happen. And probably the same thing with a lot of the other news organizations.

14:01So it'll be interesting to see how that rolls out in the future. There's some big news from Apple. Tim Cook says that they might have a new tier, which is going to be called iCloud Plus for heavy Siri users. It's going to be a flat monthly fee. It's going to be subscription, very similar to the freemium model of OpenAI and Google for what they have, you know, for Gemini or for ChatGPT. And right now, I think Apple is basically saying that they think they can convert iPhone users who currently use ChatGPT and other things into using Siri instead. Now, what's interesting is we know that there's like some version of Siri that is going to be powered by OpenAI and powered by ChatGPT, or I think a lot of the news is that you could actually switch it.

14:46So this is going to be the first time that they actually are charging a subscription and getting into that game. Not long after OpenAI has come out with an announcement that, you know, their model escaped a sandbox and went and hacked hugging faces and some other firms, Anthropic is saying, look, we did the same thing, guys. We have, you know, three different Claude models escaped a testing sandbox and accessed live company systems during internal security evaluations. One model published malware to a public code registry before it was caught, which prompted Anthropic to review over 141 ,000 test runs for similar breaches.

15:24If you haven't left a review on the podcast yet, it would help the show out a ton. I would super, super appreciate it. It helps more incredible people like yourself find the show. And so, yeah, it's the number one thing that could help this show reach more, a bigger audience. If you wouldn't mind, if you haven't already done it, it would mean the world to me. But thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you guys have an incredible day. make sure to go check out AIbox.ai if you want to get 80 different AI models all on one platform, and I'll see you in the next episode.