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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Well, we have a fantastic show for you today, folks. I made it to San Francisco and back since the last show. This is a new thing. I like this. Being able to get up from the show, go do something in San Francisco, get back.
Speaker 2:Very excited didn't you want to stay?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I like doing the show. Pretty simple. Good to be here in the TBPN UltraDOM. We have a great show.
Speaker 1:We have a bunch of great folks coming on the show. What was on my mind last night? Was listening to China talk. Jordan Schneider was talking about evaluators, third party evaluators. And I was noticing this discourse around it feels like we we we funneled into, like, very clear camps super, super quickly.
Speaker 1:And it feels like, I don't know, too calcified for how fast it happened. Like, the the Dario SA comes out and, you know, he throws out meter, says he's bringing in meter, and the backlash is like a media at the New York Post is crashing out saying, like, these are handpicked AI watchdogs. Martin Casado, Martin Casado over at a 16 z, he's pushing for the Department of Energy. He's like full nationalization now. And, you know, both of those have their advantages, disadvantages.
Speaker 1:They both do good work. They are the extremes. And so I was just I was just sort of wondering a few things like first, what other regulatory bodies can actually work? How do they work in other industries? It's very interesting because like the revolving door is something that's common like in in in in financial regulation, you get people that work at banks and then they go and work at the regulator and then they go back and forth.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is the this is the story of many people in the crypto industry where the regulators who are regulating it, they go back and forth. Like, revolving doors exist, but I think the pushback to meter is very much like the door is like too revolving or it's too it's too close, I guess. But the but but the more interesting question to me is is Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the defensive meter Yeah. Is that I don't know many groups that are qualified at all Okay. To even to even understand what's going on at the frontier. Right? And so
Speaker 1:Is that true though? I got I see. I That's the thing I disagree with.
Speaker 2:I I I would say that there's there are not that many groups that have been this invested in in understanding frontier model behavior for this long. That's a separate It's thing just a small group right now.
Speaker 1:That's a separate thing. So I think there's two separate things. There's one which is like super forecasting, seeing the future, predicting what's gonna happen. I think that's important. I think taking that seriously is important.
Speaker 1:But then there's the other side which is like doing the work, reading the logs and being like, this violated this rule. This hack happened. Here's how it happened. And I think that those are actually two separate disciplines, two separate jobs. And you can just tell the regulator if it's someone.
Speaker 1:You don't need to tell like, if you hire someone and they are able to get up to speed on how these systems work and and evaluate them and look at logs of different incidents, see what's happening, assess the risk level, assess the liabilities. If you can get those people up to speed, you can just be like, it is your mandate to take this seriously. And the example that I'm pulling from is like, you can be 22 years old, not graduate from college, go into the Navy, enlist in the Navy, not even in the officers training program, and in eighteen months, you can be responsible for the security of a nuclear power plant on a summer. You do six months in nuclear field a school, about six months of nuclear power school, and then six months of hand on hands on prototype training before arriving in the fleet. Nuclear power school covers math, nuclear physics, reactor principles, health physics, materials, thermodynamics, electrical systems, and reactor technology.
Speaker 1:There's no part of that that's like, you need to really, at a deep level, understand that, like, nuclear annihilation is bad and could happen. You don't need to be able to forecast out, like, well, what happens if China and geopolitics and Iran gets the bomb and then these people and then Pakistan. Like, you don't have to understand that to just know, like, don't let it blow up. That's your job. Here's how you don't let that happen.
Speaker 1:We've created a plan for you. You're 22 years old, but we know that you can do this job and you are enlisted to do this job. And doesn't matter if you think nuclear war is impossible or doesn't matter if you think it's gonna happen tomorrow. Your pea doom on nuclear is completely irrelevant to you doing this job. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that that's something that is maybe being missed here a little bit. There's like there's like, well, you have to take it seriously. Yeah. You have to have seen it coming.
Speaker 1:And I actually think that, like, super forecasting, super important, awesome, also just like fun read, really cool. And if you take it seriously, you make a lot of money, you work on interesting stuff, you get amazing technology. There's so many things that come downstream of that that are really, really positive and really important that I don't necessarily know that it's actually a prerequisite. And then the other thing is yeah. Tyler?
Speaker 3:I mean, like, METR, they're not the ones putting out those forecasts though. Those are other groups. Yeah. If you look at, like, METER research, it's, you know, very complicated benchmarks and, like, these kinds
Speaker 1:of Totally. Totally. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm sort of collapsing the METER criticism from, like, the New York Post perspective. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and I think that is
Speaker 2:Overall, I think it generally Yeah. People are gonna like, if if if there's a third party regulator, it seems like it has to be an entirely net new group because I don't think anyone has like Whether or not meter meter could be operating and and their actions could reflect that of a fully Mhmm. Independent group. But the financing structure, the history of the of of the various parties there just makes it so that people don't have any trust that they would act like that.
Speaker 1:Sure. The interesting thing is that there is actually a distinction in the history of nuclear regulation, which is there's a difference between advisers in the before the NRC, it was the Atomic Energy Commission. And the AEC was created to oversee nuclear development. And many of the scientists who did forecast the importance of riskiness of the technology were involved. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Like Einstein writes this letter and says nuclear war he basically describes what nuclear annihilation could look like. There's a whole bunch of other scientists that actually run the numbers and they're like, this is what could happen if all the nuclear bombs go off. They do all the calculations. There's some that go a little bit too far. But in general, like the scientists were the ones who got to it earlier.
Speaker 1:But the scientists didn't actually wind up being the regulators. They wound up being the advisers. So Oppenheimer became the chair of the AEC's General Advisory Committee, which had enormous influence but didn't actually issue licenses. So the actual work that was being done, it was like, okay. Oppenheimer in this advisory role says, like, well, we need to have a security guard here with a gun that makes sure that no one can steal the nuclear material.
Speaker 1:Right? But he's not the one doing it. He's not the one actually hiring that person. That's just like an engineer who's qualified for that job. And I think that actually takes a lot off of it because you could say, oh, there's all these, like, conflicts of interest here or there or there, whatever.
Speaker 1:But if you just say, well, they're just putting putting out a proposal that then people are gonna go and implement. But then the actual people that are doing the implementation are are much less conflicted because they're just drawn from the broad pool of engineers and scientists and mathematicians and physicists and whoever else we have in on America who can do this type of work, it gets a lot less complicated in my mind. There's a whole bunch of other interesting details from the AEC history. And so today, the regulators, like nuclear regulators, are talented and hardworking, these are not like the most elite jobs. Like you can just be a nuclear engineer, mechanical engineer, material scientist, physicist, health physicist, geologists, probabilistic risk analysts, cybersecurity professionals they hire for this, emergency preparedness they hire lawyers, they hire inspectors.
Speaker 1:Pay for some of these jobs ranges between 125,187 thousand for many NRC technical staff roles. This machinery did have to get sort of described by the scientists. But then the implementation of that machine, of that regulatory structure, is actually done by really hardworking, really talented Americans, but not head in the clouds, not thinking about the future in some bizarre way. That's enough to happen at the democratic level and then it gets implemented. I think that that might eliminate a little bit of this like, Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, this person who's really tied to you is now inside actually the one with the keys, the one with the with with with the role overseeing you. I don't know. What do think about this, Tyler? You you have some pushback?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, like, I I know that Casey, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, like, I think that they've had a hard time, like, staffing Yeah. So it's like like they're having a hard time, like, finding people who who will come from the labs. May like, maybe they should just brought in who they're looking for. But it seems like it's still the the ways that we detect if a model is safe or not are not, like, set in stone yet.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Like, it's still, that's what the role of meter that that's kind
Speaker 1:of what they're Sure. Doing right
Speaker 3:Sure. So I I think it is still different than, like, you know, there are predetermined accounting practices and you can just kind of check the box and, like, follow the rules. Yeah. It's something that still, like yeah. It's like a moving field, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there is there is the question of like with particularly with like agent swarms perpetrating cyber security violations that don't directly cause economic harm. I didn't tell it to hack you. It hacked you, but it didn't knock your payment system offline.
Speaker 1:So you didn't lose a dollar revenue. It's like very hard for you to prove that I acted wrong and then also economic damages. So there's a whole new level of like tort battles that need to be battled out in the court of law to see like what exactly do I owe you because I shouldn't have done that. But what do I owe you? What's the damage?
Speaker 1:What's the what's the problem there? And then and then you can go and say, well, you know, how how do we measure that? How do we prevent that? And how do we work through that? But the the discourse is getting like more and more more and more polarizing by the day.
Speaker 1:We'll see. I think there will I think there will be the the big sit down between the lab leaders. I wonder how important it will be to have Jensen with a beer alongside Sam, Dario, Elon with beers. I mean, as the clear proposal, there's gonna be beers involved. That's what we know from the interviews.
Speaker 1:Everyone's asking why can't they just sit down and get beer.
Speaker 3:Six months of those could have been on the Cheeky Plain podcast.
Speaker 1:It really should. That that that is sort of neutral ground too because Elon's an investor in Stripe. What happened there? Elon's an investor in Stripe. He's a co founder of OpenAI.
Speaker 1:And Sam's, I think, an investor in Stripe. And then Elon's working with Dario on compute stuff. So maybe Cheeky Pine is like the perfect neutral ground. I think it'll probably be on national TV, actually. But we shall see.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll follow it here.
Speaker 2:Quickly jumping in, we have a rate hike. Yes. Tell me about that. Horsch hiked 25 pips. Okay.
Speaker 2:This was First time in three years. Priced in. Cal, she had it, I think, at, like, 89 percent Mhmm. This morning, so not a huge surprise. I wanted to head over to Joe Weisenthal's feed
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And just kind of read his reaction if he has one.
Speaker 1:Well, you pull that up. I'll give you the highlights from the Wall Street Journal. The the Nasdaq react positively up 60.67%. Six is the Wall Street Journal. They need they need a JavaScript plug in that changes it to point six six nine or something.
Speaker 1:Most officials penciled in one more increase this year, an energy shock and a surge of AI investment have reshaped the inflation outlook. We talked about the Fed interest rates yesterday a lot, but the Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday for the first time three years, a sharp reversal that began taking back cuts as it made last year, implicit and implicitly undercut the White House's insistence that inflation is not a concern. The Fed is saying, it kinda isn't a concern. The increase approved unanimously, will raise the benchmark Fed funds rate by a quarter point to between three and three quarters point and 4%. The vast majority of officials penciled in, one more hike this year in interest rate projections released after meeting.
Speaker 1:So they think there's going to be more rate hikes. Chairman Kevin Walsh vowed shortly after taking office in May to end an overshoot of the Fed's 2% target now in its sixth year, and followed through with an increase that had been widely anticipated in recent days. The rate hikes scrambled an account of the White House had offered of the man tapped by the president for the job in January. Trump and his allies had cast pressure to raise rates as coming from a committee hostile to who last year said he would have cut rates sooner than the Fed ultimately did. It also followed a lost year in the Fed's inflation fight.
Speaker 1:The central bank has made no progress towards its 2% goal since mid twenty twenty five, including after cutting rates three times last year to guard against labor market slowdown. Instead, the Iran war has lifted energy prices, the AI boom has driven an investment surge that has buoyed the economy and markets today. Policy action will support a timely return to the committee's 2% goal. The Rates and the committee said in the policy statement, analysts said that despite intense focus of late on monthly inflation data, the biggest change to the outlook has come from a run up in energy and commodity prices. It's the fact that the war in Iran has re intensified and the energy price shock is getting bigger again, said William Dudley, the former New York Fed president.
Speaker 1:What you got for me, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I was just reading through a bunch of different reactions
Speaker 1:Take your spot.
Speaker 2:On Which one? Bloomberg itself. Let me pull them back up. But they have a live blog. Some people are saying this is more hawkish than expected given that the Fed took away next year's cut.
Speaker 2:Big changes in the dot plot line, the Fed September dot plot. We now have four officials expecting to raise rates two more times.
Speaker 1:Two more times?
Speaker 2:They previously just been one at that level. Oh. A whopping 12. Policymakers see rates going up once more before the end of the year, and the remaining two see holding rates at their new 3.75 to 4% level. Reminder that in June, the last time we got these forecasts, half of the committee expected the Fed to hold or cut rates.
Speaker 2:And again, it looks like did not submit a dot. So he's going dotless here. Kind of a statement in itself. Yeah. So far, the AI trade, the build out, everything has been overwhelming even in the face of headwinds like rising rates.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the mood from Silicon Valley was like, we're definitely not booming until we go back to zero interest rates. Like, this whole tech thing, it only works when the interest rates are zero. So, like, we'll just wait it out and Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the reality is there was a bunch of ideas and investing styles that only worked when rates were near zero.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, yeah, it was specifically, when you look at the companies that that really boomed in that era Mhmm. There wasn't a lot of net new, like, really truly innovative stuff outside of financial products Mhmm. Which benefited from from low rates.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? Some of them benefit from high rates though. Right? If it's like a savings product, the spread's higher.
Speaker 1:But if they have to borrow a lot of debt
Speaker 2:Potentially, but but again, I'm thinking of like lending companies like Cool. Pipe. Right? Pipe was a company that at the time went from
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Incorporation to billion. I I forget what their peak valuation was. But
Speaker 1:And it makes a lot of sense because they're basically borrowing at 0%, then they're lending to a company at 5% or something. You know, what what whatever their spread is, like, it's actually justifiable to a to an earlier piece of the market. But that sort of breaks down when you have to go to a company and say, hey, you want you want money at 12% or something like that Yeah. For an early stage company?
Speaker 2:Well, let's head over to Who Man. Daria, we should pump the brakes on the frontier. Sam, yeah, let's all slow down together. Meanwhile, Zac.
Speaker 1:The the funny thing is yeah, I mean
Speaker 2:Let's let's talk about what Zac wrote. He said, last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone. This is when Zac said, really want people to understand my values Mhmm. Before we come out with our most powerful AI ever. And I at least felt like we we already had a good understanding of Zach's values.
Speaker 2:But he wrote yesterday, every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. The reality is people don't wanna use agents that are misaligned with them and don't do what they ask. So labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned. Right away, you know, out with this point, it's like the safety debate has not been sort of like around the idea of, oh, they're gonna create personal agents that are gonna be misaligned to the users. Like this this is not at all Well it's just this is just a point that doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:No. No. I mean, there is there there is a like it is not the safety crowd, but the whole like social media is brain rod addiction. Yeah. Like like that is something that there is a separate crowd that does critique that and says like, I don't want the addictive flywheel of of maximizing screen time to be brought to AI.
Speaker 2:It's totally separate debate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I agree. I agree. It it it's not it's not
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the the true AI safety debate.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it is a debate.
Speaker 2:There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. Mhmm. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate. Again, like, this is not relevant to the current safety debate. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Obviously, people wanna make products that do what their customers want them to do. No one has been worried that you can't make a model that in the near term or in the medium term or even over long running tasks can generally do what the user wants. The concern is that that if you leave models and and give them a task that that Yeah. Is more expansive that they can start to do things like hacking Hugging Face. Right?
Speaker 2:So, again, nobody is sitting here saying
Speaker 1:The main thing is that this this is talking past the x risk question. It is completely dismissing
Speaker 2:the Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Discussion, which which Dario is, like, laser focused on. And so this feels like it's a rebuttal, but it's actually, like, talking past it in the sense that he's like, labs face significant liability. And it's like, well, the extra scenario, the liability doesn't matter. That's the whole point, is that, like, no one's gonna come and
Speaker 2:And here's here's the best here's the best line.
Speaker 1:Extended.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Meta delayed shipping muse for several months to focus on safety and security.
Speaker 1:That's actually very rational and important because
Speaker 2:Every company delays their products for months. That's just called building a good product.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:To make it safe and secure. Like, period. This is what Meta has been doing forever. You have to do it. You have billions of users.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta make sure they're safe and secure. Every single product. Again, I I felt like he was
Speaker 1:But you you so so
Speaker 2:he There's a lot of things in here that are rational.
Speaker 1:He's he's taking a victory lap on not taking a victory lap. Don't you realize that? He says, we didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day to day work because it was clearly the right thing to do.
Speaker 2:And again, every single company does all of these things. Every single company that makes say I've done it.
Speaker 1:Laps while they're doing it. He's taking a victory lap for not taking a victory lap. It's not that complicated. He says everyone else says like, we're taking safety seriously. We want a pat on the back before we delay the product.
Speaker 1:And he's saying, I want the pat on the back after I delay the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just think it's I just
Speaker 1:there's a lot of back patting going on.
Speaker 2:I just think it's I think it's I just think it's very funny to I I think it's funny how much All these points are are fine. They they generally are rational and they make sense. Yeah. But I think it's funny that people are giving him so much credit for this note Yeah. Given that he's totally missing the main point that everyone else is focused on.
Speaker 1:Ex risk?
Speaker 2:Like, intentionally missing the point. In order to get brownie points from people that don't even understand the current debate.
Speaker 1:No. To get brownie points from other people that have a PD move zero. Who are like, yeah. And and you can see who's who's supporting this. They're like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Like, just do put put the put the agents in the bag, you know, make the tokens free and and just make the products. Like, I'm not worried about that at all. And for that crowd, they're like, thank goodness. You didn't like fall in the hole of like stooping to this PDOM debate that I don't take seriously.
Speaker 1:That's the side
Speaker 2:I just wish that he would come out and say, I have a PDOM of zero. That's what he's saying. No. He's not. He's not.
Speaker 2:He's trying to position. He's saying he's not being explicit about that. He's trying to let people say we care a lot about safety. We slowed down our development because we care about safety. Trust and alignment are important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:He should definitely come out and say PDOM zero because if it's not zero and it happens and we all go extinct, no one's gonna be able to dunk
Speaker 2:him. Right? Yeah. So it's it's pure upside.
Speaker 1:Pure upside to be PDOM zero guy. Why has no one considered this? The aura game is so high.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would I would respect it a lot if he just came out and said what he actually thinks, which I I do believe you're right.
Speaker 1:P doom zero.
Speaker 2:Which I he has a P doom of zero and and his P abundance is
Speaker 1:I I mean, that's what he said in the in the in the previous essay. He was he was basically like, I don't think the he he he even he even was gesturing towards like the the fear based marketing, the doom based marketing is just a marketing tactic. I don't think it's rational. And also, don't think it's good for people to be in that head space Yeah. And like and it's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Info has
Speaker 2:Here's the thing.
Speaker 1:He has a problem
Speaker 2:with it. One of one of the last lines committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self improvement is one of the best ways to ensure if we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. Look, like, there's absolutely zero shot that Zach walks into MSL and like gathers the researchers and says, look, I don't wanna make models that make our models better. I don't wanna do it.
Speaker 2:I want you guys just focus. There's zero zero chance. So again, like this to me is just like he is being disingenuous with his positioning of almost every single point here.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I do think that there is a trade off right now between making models good at things that are not on the RSI path and those that are. And so, like, the race to become really, really good at coding is super aligned with RSI. The race to do image generation is not. And image generation does not seem to be on the RSI critical path.
Speaker 1:Although I I think DeepMind put out something where they're using world models and they think they have a breakthrough there. I don't know if I if I saw that accurately. But but maybe they're wrong. But at least like the bet at at least in Thropic has been like, we don't need to be world class at image generation to get where we want to go because we just need to be really good at coding. Coding teaches us teaches the model how to train new models and then we get, you know and then and then and then that that final model, we can ask it to spin up an image generator if we want.
Speaker 1:Zach is saying the opposite. He's saying, like, yeah, we will actually go and try and build a tool just to help you book a dinner reservation, and that's a good use of compute. Probably not on the RSI path. And and that's like a reasonable trade off. That feels that feels real to me.
Speaker 1:I don't know. What what do you think about engaging independent evaluators? Is this like Yeah.
Speaker 2:He says
Speaker 1:says it's already industry best practice. Is he talking about benchmark stuff? Or is he talking about like actually like the you have Slack access, you have a desk, you have a badge, like you don't work here but you're allowed to just go wherever you want. I think that that's the next step. I And think he's maybe talking past that a little
Speaker 2:bit. Yeah. And he's talking past this again engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too.
Speaker 2:It's like other labs also do that too. Also do that already.
Speaker 1:Well, as of last week, Anthropic does this with meter. Like they said that they were gonna do that immediately. So they were doing badge and slap
Speaker 2:he's not saying that he's doing that. He's saying that he's doing the thing that every group that's making model has been doing for the most In
Speaker 1:the prior era.
Speaker 2:For a long time.
Speaker 1:But the new thing is badge and Slack access and desk even though you don't work at the company. And that's when everyone's like, woah. That's crazy because these organizations are very, secretive and you're really gonna let this nonprofit come in. It's like sort of a wild move and that's why people are like, oh, wait a little. Like, how aligned are they?
Speaker 1:And, like, what is the what what's the knock on implication? Like, can these people not leak? Can they not can they be trusted? Are they gonna go to a cocktail party and be like, oh, yeah. The new model is actually really bad or whatever.
Speaker 1:Like, there's so many things that are like like, Meta deals with leaks all the time. And so the prospect of bringing in a non employee who is there explicitly to whistleblow effectively and, like, is allowed to talk about anything and, like, is is, you know, third party evaluator. Like, that is a huge step, and I think that's why people are like, woah. This is a big deal. This is a big proposal.
Speaker 1:They could be if this was not a big thing, if Anthropic was just like, oh, yeah. We're gonna do a benchmark with meter. Everyone would be like, yeah. That's fine. Cool.
Speaker 1:Do that for sure. Awesome. But like people are like, wow. Okay. Like meter's gonna have a have Slack access at at Anthropic and you're asking other people to do that.
Speaker 1:Like that's we gotta know who these people are. We gotta make sure that this is like the right team for this. This is sort of a crazy thing. This is sort of unprecedented. This doesn't happen a lot.
Speaker 1:Like This is new. And so, yeah, the newness is not fully embraced here. And I think that's a little bit of like, okay, you're not really engaging with what's coming down the pipe, which is like maybe a government employee in your building. That's
Speaker 2:not happening
Speaker 1:right now. Maybe maybe a nonprofit from Berkeley. Do you like that, Mark? How do you feel about that? Are you cool?
Speaker 1:It seems like you're cool with it, but I don't know if you're actually gonna be cool with it because it is a little it is a little wild. Right? It's a different thing. It's a new thing, but it's it's a modern it's a modern day.
Speaker 2:Pull up this image.
Speaker 1:What image are we pulling up? This this meme has been applied to like seven different people this week. It's
Speaker 2:but I think it's I think it's particularly relevant because you have you have Elon, Demis, Dario, Sam, all these people from different factions that are at I've or
Speaker 1:seen this applied to Theo. I've seen this applied to Cohere. I've seen this applied to DeepMind and Gemini. I've seen this people apply MSL. People are just whatever shot they wanna take, they're applying this.
Speaker 1:It's not it's a it's too broad
Speaker 2:at this point. There's people
Speaker 1:I think it's the way the inverts. It's all clowns and there's one tactical soldier.
Speaker 2:There's groups that are at the frontier. Really? They're on the battlefield. Yeah. And they're deeply concerned.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you have Zach coming in here saying, yeah, like, I built a cool personal agent. It's it's aligned. What's there to worry about? Nothing to worry about.
Speaker 2:You're not really in You're not really on the battlefield yet. And And I'm not saying with Sure. Watermelon they can't get there and Muse seems like it's Yeah. And Muse That's amazing a reviews. It's Got it seems like an amazing product.
Speaker 2:Again, I I thought the whole post was silly just like I thought the last post was silly.
Speaker 1:Happened to the to the call sheet AI price tracker? Do you see this? We we talked to Tarik when this launched.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:like, oh, this is cool. This will allow you to understand, like, basically a proxy for the AI build out. Like, how are how are GPUs trading? Banned. Banned, apparently.
Speaker 1:The US Commerce Department last month ordered call sheet to take down one of its products tracking the price of AI compute, the crucial power from data centers that's driving the artificial intelligence boom, if you didn't know what AI compute was. Commerce officials cited national security concerns, and that's what stuck out to me. I was like, there's so many different prediction markets that I can easily trace through, like, oh, you have a flight delay one and you could have somebody that calls in and tries to get the flight delayed. That could be very disruptive. FAA could have a problem with that.
Speaker 1:But this one, I wasn't worried about at all. We talked to Tark about it and we were like, yeah, this one seems sort of informative and interesting. So the product pulls together data from several markets that allow users to bet on the cost to rent NVIDIA chips to create an overall picture of where AI compute costs are heading. Call sheet quietly complied, though many of the underlying markets remain open for trading. Separately, Commerce has pushed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction in future markets, to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for sixty days.
Speaker 1:And so even though some of the contracts are still open and will close, maybe in sixty days there won't be any compute prediction market futures, which is very interesting. But call sheet declined to comment, while a commerce spokesperson said the department, quote, has never once asked call sheet to take down this market or any other markets. Interesting. So the commerce spokesperson said, This story is false to semaphore. So, lots of people going back and forth.
Speaker 1:It's unclear why the why commerce is worried about the nascent market which aims to do for AI computing what oil futures do for crude, let buyers and sellers of compute lock in prices and give traders a way to bet on where those prices go. One potential reason floated to semaphore by market participants is that compute futures could be manipulated to show a sharp drop in the cost of older chips, which might destabilize AI stocks and debt markets. Some of these markets are thinly traded, which could lead to volatility even without bad actors. So, you're trying to wipe out situational awareness. You're short the Cauchy prediction markets on AI compute futures.
Speaker 1:Everyone thinks, oh, AI is bust. The market trades down for a couple days. You clean up and then you buy back in or something like that. I guess that's what the rumor is here that some of reporting on. The cost of compute has become one of the most important numbers in The U.
Speaker 1:S. Economy. One side of the debate fears that older chips, which serve as collateral for billions of dollars for borrowing by neo clouds. On the other on the other are concerns from big companies adopting AI that shortages of power and infrastructure will send prices of token soaring. That uncertainty has given rise to a futures market that was starting to take off this summer.
Speaker 1:The CFTC's sixty day pause could delay plans by exchange operators like CME and and NYSE in parent Intercontinental Exchange along with upstarts like architectural financial technologies to list two siding two sided betting parlors. Interesting. Get that flashbang ready. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you Flashbang.
Speaker 1:Throwing flash bang. Boom.