Iran Strikes in the AI Era; Prediction Markets Ethics; Paramount Beats Netflix

14:13Brian Barrett:We had talked earlier about how tech workers at Google and OpenAI were circulating tons of letters calling for clearer limits on how their employers were working with the military and DOD after the U.S.'s strikes on Iran. When it comes to recruitment, when it comes to actually keeping people in-house, do things like this matter? Yes, like 100%.

14:32Zoë Schiffer:I think it's a really good question, but I think that if you talk to researchers, and not everyone feels this way, but there are a ton of researchers, and I think it makes sense because a lot of these people come from academia. They tend to be a little more idealistic. They do not want anything to do with military use. And they really want their company to say firmly, like, we're not going to be involved in autonomous weapons. You can no longer, like, join a frontier AI lab and say, I'm not going to work with the military at all, because they're all trying to get these government contracts. But I think that there is a pretty large contingent of people who are very disgusted with the idea that their, like, cool, nerdy, cutting-edge AI research could be used in—basically, could be used to kill people.

15:11Zoë Schiffer:They just don't want that. And I think that that actually matters. Do you think they'll quit over it, though? I mean, I think we're already seeing some people quit OpenAI and join Anthropic.

15:18Leah Fessler:Yeah. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I think you have to remember, too, it's a weird market in the sense that anywhere you go, if you're there for a decent, like, so you're vested, you're going to have enough money that you are never going to have to work again. Right. So you can bake in more. So you can, like, you're not really trapped. Like, there's so many places that are going to give you so much money. that that's I feel like that's less of a consideration.

15:44Zoë Schiffer:Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I think we should like underline that point. We're not talking about people like quitting and giving everything up. They've made generational wealth. They can now quit their current job that's paying them millions and millions of dollars and then go to another job that will also pay them millions and millions of dollars. So like the world is their oyster.

16:01Leah Fessler:I want to go back to one point really quickly to Zoe that you made a little bit ago, which in terms of the messaging, how opening eyes messaging early kind of got them into to back them into this corner where now they're kind of unwinding it. I think messaging has a lot to do with this too in terms of the U.S. military's interest in this stuff. If you go around saying from the very start, I'm building something that is more powerful than nukes and is going to irrevocably change society, the U.S. government and the U.S. military and other governments and other ministers are going to be interested.

16:31Leah Fessler:I think if you think of if someone were to say, hey, by the way, I'm building a nuclear bomb in my garage, they are also going to get a call from BDXF, right? Right. So I think I think they've they have built it right or wrong. Like, however, however strong you think is going to be at a certain point, if that's the message you're projecting, it should not be that surprising that it's come to the head like this.

16:50Zoë Schiffer:Yeah, I mean, and it's also worth saying really clearly that, you know, we're talking about fully autonomous systems. We already have fully autonomous weapons. They're being deployed in Ukraine. They're little drones and they're not run with LLMs like the models are simpler. But like, it makes sense that especially when we're talking about a system that is more advanced and less reliable, there's a little hesitation to just say carte blanche, do whatever you want. But that's in fact what the Pentagon is saying is required for a government contractor at this point.

17:19Brian Barrett:I have to say that watching the Pentagon respond to all of this has been wild, really, really wild. They very much view this technology as theirs. Like the idea of this ownership, the idea that like, no, this was like made in America. You made it for you, but it's for us. Like this is very much for us. And watching that reaction that played out in press conferences, on X. I mean, it was really wild to see like Emile Michael, for example, just go on rants. Zoe, are you going to say it?

17:51Zoë Schiffer:I'm going to say, Emile Michael, you should turn off your views on LinkedIn because people can see when they look at your phone.

17:58Leah Fessler:Yeah, that's a tip for Emile Michael if you're listening. And like if you listen to Uncanny Valley, which you should.

18:04Brian Barrett:And this is this is really the Trump official that's kind of leading the war against Anthropic here. He has these deep ties to the tech world and he's the Pentagon's public enemy number one of anyone who's trying to cross the Pentagon. So the fact that one, he has not maybe the best OPSEC in the world, question mark, but two, is comfortable making this such a public battle is very much something to take note because it's not just a message to Anthropic in my mind. It's a message to anyone else who would dare question these policies.

18:34Leah Fessler:I want to go to something top of mind. Have you all checked your Calci or Polymarket portfolios lately? How we doing?

18:40Brian Barrett:Well, I haven't invested yet in our survivor winners, but, you know, soon, soon.

18:44Leah Fessler:No, in terms of like things that are surprising or like but shouldn't be anymore, prediction markets obviously have sort of taken over so much of our lives in so many ways. But I mean, the general are not the three of us.

18:58Brian Barrett:The three of us actually text every single morning and go, what'd you make on Kalshi last night?

19:04Leah Fessler:But surprise and not surprise, there's so much betting going on around the Iran war to continue that thread. Right now, one of the top bets on Polymarket is will the Iran regime fall by June 30th? Total bets around$7 million in that market alone.

19:20Brian Barrett:That's so upsetting, Brian. These are people's lives. I don't know. I understand that so much of this has become a gamified version of itself. I understand that the stock market and the way that we do so much of all of this, but this feels extra gamified to me.

19:37Leah Fessler:Well, and in terms of people's lives, I mean, there was a big controversy just early this week about how Kalshi settled a bet or resolved a market. There was a$54 million market on the fate of Iran's supreme leader. I believe that they phrased it, Leah, correct me if I'm wrong, they phrased it as like, he'll be out of power.

19:54Brian Barrett:That was exactly what happened.

19:56Leah Fessler:And then he was blown up by a missile. So technically out of power,

20:02Brian Barrett:but that wasn't the bet.

20:03Leah Fessler:Because, and you can't bet, and they're like, we don't allow you to bet on deaths here. So he's out of power, but not. So they are invariably betting on whether people will die just finding cute ways around it and then having a hard time resolving these markets. So that's a problem. And the fact that there was a$54 million bounty out on this guy collectively from bettors, including one user called MagaMyMan, who had won$553 ,000 on the timing of all this, it is outrageous. And I think whether or not any of this is insider trading, it's just, it's grotesque.

20:41Brian Barrett:It's grotesque. That's the word. That's the word that I was looking for, for sure. That's the gamified, grotesque, like a very, very narrow look at like the value of people's lives.

20:52Zoë Schiffer:On slightly lighter Polymarket and Calci news, like we are seeing a lot of markets that have to do with what looks like internal company data. So like the launch of GPT-5 or Sam Altman being ousted as CEO years ago. And last week, Kate Nibbs reported a story that OpenAI had actually fired an employee for insider trading on prediction market platforms like Polymarket. OpenAI's CEO of Applications, Fiji Simo, disclosed this in a note to staff. She said that the employee in question, quote, used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets. But we're seeing this at a bunch of other firms.

21:36Zoë Schiffer:Kate Nibbs reached out to a lot of big tech companies. Very few would actually comment on the record. But data suggests that this is far from the first time this has happened. There's a pretty famous example of the so-called Google whale, which was a pseudonymous account on Polymarket that made over a million dollars trading on Google-related events.

21:56Leah Fessler:And like multiple, right? It's not just they took a random shot. And there's just no real interest. I mean, Kalshi has recently taken action against two people who had, they found two instances of insider trading. One person was running for office, one person who's tied to a YouTube account. And they suspended their accounts for a couple of years or so. But those are tiny enforcement actions. And I think sort of meant to say, hey, we're doing something. But really, they're not.

22:26Zoë Schiffer:I think we're also like, we're looking to the platforms and the companies to crack down themselves at this point. because the Trump administration has taken a much friendlier stance toward prediction markets than the Biden administration did. And why might that be?

22:41Brian Barrett:I mean, look, the Trump family has these ties to the prediction market world that are, it really reminds me of their investments in crypto world too. It's in so many ways, it's these things that don't necessarily have the government regulations that they could or should have. But like True Social, the social media platform that is majority owned by Trump and his family. They're planning their own prediction market offering. It's going to be called Truth Predict. But Trump Jr., Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to both Kalshi and Poly Market already. His venture capital firm has invested in Poly Market.

23:16Brian Barrett:They are very much in this, the exact same conversations that we were all having last year or even just a couple of months ago about Trump family being in in crypto world. They are there. I wouldn't go out on a limb and say like they're personally gamifying everything and that's in Iran, but like they're benefiting from it, they're profiting off of it, or at the very least that they're seeing that this is a ripe market for expansion and going, I want in on that. Forget the fact that their family, their father is the one that's helping make these world decisions.

23:47Leah Fessler:And this is where that insider trading thing gets potentially even scarier, right? Is no indication that these people are insider trading off of big global events yet, But there are people who have a vested interest in doing that who would know. And even just the perception that policy could be made based off of, you know, looking to score a quick buck, that's damaging in and of itself. And I think that's sort of where we're headed.

24:16Zoë Schiffer:Before we go to break, I want to give listeners a little insight into a very different business story. This one is about a transaction that we're keeping a very close eye on, which seems to be very near the finish line. So late last week, Warner Brothers agreed to be acquired by Paramount Skydance in a$110 billion deal, with Paramount agreeing to pay a$7 billion termination fee if federal regulators don't approve the merger. So Larry and David Ellison are continuing to become even bigger media moguls than they already are.

24:51Brian Barrett:I mean, let's spell this out. They already are running CBS. This would give them control of CNN.

24:57Leah Fessler:And let's not forget that Larry Larson has a huge stake in TikTok. No, it is sort of this ongoing consolidation of media in the hands of Trump allies, which will surely be fine.

25:10Brian Barrett:I'm talking to friends that are reporters at CBS, at CNN, who are freaking out, you guys. They're looking at this and forget even the fact that like, is Barry Weiss soon to be their boss? Are the Ellisons going to be canning anyone who's ever spoken out against Trump on CNN? Jake Tapper, are you out of here, buddy? But like people are talking a lot in these newsrooms about the overlap already between CBS and CNN. These are very similar products here. You look like there's an incredible financial team at CBS. There's an amazing biz team at CNN who are constantly breaking news, who've done just amazing reporting over the years.

25:47Brian Barrett:But if you're looking at them on a side-to-side thing, do you need to have all of this in your portfolio at the exact same time? You've just doubled the amount of journalists you have. And the journalists there are flipping out. Everyone is really, really scared about what's to come.

26:01Zoë Schiffer:Right, because we're not even talking about the seemingly ideological purge that Barry Weiss has already kind of overseen at CBS. I mean, I'm thinking of that Claire Malone article in The New Yorker where I think the quote was like the de-bathification of CBS News, which will never leave my head. But, you know, I think that they are really trying to remake these news companies supposedly in their mind to make them less lefty, I guess. But I think the result is that lots of people are losing their jobs and the potential for that is only going to spike. It's very scary.

26:34Brian Barrett:I also, I mean, Paramount wasn't even the preferred partner here for the deal, guys. Like, this was supposed to be Netflix. People thought that was a done deal at a certain point. WBD, the parent company of CNN, they were questioning if the Saudi financing backing part of the deal, if the Ellisons could really guarantee that they could even put up the billions of dollars for this. There were a lot of questions before we got to this point.

26:56Leah Fessler:I think, you know, if you're Netflix and you're looking at it, I think what seems to happen is one Paramount overpaid by miles and miles and miles. And say what you about Netflix, they are relatively concerned. Like they know how to spend their money. But then also, you know, Susan Rice on the Netflix board. Trump had a meeting with the Netflix CEO prior to this, had put pressure reportedly on him to remove. I'm not saying that that was the sticking point. I think at a certain point, if you're Netflix, you're saying, well, if I do on this, am I going to get past a Trump regulatory approval process?

27:30Leah Fessler:And even if I do, what kind of pressures am I going to see on the other end of it? Is the juice just not worth the squeeze? And I'm not, I think either way, you know, as someone who enjoys seeing movies in a theater, I'm broken up about this no matter what. I think Netflix would have been a tough situation for other reasons. But yeah, I think there's just no, there was no real path given how much money Ellicens have and how much Trump did not want the Netflix part to happen.

27:57Brian Barrett:The pressure was real. Honestly, we've talked about so many diverse topics this week. I keep getting back to all of this is just like the world of Trump. This is, this is Trump's pressure. This is Trump's family getting in on the markets. This is, it's endless. I can't imagine what the U.S. business landscape, what the U.S. media landscape looks without Trump's fingerprints in everything right now.

28:20Leah Fessler:In terms of everything, can I list off some of the IP that the Ellisons will now own? Oh, God. This isn't everything, but it is. So CBS and CNN, we talked about HBO, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Looney Tunes, two dozen cable networks that your mom watches.

28:43Brian Barrett:I mean, they're going to de-woke Star Trek. Shout out to my mom. She'll be really, really upset if anything happens to that IP.

28:49Zoë Schiffer:They can have Harry Potter. I felt like that franchise was very disappointing. name.

28:53Brian Barrett:It's kind of mind-boggling, though. It's really giving Veruca salt. Yeah. Yeah. Right?

29:03Leah Fessler:Willy Wonka, also a Warner Bros. discovery property.

29:06Brian Barrett:Oh, fantastic. I'm going to have to pay a million dollars now that we've made that reference.

29:11Leah Fessler:Well, Leah, save some of that energy for after the break when we are inaugurating a new segment called Futurecast. We're going to share some of our predictions related to tech and beyond. Stay with us.

29:51Brian Barrett:and human stories shaping the future of medicine, from advances in AI and cancer research to the rise of chronic disease and autoimmune disorders. Not sure where to start? We recommend the Season 4 premiere, where dermatologist Dr. Saranya Wiles and biomedical engineer Dr. Adam Feinberg explore how 3D bioprinting is revolutionizing medical research and accelerating breakthroughs in healthcare. Whether you're a healthcare professional, patient, or simply curious about what's ahead, Tomorrow's Cure invites you to imagine what healthcare could look like and shows you the future is already here. Find Tomorrow's Cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now.

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31:02Leah Fessler:Porn is everywhere. Millions stream it every day, yet nobody seems to know who really controls the business. I'm Alex Barker. I'm a journalist at the Financial Times. Years ago, my fellow reporter Patricia Nielsen and I started digging into the porn industry to find out how the money flows. And in our new audiobook, The Kink Machine, The Hidden Business of Adult Entertainment, you'll hear our investigation into the power and influence that drives the most taboo corners of the internet. Find The Kink Machine, the hidden business of adult entertainment at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify or wherever you get your audiobooks.

31:48Brian Barrett:So guys, this week we're switching it up and doing our first Futurecast segment. This is our time to bring predictions to the table. What do we think is coming down the pipeline next week, next year, next month? Who wants to go first?

32:03Zoë Schiffer:Okay, I'm going to think through this in real time because I had one and then I changed my mind. But I think open models are potentially an existential threat for open AI and anthropic. What we're seeing right now is this question around are scaling laws going to hold? If you throw more compute at these frontier models, are you able to train smarter and smarter models that like, you know, leap forward in terms of their intelligence every time there's a new release. You know, despite what happened with OpenAI's GBT-5, where it was kind of hailed as like the coming of AGI, and then it was pretty disappointing, like the models are continuing to advance really rapidly.

32:46Zoë Schiffer:I think Anthropix coding models are a really good example of that. But we also know that if you throw enough tokens at a model, you can extract the model parameters and, you know, essentially build a frontier model that looks a lot like Claude, essentially. We're seeing places around the world, I'm not going to name any names, don't come at me, do this. And so their open models are getting really, really advanced really quickly. And, you know, if you can essentially access Claude without paying Anthropic and instead you're paying, I don't know, DeepSeek, like a nominal sum.

33:23Leah Fessler:Not that we're naming names. Definitely not naming names.

33:25Zoë Schiffer:Sorry, that just slipped out. I think that you're going to do that. And if Anthropic is able to keep advancing, that might not be an existential threat yet. But I feel like in the next couple of years, it might change.

33:37Leah Fessler:So can I ask a quick follow-up? Because this was Meta's strategy for a long time, right? They were saying, we're going to go all in on Lama. We're going to have an open-weight model. And that's going to undercut the businesses of these other folks. I don't mean like trying to rip off the model. They were building it themselves. But they have since abandoned that. So what's different?

34:01Zoë Schiffer:Yeah, I think that that's a really good point. I mean, I think one difference like you alluded to is if you're trying to build the open model yourself versus, say, distilling someone else's frontier model, that's a really big difference in terms of the cost of compute that you're throwing at it in terms of how quickly you can advance and surpass the model you trained on originally. And so I think if you're willing to take a different tack than Meta did, you can move much more rapidly. Interesting. That's a good one. I want to think about that.

34:31Leah Fessler:And I have a future cast.

34:33Brian Barrett:Take it away.

34:35Leah Fessler:Do we use future cast noun, verb, or both?

34:38Brian Barrett:Oh, I think both. Yeah.

34:39Leah Fessler:Okay. Well, I'm going to future cast something now. No, I think that there, if there's not already, there's probably already somewhere. I think there will be a well-known, highly visible, red-pilled prediction market out there that will let you bet on violent crimes and let you bet on yourself doing violent crimes. and no one will regulate it because it will be in some random island somewhere that's mostly inhabited by gazelles or penguins. And so people are just going to make a ton of money off of themselves doing horrible things.

35:10Zoë Schiffer:Oh my God.

35:11Brian Barrett:This is, at the very least, you should get the IP for that. I know. This is a movie. This is also my spec script.

35:17Leah Fessler:This is also my side project.

35:19Brian Barrett:Yikes. Yikes, Brian. Wow. Future cast. Future cast. That's a, okay, Mine's actually kind of a little sad too. I'll be totally honest. I'm thinking, I've been thinking a lot this week about Iran. I'm thinking a lot about the timeline here and how chaotic and unclear, unclear the ending of all of this is. And obviously the U.S. has gone into all of this with their partner, Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi wins consistently when he is putting the country at war. And like throughout history, that is very much like you're a country at war, you're going to win your election. People keep the incumbent.

36:01Brian Barrett:It's trustworthy. It's like just stay the course. I'm looking at this. I'm looking at the midterms. Stats are bad for Republicans right now. They're theoretically going to get crushed in the midterms. Again, I say theoretically, we're many months out and a lot can change. To be a country at war, regardless of how it started and who started it, right now there's only a couple of U.S. service members that have died. but each death is a tragedy. I'm waiting for that number to go up. I'm waiting for the U.S. to say, now this is, we have to, we have to do it to honor the military. We have to do it to protect U.S.

36:38Brian Barrett:interests abroad in a very, very scary way. So my future cast is that this is going to be used to keep Trump in power, to keep Republicans in power for a little bit longer.

36:48Leah Fessler:I think that's probably Despite how unpopular this war is in the U.S. right now, I also think it creates a pretext for declaring national emergency of some way or the other that would, you know, potentially unlock illegal, but whatever. It would lock efforts to make it harder to vote in areas that would not vote for Trump.

37:07Brian Barrett:But a government at wartime is, this is an entirely different situation right now. We have to look at our midterms polls and these like close races way closer. We're looking at folks that are going to be pitching their experience, their knowledge, their age in some ways. No, I know how this goes. I am right in there with the president. I know what we need. You know, Brian, you mentioned U.S. farmers needing fertilizer. This all ramps up to the federal government. And I don't know if I see a world where the GOP is not going to be taking advantage of that. Anyone have anything nice to say before we sign off?

37:43Brian Barrett:It's so nice having you in New York, Brian. It's great to be in New York.

37:46Leah Fessler:and Leah won a big award. Yay. Okay, that's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about today in the show notes. If you have any comments, you can find the episode transcripts at wired.com to discuss. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles. Pran Bandy is our New York studio engineer. Kimberly Chua is our digital production senior manager. Kate Osborne is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director.

38:24Zoë Schiffer:What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done?

38:29Brian Barrett:Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday

38:50Zoë Schiffer:for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in.

39:00Leah Fessler:From PRX.