Experts Sound Alarms on AI & Sugar Prices Hit 5-Year Low

0:28Recently, I got an ad for the best lawn fertilizer. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions apply. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, AI presents an existential threat to humanity, say people working on AI. Then the hottest stock right now is a 175-year-old glassmaker. It's Friday, February 13th. Let's ride.

1:01Today is Friday the 13th. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. And a new pop-up in New York City manages to combine the doom and doting of both. This week, the chatbot platform Eva AI opened what it claims is the world's first AI dating cafe in New York City. What that means in practice is you go to this bar by yourself, sit down and put headphones on, then flirt with an avatar on an iPhone that's propped up on the table. Good luck to the server who's trying to take your order. No doubt this was mostly a marketing stunt, and the people who've showed up so far were more in it for the novelty of it all than to actually find digital love.

1:35But hey, at least AI is a cheap date. Yeah, there are certainly more influencers or media at this cafe than actual people taking their AI out for a date, but this is happening. People are talking romantically to AI companions. 28 % of American adults admitted to having at least one romantic encounter with AI as of last October. 42 % of high schoolers admitted to using AI companions for friendship. And then the Reddit community, our My Boyfriend is AI, has 48 ,000 users. So maybe they're not actually going out on dates to bars, but they are certainly speaking with them, maybe in the privacy of their own homes.

2:14This may be the first AI dating cafe, but it might not be the last. Absolutely not. And now a word from our sponsor, FlavCity. Neil, my smoothie budget is getting crazy. I'm buying all kinds of berries, powders, tonics, and don't even get me started on the price of mushrooms. That is crazy, especially when FlavCities all-in-one smoothies have the benefits of those ingredients in one bag. No blender needed. All right, well, there's no way it tastes better than my super secret smoothie recipe. No, they absolutely taste better than your gross weird smoothie. Whether that's the pleasantly pepperminty shamrock, banana bread, brownie batter, or any of their wide range of flavors, you get a tasty, protein-rich smoothie.

2:50All that and with 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen. Wow. Head to go.shopflavcity.com slash mbds. That's go.shopflavcity.com slash mbds. Something pretty unnerving happened this week. Leading researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the leading AI companies, said they were quitting. But it's not that they quit that'll give you goosebumps. It's how. After they left their jobs, these researchers wrote sermons warning that rapidly advancing AI could break containment and threaten humanity. In essence, they said that as employees on the inside of AI companies, they saw the future. And they're telling all of us on the outside that things are not under control.

3:31After Mrinang Sharma, who led Anthropics Safeguards Research Team, quit on Monday, he said, quote, the world is in peril. We appear to be approaching a threshold, he added, where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world lest we face the consequences. Now that he's left AI, he's going to pursue poetry. Another one of the defectors, Zoe Hitzig, said she was leaving Open AI because of, quote, deep reservations about the company's direction, specifically its recent push to include ads in ChatGPT. In the New York Times, she wrote, I once believed I could help the people building AI get ahead of the problems it would create.

4:04This week confirmed my slow realization that Open AI seems to have stopped asking the questions I joined to help answer. And I didn't even mention the most discussed piece of AI doomsday literature that arrived this week. In a mega viral article on ex-AI entrepreneur Matt Schumer compared our current situation to February 2020, when many people dismissed what would later become a global pandemic. Toby, you freaking out? I don't know if I should be freaking out, Neil, and that's the problem. It's never good when the loudest warnings are coming from the people closest to these problems, but I really don't know what I'm supposed to think just sitting as a normal, casual user of AI?

4:41Is this just another part of the cycle where people start yelling out doomsday scenarios? We've been hearing this since AI kind of came to fruition a couple of years ago. Why is now a better moment? And there are a few things that you could point to that say, yes, this is now a moment to be concerned, mainly that AI is getting better at self-improving. It's getting better at using code to improve itself. And that is a slippery slope that if OpenAI's latest codex model, for instance, writes the code that improves upon itself, then humans are out of the loop and it can kind of spiral into the singularity, can spiral into a Terminator scenario.

5:20These are all the things that people, you know, keep AI researchers up at night. So I don't know if this is a real inflection point. It feels like it because of all the people that just quit at the same time, or maybe it's just another bump in the road. Yeah. Yesterday, Spotify went on its earnings call, had its earnings call, and they said that the best developers at their company have not written a single line of code since December. ChatGPT 5.3 Codex, which is OpenAI's coding tool, said it was our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. And then Claude Cowork said that, which is Anthropix's coding tool, said that it was written almost entirely by Claude itself.

6:02So we're seeing the proliferation of agents. These are AI that'll basically go into your computer and do everything you can for you. Seems like this is perhaps the tipping point. This is perhaps the AI advancement that has led to this wave of resignations and these increasing calls of not just doomsday scenarios like Terminator, but also just a huge job wipeout. These are software engineers saying, I'm not needed anymore. Like, this is doing my job. Just wait for it's coming to you next. And meanwhile, there's this insane juxtaposition happening right now because Anthropics just raised$30 billion at a$385 billion valuation.

6:41Their run rate has grown to$14 billion. That is 10x growth annually. It is an insane company right now. I have some stats from Axios on the adoption of Anthropics Cloud Code. That revenue has risen above$2.5 billion, more than double at the start of the year. Its weekly active users have also doubled. Customers spending over 100 ,000 annually have grown 7x over the past year. And according to Anthropic, eight of Fortune 10 companies are now clawed customers. So everyone in their mother at the highest levels of corporate America have adopted this coding tool. And we have never seen revenue growth at this speed, which is crazy to talk about as soon, in the same sentence as talking about all these researchers quitting because of AI safety concerns.

7:26And the question a lot of people are asking is, where is Washington on this? You have even Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei is saying, yes, there's a small chance that we're going to like the stuff I'm working on is going to wipe out humanity. Saw this wave of resignations, but there's basically crickets coming from Washington, D.C. Well, a bunch of pro-AI and anti-AI forces are coming together to make this a big issue in the upcoming midterm elections. Anthropic, we keep coming back to them, just announced it's putting $220 million into an AI regulation pack ahead of the midterm elections. Meanwhile, on the other side, you have a pro AI pack that has raised$125 million so far.

8:07That's from Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder. So you're seeing a lot of war chests being raised to go after this issue and whether or not we should actually regulate AI and to what extent, especially as these calls from the inside grow louder. All right, let's move on to our Stock the Week and Dog the Week, the segment where we pick one stock that controls the concentric and eccentric portion of their lifts and one stock that just lets the weight flop around. I won the pre-show game of who can stick a sticky note higher on a wall, so I'm up first. And my stock of the week is Corning. Corning is a 175-year-old company that used to make light bulbs for Thomas Edison, but now it's one of the hottest names in the AI trade because of its focus on fiber optic cables.

8:49Fiber optics flopped hard in the wake of the dot-com bubble, but have found second life as the arteries inside data centers. Fiber optics use light to transmit data instead of electrons, making them more efficient for server-to-server cabling compared to something like a copper cable. And Corning is the Michael Jordan of these things. According to the Wall Street Journal, they pull glass strands until they are as thin as a human hair, sometimes stretching 30 miles long. They're so translucent, you could fill an empty pool and still see the bottom. Corning actually lost money for years before data centers showed up, but everything changed after ChatGPT launched.

9:24It took them 50 years to sell its first 1 billion miles of optical fiber, then just eight years to sell its next billion. The third billion will come even sooner. Investors have certainly taken notice. Corning is up 15 % in the last week and 158 % over the last year, surpassing its pre.com bubble high. I knew I should have invested in Corning instead of cornhole, Neil. Come on, Toby. I've noticed a pattern in our stocks of the week. I mean, at least last week we did Caterpillar, right? Which made generators that go into data centers. This week is Corning that makes fiber-operated cables that go into data centers.

10:01So I don't know, maybe if you're a savvy investor or someone who's looking to make some money in the stock market, you just look at whatever inputs are going into data centers and just try to invest in whatever company. I don't know if we're just doing the panels now or the catering company that's catering to the to the workers but this all stems it seems from a meeting in 2018 uh corning executives went to dallas to tour a data center owned by meta and they what they saw there was a lot of copper cables a lot of older fiber optic cables and there were just so many of them and they said okay maybe we should just make a better fiber optic cable because i'm already seeing a lot here this was back in 2018 and then 2022 comes along and absolutely supercharges demand for data centers, AI data centers, and fiber optic cables.

10:44And they were just like, oh yeah, we have all of this ready for you. We're already the biggest maker of fiber optic cables. And they were just ready to go to supply all of this data center build out worldwide. Yeah, a lot of company leadership would go, thank goodness we took that trip in 2018 because we would not be where we are today without that. I do wanna dig into why optical fiber is better than copper. And it's not necessarily better, it's just different. Power flows pretty well through copper, but data flows better through fiber. So it's kind of different use cases. It's just a lot more efficient too.

11:16Over short distance, photons, which are light packets that are traveling through fiber optics, they are three times more efficient. Over long distance, photons are 20 times more efficient. That's why it was a big part of the internet boom and internet revolution because it was so good at those things. But Corning also is just a cool company because it's made a lot of cool stuff over its time. I mentioned they were literally making glass bulbs for Thomas Edison back in the day. They also make Pyrex as well. They are part of the team that makes the iPhone and the hard-to-glass shatter. We just mentioned Corning earlier this week because Ferrari unveiled their new interior of an electric vehicle designed by former Apple designer Johnny Ive.

11:57And it is full of Corning components. So this company does tons of cool stuff. They're very innovative. They keep everything in-house. It's a name that people know but has just recently risen to the forefront. Yeah, the last time I thought about it, I think I was 10 years old. We were doing a road trip through upstate New York with my family, and we went to the Corning factory, which is up there, and it was pretty cool. And I didn't realize that I would be talking about it later on the podcast. Okay. You should have been investing in Corning instead of looking out the window playing the alphabet game, Neil.

12:27You could have been generationally wealthy by this point. All right. My dog of the week is C12H22011, better known as Sugar. According to the Financial Times, sugar prices have plunged to their lowest point in more than five years as people on GLP-1 treatments lose their sweet tooth. The decline is pretty staggering. Raw cane sugar futures have fallen to less than half of their levels from late 2023 and are sitting at prices not seen since October 2020. Traders told the FT that this is no doubt a result of weight loss drugs sapping future demand for sweets. Last year, 10 % of the entire U.S. population was on some form of GLP-1 drugs, whether Zip-bound, Wigobi, or any number of knockoffs.

13:06These drugs limit how much food you want to put in your stomach, very much including dessert. And so people are forecast to eat a lot less sugar going forward. And by a lot, I mean that the U.S. Department of Agriculture lowered its estimate of sugar use by 23 ,000 tons through 2026 because of a drop in human consumption. Toby, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Weight loss drugs are rapidly shaking up food markets. They're shaping up lots of different markets. I go to the supermarket aisle in the UK. Cottage cheese sales are up 50 % year over year, according to data from Numerator. You go to the airline industry.

13:41They are projecting$580 million of cost savings because slimmer passengers, lighten aircraft loaves, you save on fuel costs. And then also you look at the shares of the Magnum ice cream company that was recently spun off from Unilever. They said that we are facing structural risks posed by GLP-1 drugs. So you are seeing it in all sorts of categories, obviously food, but even as far as airplanes as well. The market for sugar specifically is very funny because there is a thing such as people with a sweet tooth because it's very top heavy. The top 20 % of consumers account for about 65 % of sales of sweet products like cookies and ice cream.

14:22So if GLP-1 gets to these super users, then this entire sugar market craters, because those of us on the 80 % spectrum, we're like, okay, sugar is fine, but I don't really care about it. But there are some superpower users that are kind of propping up this entire sugar industry. And if those fall by the wayside, then this entire thing collapses. Did you just put yourself within the 80 % of non-sweet tooth? You said those of us in the 80%. You know that. I'm not a big dessert. You're not a sweet tooth. I unfortunately am a sweet tooth. I am 100 % part of the 20 % there. Can I give you a secondary dog of the week too, Neil?

14:57I know your sugar one was great. I don't need a chemical formula for this one. Green light. I'm not, yeah, I don't even know why I asked permission. I'm going to do it anyways. So trucking logistics companies got wiped out over the past week, and you'll never believe why. It's because of AI fears of disrupting the industry. The Russell 3000 trucking index fell 6.6%. Landstar Systems down 16%. And C.H. Robinson was down 24 % for a record intraday drop. These are companies that sit between shippers and trucking capacity. But the market puked on itself because a company formerly known as the Singing Machine Company, a.k.a.

15:32a karaoke business, rebranded in 2024 into an AI logistics platform. And they announced this new thing called SemiCab that they claim helps customers scale freight volumes by 300 to 400 % without increasing operational headcount, basically making it a lot more efficient. Same trade that we've seen play out in many, many other parts of the economy. Now it just hit the trucking industry. It is insane because this website still references singing machines on it, and yet it just wiped out billions of dollars from major trucking companies. The stock market is jumpier than after I see a horror movie.

16:07First, it was software, wealth management, commercial real estate, now trucking. And these are just like really small announcements. It's just it's panic and nervousness everywhere. And tech stocks specifically have been down pretty hard this week. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with some Olympic stories right after this. I'm being more intentional with my everyday movement. Oh, yeah? Did that indoor putting green you ordered arrive yet? Not yet. But besides that, when I trained for the marathon last year, I realized it's less about metrics and more about what works for my body.

16:41and that's where Woop's wearable tech can help. Woop isn't about chasing numbers. It's about building awareness, spotting patterns, and knowing when to push and when to pull back so you can show up with more energy, presence, and intention. Turn insight into everyday action. Try it out at join.woop.com slash brewdaily. That's join.woop.com slash brewdaily. Do you have your Valentine's gifts sorted yet? No, dude. I'm with the 76 % of people that buy on February 13th and 14th. Got any ideas? Flowers? Chocolates? How about the ultimate Valentine's gift that includes everything? One that makes you look like you've been planning it for a lifetime.

17:21Ooh, yes. Now you've got my attention. How about a trip to paradise at a luxury Sandals resort in the Caribbean? That would boost your relationship more than anything else. And they have a sweetheart sale on now that runs until Monday. Be right back. I'm off to sandals.com to book me a sweet, sweet now. Neil, tax season is fast approaching and it's got me thinking about my finances. Yeah? Is this finally the year you're going to work with a financial professional? That is a way better idea than what I was thinking, especially since Northwestern Mutual can match you with a financial professional who will work with you to build a plan based on what's important to you and help grow your wealth and protect what you've worked so hard for.

18:02That's right. So find a better way to money at nm.com. That's nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. So we're a little Olympic-pilled right now, as I hope you are too, which is why we went down a bit of a curling rabbit hole recently. And in that rabbit hole, we discovered granite. Lots of beautiful granite sourced from a single uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland. Ailsa Craig, as it is known, is where all the granite that makes it into Olympic stones is found. According to CNN, the granite is exceptionally fine-grained with minerals arranged with such compactness that makes it resilient to collisions and allows it to be polished and become smooth enough to glide on ice.

18:47Dr. Bob Godet, a geological analyst at the National Museum Scotland, explains why it's aeus a craig or nothing. Professional curlers have used other kinds of stones which slide perfectly well, but when they hit each other, they don't bounce quite the same. In fact, it's so well-suited for curling that no other type of granite has ever been used in formal competition. Neil, I'll stop there before I get too granite excited and start talking about the differences between common green and blue hone. This granite on Ailsa Craig rocks. It really does. And what's super cool is the harvest operation. I guess they call it a harvest is when you take granite out of the landform.

19:25It's been described as a military operation. First of all, these harvests don't happen all that often because it's such a process. One was in 2013, and then another one, another harvest didn't happen until 2020. And they're doing a harvest this fall. So they happen every six, seven, eight years because they get a ton of granite over to the mainland. And that's kind of all they need to make curling stones. But this operation is pretty crazy. There is just one company, we should mention, that has the exclusive rights to harvest granite on this island. called Kays Scotland. So before they head over, they have to complete a 52-page environmental impact report.

20:05They have to bring a conservation consultant with them because this is basically an ecological preserves. There are endangered birds and seals there that you can't mess with as you're harvesting the granite. They even have to put rat traps on the landing craft they used because this island is rat-free and they can't have rats coming over. So it is a huge process with a lot of paperwork and you can understand why they only do it almost once every decade. And I know I said I wouldn't dive into the different types of granite, but I can't really help myself because a curling stone is not built just using one type, even though it is built using granite from Ailes Lecraig.

20:38There's common green and there's also blue and red hone. Common green makes up the body of the stone, including the striking band where the stones actually knock into each other. Common green is great because it gives its stone its springy nature. Like you want it to bounce off of each other. You don't want it to be dead on impact. And then the bottom running surface, as it's called, is actually used blue hone. It has the narrow running band that makes contact with the eye. So very small geochemical differences in the granite, but it makes it well-suited for the particular actions needed in curling.

21:13I never thought I would know this much about curling, but I'm very happy I do because now next Winter Olympics rolls around, you can say, oh, oh, I know where that granite comes from. It comes from Ailsa Craig. It's super interesting. And business is booming. So curling first appeared in the Olympics in 1924, was there for a few years, and then it kind of went dead and there was no curling at the Olympics until it started coming back. And then it wasn't added to the official program until 1998. And now a lot more people are playing curling. I guess you play curling. World Curling's membership has tripled since 1998 to 74 nations.

21:48and this case Scotland is doing pretty good business. It sells these curling stones for almost$1 ,000 and they produce 2 ,000 to 2 ,500 stones each year for 77 countries. Also, I thought this was a final fun fact about curling. It is the only sport in which the projectile's trajectory can be influenced after the athlete releases it. I don't know. I've been kind of like blowing on my darts as I'm playing darts inside a bar, but maybe that's against the rules. All right, we've talked about stones. Now I want to tell you about drones. Drones have been the under-the-radar winners of this Olympic Games.

22:21First-person drones, or FPV, are everywhere you look, following losers down the track, chasing skiers down a mountain, and racing after curling stones down the ice. Just kidding about that last one. But if you've been watching, you've definitely noticed them buzzing around. I was watching Luz earlier this week and kept seeing a little guy of sorts merge onto the track above the athletes. It happened over and over for every racer, and I just assumed it was an automated system running on cables or something. No, there is a dude piloting this thing in close quarters with no margin for error. In fact, every drone you see has a pilot behind the sticks and it's made viewing a lot more immersive.

23:01Social media is full of people saying they never truly understood how fast downhill skiers are going until a drone brought them close to the train going nearly 90 miles an hour. I can't get enough of these things. Yeah, these drones have been especially invaluable for those of us who want to get a closer look at doubles luge aka seated rivalry but if you think about the production challenge that's facing NBC and other broadcasters at the Winter Olympics I mean you are typically when you are broadcasting a sport it's very static in a contained atmosphere it's a basketball court it's a football field it's a hockey rink these are mostly indoor enclosures well now you have to show the audience what it's like to for someone to ski down 80 miles per hour a mountain or go down a luge or bobsled track or do a snowboard halfpipe.

23:48These are just kind of on the face of a mountain, and they're such huge landscapes and scenes that it's very hard for the viewer to understand what's going on. I think drones have been, which first appeared in the 2014 Sochi Olympics, have just been a huge unlock, not just for the Olympics, but for the broader TV broadcasting community to really give us a sense of scale and speed that these athletes are operating at. And I think the athletes like them because they do want you to understand their sports more. And the pilot of the ski jumping drone, for instance, is a ski jumper who knew a lot of the athletes personally.

24:21So he's coming to it with the intention of showcasing this sport very well, which, of course, the athletes are going to like. Some have complained about the noise of drones, which they are a little buzzy, but that's kind of a small majority. I was thinking about safety too, because these are athletes at very high speeds doing their thing. And then you also have these drones at very high speeds with very little margin of air sometimes. And according to the Olympics, the drones never fly over or in front of an athlete. So should something go wrong, it always crashes behind them, which feels very intuitive and smart when you think about it.

24:59Don't get ahead of your skis and fly your drone ahead of your luge athlete. And it's been working in the first five days of the Olympics. NBC viewership is up 93 % from Beijing four years ago. Now, that could have a lot of confounding variables like the time difference. Nope, it's the drones. And things like that. But it could be just that people are very into the Olympics. The Olympics has some sauce back. And a good part of that may be the drones and all the viral things going on social media about these new camera angles. And I know you've been waiting all day for this, all morning for this, the day seven viewing schedule from Neil.