Big Technology Podcast - Are AI Glasses Over?, Big Technology Audience Questions, Alex Stamos on AI Cybersecurity

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news LIVE from Big Technology AI Summit. We cover: 1) Do Snapchat Specs signal the end of AR glasses 2) What should an AI device do? 3) Audience questions from the Big Technology AI Summit! 4) How should companies plan for such fast moving technology? 5) What's the ideal AI device form factor? 6) Can AI models be more useful for biology? 7) Can the U.S. and China get along on AI? 8) What responsibility do AI companies have to society? 9) Ex-Meta CSO Alex Stamos joins us to talk Fable's cyber-risks 10) Is it marketing or is it material? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though for many of you, he needs no introduction. Let me introduce Ron John Roy. I first started reading Ron John Roy's writing. In 2021, he had written this newsletter called Margins and I thought it was a terrific newsletter. I saved it. I spent my winter break reading it. I DM'd him. By that January, we had decided to do an emergency podcast about a crazy financial situation. And then Ronjin and I kept talking more and more. And then by January, 2023, I wrote to him and said, hey, don't you want to just come and do this every week? And lucky for me and lucky for us on with anyone involved with Big Technology podcast, Ron John said yes. And so getting a chance to speak with Ron John every Friday is an absolute joy. It's definitely one of the highlights

of my week. And today we're thrilled to be able to do our Friday show live here with you, with your audience questions. And then we'll just run it tomorrow like a normal podcast. So I hope you're ready. We definitely need your participation. And please join me. welcoming Ron John Roy. I got them on. I'm going to take these off though. We'll get into the snap spectacles. This is this is a medium risk maneuver because I have this microphone on. So those are the Snapchat spectacles. These are not Snapchat spectacles. They're the original developer beta edition though. So they're not the new ones. But I had them in 2021. Now everyone knows how cool you are. All right. Should I start the show? I'm as cool as Evan Spiegel.

That's right. Yeah. All right. Is he still cool, though? All right. Let's do it. How would I start it? Did I throw you off? No, no, no. I didn't even write this down. Okay, I'll try to do it. All right. Snapchat comes out with new spectacles, and we take your audience questions. That's coming up right after this on a big technology podcast Friday edition recorded on Thursday. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.

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10% off and free shipping at tryqS.com.com slash podcast. That's tryquS.com slash podcast for 10% off and free shipping. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is unintended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We're joined, as always, by Ron John Roy, who is here with us, not in studio, live, with the Big Technology.

AI Summit audience. Audience, audience, let's hear you. The way this is going to work is Rhonda and I will break down one story and then we definitely welcome your questions, your prompts,

your arguments with us. If you don't have anything, we have plenty to do, but we'd love to have your participation. You can line up at either of the mics there to ask us a question. Let's start with our top story this week. I promised myself

when this summit was being planned that I would not be mean to Snapchat. However, Snapchat has left me with no choice. John, Let's roll image C, please. Listeners, if you are listening on the podcast, you'll see what we're looking at at the audience here is a image of Evan Spiegel on CNBC wearing the latest Snap Spex. The headline is Snapstock Falls after AR Spex debut. Almost 20 years since the launch of the iPhone, people are ready to think about computing differently.

Spiegel said in an interview with CNBC. The market reacted differently. Ron John, let me just go to you quickly. Do you think that Snapchat and meta and all these other companies have been trying to build these AI device of the future for years? And this is what we're looking at. This is what we're looking at. You kind of ruined my surprise. Can we go to D, please?

I mean... I brought them. I had to bring them after sending Alex Saph photo. Is it time for us to finally accept that we're not going to have an AR device? Interesting. So these again, I got these in 2021. It's actually a very cool technology. Like it's, no, I'm serious. Augmented reality. If you ever use Magic Leap in the 2010s, like being able to paint throughout your room and walk around that painting, being able to play games or you're chasing zombies. Again, my seven-year-old son actually is probably the only fan of Snap Spectacles in the world right now. He still loves using them. He also likes to watch YouTube on them, which is kind of amazing.

But I think that form factor and the experience is amazing. Vision Pro has not quite captured it. I don't think what we just saw on Evan Spiegel's face is going to capture it. I think eventually maybe Apple or someone will, but I don't think we're there yet, but I think we will be. I still am betting on AR eyeglasses of some sort. Here's some of the social media reaction. Does anyone that works at Snapchat have the guts to tell leadership

that these things are ugly? That feeling when your glasses are so heavy, they give you cauliflower ear. Snap is the best brand in the world when you're 16 and the worst brand to be associated with when you're 21. The people who actually buy $2,000 AI glasses aren't teenagers.

If you think you really want to wear always on camera around in public, it should have to look like this with the picture of Evan Spiegel. Let me make the case that it's over. Good, because I'm going to take the other side. I think that the iPhone series released that we just saw. Does anyone hear Listen to Ron John on Fridays?

Do we have listeners? All right. So you'll know which direction this might go. What's this guy I've been begging for since he came on the show the first time? Better Siri. Better Siri. I think they actually did it. Like the new Siri, if you look at the videos, looks terrific.

And so maybe this idea of we have to wear the computing on our face is something that kind of sounds good in concept, but model after model. It's not, and the AI device is the iPhone. Okay, that is an interesting direction to take it. I still think the form factor, do any of the audience have like meta ray bands or any other device like that?

I see a few. Like you start to feel as you're walking around, as you're kind of interacting in the real world, stuff can happen that's not just maybe eventually Siri talking to you and using a traditional AI model to actually, you know, give you kind of information. So I don't know. I'm still, I still think AR as a form factor via glasses is going to happen. I think you have meta ray bands. You enjoy them. You know, I didn't want to say this publicly, but I have not used them. I mean, I have, but I don't, I use them for a bit. And like I said on our show recently, I was on a hike. was cold. I was ready to get to the summit and put those glasses on and the battery started blinking red.

And I couldn't use them. I had to use my old phone. And let me say this. Like, you know, they haven't taken off as a mainstream consumer device. And if you look at the stock of every single company that's pursuing them, it's not good. Snapchat, like we just said, is struggling. Meta, as we know, has its problems. No one's looking at these raybans to save meta. Well, no, but to me, the Apple Vision Pro is like the more direct correlated product. You want to know what the best thing about the Vision Pro was? Fine Vision Pro, yeah. They put the person on Vision Pro on Siri, and he fixed it.

Mike Rockwell. Oh. So? I would not have guessed that the person who made the Vision Pro would be the one to fix Siri after all these years. But I guess if that's the case, that's exciting. Did it? Yeah. Yeah.

So you're going to still, can you put those glasses on one more time? Again, I was told backstage this might destroy my microphone, but I'm going to try. Do I look cool? No. No? No. No. I mean, even we were joking that Evan Spiegel is going to the Met Gala with his model wife.

Like, this is like the coolest person in the world and how bad they made him look. If it was like when Zuck wore Project Orion, no one really cared that much. But I think because Evan Spiegel is such a cool looking dude, that's why it looks so egregious. That's my take. So your answer on the way to make those things work is just be less handsome. That's it. That's it. We'll write to Spiegel and let him know.

No questions? Okay. All right, great. All right. Yeah, don't be shy. Is it on? Yes, it is on. Hey, guys. If you're willing, let us know who you are. This is Sergejee-Jahel, actually, an industrial analyst, flew from New York a day earlier to join U.S. Welcome. Let's give him a welcome.

Thanks a good. Ask a way. Quick question about, actually, it's an observation. I want to get your take on this. When companies have this gap between what people need today and what they're working on, which is like in future, it can be two plus years out, so they lose that traction from the investors' point of view as well as employees and partners. So do you see that that's happening to META and others?

Like it happened to IBM when they were living in future with Watson X, for example. So what's your take on that? It can be B2C or B2B examples. Okay, thank you for the question. Yeah, no, no, that's a great question. I do think, like, if we're talking about kind of how the interface for how you interact with a computer, I have been begging for something else other than me holding my phone looking at it. And we haven't really gotten anything for a long time.

I mean, Humane tried with the pin. I still think maybe some kind of pin is going to be around. Johnny Ives pin at OpenAI, maybe, maybe at some point. Greg Brockman is coming, so we'll put it. We got to ask him about the pin. We'll talk about that. But I think, like, being able to interact with all of this information, now being able to, like, process information so much more reliably with AI,

just I don't want to have to keep looking at my phone and just looking at it on there. But even actually on the phone, I'm guessing do a lot of people here dictate more to their phone right now? Like that's completely changed. In the past, like, I would have felt weird just talking to my phone. And now I'm constantly using whisper flow and just talking to whatever. Tell a story about you and your wife. I know. Okay.

I don't know if this is the most depressing thing or, and my wife is not here and hopefully won't kill me if this is being live streamed right now. No, we're going to broadcast this. So I am constantly dictating to my computer, to my phone. And the other day, it was like Friday night, we had put our son to bed. We're both on our laptops, and I'm on one side of the couch dictating, and then I look over, and she also has her laptop open and is kind of whispering to her computer too, and I'm like, is this the future of the future? But it's a new computing interface, so I'm happy about it.

Right. I think the gentleman brings up a great question, which is that things are moving so fast, how do you plan right now? And honestly, I don't know how you do it, because every day there seems to be a new capability, then the capability is taken off the table, like Fable, for instance. I mean, the tweets about Fable where, like, people are adding Dave Sacks and they're like, please, I'll do anything for Fable back. Just bring it back and he won't bring it back.

But it's just like, I don't understand how any company does that. And I think that actually would be a good topic for us to sort of get into on a future show. Yep. Okay, let's go this way. Hi, thank you for taking my question. I was curious your views on in the next like five years as air glasses evolve, whether like the chunky spectacles is the way to go or thinner glasses with like upward compute

like either wireless to your iPhone or like the Vision Pro like cable down to the battery pack and compute. Well it's a battery for Vision Pro but it could also have compute on board. So I'm curious like the next five years where you think consumers will gravitate towards. No, it's a great question because if you ever use Magic Leap, there was like a puck.

Puck. That's what it was. Here's my hot take. Anything, any device that requires a puck. Not working. Well, how about this, though? Okay. What if the puck is your iPhone? Oh, shit.

All right. Exactly. So, which gives Apple an opportunity that, like, if the compute is taking place on the phone in your pocket, it allows you to be much slimmer from a power perspective. You don't want, like, a lightning cable connected to your face. But, like, it still, I think there is a, it makes me think Apple still has a good chance in this space because the iPhone can do all of it. the heavy lifting versus this thing on that is really heavy on your head. Can I, can I ask, so what's your name? I'm Kyle.

Kyle, so what do you want to use a, like, face computer for? That's a good question. See, I told you, Ron John. This stuff is not happening. No, no, Kyle's got something. All right, let's give Kyle an opportunity here. I didn't mean to put you on the spot, but thank you for helping me prove my point. I think one cool thing would be like a share.

like TV or something like like imagine vision pro and you have just a shared just like movie theater you're on a plane with your family or something and you just have like the shared experience but it's just glasses I like that I like that like for me one of the coolest things I always like because you know as you get older you move further away from your friends and it would be cool to like be in the Visions final together yes sit half court watch the Knicks next Timothy Chalmay but We're just in the Vision Pro. But you know what's interesting? Apple never advertised that as a social device.

All the marketing was just, you're sitting alone at home, and all you're doing is the Vision Pro. Nobody else exists. The other big one, yeah, sorry, interrupt. No, no, please. The other big one for me is just having a lot of monitors around when I'm working. Like, even though I have, like, an ultra-wide or, like, three monitors, I feel like sometimes they could have more.

So just being able to, like, interact with AI to pull up the exact, I'm looking for out of like I'm one of those people that has like a thousand tabs so just being able to pull up the thing and I just say open up that tab and it just pops up and pretty cool would 8,000 individual tabs in a giant planner's face be better or I love what kind of going with this yeah no no but I do agree like that being able to do more open scaled work and like look at different charts and I think there's that still and I know like I've friends who own the vision pro who use it for that Still, no. But did. They had a nice time. All right, thank you, Kyle. Let's go here.

Hey, hey, what's up? This is Sasha. Hey. From Yale University doing research on AI Agents for Finance. First of all, love you guys. Listening to you guys, chat on the way to work has been my team. I think this is a sentiment shared by not just me, but many people in the audience. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Appreciate that. And thank you for coming. Did you fly in? Yes. Oh, my God. Thank you for coming. It's great to see you.

It's worth it. I appreciate your sharp line of reasoning and questioning. So what's your view on the meter benchmarks of how long the AI agents can work independently, being saturated? Are we at that point of them being at infinite number of hours working yet? Or are we reaching that soon? And what is the world going to be looking like after we hit that infinite mark? That is an excellent question. So first of all, there is some controversy about the meter monitoring,

but I think it's kind of directionally accurate, right? Like I showed the meter chart at the very beginning of our event today, that like you saw these models, they could not code autonomously for more than 30 minutes in 23, and now they can code autonomously for the human equivalent of 18 hours, right? So what happens if they just kind of blow past that limit and then they can code all the time? That is an excellent question.

Do you have any thoughts? So I felt that with the goal mode and automation mode, it practically felt that they are already doing this autonomously forever. Right. I want them to send me reports. My prompt would be, if you find something interesting, send me an email. Then when I see it, I will come back and intervene. I felt that for many tasks, it's already at that mark.

Yeah. No, a perplexity computer will basically do that. So that's definitely something that's happening. But I'll just say one more thing, and then we'll go to Ranjan. Greg Brockman, who will be here later, has this idea of a compute-powered economy where, like, you know, you sort of, once you get these bots working the way that you explained, maybe he'll say this later. You just kind of throw them at any problem, and then they just kind of work autonomously through it.

Now, we've never seen what the world looks like when you can do something like that. But I do think, given the progress that we've seen with the models, you would imagine that something substantial will come. at a certain point. So my day job, I work at a company, writer, we're an enterprise AI company. And the goal mode was asked about recently, again, the idea that you just provide the goal,

the agent will iteratively loop and keep doing work until it finds the right solution. In the real world, that is, like, the benchmarks versus the real world, I still think there's such a massive gap in terms of what does the data look like, what is the actual problem? Does the customer or the person actually understand the goal in a clear enough way

that they're able to define it to kind of push that loop forward? So I think it's an interesting, I think with a lot of AI, again, even around the benchmarking, like, again, versus real world understanding of how to use it, what's happening, and what's available for it to use, there's still a lot of work to be done. I mean, you can do these goal modes for like less, complicated tasks. What have you goal-moded?

So I worked with Perplexity Computer recently to try to have it find a hotel discount for me. No travel stories. I've been on a rent. This has been for like two years. Every time, I remember like Sundar. Actually, it was, I don't know if people remember in 2019. Did you even let me finish my example?

Wait, no, no, no, I'm just saying, why does everyone when they talk about agentic talk about travel? I get... Because travel is such a pain in the ass. But it's... I don't know. Okay, go on. Go on.

I'm sheepish now. No, no, no. Hotel discount. Hotel discount. I just looked at the hotel every hour and when it dropped behind below a certain threshold, emailed me.

So that was pretty good. Okay, that's a clear goal. I'll give you that as a clear goal. I respect your... I think you're right that we definitely need better examples than these travel stores. It's a pet peeve.

It's just for some reason, every Apple, the original ridiculous Bella Ramsey commercials are on. Apple Intelligence of court. Everything is flight booking and stuff. And again, like... You have killed that Bella Ramsey commercial so often.

That one... They're going to know the creative agency is just going to write to you. And I love The Last of Us and I love Bella Ramsey, but those commercials still irked me. What happened in those commercials? One of them, she's sitting at someone that she can't remember who that person is and in real time asks Apple Intelligence, like, tell me about this person, my interactions. Which, again, is just such a weird thing. like, I'm so much better than you that I don't know who you are

and I need to remember who you are and have AI tell me, and it didn't even come close to working with Apple Intelligence. That was the worst one. You know, it would be good for that, actually. What? All mode? Air glasses. Oh, AR glasses.

There's the real world use case. Or the fact that that commercial was so bad, just, again, proves my point that AR glasses aren't going to work. Okay, sorry. Thank you so much for the question. Thank you. And we'll go over here. Oh, you'll be here.

Okay, fine. We'll go here. Okay. Hi. Hey, Gerald Harris. I'm on the board of the Commonwealth Club here, and I run some programs for the club, and I have a small scenario planning consultancy.

But here's my question that I think hasn't come up here. What should we be concerned about in terms of using the AI models, them building a database, on us and then turning that into advertising. So the advertising potential revenue from users, do you think the AI companies will ever go after that revenue or use that information for advertising purposes? Ooh, that's a good one.

So will AIs build an amazing sort of profile of you based off of all the personal data and then use that for ads? Most certainly, yes. Someone left one of the companies and wrote about that in the New York Times. about three months ago. Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah, that's coming. I think that advertising is obviously going to be one use

where we're going to start to see some of the problematic stuff here. But actually, if you look at the ads that OpenAI gave you, it's sort of like more of a, and obviously they always come out with the high-touch brand, and then they will, like, get you on the direct response, like super-targeted stuff once they realize they can't make money on brand. But, like, it looks pretty good. Like if you're, sorry to go with a travel example again,

if you're like researching travel on chat ch pt you like you can go into an advertising chat chat experience and that will help you but i think that like we have never had technology ever the collecting this much information about us has anyone here um like talk to like chat chpt or claude and say can you psychoanalyze me if you're not or give me any any insight about myself just like five of you the rest of you have done it it's scary and and we're getting and And that's the like gated stuff. And we're giving us all this information to, to companies. And it's a trust thing that we don't really know where it's going to go.

Yeah, I think it's interesting because, again, Open AI originally ads are going to be a big part of the business. Now they pivoted away from that a bit, but are still releasing ad products. At least Anthropic is not, I mean, I don't think they're going in that direction at all. Google and Gemini, obviously 100% will. and like you probably will get a really good ad experience. I mean, the more it knows about you, the types of questions you're asking, but it is like, you know, like thousands and tens of thousands of three to five word Google searches are a lot different than entire thought

partnership therapy, like research exploration. These models will know everything about you. And it is, it's terrifying. Have you done the psychoanalyze me prompt? No, but I did. So I use like Claude and ChatGyPT, Gemini. I'll kind of go through the three of them and cycle around. So it is funny. So I have asked like, what do you know about me? Like what would you ask back? And they all have very different kind of like jagged, jarring aggregations of who I am. Like, I don't know. I don't have one that just knows me through and through. I've done it. I've done it with Chat Chupy-T. Yeah. It's pretty good. And then, like, we'll first give you a answer that's, like, kind of sanitized, and then you say go a little deeper, and then you say get a little darker.

Oh, dear. I have not red-teamed chat TV team. I challenge you all to give it a shot. Don't go darker. Don't do that. Don't go darker. But if you really want to. Okay. Thank you. Over here. And thank you for the question.

Let's move on. Let's move on. Yeah. Thank you, guys. And really appreciate all. all the work that you will do on the podcast and YouTube, your conversations go so deep and still very broad, so I really appreciate that. Thank you. We appreciate it.

You're a listener or viewer. Oh, yeah. All right. Both. Thank you so much. Depends on where I am. Amazing. Appreciate it.

And my name is Saoji. I'm an advisor for startups in the AI space, and I've been in product management and go-to-market strategy. My question for you, somewhat related to the gentleman before, you know, there is a lot of coverage on agents. and what agents can do and a little bit about the governance and cost control. What I don't see a lot about, you know, is agents do drift, probably why we don't have better examples than travel.

And, you know, over the period of time, they don't get better at that specific, you know, understanding of the people and the business context and the operating model they're working in and, you know, learn from it. And I was wondering, is there a lot of conversation that you guys are seeing around the learning layer in the agents? And is it too early for that to happen? And the conversation is mostly around governance

and cost and access. It's actually a good question for Rantan. Yeah, so again, working in this all day and thank you for the question. I think what's going to happen, and I'm already starting to see, is like six to 12 months ago, the approach was just jam as much information

into whatever system you can. And we were kind of promised that it would just work. And AI is just going to, and like there's, you know, you'd get this feeling that, oh wait, 100 page PDF, it actually could parse and I can get information out of. But then when you're doing that at any kind of agentic scale, it doesn't. And I think already like how information gets chunked up

and like distributed in different ways and context windows, everyone would see like one million token context window, but we didn't really know what it meant. And now more and more like, and I actually think this is going to be one of the most interesting, like, professional opportunities and areas to be an expert in going forward is like being able to kind of, it's funny,

like it is as much art as science right now, but I think like the more you can start to grab a hold of how information flows through these agents and how you actually get it reliable, it's going to be a really, really interesting space. It's no one job right now. Okay, thank you for the question. All right, we have seven minutes, three questions.

Let's see if we can keep the questions brief and we'll keep the answers brief and we'll get to everybody. I'll try to be quick. Thank you. Hey, everyone, big fan of the pod, by the way. Chris of Wehey, I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Virus Watcher.

I'm here with my colleague. Oh, cool. Flew in from Dallas. He flew in from Austin. Nice. Big fan. We got a couple of Dallas folks here today. Who's Dallas?

Shout out Dallas. There we go. Okay. Go Matt. Hey. Oh, yeah, we're big in Texas. I'm going to go in a different direction with my question. I want to know kind of what y'all's thoughts.

And honestly, if you can ask this kind of later on with Greg Brockman and others, what is the thought on using AI models and AI technology for biological intelligence, biosurveillance, and public health for emerging risk detection with infectious diseases? It's a very interesting project that we're working on. We have a lot of epidemiologists on our team. We were just at the UN two weeks ago with the World Health Organization and trying to discuss these problems and how we can use the technology to kind of detect these things early on.

So I kind of want to get you guys' thoughts on that. Can I ask you a question back? And if you could give a brief answer, that would be great. Okay. Are you a believer in the biocapabilities of these models like Fable? Like, do you think Anthropic made the right decision by gating them? Wait, wait, wait, biocabilities meaning, Like, you're talking about biological weapons.

He's talking about, like, disease, correct? But I think that... No, no, no, his answer will give us insight into the question. I mean, I think it's a very touchy, you know, it's a... There's no right answer, I don't think. But I do think it probably did more harm, you know, than, you know, not allowing everyone to kind of take advantage of the time. So you're not, you're not basically worried that today's cutting-edge models could cause, like,

new bio threats. No, I am, but I think there's also a lot of positive that come out of it as well. Let everybody use it, though. Yeah. I mean, I just, you know, it doesn't even have to be a Fable-style model. It can be, you can take a frontier model

to still a more custom model. Yeah, safety with, you know, safety standards involved. But sorry, I don't want to be too long. I just want to be a great question. Ranja? In terms of the first part of it, I do think, again, like, and it's one of the,

the underappreciated things and I feel in the AI industry, like disease prevention and scenario modeling around virus, like we don't talk about that stuff enough or whoever is trying to talk about it, it does not get listened to enough. So I love the kind of work you're doing. And like those kind of stories would bring the AI industry a little bit better reputation. Yeah, no, I agree. You're thinking about biological weapon. No, I think that if, well, if you can do one, then you could certainly do the other. Am I? I don't know. Is one like by, okay. I actually have no idea

in terms of giving me just all these problems here. No, I hope that we can. Sorry, I know it's a very No, no, no, no. We're going to speak with we'll hopefully have some time to talk about health with Brockman. Yeah, I would love yeah, if you can have for me that. Okay. Okay. Thank you for the question. Over here.

Hi, thanks. My name is Heidi. Hi, I'm your linking online friend. That's right. You message me yesterday. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. for being here. I'm doing this event, see each other in person. My question about, before you were with a different speaker mentioned about China, so I'm Chinese, I'm curious about why you think China is important, very partnership with

USA special high tech. Second question about Rui, so you mentioned a lot of LM, larger larger-ritch model. So my question about Gemini, ChitGDP, and Claudia and Alison, which one you prefer think about in future is more stronger, smarter, in the future. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Well, the question on China is, sorry, what's the question on China? No, no.

Why you think it's important to be a relationship with USA? So, yeah, thank you. You know, all right, I will take that question, and then Ranjan will answer, which he likes better. You know, I think that we're obviously in this competition. The U.S. and China are in this competition, and there's, like, a lot of suspicion on both ends. And, you know, I've said in the past that, like, it would be great if there was better cooperation between the two countries. And people have told me that I'm naive, but I'm not going to, you know, lose that hope. I think that if, if, I mean, in some ways, competition's good, right? Because then you'll just

have everybody striving to build a better thing. But, you know, we just talked about, AI for health if the countries were able to work together, maybe on specific initiatives, that would be much welcome. I think the most interesting part of like U.S. versus or U.S. with China in terms of AI, in the last few months, the conversation around moving towards deep seek and adding it into your agenetic process or adding Chinese models did not exist in any conversation I was in 12 months ago, and now is in almost every conversation, at least as an option because cost has become such a larger part of the conversation. So I think it's a good thing. I think the more integration there is overall across these systems, the better.

Yeah, but watch out for La Chateau-Fat. Oh, La Chate en fait. The cat holding the hands with Dario and Sam is my favorite meeting the whole year. Okay, we have one minute left, but let's see if we can do it in a minute. All right, I'll go through this quickly. Hi, Maria Serra Roberts. I'm in business management consulting. My question is a little bit different. As we are evolving into or entering in a world already where endless possibilities are available, where and how do you see the evolution of the responsibilities that big tech companies have

in supporting making this world better, not the product and our engagement and how we interact with all the screens better, but rather like the real big problems that the world has. And not because they should, but because they can. So how do you think about the evolution of that as we step into this world? I'll answer that. Do you want to answer? Go ahead. I just said we had a backstage.

We had a long rant because I'd forgotten that Anthropic is a PBC Public Benefit Corporation, but I still think there is a responsibility. I don't actually see it happening in any kind of way because competition is so fierce. Now I wish it would, but I don't see it happening. Yeah, that was a good answer. Come on. I want to make people make sure everybody gets to coffee. Oh no, screw it.

I'll answer it. So Jeff Bezos, so I think they have an obligation to do good for the world. And I don't know if, and I know people within the companies are very serious about that. So they have their own side projects. But I think, you know, as a society, maybe we can't expect them to do it out of the goodness of their own hearts. Jeff Bezos was recently doing an interview, and he said, I think what I do in the private sector is going to outweigh whatever I could do charitably. I disagree with that. And I think that that's just the mindset of a lot of people at the top of these companies.

And so, like, everybody else needs to be aware of that and not count on it even though it would be nice. So that's my perspective. All right. Ron John, will you come back with us after the break and speak with Alex Stamos and I about whether this mythos and fable stuff is material or marketing. You know I would love to. Do you guys want to get a coffee break? You guys are amazing.

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Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, Moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. So you may have heard that AI is in some trouble in Washington. And that story has led to a lot of guessing. People have guessed, are these models actually that dangerous?

How much better are they than previous generations? And do they deserve to be restricted by the federal government? We've certainly done a lot of guessing. And I think the only way to get to the bottom of this is to speak with somebody who is deep in the weeds on the cybersecurity aspects of the government. of AI models, someone who secures them, and someone who has spent a career working in security. And that would be Alex Demos.

Alex Demos is the former chief security officer at META, and he's the current chief product officer at Corridor. Ranjan and I have this debate all the time is what's going on with mythos marketing or material. Well, let's get to the bottom of it. Ron John will come out and be my co-interviewer for this one. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Damos, and once again, Ron John Roy.

you. Thanks, friend. Alex, boring times in your industry. Yeah. It's an honor to be here. I am by far the poorest person in the afternoon lineup. It's like I bring down the mean net worth by a comma, I believe. So I do appreciate being here.

Well, Alex, I don't want to cue you into podcast or finances, but I think you're good. Of the guests, I guess, yeah, yeah. So talk a little bit about, we're obviously at this moment where the government has pulled down, or basically forced Anthropic, to pull down Fable or Mythos, its frontier model. Right, both of them, yes. What happened? Right. So just for a recap, for everybody, last Friday, what happened was the White House became

aware of research that Amazon had done. It is not unreasonable for Amazon to do this work, right? So Amazon hosts Anthropics models in what they call bedrock. This includes in all of the classified spaces. So if the NSA is using Anthropics models, it is running an AWS secret cloud or top secret cloud. And so Amazon is doing security testing. I expect this is part of getting ready to host Fable and Bedrock

and found some things that they wanted to complain about with Fables protections that make Fable different than Mythos. I guess we can talk about the exact ones. Amazon had sent over these results to Anthropic. There was some disagreement between Anthropic and Amazon during the week of how serious they were. Now, I don't have the exact details here, but somehow apparently Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, mentions this to somebody at the White House, and the White House freaks out, and according to reporting, calls Amos, or Anthropic and is not happy with how quickly they can get Anthropic on the phone.

Anthropic is asking for more technical details. They're not able to get details from the White House of what the White House wants, so the White House orders them to take Fable down. Anthropic says, no, we can just fix these issues. Why don't we work it out together? And as a result, instead of working out together on Friday afternoon, something around 5 p.m. Pacific time, the Commerce Department signs an order saying that the models are designated,

export controlled, and that no foreigner, including the foreign citizens who worked and actually built the models themselves can touch them. Whether or not the administration actually has that legal power is disputed, but Anthropic decides to actually follow through instead of immediately getting a temporary restraining order, and because they have no ability to make sure that no foreign citizen is seeing the models actually pulls them down, both mythos, which was privately accessible, as well as Fable, which was publicly available. Now, you've spent a career working in security. Yes.

Ron John and I for months now have had this debate about whether all of this talk of doom and super powerful models from Anthropic, like for instance, mythos, a model so powerful that you can't access it, whether that represented a real capability increase or whether that was just marketing. And it's a step change, not really a step change in capabilities. So I actually want to toss it to Rajan, who is firmly on the marketing side of this thing, just to make the argument of why you think this is marketing, and Alex can address that. Yeah, I think trying to understand, like, what is that capability, new capability that is so dangerous?

What is that step change? I think the reason I get so suspect on it is how perfectly coordinated a lot of the marketing and communications are around how they roll these out. Like, again, mythos is the most dangerous thing. There was someone eating a sandwich in a park that actually got, like, where the model broke out of containment, was like a PR release. It was a very coordinated thing. So what is that danger that they're trying to kind of bring to the world? Like, what is it really?

What does it look like, feel like, or what is it actually going to be a problem? So how much money do you guys have writing on this? Well, how would we even play this? I don't even know. Oh, like as a bet. As a bet, like, is there a polymarket? Oh, yeah. Because I'm trying to see what my angle is here.

Apparently, I have, yeah. Well, no, you are the person that knows. You know the answers here, and we have just been kind of like debating on vives. We just argue on FI. So, okay, so it's actually a little bit of a complicated answer. So, mythos is almost, it is the best bug-finding model that we know about, for sure. It is most likely the best bug-finding model in the world. And I say most likely because we do not know.

what the Chinese secretly have in their labs. But for all the stuff for which we have open, known security evaluations for, it scores the best. Now, is it the avenging cyber god that Anthropic makes it out to be?

I personally don't think so. Yes. It is... You're not right yet. But it is really good. It is really good at finding bugs. But from my perspective, the, like, Opus 4-8,

GPT 5.5, a bunch of other models are here, and mythos is here. At bug finding. At bug finding and exploit development, and it is not here, which is kind of where you would think from reading all this stuff. The other thing is that everybody pretends that mythos was the breakthrough, but that is not true. For people in the security world have been paying attention, this Rubicon was crossed well last year with the Opus 4 series, with the GPT5 series.

That is when the models became better. good or better than the best human bug finders. And not just as good as the best bug finders. And there's like 50 or 100 of these people, and I know a couple dozen of them. The problem is those people are very expensive, right? And they don't scale. You can't just throw water on them

and make them multiply like gremlins. That would be nice. I mean, certainly the NSA would love that. But models can. You can just scale them as much as you want with money and power and GPUs. And so that last year was a huge deal. Because all of a sudden you saw these amateur bug finders.

Imagine you went to a high school track meet and every single kid is posting Olympic World Record Times, you'd be like, man, they're juicing, right? That's something that happened. That is what last year was like, like mid to late last year in the vulnerability discovery world is the kids started juicing, right? And it's because the models hit this point

where they could find everything. And so, yes, Mythos is really good at finding bugs. it's really good at writing next plates. Fable is not. And so that is what the whole point of fable is it is the same model weights as Mythos, but Anthropic put a protection in place to keep it from doing the really nasty stuff that Mythos will do. And Amazon has some complaints about that.

But what happened is the complaints Amazon has, a number of us have looked at them, and then Anthropic has pushed back, even with the jail breaks that Amazon has, you cannot get Fable to do things that you can't do with the Opus series, with GPD-5, and even with a bunch of Chinese models. So that is why the actions by the Trump administration

make absolutely no sense, because those models will not refuse at all. You can just ask GPD-5 to go find these bugs, and it will go do it for you. You can just ask Kimi, which is an open-source Chinese model, it will go write you these exploits. And so, yes, you can trick Fable into doing certain things, but you can't trick it into doing the really powerful mythos stuff,

which is like grind on the Linux kernel for all day and find a bunch of bugs, which will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, it turns out if you pay the full price. And those have not been jailbroken, and so there's no real good reason for what happened. So yes, mythos is really powerful. It has only been accessible to a very small number of companies. It is not magically powerful.

The other thing you have to remember here is, like, bugs are cheap, exploits are, like, We're now drowning in bugs because these models are so good at finding. We have so much bad software. We've been writing bad software forever. And it turns out that like, human beings writing code in CNC plus plus especially was a really bad idea.

That like we should not have been writing, like building our entire lives, like based upon memory unsafe languages. And then in the presence of these superhuman bug finders, not just mythos, but all of them, that was not a good idea. And so, if you're a pedestrian and you get hit by a F-150 at 80 miles per hour or a McLaren at 200 miles per hour, you don't really care. You're dead, right? And that's the difference here. It's like the mythos is the F-1.

Small preference, right? Thithos is the F-1. Yeah, exactly. And Kimmy or G-LM-5-2 is the F-150. And so you could take the McLaren off the market, but all you've done is actually hurt the defenders who want to have full cover. who want to be able to find all the bugs. An attacker only needs one or two bugs to string together to actually pull off the attack. And so that's why, you know, so about 150 of us wrote this open letter and signed it saying this is really stupid because all you're doing is hurting defenders

and you're also really hurting the US AI industry. Okay, I think Ron John wins the debate. Well, no, it's not all marketing, but it's not all marketing. But like, I just want to say, like, like, mythos is really powerful, but doesn't really matter because there's so many bugs out there that you can use any of these models to find them. What I'd like to do is I'd like to shift the debate one away from finding bugs, because the other problem here is like, we cannot set the standard that US AI models can't find bugs.

That is a terrible, terrible, terrible standard. If you have a, if you are writing software with an LLM, it has to be able to understand what a bug looks like, so it does not write those bugs. It has to. And that's the trick actually Amazon used was they tricked it into basically finding bugs and individual lines of code because it has to be able to do that to write secure code.

If American LLMs know nothing about security, they will create more security flaws. So we cannot create a standard where American LLMs are dumb about security. That would be a humongous own goal. And that is one of the possible outcomes here of this whole brouhaha. that would be really stupid.

And so, you know, my, I think, yes, I don't think either one of you wins. I mean, as the referee here, I think Ron John has a little bit of a, you have a point, but Mythos is really good. It just doesn't, Anthropic has pleaded up too much. Open AI is rumored to be releasing

something that's Mythos quality really soon. And I doubt that they're going to, like, follow. They'll just give it a number. Like, I think they've learned from Anthropic, you don't call your thing like the cyber gorgon. That actually would sell. Yeah, it sells a little too well, right? Right.

Maybe as a Greek with the Odyssey coming out and getting a little sensitive about the marketing here. But like, you know, let's like back off on the naming scheme and move back to numbers. But like I think a big part of this is we just have to like reset the standard of like not bugfinding but the actual creation of exploits and then other kinds of offensive operations

of which there's a bunch of other things you can do offensively with these models. Those are the things that we should call off limits, not bug finding, because that is something that we have to do much more quickly than we're doing right now. Can I, I just want to try to articulate my point, which is, you know, this is, all right, so when we talk about as mythos material or as mythos marketing, my argument would be like, if something was material, it would look a lot like what we're seeing today, right? Like, at a certain point, these models are increasing in capabilities. you're going to want to put some safeguards on them.

And so is what Anthropic is doing that different from like where you'd want to be if you actually had these concerns? I mean, I think both Anthropic and Open AI have a path in which they have like a K.C model. Now, know your customer. Know your customer, yeah. So Open AI actually has a couple levels. They have a public one where you can basically say, I want access to cyber capabilities. And then they have a private one.

I believe Anthropic only has the private one, right, to get access to mythos. But I do think it's reasonable to have some level of gating. But in the case of Glasswing, I think it was honestly, I thought it was not widespread enough. I know of like critical infrastructure companies that don't have access to Mythos right now. Nobody does right now. Well, right now, before last week,

like people who should have had access to not have access. Now, seeing what happened here, you can see why they were so careful. But from my perspective, as defenders, We are in a race against time, right? We have all of these bugs that need to be fixed. And we also have this weird thing where we're like, this whole conversation is predicated on the idea

that, like, the American labs are years ahead of our adversaries. And that is just not true, right? So while Fable was shut down, on Tuesday of this week, GLM 5.2 was shipped, right, from Zita AI, which is a Chinese lab. This is an open weight model. It is MIT licensed. So any of you can go not just download the weights from Hugging Face,

but you can include it in your own product and you can retrain it. It is within percentage points of the top closed models from Anthropic and Open AI in a bunch of things, a bunch of e-vals. We don't know how good it is at bugfinding yet, so there hasn't been any good testing here. But encoding a bunch of other intelligence tasks, it's almost as good as the best the United States has. And that's the best Chinese model we know about, right?

Unlike American labs, the Chinese are not going to announce their mythos. And so the idea that we should be doing everything in the United States to just be playing defense is we're playing a defensive model here. That is stupid from my perspective. We need to be accelerating our capability to do these things and not just playing defense. Well, now I am sufficiently scared, even though I've thought that the mythos was pure marketing. But what do we do about it? How do we? What is that?

And I think I share that Glasswing, again, why it felt like marketing to me, it was this kind of exclusive club that people were invited to and I actually spoke with people who are using it. And they spoke about it almost like it was a club. Like, oh, yeah, we got access to Mythos. We're spending a ton of money. Like, I think what should it look like this kind of rollout to actually help us? In Glasswing, I mean, they're fixing real bugs. They have found like 10,000 bugs. Now, one of the problems with Glasswain is they found like 10,000 bugs, but they've only.

fixed a thousand, right? So like you do not want a 10 to 1 ratio of the bugs you found to fixed. We just joined a thing called Project Athena, which Chain Guard is running, which is all about fixing specifically open source bugs, right? So Glasswing is a lot of that is closed source with inside commercial companies. We are part of this coalition that is using mythos to fix open source bugs, which is a huge challenge because like just finding the people who have access to that source code, commit access is difficult. So that's going to be like a, a, a a huge push. So it's not like just totally BS. I do think that one of the things that's going on here is that if these companies ran any modern AI security tool against their code base,

they'd find 80% of those bugs. They don't have to use mythos. Right. Okay. So it's just that they've never looked, right? It's, they're like, that's concerning. Yeah. Right. And so they've, they're like, oh, yeah, I've got this old crappy code and they look for the first time and they all of a sudden they find it. And they could have done it a year ago or six months ago and found some number or some percentage. I had this conversation with the CEO this morning who's like, how do I get into Mythos? Alex, who can you call? And I said,

don't wait. Here you go. Here's an API key for Opus. Right now. It works today. Because do not wait for the Trump administration to figure out what they're doing with Mythos. Use Opus 48 right now, and I guarantee you'll get 70% of the bugs you care about. Alex, you're a security researcher. One of the

stipulations about getting Fable back. So, by the way, Anthropica said they expect Fable to come back on soon. But one of the stipulations that's been talked about to do that is that they have to prevent it from being able to be jailbroken. Is that possible? Yeah, I saw you did jailbreak in air quotes. Yeah, no. So we have two minutes left.

So talk a little bit about why that's not possible. No, there's actually a paper from NIST. It's like a kind of a godel complete NIST theorem kind of paper that basically says it's impossible to make a model that is completely not jailbreakable. Like I said, Fable needs to be able to understand what security flaws are to be able to do its job. I think what enthropic might, the game they might be playing here is redefine what jailbreak is back to what their system card says. So their system card says we define different levels of cyber capability and finding a couple of bugs and knowing what a bug is is okay, but we won't let you like build exploit chains and do lots of long term stuff. And so if they can define back to their system card what a jailbreak is, then they're fine, right? What would be terrible for the entire American AI

and cybersecurity industries is if the Trump administration defines a jailbreak as having any ability to find any vulnerability in code because then all of us have to go to Chinese models. That's it, yes. Like that would be a terrible, terrible outcome. And that might happen because unfortunately, the news that broke just in the last couple hours is Politico is reporting that Anthropic and the Trump administration

are negotiating what the AI safety standards should be. So, like, I don't know, it's like Howard Lutnik writing an e-vail right now. Like, I find that a little terrifying. So I am hoping that enthropic, obviously there's very smart people inthropic working on this. I am hoping that they were able to come up with something reasonable that moves stuff towards exploitation, not bugfinding. Like, we have to have the ability as defenders to find in fixed flaws. The other thing I just want, because we don't have a lot of time, the other real own goal here, was that this injected a type of political instability and political risk.

into the USAI industry that did not exist. There are a bunch of companies that are now going to have to use open weight models because at any time on a Friday afternoon, it's good thing that Fable is only out for a week because people didn't have time to work into their critical path. But if Fable had been out for a month and at 5 p.m. on a Friday,

all of a sudden it got yanked, then pagers across the country would have gone off because every system would have fallen over. And so now, this week, CIs and CTOs are signing contracts to have open up. and weight models on different hosts, on US hosts. They're not using Chinese hosts, but they're using Chinese models as backups through LLM routers because political risk is now a risk of using AI companies. That is a massive own goal. The United States of America does not need to do that.

We should not do that again. That is incredibly stupid at a moment of maximum pressure from the people's world of China. And so I can't stress enough. Like, we lost a war this weekend. like let's not lose another war by making it unreliable to utilize the United States for AI. Alex, will you come on the show for a longer conversation about this? Absolutely, I'd love to, yeah. Alex Damos and Ron Jennery. Thank you. Thank you.