Social Network Sequel Trailer, Fable 5 Sparks Safety Debate, SpaceX IPO Watch | Diet TBPN

0:02John Coogan:Two major stories, a bunch of major stories, but the big one, Facebook got a movie, another movie, actually a third movie if you count the documentary. There's been The Social Network, The Social Dilemma, and now The Social Reckoning. Only two of those are movies. The Social Dilemma is a documentary, but it's very interesting. And The Ananthropic got a fable, and there's been a ton of reaction. Ben Thompson was writing about it, to the rollout there, the Wall Street Journal. The announcement should have been like the really good model launches. And people are amazed at what it can do. But they put the title, Anthropic Puts Curbs on AI Models.

0:40John Coogan:So I'm sure you've seen this on the timeline, but we'll take you through some of the debates over how restricted the model is in certain areas. Bio is a big one. Cyber is another one. There's a bunch of funny examples. There's a bunch of reasonable arguments for doing this type of stuff. So we'll go through all of it. So I want to kick it off with the the social network sequel I want to watch the trailer for the social reckoning because Jeremy strong is playing Mark Zuckerberg I've heard people say hey he looks he looks like Zuck like the styling is there The one critique is Jeremy strong looks a little bit older than Mark Zuckerberg did in 2011 They're calling him Unk or Elder?

1:22John Coogan:It just doesn't, I think it'll color the movie a little bit in the sense that the film is telling the story of this very difficult whistleblower situation and it's different when it looks like a mature adult versus someone who was young and running into these problems for the first time. So let's pull up the train. Jason, before I go on, I want to make something clear. This is how it starts. Okay. I have a hunch you're not a fan of Facebook. But I am. I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it. Okay? You send me a message. What would you like to talk about?

2:04John Coogan:The chairman gavels a session to order. You'll read your opening statement, which we'll skip past for now. That's a separate session. And we'll move to witness questioning. Spell your name and state your current occupation for the record. So is it not Fincher this time? Let's see. Zuckerberg. Oh, it's co-produced and directed by Aaron Sorkin.

2:33Companion piece to the social network. Ish.

2:38John Coogan:Ish? Is this Mike Isaac? I don't think so. Jeff Horwitz. But I think you do. He wrote Broken Code. He was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. He is a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. Broken a number of global news stories. Including the Facebook files. The fire hose of bad information. You are injecting it to the air supply. Ooh, Bill Burr. I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not the one who's lying. And I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is. It's not a bad Zuck impression. He's got the voice tone pretty down. As a result of time spent on the platform. Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.

3:14I know there are easier enemies to make. The Mafia would be an easier enemy to make. So what would you need? To stand up the story, the internal documents. This is a material violation of my MBA. We're twice as big as the biggest country on Earth. We're not fighting with Congress. We're post-government around here.

3:30John Coogan:Twice as big as the biggest country on Earth? What? From a user standpoint? Oh, okay, users. I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources. Harm, I promise you, is imminent. enough people around here understand that when i say no that's the end of the debate i'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore charlie look around and if they were trying to go as inspirational as the social network they really missed the mark there what happened yeah so that their intention was to try to fire up the next generation of entrepreneurs that to inspire it seems like they missed to inspire them to inspire them to uplift that.

4:10You can build any business out of your dorm room.

4:12John Coogan:Yep, yep. If the goal of this film is to really, really take the viewer inside TBD and Meta Super Intelligence and what's going on with Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Alex Wang. Yeah, I didn't see any. It feels like they just dropped the ball. Yeah, like I didn't see anyone that even resembled Jan LeCun. That is crazy. The Llama 4 moment, that could have been the crescendo. Yeah, behemoth. Behemoth and all the drama around that. You want drama. You want Hollywood drama. You want Oscar bait. Llama 4 behemoth. That story is going to put butts in seats. That's right. Now, more seriously, it's hard for me to, it's going to be really hard to not look at Jeremy Strong and O.C.

4:55John Coogan:Kendall. Yeah, because you're a succession guy. So this is a sequel to The Social Network. Instead of chronicling the birth of Facebook, it's the story based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Francis Haugen. It's going to be dramatic. It's not going to make people like Facebook more, and it's probably going to make Americans even more distrustful of tech. What's interesting here is that if you stop a random tech person on the street and ask them, like, what is the social reckoning about? They might say Cambridge Analytica, because that was another drama moment. And I was sort of like, is it Cambridge Analytica?

5:29John Coogan:Is it the Haugen thing? And a lot of people don't even remember what the whistleblower story was. Little refresher there. It was an internal document leak. The Facebook files showed that Facebook internal employees were aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms, yet persisted in prioritizing profit over addressing these harms. Now, Nikita Beer chimed in, who now works at X, a rival platform to Threads, and said, Zuck makes a lot of mistakes, but this isn't one of them. Meta literally had multiple teams of$1 million per year engineers working on teen mental health, and they had the agency to override big product decisions.

6:10John Coogan:They're probably a thorn in Nikita's side because he's trying to maximize click-through rates, maximize attention, and he's getting pushback from, hey, there's guardrails here. And he says, the story this movie is about is actually a product manager who didn't get a promotion. And so the only thing with that argument is like you could make the same argument is like the cigarette company has million dollar like doctors and researchers focused on making sure cigarettes are as healthy as possible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And especially with the new fertility data, I think that there's there's a new cycle brewing of like exactly how bad is social media.

6:45John Coogan:I still don't really buy the addiction thing just because I'm familiar with like addiction defined in nicotine Which is like extremely addictive. It's chemical and like you have cravings Like if you forget your phone like do you have the same cravings? It's it's it's sort of different and But they're serious, but there is like a very serious Discussion going on around social media and it's a fax and yes It's the fun addiction thing is is like very real is I was at I was at an event last night and they required everybody to put their phones in these sort of like locked bags so you could go outside at any point.

7:20And you felt sick. I didn't feel sick, but I noticed probably like 20 times throughout the night I was thinking of going for my phone.

7:28John Coogan:Yeah. I didn't start having like physical withdrawal symptoms. Yeah, but the craving was there. Yeah, I just kept thinking about it. It was like phone noise, right? Phone noise, yeah. Oh, this is real. This is real. I was having some phone noise. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah okay so yeah that's legitimate so the question that i had really quickly is like what is the impact on meta like uh we can pull up the stock chart it's a one and a half trillion dollar company they're trying to raise more equity for the ai build out hire people like is this good bad what does it look like over the short medium long term so short term i think this was amazing timing they really got lucky because uh as we will talk about like the fact that this trailer dropped the same time as Anthropics Fable 5 was incredibly fortuitous because Fable just took over the timeline and no one was really talking about this in tech.

8:16John Coogan:Tech insiders won't really see or talk about the social reckoning this week. Case in point I put it second in the newsletter when I wrote it up. Medium term I think Jamie Strong is gonna drag Mark into like the bad group of AI leaders while he's on his Oscar tour. Like there was a version of Facebook strategy, a meta strategy, that's just like, hey, we're like Amazon, we're like Microsoft, like yeah, we have bets in AI, but we're not like, we're not deciding the frontier. Obviously, Mark has made the decision to hire some of the greatest researchers, invest very aggressively, and this puts him sort of at the center of the conversation around, well, what will the effect of AI be on our society, on kids, should kids be talking to LLMs?

8:56John Coogan:Psychosis, all these different things will come up, just as we saw 4.0 psychosis and then Claude Code psychosis a little bit pop up and people are talking about that. You're priming the pumps for the next wave of like, oh, a bunch of people went into the Meta app and they had a bad time and now we got to talk about that. So I wouldn't be surprised. What do you think Mark is going to be more annoyed about this week? The fact that SpaceX is going to be valued meaningfully higher than Meta or this trailer. It's actually a tough one. I don't know. I mean, I think the real one is Fable 5. If Meta was using a ton of Anthropic models and then the new model comes out and says you specifically can't use it in MSL, the most important initiative in the company, that's a pretty rough thing where you're like, oh, I've been working with this company to develop my models for my family of apps and now I can't use them anymore.

9:51Also, but if they do, Meta is spending billions of dollars a year with Anthropic. They They have been for a while. ARR, but yeah. Yeah, they will spend billions of dollars this year. And the question is like, if Anthropic does allow Meta to use their models for Meta's AI research, what does it say about what Anthropic thinks about Meta's potential in AI? Secretly love ads this whole time.

10:17John Coogan:No, I don't know. No, to me, it would be them not feeling like they had a ability to get to the frontier. Totally, totally. totally and then and that's an ace that's up their sleeve at any time they can always just take the guardrails off and be like hey more more more ai more intelligence on demand for everyone um so uh i think the fallout of the medium term jeremy strong's gonna go on this press tour uh for the oscar and he's gonna have a bunch of like really emotional pithy sound bites and then also be uh like just viral because it's funny to see him doing this impression and he's very good at like drawing he's already gone viral for his mark zuckerberg impression in the past uh so i wouldn't be surprised to see the next version of a Bernie Sanders press release about AI highlight Dario, Sam, and Zuck instead of what has historically been the order which is Sam, Dario, and Demis.

11:06John Coogan:So it's always based on like perceived industry power and negativity around personal brand. So they have to have a scary quote and then they also have to have a lot of power in the industry. Zuck's power in the industry is rising and also with this movie like there's more ways to to take shots at him, like, oh, look at what he did with the Facebook files, remind yourself of that, because a lot of people don't really remember the details, they're going to after they see this movie, then you can say, well, this guy's also building crazy data centers, and look at how he handled this. If he handles the AI thing like that, it's gonna be bad, right?

11:38John Coogan:So that's like a little bit of a risk in the medium term. Long term, I don't think the social reckoning is gonna matter all that much for Meta. People will complain about Meta's data centers. Why did they not get Jeremy Strong like a wig? Because also he is playing an older, remember when he had the Caesar haircut? Yeah, so it's a different time. So people will complain about all this stuff, but they'll do it on Meta's family of apps. I don't think they'll be churn. And certainly advertisers won't pull out. It's impossible to pull out of Meta because it just drives up the ROAS, the return on ad spend for smaller companies.

12:12John Coogan:And a bunch of small businesses will just jump in and say, oh, great. Like, you know, some big company pulled out and is boycotting Meta. That's great. I'm a Ridge wall. It's gonna jump in or somebody else is gonna jump in advertisers have tried to boycott it Yeah, you can't on Facebook. It's impossible So the business is just too strong and I also don't think mark will be singled out by a regulatory hammer Should it come down hard like if there's a data center ban I don't think it's gonna be uniquely focused on meta or only Dario and Sam have like true scapegoat risk because they run pure play Labs and have been so noisy about AI and they have the biggest revenues in the category There might be a day there might be data center regulation, but it won't unfairly target meta So anyway, that's my social reckoning take.

12:50John Coogan:Let's move on to Fable, which launched yesterday. And the model seems like incredibly impressive. I've been seeing these like vibe-coded games that look really, really good. And for some of those, I haven't seen the vibe-coded games hit really well on social media because you take a video of them and you show the example of what it built. You share the time. And people just sort of believe it. It could be embellished, but in general, these feel like pretty solid. Of course, like making a great game is a great mechanic, and there needs to be multiple levels, and like a single demo of like a forest putting in is not quite there, but really, really useful.

13:28John Coogan:And I'm sure we'll see a bunch more examples of like games as memes, simulators, and these things are going to get easier to build. That's really exciting. Of course, there was a bunch of debate on the timeline yesterday, and it's bleeding into today around the latest model, Fable 5. uh the first mythos class model uh that both seems remarkably good at long horizon tasks like software development knowledge work but rejects requests related to biology cyber security and frontier llm development interestingly i haven't seen anyone share rejections around anything else like do they remember to reject like build me a nuke like i haven't seen anyone try that and it'd be very funny if it was like oh yeah just we we didn't get around to that or there are so many other things but i think a lot of those other things that you should reject queries that you you reject have been ironed out in previous iterations.

14:17John Coogan:So going back, you know, the say a slur was a big one for a while or say something rude or make a political statement. Pausing a chat, basically just like shutting down a conversation versus like switching you to a less performant model. Yeah. And it creates this like screenshot that went viral pretty much continuously yesterday. And so this aligns with Anthropix focus on safety. But as many people have pointed out, it's also just good business. You don't want competitors using your products to directly create competitors. And you also don't want financial liability or negative headlines from bad actors using your models for nefarious purposes.

14:52John Coogan:Ben Thompson called it true alignment. The take safety seriously culture aligns with business value creation, which is very, very rare. Oftentimes, the be good or your culture limits what you can do and actually hurts your business. but it's something that you do in favor of brand like Apple would probably be more profitable if they were using like diesel generators for all of their data centers. They went clean energy because they wanted to have an environmental brand. And over the long term, it's helped them. But in the short term, it's been rough, of course, and expensive. So Ben Thompson writes, what is so fascinating about Anthropic, however, is that while I'm sure some executives of the company are thinking this way, I also totally believe that the employee base broadly also happen to believe that they are doing the right thing.

15:38John Coogan:It's fascinating to observe. Me, the rational business analyst, sees a hard-nosed but understandable decision to cut off would-be competitors, anthropic employees, and advocates. The true believers see a regrettable but understandable safety decision that ensures that responsible and thoughtful people themselves, of course, will be the ones guiding our AGI future. This is true alignment, and it's an incredible accomplishment. Facebook has tussled with this a bunch, and we already talked about that, but But to be clear, the Fable 5 rejection threshold really does feel way too low from what people are saying.

16:11John Coogan:Tons of examples on the timeline of a biologist just saying hi to the model and getting kicked down to Opus. I saw you shared, someone just said, cyber with the devil horns, the purple devil horn emoji. And it's like, we're not going further. Of course, like bringing down like a broad hammer, you can always dial it back over time. But every rejection is this implicit invitation to hop on the phone with an anthropic sales rep and get on the mythos enterprise plan. And that's where the real dollars are, too. The timeline is unhappy because the idea of democratizing science, technology, all of this is very alluring.

16:45John Coogan:But the pool of dollars available from all the biohackers in the world probably isn't close to the budgets available from big pharma. And so, again, you're in this rational business analyst situation, and you fail to see how this is that damaging, except to the hacker community. The real tricky part is how a frontier AI research is handled. Instead of outright rejecting the query and bumping the user down to Opus, the model appears to answer, but quietly gives a degraded answer. And this was disclosed in the model card, which is interesting. So this is, again, reasonable decision. Yeah, but not disclosed in the product.

17:23John Coogan:In the product. While they're paying for it. Which is a different path than bio and cyber. So if you go LLM Frontier Research, devil horns, it will actually give you an answer apparently. It won't bump you down immediately. So it doesn't disclose that, which is odd. Outright rejecting requests for AI research and just saying, hey, user, sorry, this model doesn't work for that type of project. Please use another model or contact sales if you want help with this. Would have been much more in line with the bio and cybersecurity strategies. And it's also possible that they just didn't need to disclose this at all.

17:56John Coogan:They could have just released a model that was intentionally nerfed on AI research. It would have shown up in the benchmarks because people would have benchmarked it on some sort of AI research bench and been like, oh, weird. It's really good at all these other things, but it's bad at LLM research. And maybe that would have been a bit of a brand hit maybe, but users might never know that the model was intentionally degraded around this category of work. So that leaves this third more worrying position intentional degradation without disclosure in the model card There's no evidence of this but it's possible that other workflows might be nerfed and there's no law or even convention around disclosure Again, maybe good business but a weird situation to be in so probably bullish for evals If you're building a business on top of a big lab that you can imagine like a legal AI company We want to be really sure that the models they're using aren't degrading unexpectedly and not telling them It's different if you're like, hey, I've been a bio researcher for a while.

18:49John Coogan:I'm using this. And I know that this model was never intended for me. Or I've been using it. But what you don't want is like, I'm using it. And now it's giving, now it's leading me astray in my work. And it's also not telling me that it's going to lead me astray, which would be like sort of an odd outcome that I think they'll probably address in the near future. Anyway. Yeah, that aspect triggered Dean Ball. Yes, what did he say? He said, my last observation, the Anthropic secret sabotage safety policy is that it undermines actually good safety policy. How? First, it is very plausible to describe this as anti-competitive behavior.

19:25Even if you're maximally sympathetic to Anthropic here, you must admit this. And it is behavior being justified in the name of AI safety. If you believe, as I and many Anthropic staff do, that it may end up being critically important to relax antitrust enforcement so that the frontier labs can cooperate and collaborate on some areas of AI safety. Anthropic just undermined the case for that in a large way. Overall, this massively and profoundly raises the status of the argument that AI safety has been hyped to justify monopolistic behavior by labs. I continue to believe that AI safety is a real and serious issue that is growing in importance rather than diminishing.

19:59If you agree with me, this incident is a setback, maybe a serious one. And third, he says, I have observed elsewhere Anthropic's official corporate policy is structurally identical to the fact pattern alleged against them by the Department of War. I still think DOW acted both falsely and wrongly in that fight, but it is no longer possible to defend Anthropic with a full throat after this incident. This raises the case for heavier-handed regulations. Anthropic is making an awfully good case here that their product ought to be treated as utilities, and thus their alignment practices should be a matter of public policy rather than private property.

20:34I am starkly opposed to this sort of state power grab, but Anthropic is doing more to justify it than anyone else. Thus, significant damage has been done to a community and entire approach to AI governance. It was done unilaterally by Anthropik, likely motivated largely by self-interest and justified within the internal psychology of the firm through the lens of safety. I suspect this is fixable in the economic and legal senses for Anthropik, but I fear that trust has just been broken and the goodwill extinguished will take very much time to repair.

21:01John Coogan:And just to level set on Dean Ball, he wrote the AI action plan, but then also came out very publicly in support of Anthropic during the conflict with the Department of War saying that the Department of War is completely overstepping by pushing towards supply chain risk designation putting pressure on Anthropic for not wanting to work with the government in that particular way obviously there's a whole bunch of new data that's been released and stuff and that that conversation has evolved but it doesn't strike me as some like crazy hater Anyway, Doug O 'Loughlin was also sort of mixed results on Fable.

21:38John Coogan:He says, when it works, it's brilliant, but the unilateral guardrails make me frustrated beyond all belief. He has a folder of health information with like 100 days of Aura health data. This is a very logical thing that people would do with Codex or Cloud Code, gather up all your health data. I actually talked to a very, very prominent person in tech about how they got into Vibe coding and CLIs. and one of the first things they did was reanalyze some whoop data reanalyze some health data and he correctly detected sleep apnea and went and got it treated like that is it's not a cure for cancer but that's like incredibly awesome and like very very good and exactly what you want to see and who knows maybe the thing that you detect early could lead to an increased risk risk of cancer in the future and that would be a really really big win for our society and so um a little bit tricky there.

22:30John Coogan:He says there's a private investment in the life sciences tool space. Guess what? It's not safe. Doing some code scanning for vulnerabilities, not safe. I get the safety, but it feels incredibly out of touch for a group of a few thousand people making total comp in the millions, telling me what is and isn't safe. Dario worried about inequality. I think he has to realize that he is the inequality and the unilateral gatekeeping feels whack as hell. I don't like it. People are very, very... And like Doug O 'Loughlin is extremely optimistic about anthropic like he he recognizes the power of the models in the business and has been uh very very uh strong supporter i i feel like a strong user uh he was one of the first people to admit to cloud code psychosis uh and he's unhappy with the current situation but these things are very tunable i'm optimistic uh with more disclosures and more fine tuning and uh and a smoother smoother path uh i think we can get to the good outcome here mu last last one cramuse says tell me about mitochondria it's the powerhouse of the cell right chap no the chat pause is rough yeah it's a it's a screenshot but maybe the harness is just saying like sorry if you don't know that the mitochondria is a powerhouse of the cell like it's not worth my time i don't even want you i mean that's the thing with like the good you know good yeah yeah i mean there are expensive of questions and all of these screenshots are clearly from like$100,$200 a month plans and I'm sure the GPUs are on fire as they always are with any new model launch from a frontier company and it can make rational business sense and so when everything aligns, when you're like yeah we're maybe being a little bit too safe but it's actually good for our business, it's very easy to say yes to that stuff.

24:16John Coogan:The big question is like where do you get tested where something, there's a hard decision and it doesn't align with your business interests. That's always tough. The new data retention policies as well, that also has to do with like, does it trying to... This one was funny because I assume that every tech company stores everything forever. Basically, I didn't realize that they don't. Not for these like enterprise use cases. I know that the enterprises said that they wouldn't train on your data. But like when I go into any chat app, I expect to have my data from a year ago still there. Like I want, in fact, one of my main critiques and frustrations with these apps is that when I go to them, I want to be able to, instead of hitting the search bar, just go into the chat box and say, Hey, remember a couple of months ago, we were talking about CrowdStrike and I had you pull up some data.