Big Companies Start Hiring Again, Anthropic's Open-Weight Position, Zuck Backs AI for All | Diet TBPN

0:02John Coogan:Well, Anthropics responded. We're going to go through that proposal, the facts and the proposal for what happens next in the open model debate over whether or not they should be banned, restricted, tested, limited in some ways, sued. There's a whole bunch of different possible outcomes, but we'll take you all through it. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that large companies are beginning to hire again. They have a large white pill. Yes, it is a large white pill. Has hit the front page of the journal. Yes, and I think people have been going back and forth on this. This is a story that's just getting digested by the tech folks, like the actual AI lab leaders who had predicted crazy job losses and are now not really seeing that.

0:45John Coogan:They're seeing productivity boosts and different diffusion, taking time in certain places, and there's new capabilities. But it's not exactly a drop-in replacement for a coworker, at least in most scenarios. And that's what the Wall Street Journal is reporting. So let me set the table and then we can debate it a little bit. After roughly a year of cautious hiring, companies across technology, transportation, defense, and other industries now say they need more employees to work alongside AI systems. Total victory for both humans and AI. We're working together. Peace is possible. It's an example of Jevons' paradox.

1:24John Coogan:Jevin's paradox, when a technology makes something more efficient, demand often rises enough. The total use and the need for people actually increases. For roughly the past year, many companies pointed to AI while announcing layoffs. This was a huge thorn in your side. I think you hated this more than anyone else. And you were right to because it did seem like it was just PR, spin, et cetera. Yeah, it was a way for CEOs and management teams to save their own ass instead of saying, you know, hey, we overhired or the business isn't doing as well as we would like. And we need to sort of basically settle down for a second and get our mojo back.

2:05John Coogan:Yeah. Obviously, no one wants to say that, but I think one of my favorite posts was the, and obviously these circumstances are never great, but the new CEO of Xbox came out and just was like very honest about the situation. Yep. And I think that more of that is necessary. Yeah. Also, there's a lot of firms where once they get to 10 ,000, 20 ,000 employees, they might say, look, 20 ,000 might be the right number, but the bottom thousand people are not performing. We would like to lay them off and then bring in a new thousand people that are better fit for the company and the current trajectory that we're on, the current skills that we need.

2:45John Coogan:Maybe we need more salespeople, more developers. And those bottom thousand people might be top 10 % at another company. Exactly. Yeah. So the narrative appears to be shifting. Companies like CSX, Alphabet, ServiceNow, Snap-on, and consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton have all recently signaled plans to expand hiring, particularly in areas where employees can use AI to become more productive. Yeah, it used to be somewhat of a flex if a company was like, yeah, we put up a role and we got 2 ,000 applicants. Yeah. It's like, well. That's true. And then also it's a little bit of a sign of like, oh, wow, they have 100 openings.

3:21John Coogan:like they must be like growing so fast, you know? So, but if it's just a prompt to say, oh yeah, put up, like look at my organizational design and add five roles for everyone because why not? Why not see who comes by? You know, we're not, we don't necessarily have to interview these people. So weird, weird dynamics, but we'll dig into it. So meanwhile, the latest weekly US jobless claims fell to one of the lowest levels in decades underscoring the resilience of the labor market. The shift also reflects a more realistic understanding of AI's capabilities. Sarah Franklin, CEO of HR platform Lattice, says many companies initially assumed AI agents could replace entry-level workers, but are now recognizing that human employees remain essential.

4:03John Coogan:Just because you have coding agents doesn't mean you're not hiring engineers. She said, adding that Lattice is seeing renewed hiring among many of its customers, including for junior roles. Robert Half, CEO M. Keith Waddell said, AI's effect on employment has been more benign than some has feared, adding that hiring demand continues to improve and market conditions are increasingly more supportive of business. And so I do think there was a little bit of like a successful psyop with the AI is going to be able to do everything, where I do think there are some firms that were like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't hire.

4:36John Coogan:Or because like, what if we get it wrong and we hire a bunch of people and then AI really does catch up and we don't need those people. That's silly. We shouldn't go through that like whipsaw effect. And so people are going back and forth on that. Bryce Roberts. Yeah, it's interesting. At least in our organization, which is unique and very niche, and there's not that many organizations that are running a niche technology daily show. Yeah. I feel like a lot of what the value that we get out of AI would have historically been done by not super expert level freelancers, right? These sort of like Upwork style tasks that you would do historically, like an idea for a funny song, right?

5:20I've paid to get a funny song made probably a decade ago online, right? As just like a joke. And now you can just go to Suno and make something like that. And then there's other things like make a funny website, right? I historically would maybe work with freelancers.

5:36John Coogan:So you're saying that I should take down the five open roles I have for Celtic punk session musicians? Not yet. Because I was going to hire five Celtic punk session musicians to constantly record Dropkick Murphy's covers for us every day. Well, I'm not ready to say that you shouldn't do that. I'm actually closer than ever to hiring a full-time Celtic punk band to play music, to recreate songs. Codex and Guinness. Yes. I'm closer than ever to doing that, where that was not even on the roadmap a few years ago. Yeah, I don't know. It's a good point. Yeah, there's a lot of things that you are doing that you would never do with a full-time employee.

6:19John Coogan:Yeah. It just sort of like fills the cracks and allows you to do more different things in your organization. But the core stuff is still like you want a person that's responsible and then you want them using AI. I don't know. Yeah. The Wall Street Journal breaks it all down, but we went through most of that. So Bryce Roberts, he's taking the other side of this. He says, he shares a screenshot of a text message that says, we honestly aren't hiring a ton right now, AI backfilling most roles. Backfilling, is that specifically, does that specifically refer to when someone leaves the company, you backfill them with AI?

6:50John Coogan:So you say, oh, someone quit. Like if there's Steve and Jim on two different, on one team, and Steve quits, you say, hey, Jim, can you just, instead of hiring another person, just do twice as much work with AI? Is that what this person's articulating? I mean, obviously there's some companies that are like, yeah, we're not hiring anyone. We're going for the one person,$1 billion company. Like, I'm not going to hire anyone. I'm just going to use it. Yeah, but that's rare. Usually when your business is ripping, you're like, I can't hire great people fast enough. Yeah. And sometimes you actually don't have time to invest into various hiring processes.

7:23But yeah, I would read into this text, the company's just probably not like ripping. That's my takeaway.

7:31John Coogan:Well, Bryce Roberts says RIP new grads. Matthew Prince over Cloudflare takes the other side. He says, wrong strategy to stop hiring new grads. The right strategy, hire them and insert them into legacy teams to help them better adopt AI. And Cloudflare, of course, hired 1 ,000 interns. It was a crazy number, wasn't it? Yeah. Up there in like almost 1 ,000? Four digits. That's crazy. Let's play the latest good work reel. I'm watching reels now. This is what we got is a Bernie Madoff. Pretty good. That's from the 80s too. That's good. Yeah, yeah. I've seen a few of these around before. Up next. Solid Sam Bankman Freed here.

8:13That's nice. That's really nice.

8:15John Coogan:I like that they actually printed these. I think he made it from balsa wood. Is this balsa wood? Yeah. The acting is so good. Oh. Wow. Wait, John. This is a vintage Zuckerberg. Yeah, 05? This is a vintage 05 Zuckerberg. Let's just check the back really quick. Yeah. There it is. That is a patch from his Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs. You can tell by the smell. Is that real? What is that referring to? This is on athlete trekking cards. I'll put a piece of the jersey. Piece of the jersey. Sleeve this one. Yeah, yeah. All right, up next. Sleeve it. Ooh, okay. Nice. Elizabeth Holmes. We do have two, I believe.

8:58We have two, but a triple Holmes is what every good collector has in their arsenal. All right. Last card? One card left. Three, two, one. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

9:11John Coogan:Oh, my God. All right. Turn it off. Very funny. Very funny. It is funny how the business comedy canon has really solidified around Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankenfreed Mark Zuckerberg there's like a few names I'm surprised they didn't have an Adam Neumann rookie card in there I don't know if Adam Neumann is like a big enough name relative to Sam Bankenfreed and Elizabeth Holmes it's just interesting like the different the different names that have broken out that you can do a comedy sketch that's like you know it goes as big as as good work does because they get you know I think millions and millions of views alright pull up this image from Manhattan this morning we got sent this We've been doing on-the-ground reporting.

9:53From one of our on-the-ground reporters in Manhattan. There's a company called Black Sheep that got 20 trucks, and they're just driving them around Google's Manhattan office saying, shame on you, Google. Return our$80 ,000. We had to dig in. We got very curious.

10:12John Coogan:I had no idea. They make sunglasses? They make$8 sunglasses that beat$350 sunglasses in an NBC lab test. Okay. Are you wearing black sheep today? I wish. I wish. So black sheep makes direct to factory. Okay. Factory direct prescription eyewear. Stop paying$500 for$5. This is from their own website. They're saying direct to factory optical disruptor. What do you mean direct to factory? This is from their website. Where are you getting this? on black sheep. I'm on black sheep.io as well. It says factory direct, direct to factory. Look, I want to send some eyewear to a factory. Direct to factory.

10:55John Coogan:I'll be sending it to them. Direct to factory. Yeah. So this company, they say direct to factory optical disruptor, black sheep launches 25 truck gorilla campaign against Google in Manhattan. Okay. And then they're, they're sort of like narrating their own gorilla campaign, A fleet of 25 minimalist LED billboard trucks surrounds Google's Chelsea headquarters after the tech giant weaponized an organic search glitch to pocket nearly$80 ,000 in ad spend following Black Sheep's viral NBC Today show debut. 25 LED trucks deployed,$77 ,000 drained in 30 hours. And then they're just continuing to market their own products.

11:40Very interesting strategy here. I think every marketer has had the experience of having a campaign go haywire. Very fascinating to take this route. Let's see how it works for them. If I were Google, I would say you can have your$80 ,000 back, but you can never advertise on Google again because I just don't know how.

12:04John Coogan:I don't think Google would ban them permanently for this. This is ridiculous, but it's going to be like any other, like it's a self-serve platform. But is it a good campaign? But what actually happened? So they say, how it unfolded. NBC Today show segment airs. They test the retail subscription against Black Sheep's factory direct pair. National search traffic spikes. Hundreds of Americans search Black Sheep because they're seeing it on TV. The organic listing breaks. Google search engine redirected organic brand traffic to a dead-end third-party 404 error page. And so with the organic route broken, users were funneled into Google's paid listings.

12:45John Coogan:So what is their claim? How is Google responsible for this exactly? Sounds like user error. Because, I mean, you do have some control over your Google search results based on the webmaster tools. You can index certain things. And then also, if you're noticing a 404 page, you could like redirect it quickly. But again, if this is happening all very fast. They can use your error. But I mean, it is interesting because they're probably going to get more than$77 ,000 worth of organic just from this. I mean, I didn't see the original campaign and I'm seeing this because this is hilarious. But this is like, is this, they shared an AI image with tons of these like shame on you trucks.

13:24John Coogan:But those are real. These are real. And are those minimalist or maximalist? Those seem maximalist to me. But maybe they're minimal. Minimalist, I guess, in the display of the way they actually are leveraging the space on the truck, black and white. Truly underrated surface area for stunts and advertising. This message is sort of like squabbling with Google over this sort of odd scenario. But you can imagine someone using this for something much cooler and much more positive and not like this, you know, sort of unfortunate situation for them where they're dealing with the fallout of a Google error.

14:01Well, we want to interview the truck drivers. So if you're driving a black sheep truck around Manhattan today, reach out. For sure. Nick, make it happen.

14:11John Coogan:Ilya said straight shot to SSI. So they better not be gearing up to release a work agent called Francois. Francois would be a very good name for an AI agent. I like that. I do wonder what they're going to be releasing. As the SSI is going to release, is that complete rumor? Because all Ilya said is that they would scale their research. So that just means they've done a bunch of research. They have some sort of architecture that they like, some sort of flywheel, and they're going to use more compute. And so that's why they're raising money. I don't think they said, and we're going to release it publicly.

14:46John Coogan:But everyone's thinking like probably still LLM or something different. No one really knows. Yeah, I mean, I think still broadly like generally LLM-based. Post God. Next level. There are levels to vague posting when you live a vague life. It's just like your entire life is vagary. Anyway, in other news, Recursive Superintelligence signs a$410 compute deal with Amazon. So funny. And it's in the NetCrunch. It's in the header too. Of course, that is a typo. It says recursive super intelligence signs 410 million dollar compute deal with Amazon. Congratulations to recursive super intelligence. Throwing safety out the window.

15:32John Coogan:That should be the tagline because there's already safe super intelligence. But we're just doing recursive super intelligence over here. But of course, the company is doing very well. They emerged from stealth in May with$650 million in funding, focused on building open-ended, self-improving systems and potentially compute-intensive approach to AI research. This multi-year deal is meant to provide flexibility as the company looks to scale up those systems. Recursive's$410 million outlay represents the bulk of the company's fundraising to date, but on a call with TechCrunch. Hey, hey, hey, they still have a couple hundred million left over.

16:09John Coogan:Founder and CEO Richard Socher emphasized that he expected it to be the first of many such deals. So is this – I feel like normally when you see like a compute deal signed, it's always like more complicated than just like we're buying this expensive thing. It's usually like we're paying – I'm like – we used to be so like anti-circular deal that now I just have come to – I've been so normalized by them that I expect them every time. And I'm like, wait, wait, this is – there's no circularity here? I would have expected like Amazon's investing in you and you're buying Tranium and racking it. And AWS is doing a new campus and they're investing in this and that.

16:47John Coogan:And you're investing in them. Instead, it just seems like it's a pretty vanilla deal. It's like they're just buying a lot of compute from Amazon. Great. Seems like it. Well, good luck to them. Very excited for what they're launching. Yeah. Jason, VP of Startups and VC at AWS says part of the agreement is that we're going to co-develop him for a purpose built for these types of companies. So fingers crossed, but it seems like we could get some circularity.

17:15John Coogan:Yeah, let's hope so. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app services and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Fingers crossed.

17:35John Coogan:Well, here's a deal that's somewhat circular. We got NVIDIA revealed as a tenant for a$50 billion data center that will use its chips. So they're the tenant of the data center that uses its chips. We'll talk to Tate Kim about this. CEO Jensen Wong deploys balance sheet to backstop growth of AI computing market. NVIDIA has signed leases worth up to$50 billion for a massive Texas data center. That's very, very big. That's very, very big for a single site. A previously undisclosed commitment that shines a new spotlight on the chip group's growing role in financing AI. The nearly$5 trillion company is leasing the entire one gigawatt facility that developer HUT8 is building, which will house hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA graphics processing units.

18:22John Coogan:So you have to imagine that once they have these, they serve something or wind up selling them. These things change hands so many times. There's a lot of different ways that this could play out ultimately. But in the – can we pull up the NVIDIA chart? Yeah, there we go. NVIDIA, big candle today, up 3%, 5.17 trillion. Let's take a look at Apple, 4.99. They crossed five today. They're down a little bit since they breached that. But they're neck and neck. Google is sitting at 4. Apple running the do-nothing win strategy. Yeah. Jensen doing thousands of deals. They didn't even sign the open letter.

19:04John Coogan:There are three companies that still, I believe, still haven't signed the open letter. Only three companies on the entire surface of the earth. There are three major companies that haven't signed that NVIDIA open letter about banning open source and or not banning open source. Amazon, Apple, and Anthropic. Anthropic put out a post yesterday, very, very clear response, sort of outlining their view on open source, their stance. Apple and Amazon haven't signed. And they both have very physical elements in the world in the sense that they're sort of unsloppable. You can't vibe code in Amazon warehouse.

19:46John Coogan:You can't vibe code in iPhone. There are threats to those businesses, of course. And, of course, Apple should benefit from open source, and so should Amazon, because they'll be able to serve open models across AWS. But it's just potentially interesting. I think the Apple standing back is more just like, look, we're not jumping on with this crazy open letter that everyone is signing. Like, we just have our own brand. We're thinking different. We're doing our own thing. Well, and based on other Apple AI timelines, I would expect them to sign it in maybe a year or two.

20:16John Coogan:Potentially. These glasses have changed you. They turned you a new beast. Let me run through the three Anthropic proposals because it's an important response. So Dario Amadei, Anthropic CEO, responded directly to that letter supporting open weight models that circulated over the weekend. So he makes three claims just to sort of clarify things that I think are important. One, he says Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open weight models. Now, that's a blanket ban. There's obviously like defining what a ban is and what an open weight model, what a distilled model, what a foreign model is.

20:50John Coogan:These things all matter. But he has come out and said, look, we never advocated for a total ban on open weight models. Two, he says, undergirding all of this is the U.S. must beat authoritarian governments in the AI race. He points to China, but he identifies any authoritarian government. If they get really powerful AI, they'll come over here and steamroll us, and you won't be free to do whatever you want to do in America. Three, powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyber attacks or biological attacks. There are risks to having really, really powerful AI open source systems just running around.

21:25John Coogan:So he's worried about those three things, clarifying those three points. But he makes three recommended actions. He makes three proposals. First, he says, let's continue to sanction chips. Let's not sell chips to China. He says, we should not sell powerful chips or chip making equipment to China. So this has been debated for years, like going back to the Biden chip controls. Everyone knows every different angle on this, the basics. I mean, there is a pretty good argument for chip controls, even on purely geoeconomic competitive grounds. Like, even if you don't believe in the risk of authoritarian governments having powerful AI, even if you just think it's like, you know, fancy autocomplete, it's like, well, it's the engine of our economy, and if you can slow down a rival economy, that's beneficial to you, right?

22:10John Coogan:And so, and there also seems to be basically unlimited demand for chips in America. So by restricting sales to China, that shouldn't actually hurt American chip companies all that much. But yes. Well, they just like their argument would be we fully lose the Chinese market, which is the second largest computing market in the world. No. Right. So I think but but you're the counterpoint to that is you were going to lose it anyways. Yeah. And a lot of that stems from the fact that China has been building an indigenous chip supply for decades. We've talked about going back to a whole bunch of their state-led, state-funded chip and fab processes.