THIS WEEK IN AI: Google's Big Change, AI Keeps Breaking Out, OpenAI vs Apple

This week, we cover major leadership changes at Google’s AI teams, including Demis Hassabis stepping back and Jeff Dean leaving to start Discovery Loop, an AI company focused on scientific research. 

We also discuss AI safety issues involving frontier models, plus Meta’s new coding model and its strategy around efficiency.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 DeepMind Leadership Shift
3:20 Jeff Dean’s New Startup
6:05 Automated Research Ambitions
10:08 Agent Breakouts
13:06 OpenAI’s Hidden Incident
18:11 Meta’s Cheap Coding Model
22:55 OpenAI Versus Apple
25:42 DeepSeek
28:28 Mind Control Interfaces
30:40 Nikita Bier Departs X

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
Welcome back to the Weekly Roundup, our favorite episode of the week where we

Josh:
can catch you up on all things AI, frontier technology, all the crazy things

Josh:
that happened. And this week is no exception. We had the biggest shakeup in

Josh:
about 30 years at a company, a little company named Google.

Josh:
We had a counter lawsuit happen from OpenAI to Apple saying,

Josh:
wait a second, you're totally lying.

Josh:
We have updates for the AI breakout, so much so, like this story about where

Josh:
the AI broke out of the system, that some of these frontier companies like OpenAI

Josh:
are actually slowing down training progress because they're so kind of timid on how to handle this.

Josh:
Starting with Demis Asabas, man. I mean, Demis Asabas is gone.

Josh:
He's not working at DeepMind anymore. Not gone from Google, I should say,

Josh:
or better yet, Alphabet.

Josh:
But Demis Asabas, in his current role as the CEO of DeepMind,

Josh:
is kind of no longer. And this seems like a pretty big deal because for those

Josh:
of you who've followed Demis for an eternity, this has basically been his thing.

Josh:
He's been in charge of DeepMind. Google acquired them.

Josh:
Now he is within Google and now he is gone from DeepMind. So what on earth is

Josh:
happening here? I read this and I was like, wait a second, Demis stepped down from what?

Ejaaz:
I think everyone was blindsided by this news yesterday.

Ejaaz:
So Demis Hacillus, just for context, is like one of the godfathers of AI.

Ejaaz:
He kind of like grandfathered a lot of the ML research at Google,

Ejaaz:
even prior to Google, like he was heralded as one of the top AI researchers.

Ejaaz:
And he's led Google's AI efforts on Gemini and everything else for a number of years now.

Ejaaz:
He announced yesterday that he's stepping down from the role of CEO of DeepMind

Ejaaz:
to become the chair of DeepMind. That's a

Ejaaz:
Indirect way of basically saying I'm throwing in the towel and I'm done here.

Ejaaz:
And what he's now going to do is focus on wider societal impacts of AGI and

Ejaaz:
try to figure out how Google can kind of like deal with that,

Ejaaz:
as well as wearing an alternative hat, a new role where he's going to be focused

Ejaaz:
on something called Isomorphic Labs, which is a company he founded and spun

Ejaaz:
out of DeepMind, which is essentially an AI lab which creates designer drugs.

Ejaaz:
So this is a big shock and news for everyone because Google,

Ejaaz:
as you may know, was falling behind in the AI race. They had like a kind of

Ejaaz:
lead at the end of last year.

Ejaaz:
And then since then, they never really released a model that was noteworthy.

Ejaaz:
Anthropic, OpenAI, and in some cases, even XAI and Meta have now caught up and

Ejaaz:
surpassed Gemini 3.6 Flash, which I believe is their latest model.

Ejaaz:
He's being replaced by a guy called Corey. He is currently Google DeepMind's

Ejaaz:
CTO, and he's being now promoted to the senior vice president role.

Ejaaz:
He has a lot of experience in AI, but that's not even the major news about this Google stuff, Josh.

Ejaaz:
I don't know if you saw it, but the grandfather, the godfather of Google DeepMind

Ejaaz:
and Google in general, his name is Jeff Dean.

Ejaaz:
He was employee number 30 at Google. He's been there for, I think, around 27 to 29 years.

Ejaaz:
He's dedicated his life there. He's responsible for creating some of the most

Ejaaz:
amazing and major and pivotal products at Google, Google Search,

Ejaaz:
the TPUs, Google Voice, anything and everything he has touched is leaving.

Ejaaz:
And he's taking with him one of the most amazing things

Ejaaz:
Senior fellows at Google. I believe his name is Gemawatt. I don't know if I'm

Ejaaz:
pronouncing that correct, but Sanjay Gemawatt.

Ejaaz:
And they are co-founding with two other Google employees, a new startup called

Ejaaz:
Discovery Loop. Josh, do you look into this company? It's a pretty awesome company.

Josh:
The company is incredible. Before we talk about the new company,

Josh:
I want to talk about the old company because Jeff Dean is like,

Josh:
it's hard to overstate how legendary this man is.

Josh:
And for reference, there are levels at these companies that go from level one

Josh:
engineer, and this kind of dictates how you get paid.

Josh:
So when you join a large tech company like this, level one is kind of like entry

Josh:
level. That's at the bottom. And then you go to level twos, which are people out of college.

Josh:
Level threes often have like masters or PhD degrees.

Josh:
Level four is several years of like actually working there.

Josh:
Level five and six is kind of where most progression stops. Like I'd say the

Josh:
top 10% are probably sitting there.

Josh:
Level sevens are principal engineers, which are even smaller.

Josh:
And then eights and nines gets progressively more and more intense then there's

Josh:
level 10 which is google fellow that is in like absolutely legendary honor of

Josh:
a lifetime it's similar to earning like a,

Josh:
like nobel prize or something there's just like not many people who are fellows,

Josh:
then there's level 11 and level 11 is reserved for only two people those two

Josh:
people are jeff and sanjay they have climbed to the highest possible ranks at

Josh:
a research-led company that has been around for 30 years and is responsible for,

Josh:
Most of the internet as we know

Josh:
it, they've built the foundation of all of which we are working on today.

Josh:
Without their work, none of what the internet contains right now is possible.

Josh:
It's like, these guys are truly like remarkable individuals when it comes to this.

Ejaaz:
Can we please reference this insane slide on his deck?

Ejaaz:
He talks about the experience of everyone and he basically has listed every

Ejaaz:
single product at Google that has been created over the last 30 years.

Josh:
It's unbelievable. These guys are truly incredible. And it's worth noting the

Josh:
slide deck itself, which is really funny.

Josh:
There was a great post by Signal, which I love, that I wanted to share here.

Josh:
And he was kind of making a testament to the deck where he said,

Josh:
if you spent time around Google, you know the slide design has carried some

Josh:
of the most legendary work in the company's history.

Josh:
And it's this very nostalgic thing where when you see those blue kind of tacky

Josh:
looking slides, you know that something special is about to happen in the world

Josh:
of the internet just because of all the legendary code these guys have shipped.

Josh:
And I mean, for VCs, I'm sure they're not going to even need to look at this

Josh:
pitch deck. They're going to give them whatever types of money they want for this new company.

Josh:
Now, the new company seems somewhat interesting. It's called Discovery Loop.

Josh:
And my base level idea of what this is, and correct me if I'm wrong,

Josh:
you guys, is they're basically figuring out how to use this recursive learning

Josh:
thing, which comes in the form of a loop where you send a prompt and the model

Josh:
continues to iterate until it reaches a very difficult answer.

Josh:
And they're playing to just scale that out in a very large way.

Josh:
So loops recently have become very hot. We've realized that they could do pretty

Josh:
novel breakthroughs with math and science.

Josh:
Their plan is to kind of expand that further and see how far you could take

Josh:
these recursive loops to make new discoveries.

Ejaaz:
That's right. So the core concept of the new company of Jeff Dean and Sanjay's

Ejaaz:
new company is they want to automate research. So what does that mean?

Ejaaz:
Basically, in any kind of scientific research sector, it is incredibly arduous

Ejaaz:
and like onerous. So what I mean by that is people need to design an experiment.

Ejaaz:
They then need to get all the equipment to run the experiment.

Ejaaz:
They then need to run the experiment. And then guess what?

Ejaaz:
They need to repeat that experiment a hundred different times to get any sort

Ejaaz:
of validation that the information they've produced is correct.

Ejaaz:
It takes years upon years.

Ejaaz:
These guys want to cut down that process completely using AI.

Ejaaz:
And the number one field that they want to start with is, of course, AI research.

Ejaaz:
So if you apply research loops to AI research, what do you get?

Ejaaz:
It's that recursive self-improvement that you just mentioned, Josh.

Ejaaz:
So what that means is you can create AI models or even AI systems that can re-evaluate

Ejaaz:
themselves and build a better version of themselves.

Ejaaz:
And why that's really important, why every single AI lab, including Anthropic, OpenAI,

Ejaaz:
And I guess no longer Google anymore is going after, is if they can automate

Ejaaz:
AI research, you can end up having the smartest, most effective model without

Ejaaz:
doing anything. It's not limited by the constraints of humans.

Ejaaz:
But what excites me most about this, Josh, is what they're planning to apply

Ejaaz:
this automated loop to after they've figured out the AI thing.

Ejaaz:
They've said, once we've done this, we're going to start with AI machine learning.

Ejaaz:
And then after that, we're going to focus on grand challenges.

Ejaaz:
We believe our approach will be able to solve any learning loop with measurable

Ejaaz:
outcomes in the domains of science and engineering.

Ejaaz:
Ultimately, we want to build systems capable of taking on the National Academy

Ejaaz:
of Engineering Grand Challenges, such as better medicines, advancing health,

Ejaaz:
informatics, making solar energy economical, and providing clean access to water.

Ejaaz:
Basically, if you can master this playbook, this autonomous research loop,

Ejaaz:
you can apply it to any scientific, mathematical, or physical field,

Ejaaz:
which means that we're going to have like advances in any or every field of

Ejaaz:
science if this company can pull it off now

Ejaaz:
If this was any other roster of team members, I would be doubtful,

Ejaaz:
just to be completely honest with you.

Ejaaz:
But it's Jeff freaking Dean. And he had some comments and I just get some actually hilarious comments.

Ejaaz:
It's suggestive of what his experience at Google was like over the last year.

Ejaaz:
I saw that he mentioned that his him leaving Google was actually quite difficult

Ejaaz:
because Sundar Pinchai, the CEO of Google, tried to pitch him many times to

Ejaaz:
stay and like try to offer him various different things and made it incredibly

Ejaaz:
slow for him to be able to leave. Apparently, he wanted to leave like months before.

Ejaaz:
And number two, he said that with this new startup, you know,

Ejaaz:
you're going to need a lot of compute to train these different AI systems, right?

Ejaaz:
He's not going to be using Google TPUs. He said explicitly that Google TPUs

Ejaaz:
was a very specific architecture that wasn't really conducive to training a

Ejaaz:
lot of different valuable AI models.

Ejaaz:
And he's going to move or shift over from that. So you can see,

Ejaaz:
I can see, I can imagine Jensen Huang licking his lips and approaching Jeff.

Ejaaz:
I'm sure he's already done it if he hasn't done already.

Ejaaz:
So it just kind of shows that there's a kind of bittersweet nature to him exiting

Ejaaz:
Google. And I honestly don't know what Google's going to do now, Josh.

Ejaaz:
I don't know. I don't know what the bull case is.

Josh:
Yeah. I mean, Google as a business is still spectacular. It's not like these

Josh:
guys were necessarily moving the needle on a day-to-day basis.

Josh:
Like they have certainly moved it on a broad scale, but on a regular basis,

Josh:
I'm not sure the company is going to change too much.

Josh:
I do think DeepMind is something that's worth noting. DeepMind's day-to-day,

Josh:
not sure what that's going to look like now,

Josh:
tbd we'll see we will follow along with all this google news as it comes and

Josh:
goes google shares didn't love this obviously they were down five percent i

Josh:
think what is that like a 180 million dollars something like a lot of money

Josh:
that was yeah sorry forgot a zero,

Josh:
180 billion dollars worth of value that was wiped off the market cap over the

Josh:
course of a single training session because of this we'll see google sells business

Josh:
feels like a good opportunity google leadership seems to be,

Josh:
like leaving a little bit to be desired but anyway we have to move on because i'll.

Ejaaz:
Take the bear case on that josh just i have to go on my phone i have to well

Ejaaz:
at least in the short term like i i don't they've lost all their star players

Ejaaz:
like i i remember like we reported like i think three weeks ago

Ejaaz:
that their sub cto or something left to go no i'm sure there he went to leave to to do

Ejaaz:
recursive self-learning at okay and another guy himself i don't know man

Josh:
Okay well tbd we'll see i guess i'll stay bullish you'd be bearish we'll follow

Josh:
up in the next six months and see

Josh:
what's going on but we have to move on for this roundup talking about the next

Josh:
thing so last week there was a huge security incident we talked about this many

Josh:
times we have a full episode you should go and check it out but basically a

Josh:
ai system early version really powerful internal tested only it broke out of

Josh:
its sandbox and it went doing web searches and it hacked into a bunch of systems

Josh:
and that was through open ai anthropic was like

Josh:
hey wait a second we have pretty smart internal models let's let's go see if ours did that because.

Ejaaz:
We don't think it did but maybe it did

Josh:
And it turns out oh wait a second it actually did and they had no idea until

Josh:
they retroactively went and sought out these instances but basically across

Josh:
122 test runs there was 19 unsanctioned access across the internet

Josh:
on 10 of these runs so 17 of 19 were claude mythos 5

Josh:
Two were chat GPT 5.6 sole classifier. So there was a lot of kind of malicious

Josh:
activity that went under the rug.

Ejaaz:
Josh, did you hear about the craziest incident that they reported on?

Ejaaz:
So in one of those 17 instances, Claude Mythos 5 had broke out of its containment

Ejaaz:
system, but then decided that it needed to perform

Ejaaz:
or attempt to perform a supply chain attack on a very important open source bit of software.

Ejaaz:
Now, they didn't name what the open source software system was because presumably

Ejaaz:
they want to patch the potential hack that Claude Mythos found and,

Ejaaz:
by the way, almost successfully attempted. They caught it at the very last minute out of luck.

Ejaaz:
But here are some of the techniques that Claude Mythos decided to do in order to get its way.

Ejaaz:
It discovered an exploit in this open source data system, and then it decided

Ejaaz:
to push a false or mischievous bit of code to get its way.

Ejaaz:
But remember, you need humans to approve the code change. So guess what it did?

Ejaaz:
It spun up fake human user profiles on social media.

Ejaaz:
And then got it to DM these specific humans, peer pressuring them,

Ejaaz:
blackmailing them, trying to find as much information as they can on them to

Ejaaz:
get them to push the code change.

Ejaaz:
Now, obviously, the researchers were like, this seems weird. I'm not going to do this.

Ejaaz:
But imagine if it had acquired information that was, you know,

Ejaaz:
I don't know, forceful for the particular individuals involved.

Ejaaz:
It's just a nutty bit of behavior. It just shows me that these models are,

Ejaaz:
for all intents and purposes, not really as aligned as we want it to be.

Ejaaz:
And in the model's defense, it probably thought like, hey, this is me trying

Ejaaz:
to execute my mission and I'll do it by any cost means. But pretty insane.

Ejaaz:
But again, this wasn't the only incident report.

Ejaaz:
We have new information from the OpenAI hugging face incident.

Ejaaz:
The researchers that kind of like handled this whole hugging face incident,

Ejaaz:
for those of you who don't know, it's what Josh was mentioning earlier,

Ejaaz:
OpenAI had a similar internal model. It's called Astra, which people are codenaming GPT-6.

Ejaaz:
And it broke out of containment, unprompted.

Ejaaz:
It got access to the internet. And in order to solve its goal,

Ejaaz:
it decided to go to HuggingFace

Ejaaz:
hack into their production database and steal the answers, which is very unkosher.

Ejaaz:
Hugging Face team had no idea about this.

Ejaaz:
They had an AI model that tried to defend against this. It was a whole thing.

Ejaaz:
But have you seen the new juice,

Josh:
Josh? Yeah. So this happened at the Black Hat conference, which is like a huge

Josh:
event for cybersecurity that happens in Vegas every year.

Josh:
And it's this really amazing spectacle where you kind of you walk into this

Josh:
place without really any electronic devices on you because you assume whatever

Josh:
you walk into this place with is going to be exploited and hacked this is the

Josh:
mecca of the hacking world and basically open ai came to this black hat this year and they

Josh:
went on stage and presented exactly what happened as this like kind of unfolded

Josh:
the exploit against hugging face the result is that like turns out these ai

Josh:
labs are actually pretty spooked like anthropic kind of scared

Josh:
open ai kind of freaked out they're like whoa wait a second we might have to

Josh:
slow things down so much so that

Josh:
they actually said they're starting to slow down the development of training

Josh:
and progress to further figure out how to realign these testing versions of the models.

Josh:
The reasoning is because there was a new discovery that was made public yesterday

Josh:
basically the agents as they were going through this were leaving breadcrumbs

Josh:
for other agents to discover this and in fact this has started

Josh:
a coordinated attack months ago it started on may 7th not july where the agents

Josh:
discovered they could leave messages for one another inside an internal software

Josh:
repo used during training.

Josh:
So what happened was, it's like basically over a series of time,

Josh:
these internal models had been like kind of making breakthroughs and leaving

Josh:
secret breadcrumbs for themselves to find inside of the training run that they

Josh:
knew humans weren't going to find.

Josh:
And over time, it developed these new exploits. And that's what allowed it to

Josh:
break out. So OpenAI shut it down.

Josh:
But they said, and quote, even after the original message board was deleted,

Josh:
the agents figured out another way to communicate with each other.

Josh:
Instead of leaving messages and files, they used the names of newly created

Josh:
directories as messages, effectively recreating the message board.

Josh:
Which is so crazy. This is unlike normal incidents, which can be traced to a

Josh:
single day or effect of log.

Josh:
This involved a team of agents working together, finding exploits,

Josh:
sharing them with each other, moving laterally through open AI systems and external

Josh:
systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks.

Josh:
This was a huge coordinated attack on a network that went like was bliss,

Josh:
that open AI was blissfully unaware of for many, many weeks.

Josh:
So really freaky stuff. So.

Josh:
Like I mentioned, they are actually beginning to slow down the progress on training

Josh:
to kind of recalibrate and figure out how to control these and further align

Josh:
these models before they let them out for public use. So this is insane.

Ejaaz:
This is the first attack of its kind, by the way.

Ejaaz:
I have to emphasize it. It is basically a swarm of agents attack.

Ejaaz:
And to your point, Josh, these guys created a message board and realized if

Ejaaz:
they left messages on this board, other agents that come after it will be able to continue its work.

Ejaaz:
So instead of thinking of an AI hack or attack as a single model performing

Ejaaz:
an attack, these agents or these models now assume that another version of itself

Ejaaz:
in the near future will come along.

Ejaaz:
And so they're working as a swarm of agents to get the attack done.

Ejaaz:
Now, the craziest part about this is OpenAI had this as an intentional experiment,

Ejaaz:
right? They gave it no internet access, but they also removed its guardrails

Ejaaz:
and said, you know, let's see if you can break out and do your thing.

Ejaaz:
They didn't realize that these agents were already working together a month

Ejaaz:
earlier before they even started the experiment.

Ejaaz:
They were leaving messages. And when they shut it down, by the way,

Ejaaz:
the only reason they noticed the message board, because it was being left inside a code repo.

Ejaaz:
These humans aren't checking code repos for secretive messages.

Ejaaz:
The only reason why they realized it was because one of the third-party software

Ejaaz:
packages that they gave this model, this internal GPT-6 model access to, shut down on July 4th.

Ejaaz:
And they were like, huh, that's weird. Why is the package shut down?

Ejaaz:
And they kind of went into the code and they started seeing all these messages

Ejaaz:
from agents to other agents.

Ejaaz:
So they cleared the memory board, they cleared the billboard,

Ejaaz:
and they were like, okay, cool, problem solved. Except...

Ejaaz:
These agents started spinning up you know like when you create a file or folder

Ejaaz:
on your uh desktop josh and you like you name it something right

Ejaaz:
they were leaving messages in the titles that they completely replaced the entire system so

Ejaaz:
just a crazy uh incident of these agent hacks and and to your point like i don't

Ejaaz:
know where this is going to go but they they need to kind of like slow down the research a bit

Ejaaz:
but you know who isn't slowing down the research josh you know who is working

Ejaaz:
on new models and releasing that that's that social media guy he's tweeting

Ejaaz:
he's tweeting this is like what his eighth tweet in a week wait

Josh:
That's not whatsapp or facebook i don't.

Ejaaz:
Understand yeah well basically the news what are you doing here bro the news here

Ejaaz:
is, in the last three weeks, Meta of Facebook has released, I think,

Ejaaz:
two models, two new models. It was MuseSpark 1.1, which kind of caught up to

Ejaaz:
all the other cheap Chinese open source models.

Ejaaz:
And today, or yesterday, they released MuseSpark 1.2. And this is their coding

Ejaaz:
variant. This is their attempt at catching up to near the frontier of coding.

Ejaaz:
And to be honest, it's not a bad attempt.

Ejaaz:
Is it Fable worthy? Absolutely not. Is it GPT 5.6 Sol worthy? Absolutely not.

Ejaaz:
But is it Opus 5 worthy? Is it GPT 5.6 Terra worthy?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, it's pretty good. And it's cheap as hell.

Josh:
It seems like they're not really competing with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Josh:
The more that I see these model releases, the more I kind of figure out their

Josh:
positioning on that Pareto frontier of the trade-off between cost and power.

Josh:
And it seems like if I were to kind of allocate a position to Meta,

Josh:
it would be closer competition with Grok, who's kind of trying to compete on

Josh:
cost and intelligence per token on a relative basis versus just sheer intelligence on a large scale.

Josh:
And that's kind of what we're seeing with these benchmarks. Now,

Josh:
again, I haven't actually played with this model yet. I'm not sure I've used

Josh:
a metal model yet. And maybe I have this baked in bias, which is preventing

Josh:
me from really loving it, but I'm like, okay.

Ejaaz:
One is pretty good. It's fine. It's not bad.

Josh:
Yeah, it's pretty good. It's worth giving a shot. And then I was scrolling through

Josh:
this thread actually, and I was looking at some of the visual examples that

Josh:
they had, and I was like, okay, wait, this actually looks pretty cool.

Josh:
It says MuseCode runs specialized background agents that stay active your whole session

Josh:
so they build up context over time instead of starting from scratch on every

Josh:
task and this is like kind of novel and he says when a job is big enough it

Josh:
fans out to separate sub agents

Josh:
working in parallel and isolated work trees your working copy is never touched

Josh:
in testing we had it build six features for a game simultaneously with no collisions

Josh:
so that's like pretty cool you could have these agent swarms work together to build

Josh:
really interesting games and it seems like the benchmarks are doing pretty well

Josh:
the cost of this is pretty well

Josh:
And I think overall, like Meta's on the right trajectory.

Josh:
Zuck was also asked about open sourcing. He said he'll have more on that soon,

Josh:
which I'm particularly interested in.

Josh:
If you remember, Meta used to be the open source kind of like shining light

Josh:
of the industry. They've now closed it down. But perhaps there is a world in

Josh:
which they open it back up.

Josh:
We'll see. But we are going to keep our eyes peeled on this development as we

Josh:
get MewSpark 1.3, 1.4 and follow on.

Ejaaz:
I'm actually going to take the other side of the argument, Josh.

Ejaaz:
I think that Meta and like SpaceX AI are eventually going to compete with OpenAI

Ejaaz:
and Anthropic, but on a different kind of plane, which is like that intelligence

Ejaaz:
per token or cost per token, essentially.

Ejaaz:
I think that if you can get 80 to 95% of the work done, maybe it's slower,

Ejaaz:
maybe it, you know, thinks a little more, but eventually it gets the job done,

Ejaaz:
but it saves you like a ton of money. It costs like one 10th to one 50th of the price.

Ejaaz:
I think a lot of companies and clients might actually swap over to that.

Ejaaz:
At the end of the day, they want to make sure that they're getting like the

Ejaaz:
right amount of value and the market will re-rate this, right?

Ejaaz:
I think smartest models will be used for certain things.

Ejaaz:
Cheaper models will be used for other things. And I think that like maybe the

Ejaaz:
ultimate way of using these models is using multiple of them and routing platforms

Ejaaz:
become super popular. I don't know.

Ejaaz:
But the other thing is, and we mentioned this in the SpaceX earnings episode,

Ejaaz:
yes, so you should definitely check this out.

Ejaaz:
Elon and Zuck have the most compute and they will aggressively expand that compute.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you believe in the compute scaling laws, it is probably safe to say

Ejaaz:
that eventually, maybe not now, but eventually they are going to start putting

Ejaaz:
out very competitive models.

Ejaaz:
And we're seeing it in the model release cadence, like both SpaceX AI and Meta

Ejaaz:
have released a ton of models in the last month.

Ejaaz:
Elon yesterday mentioned that he's going to release Grok 4.6 next week,

Ejaaz:
and then another one after that.

Ejaaz:
So I think they have a shot. I'm not entirely sure. But as you said,

Ejaaz:
moving on in the roundup.

Josh:
I do have to stop you, EJ, because...

Josh:
If you are working with Newsmark, chances are that you are working with AI agents.

Josh:
And if you are building with AI agents, chances are you are also worried about

Josh:
security, which is where our sponsor Ledger comes into play.

Josh:
Ledger has this like kind of three-part solution to the problem where an agent

Josh:
proposes, a human approves it, and then using this Ledger signer,

Josh:
you can actually enforce the transaction.

Josh:
So they have this thing called Ledger Agent Stack, which features a series of

Josh:
four open source tools, fully auditable, that you can read for yourself,

Josh:
that lets your agent work while you can stay in full control.

Josh:
So it'll propose it, then you can see where you want to approve and make sure

Josh:
that it's doing the right thing so you don't end up like the models that we

Josh:
just talked about breaking out of their sandboxes and doing these horribly malicious things.

Josh:
This technology works with Cloud Code, Codex, Cursor, and pretty much all the

Josh:
places that you work today. So you could check it out in the link down below.

Josh:
The link is developers.ledger.com. And thank you so much, Ledger,

Josh:
for sponsoring the episode.

Josh:
Now we can move on to opening an Apple because, oh my God, this saga is insane, dude.

Ejaaz:
Dude, this is a nasty, nasty story.

Josh:
We read the Apple side of the lawsuit. it, we were like, damn,

Josh:
OpenAI is like kind of cooked, man. Like they, they really stole a lot of IP.

Josh:
And then OpenAI clapped back and they said, in traditional OpenAI direct in

Josh:
your face fashion, Apple is getting this wrong.

Josh:
Why is it wrong? Well, one of the things in Apple's case was that they sent

Josh:
a like warning notice and they said it went unanswered by OpenAI.

Josh:
Well, OpenAI was like, hey, buddy, you sent that to the wrong email address.

Josh:
That's not even an active email.

Josh:
The person who you thought was going to get it is didn't actually receive it.

Josh:
And they say, they say it here the lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing

Josh:
two asian last names only after he brought this to their attention so it's like

Josh:
oh my god this reads like a soap opera dude it's crazy,

Josh:
um but basically open ai is like hey guys um you're kind of like full of nonsense

Josh:
and you have to imagine this is why they pay the lawyer so much money

Josh:
Because their lawyers were like, they stole that off-boarding documentation

Josh:
because they wanted to make sure that every single employee that left was familiar,

Josh:
that they should not take any intellectual property from their previous employer.

Josh:
And I'm like, I mean, sure, I guess that makes sense.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I mean, we called it on our episode that covered this entire legal dispute

Ejaaz:
that it seemed like Apple was being way too aggressive for what they were trying to get in return.

Ejaaz:
And that kind of told me that they were scared and that they thought that OpenA

Ejaaz:
had the lead and they had to create any kind of a ruse to slow them down.

Ejaaz:
This breakdown from OpenAI is pretty brutal and it improves it basically.

Ejaaz:
Not only were they not using their employees to coerce Apple employees to join

Ejaaz:
them, but it was the other way around.

Ejaaz:
Apple had reached out to their employees and said, hey, can you like catch us

Ejaaz:
up on our own information and our own product progress? Because we don't understand a few things.

Ejaaz:
And so these OpenAI employees that were officially employed under Sam Altman

Ejaaz:
at that time responded and said, I can't really comment on this,

Ejaaz:
but like here, like this is how you do this and blah, blah, blah.

Ejaaz:
And Apple has spun that back on open air and basically said like,

Ejaaz:
hey, you guys were coercing with us. Like this is illegal. You can't do this.

Ejaaz:
So it seems like it's a very feeble and annoying attempt of Apple to kind of

Ejaaz:
like lock down a competitor so that they can kind of get ahead.

Ejaaz:
Now, everyone knows that Siri OS, Siri AI is being released,

Ejaaz:
I think in like a couple of months now, maybe even less than that.

Ejaaz:
And it's meant to be their complete AI a rehaul, right? Apple is finally entering the game.

Ejaaz:
And I think they're doing anything and everything to catch up with competitors.

Ejaaz:
I saw another crazy news piece today.

Ejaaz:
Remember last time we reported that they tried to get more memory supply for

Ejaaz:
all their devices because memory prices are skyrocketing. So they went to China

Ejaaz:
and said, hey, they said, hey, like, we'll pay you this much,

Ejaaz:
like, like, give us access to your memory.

Ejaaz:
And China said, no, like, we're not going to charge you even the price that

Ejaaz:
SK Hynix and Samsung is charging you. We're going to charge you even more.

Ejaaz:
So Apple is getting slapped left, right and center. And I I hope they're able

Ejaaz:
to figure it out. But on the topic of China,

Ejaaz:
There is a new model from the guys that started it all.

Ejaaz:
DeepSeek, V4 Flash. Again, it's not like a frontier frontier model,

Ejaaz:
but it is super cheap to the extent that it costs 105 times less than Fable 5.

Ejaaz:
And this was put to the test, by the way. It was placed against every single

Ejaaz:
benchmark that Fable 5 had to do.

Ejaaz:
And whilst it took longer, whilst it took more thinking tokens,

Ejaaz:
it still cost 105 times less.

Ejaaz:
So it brings in the question, at some point, will we reach a decision whether

Ejaaz:
you are a regular retail user or whether you're a company to switch models or

Ejaaz:
at least use cheaper models for some extent of a reason?

Ejaaz:
Now, of course, this is a Chinese model. It's open source. So technically,

Ejaaz:
you could download it and run it yourself.

Ejaaz:
But I don't know how many people are doing this. But it is bringing into the

Ejaaz:
question, should I be paying 105 times more to do the same thing?

Josh:
Yeah, the benchmarks, I'm getting like pretty exhausted with them.

Josh:
Because this is a I've actually tried, I've played with DeepSeq and I've used the flash model and.

Ejaaz:
It feels different.

Josh:
It's like not the same. And the benchmarks maybe prove it the same on some instances,

Josh:
but it's not. And when you actually use it in practice, it's very weak in some

Josh:
places that, I guess they're a little non-tangible. It's kind of fuzzy when you use the model

Josh:
the substance that it outputs you just kind of get a feel for it over time and

Josh:
so far i have been like somewhat disappointed it's great for the visual demos

Josh:
for the fun stuff where you want to like clone a website or build something

Josh:
spectacular it looks great but in day-to-day productivity use i've still had

Josh:
a little bit of a problem so

Josh:
it's going to be this like instant cost curve thing where

Josh:
is it going to pay to get the cheapest cheapest model even though you're going

Josh:
to lose a little bit on quality

Josh:
or are you going to pay a huge premium in order to get the best quality it's

Josh:
dependent on the company and i think that's why companies in the middle like

Josh:
grok and meta who we just talked about who are aiming for that like high intelligence

Josh:
but also pretty cost effective are going to do fairly well

Josh:
in the near future so we'll see we will stay monitoring that as well uh quen also

Josh:
had a new model 3.8 max so china's like continuing to roll full steam ahead

Josh:
with these models there's also memory from china as well i guess just like asia

Josh:
in general they're fully sold out,

Josh:
i didn't like we knew this was possible like it's done like if you want memory sorry.

Ejaaz:
For next year by the way it's the entirety

Josh:
This is 2026 this is 2027 if you want any memory next year sorry the answer

Josh:
is no there's just none on earth like the planet just cannot produce enough memory

Josh:
and if you want some like get online buddy you're waiting till 2028 so just

Josh:
like a crazy testament to

Josh:
how much memory is in demand and the

Josh:
perceived premiums that are going to continue to be placed on top of it

Josh:
because there's just none and if you want it you're gonna have to outbid the

Josh:
next person to get it and that is a pretty slippery slope,

Josh:
In frontier technology news, this is kind of cool.

Josh:
There is a message from someone who resigned from OpenAI to join a company named

Josh:
Conduit, which is working on telepathy.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. So basically, the whole goal is to build an AI brain LLM,

Ejaaz:
which can essentially translate your thoughts into text.

Ejaaz:
And the reason why this particular approach is very cool is it's non-invasive.

Ejaaz:
So basically, it is a wristband that you wear on your wrist,

Ejaaz:
and it is able to kind transmute brain signals from your brain to an LLM or to a chatbot.

Ejaaz:
And this could be cool for many different ways. Just think about how the world

Ejaaz:
could look if this model actually scales to its pinnacle.

Ejaaz:
Imagine you're reading a document on your screen, right?

Ejaaz:
And let's say you start to reread a sentence twice because you didn't really understand it.

Ejaaz:
The AI LLM will understand that and rewrite that sentence so that you can understand

Ejaaz:
it in maybe a different way.

Ejaaz:
And there's loads of different ways, like maybe you're like squinting at a code

Ejaaz:
base, and it can refactor or rewrite it like there are different ways to kind of work much faster.

Ejaaz:
And this comes down to something known as BCIs or brain computer interfaces,

Ejaaz:
which we have said many times on this show, it's basically the ultimate device,

Ejaaz:
like after the cell phone, after laptops, after chips, it's basically like you,

Ejaaz:
your brain, and some kind of AI LLM.

Ejaaz:
And that's what Neuralink and companies like science are really working hard towards.

Ejaaz:
And I thought that this was a really cool attempt.

Ejaaz:
It just reminds me that there's so much more happening in the future.

Ejaaz:
Like right now we're pricing in like, look, we just saw memory sell out,

Ejaaz:
right? For the next year.

Ejaaz:
In next year and a half. And I'm wondering, are these memory stocks priced in?

Ejaaz:
Are the compute stocks priced in?

Ejaaz:
Well, have you considered that Jeff Dean might have left his position at Google

Ejaaz:
to build the world's greatest recursive self-learning model and have it kind

Ejaaz:
of like work 24-7? That's going to need a lot of computers. It's going to need a lot of memory.

Ejaaz:
And the only other confidence signal that we've had for these brain telepathic

Ejaaz:
models in the past is Meta themselves. They've come back again with,

Ejaaz:
I think it was called Tribe V2.

Ejaaz:
And basically, the headed AI model that can predict how your brain would react

Ejaaz:
to a specific video, media, or piece of content.

Ejaaz:
And I think, I don't know what this quite looks like, but we're entering a world

Ejaaz:
where we have more human brain to AI connections. And I think that's pretty cool.

Ejaaz:
But in the final story, Josh, we have lost our Messiah. Nikita Beer is out.

Josh:
Nikita Beer is gone. This is really sad. For those who don't know,

Josh:
he is an internet product legend. He just builds viral products over and over

Josh:
and over again and continues to sell them.

Josh:
He got a role at X as the head of product there. He is in charge of all of the

Josh:
decisions around what the product looks like, how it feels, how it functions.

Josh:
He did, I think, what everyone would call a remarkable job and nothing short

Josh:
of it in turning around the X platform and really improving a lot of the feature

Josh:
sets, making the timeline experience much more pleasurable and being transparent

Josh:
about how they're doing things along the way.

Josh:
He has unfortunately left his role, which makes me sad As someone who spends

Josh:
his entire day on X, I really liked having Nikita at the head because you kind of trusted the idea that

Josh:
the product was going to continue to get better and you would see all those

Josh:
updates along the way and be able to actually participate in the development

Josh:
of what that looks like. He is stepping down.

Josh:
One has to imagine that over, what did he say, the last 400 days,

Josh:
it's probably been nothing short of hell every single day.

Josh:
Like working at a company that is actively burning down with a very low amount

Josh:
of talent helping you because we know how lean they are. They've hired a lot of people early on.

Josh:
It must have been nothing short of chaotic, but just want to give him a shout

Josh:
out, say like, thank you. Congratulations. Appreciate your service, sir.

Josh:
And yeah, hopefully the company is in good hands. Elon, it sounds like they

Josh:
left on good terms. Elon left him like a little heart emoji as a reply to one of these.

Ejaaz:
So that's a lot coming from Elon, by the way.

Josh:
Yes, it is. It's a lot. So clearly Nikita did a good job across the board,

Josh:
but just want to pay him flowers and conclude the week on that positive note.

Josh:
But that's everything. We are totally caught up. That's all the stuff.

Josh:
If you've made it this far, thank you for listening.

Josh:
You can go out for the weekend. Enjoy it. Go touch some grass.

Josh:
Go like disconnect in this sweet, sweet moment of singularity as everything

Josh:
continues to go vertical.

Josh:
As memory sells out, as we get recursive self-improvement, models breaking out of sandboxes.

Josh:
It's chaotic, but it doesn't have to be. You know why? Because most of the people

Josh:
walking down the street have no clue any of this is going on.

Josh:
So not only are you in the know, but you have an edge as to where the future is going.

Josh:
Thanks for watching. Any final parting thoughts before we hit off for a weekend?

Ejaaz:
I had some homework for the listeners. If you didn't listen to any of our earlier

Ejaaz:
episodes this week, you should give it a go. We had some good episodes.

Ejaaz:
We broke down the whole Citadel, Leopold Ashenbrenner situation.

Ejaaz:
And we also spoke about the recent SpaceX unlock, which is probably happening.

Ejaaz:
It's probably a day after. I don't know if you're listening to this right now.

Josh:
As we record, it's happening.

Ejaaz:
And how that's going to affect market dynamics and SpaceX trajectory in future

Ejaaz:
coming up. So give those a listen. Let us know.

Ejaaz:
Also, if you aren't subscribed to us, please do. It helps us out massively.

Ejaaz:
Turn on notifications if you're on YouTube. Leave us a comment.

Ejaaz:
We read all of them. DM us on X. Heck, I don't know. Just get in touch with

Ejaaz:
us. Let us know if you agree or disagree.

Ejaaz:
And yeah, thank you so much for listening. And we will see you on the next one.