Iran Strikes in the AI Era; Prediction Markets Ethics; Paramount Beats Netflix

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1:19

hey it's Brian, Zoe, Leah and I have really enjoyed being your new host these past few weeks and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute. Please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people. And for any questions and comments, you can always reach us@ uncannyvalleyired.com thank you for listening onto the show. So excited that I am in New York doing this in person with Leah Fiker. Zoe, you're still on the screen.

2:24

I know I am. Brian, should we brag about why you're in New York?

2:51

Yes, we absolutely should. Leah was honored last night at the Front Page Awards as Journalist of the Year, correct?

2:54

She got a literal physical award.

3:02

She did. Not only that, Zoe, you don't know this, but I do because I was there.

3:05

Wow.

3:09

She got introduced by our editor in chief, Katie Drummond.

3:10

She.

3:12

She made a video about her achievements last year and she gave a lovely speech.

3:13

Wow. I love this.

3:18

It was really nice to be clear to me, this isn't a word for all of wired.com and in my video I did not mention myself once because this is about Wired and all about Wired.

3:20

It's about Leah and it should be.

3:29

Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry.

3:32

I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor.

3:37

And I'm Leah Figar, Senior Politics Editor.

3:39

This week we're diving into the ongoing conflict in the Middle east, particularly as the AI industry has been entrenching itself with the Department of Defense. We'll also discuss what's going on with prediction markets and what we make of the potential Paramount and Warner Bros. Historic merger.

3:42

Let's jump right into what's going on with Iran. It has been NonStop since the US and Israel began a coordinated military strike on Iran on Saturday. Iran has responded with their own attacks on U.S. bases and countries across the Gulf. Things have escalated really, really quickly.

4:05

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed in today's joint attack by the US And Israel.

4:25

Iranian officials say airstrikes hit an elementary

4:31

school Saturday, killing more than 160 people, mostly children.

4:34

US embassies across the region are now

4:38

telling Americans to shelter in place. I know we were all working this weekend on this, but I was sort of stunned how quickly disinformation became the center of this conflict. Wired reviewed hundreds of posts on X, some of which racked up millions and millions of views that promote misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attacks. Our colleague David Gilbert reported on some of these very specific examples, and the range was wild. They included AI generated images to video game scenes being passed off as real Footage to countries getting mistaken for each other. To me it's a combination of like, obviously there's a lot of disinformation out there, but it's also. Because this is just chaos.

4:40

Yeah, I think to me what's the disinformation itself is maybe less surprising than the lack of urgency around fixing it or doing something about it, which I guess I shouldn't be surprised at that either. But I feel like every time anyone anything happens, you get sort of. It's almost the same lineup of the video game footage.

5:19

No, the blog writes itself.

5:39

Yeah, it really does. As does the part of like. And also X got rid of most of its public safety team. They've got community notes in there that they append to some of these, but by the time a community note gets on there, it's already been viewed 4 million times. And also it's below the post anyway, so you've already seen it and doesn't really seem to stop them from getting distributed.

5:40

This is the culmination of years of product and policy decisions. It's what happens when you make the platform hostile to journalists. You get rid of most of your fact checking team and content moderators. You rely on community notes which have proven time and time again that they're really effective for certain things. But during breaking news they're woefully inadequate. And you pay people for traffic which incentivizes people to have quick hot takes, whether or not those takes are actually grounded in reality. So yeah, I mean, we should continue to report this story. We should not continue to be surprised by this story.

5:59

And that's. That's absolutely right. I mean I'm looking at. There's been some amazing wired coverage of how like Iranian journalists and activists and just ordinary citizens are trying to get information on the ground and actually get it out then from the country. So it makes me think who. Who is this disinfo for?

6:36

Right.

6:52

Is it just to really create more chaos, muddy the waters? Whatever it is, X is an absolute cesspool. It already is so difficult to trust numbers and facts and figures about what's coming out, who's actually able to get Internet access. It's constant.

6:54

I think one thing it's for, I think a lot of this comes from accounts with blue checks and blue checks can monetize content. So a lot of it is really, I hate this phrase because it's targeted at journalists a lot. But I think in this case true for the clicks, but it is. Your point is right? Iran has 4% Internet connectivity right now. So there is all this narrative happening around the country that is being the journalists left X, but the politicians are still there. I think there were a couple of high profile instances of legit politicians free posting, commenting on things that were fake as though they were real. And that shapes public opinion. And public opinion really matters in a time like this. We're in a war that is not authorized by Congress that threatens to spill out into a much bigger conflagration.

7:06

I mean, it, it doesn't really seem like this is ending anytime soon. If our Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's recent comments about how this doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon are to be believed. I mean there's over 1,000 people, I believe at this point CNN has been reporting that have been killed during like the fighting in the Middle east from strikes. A number of those are U.S. service members and Wired's own core interests as well. We're talking about trade, we're talking about oil, we're talking about data centers. Like how all of this is gonna be swept up. I don't, I don't know. I don't really see a world where we're not going to be talking about Iran anytime soon.

7:52

It's interesting, you know, Molly Taft, who's our great climate writer, they've written about how oil and gas prices spiked, which I think you would assume, you know, the Strait of Hormuz is not officially closed, but it's basically closed because the Iranian military has said don't go in there. But it has downstream effects too. Fertilizer prices are going through the roof. They have a story about this on Wired on Wednesday. Because the Middle east supplies a huge amount of the world's fertilizer. Now you may have noticed that it's also just about springtime, which is kind of when us farmers need fertilizer the most.

8:27

Great.

9:00

Yeah, this is good. It's just great all around. I mean, there's so many like knock on effects I have to also shout out. CNN's World Team has been doing the most unbelievable updates, like minute to minute, hour by hour. It's just this little corner on the side of my screen and they're getting like really into the nitty gritty of what this means. It's not just these different strikes. The idea that there's for example right now an 18 hour traffic jam in Lebanon as people are trying to get out. Like these are very, very. But yeah, Brian, I think about the fertilizer. I think about all of these knock on effects and just the full, full spiral that the entire world is being pulled into right now. Already this morning, on a bunch of different travel accounts, people were starting to talk like, can we be in Europe this summer? And I'm like, whoa, this has hit the influencer spaces. People are having a conversation about World War 3. They're sharing that Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker. What do you mean, World War Three? And that made me think, what about World War Me? Like, the fact that this has like made it into the public lexicon so quickly, I just don't see it ending anytime soon.

9:01

I mean, I think within this conversation we have to talk about the AI angle because the conflict is happening on the heels of the Department of Defense making and then potentially breaking deals with top AI companies. So this past Friday, OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of Defense. Right as Anthropic was going head to head with that same department over concerns about how its technology would be used. It wanted a couple of conditions, including a ban on surveillance of American citizens and a ban on using its technology to build fully autonomous weapons. The DoD was not a fan of putting those conditions in the contract. And then on Saturday evening, the day this Iran strikes began, Sam Altman started an Ask me anything thread on X, saying basically that the deal that he'd cut with the Pentagon was rushed. The optics didn't look great to say the least. But ultimately he defended the company's decision by explaining that their goal was to de escalate things between the AI industry and obviously Anthropic and the dod.

10:03

I mean, our conversations from last week's episode feel so prescient now. We were like, this is it guys. This could be real bad days before the strikes. It's so much worse now. It is so much worse. I mean, I. Can we talk about Sam Altman's ama?

11:12

Yeah, I mean, so it's so interesting because I feel like during our last conversation we were talking about the Optics and the branding and I feel like yet again Anthropic has really come out on top. I was thinking of these events in terms of recruiting, which sounds so dumb, but it's like there is such an intense talent war taking place among the major AI labs. And Anthropic, I feel like, continues to position itself as the good, the level headed AI firm. And OpenAI continues to kind of blunder in these moments. And whether or not like you believe Sam Altman, it comes out looking a little sloppier and a little less like it has a firm set of values it's following. And I think that's actually really going to matter in terms of who is able to get top research talent to join their labs.

11:28

The public perception thing is really interesting to me because I feel like, and I'm curious what you guys are seeing too. It feels a little bit off. Like I think there's this sense that Anthropic is the, if not the woke AI. It's coded blue now. Right. But first of all, Anthropic products were used extensively in the initial strikes on Iran and continue to be. Right. It's a six month phase out.

12:17

This feels a little bit like we're giving them almost too much credit and maybe they've won this culture perception war here. But in the long term, they were part of this. They said, please don't use our robots to kill people without a human clicking the button. That's the conversation here.

12:38

But I think that conversation too, isn't it more around because they're not ready yet, then it can never do this.

12:54

Yeah, they're basically saying, look, it's not fully reliable. But it's interesting because the reason that Anthropic was able to cut these deals in the first place was because their models were being run on Amazon secure servers. Amazon was already Fedramped and so they basically had access to contracts that would allow their models to be run on classified systems, which OpenAI did not have. I also was having conversations with people inside OpenAI who were kind of pushing back at this idea that this moment is a real sea change for the company. Because as you might remember, OpenAI famously had kind of a blanket ban on military use. And then they started to kind of redefine that policy over time. But people at the company were like, look, we were a very small AI lab, we had a blanket ban. But then we started to have these conversations internally of like, is it a blanket ban on all uses? Or could you allow the Pentagon to use ChatGPT to summarize their emails, but not build autonomous weapons? And they started to need to really define that, but because they'd come out so strong by being like, you know, we're building AI for the benefit of all of humanity. As soon as they started to tweak their policies, people were really, you know, calling them out for being hypocrites, which I think they're getting more and more sensitive to over time.

13:01

We had talked earlier about how tech workers at Google and OpenAI were circulating tons of letters calling for clearer limits on how their employers were working with the military and DoD after the US's strikes. On Iran, when it comes to recruitment, when it comes to actually keeping people in house, do things like this matter?

14:13

Yes, like 100. I think it's a really good question. But I think that if you talk to researchers and not everyone feels this way, but there are a ton of researchers and I think it makes sense because a lot of these people come from academia, they tend to be a little more idealistic. They do not want anything to do with military use and they really want their company to say firmly like, we're not going to be involved in autonomous weapons. You can no longer like join a frontier AI lab and say, I'm not going to work with the military at all because they're all trying to get these government contracts. But I think that there is a pretty large contingent of people who are very disgusted with the idea that they're like cool, nerdy, cutting edge AI research could be used in, basically could be used to kill people. They just don't want that. And I think that that actually matters.

14:30

Do you think they'll quit over it though?

15:13

I mean, I think we're already seeing some people quit OpenAI and join Anthropic.

15:15

Yeah, yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I think you have to remember too, it's, it's, it's a weird market in the sense that anywhere you go, if you're there for a decent, like you're vested, you're going to have enough money that you are never going to have to work again.

15:18

Right.

15:32

So you can bake in more. Like more so you can, you're not really trapped. Like there's so many places that are going to give you so much money that that's, I feel like that's less of a consideration.

15:32

Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I think we should like underline that point. We're not talking about people like quitting and giving everything up. They've made generational wealth. They can now quit their current job that's paying them millions and millions of dollars and then go to another job that will also pay them millions and millions of dollars. So the world is their oyster.

15:44

I want to go back to one point really quickly too, Zoe, that you made a little bit ago, which in terms of the messaging, how OpenAI's messaging early kind of got them into, backed them into this corner where now they're kind of unwinding it. I think messaging has a lot to do with this too in terms of the US military's interest in this stuff. If you go around saying from the very start, I'm building something that is more powerful than nukes and is going to irrevocably change society. The US government and the US Military and other governments and other militaries are going to be interested. I think, if you think of if someone were to say, hey, by the way, I'm building a nuclear bomb in my garage, they are also going to get a call from bnex. Right. So I think they have built it in. Right or wrong, however strong you think AI is going to be at a certain point, if that's the message you're projecting, it should not be that surprising that it's come to the head like this.

16:01

Yeah, I mean, and it's also worth saying really clearly that, you know, we're talking about fully autonomous systems. We already have fully autonomous weapons. They're being deployed in Ukraine. They're little drones, and they're not run with LLMs. Like, the models are simpler, but, like, it makes sense that especially when we're talking about a system that is more advanced and less reliable, there's a little hesitation to just say, carte blanche, do whatever you want. But that's, in fact, what the Pentagon is saying is required for a government contractor at this point.

16:50

I have to say that watching the Pentagon respond to all of this has been wild. Really, really wild. They very much view this technology as theirs. Like the idea of this ownership, the idea that, like, no, this was like, Made in America. You made it for you, but it's for us. Like, this is very much for us. And watching that reaction that played out in press conferences on X, I mean, it was really wild to see, like, Emile Michael, for example, just go on rants. Zoe, are you gonna say anything?

17:19

I'm gonna. Emile Michael, you should turn off your views on LinkedIn. Cause people can see when they look at your phone.

17:51

Yeah, that's a tip for Emile Michael, if you're listening. Emil Michael, if you listen to Uncanny Valley, which you should.

17:58

And this is really the Trump official that's kind of leading the war against Anthropic here. He has these deep ties to the tech world, and he's the Pentagon's public enemy number one of anyone who's trying to cross the Pentagon. So the fact that, one, he has not maybe the best OPSEC in the world question mark, but two, is comfortable making this such a public battle is very much something to take note. Because it's not just a message to Anthropic in my mind, it's a message to anyone else who would dare question these policies.

18:04

I want to go to something top of mind. Have you all checked your Kalshi or polymarket portfolios lately? How we doing?

18:34

Well, I haven't invested yet in our Survivor winners, but, you know, soon. Soon.

18:40

No, in terms of things that are surprising or like, but shouldn't be anymore. Prediction markets obviously have sort of taken over so much of our lives in so many ways. I mean, the general R, not the three of us.

18:44

The three of us actually text every single morning and go, what'd you make on call she last night?

18:58

Yeah, yeah. But surprising, not surprising. There's so much betting going on around the Iran war. To continue that thread, right now, one of the top bets on polymarket is will the Iran regime fall by June 30? Total bets around $7 million in that market alone.

19:03

That's so upsetting, Brian. These are people's lives. I don't know. I understand that so much of this has become a gamified version of itself. I understand that the stock market and the way that we do so much of all of this, but this feels extra gamified to me.

19:20

Well, and in terms of people's lives, I mean, there is a big controversy just earlier this week about how Kalshi settled a bet or resolved a market. There was a $54 million market on the fate of Iran's supreme leader. I believe that they phrased it. Leah, correct me if I'm wrong, they phrased it as like, he'll be out of power.

19:37

That was exactly what happened.

19:54

And then he was blown up by a missile.

19:56

So technically out of power, but that wasn't the bet.

20:00

And you can't bet. And they're like, we don't allow you to bet on deaths here. So he's out of power, but not. So they're. They are invariably betting on whether people will die, just finding cute ways around it and then having a hard time resolving these markets. That's a problem. The fact that there was a $54 million bounty out on this guy collectively from bettors, including one user called Magamyman, who had won $553,000 on the timing of all this, it is outrageous. And I think whether or not any of this is insider trading, it's grotesque.

20:04

It's grotesque. That's the word that I was looking for, for sure. That's the gamified grotesque. Very, very narrow look at the value of people's lives.

20:41

On slightly lighter polymarket and Kalshi news, we are seeing a lot of markets that have to do with what looks like internal company data. So, like the launch of GPT5 or Sam Altman being ousted as CEO. And last week, Kate Nibs reported a story that OpenAI had actually fired an employee for insider trading on prediction market platforms like Polymarket. OpenAI's CEO of Applications Fiji Simo disclosed this in a note to staff. She said that the employee in question, quote, used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets. But we're seeing this at a bunch of other firms. Kate Nibs reached out to a lot of big tech companies. Very few would actually comment on the record, but data suggests that this is far from the first time this has happened. There's a pretty famous example of the so called Google Whale, which was a pseudonymous account on polymarket that made over a million dollars trading on Google related events and like multiple, right.

20:52

It's not just they took a random shot and there's just no real interest. I mean Kalshi has recently taken action against two people who had, they found two instances of insider trading. One person who was running for office and one person who's hyp to a YouTube account and they suspended their accounts for a couple of years or so. But those are tiny enforcement actions and I think sort of meant to show hey, we're doing something but really they're not.

21:57

I think we're also like, we're looking to the platforms and the companies to crack down themselves at this point because the Trump administration has taken a much friendlier stance toward prediction markets than the Biden administration did. And why might that be?

22:26

I mean, look, the Trump family has these ties to the prediction market world that are, it really reminds me of their investments in crypto world too in so many ways. It's these things that don't necessarily have the government regulations that they could or should have. But like Truth Social, the social media platform that is majority owned by Trump and his family. They're planning their own prediction market offering. It's gonna be called Truth predict. But Trump Jr. Donald Trump Jr. Is an advisor. Both Kalji and Polymarket already his venture capital firm has invested in Polymarket. They are very much in this the exact same conversations that we were all having last year or even just a couple of months ago about Trump family being in, in crypto world. They are, they're, I, I, I wouldn't go out on a limb and say like they're personally gamifying everything and deaths in Iran, but like they're, they're benefiting from it, they're profiting off of it or at the very least that they're seeing that this isn't a ripe market for expansion and going I want in on that. Forget the fact that. But their family, their father is the one that's helping make these world decisions.

22:41

This is where that insider trading thing gets potentially even scarier. Is no indication that these people are insider trading off of big global events yet. But there are people who have a vested interest in doing that who would know. And even just the perception that policy could be made based off of looking to score a quick buck, that's damaging in and of itself. And I think that's sort of where we're headed.

23:48

Before we go to break, I want to give listeners a little insight into a very different business story. This one is about a transaction that we're keeping a very close eye on which seems to be very near the finish line. So late last week, Warner Brothers agreed to be acquired by Paramount skydance in a $110 billion deal with Paramount agreeing to pay a $7 billion termination fee if federal regulators don't approve the merger. So Larry and David Ellison are continuing to become even bigger media moguls than they already are.

24:16

I mean, let's spell this out. They already are running cbs. This would give them control of cnn.

24:51

Well, and let's not forget that Larry Olson has a huge stake in TikTok. No, it is sort of this ongoing consolidation of media in the hands of Trump allies, which will surely be fine.

24:57

I'm talking to friends that are reporters at cbs at CNN who are freaking out, you guys. They're looking at this and forget even the fact that like is Bari Weiss soon to be their boss. Are the Ellisons going to be canning anyone who's ever spoken out against Trump on cnn. Jake Tapper, are you out of here, buddy? But like people are talking a lot in these newsrooms about the overlap already between CBS and cnn. These are very similar products here. You look like there an incredible financial team at cbs. There's an amazing biz team at CNN who like are constantly breaking news, who've done just amazing reporting over the years. But if you're looking at them on like a side to side thing, do you need to have all of this in your portfolio at the exact same time? You just doubled the amount of journalists you have and the journalists there are flipping out. Everyone is really, really scared about what's to come.

25:10

Right. Because we're not even talking about the seemingly ideological purge that Barry Weiss has already kind of overseen at cbs. I mean I'm thinking of that Claire Mal in the New Yorker where I think the quote was like the deep athification CBS News, which will never leave my head. But, you know, I think that they are really trying to remake these news companies supposedly in their mind to make them less lefty, I guess. But I think the result is that lots of people are losing their jobs and the potential for that is only going to spike.

26:01

It's very scary. I also, I mean, Paramount wasn't even the preferred partner here for the deal. Guys like this was supposed to be Netflix. People thought that was a done deal at a certain point. Wbd, the parent company of cnn, they were questioning if the Saudi financing backing part of the deal, if the Ellisons could really guarantee that they could even put up the billions of dollars for this. There were a lot of questions before we got to this point.

26:33

I think if you're Netflix and you're looking at it, I think what seems to happen is one Paramount overpaid by miles and miles and say what you about Netflix, they are relatively conserved. They know how to spend their money. But then also Susan Rice on the Netflix board, Trump had a meeting with the Netflix CEO prior to this, had put pressure reportedly on him to remove. I'm not saying that that was the sticking point. I think at a certain point, if you're Netflix, you're saying, well, if I do own this, am I going to get past a Trump regulatory approval process? And even if I do, what kind of pressures am I going to see on the other end of it? Is the juice just not worth. And I'm not. I think either way, as someone who enjoys seeing movies in a theater, I'm broken up about this. No matter what. I think Netflix would have been a tough situation for other reasons. But yeah, I think there's just no. There was no real path given how much money Ellisons have and how much Trump did not want.

26:56

The pressure was real.

27:55

Hard to happen.

27:56

The pressure was real. Honestly, we've talked about so many diverse topics this week. I keep getting back to all of this as just like the world of Trump. This is Trump's pressure. This is Trump's family getting in on the markets. It's endless. I can't imagine what the US Business landscape, what the US Media landscape looks without Trump's fingerprints in everything right now.

27:57

In terms of everything. Can I list off some of the IP that no. The Ellisons will now own?

28:20

Don't do it.

28:25

Oh, God.

28:26

This isn't everything. But it is so CBS and, and cnn. We talked about hbo, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Looney Tunes two dozen cable networks that your mom watches.

28:27

I mean, they're gonna dewoke Star Trek. Shout out to my mom. She'll be really, really upset. If anything happens to that ip, they

28:43

can have Harry Potter. I felt like that franchise was very disappointing.

28:49

It's kind of mind boggling though. It's really giving Veruca

28:54

Willy Wonka also a Warner Bros. Discovery property.

29:03

Oh fantastic. I'm going to have to like pay a million dollars now that we've made that reference.

29:06

Well, Leah, save some of that energy for after the break. When we are inaugurating a new segment called futurecast, we're going to share some of our predictions related to tech and beyond. Stay with.

29:11

As a listener of Uncanny Valley, we know you want to stay on top of today's biggest stories in tech. And if you're curious about how tech and innovation are changing the healthcare landscape, check out Mayo Clinic's chart topping podcast Tomorrow's Cure. Back for a brand new season, host and award winning journalist Kathy Werzer dives into the breakthroughs, challenges and human stories shaping the future of medicine, from advances in AI and cancer research to the rise of chronic disease and autoimmune disorders. Not sure where to start? We Recommend the season four premiere where dermatologist Dr. Saranya Wiles and biomedical engineer Dr. Adam Feinberg explore how 3D bioprinting is revolutionizing medical research and accelerating breakthroughs in healthcare. Whether you're a healthcare professional, patient, or simply curious about what's ahead, Tomorrow's Cure invites you to imagine what healthcare could look like and shows you the future is already here. Find Tomorrow's Cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now. This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoO-O-O.com that's o-o o.com what does the AI revolution mean for jobs? For getting things done?

29:30

Who are the people creating this technology

31:07

and what do they think? I'm Rana El Kalyubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor and now host of the new podcast Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human

31:09

issues at the center.

31:25

Join me every Wednesday for pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in.

31:27

So guys, this week we're switching it up and doing our first futurecast segment. This is our time to bring predictions to the table. What do we think? Think coming down the pipeline next week, next year, next month? Who wants to go first?

31:38

Okay, I'm going to think through this in real time because I had one and then I changed my mind. But I think open models are potentially an existential threat for OpenAI and Anthropic. What we're seeing right now is this question around. Are scaling laws going to hold if you throw more compute at these frontier models? Are you able to train smarter and smarter models that know, leap forward in terms of their intelligence every time there's a new release? You know, despite what happened with OpenAI's GPT5, where it was kind of hailed as like the coming of AGI and then it was pretty disappointing, like the models are continuing to advance really rapidly. I think Anthropic's coding models are a really good example of that. But we also know that if you throw enough tokens at a model, you can extract the model parameters and, you know, essentially build a frontier model that looks a lot like Claude. Essentially we're seeing places around the world. I'm not gonna name any names. Don't come at me. Do this. And so their open models are getting really, really advanced really quickly. And, you know, if you can essentially access Claude without paying Anthropic and instead you're paying, I don't know, deep seek, like a nominal sum.

31:53

Like, not that we're naming names. Definitely not naming names.

33:12

Sorry, that just slipped out. I think that you're going to. And if Anthropic is able to keep advancing, that might not be an existential threat yet, but I feel like in the next couple years it might change.

33:15

So can I ask a quick follow up? Because this was Meta's strategy for a long time, right? They were saying we're going to go all in on Llama, we're going to have an open weight model and that's going to undercut the businesses of these other folks. I don't mean like the trying to rip off the model. They were building it themselves, but they have since abandoned that. So what's different?

33:27

Yeah, I think that that's a really good point. I mean, I think one difference like you alluded to is if you're trying to build the open model yourself versus say distilling someone else's frontier model, that's a really big difference in terms of the cost of compute that you're throwing at it in terms of how quickly you can advance and surpass the model you trained on originally. And so I think if you're willing to take a different tack than meta did, you can move much more rapidly.

33:50

Interesting. That's a good one. I want to think about that.

34:17

I have a future cast.

34:21

Take it away.

34:23

Do we use future cast noun, verb, or both?

34:24

Ooh, I think both.

34:27

Yeah.

34:28

Okay, well, I'm going to future cast something now. No, I think that there. If there's not all written, there's probably already somewhere. I think there will be a well known, highly visible, red pilled prediction market out there that will let you bet on violent crime and let you bet on yourself doing violent crimes. And no one will regulate it because it will be in some random island somewhere that's mostly inhabited by gazelles or penguins. And so people are just gonna make a ton of money off themselves doing horrible things.

34:29

Oh, my God.

34:59

This is. At the very least, you should get the IP for that.

35:00

I know.

35:03

This is a movie.

35:04

This is also my spec script. This is also my side project.

35:05

Yikes. Yikes.

35:08

Brian. Wow.

35:10

Future cast.

35:12

Future cast. That's a.

35:13

Okay.

35:14

Mine's actually kind of a little sad too. I'll be totally honest. I've been thinking a lot this week about Iran. I'm thinking a lot about the timeline here and how chaotic and unclear the ending of all of this is. And obviously the US has gone into all of this with their partner, Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi wins consistently when he is putting the country at war and throughout history. That is very much like, you're a country at war. You're gonna win your election. People keep the incumbent. It's trustworthy. It's like, just stay the course. I'm looking at this. I'm looking at the midterms. Stats are bad for Republicans right now. They're theoretically gonna get crushed in the midterms. Again, I say theoretically. We're many months out and a lot can change to be a country at war, regardless of how it started and who started it, right now there's only a couple of US service members that have died, but each death is a tragedy. I'm waiting for that number to go up. I'm waiting for the US to say, now this is. We have to. We have to do it to honor the military. We have to do it to protect US interests abroad in a very, very scary way. So my future cast is that this is going to be used to keep Trump in power, to keep Republicans in power for a little bit longer.

35:15

I think that's, that's probably right. Despite how unpopular this war is in the US Right now.

36:37

Yep.

36:42

I also think it creates a pretext for declaring national emergency of some way or the other. Absolutely. That would potentially unlock illegal. But whatever. It would lock efforts to make it harder to vote in areas that would not vote for Trump.

36:42

But a government at wartime is. This is an entirely different situation right now. We have to look at our midterms polls and these close races, way closer. We're looking at folks that are gonna be pitching their experience, their knowledge, their age. In some ways. No, I know how this goes. I am right in there with the. I know what we need. You know, Brian, you mentioned US farmers needing fertilizer. This all ramps up to the federal government. And I don't know if I see, I don't know if I see a world where the GOP is not going to be taking advantage of that.

36:56

Anyone have anything nice to say before we sign off?

37:29

It's so nice having you in New York, Brian.

37:33

It's great to be in New York. And Leah won a big award. Yay. Okay, that's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about today in the show notes. If you have any comments, you can find the episode transcripts@wired.com to discuss. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. It was fact checked by Matt Giles. Pran Bandy is our New York studio engineer. Kimberly Chua is our digital production senior manager. Kate Osborne is our executive producer and Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director. This week on the political scene from the New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order.

37:34

Europe caught between two adversarial great powers.

38:21

That's basically dialing back the clock to

38:26

not only Pre World War II, but really it's a pre 20th century view of the world.

38:29

And I would say it's a world

38:34

of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

38:36

Join me, Evan Osnos and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the political scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

38:39

From prx.

38:53