Apple After Tim Cook, OpenAI’s New Mojo, Meta’s Internal Tracking Escapade

27:03Ranjan Roy:between our next model release will destroy humanity and crush the world economy and Sam telling everyone that he loves them. There's got to be. I mean, like, take a Microsoft announcement or an Adobe Summit this week, there's some software releases. There's some upgrades. Not everything has to be earth-shattering and world-defying. Like, it's just the next iteration of the model. Like, if these companies weren't in the position of having to kind of keep this drumbeat of hype being pushed until they go public in the markets, do we need this much hype for every new model release? It makes for good conversation fodder, but my wish is these would just be kind of like – they would be in release notes maybe.

27:59Ranjan Roy:Maybe there's like a press release and that's it. It doesn't have to be this all or nothing type of way of communicating around it. Is that unreasonable? Are you a truther on the – well, I guess it sort of depends on whether you believe these things have real cybersecurity capabilities or cyber offensive capabilities as well. If they have cyber offensive capabilities, then you can't just sort of say, all right, go for it. So what's your perspective on that? Do you think it's real? Because I think it's real. From the people that I've spoken with, I've done enough reporting on it that I believe it's real at least to some degree.

28:34Ranjan Roy:So if it is real, this week Bloomberg reported there was a breach for Mythos. We're an unauthorized group. They tried a number of different strategies and were able to gain access to the model. Um, they work for a third party contractor that works for Anthropic. And the way they did it is they literally like made educated guesses about the market, the, the target URL to access the model. If your model is truly as dangerous as you have made it out to be over the last two weeks. If I am Anthropic, this announcement, you should be hair on fire running around. Because if they did it by guessing a URL and having contractor access, God knows who else has it.

29:19Ranjan Roy:China already has it. The whole Jensen-Dwark-ish thing just becomes moot. Like, if it is so powerful and dangerous, this should be the biggest story. And they should be telling the world how not only are they incredibly sorry about what has happened, they are doing everything in their power to actually fix this. and nothing this is just like they don't care i don't know dude like if it's truly breached in such a pedestrian way like shouldn't they care more well first of all i'll say just because a couple of dorks in the discord got access to mythos doesn't mean that the cyber offensive capabilities of mythos are a lie um if you would have given it to everybody and and had a nothing burger, then I would have said something, but it's not on its face disqualifying.

30:09Then I'll say it's we're already now in week three of this mythos real. And I appreciate your skepticism around it. I really do. I think that we just we've kind of here are this is our new product or the model. I think you and I are kind of at an impasse. And we're just going to have to wait and see to get that answer.

30:27Ranjan Roy:No, no. But I want to ask, shouldn't that be more important if a couple of guys and a couple of folks in the discord are able to access your like potentially world destructive model shouldn't that be if you are working for anthropic if you're leading anthropic shouldn't that be the most terrifying thing imaginable if it is real i mean let me put it this way hasn't anthropic had a number of similar situations the source code for like claude code And the wood leaked and all this stuff. And it's just like they're – I think it's almost like they're leaving too much to Claude. And they probably should have thought this through.

31:07Why didn't Claude tell them to change the naming convention if they were working on this release? If it's so good and powerful. No, you're right.

31:14Ranjan Roy:I think it's just more – like the kind of whiplash from most dangerous thing on earth, sandwich in the park, the model is coming to life and you're anthropomorphizing it. And it's like going to come out and take you and send emails and posts without your – like going from that to, oh, yeah, by the way, anyone can access it by guessing a URL and some contractor access and whatever. To me, it just doesn't square. You and – I brought this up in the Greg Brockman conversation yesterday. But you and Sam Altman have a similar perspective on this. But this is just a – so Sam Altman was on Ashley Vance's podcast this week and he talked about Mythos.

31:59And he said, it's clearly incredible marketing to say we've built a bomb. We were about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for$100 million thrown across all your stuff, but only if we pick you as a customer.

32:12Ranjan Roy:That's good. That is good. Okay. Maybe Sam does love us. maybe he wants to make magic at scale which is i think what the rest of that tweet said yep well magic at hyperscale magic just at scale would be yeah i mean that's who wants that come on uh well did get dario back into the white house looks like they're gonna have a deal with the white house again to start working with the whole government so if anything it did that magic at hyperscale that's all i'm thinking about right now that's my new purpose in life to deliver magic at hyperscale i don't know how but that's what that's what i want to do you're now having this skepticism around ai so this might be a good opportunity for me to read a comment that we got on the uh on the brockman video and and see what you think uh we're closing in on four years since lm models were broadly released to the public and you guys are still talking about how the next model will be so amazing always the next one meanwhile oracle laid off half its company facebook is in the current currently in the process of laying off half its company data centers are being canceled one after another chat chipt now has ads it was a good run try and time to pivot to the next topic that's a good our listener we got some spicy we have smart like it by the way i like it i appreciate our reader feedback our listener feedback, our viewer feedback, just as long as it's not two stars in the Apple podcast or Spotify app.

33:44But when people disagree with us, I like it. It's mind expanding. You know, we are because we are again in this world where it's like, all right, the next model is going to be so good. But I would say they've improved. I would say it's really hard to argue that they haven't improved.

33:59Ranjan Roy:I will say they've dramatically improved. Again, I work in the industry. I was the one who said when everyone said 5.0 or 5.1 was a dud, that reasoning and tool calling were going to be the next big thing. You were right. There's been dramatic step changes along the way. But I also fully empathize with the listener that, like, I hate the talk about the next model. And what I was saying a few moments ago, I want the next model release to be as boring as whatever Adobe launched at Summit this week. or Microsoft launched it, whatever else, co-pilot for a co-work or whatever else. You know, like that's what it should be, not like beware humanity, our next model is dropping.

34:48You want to know what I think is getting underplayed this week? And you already mentioned it, but I think we should just say this before we go to break. The ChatGPT Images 2.0 is insane. Oh, it's insane. It can search the web. It can edit images. I mean, it is, I've tested like crazy every one of these image generators from Dolly on out. This thing is insane. Insane. No, no. This is why this was genuinely, I would put this at step change on the image generation side.

35:22Ranjan Roy:The thinking side wasn't as interesting to me because any recent model should be able to do this kind of multi-step reasoning. And if web search is part of it. But like just seeing the outputs and I've seen a lot of kind of what got us all excited about Nano Banana 2 or Nano Banana Gemini Flash 2 like looks cartoonish already compared to what like ChatGPT Image 2 is doing. So I think this was big. This was actually a very impressive thing. Do I think? But it's interesting. It's a software update that is good. Do I think it's going to change humanity? No, but it was very impressive. This was the first one that actually had me worrying about the future of graphic designers.

36:10Is that good? I'm not even kidding.

36:13Ranjan Roy:Oh, I guess. I mean, I've worried about the future of graphic designers who do traditional graphic design for a long time. And actually, I mean, Claude design and what it's able to do, I think this has been coming for a while. And I think like just being able to do some kind of like image alteration or improvement or even like UX layout of a website, I think that kind of skill has been going the way of someone kind of like writing email subject lines for a long time. But I guess to me that didn't change that much. It is interesting, like visual communication and because what I saw happening much better with this is actually kind of communicating an idea like Nano Banana could do some kind of like good cartoonish flow charts.

37:09Ranjan Roy:but like gbt image 2 actually was communicating visual concepts much much better or like communicating visually not even visual concepts agreed all right let's take a break and talk about these cuts at meta and whatever else we can fit in until we have to go we'll be back right after this i've interviewed a lot of great tech founders on this show and one surprisingly universal challenge comes up again and again finding the right domain name it's something I ran into myself when launching big technology. The names you want are often taken, and it's tempting to just settle and move on. But the founders I respect most don't settle on fundamentals, and your name is one of them.

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39:58Meta Platforms plans to cut 10 % of workers or roughly 8 ,000 employees in an effort to boost efficiency and offset its heavy spending on artificial intelligence. The company disclosed the move in a memo sent to employees Thursday. Meta also won't hire workers for 6 ,000 open roles that it had intended to fill. The job cuts come as Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is spending aggressively on the talent and infrastructure needed to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence products, including LLMs and chatbots. Well, as if that was not enough, this is from Reuters. Meta does start capturing employee mouse movements keystrokes for AI training data.

40:39Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomy, the company told staffers in an internal memo seen by Reuters. One hand, laying people off. On the other hand, those that stay have the pleasure of their movements and keystrokes and whatever they're doing on their computers being used to train AI. Your reaction?

41:13Ranjan Roy:Okay, let's separate out the two. The first, it actually shocked me, or it didn't shock me, but it's just, it's incredible to me that for years on the metaverse spending and reality labs, they never would tie any kind of cost cutting efforts. The entire year of efficiency, was that 2024? 2023? 23. 23. Like he never directly attributed it to because we are spending so much on the metaverse. And it's kind of like amazing that now we are cutting 8 ,000 people to offset our heavy spending on artificial intelligence. So the market I get loves hearing that. So investors love hearing that. So people will continue to do it.

42:03But I don't know.

42:04Ranjan Roy:I feel – do you think it's the right way to communicate for these companies just because they know it will pop their stock in the short run? Well, this is one I don't think is about comms at all. I think this is legitimately like they are doing what they said they're doing, right? Is it over hiring an abloated company that just needs to actually trim itself, which is, I think, very true for many, many of these big companies, especially over the last five years? Or is it really like we need to cut costs so we can invest more in artificial intelligence? I think it's the latter. I mean, they've spent so much money on AI, they're spending on the data centers.

42:45The market is actually much less forgiving if you don't have margins, right? And they don't have, I mean, they have some ROI on the AI because it's helping optimize their creative stack. And I think there was a headline recently that they're going to pass Google as the largest advertising business. So they see the results there. But they're not a platform that's sort of benefiting from this surge in demand for AI compute. They haven't built super AI super intelligence. So they are in a position where they cannot remain this bloated, especially as they don't have the leading model.

43:25Ranjan Roy:Well, but normally they've spent a lot of money. So just saying we will spend more money to me isn't a reassuring message. Like as a headline, it sounds like, OK, this is good. This is what everyone needs to be doing. But like money has not been the problem. What were they paying people a couple of months ago to join? I mean, this is facetious, but they effectively spent$15 billion to hire Alexander Wang. Yeah. I mean, so more money is not the answer. So, like, again, I get if the company is just bloated, if he wants to kind of like start to make things leaner, go into Zuck beast mode, year of efficiency type stuff.

44:13Ranjan Roy:I mean, if anyone is able to do that well and better than others, it's Zuckerberg. But like, I don't know, just because it means we'll be able to invest more. I still, I don't quite buy that. But that's separate from the key tracking. That? Yeah. Talk about that. I, it's one of those that it starts to make like purely technically, it's almost kind of interesting. Like if it's terrifying, but it's interesting in terms of is everyone essentially training models to do the things they're doing repetitively, which is efficient, I guess. um i guess like yeah why do you work there then i think if the goal is maybe there could be an inspiring all right here's my attempt here in the future the type of work you will need to be doing is and i believe this like moving a little bit of information from system a to system b making a little presentation around it doing a little kind of like adding your own tiny bit of insider analysis and being that cog in a larger process is not going to be a lot of knowledge work.

45:29Ranjan Roy:So maybe Zuckerberg can stand up and he can just be like, I am preparing you all for the future. So you can be the best positioned out of any kind of tech company employee to kind of meet the needs of this future. That's my inspiring message behind this. i mean i bought it i hope he'd be doing it like on you know locked in his office on like a conference room phone because he would get vegetables thrown at him from the meta cafeteria if he said that um you know in in the history of of labor and transitions of this nature there was a practice back in the day called taylorism where they they measured the movements of people working in the factory and they got them to move as efficiently as possible.

46:19They literally controlled their movement to be like a machine so there wouldn't be any wasted movement. And then eventually they replaced many of them with machines. I just don't see stories like this ending in the right way for the worker. And I will say there's one interesting wrinkle here, which is that, do you remember Scale AI, Alexander Wang's old company? They told me recently that most of the training that they're doing is reinforcement learning, where you build environments for the bots and they go and they try to figure out what to do. And well, what do you need to do to build these great reinforcement learning environments?

47:04You sort of need to show them forms and web behavior and stuff like that. And then you try to get them to model it. And with Alexander Wang within meta, I wouldn't be stunned if that is what's happening is that, you know, maybe the other way to read this is instead of like a complete AI automation move, it is effectively building gyms for bots that need more environments to do reinforcement learning within.

47:31Ranjan Roy:That is fascinating. And if Alexander Wang is adding value post-acquisition in this way, maybe that$15 billion was worth it. I was kind of fascinated. There was no denial at all of this happening. Like part of the reporting was that the CTO, Andrew Boz, like he responded in the thread that there is no option out of this on your work provided laptop. This comment received a mix of crying, shocked and angry face emojis. But also the official response from Meta to Business Insider was there are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content and the data is not used for any other purpose. like they it is amazing to me that they just they said it there's no backing off of what they're doing so so this is this is kind of nuts it's crazy yeah there's definitely a few jobs that i've held in my life that i really would not want this software to be installed on uh because i had nothing to do and spent a lot of time on my college humor.com see this is actually imagine if everyone is just on Twitter, is not doing work, and that's what all the training data is received.

48:54Ranjan Roy:And like, the agents just, like, they start, he starts to put them to work, and then they're just scrolling, and then they go to Instagram, and then they like... You're going to see these agents, you're right. They're going to be tasked with like, you know, writing a deck for you. You're going to have it take over your computer. Midway through, It's going to be on YouTube watching dogs on skateboards. And you're going to be like, what's going on here? It's like, well, I learned that this is the right way to do work. Trust the data. Trust the data. Trust the training. I'm sure we'll end up seeing some ridiculous study about this.

49:31And it'll be like AI models that procrastinate are actually more effective than AI models that stick to task.

49:38Ranjan Roy:Actually, did you see, I think she was like the anthropic ethicist. there's all these videos going around around like this interview basically the idea was like she was she's like the one who's under supposed to understand like the emotional underpinnings of claude and the model and like oh yeah was talking about amanda askell yeah and how it is anxious and so maybe you should let your agent watch a little youtube surf a little x just it It will get the job done in a more efficient way. When you push it too hard, it's just not going to do a good job. Give it a break. Don't we all need a break?

50:22Don't we all just need some time to divert from task and try something completely meaningless? That's what being human is all about.

50:34Ranjan Roy:And it will learn as it tracks your behavior if you're a meta employee. i could just imagine all these meta employees like built having ai token max doing some dumb shit while spending the whole day like watching videos on the phone that's the truth that is that is the future of work in 2026 if there's a silicon valley if that show existed now i wonder if there will be a new version of that but there's just so much material kind of hard to parody at this point because it is so ridiculous as it is. Yeah, you're right. There's no parody. All right. So look, as we come to a close, we've had this basically comparison of streaming prices in our prep doc for weeks now, and we have an opening for a rant.

51:22So why don't you take us home, Ronjan, with a little exposition here on the increase in streaming prices and what it means.

51:30Ranjan Roy:So the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the consumer price index rise in the last year was 2.6%. Now, as someone who's subscribed to too many streaming services over the last years and does not know when to cut what and has a son who won't let them cut Disney Plus and a wife who said the idea of Netflix or HBO ever leaving or even Hulu or Peacock, you know, these things. So I was curious because Netflix the other day just raised prices to$15.99 for the individual plan, but they severely restrict you in number of devices. So I think I'm paying$27 now, which is insane. So I went back and looked.

52:19Ranjan Roy:Since 2019, because it was kind of like pre-pandemic, how much have prices gone up? And we all knew there was this moment where the streaming business did not make sense, and this was a loss leader for all these companies other than Netflix. So Disney Plus came out at$6.99. It's currently$18.99. Hulu went from$11.99 to$18.99. HBO Max actually to their premium positioning only$14.99 to$18.99 now. Peacock basically$5 to$11. Paramount Plus$5 to$8. Apple TV again going back to my hatred of their services business now comes in at$5 bundles you in now it's$13 a month like all of these things I think I don't know, when you look at your monthly expenses, then deciding what you're going to have to cut.

53:15Ranjan Roy:And you see this across everything. It was the Uber mentality as well. But I think, I don't know, I was thinking like there needs to be an inflation metric relative to the average, probably big technology listener, tech industry participant, just kind of like, I don't know, just like upwardly mobile tech savvy person that is just stuck subscribing to all this do you spotify has been jacked up as well and there's no backlash there's no big consumer like movement to actually like cancel these services are you cutting any of these i i have tried for a while to like just be subscribed to the one that i use most often but i've given up i'm like quite fatigued at like trying to cancel netflix and then reinstalling it and stuff like that so now i have netflix i have prime video hbo and i think i think i subscribed to like power mount plus for like 30 bucks for the year i wanted to watch the south parks with the ai so but then you have Peacock for Premier League, Paramount and NFL, Paramount Plus for NFL.

54:33Ranjan Roy:I don't know. It is interesting to me that I was at my parents' place who still have cable and it actually kind of made me miss cable. And I don't know, I think they're spending like 180 bucks, which I think I'm spending more now. But is all this AI hype going to end up with us longing for the days of basically what streaming has done, making me wish and miss cable. Is that what's going to happen? Well, first of all, it's just going to get worse for two reasons. Uh, one is we're starting to see consolidation in the space. Like you have Netflix as this clear winter and then, um, and then Paramount and Warner brothers discovery are going to tie up.

55:15Right. So like you're going to see, well, it is actually good that the two will balance each other out. But like the days of every streamer competing with every streamer kind of on even footing in price matters, it seems to be away, seems to be going away. And then of course, with AI trained on human screen behavior, they now are required to watch at least five hours of Netflix during the workday. And that is a demand signal that we're all going and get screwed by.

55:45Ranjan Roy:And then Apple and Ternus will somehow solve it all and unbundle all their subscription services and actually make it just a product I'm excited about and I don't feel trapped by. That is something that Apple could do. So maybe they will. I will be, again, iCloud freaking photos. I'm paying$40 a month. I don't even know how. It literally was telling me that, like it was telling me, telling my wife If we're on a family plan, like you will lose access to your photos your entire life. Like if you do not pay us gun to head, that is the Apple services business model now. They certainly have. I will say this.

56:29They certainly have some mafia-esque business practices in there. So, I mean, Ternus, of course, will have to make money to bring a full circle. But hopefully he like looks at this and just realizes it's going to be his legacy. And decides not to do stuff like this because that sucks.

56:46Ranjan Roy:Do you think there's subscription revenue tied to the tabletop robot? I hope so. I hope so. It's consumption-based, token-based. That's it. Every time it moves, the more complex it does. You just get an iPhone notification. You've been charged another. Oh, my God. I can just imagine the ad. The scene fades in from Black. standing next to a beautiful glass table with a tabletop robot and a screen attached to its hand is one Ron John Roy. Here's how the ad begins. Hi, I'm Ron John Roy. I hope you're enjoying your tabletop robot and I hope you keep paying$10.99 a month for the pleasure of being able to preserve everything in your house.

57:33Because once your subscription lasts, I will be using these

57:37Ranjan Roy:robots to smash your shit up that's that is the turnus business model and the stock is gonna skyrocket that's it that's it now we figured it we at least figured it out figured out what the tabletop robot is for there it is merely a threat it's merely a threat to keep paying your services bill gotta have something that thing will knock you the fuck out of you Now that is innovation and that is how we will end another week here on Big Technology Podcast, Friday edition. Ranjan, great to see you as always. Thank you again for coming on. See you next week. Nothing is safe. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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