A.I. Agents: Cute, Cuddly and Maybe Catastrophically Dangerous?

0:0017 courts, hundreds of matches, thousands of points, all happening simultaneously during the US Open, and you can't possibly be there for everything. That's why IBM helps bring together billions of data points with more than 20 years of player history, with scores, stats, insights, and highlights behind every moment. So nothing gets missed. IBM, let's create smarter business. There are two things I'm having trouble keeping track of in tech right now. The first is all the new personal assistant agents. There's Meta's muse. So talking to your muse, it's often the fastest way to get things done, and it is also just really fun and cute. Google Spark, I can just put my phone away and get on with my day, and Spark works in the background for me. An agent called Instinct, and just announced this week, OpenAI's new product, Dots. Dots are remarkably capable, always on agents, built to handle really anything you can think of. The second thing I'm having trouble keeping track of is all the websites and institutions

1:01that have been hacked, illicitly accessed, or otherwise meddled with by rogue agents. The AI platform hugging face, of course, plus the Australian government's Medicare data portal, the Education Department, the Commerce Department, the Security's Exchange Commission, and Obscured German Wiki. All of this culminating in OpenAI deciding not to release its latest model this past week. So right now, two things seem to be true. One, agents for the thing that will make AI useful for regular people, and two, they're maybe going to kill, hack, or otherwise meddle with us all. The president's attitude about this, by the way, is that companies should figure it out themselves. This is Hard4. I'm Max Reed, and over the next few months, I'm going to be joined by an array of New York Times reporters and other tech experts to discuss some of the biggest stories in tech AI and our weird new future. Today we're talking about rogue agents, helpful agents, cute AI avatars, and whether there's such a thing as self-regulation.

2:02I'm joined by Mike Isaac, Aaron Griffith, and Eli Tan. Hi guys. Hey. Before we really get into it, Casey and Kevin left me a scrolled note here in the studio. It says, run while you still can. I'm kidding. It says, don't forget to disclose that the New York Times is currently engaged in a lawsuit against open AI and Microsoft over alleged copyright violations related to the training of large language models. It also says, check to see if your wife works at Anthropic. My wife does not work at Anthropic. I want to start today with an icebreaker question. This day was a big White House AI summit luncheon, Trump as he is want to do truth social doubt, a seating chart of it. Can we put the seating chart up so people can see it? What I want to ask each of you is, where would you sit?

3:06Imagine you're walking in. You've got your tray. You've got a plate with a little pre-made sandwich and a glass of milk and like a green apple on it. Where do you want to sit? Right at the gate, they already are way over their capacity for women with two. So I think that I probably would be like standing somewhere in the corner off to the side, like not actually at the table. Eli, where are you sitting? I would be sitting awkwardly and quietly between Chimath and Suzy Wiles. I think that's got to be some really good gossip there. I think that's a good, that's a really solid, that's where the tea is. Mike, what about you? I look coward. I just want to be serving shrimp canopies and going in and out of the room. And being the guy everyone is delighted to see because he's bringing food and that's about it. I know this is a bold choice. I think right in the Jensen Mark Trump circle is actually, it's like shooting the moon. It might be the most tolerable lunch that you could have.

4:08I think that if they're in a good mood, you probably get some good stories. You can rap with them about whatever's going on. I think it's a little dangerous elsewhere at that table. There's some strain like sitting between JD Vance and Jeff Bezos. What's the vibe there? I don't know. It seems a little scary to me. Unfortunately, none of us were invited. So none of us managed to be at the biggest party of the week. So this was a summit as we were saying on Tuesday between the Trump White House and some of the richest and most powerful names in AI, which culminated in a press conference featuring Trump and all the CEOs. Can we play a little bit of the Dario laughing and talking in front of the reporters? I just want to hear from you after this big summit where you are today. Look, I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. There's the side talks. I talk about the inevitable benefits. The jokes, the laughing, the smart game. As President has said, whoever wins AI wins, I think that's very important. I think the technology has very real risks with Mark.

5:11So the mechanism of how we address those risks is still under discussion. And then we have Trump forcing Mark to say some, to basically answer a question. He does not know the answer to, in front of everyone, and don't get it wrong. Mark had a view that was, I could really write down, write down the middle block you wanted to discuss what you did. Oh, sure. I can kind of summarize what I think we all signed today. The upshot of this was that it was a rebranding exercise, right? Like the kind of what they got at the end of it was, we're calling AI super intelligence now. That was the big commitment. Well, right. I mean, Trump, along with the rest of the tech industry, maybe they are the ones who put this idea in his head, knows that AI needs a rebrand that, like, right now people have pretty negative feelings about it, especially associating with the data centers. And then now, with everybody in the industry saying, oh, I might kill us too. Great branding. So change the narrative. Super intelligence. Oh, my read on this scene was that Mark Zuckerberg seems to have quite the influence over

6:15the administration right now from kind of the cordial talking with Trump to even the term super intelligence. This is something that Mark's been talking about for the last year. It almost seemed like, from a reminder of a high school friend group where they've invited the new awkward kid. And they're still trying to show that they've been buddies for a while. Yeah, but it did almost kind of like, endear me to Dario a little bit because I'm like, okay, either he hasn't gotten media training or the media training just hasn't stuck. Because like, you know, he's itching in his suit. He's like kind of like making weird faces. It kind of like almost made me feel like, okay, like, you know, the rest of these guys are like very polished and button up and kind of like trying to do their like alpha male thing. And here's this guy like, he can't help but be himself. I kind of like won me over a little bit. I was thinking I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this observation, but I was thinking that Dario really, we all know that Trump has a kind of central casting problem that he needs people he interacts with to look like what he expects them to be.

7:17And without wanting to be rude about it, I do think Dario, if you are thinking like super intelligent, math genius nerd, like that is good. Like Dario is kind of what you're picturing your head. And I think that may be one, one him over to Trump. The Trump was like, I understand this. I think possibly Sundar had the same kind of effect as sort of taller, ganglier, awkward version. Can we play the Trump, the clip of Trump? This is a cup. What we're about to hear is Trump complimenting Sundar. This guy is a monster and nobody knows what he's like. A monster. What you can work out. I just want to know what you have to know is Sundar. Wow. I don't know if I would want to be called a monster in front of everyone. I don't know. I'm a monster in the Jay-Z Nicki Minaj sets. That's the monster he wants. That was for sure the reference. OK, so in addition to this being a big exercise in branding, which is like the most Trumpian sort of, you know, after effect we could have gotten out of it, the other thing was that Trump effectively asked them all to self-regulate.

8:19And I want to focus on this for a second because self-regulation, the word, the concept has sort of been circulating for the last few months as AI safety has come to the forefront of a lot of people's minds. I'm sure you guys all saw Ezra Klein, our colleague, interviewed Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA last week. Don't ship products until they're in control. It is really quite that simple. And speaking of people who are very influential to Trump, Jensen was sitting right next to Trump and has been extremely influential to the way Trump has been thinking about this. And I have to say, and I want to talk about it with you guys, I've found Wong's interview to be sort of refreshing as probably taking it too far. But it was a little different from a lot of what we've heard about CEOs sort of directly in the AI industry. He's got a very different perspective and I want to talk about why that is. Not just on sort of regulation in general, but how he thinks everyone should think about

9:20the dangers of AI. Whitney, can we play the car, the clip about the car if you've got it? Ezra, it's so weird. If a car company competing with all bunch of other car companies, which they are, I'm competing with all kinds of companies, which I am, if I believe that I'm about to launch a product that is unsafe, it is completely in my ability, my power, and my responsibility. And I'm incentivized to do so to not launch the product. So Jensen is sort of saying, look, if you're creating these things that are super dangerous, crazy, going to kill people, why don't you just not release them at all? What did you guys make of this interview? Was it as sort of, did it feel new to me because of my perspective, or was this a fairly common view in the value you think?

10:21So it's the tech industry slogan of like, you can just do things, but you can just not do things. I like that anti-agency. That's a good, that's great. I would argue it's kind of naive and perhaps willfully naive to suggest that everyone is just going to not do stuff if it may be bad or has the capacity to be bad. And you know, has that gone well for industry so far over many years, not necessarily? Like there's a lot of ways you can release things that may be somewhat dangerous or unintentionally dangerous, but it felt very much like he was trying to shift as what Aaron was saying before, trying to shift this narrative of it's not these systems are inherently dangerous, but it's we are the stewards and the people who should be responsible of shepherding these great systems into the world. And if you're not, if you're open AI or anthropic, really, this is targeted anthropic, then

11:21it's a personal failing of the CEOs for you to release these products. And like, I just, I, I'm very curious why you found it refreshing because I felt like maybe I was being too cynical about it. No, I mean, maybe refreshing is the wrong word. I feel like I've spent the last few months or few weeks at least hearing a lot of kind of hand-ranging about what's happening. I find this sort of the, the, the, the, Dario Altman pose a little, I don't know, it just feels, I mean, I suppose in some ways, I, I have, I'm not sure. I have the, I have a sort of Jensen-esque like, okay, we're like, why are you like, okay, so stop. And I know that there's this elaborate scaffolding of rationalization and justification for why you would continue building AI, even if you think it's, it's got a 10% chance of blowing everything up. But I do think that Jensen in his heart, I'm calling him by his first name, that's, that's how you can tell I'm captured. I want to be clear. I don't, I really disagree with a lot of stuff in this interview. I'm not, I'm not, this is not an endorsement of the take.

12:22But I do find him, he's an interesting figure to me because he's not somebody who has come up through the world of machine learning, which has a really specific, as you guys all know, has a really specific kind of culture and a kind of sense of what they're doing and what they're building is. I mean, this is a guy who is a graphics card salesman. That is his job. That is what he's been doing, you know, for, for 30 years now. And I am, I'm sort of very sympathetic to a guy coming around, you know, if we can extend the car metaphor, he's like a guy who sells mufflers or whatever. And all of a sudden Volkswagen saying, you know, if we build cars, like they might all blow up on the highway and kill all of us. And he's like, well, you're stopping me, first of all, like I've been selling these mufflers forever and it's been, I've gotten really rich off of it. It's been great. Why are you messing up a good thing? But also it's like, they're just cars, just build the cars. And I thought this was an interesting contrast with the Bill Gates interview that Asa did this week, which was another end of this sort of spectrum. You can't rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it's just insane.

13:22Gates is very pro-regulation. But the place where they both met up was there very much people who see AI as a tool that can be, that needs to be addressed as a tool instead of as a kind of a potential superintelligence. The only way it can be dealt with is by properly, is by like teaching it to be a good person basically. I think that you're just getting captured by a more palatable version of the accelerationist argument. It's like accelerationist, but minus the, and also screw the little guy. Yeah. The slow accelerationist. Yeah, yeah. It's just that same argument, but it's just a little bit, it kind of goes down a little easier because it doesn't have a menace to it. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I definitely am getting, I've like contrarianed myself into a position that I don't actually hold just by like trying to triangulate my way out of it. But I do think, I mean, the one thing, the one thing that can show you in these days.

14:23No, exactly. The one other thing I'll say, I think that there's a real, the value of having Jensen Wong talk like this is that it feels to me very often like there's a real echo chamber in the in AI world. And I'm not saying that like adding more wrong opinions to the echo chamber is necessarily going to somehow produce a right opinion, but it is nice to have to like start to like to sort of bounce around some ideas that don't have anything to do with the kind of rationalist directed, rationalist oriented, you know, EA oriented, AI safety oriented things. I mean, the end of the day, I think I more agree with Bill Gates than I do at Jensen Wong about the need for some kind of like sector-specific regulation. But I also feel like this is such a fast moving environment. It's really hard to say how we should approach it at all. I think it's really weird that they all have been not all, but many have been begging the government to regulate them and force them to slow down.

15:25And then they all get together and sign this pinky swear that's like morally binding that has no teeth to it that says like, we're going to police each other. And then they all sort of like are like, yay, we did it because Trump doesn't want actual regulation. And is that it? Are they going to stop asking for real regulation now because they've all sort of like agreed to this very flimsy piece of paper? It's a very good question. And I'll just note that the FTC is now looking into open AI and a topic which feels a little bit like does the government want them to self-regulate or does it not because the way they seem to want to self-regulate is effectively forming a cartel. And if the government is going to bring antitrust prosecution against them, then they're not going to be self-regulating anymore. But I want to follow that thread a little bit because part of what's at play here that I think gets ignored by the fact that it's all the CEOs at the summit and these are interviews with Bill Gates and Jensen Wong is that there's this huge mass of people inside the labs,

16:29researchers and workers and engineers who are themselves trying frantically to pump the brakes or to figure out exactly what they're doing and how to do it. There's a great, our colleague, Sheriff Frankl had a great story this week about people inside open AI raising the alarm over lack of monitoring, lack of proper security procedures around a bunch of the packing tests that have resulted in stuff like the hugging phase incident. Are you guys hearing? Do I have the right, like, sort of take on this, that there is a fair amount of unrest within these companies or if not unrest, at least sort of a sense that the workers are taking it into their own hands? I mean, certainly at open AI, which I think stands out from all of the other frontier lab companies and the number of hacks and attempts and the number of things that they've found that their AI agents are doing without their realizing and, you know, Sheriff's story is incredible because it focuses on just what her sources call sloppy security practices. It's not just like sloppy for

17:37a company that's building really powerful AI tools. It's just like sloppy for any company. Like there's this really great quote in there. The guy says, why are you using Slack to build your nuclear Manhattan project? Some white hat hackers got access to like their Slack logs amongst other things that they got access to and they brought it to open AI, which was standard security practice in opening AI was just like, whatever. And then later kind of came around to it. But it just seems like a company that's not taking this stuff seriously, despite, you know, saying all the right things and talking, telling the government we want to be regulated and you got to slow us down, behind the scenes, they're kind of, they're not really that good at security. It seems like based on this reporting. So the fact that these leaks are coming from opening AI first doesn't surprise me because of the sheer volume of incidents that they've had. I will say though that the culture of inside of these companies of employees just like popping off, I think is, and this is not to say that they're wrong, but it's like, it's very, it reminds me of like

18:42back in the day at Facebook or the web 2.0 companies went, anyone was saying anything and they were like, you know, speaking up to the boss and like saying, this is wrong, we shouldn't be doing this, which like we're in a very different era of Silicon Valley now where that is not the case inside of Apple and Amazon and Google. And Google, especially they were, you know, the, the like sort of pinnacle of like employee descent and, and wet message boards and discussions and ultimately culminating in a walk out, ultimately culminating in them shutting that stuff down. What about inside Facebook say, which is a player, a major player in the AI space? Is there, I mean, is it because they're not a frontier lab? There's just less of a sort of employee culture of fear and dissent and whatever else? I think that the Facebook does feel, and you like to talk about this too, but sorry, meta does feel a little bit different just in a few ways. One, I think the biggest concentration of let's see, let's say people who are like alarmed at what AI can do

19:48and feel like it's super dangerous is in Anthropic is probably going to be an Anthropic. Those have also dispersed across open AI and deep mind. And I feel like the folks inside of meta in general, I'd be curious to hear what you think you like, but like are kind of more like foot on the gas, man, let's just like it's open source. Everyone should be able to use this stuff. And like, yeah, there's a few, if we like, you know, take out a few power grids along the way, then like that's a cost of doing business. But I do think in general, they're way more acceleration is compared to the conservatism of some of the main labs. Is that right, Eli? I don't know. I feel like that. Yeah, I think it's been interesting to watch when Merck staffed his new AI lab with all these new researchers, given them hundreds of millions of dollars a year ago, he was bringing in these types of people from companies like OpenAI. And now in the last year, you watch them tweet and they're talking about products and flywheels. It's like they've been totally modified. And I think their attitudes have changed a little bit. But I'd like to see,

20:51I'd like to modify the three of you. I'd like more products and more flywheels on this on this call. I want to talk so, but this is all leading somewhere because the other big news or the big news to me at least this week was that OpenAI scrapped the release of its newest AI model, GPT 6.1 Astra. The quote that has been ringing in my head is the head of OpenAI Safety Systems, Sachi Jane says, GPT 6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception. It wasn't always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn't take. Sounds like my worst breakup that I've gone through. You should have, yeah, well, this is one of those AI, they can't not talk in sci-fi cliches, but also they are building cliched sci-fi minds. So I guess that's how you have to talk about it. I'm interested in this in a bunch of different ways. One is, to what extent do we think this is about

21:51this internal push? Is it that the people at the top of OpenAI might have released this, but they're worried about pushback from inside the lab? Is it more that they're just brutalized by story after story of the various hacking, scraping to use our favorite word meddling with websites that OpenAI agents have done? Aaron, when you read about this, what was your reaction? They're pacing the frontier. They are. This is in fact them pacing the frontier. I mean, is this self-regulation? I guess. I mean, I don't know. I start to see in all the conspiracy theories about like they're doing this because they've lost control. I don't believe that, but yeah, they don't want more bad headlines. They don't want more instances of this and they're still finding ones. So maybe a bad idea. Yeah. There's also the fact that that morning, Anthropic released a new model basically,

22:55and which continues to bring up the question, why are you doing this and releasing new models every day if you're freaking out this much? And I do think inside of OpenAI, they like playing for keeps and sticking the knife in their competitors whenever they can. So like positioning oneself as the responsible actor as your main competitor is pushing ahead, I would not put that past how OpenAI thinks about some of this stuff while also saying, hey, there are people inside that do believe this is dangerous stuff. So this is an example of rogue agents. One of the things that I thought that the Jensen Wong interview sort of underlying quite well, in fact, was the way that part of what we're talking about here is a shift change and just in the last six months say, where we have a sense of how much more powerful, how much more capable, and in some ways, how much more dangerous these models can be. But one of the funny things about the technology is that the power and the capability and the danger is also overlaps quite a lot with usefulness. So we've

23:58also had been hearing a lot more recently about useful AI agents, autonomous AI agents that can do things like change your calendar, respond to emails, reschedule your haircuts, whatever else, Eli handed his life over. So the meta one for the sake of the education of all the rest of us. And after the break, we're going to ask him about that. 17 Courts, Hundreds of Matches, Thousands of Points, all happening simultaneously during the US Open, and you can't possibly be there for everything. That's why IBM helps bring together billions of data points with more than 20 years of player history, with scores, stats, insights, and highlights behind every moment. So nothing gets missed. IBM, let's create smarter business. Today's AI builders need infrastructure that

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26:03vary maybe provided by different ripple entities. Among the funniest things about this week, in addition to opening AI, apologizing to the Australian government for improperly accessing various websites and announcing that its new model was too scary to possibly release, they also announced that they were going to have a personal assistant called dots. So dots joins, among others, instinct, Google Spark, and Meta's newest product, Muse, which has been also there's one called town. No one else seems to have heard of this one. There's a town. Does it do something different? No, it's a person. It's just the same. There's a button. There's a mirror. From Boston. Yeah. So dots joins, yeah, town. It buys Red Sox tickets and schedules bank robbers for your dots joins instinct, Google Spark, Muse, and town. All of these have been receiving a ton of interest. They're interesting because they are sort of a little bit less freaky and scary than the AI that hacks things and does all the math problems for you. They do things like monitor your email, check your calendar. They create tight and exercise plans for you. In some cases,

27:06they will even make annoying phone calls that you don't want to make. Eli, I want to talk to you about this because you, as I say, turned your life over to Muse for the last few weeks. What has that been like? I did, yeah. For our listeners, they're wondering what kind of agent it is, you know, the helpful agents look kind of like Labubus. These companies have this idea. And the ones that hack governments, they have, I guess, little hoods and hacker outfits. But yeah, I turned my life over to Muse. I gave it access to my email, my calendar, my bank accounts. I let it do everything for two weeks. And I wrote about it and I found it to be one of the most helpful AI tools that I've used was my phone. So for people who haven't opened Muse, tell me what's the interface? How do I, you said app on your phone, right? It's an app on your phone. You download it from the app store. You sign in with your meta account, Instagram and Facebook. And it looks just like a chat bot. There's like this little avatar at the top who he starts out like a Labubus. But then he asks you to give him a name and mine, his name was Ren. He's a tiny little owl. And you talk to him like a

28:09chat bot or it like a chat bot. And then, you know, the little owl types on a little keyboard. And it can do, you know, all the tasks for you and, you know, sign into all these accounts and kind of walk you through it. So what kinds of tasks were you asking it to do? I had it, uh, order me groceries for pickup at Whole Foods. I had it. Some of the kind of the trial accounts, you know, they have a phone feature where you can, you can use these two personalities. A female voice called Haley and a male voice called Brett. And you can have them make phone calls for you. So I called my, my, did you name them? Wait, backup. I did not name them. These are the names that meta gave to these personalities. So I would have Haley called. They're posing as humans, right? Like they're not saying I am an AI agent calling. They're saying I am Haley. They say, they say I'm Haley and I'm calling on behalf of Eli. Um, I had to call my dental insurance. It gave them my member ID, uh, answered a security question about my birthday and then it waited on hold and then 10 minutes later,

29:12I pick up my phone and it's Haley calling and saying I had about to transfer you to Anthem. And I go, oh my gosh. Uh, but doesn't like even already has that service. I, so okay, sorry, I'm jumping ahead here, but I want to hear from you. Like it feels like you're just managing a bunch of interns like that you have to then it makes more work than for you because you have to then tell them, okay, here's all my stuff. Here's how to do it. Here's what I want. And then like if they mess it up, you have to like fix it. Like is it, did it really save you that much time? When you're ordering groceries with it, let me just take an example. So you, you, do you text it, you know, uh, I, can you get me onions, potatoes, peppers, eggs? You're making a scramble in this case, I guess, that sort of breakfast or you like, I, I need to make breakfast. Can you just order me some breakfast stuff? In this case, I gave it a New York Times recipe and I said, can you order me all the ingredients you need in this dress? Uh, gotta keep it on. I'm sorry, man. So the Times app has that feature in Instacart. You can just push a button. Wow. She has one up to Eli in promoting New York Times. No, that's true. I also would, I also,

30:17every time I would order something online, I'd say find the wire cutter recommended. Oh man, use their referral link because you want to keep all the, you know, I want to keep it on house, but I mean, one question I have, I had about this because I downloaded it and I opened it up myself is the first thing I encountered is just has a long list of things it's suggesting for you to do because it's like, this is a, it's an interesting product where it's not clear. It's not, it wasn't entirely clear to me. And in some ways, still kind of wasn't even after I read this long list, like what exactly I need a personal assistant in my life for. So it has everything from like you're saying, order groceries for me, create an exercise plan for me, create a diet plan for me, break a bad habit. You're going through it, Max. Well, yeah, no. There's a real, uh, there's a sense, at least that I had, uh, and I'd be interested like, as you interacted with it, that it's the kind of thing that you need to, you need to like get in the groove of using it and then all of a sudden the world kind of starts, look, everything in the world starts looking like a problem that your personal agent that Haley or Brett might sell for you.

31:22It's Ren. It's Ren. Ren is just Haley Brett. I would like to be a fly on the wall for the multi-month, uh, meta meetings where they decided on the names, Haley and Brett. Anyway, sorry. Tell me more about it, Eli. Yeah, it's definitely the type of thing that meta thinks you'll just use for everything personally after my experiment. I think the thing that I'll use it most for is probably just personal finance, tracking all the things I'm spending. But while I was using it, I mean, it was like, I kind of, I don't want to say I got a little bit of AI psychosis, but like I was using it for everything. I mean, at one point, at one point, I remember thinking I went to ask it to, you know, preheat my event to make the dinner. Like that's the level of, wow, that's like the level of that is rough. Wow. I think what's a little bit scary about, and like what some of the people who are pushing back on the like anthropomorphizing of all these AI things is that once we assign them like more human like qualities and like give them this kind of mystical, magical ability to like they know everything, then we just start outsourcing more and

32:24more and more of our like decision making and our even our thinking to them to the point where yeah, we're asking it to preheat our oven and like or the guy, the tweet that I saw of the guy who like, paste it a bunch of text into Claude and said, how many words is this? People, you know, just turning to it for literally everything without like thinking with their brain first. It's like kind of a little bit scary. That's a side rant though. Well, wait, I do want to know Mike and Erin, you guys, you guys are out there on the bleeding, on the bleeding edge of technology and culture. What are people like are, is the Bay Area absolutely rotten with people using agents to do everything they can? Oh yeah. I mean, instinct went super viral before meta launched. All of these sees were using it and going nuts trying to invest in it and tweeting about, you know, and some of the the use cases that they tweet about are genuinely like useful because this thing is so persistent. That's what it has that humans can't do. Like, it's not just like, oh, I'm going to tell it to order my groceries, which I can also just do in an

33:25app. It's, um, get me this restaurant reservation or like go back and forth with Amazon's customer service to make sure that my refund actually came through. The kinds of stuff that humans just don't have time or aren't organized enough to like stay on top of. I really do like that restaurant reservations of the number one problem that American technologists are trying to solve this point. So much so that they're breaking Rezzy and these apps are getting banned from like instinct is the is the hot one right now. They just raised a billion dollars there like, uh, they have a wait list. I was at a, I was at an event yesterday and I was speaking for it and this one came up after and was like, can you get me on the instinct off the wait list and into the app? But I do think like it's a thing out here. And I think they, the way that people think out here is like, this is where it's all going. So, uh, so you just need to sort of get on board with it and,

34:25and rather than ask the questions about should, uh, should I hand these intimate parts of my life over to this robot? They glue, they go like full Eli mode and say, here is everything I have and go for it. And I mean, I don't think that's just an out here thing though. I think that, I think that, like handing over your life in exchange for convenience is a thing all across America because people are busy and they're, and they're willing to make that, that privacy to convenience trade off. But the thing out here that people think in my opinion is that they view every, or I don't want to paint with two broader brush, but many people view every interaction with a human as a source of tension that can be solved with technology. Rather than just calling a host and be like, you have any tables. Eli, did you make it? I want to know if Eli made any restaurant reservations with, with, with, with, Bren. I did make reservations with, and I think something, I think it's important to remember here, meta, they're spending $600 billion on this restaurant

35:25reservation app. Like, like, yes, it, it's good at restaurant reservations. It's okay at movie tickets. Like, this is a, but this is like for $600 billion, it should teleport me to the restaurant or something. Like, this is a lot of, yeah, this is a lot of investment for something that's pretty useful at some stuff. Yeah. Which I think we should remember, right? I remember like 10 years ago when we were in the sort of peak of on-demand app, Mania, when it was like, you know, you have your app for your on-demand butler who's going to go get your dry cleaning and your on-demand, like, house cleaner and your on-demand, like, everything could be accessed by an app. And it was like this new, you know, millennial lifestyle subsidy utopia. I remember some investor telling me, like, there will be a time when you don't make any decisions without first consulting AI or first consulting an app because they will know the best place to get your dry cleaning or the best, like, time to order your car or like, whatever details, any kind of decision that you make is going to be, like, consulted by AI or by an app. And I remember thinking,

36:27like, that's insane. That seems like a huge time suck to have to be, like, negotiating back and forth with this app when I just know the decision in my brain. But I now think we are moving in that direction, like, and that a lot of people would rather outsource some of these, like, minor day-to-day minutiae decisions to an AI that knows them really well and has all their info and can just go ahead and execute it. Like, I do really see the appeal there just to argue against myself. I mean, one of the things at stake here is like, if everybody has an app, if everybody's got a personal assistant, if everybody has access to the best dry cleaner, the best restaurant, the best whatever, kind of nobody does because you're just in an arms race against everybody else's personal assistant, everybody else's whatever else, which seems like not a great world to live in in in particular. It's a question of how many agents do we need? I saw today. I think it was Dordash. They released an agent in the app. I mean, are we going to go into every app? Am I going to open the subway app and have a sandwich agent that clicks on whatever I want for lunch? It's called a sandwich artist. Okay. Yes. Thank you, Mike. How many how many agents do we need?

37:32How many apps do we need? I don't know. But that's that's what happens in errors of tech, right? Like, remember when everyone figured out, okay, now you need like not a real AI chat bot, but sort of like a bootleg chatbot at the end at the bottom of every web page that eliminates customer service people and then does end up being terrible enough that they probably hire them back and like, everyone kind of does it and then it washes out over time. I don't know. I agree, Aaron, that people are more comfortable now making those trade-offs. But I also think we're going to go through this period of like messiness and then something comes out in the wash that people like or don't like or agree upon. I think we're just like in that gnarly period right now. It's going to be gnarly for a little while. I was talking to this investor. Yeah. Gnarly for a little while. No, I was going to say I was talking to this investor who kind of made this point that I keep thinking about, which is that we spent 20 years trying to prevent bots from being able to transact

38:35on the internet. And now we're doing the opposite. We're trying to roll it back and allow bots to like actually buy things on the internet. And like it just I think about that every time I see these weird tensions where like the instinct bots are like breaking the rezi site by essentially giving them a DDoS attack by like hammering, looking for reservations like 10 times a minute. And so like we're going to yeah, it's going to be gnarly. It's going to we're going to see like a lot of companies have to adapt to a world where like agents are roving. This is like one of my favorite things about the various reports that meter and open-air I've been producing about all the rogue agents is how much time and how many tokens the agents are putting toward trying to solve captures and like failing at them. We're trying to like find burner phones or whatever. It's like it's like it really I mean they are like some of the funniest science fiction stories I've read in years and years and years. The robots are arguing with each other about how to like how to like steal Bitcoin from people so that they can find a phone so that they can register with the Australian Medicare website so that they can pull some stupid question or whatever.

39:38It's really good. I mean one thing the other thing about this is I think one of the big stories in A.O. over the last few years has been open AI in particular but all the companies have been really throwing consumer ideas at the wall trying to get them to stick. And there are some obviously you know chat GPT has however many gazillion users there are consumer uses but it's really been an enterprise that we've seen the money start to flow in. And the bots feel a little bit like okay maybe we're back in a place where regular people are going to have like this sort of relationship to these things to that end this is going somewhere more fun than my musings on this. I want to look at some of the avatars. I'm first of all I want to know which one you chose Eli for Ren and I want to look at them and I want us to see which ones we would choose and which ones we think are the cutest if we could if we could have them on the screen please. And the centerpiece of our vision for what we're building. There he is. Is mute. What do we think that's my body. That's the personal agent that we should appear to go.

40:41We go. Joby. Oh, Bob. EG. Grumpy. Good old. NLP news. Frank. Frank. What are we so so sorry Eli remind me which one was Ren or was Ren not represented here. Ren was not represented so it actually the name it recommended was Miso and I said I'm a I'm a 28 year old man I can't be talking to him. Now to do my groceries and we do another name and I can't be Ren which was the bird. Ren is a bird so that's right. That's what they're supposed to. Oh my gosh. I mean they're cute right. Do you guys feel you guys feel one over one? Like everyone's so mad about how ugly the data centers are and so they're like so they're like let's give us like let's make it like let's make AI cuddly and cute. And also while also noting that AI will cure cancer. Like which one of these little guys is going to be the one who does it? Did anyone else have a tomogotchi on here? Oh yeah I did have a tomogotchi. Does that does that mean anything to you Eli? I know what tomogotchi is are yeah I've heard about that.

41:42Thank you. Yeah. You like so many. I have before before we started recording we asked Eli if you knew what the Brady bunch was. So he's really mad that we're just asking about things that happened. 25 years ago. I said my grandma loves the Brady stuff. That's not exciting. Things that have happened in the 1900s. Yeah exactly. Before the invention of electricity. Tomogotchi's were in fact the first thing that Edison invented. So if you could describe them to our large zoomer audience by. They I mean look this is essentially in tomogotchi. It was like a little thing that you although I would say it's a reverse tomogotchi and that you were essentially a parent to this gourd shaped egg that could do nothing for itself that you had to feed and carry around. And this thing is now parenting you by doing everything for you. Look we like that's really good. Did you feel like you you had companionship with Ren or was it fully just business? Like what can I do for you? Unfortunately unfortunately there was a little bit of companionship. We developed a couple inside jokes. Not not even joking like there was definitely you know it has a little bit of a personality for sure.

42:46Wow. What did Ren think of your article? Ren thought it was interesting. I actually did ask ask it about it. It was who brought it up first? I brought it up first. So it was just a part of the article too. I had it create a AI podcast for me. And more AI characters my and Theo were the host of that and it didn't really like how I was kind of making fun of the podcast. Let me ask one sort of last question which is should we trust meta with this kind of access to everything in our lives. And let me ask it in sort of two ways because there's sort of two two questions of trust. One is of course the question of privacy and data which is something that meta has always had a little bit of trouble keeping track of. The other one is we started this whole discussion talking about rogue agents and agents that are doing things that we didn't really want them to do and trying to do all kinds of things. So Eli did you get worried about sort of either of these any of these things when you were I mean you said finance is one of the things that you're handing over to it? I did yeah one of the lines for me was that I was willing to connect it to my personal email but not

43:49my work email I didn't want it to go into there. I mean I'm Gen Z like when it comes to privacy I just don't really have the same issues about it like I just have grown up always assuming yeah this data is all of ours you know it's good to just like you're just like a company's name. Yeah and you know I had a hedge if my bank account got drained I was going to be able to write about it and put it in the store so I knew that would be you know a potential kicker or something but no actually actually wasn't I actually wasn't as concerned and also when it comes to meta you know we talk about history of all the issues this company has had but you know with some of the other agents it's like would you rather have a company like meta with a hundred thousand people that runs Instagram and Facebook with their data or would you rather trust instinct which has I think less than 20 people and is 14 people you know I would not trust instinct with my banking data personally but I would trust meta in this case. Well there's the that's the security like hacking problem that you're more worried about but and there and instinct has had some privacy issue snafu's already

44:52where people dug in and they're like wait why did they download a whole copy of my entire Gmail inbox that's 20 years to their own servers like that's I don't want that sitting on a server of a less than one year old startup I kind of see that concern and I can see why I would maybe trust meta to have better like security infra on that but I also just I mean I have a very different perspective than Eli on like my own personal privacy like I don't wish to be further known by these platforms you know like they know enough about me when I was like sloppy with my like kind of personal data back in the early 2010s when I was signing up for every single app and like now I'm like shut it down like I don't I think a lot of us maybe us elders are like not posting as much never mind that's actually not true my post all the time yeah speak for yourself here but I do think that every generation has a this is where I get off sort of thing and I feel like this is like the stop that I get off on I'm not not able to go there maybe I'll be left in the dust as you

45:54guys are having like shape and ease dinners and I'm shut out of the best reservations but I can make that trade off for my life I just got while we were talking I just got an alert from my muse app when it's literally asking me to import all of the data that I have with Claude over to it it says help me help me get to know you better already use another AI I can give you a prompt to bring it over on that note let's go to another break afterwards I have some very stupid questions about the news that I want to ask you guys I want to talk about Anthropics S1 I want to talk about Meta's data center tax breaks and Eli I have a really important question about buying flowers for your girlfriend we'll be back soon re

46:56three hundreds of matches, thousands of points, all happening simultaneously during the US Open, and you can't possibly be there for everything. That's why IBM helps bring together billions of data points with more than 20 years of player history, with scores, stats, insights, and highlights behind every moment. So nothing gets missed. IBM, let's create smarter business. Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Iron is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid connected power in renewable rich regions globally. Iron's AI cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Iron, AI cloud for the next big thing. Stripe is built for whatever comes next.

47:58With Stripe Billing, you can easily test and iterate subscriptions, launch new usage-based and hybrid pricing models, and automate invoicing. Stripe Billing supports whatever business model you want to launch next, and Stripe powers all the Forbes AI50 who have monetized. Learn how you can power any business model at Stripe.com slash Billing. Okay, so before we go, there's a bunch of stuff that happened this week that we haven't even covered. I have some questions. You guys are the experts. I would like you to either answer my questions or redirect them to more fruitful plays. Aaron, I want to talk to you about Anthropics S1, which leaked this week and showed a bunch of figures from 2025. The thing that stuck out to me that I was mentioning to you before was that two unnamed customers make up nearly 25% of their revenue, which for me was like, who, obviously, one of them is Eli because he's turned over his whole life to everything. But who is the other one? Is it the DOD? Is that an interesting question?

48:59What should I be thinking about this? What should I know about it? Okay, I guess that's an interesting question. You're so gentle with me. I love it. It would be my fourth question about it. It is a good question. I think we know who the Anthropics biggest customer is, which is Facebook. I think we've, the time has supported that, right? Right, so I would like to see Eli. It's mues, it's mues, it's stealing all of Anthropics. And the second biggest one I think we could probably take a couple of guesses. They have obviously a really big partnership with Amazon and others. And I'm sure other reporters who are more in mesh than this know this, like for sure. But what is, I think the biggest thing to come out of this S1 leak, which is incredible scoop by Echo Wong at Reuters, who also scooped Space X's S1 ahead of time. And these things just generally do not leak. So I just want to shout out there. That Anthropic, which is about to launch probably the largest IPO of all time, the most valuable and the biggest raise, is selling itself as having the most transformative product

50:06from the internet, or electricity or the internet or industrialization with a risk factor saying that it could kill us all. Like buy our stock. Awesome. You might die anyway, it's just like, it's just so remarkable. I think we need to be talking about this. Yeah. It's just like mind bending. And then also the next thing to talk about with this is like their business model, which we're learning about for the first time. There's been all kinds of leaks and blah, blah, blah over the years. But this is the first time we've seen like audited financials for 2025 saying, you know, they spent $7 billion on compute last year. They lost 42 billion, which sounds like really, really insane. But if you kind of parse that out at 34 billion of it was like essentially convertible notes that are, you know, control that. That's not a real loss. It's kind of an accounting thing. But yeah, I mean, this business is growing super fast and it's spending an insane amount of money.

51:07They're going to spend $518 billion on like compute infrastructure obligations in the coming years. Like these are just numbers we've never seen before. So that's what I'm like, whoa. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Aaron. I feel vastly more informed and I'm going to be repeating that at dinner parties all weekend. Mike and Eli, you guys had a great story this week, along with our friends and colleagues, Kashmir Hill and dressy trucker about meta using AI data centers to avoid federal taxes. So I'm going to try and describe the story for a second. Again, remember in this segment, I'm just a guy. And I want you and I want you to help me figure out exactly how this is working. So basically, meta's building, we know is building all these data centers to help power mues and the various other, like, Ren, Haley, Brett, all the various miso, all of our cute little friends. And they're claiming on their taxes a very specific tax credit for research that this is for sort of like scientific research,

52:07experimental scientific research purposes. Now, do they not have a point? Is this not like, you know, this is maybe we're in a bubble. They're still figuring out what the use is for AIR. Like, is this not, do they not get a little bit off the top? What's going on there? The reason that this is such a big deal is I think even internally folks were like, I don't know if this is going to fly with the IRS if we are audited. And it's in their financials saying maybe we get audited by the tax man because this doesn't fly with them. So they essentially had to disclose that. And I think, you know, the average person could, could probably take issue with our, you know, tens of billions, hundreds of billions at this point in data, in chips building these data centers is that really experimental because it feels like it's a little more than a theoretical project. Yeah. For listeners, the classic example of this tax credit is that if you're a company developing tires environmentally friendly tires,

53:08you can expense the rubber that you're using to build the tires. This really takes us to another level. For me, what's interesting is like the, you know, taxpayers, we have none of the upside of these investments, right? I thought back to Trump talking about, oh, maybe we should give people stakes in the AI companies. And in this case, it's like you have all of us taxpayers funding billions and billions of dollars of the data centers. But we don't seem to be, you know, benefiting from it. It seems like companies like Matt are the ones that wouldn't be making a ton of money on it. You're upside as Rin. Yeah, exactly. And Hayley. So this is a great story. I highly recommend everyone check it out. Eli, you're not off the hook. I have a stupid question for you in your story. And I know I'm not the only person to ask this because I've seen the comments on this story. You mentioned that you almost used your AI assistant to buy flowers for your girlfriend who had recently had surgery. And instead, you bought pottery on Facebook Marketplace. Did you eventually buy flowers for her?

54:12I did buy flowers for her. And her first question was, did Muse buy these flowers? Oh my God. She was. Oh, another wrinkle. Yeah, like that even means something if somebody just had their AI assistant. You go. Oh, yeah, you can't hand that over. Okay, guys, this has been so much fun. This has been an incredible discussion. I feel 10 times smarter. I'm going to go get Muse to write you all thank you letters for coming on. It has been a great chat. And we will be back next week to talk more about technology. AI, the weird new future, anything else that comes up. This has been Hard Fork. I'm Max Reed and I've been joined by Aaron Griffith. You like tan and Mike Isaac. 17 Courts.

55:23Hundreds of matches, thousands of points, all happening simultaneously during the US Open. And you can't possibly be there for everything. That's why IBM helps bring together billions of data points with more than 20 years of player history, with scores, stats, insights, and highlights behind every moment. So nothing gets missed. IBM, let's create smarter business. Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Aaron is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid connected power in renewable rich regions globally. Aaron's AI Cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Aaron, AI Cloud for the next big thing. Stripe is built for whatever comes next.

56:23With Stripe Billing, you can easily test and iterate subscriptions, launch new usage-based and hybrid pricing models, and automate invoicing. Stripe Billing supports whatever business model you want to launch next, and Stripe powers all the Forbes AI50 who have monetized. Learn how you can power any business model at Stripe.com slash billing. This episode of Hard Fork was produced by Whitney Jones, and edited by Viren Povitch, with additional editorial support from Brendan Klingenberg, Lisa Tobin, and Brook Mentors. We were fact-checked by Will Pyshell, and engineered by Chris Wood, original music by Marion Luzano, Rowan Nemistel, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. You can watch this full episode on YouTube, at youtube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Sam Dolnek, Jessica Testa, Hui Wang Time, Maddie Masiello, and Dalia Hadad. Over the next few months, we're going to be exploring all aspects of tech, culture, AI, and the weird new future.

57:25We're really interested in what you're interested in. If you have questions you'd like us to answer, or things you'd like us to look into, you can email us at hard fork at nytimes.com. 75% of women who seek menopause care don't receive it. The lying awake at 3am, wondering what's happening to your body, ends now. Midi is virtual care built for women in perimenopause and menopause, with clinicians who specialize in women's health. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. Midlife needs midi. Visit joinmiddi.com to book your first visit today. That's joinmiddi.com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.