Scandals and Meta's Prediction Market Ambitions

There's no playbook for modern work, but on the podcast Work Life, company builduilder Molly Graham talks with operators and leaders from the most well known companies like Facebook and Instagacart about how they make decisions, redefine success, and navigate change as tech's impact on work continues to grow, from leadership to AI to the uncertainty of it all Tune in for convos that go deeper than your typical work advice. Find Work lifeife, a podcast from Ted wherever you get your podcasts. So Casey, we are back in the office after a vacation and I was going through my mail this morning, which is usually just junk and books that people send me. Letters from prisoners. Letters from prisoners. But today I got a letter that was neither a book nor from a prisoner. It came from A seventh grader who wrote to us, said, Dear, Casey and Kevin, I am Nathan Herrick and I'm a seventh grader at Saint Peter School in Cambridge. He says some very nice things about the show. Well let's in full. Okay. He says I wanted to inform you how helpful your podcast is for me. Before listening to your podcast, I always felt behind in tech All my friends were talking about things in tech that I didn't understand. It made me feel isolated and alone from them. But your podcast helped me rejoin my friend group with more confidence about technology. He said, than you for creating hard fork or as my sister calls it, hard Dork Br N By the way, that is such a sister comment. It is Nan, don't listen to your sister. Oh no, do not listen to her. But do listen to her for. Absolutely We're so glad to have you. and I'll just say it, if you're a seventh grader and you're writing paper letters and sending them in the mail to podcasts, you're gonna make it in life. The idea that like you were so far behind in tech news that it was like harming your relationship with other twelve year olds' like what are they talking? What Yeah Who are these nuclear physicists he' hanging out with on the playground? They're running aentic loops yes. Exactly Social studies homework. seeventh gradade with a clod swwarm is a terrifying thing to consider I'm Kev News, Te callol uss the Neworkim. I'm Cy Newood from Platformer. this is hardbard This week. The Trump administration lifts its restrictions on anthropics's most powerful models. What have we learned about how the government wants to regulate AI? Then, pediatric surgeon Dana Suskin stops by to discuss her new book on parenting in the age of AI. And finally, it's our news segment about prediction markets Against all odds, and the odds that you like it, they are pretty high. Well, we've had some big news out of Washington in the past few weeks We are in the middle of something truly insane and unprecedented that is happening between the frontier AI companies, including openpen AI and Anthropic and the federal government, which has decided all of a sudden with basically no rhyme or reason that it wants to start picking and choosing which customers are allowed to use the frontier models. Yet when this happen, many listeners reached out to us and asked us if we would consider doing an emergency episode And I'm happy to say that the emergency lasted so long that we're able to get to this now on a regular schedule. Yeah It's sort of a rolling emergency. We' sort of like a permanent crisis. Exact will. Exactly. So before we get into fable, since it does involve AI, we should make our disclosures. I work for the New York Times, We' just doing open AI, Microsoft and Perplexity. my b Oh downowngrade And my fiancee works philanthropic Let's just explain what's been happening and then we can talk a little bit about what we think about it. So the first sort of salvo in this dispute was on june twelfth, which was the day that we officially left for our break. veryery good timing by the US government. when the Commerce Department issued an export control directive shutting down access to Fable five and Mythos five The most powerful versions of Anthropics models, Fable, in particular had just been released a couple days earlier. And basically the government said, no one is allowed to use this. If you're a foreign national, including an employee of Anthropic inside or outside the US, you are not allowed to use this model basically shut down access for all customers everywhere. Anthropic basically had to pull the model because it had no way to do sort of usser by user citizenship verification. And as its reason for doing this, the federal government said, well, we received some notifications from a trusted partner that there was this jailbreak issue on Fable specifically. And who was this trusted partner, Kevin? Well, we believe it was Amazon, which based on some reporting from the information Andy Jassseie, the CEO of Amazon had gotten in touch with administration officials after researchers at Amazon had disiscovered this jailbreak, this way of getting supposedly restricted information that could be used in cyber attacks. basased on some reporting from the Wall Street Journal, we believe that Andy Jassse sort of tells the Commerce Department about this. They freak out and say, we've got you know, we've got to get this model off the market. Okay, so let's zoom in as far as we can here because I think it's really important to get clear on What was the thing that this model did that gave the Trump administration the HBGeeBs? My understanding, Kevin, is that when other security researchers have reviewed what we believe the issue was here, it was a fairly standard back and forth and was the sort of interaction that you would expect a cyber deffender to have with a model to try to get it to identify and fix a bug. So what do we know exactly about what was going on here? We don't know exactly what Amazon's researchers discovered that made them so concerned. One cybersecurity expert who reviewed Amazon's work said in a blog post that These concerns were basically not a big deal, that this was something that defenders who are trying to patch systems from cyber attacks need basically asking AI to find and fix the bugs in a given file. And I guess Amazon's researchers determined that that same technique could be used to exploit a piece of software or find vulnerabilities, which of course is the whole advertised purpose of giving Mythos and similar frontier models to cybersecurity defenders ahead of the general public? Right, Anthropic had launched this program called Project Glass Wing, where it had shared Mythos with a relatively small number of partners in an effort to harden the defenses of a lot of the critical infrastructure in this country and in allies before similar capabilities were found in other models And as soon as the government stepped in and said, you, effectively we're placing export controls in this technology, all that stopped Yeah. And so it's now been a couple weeks since these export controls went into effect. Last Friday, Anthropic and the Trump administration reached a sort of tentative deal, allowing Anthropic to restore access to Mythos for some clients. And then on Tuesday night, news broke that the Commerce Department was lifting those export controls and restrictions on Anthropics's models Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik sent a letter to Anthropic saying that the company had taken steps to address the risks associated with these models. And on Wednesday, Anthropic announced that Fable five is back that it is again available to users around the world. Mythos five still not publicly available, but is going to be restored to a set of US organizations, and they will sort of coordinate with the government to expand that more broadly Casey, what did you make of the government's reversal here Well, I mean, to me, the reversal seemed inevitable and it still concerns me how little was said about the process behind this. I was probably more interested in anthropics response because they put out a blog post that effectively put the industry on blast and said that GPT five point five kim K two point seven and several other models could find the same vulnerabilities that had resulted in Fable being banned. So effectively Anthropic said, hey, you know we like added another safeguard, but like really, this is an industry thing. Don't point fingers at us about this. Yes. And speaking of other models, let's talk about what is going on with open AI and GPT five point six. Last week, as OpenAI prepared to release their newest GPT five point six models, Sam Alaltman told the staff that they would not be rolling it out to the public right away. They would release it first to a limited group of partners that would be approved by the government and that the Trump administration had asked the company not to release the model more broadly than that And he didn't sound happy about it. This was clearly not the way that Open AI and Sam Alaltan had wanted to release GBT five point six, but the way that he phrased it made it seem like this was sort of pressure that had been applied to him from the Trump administration. So this new business that the government is in of telling AI companies, you can't release this model or you can only release it to a list of customers that we approve Beforehand seems to be applied to at least two companies now and this seems to be coalescing into something more of a broader strategy and not just a single targeted act of retribution. Yes, and what we have said before on this subject is that this is the exact state of affairs that the people who are now running AI policy in the Trump administration were the Biden administration, right? They were warning you know, they're going to create a licensing scheme and they' they're going to start picking winners and only a handful of the administration's favored labs are going to be able to release any models. and that's why we've got to get rid of this Biden executive order. Fast forward to today, they have implemented a de facto licensing regime and because it's the Trump administration There are no known rules. There's no transparency whatsoever. We have no idea what makes a model considered safe to ship or unsafe to ship. We're truly just in this like authoritarian limbo where until a few people decide that you know, fable or GPT five point six are safe to use, we're out of luck. Yes, AI is now being regulated by vibes. Yeah. and that is a state of affairs that I think both you and I were worried about Which is why several years ago when these kind of pre deployment testing regimes were proposed as part of these AI safety bills, we said, well, this is probably a good idea to have something like this in place so that you don't just have this kind of slapdash chaotic approach where like models with really scary capabilities start coming out And then the federal government has to scramble and try to figure out what the models are even capable of and then take some, you fast action on that basis rather than having something that is actually thought through and planned from the start. Yes, and let me say, I think the government should be able to prevent the release of large language models. I do believe that. I even think that after a model has been released, if it does something really dangerous, I think the government should be able to come in and say, hey, we actually need you to place a pause on that I just think that it should be done with a set of clear rules. I think the companany should have due process. I think there should be a process for fixing those models and getting them into public shape and getting some sort of consensus on when it can be released. You know, just sort of like basic good government stuff. and we are just so far from that world. I mean, I want to return to the point that you made about the hypocrisy of the people especially on the tech right who made opposition to AI regulation and licensing their entire personalities several years ago. You know, Mark Andreesen has credited this I think Nonxistent meeting. I have tried to back up through reporting the facts of this alleged meeting that Mark Andreesen says happened with officials from the Biden administration, where they basically said, according to Mark Andesen, that they were essentially going to pick winners and losers in the AI industry and that their favored labs would be able to develop and release powerful models and that no one else, including open source developers would be able to I have tried to back this up. I have tried to find, I've talked to many people who would have been in a meeting like this. No one remembers it happening like this. So this may be a convenient fiction that Mark Andreeson has decided to tell But This was their whole personality for years. They said, we are becoming a socialist Soviet style state where the government's going to tell private companies what they're allowed to do. David Sachs, the former AIsar famously said that the private sector should be allowed to cook. And now we have just a couple years later a what you call the de facto licensing regime and Picking winners and losers. They're saying this company can release their models. this other company can't. They seem to have no clear criteria. They're going on these reports from random, you know, companies that are testing these models. and it does not seem like they have any interest in sort of formalizing that or making it any easier for AI companies to navigate. I mean, you say they're picking winners and losers. Really, they're just picking losers, right? They're saying this model's too good. You can't release it, sorry loser Right? Yeah you know, so there's it's unclear what is the way to win here? I mean, the way to win is by becoming a political actor, right? Like that that is sort of the downside here is that like now deploying models, if you're an AI company is a political process. Well, look, I mean, you know, I would love to ask Greg Brockman over at Op AI how he feels about his twenty five million dollars donation to the Trump people, right Be that didn't seem to buy them a lot of goodwill when it came to GPT five point six. So I don't know that, you know, sucking up to the Trump administration will le even get your model out the door right now It won't get it out the door right now, but I think they are going to, if I had to predict, they're going to have an easier time over at OpenAI releasing these models in the future. I think the big shift that is really weird right now that all the labs are trying to process is I think they just moveved from a sort of default yes environment where like the assumption was if you trained really good model, you could release it And now I think they're in a default no environment where if you build a model that is more capable than Claud Mythos or GPT five point six, your assumption has to be that the government of the United States is not going to let you release it, at least not right away and at least not to everyone.. So I think that is a huge shift in the sort of structure of the AI industry That has happened more or less overnight. Yeah, I mean, and this is just another moment where I wish that we had a Congress that was taking this seriously. This is a clear moment where we need a legislative framework for how these companies should be regulated that does govern how and when models can be released and governs how and when they are taken off the market over safety concerns, right We know what to do here. We just have a government that is not doing it. Yes. And Dean Ball, former hard fork guest, former Trump administration, AI advisor, soon to be open AI employee, had a great post about all of this just a few days ago, where he made the point, which I thought was reasonable that like the government should have some role, it's reasonable to expect that in the future, when these models are very powerful and have very scary capabilities, that the government will want to take an active role in deciding what can and can't be sold. That seems reasonable. Yeah. And I think there's a good argument that that moment is now. that the models are now capable enough and scary enough that the government has an interest in addressing it. Totally. But Dean made the point that you actually need technical experts in government to make that happen. You need people who are capable of evaluating and running the safety tests on unreleased models to determine what they are and aren't capable of. And right now, at least according to Dean, we don't have that. Well, Kevin, I have some great news because on Monday, none other than Mark Andreeson himself joined the U S. Defense Policy booard whichich will put him in regular conversation with Pete Hegseth and other government officials. And so now Mark can finally get to the bottom of this and demand that the government drop this de facto licensing regime. Do you think he'll be running any of the safety evaluations himself? I am terrified to find out. So there's one other twist of this story, and it's something I'm really interested to get your take on, which is the whole China angle because the other backdrop of these discussions between the US government and the US AI labs is that these Chinese models are getting pretty good. So recently we saw a new model out from the Chinese company ZAI called GLM five point two You know, people are saying that this is you one of the best open source models out there. There's been a little bit of what I would consider overheated reporting that suggests that it's as good or better than some of the frontier models from the AI companies in the US. I don't think that is probably true, but it is at least in the sort of same tier of consideration. And so there are people who are saying, well, this is goingo to be a big problem because at the same time, the US government is pulling American models off the market that are very powerful. We now have these Chinese open source models that customers, big businesses can use for much cheaper that are just as capable and that are not in danger of being clawed back by the US government. What do you make of that? I think this is basically BS. likeike I do I think it feels like a lobbying tactic from people who want to get the American models back into production. I have seen no credible reporting that the Chinese models have kept up, Even when I've read the reporting that we've seen over the past week out of the Wall Street Journal and others, there aren't numbers in there that would lend credence to it. What there are is a handful of people saying these models are really good And look, I'm sure these models are pretty capable. I'm sure they're more capable than the open source and Chinese models of a year ago. But we learned during the deep seek freakout that a reliable way to get attention in AI Dcourse is to wave your hands and say the Chinese are catching up, the Chinese are catching up and everyone will pay attention to you. But when you look at how the Chinese are building these models The theory just doesn't hold because you have to keep in mind, what these Chinese companies are doing is distilling American models.. They're getting in there and they are scraping the responses of these chatbots and they're using those to make their own chatbots. So the best Chinese models are kind of like American models once removed. And that is why they're always going to be at least a little bit behind the frontier And let me say one more thing, Kevin. while I'm all worked up. which I'm increasingly coming to think about like the whole AI market in as like two like systems There's the frontier and there's everything else. okay? And if you're truly at the frontier, we will know because you can see it in the benchmarks. You can see it in the revenue figures of the companies that are selling this stuff, that is where the actual value is And then there's everything else, which is the million little open source models, the distilled models, the Chinese models, and they're just a step behind. And look at the revenues of those companies. There's an insane amount of competition and it's not as good as the best. And so in my view, these Chinese companies that we're talking about right now, they're firmly in the everything else camp. That's not to say they aren't getting better over time because they are But if you're going to tell me right now that this is as good as a mythos, I'm going to need to see the damn numbers, right? I think that's right, but I'm also like I'm not as quite as skeptical of this fear of China catching up as you are in part because I think these distillation sticks to You get a model that is almost as good as the original. If the Chinese companies are able to keep doing that, I think there's a plausible case that they will shrink the time, the sort of gap between the American frontier and the sort of open source frontier. Maybe it's nine months now, maybe in the future that becomees six months or three months. I think that sounds plausible to me I also think that there are a lot of businesses right now who are really freaked out about what is happening with Fable and with GPT five point six. and they are saying to themselves, well, if we were to sort of go with the latest American models at all times, not only are we paying a premium for that, but it could be yanked away by the government with no explanation and no due process And it would totally screw up all of our workflows and all the software that we're building on top of those tools. So I did actually talk to someone recently who works at an American tech company, not one of the AI labs, but like a solid big American tech company who is saying that they're actually spending a lot more time with these open source Chinese models, not because they're as good as the frontier models But because you can download them, you can run them on your own hardware, and they're pretty good for a lot of tasks that don't need the absolute capability frontier that you would get from a Mythos or a GPC five point six. So I think that in this moment where there's so much uncertainty coming out of Washington, I think a lot of companies that rely on these tools are going to take a hard look at the Chinese models and see whether they might be good enough for some percentage of what they're doing. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, like the American economy has been so strong for so long in part because the government has mostly been safe, boring, and predictable. and the Trump government is not those things, right? We saw this during tariffs, right? where liken the American businesses were having similar problems because they couldn't predict how expensive their products were going to be on any given day based on what the tariff of the day was, right? And now we have the LLM restriction of the day, and it's causing similar havoc in the economy So I think one obvious link between the actions of the U.S government and the China subplot here is that maybe there's a possibility that the US. government restricting access to these frontier models from American companies actually doesn't allow China to catch up. Maybe it slows China down because if they are so reliant on distilling from You know, Claud and the GPT series and other leading American models, maybe not having access to those models will hurt them. So is there any sense in which you think this action by the Trump administration could actually widen the gap between the US capabilities frontier and the sort of Chinese open source frontier? I mean, maybe, but that is an extremely ham fisted tactic for accomplishing that goal The United States government has many levers it can pull if it feels like Chinese companies are attacking its companies. Like for example, they could sanction companies that they believe have caught distilling. They can prevent them from selling their wares in America. They can get allies to do the same thing. We saw Anthropic the other day send a letter complaining that Alibaba has apparently been doing wide scale distilling of Claud and the hope there is that the government will intervene. So that is how these things are traditionally done. While it is true, I suppose that this is going to make it harder for Chinese companies to distill the next models, there are still all of these other reasons why at least for me, like that's the worst way to go about it. Right. That makes sense to me. I mean the argument that I would make against that point is like What matters is not just the capabilities frontier of the internal models that the companies in each country have. What matters is sort of the deployment frontier and for a society to really harness the benefits ofI, you have to be able to use the models. like you have to be able to deploy them inside big companies. you have to be able to deploy them inside consumer products. L people have to be able to use them. It is not just like which lab has in their basement the most capable model that nobody else can use. Right. And all of this happened at a time when Companies and government institutions around the world were using these very powerful models to improve their cybersecurity defenses. right? I mean, like that's one of the reasons why this issue feels really urgent is that there was an ongoing project to protect the critical infrastructure of the United States and its allies. and that was yanked away. while at the time we're selling advanceced ships to the Chinese to help them catch up So I think there's one silver lining to this story for me. is that for years now, you and I have been sort of hoping against hope that the US government would stop just sort of talking about AI as this unallied good that was just a normal technology that was gonna supercharge the economy, that they would actually start to pay some attention to the risks of these powerful AI systems That is happening now for better or for worse. The government is now firmly aware that these models do pose risks. They are sort of thinking about cybersecurity, but I imagine they are also thinking about bio risk and other types of risk. So I think that there is a sort of way to spin this whole saga as a clunky, ill advised first step on a good path, which is like the government is waking up These models are very powerful, they can be very dangerous. They're going to get more powerful and more potentially dangerous as time goes on. And so I think what we're seeing now is sort of a fumbling attempt to kind of do something. And I think they will come up with better ways of doing this over time. I hope anyway that that they will this is not sort of the permanent structure of the AI licensing regime in the United States. But at least they are not just pretending that this is just a normal technology anymore. That is true, and I'm glad that it's the case. But at the same time, this same administration has been pushing to allow the export of more and more advanced ships to China, which will allow China to train more powerful models over time. And they're doing that at the same time as they preventing good models from being used by our allies like Britain and other countries. So there is still an extreme level of incoherence in the administration's position, in my opinion. Well, you can't win them all. That's true We to come back, a conversation about AI and parenting. Do you know where your children are? I have children There's no playbook for modern work, but on the podcast Work Life, company builduilder Molly Graham talks with operators and leaders from the most well known companies like Facebook and Instacart about how they make decisions, redefine success, and navigate change as tech's impact on work continues to grow, from leadership to AI to the uncertainty of it all Tune in for convos that go deeper than your typical work advice. Find Work life, a podcast from Ted wherever you get your podcasts. Gira B at Lassian, where your team and your coding agents work from the same context. Try it free at jira. gov That's j IRA. dv. These days, you can chat with AI about almost any business problem, but only rippling AI is built to solve them. That's because rippling AI is built on your live global workforce data. So it doesn't just uncover insights into your business, it uses them to take complex actions across your departments. Ready for AI that isn't all talk Head to rippling. Ai slash hardfork and get AI that turns insight into action That's RIPP LNG. Ai slash hard fork Sign up today Okay see, I'm very excited for our guest today who is an expert on the intersection of parenting and AI. This is a topic that I've been wanting to explore on the show for a while now, in part because it's just become a big part of my social life is talking with other parents about how we are or aren't exposing our kids to technology, including AI and chatbots So today we have on the show our guest, doctor Dana Suskin. She's a pediatric surgeon and childhood development expert. She's a professor at the University of Chicago and the founder and co director of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health. She's also an author, and she has a book coming out soon called Human Raised, Nurturing Cnection, Curiosity, and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI And when I heard about this book, I thought this is just the person we need to tell us slash me how we should or shouldn't be using AI with our children. Absolutely. because in addition to all of that, Kevin, doctor Suskin is a parent to eight children who are now all grown up. So this is somebody who has a lot of expertise in this subject Yes. So I think this is an important conversation today, but I think it's about to become much more important because there' just a lot of AI products and tools aimed at young kids that are making their way to the market and are going to become, I predict more popular in the next few years. So already, we've seen Miko and Luna, which are two AI powered robots that are designed for And we've got all these sort of child specific companions and chat bots with names like AsI and Ello and Hey Auto. and we're just starting to see a lot more products using AI that are aimed at children. And I think for a lot of parents, that is creating a lot of anxiety because how the heck are we supposed to know which of these things are going to you know, help our kids grow and develop and which are going to turn them into glorified slop cannons. Yeah. and that's what you don't want as a slop cannon child. Yeah Heaven forbid. But here's what I'll say if your child is a slop cannon, you need to read this book. That's true. Let's bring her in. Doct Dausk, welcome H Heart For. Thanks so much for having me So you've got this new book coming out Human Raiseed, which is about parenting and sort of child development in the age of AI. And I was so excited when I heard that this book was coming out because as the parent of a now four year old, I see this issue coming for me in a way that makes me quite nervous. And so I was so happy when I heard that you were starting to do the research about what we as parents should think about our children potentially using AI which I think is going to be a bigger issue for me as my kid gets a little older, but it is already an issue for a lot of parents, I know. So first of all, like what made you want to pursue this topic as someone who's long been interested in childhood development? Yeah. so I'm a cochlear implant surgeon. and you may say, well, why exactly are you on this or even thinking about this issue? But early in my career, I started noticing profound differences in the outcomes of my own patients. So I would do the same surgery, same technology, same parents loving them, and the outcomes of the children were so profoundly different with some of them being able to develop language and others not. So that experience actually brought me into this incredible world of brain development and neuroscience that shows that human connection is not just a nice to have, it is the foundations of how we learn and how we learn to be human. And so my whole career has been focused on that and supporting parents and caregivers in that important role. And then suddenly, AI comes onto the scene. For the first time in human history, we have technology that can actually mimic that interaction that has traditionally wired our children's brains. And now I'm like, o We need to probably step back and really think about what is happening in our children's world because the choices that we make at this moment is going to determine what our species look like Dr. Saskin, can I run some scenarios by you from my own parenting journey and you tell me whether I'm being a bad father or not So there's no such thing. The two primary ways that I'm using AI with my four year old right now, onene is to just like answer random questions that he asks. We're in like a big question phase right now. So the other day you know he asks me, where does wind come from? And I realized I us don't know the answer for. Yeah I have to say that's like a hard question. Yesull up I pull up an AI model and I ask, and you I get back this answer and it's about like you know, air pressure and I'm like, okay, this is for a four year old. Could you like dumb it down a little bit? And it gives me a great answer. You know we tell him the answer and he has the answered his question. Now he gets to like repeat it to all his friends That's that's, you know, optional one. By the way, yeah, on his playground, the kids are obsessed with where R comes from. Its's a hot h over there. It's made it quite popular preschool. Yeah. So the other way is just like creating stories for him. So you know, one of the things that these models are quite good at is like you give it some, you know guidance. I want a story about a kid this age who has a best friend who's a dinosaur and they go off and they play soccer together or whatever it is. I would do one where his best friend is the wind. I think I could really hit I could clely with him Right now. So Are either of those examples of AI use in parenting of a young child going to harm my son Absolutely not. So first of all, those are great examples. And you know, I put in this book, I tried to really also give grounded and practical frameworks. And one of the frameworks that I give parents to sort of think about AI in general, sort of an evergreen, I call it hope H's human connection is irreplaceable. It is what we need to protect and double down on. But O is owning your imperfections, as I said Kids don't grow through perfection. they grow through I don't know about you, but I was I am a very imperfect parent, but now I know it's really good for my kids. P is protecting the early years. Those first years, when you get eighty five percent of the physical brain being built, we've got to be extra careful about what we let in. But lastly is E If you're going use it, use it to enhance, not replace. You're really using this technology to enhance your relationship, fill in the gaps of knowledge that you may or may not have. And that's a great way. This book, in my view, is not at all anti tech. I'm an implant surgeon, I build AI tech. I'm all about it, but how do we use it to our relationships and support us in this important role. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me and it is compatible with, I guess my own sort of vague optimism about AI in the lives of kids. And you know, I see a lot of parents right now with a lot of anxiety about AI that seems like it is borrowed from this earlier era of like the screen time debates or the debates about sort of addictive social media platforms for kids. And to me, it just feels fundamentally different what AI is as a technology and what it is capable of doing for children Like I just think back to my own childhood and like I was a I was a nerdy kid who loved to learn stuff. And if I had had like a chat bot that could have taught me about the Bernoulli effect in a way that was like enjoyable and entertaining to me, like I would have done that and I would have been happier than going to my, you world book Encyclopedia and looking up that fact. So I think for the curious kids out there, my sense is and please tell me if you agree with this, like that this could be an incredibly enriching technology for them if it is designed well and if parents are sort of in the loop of how their kids are using it I mean, one hundred percent, I agree with you. I think to your point, this people go to the social media as the best analogy, and I get it. But I think a better analogy is actually processed food. processed food is a continuum, right? There's whole wheat bread, which is processed, but it's still nourishing. And then you've got the ultra processed variety, you know, the Doritos and you know, twwinkies, which are good occasionally. But the truth is is that in the same way, AI is a huge spectrum. I mean, not only being able to provide answers as a chat bot, but you know lifting invisible labors off of parents and teachers to diagnostics. You know, I come from the world of medicine where it's transformative. I think People are really focused on the AI companions which I get, which am concerned about in terms of crowding out that necessary human connection. but that really that's a small part of what AI is. I mean, you can have socially assistive robots that help children with autism learn to read social cues to better connect with other humans. That's an amazing example. So I think to your point, it is a spectrum and it's not a monolith. I'm curious though, like where if anywhere are you like drawing the bright lines? Like where are you saying like, you know, do this, don't do that? Yeah That's pretty easy right now. We are at the very beginning of this tech revolution and AI companions in the, you know AI toys that claim to be better alternatives to screen time, that feels like a pretty hard no. You've got to know I think the thing that we can learn from social media is that we need to take a precautionary principle You've got to show me it's safe before I'm going to let it into the developmental sanctuaries of of our kids because the stakes are just way too high, even higher than social media, in my opinion. Yeah. What about like smart devices that are not meant to be plush toys, but like my, you know, my kid loves talking to Alexa and asking for various children's songs that are intolerable to adults, but that he loves to play on repeat. Like is that the same thing? or is that different because it's not pretending to be a companion or a stuffed animal I mean, I think it's It's how much? I mean, it's a slippery slope, but I think we can all agree that know, Alexa playing songs when you're around or even if you're not around is probably a fine thing. It's at this point, it's more just the crowding out of the human interaction that I'm very concerned about Yeah, My kid would otherwise be asking me to play the blippy garbage truck song four hundred times. So I'm somewhat sympathetic to that. You know, you've mentioned that we're pretty early in many ways in the development of this technology, but I also know that you know you're really concerned with some of the things that you're seeing. Is this a moment where you feel like the government has a role to play in regulating the technology? And if so, what do you think that role should be No, absolutely. I think We know in Norway they've actually set out a law that there's no genAI in the school system in the early years. And in the same way, I think we're seeing that in the US. I mean, in some ways, this really mirrors the industrial food revolution. When the food revolution happened, you know, initially, there was no guardrails. And eventually we started the Pure Food and Drug Act. and then eventually we got, you know the little What is it called on Nutrition nutractal labels the nutrition labels. I mean, these are the things that, you know are going to happen. It just we're just at the very beginning, but hopefully we'll start seeing it. What do you think of the Norway approach? Like does it seem wise to say like, hey, until we've done a little bit more research, we're going to keep like kids under sixteen from using Chat GPT in schools for any reasons? Do that Whise I mean, I think it's taking a scientific approach. I don't think they're saying no never. I think they're saying, wow, this is happening so fast. Let's take a step back. We know what works. I mean, look, if we didn't know how to educate humans Um, I would get it, but I think they're just taking a prudent approach. And I'm a scientist who is about innovation. I just, you know, I think about what happens in medicine and we're much more, you know when we have a new drug on the market, it's not like we have to say, ooh, I wonder what's going to happen to my child if I give them this new medication. I'm not sure why know this new technology, which is so incredibly powerful. It's amazing, right? We have to acknowledge that it's a powerful technology that we need to understand what happens to us. I think the story of AI is as much about technology as it is about understanding what it does to humans. And I think that's what Norway is saying. Well, let's try to give parents some practical advice. You suggest that when parents are trying to figure out whether a particular AI tool or product is suitable for them, they should ask themselves six questions. So what are the questions the parents should be asking? Sure. so I becausecause I'm a surgeon and I love acronyms. It's called detect So what is the detect method? D is designed what is this tool designed for? Is it interacting directly with your child orr is it helping you? Do you really need it He is Was it ethically trained? T is, were there any troubles with this technology in children? E is, What is the evidence? Does it really do what it supposed to do. C is confidentiality, what happens to your child data? And lastly is T. What is it teaching from a value standpoint And that detect method is used so that parents can quickly and easily figure out, is this something that they want in their child's life? All right, so I wanna see if we can apply your detect framework to like an actual AI thing that is in the market right now. There is something called Cradle wise, which I learned about from a tweet by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI And he has a baby, and he tweeted that they had bought, quote, a lot of silly baby things that we haven't needed, but definitely I recommend a cradle wise crib and a lot more burp racks than you think you could possibly need. As for the cradle wise though, this is apparently a smart crib that uses AI to detect early signs of a baby waking up and automatically starts a gentle bouncing motion and soothing track to get them to sleep. So if we were to use your framework, doctor, how would we rate cradleize All I can say is I wish I had been there when I had one. Yeah had my children. So what is it designed to do? In some ways, it's designed to support the parents by helping the child sleep. E, how is it trained? I think it's probably ethically trained Is there any evidence that it Kids have had trouble? Not that I'm aware of, but I haven't so much as googled it yet. But that would be a thing to do would be to sort of investigate whether there've been any problems with the device. Problems. Yeah. Yeah. So and what the evidence were. And probably some researchers have looked to see, does it keep kids asleep? Do they have any problems I mean, I think long and short of it, I think that that feels very aligned with a using technology to enhance not replace Sam Altman's parenting, allow him to have a good night's sleep, let the baby sleep. So Just hearing it very, you know for the first time, it sounds like a good thing. It seems okay. I'd say I would take a bed that would actually gently bounce me and rock me back to sleep when I wake up in the middle of the night because whatever I'm doing now it is not working for me. You have to update the firmware on your eight sleep. Yeah. I'm Googling this right now and it seems like there have not been serious problems with the cradle wise smart bassinet, although it does say that they it has proprietary linens. You cannot buy cheap third party crib sheets because the mattress is a non standard shape. You know, Cradle Weice was one of my favorite songs in the sound of music It doesn't make way anyyway. Okay listen, it's either that or like me, my lay husband and I had three kids in our bed at one time. And I don't know, if I had cradle wise, we might have had more sleep. Yeah. That's wild. That's wild. That's heroic. Yeah, seriously.. I think this falls for me into the category of like It makes you a better parent. It does actually make you a better parent to get six hours of sleep and it does. Here's what I'm going to say, Do not overclock your cradle Y so it starts shaking incredibly quickly. Even if it seems like it would be kind of funny. Don't do it. I mean, I do think eventually we will need some kind of like a TV rating system for AI products And I'm curious whether you've heard anyone suggest that or whether you have any ideas about how That could be implemented Yeah, one hundred percent. A actuallyually I talk about the goodood Housekeeping seal of approval, which actually came out of the Industrial Food Revolution and suggests that we actually need something similar. And I've heard of different groups talking about doing it. Common sense media, I think, is thinking about it and others. Maybe you all should be doing it He did the hard fork deal of approval Yeah Yeah. I mean, I think one of the hardest things is that these models are generally useful. like they can do amazing things that are very good for kids. They can teach them science, they can teach them to read, they can, you know, give them creative outlets and they can addict them or become you know harmful companions or shut out the rest of their human friends because it's just so fun to talk to the AI companions. So I just think like I want the AI companies thinking more about parental controls and visibility because I think parents should know what their kids are talking about. But I think as with screen time, I think there's this sort of dangerous tendency to flatten every product into a single verdict, which is like You know It really matters what your kid is watching on their screen. It also really matters what your kid is talking to AI about. And I think the more that parents can be aware of and respond to that, rather than just saying like this product is okay and this product is bad, the better off kids will be. Well, and you know, Kevin, that actually brings up something interesting, which is that you know earlier during this interview, you brought up the Bernoullly effect Yeah And I thought that I can imagine a lot of children listening to this and racing to their AI, you know, to find out what it is. So I thought I would take this opportunity as a human who wants human connection with children to share what the Bernoulli effect is. And what it is and you guys already know this, but it's and honestly, Kevin, it's more commonly called the Bernoulli principle. So I don't want to embarrass you But it really is sort of known as the principle. And it states that for a fluid, such as air or water flowing smoothly, an increase in the fluid speed is accompanied by a decrease in its pressure. So children, I hope that you heard that and have internalized that and are not gonna to ask AI about it. It's what allows airplanes to fly. Exactly. Didn't you learn that in middle schoolool science? Yeah Okay, let's get back to doctor Susknd here. I just had to say that. We just like to do our little bits and just force our guests to suffer through them. Okay. you want me tell you an interesting story. Yes related to knowledge. Yes. so in our center, we've built this really cool computer adaptive tool that measures what parents know about child development in all domains It's very predictable of what parents do and child outcomes. So we use it in lots of research. So recently, we haven't published it yet, we had Claude take the it's called the spepeak to see how Claude would do And so I'm going to ask you all Do you think Claude did really well, mediocre or not so great on Its knowledge of child development reallyally well. I would say well, yeah You're right Cluded it. Claude did incredibly. Claude aced it. And so Because we didn't want the story to be, oh, you know what, now Claude can parent, because that's not the message, the message is Claude can obviously be a resource. So when parents have a question, oh, you know X, Y and Z about child development ident they can confidently ask Claude and Claude will give a right answer. I mean, that tracks one hundred percent with my own experience of these tools, which is that they are often more seasoned and more confident about parenting advice than I am and that they've been a very good resource for me when I'm feeling stuck or I'm trying to deal with some like behavioral thing that I don't know how to deal with, or I just need a little backup. I can just go to Claude or Gemini or ChatuT and ask the question. and usually the answer it gives back is pretty good. Dr. Suskin, I want to ask you about the title of your book, which is essentially a provocation as I read it that says Basically as AI tools become more normalized, this idea of being human raised, this is going to become rare. and maybe something of a luxury where like if you are born into a family with a certain level of security and privilege, you will get sort of the human experience of having human parents. And if you are not, you will be raised by the machines. Am I reading that right? And is that what you think is likely to happen? Well, I'm writing this book so that hopefully it will not happen. But yes, so in the same way as A hundred plus years ago, you never questioned if the food on your table was organic or farm. raised and then suddenly you know, fast forward with the rise of altate processed food and suddenly organic was that for children with privilege. In the same way, my concern is that artificial alternatives will become the cheap calories of brain nutrition and humuman raised and human connection will become a luxury item and we just can't allow that to happen. Every child deserves to have urance and caregivers who love them, raising them, Not to say that AI can't support those parents and support, know some of the development, but I think we need to be very careful because we've seen this story before Well, Dr. Suskin, thank you so much for coming on and for your great book, Human Raised. I think this is a topic that a lot of parents are really interested in right now, and so I predict you'll do pretty well Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming. It's great to see you When we come back, scandals and controversies abound in the world of prediction markets. We'll recap it all on our new segment against All odds. There's no playbook for modern work, but on the podcast Work Life, company builduilder Molly Graham talks with operators and leaders from the most well known companies like Facebook and Instacart about how they make decisions, redefine success, and navigate change as tech's impact on work continues to grow, from leadership to AI to the uncertainty of it all Tune in for convos that go deeper than your typical work advice. Find Work Life, a podcast from Ted wherever you get your podcasts. When you're at work, you never know when you'll be interrupted. But with the Dell Pro powered by Intelcore Ultra with VPro, no matter what distracts you, your laptop won't. It's battery optimized for the way you work. With built in intelligence that quiets distractions when you need to focus, your laptop will help keep you locked in, even when it's brring your dog to work day Built for those who stay in the flow, the Dell Pro for you. Dell dot com slash deell dash Running a small business means every hire matters, but finding great talent isn't easy. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro. your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you, so instead of sorting through applications, you spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, those hiring with LinkedIn are twenty four percent less likely to need to reopen a role within twelve months compared to the leading competitor Join the two point seven million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedIn. com slash hard fork. Terms and conditions apply Well, Casey, one of the other stories that keeps on giving are prediction markets. This has been a source of nonstop entertainment and scandal this year. And so we thought we would introduce a new segment where we round up all the latest news and scandals about prediction markets. and we're calling that segment against all odds Well, Casey, I think we should start this segment by looking at a recently released ad from the prediction market company, Polymarket And I'm just gonna to play this for you I could ask one question. So we start with Rick Rubin And the US wentin it off E skill of France rou Lglix Kiaas, football or soccer L Would the world be better off for years? Beneton out of gambling A series of questions appears on screens. Will borders matter in a hundred years? Do aliens exist Well Messi win again Will tradition evolve got to anya West song in the background, which is a choice People who never stop asking are the ones who find answers Now, Casey, did that ad make you want to open up an account on an offshore crypto denominated prediction market and start gambling with your savings? I find this ad so offensive. Like the way that it presents prediction markets as like first of all, like grounded in concepts of like multiculturalism and togetherness, you know,'s like It has this sort of almost like mystical feel of like if we could just all get in the same room and gamble together, maybe wars wouldn't happen anymore. You know, I mean, like that's the feeling. And I truly don't get it at all. It's very sad that they didn't feature the actual customers of Polymarket who are like troops on active duty in war zones. O like middle schoolers Yeah People in Bad Bunnyies Super Bowl Eourage Yeah. my like sort of half joke for like the official marketing tagline of any prediction market should just be betray your friends because that's the way to make money out of prediction market. You found out something you're not supposed to know get on a prediction market. Yeah. So the ad I want to see is screw over someone close to you. Yeah. well, well my second question about this is how much do you think they paid Rick Rubin and do you think they paid him in polymet credits or in dollars. I would guess it was it was in the millions, Kein. Yeah. Yeah You don't think Rick Rubin just did this one for free as a sort of testament to his commitment to craft and creativity and the artist's dream? No, Rick Rubin produced The Beastie Boys. He has not had to work in a very long time So these ads from Prediction markarkets are just inescapable. I was watching the World Cup on TV over the break and just like every other ad is now for some kind of Prediction market or gambling site. It is wild But there's also been more than advertising happening in prediction markets. I want to talk about this incredible story that David Siegel at the The New York Times recently wrote called The Donking of a Truth Machine, which is about a very silly, but Sious at high stakes controversy on poolymarket, the very company whose ad we just saw And it all boils down to this seemingly crazy question Did a guy in a video say the word Donk? So the backstory here is that there is a professional gamer named Daniel Krishkovetz, whose nickname is Donk And back in April, there was an active betting market on poolymarket about whether during the broadcast of this video gaming touram someone would say the name Donk. Now crucially, Donk was not participating in this video game tournament. So because if he was participating, it would seem very likely that at some point someone would say the word Donk. Yes. So this is the kind of sort of silly market that often happens, you know, will will this word be uttered during a CEO's earnings call or will the White House press conference say the word you know, some word And people bet on this. it's, you know, it's a time tested form of gambling on these websites But this particular market, the Dk market, went sideways because there was this very long seven hour long gaming tournament stream and it appeared that Donk was not mentioned. But then somebody on this market was like, wait a minute, at one point The commentator doing the play by play on this gaming tournament appeared to stumble over the word don't. And it sounded like Dk to this person. And bas now here's what I'd like to do. I like you to say a sense the say a senseence with the word don't, but make it sound like dononk T Don't look back in anger Okay, very good. than you. You can go on now Okay. So u This started a very fierce argument about whether this commentator had actually said Donk or whether this was just a slip and whether an accidental donk is still a dononk for the purposes of resolving this As this big fight occurs and David goes into this fight in very amusing detail in his story. But to boil it down, basically, whenever there's a contested market where the resolution isn't clear on polymarket, there is a system called the Optimistic Oracle. where Basically, the people who hold this special crypto token called UmA Can vote on disputed outcomes? at the end of the sense, I just wanted to jump out a window. I just have to say that. J learning all of that information. I truly want to forget I've ever learned that information. None of those words are in the Bible. Truly. So basically the way this works is the more of these UmA tokens you have, the more voting power you have in these disputed markets and basically, this is their way of sort of trying to inject some sort of a fair resolution criteria into this into these markets where it's not exactly clear who is supposed to win and who is supposed to lose. And the fair criteria is whoever amasses the most UmA tokens is the arbiter of truth. What a great system. Yes, it's a crazy way to run a market. You're essentially like giving the power to resolve these markets and determine who gets paid out and who doesn't to like the richest, you people on the platform, or at least the people who have spent the most money on this meaningless crypto token. Anyway So This one resolved in predictable fashion, which was that a company called UmaRocks amassed a bunch of these tokens And announced that it was going to vote no on this question of whether Donk was uttered on this gaming stream, which led to a bunch of follow on no votes. So the nos won out in the end, but it was sort of a rigged resolution. So there's even like a form of gambling and how this thing gets resolved. is what it sounds like. Yes. You can gamble on the gambling mechanism It's sort of turtles all the way down. I When I was very I don't know what it was, but when I was young, I just sort of decided that gambling was not going to be for me. And to watch the way that the world has transformed over the past twenty years to turn absolutely everything into gambling. I just like continuously feel like I'm losing my mind. Yes.ere's the thing. You will lose money. Statistically, you will this is not going to turn out well for you. And yet like now some meaningful portion of our economy is now just people who have decided to lose money that way. Why do you lose money on journalism? By a subscription to a publication At least you'll get something in return other than suering, But you won't get the satisfaction of amassing Uma tookens in order to resolve the criteria for the market on whether Donk was uttered during a video game broadcast. And that's what really counts into true. So what else is going on here against the odds?ven Speaking of polymarket, Jasey, would you believe we have another polymarket scandal? I believe it So a couple of weeks ago, there was this great investigation in the Wall Street Journal about polymarket and specifically their strategy for social media marketing. They have done for a while now these social media videos where they'll pay a creator to film a video of themselves making a bet on polymarket And the journal actually went back and looked at those bets to determine A, whether they were real, whether these bets actually happened on polymarket. And B, whether if they had been real, the people making these bets would have won or lost money. Oh I can't wait to find out. So they analyzed more than eleven hundred videos from ten creators and they found that although seventy percent of these videos showed a bet being placed None of these bets were real. These were all fake bets one hundred and eighteen of the videos showed the creators winning and the video suggested that these people would have won almost nine hundred thousand dollars in total. But in reality, if those bets had really been placed, these same people would have lost more than one hundred sixty six thousand dollars. So it's like I mean, in some sense, it's like every ad you've ever seen for like a casino where it's just like people celebrating winning. Right? justust making it rain, tossing one hundred dollars hundred bills in the air. Yes. But it turns out that you do not always win on polymarket and you are not always happy and tossing money everybody. But I love first of all, this was a really great story by the journal. And second of all, what I love about it is that it shows The actual surefire way to make money on polymarket, which is to make a video as a creator in which everyone is lying about everything and then you'll really rake it in. The other guaranteed method for making money on polymarket, insider trading. But that one doesn't play as well on camera Okay, we have one more prediction market story this week. This one was broken by our colleagues at the times, Mike Isaac and David Yaffe Belleny. This one is about meta The headline is Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app Mike and David report that after seeing the success of prediction markets, Mark Zuckerberg got the bright idea to build his own. Two people with knowledge of the matter at Meta said that Zuckerberg had recently dispatched a small team to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalsshi, where instead of wagering real money, the app would rely on a kind of video game like fake money point system But the company they reported had not ruled out the eventual use of real money, betting the app is internally called Arena and would be functioning independently from Meta's existing social networking apps. Casey, what did you make of the Meta Arena story? So this was a great scoop and I think the truth is I don't know how big of a reaction I should have to this because Meta does stuff like this all the time. Whenever a hot new thing comes out, they spin up their own version of it. Simes it works like with Instagram stories or with Reels, which was its answer to TikTok Many, many other times, it just like completely fails and flops. I don't know what is going to happen here because as we've just been talking about, these prediction markets are becoming extremely popular And I imagine that the version of it where you can't lose real money will be less popular weirdly than the one where you can lose all your money. But I suspect that if it is successful, one, they will absolutely do real money wagering. I think they're probably salivating over that prospect. And two, it will come to Meta social networking apps and you will see, you know, little carousels for this in your Instagram and your Facebook. I just I love this L like imagine you're on Instagram and you see a post of your friend with his new girlfriend and right below it, there's like a market for like, how long will this relationship last? Totally Totally announcing your engagement and that it's like what's the two year odds on this one gang. Yeah, no, that's that is so perfect. And they would absolutely do it. You know, the ethos that Meta and I know this from speaking to them is