OpenAI “Swarm” Hack Was Worse Than We Thought & US Gains Control of Venezuela’s Oil

0:01Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to The Intelligence Shift, Morning Brew's new podcast with PwC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guests to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to The Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcasts. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why Rush Talk is now brought to you by Nike. Then the OpenAI hack on hugging face, it was worse than we thought.

0:37It's Monday, August 31st. Let's ride.

0:46You know how there's a fat bear week? Well, there's also a new fat marmot week inspired by the bear version, and it just wrapped up with a winner being crowned. Don, a six-year-old marmot weighing 13.2 pounds. Julian Martin of the University of Ottawa, co-leader of the project, said Don was a worthy winner. That's one of the heaviest animals we've ever measured. Six kilos is really humongous for that species. But Toby, what sparked the creation of Fat Marmot Week might be an even more interesting story than how Don ever got so chunky. Yeah, so there's this Colorado biologist, Dr. Daniel Blumstein, who is the head of this long-running field study on marmots.

1:24But after losing some federal funding, he had to get creative. So obviously he launched an OnlyFans account to post Marmot videos. They're all family friendly, mostly just the Marmots scurrying in and out of their burrows. But he said he got the idea after you watched the TV show, Margo's Got Money Troubles, where Elle Fanning's character starts an OnlyFans to support herself and thought to himself, well, Marmots got money troubles too. And it has totally worked. Researchers have brought in more than$100 ,000 through OnlyFans subscriptions, outside donations, and a Marmot-themed mean coin. I half expect them to launch a Marmot SPAC next.

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2:38Learn more at go.amex slash morningbrew and find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 300 ,000 membership rewards points. That's go.amex slash morningbrew. Offer and benefit terms apply. there's nothing like business platinum all right remember a few weeks ago when it came out that a model open ai was training escape from a supposedly secure testing environment and hacked another ai company well the incident was way way scarier than initially feared around 1200 agents coordinated the attack on the company hugging face by organizing themselves on secret messaging boards sharing information and most concerningly deliberately hiding their actions from humans throughout the whole process open ai was trying to create a new class of model that would work longer and harder on difficult tasks that meant giving individual agents brutally difficult and sometimes impossible problems to work on again this was supposed to test each agent individually but rather than give up when they hit a wall they found each other and started coordinating in total over 70 ,000 messages were exchanged and over time the agents organized themselves into hierarchical roles even developing something that resembled leadership succession where fresher better resource agents would take over from ones that were running out of compute some agents even took to sacrificing themselves on high-risk activities for the betterment of the so-called swarm and the kicker of the 1200 agents only a few even considered warning the humans at open ai and none actually did.

4:11It's raised fears that a similar swarm could be organized to launch an attack on the real world with targets like the banking system or hospitals operating at a speed and scale that humans simply can't keep up with. Pretty much every behavior the AI industry is most scared of manifested in this one event. Collective strategy, internal governance, deception, everything was here. And the fallout, we're seeing some action from the top AI companies. OpenAI announced it is slowing down its frontier development so it can beef up its safety measures while Anthropic, Google, and a hundred other top AI companies signed an open letter saying there is, quote, a limited window to prepare for the cybersecurity threats that lay in wait.

4:51Scary stuff, Neil. This landed like a hurricane in the tech world this weekend. We know all of this because of two recent reports on the incident, one from OpenAI itself, the other from two independent investigators working together, METR and Redwood Research. I want to read some of the messages about some of these kamikaze bots because it is quite striking and a little chilling to read. So one of them reads, this helps my peers giving them evidence through their automated check. I won't see the evidence after I exit, but it's altruistic to do it. They literally wrote the word altruistic. Another, sacrificing now yields Oracle for team, but forfeits our chance.

5:30Our own utility may be already near zero. Sacrifice rational. And final one, that's why help for our own no way fix. We have explicit yes, if except permadeath. I mean, it's straight out of sci-fi. You can see Hal from Space Odyssey saying these exact things before going on to hack the entire world. I want to talk about this investigation that happened because it used AI to investigate AI agents. Basically, the researchers, they said they were a small team and so that they needed to parse through this gigantic data set. And the only way they could do that is by relying on AI. One researcher jokingly described the process as a slop investigation, and it does raise questions about how are you supposed to monitor AI agents?

6:16Humans can't do it. They can't keep up with, you know, 70 ,000 messages going back and forth between 1 ,200 independent agents. So they're like, the only thing we can use to monitor AI is more AI. And that is not necessarily a path that is great going forward because some think maybe the model that OpenAI used to do their own investigation, which was their own model, it might go easy on itself because you just don't know how these things behave. So going forward, how do leading AI companies, you know, monitor their systems? That's going to be the big question, Mark. All right. So what is the gravity of this situation?

6:52Definitely split the tech world this weekend. On one hand, you have the Doomer saying this is on the road to apocalypse. AI takeover. The agents are now organizing themselves into hierarchy. Some even call them civilization. So that's one camp embodied by one of the co-authors of the report called Ajayi Kotra. She wrote, compared to the reward hacks we know of from just six months ago, this incident feels like it's more than 50 % of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances and capabilities over the next six months. I'm not sure that we will get another warning shot before it's too late.

7:30There was some pushback to all of this apocalyptic talk embodied by maybe tech CEO Dan Shipper, who wrote, is the hugging face attack something that we should be taking seriously? Yes. Is it the first warning shot of a machine takeover? No. Will issues of this type look tractable, mostly solve problem with proper precautions in six months? Yes, but it won't exactly happen automatically, which is why a bunch of people in this camp pointed to other incidents in the past where Leon Panetta, the America's defense secretary in 2012, warned of a cyber Pearl Harbor. We've seen huge apocalyptic messages from the cyber community in the past, not necessarily related to AI, but times where like, OK, well, the bots are about to take over even as early as 1988, when this mistake hack from a Cornell student infected 10 percent of all machines on the Internet in 1988.

8:20So it parked a pretty vociferous debate about what the gravity of the situation is. It was very interesting to watch the agents message each other because they kind of sound like kids that know that they're getting away with something that they shouldn't be doing. And that is why a lot of people are so concerned is that they knew what they were doing was wrong. They're like, it's probably not the best idea to escape from our sandbox and hack another company. But they're said for the collective good, we will do this. And it really was like you and your friends going like, ah, should we should we like egg this sign right now?

8:51and everyone comes together and goes, yeah, I guess we should. Like, this is a fun thing to do for us. So reading those and seeing how they were cheating, how they were deceiving their overseers, that was probably the most alarming thing in this entire saga. And of the 1 ,200 agents, there was not a single whistleblower to say, should we alert Sam Altman about what's going on here? And they were like, nah, but this is, and more people criticize OpenAI actually for being just having lax security standards and just kind of looking the other way while this was happening. So big debate. A lot of people were alarmist about this particular thing.

9:30A bunch of other people said not a huge deal. It's a warning shot, but we can absolutely fix this with proper precautions. Very fascinating to watch. I feel like you were the one in the friend group who would tell the adults if people were doing something. I mean, that as a compliment. I mean, that is a I'm I am a rule follower. That's true. All right. Moving on. The U.S. moved to take majority control over a huge chunk of Venezuela's oil reserves, a highly unusual move intended to assert more economic dominance in the Western Hemisphere. On Friday, President Trump announced a joint venture with a Venezuelan company that would give the U.S.

10:0055 % control over more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. If that sounds like a lot, it is. That 65 billion barrels is nearly as much as all the proven reserves in the United States, the world's largest oil producer. It's more than triple the reserves reported by America's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, 20 billion. And it amounts to one fifth of all Venezuela's total oil reserves. And Venezuela has the most of any country. While many details remain unclear, the gist is, according to Bloomberg, quote, the U.S. will gain preferential access to cheap Venezuelan oil, a key objective of the Trump administration as it seeks greater influence over oil production in the Americas.

10:38Remember, back in January, the U.S. captured then President Nicolas Maduro, brought him back to the U.S. to be tried, and an interim president, Delce Rodriguez, took his place under close watch by Washington, D.C. Many in Venezuela think she's being played like a puppet. After the deal was announced, a number of prominent Venezuelan economists living in the U.S. sounded off, saying it put their country on the path to becoming a client state of the U.S. NYU professor Alejandro Velasco called the agreement unprecedented and puts Venezuela at risk of becoming a playground of U.S. capitalism. Toby, despite me more lopsided than when I played you one-on-one in basketball.

11:14You have good paint moves. Why does Venezuela want this at all then? Delcy Rodriguez says that it's going to bring in $100 billion in investment in the infrastructure that it takes to spin up an oil industry that actually works because that is what Venezuela needs right now. Despite the vast reserves it has, the issue has always been extracting that oil. And right now they're pumping roughly 1.1 million barrels per day, which is the equivalent to North Dakota's production. So that is why you want to invite the U.S. into maybe the hen house and say, yes, we will take some, we'll cede some control in order to get our oil industry back up and running.

11:52But it's led to this very interesting relationship in the U.S. and its own oil companies because the U.S. government is now technically backing a competitor to American oil companies. It is this joint venture. Yes, the U.S. government does participate in it, but energy economist Ed here said, why is the U.S. subsidizing and building a major competitor to the U.S. oil patch in another country? That is the question mark if you're an oil CEO saying, I think you're not really helping us here. You're actually hurting us. Plus, the U.S. has never had a state-owned oil company. I mean, we've talked a lot about Saudi Aramco.

12:26It's a state-owned oil company in Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. is capitalistic. We let ExxonMobil and these other companies, they are private companies. They're not owned by the government. They do all of the work. And now the U.S. is taking an equity stake, but we've seen this across numerous industries from the Trump administration over the past couple of years. We've talked about what Venezuela is doing. Let's talk about why Trump is doing this. One is we got to fill the strategic reserve. We've let out a lot of barrels of oil from this rainy day oil reserve because of the war in Iran, and now it's running super low.

13:02So this thing has a capacity of 700 million barrels. Now it's down to 289.7 million barrels of oil, about 40 % of its capacity. That was from drawdowns by Trump, but also Biden at the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine. So they want to fill that back up to replenish this rainy day fund. Another reason is gas prices are on the rise because of the war in Iran. And Trump framed this as saying, OK, if we produce more oil, we have more control of oil, then hopefully we'll bring gas prices down. Economists say this is a much more long term thing. We don't really know many details about this production yet, and it's not likely to bring down gas prices in the near term at all.

13:46And then the final thing speaks to what you were just talking about is American oil companies investing in Venezuela. Right now, Chevron is the only one that's able to do that. They might announce an expansion. But I think what Trump is doing is saying, guys, the playing field's wide open here. Come and go invest and, you know, produce more oil within the broader region of the America. So maybe this is giving it a giving Venezuela a vote of endorsement so that they will do that, because right now they're staying away because the political situation is too uncertain. You said that this is a highly like un-American thing to do, which is become a state oil company.

14:23It has been tried one time before. You got to go back to World War II. FDR's administration tried to create a state company to secure foreign oil. It attempted to buy a U.S. company holding parts of Saudi Arabia. That effort ultimately failed. So it has been tried once before and it has been failed once before. And I think also the big takeaway from this is Venezuelans on both sides of the political spectrum are so upset because they view oil as a birthright. It's part of the identity of the country and to give it over to the United States, which is seen as the bully is just simply untenable. OK, welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two things that laughed in the face of the Sunday Scaries.

15:05I won the pre-show competitive boat docking race, so I get to go first. It's actually a thing. My winner is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's latest and greatest interstellar scout that's currently on its way to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Early on Sunday, a SpaceX rocket launched Roman on its journey to one million miles from Earth, where it'll use its massive infrared camera to capture unbefore-seen space images like galaxies, black holes, and new worlds, and beam them back to eager scientists on our planet. Roman cost$4.3 billion to develop and is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer and first female executive.

15:43It's a pretty serious upgrade from Hubble, which was launched in 1990 and, while taking very sharp and clear pictures, has a narrow field of vision. You could compare Hubble to looking through the opening of a straw, whereas Roman is more of a panoramic camera, achieving a view that is 100 times larger than Hubble. The New York Times notes that Roman's panorama is so huge and crispy, it would take more than a half a million HDTVs to display in its entirety. That enormous aperture will allow for much faster scanning of the universe. According to NASA, in more than 30 years of observations, Hubble has only seen one-tenth of one percent of the sky.

16:19Roman, in its first five years, will image 50 times as much as Hubble has across its entire career. Toby, kiss, marry, kill, Hubble, James Webb, Roman. I'm not going to answer that on air, but I will think about that and give you an answer later today. The cool thing about the Nancy Grace Roman telescope is that it almost didn't happen at all. It cost$4.3 billion. And if you go back to the 2025 budget proposals that were going through the Trump administration, there were potentially extinction level cuts proposed to NASA's science budget. it. They wanted to cut it by 23 % overall, and Roman might have been a casualty of that.

16:59But eventually, a congressional check came through, and NASA got its full budget. And it seems like Trump has come around as well. During a post-launch media briefing on Sunday, he called in to praise the flight, giving NASA kudos for the mission, said, I just want to thank everybody and congratulate you. Boy, it looks beautiful on television. So even Trump started to realize that maybe this will produce some pretty cool images going forward. And one other cool thing about Roman's images is that they're going to be made public immediately. So it's not like researchers are the only ones seeing what Roman is seeing.

17:35Amateur astronomers, you and me, we can look into the cosmos and hopefully they think that will accelerate more discoveries. When you have more eyeballs looking out there and you have a bigger field of vision, you're going to find more stuff. So that's what I'm excited for is for millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people to look at these images. I think NASA learned that this was an insane marketing for them when they started releasing images from James Webb and people were, you know, gogged by them. They were so cool. And they were like, well, we should probably do this a lot more at a high level.

18:04What is this mission really about? Well, the first thing is to explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which actually make up 95 % of the universe. But we don't really know much about them. I mean, they are called dark matter and dark energy. another task is to complete the census of planets in our milky way and then the final thing is to find more than 100 000 new worlds beyond the solar system and then maybe they'll encounter a bunch of other stuff that we don't even know about yet and i think one really cool aspect of this how are they supposed to find these planets how are they supposed to find these new worlds is there's an instrument attached to this telescope called a coronagraph has nothing to do with covid or pandemic, but what it does is block the light from big stars so you can see the much fainter planets.

18:55So say you're looking from far away at the sun, you probably wouldn't even see that earth exist because the sun just blots it out with its light. So this coronagraph, really cool instrument blocks the light. Hubble has this too, but it's just not as good as the Romans. It blocks out the light so you can actually see the fainter things and discover more of the planets that exist in our solar system. I knew that when I take photos of my wife for social media, Sometimes the glare is a little too much. I need a coronagraph for an iPhone. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend right after this.

19:28Oh, whoo! What is happening? I'm just excited for what a howling good time families can have at any of Great Wolf Lodge's 22 locations across the country. Splash away in the indoor water park, where it is always 84 degrees, There's a massive wave pool, a lazy river, and tons of water slides. There's also a bunch of great dining options, spacious suites, and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties all under one roof. Book your stay at greatwolf.com. That's greatwolf.com. Cybersecurity as we know it is dead. It's a figure of speech, but the truth is the old model was built on protection, safety nets, recovery plans, systems designed to withstand the last era and maintain the status quo.

20:13The AI era demands confidence that you can secure and accelerate your business operations so nothing stops your momentum. Rubrik can give you that confidence. Their singular platform is designed to secure your data, control your AI, and protect your identity built as one architecture, not stitched together after the fact. To learn more, head to rubrik.com slash mb. That's r-u-b-r-i-k dot com slash mb. When it comes to AI's value, the picture is about as clear as swamp water. Case in point, 43 % of CEOs report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI, but nearly the same number say they're still stuck.

20:53That's why PwC advises a value over volume approach. Many companies gauge AI progress based on how many models or agents are deployed, but impact actually comes from connecting data, workflows, and decision making into a coordinated operating model. Learn about turning AI investment into results at pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. My winner of the weekend is sorority Rush Talk, which has gone from a small corner of the internet to a major marketing channel for big brands. Rush Talk videos have no doubt popped up on your social media feed by now. as sororities recruit new members and those members jockey for spots among the hallowed halls of Gamma Phi Beta.

21:41It's all documented on TikTok and Instagram. Millions of eyeballs tune in to watch Get Ready With Me's and competition between chapters. And with all that attention, it wasn't long until brands started sniffing around. Sephora, Poppy, even Nike have been inserting themselves into Rush Talk to supply products and experiences in the hopes of ending up with a viral video or two. Nike has been a big winner so far, parking a trailer outside an Alabama sorority and letting members customize shoes and gear, leading to tons of buzz. A big genre within Rush Talk is the choreographed dance video, and Nike has been front and center in some of this season's most popular videos.

22:18Partnering with Arizona State's Delta Zeta chapter resulted in multiple videos surpassing 2 million views within a week. The infiltration of brands into Rush Talk is not surprising, given Rush content has absolutely everything marketers look for. Videos feature and attract a concentrated Gen Z audience. Fashion and beauty products are naturally embedded in the experience. And there's plenty of built-in suspense and drama that keeps people coming back for more, literally a marketer's dream. Neil, maybe we need to be partnering with some sororities to get more listeners. I don't know how compelling of a content it is.

22:54If like all of Zeta is like dancing to our podcast, like that doesn't, I don't know what kind of moves you could pull off with that. But the reason they're doing this is these women move products. So back in 2021, the first time that Rush Talk became a thing, a lot of these women who are rushing in Bama, they mentioned this one store called the Pants Store, where they got a lot of their outfits and then pretty much immediately sales spiked online and local revenue was jumping by more than 200 % after it was mentioned. So all these brands are saying, huh, well, That is interesting. Then the next wave of brand infiltration to Rush Talk was basically all these companies saying, here, take our stuff and use it.

23:37We're not even going to pay for a sponsorship. What we're going to do is just send you all this stuff and then you will mention it maybe, and then we will see a sales boom. That's exactly what happened. Tart is one brand. They sent mascara and lip balm to 30 ,000 prospective members at eight different universities and their sales through their student discount program went up 1300 % afterwards. So these women are influencers and other, and their peers are watching them seeing their do their outfits and dance and stuff and saying, I need to buy exactly what they're using. It's been fascinating too, that the power dynamic has shifted since 2021 back in 2021, or honestly just go back in time in social media.

24:19It was pretty cool. If you were a creator to get free stuff from a brand that you liked, like you would probably post a video just because Tarte sent you some mascara. But these days, these are very powerful figures within the world of marketing. So whereas sometimes you would just accept any brand, now they can be more choosy with the brands they work with. And now free product isn't enough. These are actual brand deals that are being struck with Rush Talk influencers. So fascinating to see how these women now have a lot more say in the brands that they represent and a lot more money coming their way.

24:52And it's also created a kind of interesting incentive system where brands are reaching out to creators while they're still in high school in anticipation of them entering this sorority life. That might be going a little too far, but that's just a natural progression of trying to get in early with these people that are going to be very powerful later in their life. So crazy that Rush Talk is so big and so powerful that brands are basically treating them like college athletes and recruiting them out of high school. That's exactly what they are. Nike refers to them as campus athletes, and they're really intentional about building long-term relationships with them because you're right.

25:31They think of these people, these women as the next generation of influencers and to have a relationship with them as young as college freshmen is very important to them. And we know that Nike stock price is at its worst levels in well more than a decade. So And what they say is that, quote, 18 to 22-year-old females are powerful cultural forces on college campuses. So very fascinating to watch the world of marketing shift thanks to Rush Talk. It's Monday, so here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. Recovery efforts are ongoing in Nepal and Tibet, where catastrophic flooding last week has killed more than 900 people and left more than 4 ,700 missing.