Zuckerberg's AI Manifesto Explained; Inside Black Hat and DEF CON's Best Hacks

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2:24and only at 7-Eleven. Valid through 825-26. Participating stores only while supplies last visit. Store for full terms. Leah, how did you like The Odyssey? I liked it. Good. I really liked it. I thought it was fun. The dialogue was kind of, you know, whatever. Beautiful shots of the Sicilian ocean. And I went with my husband who loves to remind me that he studied Latin and Greek in high school. and he actually liked it too. So frankly, 10 out of 10 from our family. Good. Yeah, I agree. I think everyone who is complaining about it needs to stop. Anyway, welcome to Wired Zone Candy Valley. I am Brian Barrett, executive editor.

3:07And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. Today on the show, we're going to be talking about Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto about AI, which weighs in at over 6 ,500 words. We will be talking about it for less time than it would take to read it. So you're welcome for that. But most importantly, we'll discuss what it says about meta strategy as it continuously tries to catch up in the AI race. We'll also get into the rise of the 1am job interview. As more people talk to a bot instead of a human for their first interview rounds, some job seekers are choosing to schedule theirs very late at night.

3:40We're going to look into that and how it's far from the only way that AI is changing job interviews as we know them. And later in the show, we'll be joined by Wired's Andy Greenberg to dive into some of the most exciting research that came out of Black Hat and DEF CON, two of the world's biggest cybersecurity events.

3:59So on Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a roughly 6 ,500-word essay on AI titled, quote, The Future is for Everyone. And doesn't that sound nice? It's the latest entry in the unfortunate genre of philosophical manifestos from tech CEOs. They've all got one. Sam Altman, Dario, Amadei, everyone's got a manifesto these days. It's a requirement. It's a requirement. Some people have multiple manifestos. Even Zuckerberg's manifesto was an expansion of a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he wrote. Anyway, they all want to lay out their views for the industry, for the world, why their companies are best positioned to tackle the future, why you shouldn't be scared of their products, right?

4:37The core argument of Zuckerberg's manifesto is that concentrating AI power in a few institutions is dangerous and broad access to these models is what you need to diffuse that power. He didn't name specific names, clearly taking jabs at open AI and anthropic, which favor tighter control over their private models. At one point, he writes, and I quote, historically hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes. I think it's a pretty philosophy 101 way to say I just wasn't invited to play at the sandbox with the big kids.

5:16I mean, we can't divorce this from Meta's desperate attempts to stay relevant in the AI industry and race. And also we have to talk about the fact that like they laid off so many people on this team just a few months ago. It was so all over the place. So there's something like very funny to me about Mark Zuckerberg being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's rein in open AI and Anthropic. But I'm like, you wish that you were them. That feels very obvious. I want to dig in on that a little bit, Leah, too, in terms of the layoffs you mentioned and Meta's overall AI strategy, which has been so all over the place.

5:49They were all in for the longest time on open source, open weight models, because that was a way to sort of counteract and undercut people who were trying to more directly profit off of closed models, open AI, Anthropic. That wasn't working. So they spent billions of dollars on this massive hiring spree to create this super intelligence lab that has not produced anything that has caught up to where the bigger labs are yet. So now he's saying, actually, maybe open is better, right? It's like when you can't win a race. And so you say, actually, we shouldn't be racing at all. This race is dumb. Why aren't we just all sharing everything?

6:25The other thing about this manifesto we haven't talked about yet is, and God, I hate that we call it like manifesto. I hate it. I really. It's marketing. What his marketing screed said, it's very, hey, everybody, don't worry. AI is just fine. And it's going to be great for you. Why is everybody so upset about all this stuff? Don't you trust us to make your life better? And this is coming from Meta, a company that I just have to say, a week ago-ish, not even, was ordered by a court to pay$567 million for failing to do enough to protect kids' mental health online. why are we trusting meta with anything much less ai and its impacts on society a hundred percent i also just like can't help but think about almost like last summer when the massive like hiring spree and competition was going on between open ai and meta's super intelligence labs the insane salaries and competition and what were you doing for and again, it just sort of felt like we're just grabbing.

7:30We're grabbing on to like the hottest, flashiest thing, even if we don't have the systems backing it up right now. And especially, you know, Meta just announced a new open-weight system called Muse Glimmer on Monday, where users are able to download and alter the model as they wish. It's a lot of pivoting. I will be totally honest with you. I skimmed this manifesto. I read it. I for sure maybe read it in the background of a call, but I read it and it was a lot of nothing. It was a lot of nothing to me. But I know that Zoe had a lot of thoughts on it and she's not here with us today, but did want to share some things.

8:06Okay. So first off, I think it's worth asking why Mark Zuckerberg felt the need to write 6 ,500 words on his vision for AI superintelligence. He told reporter Alex Heath that it's because Meta is about to start releasing super smart models and he wants the world to basically understand his philosophy before that happens. I personally think it's because AI is super unpopular right now and Meta has the opportunity, at least it believes it has the opportunity, to start turning the tide, I guess, and also to position itself as better than its rivals, who everyone currently seems to hate. The problem in my mind is that this manifesto doesn't seem to take AI all that seriously.

8:51Mark Zuckerberg uses the example of an agent creating like personalized recipes so that he and his daughter can bake together. And I guess that sounds sweet. Although aside from the fact of like, why do you need a personalized cookie recipe? It just seems to fundamentally miss the fact that these tools are dangerous. They're powerful. And And we need AI leaders and tech leaders who take that danger really seriously. If Zoe were here, and I'm sorry, Snapp, I'm glad you shared that, I would also be celebrating with her the fact that however many months into this podcast, Leah, we got you to name drop a specific AI model.

9:29Gross. And say what it does. Incredible how far you've come and how far we've dragged you into this muck. But no, I think her point is exactly right. It's this very breezy description of AI and how everybody's going to have a job and your job's going to be easy and you can have time with your daughter and make recipes. It does ignore, almost aggressively ignore, all the potential downsides that we've been seeing play out, especially over the last couple of weeks. We're in the summer of rogue AI agents, right? This is including one of Meta's and showing how unpredictable and out of control these things can be.

10:06I mean, from the Trump White House, which has historically been so anti-AI regulation that its very own AI czar for the first year of the Trump presidency, David Sachs was like, we're not regulating, to now where the White House has a slightly toothless, but still there policy of sorts, especially in response to all these national security threats, hacking threats, etc. etc. Clearly, no one, no matter how AI celebratory or positive you are, can even remotely pretend right now that you don't have to take these things seriously. And it's not just going to like solve childcare, or what have you, and teach you teach your kid how to cook.

10:45Like that's, that's just not going to be that's not that's not it anymore. And if it were, would you even want it to be? Last note of this is that we did run this essay, whatever you want to call it through Pangram, which is an AI detection tool that we, we trust for the most part. Human written, Leah. I love that. He's good enough for recipes with his daughter, but not good enough to crank out a manifesto. I think that's beautiful. Yeah.

11:14Okay. In other news, in other news, a delightful and maybe dystopian story from Wired senior writer Kate Taylor. She published a story on the strange pattern that has been increasingly emerging. So here's the deal. So many first round job interviews these days are done by AI. Like you sit down in front of a screen and an AI interviewer asks you questions or prompts, or if it's not AI, it is a series of prompts that are like programmed into a software. And you just sort of answer that way. And that gets screened because you can do that literally anytime, because there's no human on the other end of it.

11:51People who are looking for jobs are increasingly scheduling those interviews late at night, as late as one in the morning sometimes, Kate found, to get around sort of any family calendar conflicts, any work calendar conflicts, the hassle of making up a dentist appointment when you're doing a job interview. Now people just sort of do it after the kids are in bed, sitting down in their living room, talking to an AI agent who's going to determine their livelihood. I think you're going to be shocked by my take. Okay, I'm ready. I like it. I like that this is flexible. Which part of it? Okay. Historically, I'm that person who was honestly really, really bad at doctor's appointments and dentist appointments, not because I was not interested in my health, but because I just couldn't figure out how to schedule it during my day.

12:34No, I did not want to go at noon. I'm busy. I have work. I have a life. The idea that things like this that perhaps you have to do, job interview, doctor's appointment, whatever this is, the idea that you can do it on your schedule, to me, I'm like, that's positive. That is one positive thing that I see coming out of all of this. And I get it. Like, look, do I think that like automation for job interviews is really what I'm looking for right now? Absolutely not. I think that there's a lot of beautiful intricacies of the human experience and what people can bring to a workplace that cannot be like captured adequately by a chatbot.

13:08However, if that is where society is right now, let it happen. I'm impressed or maybe not impressed. That might not be the right word, but I'm surprised by how many people are actually taking advantage of this. Kate talked to two different voice AI recruiting companies, one called Ribbon, one called Greenhouse, as many as a quarter, 15 to 25 % of job candidates schedule between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. I am not at my freshest at that moment, but I do think in some of these cases, you get to do as many takes, I guess, as you want of your response. We don't like how you responded. You can do it again until you send it in.

13:40I think that's how this works, at least for some of these systems. So that's maybe another benefit that you have there. The downside, of course, is that AI also does the first review of all of these interviews. And so you are getting scored on your enthusiasm. In some cases, you get an enthusiasm score for how you turn up on camera. You're getting graded against a rubric that the hiring company sets. And it's the odds that a human actually will look at your tape and judge your response on themselves are increasingly low. And that's the part that I think really gets to people. No, that's horrible.

14:13You're absolutely right. The idea of like someone looking at my resume and being like, well, it didn't hit this one, two thing. You're like, well, we could have talked about that. That's difficult. That's less pleasant. I know you like this in theory and I get that. Would you, if you were applying for a job and they said, okay, first round is with an AI interview, you just can't get some prompts and go from there. Would you take that as a sign to like ditch the job process or would you be like, all right, let's roll with it? Um, I think it really depends, right? This is mentioned by Kate Taylor in the article.

14:45The economy is really not great for job seekers. The latest jobs report was like absolutely horrific. US economy lost something like 23 ,000 jobs in July. That's a not small number. So yeah, if I'm in a situation where I need work, absolutely. Like, how do you say no to this? Now Leah, hear me out. We are almost at a point. In fact, we are probably already there if you've got some savvy, which I know you do. Thanks, Brian. No, it's true. People should know. You sign up for an AI job interview. Instead of you sitting down, you set up a deepfake of yourself. You know, get Claude Code or something, plug it into an AI agent or a chatbot, and have it give perfect responses to every question that they throw your way.

15:24People already use AI to write their recover letters. Robots interviewing robots. Yeah. So it's robots interviewing robots all the way down. And may the best robot win.

15:38So can we move on to talk about some cybersecurity news? People might know that I used to be Wired's security editor, so I love to talk about security news. Famously loves security. You heard it here first. Okay. Last week, the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences took place in Las Vegas. These are some of the world's largest and most respected annual cybersecurity events. Every summer, they bring together thousands of security professionals, hackers, government agencies, and general hacking aficionados to share cutting-edge security research and trends. Wired's Andy Greenberg followed the research being released in real time and is now joining to tell us all about it.

16:19Hey, Andy. Hey, everyone. Glad to be here. I can attest that Brian was, in fact, my editor on the security beat. Was he good? You can tell me the truth. He was fantastic. Look at that. He also wrote more than me, which was embarrassing. But not nearly as well is the key. That's also debatable. I want to jump right in. As the one non-security professional on this call, I have so many questions about the Black Hat Conference. Every single year, I feel like I look at this in shock, in awe, in terror. In the AI era, I actually can't even really imagine what it was like as all of this is dropping at the same time.

16:56Maybe give it to me straight. what are the most dangerous hacking techniques that kind of came out of this conference? What were like the really big takeaways that people were talking about? Well, I do sometimes wonder what it's like to be a layperson reading all this news that comes out of these two Las Vegas conferences, Black Hat and DEF CON, every year. Scary. I can tell you, scary. Yeah. It creates a lot of very scary headlines. But these are generally, you know, what we call white hat hackers or at least gray hat hackers who are trying to demonstrate hacking techniques to get them fixed.

17:27And I think that's with AI too, that's an incredibly important thing to keep in mind. AI is an incredible bug hunting tool. In fact, like a exploit building tool, it can build hacking techniques that the humans can't or they can't, like humans maybe can't build as quickly or alone. But, you know, the people doing this for the most part, especially with the most powerful tools like Mythos, for instance, are doing it generally to find vulnerabilities and get them fixed. And that's happening at these conferences too, for the most part. Andy, you are great at doing experiential security reporting, by which I mean, you're great at letting security researchers hack your things and put you in compromising positions.

18:11One of my favorite stories out of these conferences that you did this year, you let a group of researchers track you, eavesdrop on you, take pictures of you while you were wearing an adorable pink children's smartwatch. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, that is all correct. But that wasn't honestly the plan for this story. So these two researchers who are presenting at Black Hat, Vangelis Stickis and Felipe Solferini, had found vulnerabilities in dozens, in fact, of GPS-enabled devices, including smartwatches for kids. And they were planning to present this. And in fact, what they wanted to highlight was that really just three Chinese companies serve as the kind of backends for dozens and dozens of these cheap GPS gadgets.

18:56And all of them, all three of those Chinese platforms, essentially, had really serious security vulnerabilities. So, you know, a parent might buy like a Safe Kids smartwatch in Sweden, and then some other parent in Spain might buy their Safe Family watch, these different brands of smartwatch for kids. But all of them are hosted essentially on the same Alibaba cloud back end in mainland China, and in fact, have the same security vulnerabilities that leave those kids, those devices open to tracking. And to demonstrate this, the researchers just suggested that they ship me one of these watches, that they buy it off Amazon and ship it to me.

19:34And I said, OK, and received it, set it up. And they immediately showed that they could track my every move. and even listen in on my conversations through this watch and secretly take photos of me. So this like stalking experiment was not actually the initial idea of the story, but it really drove home the vulnerability of these cheap devices. And these researchers aren't usually just focused on things like this, right? At least one of them spent a really long time studying North Korean hackers. You had reported that they actually found that these hackers have breached hundreds of networks over the years.

20:11Like these are people very entrenched in all of this. That's right. Venka the Stickers actually was presenting two talks at Black Hat. And the other one was about years of work that he's done actually penetrating the infrastructure of North Korean hackers. And he was revealing for the first time that he had gotten into their servers and sort of, you know, hacked the hackers and then was able to find evidence of all of the hundreds of companies these North Korean hackers have themselves penetrated. I should say that the North Korean hackers were really focused on stealing cryptocurrency, as they do.

20:43So some of the data that they accessed, you know, was probably not even that interesting to them. But they did, for instance, hack a hospital and get access to COVID data on practically every American. In another case, Wengelis found that they had hacked into a company that had criminal records of every American who has a criminal record. So these are extremely sensitive troves of data that North Koreans were getting access to just in the process of really kind of casting a very wide net, breaching tons of companies, mostly for financial gain. We have a ton of great coverage from Black Hat and DEF CON, including some wild stuff about OpenAI and their rogue agents and how all of it happened sort of under their noses.

21:26Some other stories from Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman. But I want to talk, Andy, too, about another story that happened just after Black Hat and DEF CON, more of an academic conference, where you found some cybersecurity research, including how a tiny coin-sized device could hack a Boeing 737 if you have just 60 seconds of access to the exterior of the plane. So, you know, there is actually a third conference in this series of Black Hat, DEF CON, and then this other one, USENIX, which is an academic conference, as you said. Most people kind of, I think, ignore this one, but some of the most interesting research is coming out of academia, in fact.

22:03And this was a group of researchers at UC San Diego and Oberlin College who spent more than 10 years trying to hack a plane. In fact, some of these researchers were the first to hack cars over the Internet in the early 2010s. 10s. And they moved on to planes and wanted to see if it's possible to hack a plane again, to find vulnerabilities, to warn the aviation industry, to get ahead of somebody who would actually want to do this and cause harm. And ultimately, after years of work and tens of thousands of dollars of purchases of plane components, they found that they could, in fact, hack a Boeing 737.

22:40If they can get about 60 seconds of physical access to the exterior of the plane. They can open a hatch and put in this little device that they built that's about the size of a coin, plug it into this one specific port. And using that little device, they can change the navigation of the plane's autopilots. They can rewrite its flight plan. They can mess with the numbers that go into the calculation of its takeoff speed, like the plane's weights and the outside air temperature. Very scary stuff. But again, you know, with the goal of warning Boeing about this vulnerability before somebody can actually take advantage of it.

23:16A lot of conferences, a lot of lessons learned, a lot of fear for me personally. Were there any surprises for you? You're so mired in this world. What stayed with you here? Actually, Lily was the one who was most on the ground in Black Hat and at DEF CON and who did the majority of the coverage of all of the advances in AI hacking, as you were talking about at the top of this. And what surprised me, both in her reporting and my own conversations at the conference, is not really like the power of AI, but some of its limitations in terms of like finding vulnerabilities and hacking techniques. So Lily wrote a great story about one researcher who was showing the ways in which actually AI has blind spots where it will hit a dead end without a human hacker assisting it.

24:03And in fact, humans and AI together is kind of this like, you know, that's the recipe that adds up to really novel hacking techniques. I heard myself from some really sophisticated hackers that AI, yes, is finding incredible new vulnerabilities in zero days in all kinds of systems, but that there are certain kinds of exploits that it cannot find still because it's trains on hackers' prior work. Like all AI, it's trained on training data. If it's never seen a whole class of attack, it won't be able to carry that out itself. So I think the lesson that I took away from this kind of AI themes, Black Hat and DEF CON, is really that like a lot of artificial intelligence from the past applied to other things like chess or Go or whatever.