Allbirds Rebrand to SmartBird

Hi, I'm Nicole Felts, the global fashion news and features director and co host of Vogue's podcast The Run Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting vo ices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Rosebury, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join head of editorial content at Vogue, Chloe Mal and head of editorial content at British Vogue Chominati, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracy Ellis Ross. The run through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. This show is supported by OutShift, Cisco's Incubation Engine . Today's AI agents operate in silos, limiting their true potential. We've been focused on building bigger, smarter models, but scaling up is just one approach . To reach super intelligence together , we need to do more. We need to scale out . And we actually have a blueprint from seventy thousand years ago. Humans didn't just get smarter individually, the cognitive revolution transformed society because we began sharing knowledge, goals, and innovation. Agents are now at that same inflection point. They can connect, but they can't think together. That's why OutShift by Cisco is building the internet of cognition , transforming AI from isolated systems into orchestrated super intelligence. By creating an open, interoperable infrastructure, Outshift By Cisco is enabling agents and humans to share intent, context and , reasoning. The cognitive evolution for agents is here. Explore the internet of cognition at Outshift. com That's outshift. com . Summer always changes how I get dressed. I want pieces that feel lighter and more breathable, things that are easy, but still put together. That's why I keep coming back to Quince . They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing, from breathable linen to soft organic cotton. They sell well made basics but without the luxury markup. Quintz goes way beyond clothing, though, custom upholstered sofas, ceramic cookwear, premium bedding. It's the kind of brand you end up recommending to everyone for everything . I recently purchased a button up shirt made from one hundred percent linen sourced sustainably in Europe. This shirt is the perfect staple to add to my summer outfit rotation . Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince. com slash uncanny for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too . That's Q NCE dot com slash uncanny for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns quince dot com slash uncanny Hey, this is Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second , if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoe, and Leia to take on, now is the time to submit them to uncannyvalley at wired. com . It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get your answers. Okay, on to the show . Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoey Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor . Today on the show, we're talking about the dysfunction in Met a's newly formed AI unit and why it's been driving employee m orale, which was already very, very low, even further into the ground. We'll also break down the recent online leak that shed light on Peter Teal's Invite Only Group Dialogue, more than two hundred names of high profile people in government tech academ, , beyond are listed in the documents as members and guests of this secretive society not to mention a look at what they talk about behind closed doors. And it's a busy week for controversial figures because we'll also get into how the former crypt ocurrency founder and now convicted felon, Sam Bankman Freed, is not only trying to make his case to get a pardon from the Trump administration, but planning a potential comeback . And a bit later in the show, we'll talk about SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor and the latest on anthropics efforts with the Trump administration to get their latest models back online. Brian, I think we have to get started with the complete mess and mayhem that is going on inside Meta because it's bad. It's bad. It's so bad. People are not happy. Just set the to the scene, company has been laser focused on trying to catch up maybe win the AI race. It has poured a ton of money into creating a new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs and they've invested a ton in AI infrastructure. They've released new models. That's been a little bit bumpy. But more recently, the company has reshuffled its staff in favor of prioritizing AI. During the company's most recent round of l ayoffs last month, about seven thousand people were transferred to work on teams focused on AI . One of these teams was Meta's Applied AI Engineering unit, which basically supports the work of the people who are in Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is the super fancy AI lab . And perhaps it's an understatement to say things have not gone smoothly at all. Just to set the scene too, so you work at Meta , about eight thousand employees were let go as part of that round, right? Yes, exactly. ten percent of the company. And then another seven thousand scattered to various AI units, including this one Meta applied AI unit , which people hate. They have been in dramatic fashion too, a source that we talked to called it, quote, the gulag. They did say that. Which seems like a bit seems a bit much. But last week we learned d anuring employee only meeting for the Meta Applied AI unit, someone interrupted the call to say that they were quote being the company's bitch . The same person then asked people leading the call to write to a specific meta executive and quote, tell him he's a piece of shit. We have both heard this recording, Zoe. Yes, we have, many times. Yes . And as much as I enjoy the interruption . I even more enjoyed the deafening silence immediately after. Yeah , that was rough. And there's two things to say about this. One is that one of the reasons that people are really upset is that the work they are being asked to do they perceive as being very menial. Meta basically took a bunch of engineers who, you know, at least in their telling to us, were working on interesting, exciting projects and said, Hey, you now work in this other team . And your projects are basically like solving problems on behalf of an AI. If an AI can't do something, you help it do it. You're like, you know, doing what essentially sounds like post training to kind of fine tune a model and improve it for specific purposes . Employees said things like it's not like this work is difficult. In fact, it is that the work is very not challenging. It's chill, but suddenly I have no purpose in life. It feels like I'm just given these random tasks. I don't have agency anymore . And the other thing about it, which you and I have talked about, is like employees didn't have a choice about joining this team . They it's people who had been joined Meta because in some cases, I'm sure honestly believed in the mission of social media apps that can connect billions of people, whether you or I believe that that higher mission still holds at Meta, people presumably were there. And now they are sort of training the machine . The further context here to Zoe, which we've talked about a lot, but is worth saying, this comes on top of meta saying, Hey, by the way, we're going to monitor your laptop usage and track what you do also in order to train AI. So if you are a human working at Meta , it suddenly feels like everything you do is just in service of the machine instead of in service of something bigger. Yeah, and people are frustrated about this for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons that this is annoying to some people at, least is that, Meta's actually doing remarkably well as a company. It's had record breaking or near record breaking quarters , but it's not having business success necessarily because of Meta's AI projects. Like it's more, you know, and it's not to say the ad s product doesn't have AI in it, but like there are other parts of the business that have been around for a lot longer that are actually doing exceedingly well. And now these employees are saying, hey , we actually were doing our jobs pretty well as seen by the fact that the company is printing money. And now you are asking us to go do this other thing that is actually causing us to somewhat lose a bunch of money and force you to do these mass layoffs. So like that situation feels very frustrating. I think it's so interesting that it's risen to a level that management has had to address it in very open forums. We reported late last week as part of Hearth trying to report on this. Mark Zuckerberg himself commented on it and one of his proposed solutions or one of his proposed morale boosting agenda items was Hey, let's do a hackathon. Yeah . Which went over, how'd that go over Zoe? Okay. How did the meta rank and file respond to the hackathon idea? Well, this was an exciting week for Wired. We got a bunch of news from inside meta. I saw that and I was like, we're going to mention this in story one, but this is actually story two. We're going to do two separate scoops on this because the hackathon its own saga. But yeah, we saw employees basically immediately jump into the comments and ratio people that were talking about the hackathon in positive turps. They were saying things like we're not a company that has a hackathon culture anymore. I simply don't have time to do a hackathon. Like I'm stressed about my actual work and you want me to go play with fun toys. Like, no thank you. People were pissed . It seems like Meta has drifted pretty clearly from the days in which Mark Zuckerberg was the hacker in chief. The management seems to not realize that, or they do realize that and they don't really care because they are in the process of laying people off anyway . They have big bets going on AI where you maybe don't need as many people in the future. You sort of trust that, hey, I can do a lot of these jobs at some point along the way. I want to go to story three though, because we did have a lot of stories on this, which is Meta did acknowledge that the communication over the re org was quote atrocious. That's from Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer and longtime high up figure in Meta . But again , the solutions that Bos suggested felt to me like they may have missed the mark internally. I don't know, I don't work at Meta, but things like capping managers at twenty direct reports each, still a lot of direct reports. Limiting the number of times employees can switch new managers a part of the restructuring, sure , and then my favorite Zoey, quote, improving micro kitchens , which is to say better snacks. Honestly, people care a lot about the snacks at big tech companies from what I have seen, so maybe this will do something, but I do think people were like, this is not the point. Like we're worried about the mission of this company. We're worried about our jobs. You're missing the mark. I think one thing this entire saga highlighted for me was just how out of touch management seem to be with the rank and file employees because you can just tell in how Bos and Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox, the chief product officer talk about AI that they're really genuinely excited about this moment. And they're like, all hands on deck, we're restructuring. Yeah, we have to lay some people off, but like the rest of you here, we have a chance to really change the world and this company. In particular, with these tools, let's go . And then you have employees being like , I'm sorry, I'm completely beaten down . I feel like I have no agency. I have no say in what is happening here. I don't find this exciting . And in fact, it feels like you're making me train tools that could one day replace me, although Meta has said that that's not exactly what they're doing, but it just feels like there's a huge disconnect. Well, even if the messaging is, hey, let's change the world. We're on the precipice of something huge, there's also the reality of meta is pretty far behind in this stuff. And so as much as you say, this is for a higher cause, there's also a little bit of a scramble aspect to it. There's a little bit of like we got to just mix things up in major ways and keep shaking things up until we finally get more competitive with open eye, get more competitive with anthropic. They haven't had that breakthrough yet. I think it's important to say they've had some good indicators, but the Muse Spark, which is their kind of latest model release, that rollout has been a little bumpy and delayed. We haven't seen some AI tool that they've put in Instagram or another app really take off . In fact, the early indicators appear to be that users aren't flocking to said tools. They don't love them so far. And so I think, you know, it's a really it's a big open question. Mark Zuckerberg spent all of this money. He spent billions of dollars hiring people like Alex Wang, courting really high profile researchers to come. And I think the results of those acquisitions and that investment has yet to be seen. So it's kind of all eyes on meta for the next few months. In some ways, they went through this with reality labs trying to make the metaverse happen and that never obviously materialized and I don't think will , this is a little bit different in that other companies are showing, no, actually you can make a little bit of a business here. At least I feel like it's a more uncomfortable position because at least with reality labs and trying to make the metaverse happen, they were out there on an island doing it themselves. Here they're in a race and they are losing. So one thing I want to add just because I think it's important that everyone knows if they don't is that inside meta employees are called Mametates. That is so important . Thank you. I just think that's, I just think if you don't know that now you do, and your life is a little bit better for you. Yeah, it explains not everything, but a fair amount, I would say. Yeah, let's say so. The recording from that meta meeting and the internal calms are not the only leaked materials that we've reported on this past week. We also read a story on numerous internal records pertaining to an exclusive invite only society co founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel back in two thousand six, their group is called Dialog . It has spent two decades declining to disclose its member list. But now the directory of people involved in the society has become a bit clearer thanks to a directory in the website's code that was first revealed by a Swiss Hactivist, we reviewed it independently as well. And it shows a lot of people you might expect, but also seeing them all there together is quite something. You've got U. S. officials, foreign government figures, Silicon Valley execut ives, so a real melange of elites attending off the record annual retreats talking about some incredible stuff that we'll get into in a second. We saw a list of guests that are set to attend Dialogue's upcoming twenty twenty six retreat includes more than two hundred people in positions of power among them are sitting Trump administration officials, two U. S. senators, six members of the so called paypal mafia, a former Middle East Chief of Intelligence, a sitting ambassador to the United St ates and a partridge in a par treaty. Zoe , had you heard of dialogue before this? What's your relationship with dialogue before this leak? I had not heard of dialogue before, but other people definitely had. I think this was on some people's radar. I think Peter Teal being involved in like a secret society where he's bringing very powerful people together did not surprise me. Certain aspects of this were really funny. Like we got some of the names of like the sessions for the twenty twenty six retreat or event as it were. And they were just they're like what you would write if you were doing a bit, if you were like making fun of what dialogue might be talking about. Exactly, exactly. Things like money does question mark happiness. That was the name of one session, bring back nuclear, navigating World War III, and then how's your sex life, which brings me to a really perplexing aspect of this, there's a whole dating component to dialogue. Yeah, apparently, there were matchmaking options for attendees where you could say your marital status or whether you're single, whether you're interested in meeting people. What I found, I mean, that's fine. I think intellectual elites deserve love too, but it's such a small group. I feel like the number of like I feel like the pool is pretty small for this event to have that be a focus. Maybe that's the wrong thing to get caught up on. No, I was getting caught up on all sorts of details like this. I was like marital status. All of you guys are in open relationships as far as I can tell. Like why do why is this even relevant? But perhaps some are not. Who's to say? It also gives a look. So what we saw was apparently they ask everyone who attends to fill out a little on a sign up form, give a prediction about the future. If you're sitting around thinking like, I wonder what these people talk about when they talk about stuff, it's really kind of what you would expect. I don't know. I had some vague naive hope in my heart that their predictions about the future were going to be like way smarter than what we could come up with . Were they? No, no, we, Zoe, we could be intellectual elites. That's the thing. Some of the forms were filled out said they foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs. It's obviously tied to AI , some predicting an AI winter, domestic terrorism, targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders. Again, it's a lot of not wrong, necessarily, but a lot of the sort of warmish takes about AI that I think have been batted around for the last couple years now ever since Chat GPT kind of took off. Yeah, so if you're wondering if all of the rich, powerful people hang out together and talk about money and controlling the world , the answer is seems like, yeah, seems like maybe. Seems like probably yeah . I do want to say like it's it is maybe not surprising. Like I feel like government, tech, business, senior people . I suspect a lot of these people are talking to each other outside of the context of dialogue . But why does it draw so much interest that this particular stew of powerful people talking to each other. Why does that set people off? I think it's a good question. I think there are versions of this event that contain other groups of people, like politicians and other types of industry that have been going on for a while and maybe are a little more known. But I do think we've had kind of a recalibration of power in the past two years or maybe just like who is really in charge and who is really powerful has become a little more solidified . And I think it is the Tech Titans that are no longer just powerful in Silicon Valley, but they're really powerful on a national political scale in the U. S., but also it seems like on somewhat of a global scale. So you're really seeing that it seems like there is, you know, for lack of a better term, like an open dialogue between all of these power players. All right , well moving on to another story that caught my attention recently. Have you heard anything? Have you thought about Sam Bankman Fried convicted fraudster in the crypto sphere recently? I've tried really hard not to. There hasn't been much reason to. Until recently. Until recently. If anyone else is my boat who has not thought about, let's I'm going to say SBF because it's easier and that's what he's known as he was convicted a few years ago of being behind one of the biggest crypto frauds, there was, which is saying something because there were a lot of big crypto fraud schemes. Basically he ran a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX . At the same time, he was running a hedge fund called Alameda Research . And what he did was he took billions of dollars of funds that people put into FTX and he moved them over into Alamata research without telling anybody , and you're not allowed to do that. And he used that money in ways that were not what people who were invested in FDX entailed them to be used. Anyway, he got a twenty five year jail sentence, convicted on multiple counts of various things. Zoey, why are we thinking about him now? Okay, so the reason that this has come up is that Sam Bingman Freed is lobbying Trump for a presidential pardon. Basically, he wants the president to come in and be like, okay, just kidding, your crimes are forgiven and oftentimes this means you can get out of prison very, very early. The reason I think this is coming up is that there's been some speculation and talk around the White House that Trump might pardon around two hundred and fifty people for America's two hundred fiftieth birthday coming up in July. This is on top of, by the way, the thousands of people attried to chance six that he had already pardoned. Anyway, go ahead. Lots of pardons. No, yeah, but this would be a new list. Sam Bakeman Fried wants to be one of those people . I would be personally very surprised if you got on that list. Of course, Trump continues to surprise at all times, but there's a lot of opposition to him getting out of prison because again, he defrauded many powerful people and they are very upset with him. I want to be clear. He's actively campaigning. He gave an interview from prison to Fox Business News hinting as much. It would be obviously ultimately up to the president, not up to me . Now, have you had any conversations with the White House or anyone connected to the president at all ? I haven't myself . But have, say, your parents or anyone that you've been in contact with at all ? I can't speak for them . I assume that you would want a pardon from the White House I always forget what his voice sounds like. And I'm sure the prison phone probably doesn't do it any favors. So he has officially filed for a pardon to the Justiceed Department's pardon attorney off ice, but the Trump administration not receptive so far , which I know you said you weren't surprised by that way. I'm a little surprised. Trump had said previously that he didn't plan to pardon SBF, and again, I think he pissed people off on both sides of the aisle. So I just , you know, not impossible by any means, but it seems like it'll be a bit of a long shot. He's also not the only person who is angling for a presidential pardon. This is also gonna be going back in your memory bank, but Charlie Javis. I don't remember the name. I do remember the crime. And tell us. So Charlie was convicted after defrauding JP Morgan Chase because she sold her student aid startup Frank to the bank for one hundred seventy five million dollars by lying about how many customers it actually had to a pretty extreme degree. I don't have it in front of me , but it was one of those things where it was like, Oh , you could have done a little lie, but you did a big lie. She was convicted for seven years. And she's got some defenders who are trying to help her out with this. Mark Rowan , who's Apollo Global Management's CEO and was an early franc investor and testified in her defense, wrote a letter, a leniency letter to the sentencing judge. Since Trump won reelection, Rowan has also directed millions toward Republican congressional committees, and he also has direct connections to the Trump administration. So she might have a better shot because it does feel like these pardons are largely transactional in a lot or at least at le orast I would say Donald Trump, I don't think it's controversial to say is a transactional kind of guy . And so this could be a reward. On the SPF front, just to go back to that quickly, the reason I was a little surprised is because on the one hand, Trump loves crypto and has sort of shown a willingness to pardon other crypto people. Like have there been a few high profile crypto pardons? Yeah, Ross Olbright. Yeah, Ros s, we had finance. Oh, right, right, right. That's even more directly crypto. Ross is more silk road drugs, but famously ran on crypto so he's shown a willingness to crypto crimes off the hook . But as you were talking, I remembered also a big part of SBF's deal was he gave a ton of money to Democratic causes and Democratic politicians, I think, not necessarily because of any deeply held political feeling, but at the time , it seemed like the winning horse to back. Right, exactly. Before we go to break, we've got two shorter news updates for you. First , SpaceX's acquisition of the AI coding assistant startup cursor on Tuesday pretty soon after its IPO, SpaceX announced it was officially closing the deal for sixty billion dollars. The agreement follows an option that SpaceX secured back in April, which gave it the right to either pay roughly ten billion dollars for a partnership or acquire the company for sixty billion dollars later in the year. They went the second route, obviously , but why , why did they do it? What was up with the timing? Zoe ? Yeah , I mean, I think this makes so much sense for SpaceX and XAI. You know, if you have a deal Anthropic, if you're using the API, Anthropic can't train on that data, but if you're, you know, a regular customer, the company can. I think there's this mad dash right now to figure out like how can we get more data to train more sophisticated models? Cursor has a lot of that data. And one thing that AI companies have found is that coding specific data is really good, not just for coding, but for like training the model and all sorts of things. So if you can get a model that gets really sophisticated in that area it has like all of these other benefits. This hasn't been an area where XAI has excelled so far. And so I think it makes a lot of sense. And seeing from that perspective, I had thought ten billion was going to be like really, really cheap. Sixty billion still, I'm like, this might end up being a pretty good deal for SpaceX. Especially when SpaceX is again worth on p aper one point seven five trillion dollars, right? And if you're making stock deals, you can afford to spend a lot. And also makes a lot of sense on the cursor side of it too, right? It is very hard, I think, these days to be a stand alone AI company if you're not one of the big ones. So Kursa and its market share have been slipping down from forty one percent in june twenty twenty five to about twenty six percent in May . So it is partly a lifeline for them, right? Like if your cursor going up against Claudcode and GitHub Co pilot, like, that's pretty tough. So better to be under the XAI SpaceX blanket . Exactlyactly, ex. I also think like this is Elon Musk's playbook a little bit. If you talk to people close to him, they'll often use the term vertical integration. Like he likes to own all parts of the supply chain. He doesn't like to with third parties unless he absolutely has to. And so now you know SpaceX controls the energy infrastructure layer. There's that AI application layer with cursor and its enterprise software layer. So yeah, I think on that level also it makes sense. And then of course, let's not forget Cursor has four young co founders , each of whom now worth about two point seven billion dollars. Good job, Cursor co founders. Love that for them. Love that. Proud of you. Enjoy dialogue next year. Exactly. Okay , one more quick hit of news. So earlier this week, we reported that Anthropic was shutting down some of its most advanced AI models,oud f Clable five and Mithos five after the Trump administration imposed strict export controls. We did a bonus episode on that earlier this week, so check that out if you haven't already. But in terms of an update, as of this recording, it seems like Empik remains locked in negotiations with the administration. The two sides have been meeting in Washington, DC this week to kind of hash out the details, but so far no agreement has been reached. Yeah, and they've been actively talking. It's they seem to be a stalemate that Zoey, I'm not sure they're going to be able to get past. We had reporting go live on Monday on the site from Hugo Lowell, who's our politics senior correspondent, that the White House's bar for letting Anthropic release Fable five back into the world is some sort of guarantee or some indication that it is impossible to jailbreak. You can't jailbreak. Right. Which is not a thing. Yeah, and we just make it just make it impossible, which we talked about on Monday, but it is that's not a promise any of these AI companies can make. Like you cannot any tech company break search any part of releasing software. There will always be someone who's able to kind of get around the controls you put in place. Yeah. And so Anthropic's argument has been since this first happened. Look , we can't guarantee no jubks. What we can do is say it is almost impossible or as close to impossible as we can to do a universal job. So you will always be able to sort of pick off little pieces of this probably. But in terms of totally blowing this model wide open and getting it to do whatever you want it to do, that we can go ahead and feel pretty common saying you can't do that. But that seems like not good enough . And again, I really we talked about this before, but if I am open AI or if I am Google , I am worried that that's the bar because I'm not going to be able to hit it. Yeah, I will say those companies have much stronger relationships with the Trump administration than Anthropic does. I, you know, haven't been in the rooms certainly, but I can just see Dario Amade not being able to speak Trump particularly well. Like you could see his advis justor' beings like just, say there's no fucking way to jailbreak it. Just say the words. And he's like, he can't do it. He's like, No, well, actually, it's, you know, technically not blah, blah, blah, like, I just think there's a great that is a great impression. Thank you. I'm so sorry. All I'm trying to say is very different personality types. I think that Dario has a tendency to be a little didactic and , you know, specific in how he talks about these things. And the Trump administration , especially right now, like doesn't appear to have a ton of technical expertise, and so they're relying on outside experts to understand how bad is bad here . The whole situation is really confusing and doesn't appear to be resolving anytime soon. Yeah, and I think it has woken up Europe and the UK a little bit to the reality that the U. S. might actually cut off its frontier models to other countries, even trusted partners, meanwhile , they're pretty far behind on having anything that can compete or even come close. You've got Mistrel and France, you've got some other things going on. But if we do get to this world where there are sort of these balcanized models, that's going to be tricky for anyone not in the US absent the rise of open source, which you've also talked about, but that's still a little bit behind. Really don't see that. Really don't see that for us. Coming up after the break, we'll share our wired tired picks for the week. Stay with us. Ever notice how the second you Google something, suddenly every ad you see is about it or you try to watch something while traveling and it's just blocked? Yeah, the internet isn't as open as we think . ProtonVPN is a secure VPN service designed for people who want to prioritize their digital privacy and security . It keeps what you do online private and lets you access the internet like it should work , open , secure, and on your terms. Unlike most VPNs, Proton is backed by strong European privacy laws and years of expertise creating a safer, faster, and more open internet for everyone. 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