AI-Designed Viruses, OpenAI’s First Device, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

0:05John Coogan:Who had orange in the chat? Because the chat was trying to guess what color sunglasses Jordi would be wearing today. Is that orange or is that more of like a burnt sienna? Well, I think it's more of a green, greenish frame with more of an orange lens. You gotta drop the line. I'm wearing sunglasses because I'm looking at the future and it's very bright indeed. Knowing this reference. Anyway.

0:33It's great to be back. It's Friday. We've got a shorter show for everyone today. General partner of Coastal Ventures coming on to talk about their new investment discovery loop. Founded by none other than Jeff Dean and some of his crew from DeepMind. And then we have Patrick Wendell, co-founder of Databricks, joining to talk about their new blog post. I promise it's going to be more exciting than it sounds like. No, but they're doing smarter model routing, and we're excited to catch up with him.

1:05John Coogan:Very excited. Well, for the first time, scientists have used AI to create entirely new viruses. You asked for it. They delivered. They delivered. They delivered. They woke up busy. You know what we don't have enough of? Viruses that have never existed in nature before. It's marked a milestone that could accelerate biotechnology while also raising long-term biosecurity questions, of course. Nightmare scenario is you go to Best Buy, you get a gaming PC with a couple pretty stock graphics cards, and you're able to run an open source model that basically walks you through the steps of creating something really problematic.

1:42John Coogan:At the same time, there's a lot of really talented and well-resourced organizations that are fighting that tooth and nail. And so we'll probably see a little, you know, back and forth equilibrium there. But lots of interesting questions. Important to note that these viruses do not affect humans whatsoever. Even these new viruses, they target bacteria. So it's more of an experiment, more of a demo. But you can see where things are going. That doesn't make me that comforted, to be honest. You like your bacteria to be a virus. You know, we naturally have, there's bacteria that is part of being human.

2:20John Coogan:And you would like the bacteria to be unaffected by viruses. Is anyone standing up for the bacteria right now? Well, it's more so like you have bacteria in your gut. Yeah. And the gut is kind of an important part of the human body. Now that bacteria is going to be suffering from a novel virus, apparently. Yeah. Well, in a study published Thursday in Science, researchers at Stanford and the ARC Institute trained an AI model to recognize patterns in naturally occurring viral DNA, then used it to generate genetic sequences for brand new viruses. After synthesizing those DNA sequences and inserting them into bacteria, the team found the bacteria produced viable viruses capable of infecting other bacteria.

2:59John Coogan:The work does not create a new threat to humans. Be careful. I'm sure that will get cut out of a lot of messaging around this because it sounds really scary on its face. The AI was trained only on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, and specifically excluded viruses that infect humans, plants, animals, and fungi. As a result, the model cannot generate viruses capable of infecting people. While scientists have been synthesizing viral genomes for years to study diseases and develop vaccines, this is the first time AI has been used to design entirely new viruses that function in the real world.

3:33John Coogan:And I was going back and forth before the show on, is this anything special? you know, we've been using tools to make viruses for bacteria for a long time. This is just another tool to do it. Or is this some, you know, material breakthrough? That's sort of a debate point. It sounds really scary, but also like you've been able to design these viruses in a lab for a long time. So what is the material difference here? I think it all comes back to acceleration and cost. If all of a sudden it becomes a thousand times cheaper to generate viruses, then that could reshape biotech in a positive way, but also have biosecurity implications.

4:06Yeah, I think a lot of the reaction is just that it feels like a little too soon post-Wuhan, a little too soon post-hugging phase. There's been a variety of events that I think naturally make people a little apprehensive when you see a headline like this.

4:21John Coogan:Yeah, a lot of people are like, you know, the Eleazar-Yutkowski reaction of, ah, like this is bad. But we'll see where it goes. If the approach proves effective across other classes of viruses, it could become a powerful tool for medicine and biotechnology. Viruses are already widely used as delivery vehicles for gene therapies and other medical treatments. And AI-designed viruses could eventually expand that toolkit. At the same time, the research highlights how advances in AI are making it increasingly important to build safeguards alongside new capabilities, which I'm sure the ARC Institute is working on.

4:53John Coogan:And there's also other AI-driven neo-scientific labs. I mean, Jeff Dean's, one of those was advancing. One of the goals of his new company is to work on biotech broadly. He has a very broad remit, but there are more narrow projects like that new company that's focused on finding a cure for the common cold. There are a few other projects that are more narrowly targeted, as well as all the biotech companies that are working on stuff. If we're going to get advances in viruses that deliver gene therapies or medical treatments, we've got to rebrand virus. We got to come up with a new word. Just like GLP-1 peptide, that felt very safe.

5:33John Coogan:It was like, you're not doing steroids. You're not on gear. What's the lizard? You're doing a peptide. You're not doing Gila monster venom. Gila monster venom, exactly, exactly. You're not doing Gila monster venom. No. It's just some Chinese peptides. The Chinese peptides was a rough go. But in general, I think the fact that it was like just a peptide, it felt much more welcoming as opposed to being in the world of the steroids, the performance enhancing drugs. And it became easier for people to jump in. Oh, I got to learn about peptides. Oh, there's naturally occurring peptides. Cool. I'm into that.

6:05John Coogan:But virus has such a bad connotation post Wuhan as well as just everything. You're never like, I got a virus and someone says a good one or a bad one. Like it's always bad. Yeah, it's never good. But so they need a new brand for that if they're going to commercialize that for sure. But we'll see. Anyway, there's a whole article in the New York Times about it. This AI just created viruses not found in nature. The new study published Thursday in Science goes well beyond duplicating viral genes. Scientists at Sanford University and Ark Institute taught AI to recognize patterns of DNA in nature and then use that DNA to write recipes for entirely new viruses.

6:45John Coogan:The viruses dreamed up by AI do not pose a threat to humans because they are all similar to a naturally occurring virus called Phi X 174, which can only infect bacteria. Really hardcore name for something that's not that dangerous. Phi X 174 sounds like an offspring of Elon Musk. Governments and scientific organizations have been slow to develop guardrails that could block the creation of a deadly virus, even as the science races ahead. So I don't think they'll be open sourcing this anytime soon. But there is other news. Mark Gurman's been reporting on OpenAI's first consumer device. It will reportedly look like a hockey puck-sized donut.

7:21John Coogan:Mark Gurman, the Gurminator? Oh, the Gurminator. The Gurminator, yeah. OpenAI's first consumer device will reportedly look like a hockey puck-sized donut and cost roughly$300 to$400. What a funny form factor. Love hockey pucks. Yeah. Love donuts. Okay. So you're in. That's why I like where this is going. There's also a rumor that it has mechanical pieces on it, so I think it can, like, undulate potentially. The speculation is all over the place. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the Gurmanator, as you put it, the battery-powered device is essentially a portable smart speaker without a screen designed to be carried around the house or placed on a nightstand or kitchen counter.

7:57John Coogan:It will include speakers and microphones, along with cameras and other sensors that allow its AI to perceive what's happening around it. The device is intended to work like a much more capable version of ChatGPT's current voice mode, learning about its owner over time and using that context to make conversations more personalized. OpenAI is also making the hardware itself feel more expressive. The device will reportedly include lights and parts that physically move as it responds, with the goal of making it feel more alive than existing stationary smart speakers from Amazon and Google. The product, being developed by Johnny Ives' design team, is expected to arrive in 2027.

8:33John Coogan:Feature request. And envisioned as the first in a broader family of OpenAI hardware. where long-term, the company reportedly hopes to develop AI devices capable of taking over some of the functions now handled by smartphones. Future request. Yes. Flashbang. Flashbang. That would be a good feature request. Yeah, it says it has lights. It's got sound. You should be able to use this as an on-the-go flashbang. Yeah. So you're going to hang out with some friends. Yeah. You want to prank them a little bit when you're kind of coming in. Yeah, I do. I was reflecting on the DeepMind story of the departures there and the question of how the models are progressing versus the commercialization of those models.

9:15John Coogan:There's some real strong points. There's some weaker points within the rollout of Google's AI strategy. And I was thinking about what happened to Notebook LA because that was heralded as a very magical technology. You would give it some sources, a particular report, and it would just generate a podcast talking between two different people, much more conversational. And a lot of people like consuming information that way. So you could just go read a deep research report on the history of how bacteriophages work if you want to get up to speed on that because you're trying to understand what the ARC Institute is working on with these new viruses.

9:58John Coogan:you could go to Notebook.lm and say, hey, why don't you generate me a podcast of two scientists explaining this at a high school level and then take it into college level? Tyler in the YouTube chat says, love Notebook.lm, use it weekly. Use it weekly. I always thought that I would have used it when I was in college. Yeah. And I needed to, let's say, write a paper on something and I wasn't super prepared. I could say, generate me an hour long podcast about this set of topics, and I'd listen to that, and then I could probably rip the paper. I did that for a history exam. Wow. It was like a vocab list, and it went through.

10:38John Coogan:Okay. Yeah, middle-aged history, I think. Wait, oh, you used Notebook LM? Yeah, it generated a podcast, so I basically fed in a vocab list of, like, dates and various things, and then I had it. Wait, and was it just a general podcast? How did you do on the test? It was really easy. I think I probably aced it. Wow. There we go.

11:00John Coogan:He needs a better confidence monitor. I'm a big fan of that new trend that's like asking old people, like, how did you write a five paragraph essay without AI? And then the answer is like, buddy, we wrote a five paragraph essay without even reading the book. You just go to Sparknotes or something. But I was interested in the evolution of Notebook LM because there's this collapsing of capabilities where Sam Altman was recently sort of dragged a little bit for saying he would use Chachapiti work to generate a podcast about what's going on on his calendar and the family life and stuff. And people were like, how about you just talk to your kids?

11:40John Coogan:But the more interesting technical point on that is that do you even need ChatGPT work to generate you that podcast? Or will the voice mode and the memory feature have enough context to just sit there and talk to you like it's a podcast on the fly? Like live voice. Yeah. If you're trying to learn about a topic, for example. Pretty good. Is probably better than just generating a podcast because a podcast assumes like some certain understanding. Yeah, and it's rigid. Maybe it thinks you understand too much or too little, whereas voice, you can be like, go down this. Exactly, exactly. It's a choose your own adventure.

12:16John Coogan:It's an expert call. Instead of notebook LM, it's Tegas LM, basically. I mean, you're talking to an expert, and you can just guide the conversation wherever you go. So it will be interesting to see where this goes, what the reception is like. I mean, huge, huge delta divergence between the social media pushback for ChatGPT versus the app store ratings. There's like a billion people using it. A lot of people just like the product. And then there'll be someone dunking on it to the tune of a million likes on Instagram. And so how do you measure those two things when it comes to an actual consumer product?

12:57John Coogan:if it's delivering something good, if people are like, if the stated preference is like, I don't like AI, but the revealed preference is like, it's kind of nice to have this thing around the house. It's kind of useful. Interesting to see where it goes. The launch of this device will be very, very interesting to see like how things come together. Like you can see the ChatGPT work, ChatGPT codecs, ChatGPT like coming together into one product. But there's a world where this product launches with voice mode and it's not really capable of linking to a cloud codex instance and writing you software and doing the more advanced things that are required just to accomplish some tasks.

13:36John Coogan:Like you can go to Chachapiti and ask it to pull down an image from the internet, restyle it, change it, but you can't really tell it to do like 40 of those or like every day forever do a whole host, a whole workflow, but you can in codex. And you can talk to Codex, but it has to be running on a computer. And I would hope that by the time this launches, there's full context. Like I was doing some work in Codex, and I had the output, and then I wanted to generate an image based on that and take it on the go. But I wanted to be able to close my laptop and still be able to access it. So I had to copy the context window into ChatGPT, just the normal app, so then I could access that information and continue to transform it.

14:21John Coogan:and that was something that is like a very very temporary thing that feels like it's going to be fixed in like a couple weeks but there's a whole bunch of these little minor integration issues that probably need to be fulfilled before this product launches and delivers like the full the full capability of what you can do because so many things so many tasks instead of just knowledge retrieval require actually firing up a browser scraping it writing some code downloading uploading things, setting up an actual service and workflow as opposed to just something that can be done within the context window of a single LLM interaction.

14:57John Coogan:Last top story, a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay more than$900 million and impose new restrictions on how minors in the state use Facebook and Instagram. This is a continuation of the social media addiction. If you're watching this clip on Instagram, let us know in the comments. are you addicted to tbpn reels on instagram it's not our fault apparently it's apparently it's facebook's fault if we if we got you hooked on this stuff the ruling requires meta to establish a 567 million dollar fund aimed at addressing harms linked to its platforms on top of a 375 million dollars in civil penalties previously awarded by a jury so they're up 900 million They're very close to a billion dollars, and the numbers are going to get bigger from here.

15:45John Coogan:At least they're going to try. Okay, so last time we really covered something from this ongoing saga. There was a verdict on March 25th. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google slash YouTube negligent for designing platforms harmful to young people. A woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child was awarded$6 million,$4.2 million against Meta and$1.8 million against Google. And again, at the time, we had this lawyer on who was giving his opinion. He was like, this is just the start. Yeah. We were like, the jury has a verdict. Yeah. Talking to the biggest companies in the world, you must pay$6 million.

16:27Yeah. It was nothing. It was like this tiny amount, but it was to one person, right? And so you can imagine as these cases evolve, this new one is in New Mexico.

16:35John Coogan:New Mexico is not the biggest state in the union. It's not the biggest state. But there was also one in May 2026, so just a couple months ago, for$9 million to a school district in Kentucky. Yeah. Same sort of issue. The lawsuit accused Instagram of deliberately using addictive features that contributed to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other problems among students, forcing schools to spend more on mental health services. The district had sought more than$60 million. And I guess the total payout was$27 million because it was split between YouTube and TikTok and Snap. And in that case, there was no admission of liability and no required product changes.

17:14So I think it's time to start thinking about what the sort of battle that social media has ahead of it, kind of in cigarette terms. Tell us about...

17:24John Coogan:Tobacco master statement agreement? Yeah, exactly. So the tobacco companies wound up getting sued individually initially, and there were a whole bunch of court hearings, very similar to the Senator We Sell Ads moments, but more focused on the cancer-causing nature of cigarettes. And the question was, like, who is ultimately being harmed economically? And you would think it's obvious. The person that saw an ad that made smoking look cool, they picked up a pack of cigarettes, they started smoking, and then they got cancer and their life was cut short. They are the victim. They should be paid by the tobacco company.

18:08John Coogan:That's what would be very logical. That's not what happened. In fact, the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement landed in 1998, and it was an agreement between all of the major tobacco companies. There's more nuance to this. One of them broke loose and like testified against the others. It's a crazy story. But that's for another time. In 46 states. I'm the good cigarette company. Basically. Yeah. And so they don't have to pay. They're not part of the settlement. So they don't have to pay because they basically snitched on all the others. It's crazy. Are they still in business? Oh, yeah. Cigarette company?

18:39Renton. They're doing great. Who are they?

18:41John Coogan:Look at Victor. I've never heard of it. Yeah. Last name Victor? Yeah. They were literally the Victor. They won. They won. Yeah. There's more nuance to it than that. But that's like one way to tell a story. Anyway, so a bunch of the big tobacco companies versus 46 of the U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and several territories. The states agreed to end major lawsuits against the tobacco companies. So the same thing was happening where all the different states were suing. And they were suing because the negative externality of cigarettes causing cancer was driving up medical bills in the states.

19:14John Coogan:So the states have health care, and they assume, hey, okay, we're going to spend this much on doctors, this much on radiology, this much on x-ray equipment. And then all of a sudden, they're starting to look at their populations and saying, like, wait, everyone's getting lung cancer. We're not equipped to deal with lung cancer. We need to hire way more oncologists and cancer doctors who specialize in lung cancer. We need equipment. We need drugs that treat lung cancer. There's a whole bunch of other things that we have to spend money on. And so you got to pay us because you, the tobacco company, are responsible for us running out of money for our health care system.

19:46John Coogan:And so that was the nature of these, like, the battles between the states and the big tobacco companies. You would think it would be the individuals who got the cancer. That would be very logical, but that's not actually the structure of this deal. And so in return, all the states said, hey, we'll drop all those lawsuits. You won't have to. We won't be nickel and diming you across every single state. Instead, the companies will make large payments and follow new limits on advertising and business practices. So the end result, the headline number is$206 billion, which feels like small relative to today's standards of like hyperscalers in social media.

20:26John Coogan:Facebook generates roughly$200 billion in revenue every year. Although if they got hit with a$200 billion fine, that would be existential. But what happened with the master settlement agreement with the tobacco companies was that there wasn't just one fixed payment. Instead, it created a system of annual payments that continue indefinitely. They will actually have to pay forever as long as they are in business. They have effectively a special tax paid to them. And the amount changes based on cigarette sales, inflation, market share, and other adjustments. So if cigarette sales fall, the total payments usually fall.

20:59John Coogan:And that's a big reason why there's like a shift to non-cigarette products. Well, and that just naturally makes sense. If less people are buying cigarettes, less people are going to have health issues. Exactly. So I brought it up because I think that we could be heading in that direction with social media. There's also a fascinating dynamic because these states now have an indefinite revenue stream that will be paid to them. And you can model that out financially and you can financialize it. And a lot of people have. And so investment firms and banks and financial institutions have come in and said, okay, you are the state of New Mexico, for example, and you are expected to get$300 million from big tobacco this year, and then next year we think it'll be$297 million, and then$298 million, and then it'll go down.

21:49John Coogan:And we can model that out, and we can just give you$4 billion right now in exchange for that revenue stream or a piece of that revenue stream, And then those states can take that lump sum of cash and build a new bridge or something like that, whatever they need to do. So there's been a lot of financialization on top of it. Each tobacco company pays a share of the total amount. Its share depends mainly on the share of cigarette sales among companies that participate in the MSA. The settlement then divides the money among states using fixed allocation percentages. Some states later borrowed against these future payments by issuing bonds backed by MSA revenue.

22:21John Coogan:The MSA also limits tobacco advertising and marketing, especially marketing that could reach children in simple terms. The agreement created a permanent system. Major tobacco companies received protection from many state lawsuits while states received continuing payments and new enforcement powers. The result is not just a legal settlement. It created this long-term financial and regulatory structure built around cigarette sales. And it's now the 10-year anniversary of starting Lucy. 2016. August 8th, technically, was the day. new regulation. You know what I'm going to hit? Overnight success. Yeah, for sure.