THIS WEEK IN AI: Tension at World AI Summit, Snapchat Glasses, Meta's Crisis

We discuss Snap’s new AR glasses, AI governance at the G7, and Noam Shazeer’s move from Google to OpenAI. 

We also cover Anthropic’s Fable 5 being shut down, Microsoft’s use of a Chinese open-source model in Copilot, and Meta’s latest AI push.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Ridiculous AI Glasses
7:27 AI Summit Tensions
11:46 Noam Shazir Joins OpenAI
15:48 Anthropic’s Fable Shutdown
18:52 Microsoft Embraces Open Source
24:36 Meta’s AI Reorg Crisis
29:15 China’s New Coding Model
32:06 MidJourney Enters Medicine

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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

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.

Josh:
Well, today there's a new version of that, which is you either exit Silicon

Josh:
Valley or spend enough time there for no one to tell you that these glasses

Josh:
look absolutely ridiculous.

Josh:
What we're showing on screen right now is the Snap Specs. This is the new version

Josh:
of Snapchat's hardware offering that is marketed as this spectacle of a device.

Josh:
It is this remarkably intriguing and compelling and innovative device that sits

Josh:
on your face, that has all these capabilities. But the reality is,

Ejaaz:
I mean, dude.

Josh:
These glasses on Evan Spiegel's face, the CEO of Snapchat, not only do they

Josh:
look ridiculous, but they cost $2,200.

Josh:
I mean, what was he thinking? What was the company thinking?

Josh:
Who let this get released?

Josh:
And how are they so confident as he's walking around the venue yesterday as

Josh:
they release these specs?

Ejaaz:
Listen, this is a serious show and I want to have a serious conversation about

Ejaaz:
this, but this is ridiculous. Do you know when you buy sunglasses for a little child...

Ejaaz:
And like, or they're like, mommy, can I like wear your glasses,

Ejaaz:
please? And it just looks oversized and ridiculous on their head.

Ejaaz:
This is what this looks like. I just want to point out, for those of you who

Ejaaz:
are looking at our stream right now, the back half of the actual glasses,

Ejaaz:
the handles, barely kind of broach his ear.

Ejaaz:
They kind of like sit on top of his ear. It's squishing his ear.

Ejaaz:
That's got to be so uncomfortable. Wait, and for those of you who say,

Ejaaz:
oh, this is just an AI rendering. No, look at it.

Ejaaz:
This is live, like in the mix of things. As he turns, you can see they kind

Ejaaz:
of extend beyond the back of his head so that it's like oversized fit for him.

Josh:
Now that dude's ears are fighting for their lives.

Ejaaz:
They're fighting for their life. So this is Snapchat, who hasn't really done

Ejaaz:
anything major for the last 12 years.

Ejaaz:
In fact, for the last 12 years, they've been investing a heck ton of money to

Ejaaz:
the tune of $3.5 billion to figure out the AR glasses game. You know,

Ejaaz:
you had Meta that's released a bunch of models since then.

Ejaaz:
You've got Apple that's released the Apple Vision 4 for $3,500.

Ejaaz:
And finally, Snap has released their flagship model. You would think after all

Ejaaz:
that R&D, they'd come out with something cheap, slick, and aesthetic.

Ejaaz:
And unfortunately, it's been the complete opposite. This is $2,200 to achieve

Ejaaz:
or get these specs that you're seeing on your screen now. It's a standalone device.

Ejaaz:
It has around 51 degrees field of vision, which is similar to Meta's Ray-Ban

Ejaaz:
glasses. But of course, this thing is like 3x larger than anything that we've ever seen.

Ejaaz:
You don't need to connect it to your phone. And basically, it runs its own software

Ejaaz:
operating system on the lens itself.

Ejaaz:
Now, I have seen demos of what the software itself looks like,

Ejaaz:
Josh. And believe it or not, it's not entirely the worst thing.

Ejaaz:
You're seeing someone on the screen here where someone's playing golf.

Ejaaz:
You're seeing someone basically ordering off a menu in a language that they

Ejaaz:
don't understand. You're seeing someone taking directions. You're seeing someone

Ejaaz:
watching a movie on a plane. You're someone design the architecture of a building.

Ejaaz:
This all looks good, but these are all curated demos, just to be clear.

Ejaaz:
I don't know whether it actually looks this good, but these demos are already

Ejaaz:
better than meta Ray-Ban glasses. But.

Ejaaz:
No one's going to buy these things. And it's such a shame because it looks terrible.

Ejaaz:
You don't want to look like you're wearing old school 3D glasses,

Ejaaz:
watching a movie that no one's even there to see. It's just, it's so dumb.

Josh:
Well, forgive me for my PTSD, but I think I'm going to need to see it to believe

Josh:
it. These seem like a lot of kind of structured demos that are not out in the wild.

Josh:
I give Meta a lot of credit when they released their glasses,

Josh:
their Meta Ray-Ban displays, I think they were called. I forget because no one actually bought them.

Josh:
They did do some demos on stage and they just completely flopped and they failed.

Josh:
So I give them credit for trying.

Josh:
Snapchat, I don't think did that. This is mostly a curated view of demos.

Josh:
The form factor, it will say, there's some nice things to say about this thing.

Josh:
Like the fact that they're trying for one.

Josh:
I give them a lot of credit for actually trying for throwing their hat in the ring.

Josh:
It looks terrible, but the technology is on its way. You mentioned the 51 degree

Josh:
field of view. That actually is an improvement.

Josh:
What that means is it's about equivalent to a 24 inch monitor up close.

Josh:
So if you have a 24-inch display that you use your computer on,

Josh:
that's roughly what it looks like. Or if you step back to 10 feet,

Josh:
it's equivalent to about a 115-inch TV with seemingly pretty good fidelity.

Josh:
I was listening to one of the interviews with Evan Spiegel, the CEO, and

Josh:
The interviewer asked him the very obvious questions is like,

Josh:
how are you planning to justify this?

Josh:
It's $2,200 for this like very clunky pair of glasses. And the way that he justified

Josh:
it is like, hey, people spend that money for a computer all the time.

Josh:
In fact, they spend a lot more money on that for a computer.

Josh:
And what you're buying with these is essentially a computer.

Josh:
This is a standalone display.

Josh:
It does have two Qualcomm chips built into it.

Josh:
It has its own vision suite of sensors. It has two full color cameras.

Josh:
It has two infrared cameras.

Josh:
It has speakers. It has a microphone array. It has hand tracking, voice control.

Josh:
A lot of the features that you expect inside of a computer, it's on these pair

Josh:
of glasses. Now, the pair of glasses, the battery life is decent.

Josh:
It's four hours of mixed use.

Josh:
And with the charging case that it comes with, you get about 20 hours.

Josh:
The old Spectacles managed about 45 minutes. This is a pretty considerable jump

Josh:
over previous versions. It's just like the Vision Pro,

Josh:
There's just not really a market for this. I can't imagine there's going to

Josh:
be a world in which like, I love this type of technology. I am version one beta

Josh:
buyer of all the hardware, but even this is like, I don't want to wear these

Josh:
things. They're too bulky. They're too clunky.

Josh:
I give them a lot of credit for trying to do this, for innovating.

Josh:
And it's certainly correct, like directionally at least, where the hardware

Josh:
of glasses as a form factor is great. It's just the actual hardware required

Josh:
to make them a great product. It doesn't seem to be there, at least in the case of Snap for now.

Ejaaz:
But it's also like the worst time to release a premium product.

Ejaaz:
Like it's not cheap. This is a high-end laptop at $2,200.

Ejaaz:
You're at that level, you are competing with Apple Vision Pro,

Ejaaz:
which hasn't taken off either, right?

Ejaaz:
Apple yesterday announced that they're going to increase the cost of all their

Ejaaz:
products because the cost of memory and everything is going up.

Ejaaz:
So it's the worst time to, when people are like, kind of like pinching their

Ejaaz:
wallets and not really spending much because, you know, their premium gadgets

Ejaaz:
that they want to buy from Apple, they can't purchase themselves.

Ejaaz:
What makes Snap think that they're going to be the replacement there?

Ejaaz:
Now, one, like the points you make around the software thing and that they're

Ejaaz:
trying, I agree, is good.

Ejaaz:
The one thing that I saw when I was looking into the dev kit for this particular

Ejaaz:
device is you can hook it up to Claude or ChatGPT, which I think is pretty cool

Ejaaz:
for creating new kinds of AI apps. Typically with Meta, they're restricted to Meta AI specifically.

Ejaaz:
I know with Google Glasses that is coming up, I believe it's still tied to Gemini.

Ejaaz:
The fact that they've kind of like open sourced this to kind of like create

Ejaaz:
and run your own agent could be pretty cool.

Ejaaz:
It's like the closest thing that maybe we've come to Jarvis from Iron Man,

Ejaaz:
except this is like discount store Jarvis. This is like we've got Jarvis at

Ejaaz:
home, you know, like you can't buy the real Jarvis.

Ejaaz:
I'm hoping that this is the worst it's ever going to be. I like the attempt,

Ejaaz:
on goal that they have for creating the software suite around this.

Ejaaz:
And I also like that it's a standalone product that I don't need to hook up

Ejaaz:
to my phone. It kind of like runs on its own.

Ejaaz:
But it remains to be seen. Like I want to see someone in the wild that isn't

Ejaaz:
from Snapchat actually trying this thing but to spend three and a half billion

Ejaaz:
dollars they spent 1.9 of that by the way in 2023 alone and it's taken them

Ejaaz:
like what three years to launch this thing.

Ejaaz:
It remains to be seen, but I think we should probably move on to the next topic.

Ejaaz:
There was a very important meeting amongst world leaders in Evian,

Ejaaz:
France, which is where the famous Evian Water comes from, by the way.

Ejaaz:
It's the G7 Summit, where you had the top seven nations of the world come together

Ejaaz:
to discuss an array of political affairs.

Ejaaz:
One of the main ones, however, was around AI and governing and regulating AI.

Ejaaz:
And we had the main heads of AI were there, including Demis Asivis from Google,

Ejaaz:
Dario Modi from Anthropic, and Sam Altman from OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
Now, the main call, the main plea from Dario, Demis, and Sam was for a US-led

Ejaaz:
coalition to determine the global standards and rules for AI in a closed-door

Ejaaz:
meeting that happened in the morning.

Ejaaz:
So it was kind of like a lunch thing that happened that the G7 Trump was president,

Ejaaz:
as well as all the leaders of like Europe and a bunch of other countries.

Ejaaz:
And the main idea was let's start a conversation around how we regulate this

Ejaaz:
thing because as we know from recent news

Ejaaz:
the models have finally gotten good enough where they pose themselves as a national

Ejaaz:
threat if it's in the hands of an adversary and so that was what that discussion ensued.

Josh:
Yeah this is hopefully a productive meeting i mean the the working theme of

Josh:
this launch was ensuring a safe rapid and effective deployment

Josh:
of ai yes and i think this is effectively what everybody wants there's just

Josh:
a lot of varying opinions on how you actually get there And I am hopeful that

Josh:
the intention of this meeting was to find some sort of convergence,

Josh:
to find some sort of middle ground on how they could consider moving forward

Josh:
with these frontier models.

Josh:
We very clearly see now that we are experiencing this takeoff scenario in which

Josh:
the models are becoming better and better. They're improving themselves.

Josh:
The accelerated rate at which we are getting high quality models is like a little

Josh:
staggering. It's like very fast.

Josh:
It's overwhelming. And I think a lot of times there is this clash between the

Josh:
government, which traditionally moves a little bit slower, and these AI labs

Josh:
who are like, hey guys, this is not going away.

Josh:
In fact this is only speeding up and finding some sort of middle ground is productive

Josh:
so that we don't have any more issues like fable

Josh:
i mean not being able to use fable or being able to use it for three days and

Josh:
having it removed it sucks it hurts the users it hurts the company it seems

Josh:
like it mostly hurts everyone so hopefully the outcome of this will be a little bit more of a

Josh:
formalized process or at least a mutual understanding of where things lie so

Josh:
when companies release the model they feel very confident in the model that they're releasing

Josh:
they feel confident that the government supports them, and that there is not

Josh:
going to be another situation in which something gets released that is a frontier

Josh:
model and then gets pulled back. And I mean, fingers crossed to go as well.

Josh:
Everyone who should be in that room seems like they are in that room.

Josh:
And hopefully that leads to a pretty productive conversation.

Ejaaz:
Well, being in the room is one thing where they were sat was another thing.

Ejaaz:
I don't know if you saw the seating plan for this thing. So I was I was watching

Ejaaz:
clips of of this actual discussion because it was filmed.

Ejaaz:
And I noticed one thing. So if you look on the right side of the image here,

Ejaaz:
on either side of Trump, you had Demis Hasevis, head of Google,

Ejaaz:
DeepMind, so Google's AI division, and then you had Sam Altman to the right of him.

Ejaaz:
And then that guy, Dario Modi, yep, seated exactly opposite,

Ejaaz:
so nowhere near Trump. And so the tension was pretty obvious.

Ejaaz:
The kind of rivalry, or rather the grudge that was going on between the government

Ejaaz:
right now and Anthropic, as they're discussing kind of like re-release of Fable

Ejaaz:
and how they kind to kind of regulate and govern that.

Ejaaz:
Obviously a big tension between the two parties. When Dario spoke up,

Ejaaz:
and he was the last to speak of the three, he spoke about warning of regulation

Ejaaz:
and saying we need to overregulate this kind of things.

Ejaaz:
And we cannot get these models in the hands of China, which is nice to hear

Ejaaz:
because that's, I think, him and the government kind of align on that.

Ejaaz:
The second main discussion that was had between the three of them was the idea

Ejaaz:
of making sure we govern hardware as well as software.

Ejaaz:
Now, typically, the US has taken a very proactive approach to making sure that

Ejaaz:
China and adversaries don't get access to cutting edge chips, primarily from NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
But that has also pushed China to kind of like create their own chips,

Ejaaz:
which have now almost caught up with the US in terms of like inference and training.

Ejaaz:
Dario has been warning like, hey, we need to restrict the hardware even more.

Ejaaz:
And we need to be careful with the safeguards that we set up for our models,

Ejaaz:
which is ironic, of course, because that has led to the ban of fables so far.

Ejaaz:
Sam was the first to speak up. So he was given, if you're talking about the

Ejaaz:
Trump's favorites or the G7 favorites, it was Sam, it was Demis,

Ejaaz:
and then it was Dario. So a lot of political things going on.

Josh:
Okay, there's another big update that I want to talk about. And this one feels

Josh:
pretty noteworthy. And it's around this man by the name of Noam Shazir.

Josh:
And Noam is interesting because he is very much a legend in the AI space.

Josh:
For those who are familiar with the word GPT, perhaps you've heard it in the context of chat GPT.

Josh:
The letter T stands for transformer.

Josh:
And transformer is a engineering concept that was actually pioneered

Josh:
in part by Noam Shazir, who wrote the canonical paper, Attention is All You

Josh:
Need, about how a transformer actually works all the way back in 2017,

Josh:
which in AI years, that is an eternity ago.

Josh:
So Noam is this foundational character in the world of AI who has really been

Josh:
there through all of the changes, all the evolutions of it.

Josh:
And he's had this kind of rough, bumpy road with Google.

Josh:
He's been working at Google or he joined Google initially in 2000,

Josh:
I think that's 26 years ago he's been there. And for a long time.

Josh:
He was an engineer. He was building these AI models. They figured out the transformer

Josh:
architecture. And then he left.

Josh:
And he left to go start his own thing. He went off for a couple of years.

Josh:
And then in 2024, Google missed him so much, they reportedly paid $2.7 billion

Josh:
To license his company, Character AI's technology, to bring Noam Shazir back,

Josh:
making him a VP and one of the people in the small group that are steering how Gemini gets towards AI.

Josh:
So from 2024 to 2026, he's been working there after a pretty hefty payday.

Josh:
Yesterday, we got the news that Noam is leaving the company.

Josh:
And not only is he leaving, he's going to open AI.

Josh:
So that's the backstory. And this seems like a pretty big deal.

Josh:
Because when you think about the Avengers of AI, who are the people who are

Josh:
really making a difference?

Josh:
Noam is one of those guys. And now he has changed houses, I guess,

Josh:
in this Game of Thrones from the Google house to the house of open AI.

Ejaaz:
And he's going to be leading the architecture team at OpenAI,

Ejaaz:
which is arguably the priority team that will design the model,

Ejaaz:
feature iterations of the model, and mainly determine who leads in the race.

Ejaaz:
If you want to think of who his counterpart is at Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
it's Andre Carpathy, who also recently joined Anthropic. So if you want to kind

Ejaaz:
of think of the titans of the game, the leaders, the geniuses,

Ejaaz:
it's going to be Noam Shazia now versus Andre Carpathy.

Ejaaz:
And Noam, as you mentioned, father of the Transformer. I can't believe he left.

Ejaaz:
Um, when he left Google initially, what you mentioned, I think he was there

Ejaaz:
for like 26 years, and then he left in 2021, he, uh, started Character AI,

Ejaaz:
Josh. The-the-the AI that, like, kind of, like, creates kind of,

Ejaaz:
like, different personable characters. The original AI agent, if you want.

Ejaaz:
And then getting it acquired for $3 billion was just massively impressive.

Ejaaz:
It's also a huge knock on Google. I don't know how I can view this aside from

Ejaaz:
being bearish on Google.

Ejaaz:
Everyone knows that for the last year, they've struggled to keep Gemini models up with the frontier.

Ejaaz:
They had a massive lead at the end of last year when they released Gemini 3.

Ejaaz:
Recently, 3.5 and 3.5 Flash has kind of caught up in some kind of generalized

Ejaaz:
LLM qualities, but they've missed out on the major quality, which is coding.

Ejaaz:
It just hasn't been able to catch up.

Ejaaz:
We know that a lot of Google employees have actually been using code code and

Ejaaz:
codex itself to try and distill what the model is, but they haven't been able to achieve that.

Ejaaz:
So Gemini has struggled. And the fact that their chief architect,

Ejaaz:
he's the VP of engineering, he is basically Demis of Civis' right man.

Ejaaz:
Demis of Civis is like the front man, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Ejaaz:
And this guy is the actual technical guy. The fact that he's left to build architecture

Ejaaz:
at one of the biggest competitors ever tells me that he was either being restrained

Ejaaz:
at Google or that he wasn't able to kind of build the thing that he wanted to. And now he will be.

Ejaaz:
Sam in his announcement tweet for the hire basically said, I've been trying

Ejaaz:
to work with Noam for 10 years and it's finally happened.

Ejaaz:
And I can't wait. So yeah, congratulations, Sam.

Josh:
Yeah, we'll see what happens. It feels I can't help but notice that it feels

Josh:
like all the top talent is starting to aggregate itself between only two houses.

Josh:
We had Andre Carpathy recently joining Anthropic.

Josh:
Now we have Noam joining OpenAI. It feels like a lot of the top talent is kind

Josh:
of converging on these two places.

Josh:
It seems like these two places are kind of running away with it like we we have

Josh:
google gemini and every time we try to say like this is a new frontier model

Josh:
every time they have a big release it doesn't quite do it

Josh:
grok and the xai team and i mean spacex xas the whole that universe the elon

Josh:
universe are trying they haven't quite figured out how to get to the frontier

Josh:
and right now there's very clearly between these two companies and with this

Josh:
engineering talent piling on i don't see a world in which

Josh:
other companies are really able to catch up as quickly as they would like to

Josh:
so we'll see we'll continue to monitor that as we go

Josh:
and speaking of these leaders one of two of them had quite an update this week

Josh:
that came in the form of a copy of a letter from commerce secretary howard lutnik

Josh:
who wrote to dario moda i just do you have any light on this i haven't really looked much into it

Ejaaz:
Yeah so just to catch everyone up with some context um it's been a rocky week

Ejaaz:
for i'm probably to say the least uh they were started on such a high uh,

Ejaaz:
last week when they released their brand new frontier model fable 5 it's their

Ejaaz:
mythos grade uh model and it smashed every single benchmark and Everyone that

Ejaaz:
used it, including you and I, said that this is the best model ever.

Ejaaz:
And then three days later, the government yanked it. They sent a letter from

Ejaaz:
Howard Lutlink to Dario Modi basically saying, hey, we can't have this model

Ejaaz:
getting into the hands of foreign adversaries.

Ejaaz:
So either you KYC and ID verify everyone that uses this model or you shut it down.

Ejaaz:
Dario doesn't have the infrastructure to KYC and ID everyone,

Ejaaz:
so he shut it down for everyone globally around the world. He can't control

Ejaaz:
it. So currently, if you'll listen to this right now, you don't have access to Fable 5.

Ejaaz:
Now, the one thing that was missing was we didn't know what this letter said.

Ejaaz:
Finally, we have the details.

Ejaaz:
There's a lot of legalese in this, Josh. That's the TLDR.

Ejaaz:
There's a lot of kind of structured responses basically saying,

Ejaaz:
hey, listen, according to regulation, blah, blah, blah, you can't put certain

Ejaaz:
tools and certain products in the hands of foreign adversaries.

Ejaaz:
If this is the case, then basically we have the right to restrict this.

Ejaaz:
And then there was a lot of back and forth between Dario and this letter basically

Ejaaz:
saying, hey, this isn't a physical tool. This is a software product.

Ejaaz:
Your regulation basically doesn't cover this. And it was just stuff like that.

Ejaaz:
My kind of whole take from this is that Howard Lutnick and Trump or the government,

Ejaaz:
whoever's responsible for this, basically wanted to take down this model and

Ejaaz:
they were going to go to any lengths to be able to do that.

Ejaaz:
And it was triggered by a warning that was issued from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy,

Ejaaz:
basically saying that their security team had discovered a hole or an exploit

Ejaaz:
that could be basically accessed by China.

Ejaaz:
Now, in the interest of the letter, they describe what this attack looks like, Josh.

Ejaaz:
And basically it's an attack that can be exposed through current models that

Ejaaz:
OpenAI is running right now and Grok and Google Gemini.

Ejaaz:
So it isn't really a strong argument, but they're just picking on Anthropik

Ejaaz:
specifically and on this model specifically because they believe that it could

Ejaaz:
be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Josh:
Yeah, it's a bummer. I hope it gets worked out. Fable's an incredible model.

Josh:
It would be awesome for the world to be able to continue to benefit and use

Josh:
that model. So hopefully all sorted out soon.

Josh:
This next part of the episode is all about open source it's been a big week

Josh:
for open source like shockingly big week actually starting with microsoft believe

Josh:
it or not uh so yeah microsoft still exists they're still

Josh:
in the world of ai or ai jason whatever you want to call it and

Josh:
they have this product called copilot you may not have used it unless you are

Josh:
forced to through your employer but copilot is actually used by like quite a

Josh:
few people and they have made a large shift this week if i understand correctly,

Josh:
they're switching from usage-based pricing with OpenAI's ChatGPT

Josh:
to fully open source through the DeepSeq model, the Chinese open source model.

Josh:
They're running a Chinese open source model on Microsoft servers. Is that right?

Ejaaz:
Yeah. So Microsoft's flagship AI assistant, as you said, is Copilot.

Ejaaz:
I think over the last three months, they've released various versions of Copilot,

Ejaaz:
which does different things.

Ejaaz:
One of them uses Anthropics model exclusively. And now Now this new one uses

Ejaaz:
a Chinese open source model, which they've fine tuned.

Ejaaz:
Now their reasoning for using this model, their main reasoning is it's super cheap.

Ejaaz:
And Microsoft has undergone internally a shift from using these expensive coding

Ejaaz:
models, such as Claude Code, to cutting down their budgets and using cheaper models.

Ejaaz:
This is their first consumer-facing or enterprise-facing product where you now

Ejaaz:
get access to a Chinese open source model.

Ejaaz:
Now, they received a lot of feedback about this, which is like,

Ejaaz:
you know, is this safe? Is this cool to use? Their claim is that,

Ejaaz:
yes, it is, but it remains to be seen.

Ejaaz:
The wider story about this, Josh, is Microsoft's the biggest investor in OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
Their stake alone is worth upwards of $135 billion.

Ejaaz:
And they signed an exclusive partnership with OpenAI to get access to all their IP.

Ejaaz:
Right now, as we speak, they have access to all of OpenAI's model weights for all their models.

Ejaaz:
So they could theoretically train their own foundational model using OpenAI's

Ejaaz:
Blueprint and create even their own version. But you would think that they would

Ejaaz:
use OpenAI's ChatGPT models because it's the frontier. Unfortunately, they've fallen out.

Ejaaz:
Recently, Sam Altman announced that ChatGPD will be available through AWS,

Ejaaz:
which is Microsoft Azure's main kind of competitor when it comes to cloud services.

Ejaaz:
Now, before that, ChatGPD was only being served through Microsoft Azure.

Ejaaz:
They were the exclusive partner, but they've since had a falling out over the

Ejaaz:
numbers, over the for-profit structuring system and all that kind of stuff.

Ejaaz:
So now they don't really talk. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft,

Ejaaz:
has been having frequent meetings with Dario Modi.

Ejaaz:
The point is like him and Sand don't really get along right now.

Ejaaz:
And he's taking a model agnostic approach.

Ejaaz:
And DeepSeek is the first one. And DeepSeek just had a crazy week as well.

Ejaaz:
They raised around, I think, $8 billion at a $50 billion valuation.

Ejaaz:
The founder himself put in, I think, $3 billion of his own money to maintain

Ejaaz:
kind of like ownership class shares of this entire company.

Ejaaz:
And he said he is committing to keeping all his models open source.

Ejaaz:
So it's a huge win for China.

Josh:
While you're saying Microsoft has access to their open weights of Chash EBT,

Josh:
And they're still not doing anything about it.

Josh:
It reminded me of this paper that I wrote. I forget who the author was,

Josh:
but I saw it on Twitter earlier this week.

Josh:
And I think the title was that the window is closed. And there is this like-

Josh:
Yes, yes. And it was really interesting because it talked about how the opportunity

Josh:
for a company to become a frontier AI lab has kind of ended.

Josh:
It's almost impossible to catch up. And this is kind of the trend that we're

Josh:
seeing. And I just want to make some time to talk about it for a sec.

Josh:
Because we saw xai and elon and grok like they were the newest entrant they

Josh:
were the newest competitor and elon is among the best in the world at aggregating

Josh:
resources and solving difficult problems and they got close

Josh:
xai and grok they got very close and they're still close but they haven't actually

Josh:
been able to reach the frontier and that's after building these data centers in a

Josh:
record amount of time by like a factor of five it's like he he did everything

Josh:
you could possibly do and did it all right and still wasn't quite able to catch up.

Josh:
For a company like Microsoft, who isn't as hardcore, for a company like Google,

Josh:
who maybe just moves a little bit slower, that's such a disadvantage in a world

Josh:
where this rapid iteration is happening between, I mean, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Josh:
And it feels like there is this kind of pulling away. You see it with the talent,

Josh:
you see it with now the benchmarks, you can feel it when you use Fable.

Josh:
You're like, oh, this is a novel thing that I've never experienced before.

Josh:
And it's just, it's a shift that I just wanted to highlight for a second,

Josh:
because it really feels like The companies that are building the Frontier AI today

Josh:
Are going to be the ones that are going to continue to be leading the pack because

Josh:
of that like self recurring improvement loop and it's just like the self-fulfilling

Josh:
thing where the better it gets the faster they can iterate the faster it gets

Josh:
it's just this unbelievable thing so

Josh:
we'll probably continue to see that i don't want to get too sidetracked because

Josh:
we have another open source thing to

Ejaaz:
Talk about i actually think it's it's worth talking about because i think few

Ejaaz:
of our listeners actually kind of like can see the wider picture and i think

Ejaaz:
it's important to like paint it like,

Ejaaz:
recursive self-improvement basically like the model like building itself we've

Ejaaz:
reached a point where these models are now good enough to do it and previously

Ejaaz:
it was a capital race spend as much money as you can hire the best talent and

Ejaaz:
then design the best thing

Ejaaz:
it looks like anthropic and open air are walking away with it i will say that

Ejaaz:
i think elon and xai have a good shot because they just acquired cursor for 60 billion dollars um,

Ejaaz:
typically grok has been terrible No one has really kind of used it.

Ejaaz:
Their GPUs aren't being used.

Ejaaz:
But if they adopt cursor into the model, you can now jump and kind of catch

Ejaaz:
up at the frontier for coding and all that kind of stuff. Remains to be seen.

Ejaaz:
Google just lost one half of their entire architecture team,

Ejaaz:
who is the most important member, arguably.

Ejaaz:
So now I'm kind of hesitant, but I'm willing to say that maybe they have lost

Ejaaz:
the race now and they're going to run away with it. So it's pretty crazy to say.

Ejaaz:
Actually, talking about another company that might have lost the race entirely,

Ejaaz:
and have actually probably spent the most money out of all of these companies, Meta.

Ejaaz:
Meta's had like a crazy couple of weeks, but a crazy week in particular.

Ejaaz:
So to kind of catch you all up, Meta over the last year and a half has spent,

Ejaaz:
and I'm not exaggerating, upwards of $35 billion.

Ejaaz:
To acquire or hire around, I want to say 150 people for their AI team.

Josh:
I don't even want to think about what the average amount they paid for that person is.

Ejaaz:
That's crazy. I don't even want to think about it either.

Ejaaz:
The craziest part is they already had an AI team and they were already,

Ejaaz:
they weren't at the frontier a year and a half ago, but they were near the frontier

Ejaaz:
and they had the best open source model. It was called Llama.

Ejaaz:
And the guy that headed their team, Jan LeCun, was, you know, he wasn't that bad.

Ejaaz:
They since fired him and re-awked the entire team. Every month and a half,

Ejaaz:
I saw a tweet that someone had like measured out the cadence of this.

Ejaaz:
They fire around four to 8,000 people from their team. And they had layoffs recently about.

Ejaaz:
Three weeks ago. So they've re-auged their entire structure.

Ejaaz:
And this week, Andrew Bosworth, who is kind of like Zuck's right-hand man in

Ejaaz:
terms of laying out the foundational structure for Meta's AI efforts,

Ejaaz:
basically said, yeah, the re-aug was a disaster.

Ejaaz:
We shouldn't have done this. And it was a terrible move on our side.

Ejaaz:
They're also making some really weird decisions now. So apparently,

Ejaaz:
there's a rumor going around that 30% to 50% of their software engineers on

Ejaaz:
core teams have now become data labelers.

Ejaaz:
So what this means is they're being tracked and monitored for all the work that

Ejaaz:
they do and it's being fed into a data system which is then used to train AI

Ejaaz:
agents and AI models to do their jobs.

Ejaaz:
So it's effectively kind of like reverse engineering what they do and then eventually

Ejaaz:
the AI models will be capable enough to actually do their job and I guess they're not needed anymore.

Ejaaz:
I think the narrative that's being given is that they'll be up-leveled and kind

Ejaaz:
of like hired like a team leader for all these different AI agents but I just

Ejaaz:
don't see that happening. Meta has completely blown the lead that they had,

Ejaaz:
if they had any right now. And I just don't think they can catch up.

Josh:
It's pretty sad. Yeah, it's disappointing because when you spend that much money,

Josh:
you expect to get some sort of outcome that's interesting and unique and noteworthy.

Josh:
And the only unique and noteworthy thing we've mentioned on the show as it relates

Josh:
to things that they've released is their, what is it, the Muse Spark model that

Josh:
was serving as customer service that was then used to exploit all the accounts

Josh:
on Instagram and Facebook.

Josh:
It's just been a total disaster. And when it comes to headcount,

Josh:
I mean, I think at the beginning of this year or the end of last year,

Josh:
there were just around 80,000 employees.

Josh:
That's a tremendous amount of people to be working on.

Josh:
Like a problem and i have to imagine that it's it's very difficult to

Josh:
turn that group to be productive and to move as fast as they need to in order to make actual progress

Josh:
um but at the same time he spent all this money on building a team you have

Josh:
to imagine they exist in somewhat of a silo with all the resources they need

Josh:
and still they haven't been able to deliver anything so it's this weird place

Josh:
where again i say this a lot but i i think it's true that like meta

Josh:
Is really still just feeling like facebook plus plus it's like they tried to

Josh:
pivot to meta to the metaverse they fail that now their name is meta but they

Josh:
have no metaverse to show for it

Josh:
they're trying with the glasses they're in the same boat as evan spiegel and

Josh:
snap that we mentioned earlier in this episode where the technology is promising

Josh:
but it's still horrible no one's actually going to want to buy it or use it

Josh:
so that's still too early they have yet to prove that they can make hardware

Josh:
they have yet to prove that they can make a compelling

Josh:
ai product because everything that they've released so far has been a complete

Josh:
and total flop and it just leaves me in this really weird spot where like i

Josh:
want to believe in zuck and this founder-led company but nothing that they have produced over the last

Josh:
i don't know five six seven plus years has actually been compelling so it's

Josh:
a difficult time for for meta and i really hope they figure it out

Ejaaz:
Yeah if there was one thing to kind of like summarize meta in like the last

Ejaaz:
couple of months they they created this internal token leaderboard do you remember

Ejaaz:
this where yeah uh they ranked employees on the amount of tokens that they spent ai tokens

Ejaaz:
to be productive and it was a measurement of productivity obviously for any sensible individual

Ejaaz:
the number of tokens you spend doesn't necessarily correlate to how smart you

Ejaaz:
are how intelligently you are using tokens.

Ejaaz:
They have now used that exact same board to figure out who they fire for every

Ejaaz:
single layoff so if you're if you're a major token spender they're like oh you're

Ejaaz:
misusing your tokens we're letting and you go, that's what they did in the recent layoffs.

Ejaaz:
Sad, crazy, I hope Meta figures it out. But talking of like lean teams that

Ejaaz:
are spending much, much less, probably like one 50th,

Ejaaz:
of what Meta has spent over the last couple of years, but are still not only

Ejaaz:
maintaining the frontier, but in some cases beating it.

Ejaaz:
We have a new Chinese open source model from the Chipu, Z-H-I-P-U,

Ejaaz:
I believe, Chinese lab, GLM 5.2.

Ejaaz:
Open weights, MIT licensed open weights. So, you know, I think that means after

Ejaaz:
you get to a certain number of users, you have to like credit the company or something like that.

Ejaaz:
But I just want everyone to focus on this chart for a second.

Ejaaz:
It's on agentic coding performance. Now, if you're wondering,

Ejaaz:
why isn't it just looking at regular AI coding performance? Why not?

Ejaaz:
Why is it looking at agentic?

Ejaaz:
It's because a lot of these agents are the new way of working with AI tools going forward.

Ejaaz:
It's not just going to be you in a single session or in a single chat window

Ejaaz:
talking to one specific LLM, you're going to speak into multiple instances of

Ejaaz:
the same LLM, and it's going to be independently talking to each other and doing

Ejaaz:
a bunch of work. That's what makes you exponentially more productive.

Ejaaz:
And so agentic coding is a strong measure of whether the model is good enough.

Ejaaz:
Now, GLM 5.2, when compared to Claude Opus 4.8, pretty much matches it on its score.

Ejaaz:
Now, notably, this doesn't include Fable 5, which is the restricted model that

Ejaaz:
we can't get access to right now, but it's pretty impressive to have open source

Ejaaz:
models still catch up with the Frontier Labs.

Ejaaz:
I'm still trying to figure out how they're able to pull all of this off.

Ejaaz:
Like, they don't have any of the money. They don't have any of the chips.

Ejaaz:
I'm kind of encouraged to think that this is probably a data play,

Ejaaz:
so the Chinese have, like, access to a lot of data that they can use to smartly train models.

Ejaaz:
But it's just impressive nonetheless. And it has a really cool ability to create

Ejaaz:
front-end UX design, which is typically...

Ejaaz:
Something that's hard for models to achieve visual interpretation visual intelligence

Ejaaz:
but what you're seeing on the screen right now is i believe like a personal

Ejaaz:
website that was created in one shot in five minutes which is pretty cool to see.

Josh:
Yeah very cool model it's um it's interesting to see the benchmarks they always

Josh:
have to be taken with a grain of salt because when you see them being compared to other models

Josh:
i'm not quite sure it's it's close and for that it's respectable it's like okay

Josh:
if even if you've come close if you're a little bit above a little bit below

Josh:
just being in the ballpark is respectable i find that a lot of times now with

Josh:
the models you just got to try it out and play around with it and really get

Josh:
a feel for it because a lot of that

Josh:
the like kind of nuanced feel that you get when you play with the model is the

Josh:
thing that's actually meaningful

Josh:
versus the benchmark so that's kind of how i've been doing it i'm looking to

Josh:
try and play around with this thing and see if it could do some cool front-end design for us maybe

Josh:
rebuild our website uh that would be kind of cool um but it's really exciting

Josh:
to see china still kind of hanging on they're still pushing forward to the frontier

Josh:
every time we count them out they come back and to clap back with something else.

Josh:
So an exciting release from Jipu, or however you pronounce them, I'm not entirely sure.

Josh:
But yeah, it's very cool. And then also another ex-open source company named MidJourney.

Josh:
You might remember MidJourney because they did the image generation model.

Josh:
They were one of the very earliest people to do. Yeah, exactly.

Josh:
They were one of the very earliest people to do image visual generation with AI.

Josh:
Well, they've pivoted in a pretty meaningful way.

Josh:
Like, I'm not even sure this is the same company. When I saw this news this

Josh:
morning, I had to click on the

Josh:
profile and make sure it was the same MidJourney that I was thinking of.

Josh:
It's like something out of Dune, Josh. Because it does. The AI company that

Josh:
you know and love as the Image Generation Company has created a physical hardware

Josh:
device and a new division of the company that is known as Mid Journey Medical.

Josh:
What is Mid Journey Medical's first device? Well, if you're seeing on screen,

Josh:
there's a person being submerged underwater. This is not AI. This is a real person,

Ejaaz:
I think at least. Yeah, it's a real demo.

Josh:
And the person is being submitted or submerged underwater to get a full body

Josh:
MRI scan, which is shocking, but also remarkably impressive. I mean, this is...

Josh:
Something that would traditionally take 60 or so plus minutes and now they're

Josh:
doing it in a minute like how does an image company go from that to this this is a pretty huge leap

Ejaaz:
I think founder context is important here the founders parrots uh one of them

Ejaaz:
is a dentist and i believe his mother is literally an mri physician so he's

Ejaaz:
probably inspired in some way there and you know he's in the image game josh

Ejaaz:
it's not too far to i guess leap.

Josh:
To imaging right

Ejaaz:
Yeah imaging and and so honestly, what I thought was that this device used AI

Ejaaz:
to kind of, you know, figure out what the insides of someone might look like.

Ejaaz:
And I was getting super excited. Unfortunately, there's no AI involvement here.

Ejaaz:
But nevertheless, this is a massive, massive scientific breakthrough. And I'll tell you why.

Ejaaz:
You mentioned one thing, which is typically an MRI scan takes 60 minutes to

Ejaaz:
occur, you need to go to like a regulated like medical institute to be able to access this.

Ejaaz:
I got a pronubo scan recently, it took me 60 minutes, big, scary device,

Ejaaz:
stick them ages to set up.

Ejaaz:
This is a device that you step onto. It submerges you into, and I'm quoting

Ejaaz:
here, warm water. So you're not going to cold. It's warm water.

Ejaaz:
It's non-invasive. So there's no radiation at all. And it takes 60 seconds.

Ejaaz:
So the time it takes for a coffee to be made, you'll have a full body MRI scan.

Ejaaz:
The other interesting part is they're not putting these devices in hospitals.

Ejaaz:
They're putting it in potential spas or they're setting up a coffee shop and

Ejaaz:
spa type situations where you can like grab a coffee and just get an MRI scan

Ejaaz:
if you bring your swimsuit along, I guess.

Ejaaz:
And this is really cool because this is going to bring the cost of MRI scans

Ejaaz:
down massively. MRI scan imaging is just amazing in general for figuring out

Ejaaz:
the health of your body internally.

Ejaaz:
But it's often priced a lot of people out who don't have health insurance or

Ejaaz:
who don't want to spend several thousands of bucks to get access to it and then

Ejaaz:
book an appointment and then wait months to do this. Now you can just walk into

Ejaaz:
anywhere that has one of these machines, I don't know when they're rolling out, and get access to this.

Ejaaz:
And the plan for the future is to use AI to look at these different images and

Ejaaz:
help you with the diagnosis part of things, which is going to be pretty cool.

Josh:
I love this. It's so cool seeing a company who has a lot of money.

Josh:
They're clearly very well resourced, actually use it for something that's applicable

Josh:
that can make people's lives way better.

Josh:
And I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people who have a lot of critiques

Josh:
on how the technology works, how they haven't actually built any hardware,

Josh:
but just moving the puck in this direction, just coming up with the concept

Josh:
and figuring out how to actually turn this into reality in a way that's going

Josh:
to improve a lot of people's lives.

Josh:
I think it's awesome. And it's following this trend that we have of this health and wellness and

Josh:
Like biosciences trend that i think we'll probably continue to see a lot of

Josh:
particularly as these ai models get much better at understanding the human body

Josh:
understanding what makes us tick how to improve things

Josh:
and being able to capture data like an mri machine is the first part of improving

Josh:
the human body we first need to understand how it works what it's made up of

Josh:
where the problems are and this will hopefully help to do that for a lot more people so

Josh:
in the case of mid-journey this is awesome congratulations very exciting work to see i

Josh:
love the pivot more people should pivot from image gen ai slop to saving people's

Josh:
lives in healthcare that seems pretty tight to me

Josh:
but that is everything that's our our whole week rounded up if you've made it this far thank you

Josh:
we had a few pretty great episodes this week one of them is going crazy uh with

Josh:
leopold ashenbrenner and the reason why he is short and video with a massive

Josh:
amount of his portfolio we had another one covering the spacex ipo and whether

Josh:
or not you should buy or not so if you haven't

Josh:
go and get yourself caught up on that but if you've made it this far that's

Josh:
it you're good you can go into your weekend feeling fully up to date on all things

Josh:
AI, frontier technology, and I guess healthcare now too.

Ejaaz:
If I were to leave all of you listeners with a final prompt,

Ejaaz:
it's been a while since we've asked what the latest, coolest thing you guys

Ejaaz:
have been doing with not just an AI model, but any AI feature.

Ejaaz:
I would love to hear from you guys if there's anything that we should be talking

Ejaaz:
about that we haven't covered yet.

Ejaaz:
Are there any use cases that you guys, the weirder, the better.

Ejaaz:
By the way, I just want to emphasize this. Like, don't feel like it needs to

Ejaaz:
be anything impressive that makes you a million dollars.

Ejaaz:
Like, if you're using this to design your grocery list and you think it's a

Ejaaz:
pretty unique or novel thing, tell us.

Ejaaz:
I want to hear about it because we're always looking for use cases where these

Ejaaz:
AI models basically apply to the wider, like 99% of people who haven't gone

Ejaaz:
past ChatGPT at this point.

Ejaaz:
So if you're using it for something cool, let us know in the comments and wherever

Ejaaz:
you're listening to us, whether it's on YouTube, whether it's on Spotify,

Ejaaz:
whether it's on Apple Music, wherever, please subscribe and give us a rating

Ejaaz:
where you can turn on notifications if you're on YouTube.

Ejaaz:
You have no idea how helpful it is for us.

Josh:
Share with your friends.

Ejaaz:
And share with your friends. Share with your friends. It's very important because

Ejaaz:
it helps us get a wider reach. Josh and I are trying to grow this channel into

Ejaaz:
the biggest AI and Frontier Tech channel that we can.

Ejaaz:
And we're excited to get that. We recently, I think we got like 1,100 new subscribers

Ejaaz:
on YouTube over the last less than 24 hours. So hello to all of you.

Ejaaz:
It's lovely to meet you. We come up with Frontier AI episodes,

Ejaaz:
20-minute chunks, four times a week.

Josh:
They're a little bit longer now. We're working on 20 minutes.

Ejaaz:
A little bit longer. Some of the roundups are a little bit longer. You're right.

Ejaaz:
And in Viewslesser, which goes out to 100,000 of you every single week, twice a week.

Ejaaz:
So we have an essay and we have the five weekly highlights if you don't want

Ejaaz:
to watch all the videos and you just want to catch up through text.

Ejaaz:
But aside from that, that is it.

Josh:
That's it. We will see you. Go enjoy your weekend. We'll see you next week.

Josh:
Have fun. We'll see you next week. Goodbye, everyone. We'll see you.