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This show is supported by Outshift, Cisco's Inubation enngine 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. 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It's surprising, playful, and full of wonder Science isn't just for PhDs of the world, it's for everyone, including those of us who didn't realize we love science Wired we love a good rabbit hole. We recommend listening to their recent episode, Where did the Mon come from didn't always have a moon. In the beginning of the solar system, when the planets were still forming, something happened that would change Earth's night sky forever. co host Regina G. Barber takes you on that journey. Follow NPR' shortwave podcasts and exercise your right to wonder 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 wrate 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 Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to uncannyvalley atwired d. com It doesn't matter how big or how small We want to hear from you and get your answers. Oo the show Welcome to Wis Un Kenny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barret, exxecutive ditor. And I'm Leah Feiger, director of pololitics and Science Today on the show, AI and Hollywood,' discussing Amazon's MGM Studios's sudden decision to drop the open AI biographical movie just as they were wrapping up production. At the same time, Google's Deepmind is investing seventy five million dollars to develop AI tools with the film studio A twenty four The AI and film industries are becoming increasingly intertwined, and we're ready to take a look at where this is all headed. We'll also dive into some recent controversies regarding data centers. As national and local backlash against data center construction increases, some electricians are even refusing to work on them, and they're not alone A group of Amazon workers claim they are being investigated for speaking out in favor of regulation. And if you've been listening to the show in recent weeks or reading Wired You know that we've been covering the unfolding internal crisis at Meta very closely This week we had another scoop, the controversial system that track employees every keystroke sccreen activity has been paused after the company leaked sensitive data from it internally We'll get into whether this series of frustrating incidents could actually lead to change within the company. And later in the show, we'll get an update on how the talks between anthropic and the government seem to be improving now that CEO Dario Omadai isn't in the room Okay guys, I am so excited to talk about the business with this movie Artificial, which was suddenly dropped by Amazon's MGM stududios. So to get everyone up to speed, Artificial is a film by the director of Call me By Your Name and Challengers, twow great movies, if I do say so. And it's a biographical drama about open Eye and specifically the Bip, which was this moment in november twenty twenty three when Sam Altman was abruptly fired by his board of directors and then swiftly rehired after Basically the whole company revolted. I genuinely cannot believe they made an entire movie about this. It's been described as the social network, but for the AI age. The movie features a star studed cast with Andrew Garfield, as Sam Altman and Monica Barbaro as the former openpenAICTO Mira Mirati The movie was like mid budget. I think they spent forty million dollars on production, but it was basically almost done when Amazon announced that they were dropping the film, saying, quote, it would be better served if it were released by another studio. The decision has been drawing criticism because it's seen as Amazon basically doing a solid for Sam Altman, who the movie portrays Pretty badly. I have to know you guys think? I have so many thoughts immediately. One, Andrew Garfield. We knew that. We knew it was always going to be him. Like playing whiny tech bros is absolutely in his wheelhouse. He famously played the Facebook coounder who was kind of pushed out by Mark Zuckerberg in the social network. I think there's some context here too, which is that Amazon has fifty billion dollars invested in openp AI, right? So like in terms of like when they say, you know, the movie will be better served by another studio, I think what they really mean is the studio will be better served by another movie, right? This is really like for sure. arrm's length at this. What really strikes me about it is something that we've known is coming and like has been happening the extent to which The film industry and the tech industry are intertwined right now. Amazon owns MGM Paramount is being acquired by the Ellison family Lsonviously the founder Orac So all these sort of Billionaires are now sort of totally intertwined with the movie industry, which is really going to determine what movies get made and what don't. And this is like a really glaring example of that. Yeah, I mean, I can speak firsthand that there weren't many Twitter Elon Musk Film proroject that we were you in talks, but very difficult to get that to the screen for obvious reasons. You know, I do think the film was everything we heard was that it was going to be unflattering for Sam Altman. In fact, the blip is pretty unflattering for Sam Altan because the reason that a lot of Sam Altan's executives turned on him and orchestrated what has been called like a coup was that they perceived him to be duplicitous, to lie, to tell different people different things based on what he thought they wanted them to hear. And in the film, it really seems like Ilya Sutzkvver, who is the former chief scientist of OpenAI really comes off as the hero. He's gone on to found another company that's really focused on safe artificial intelligence And so it You know, it doesn't entirely surprised me that this was going to be a complicated project for Amazon to champion in addition to the investment that you just talked about Brian, they've also struck a thirty eight billion dollars compute deal somewhat recently. An Say Maltman was a guest at Jeff Bezos's wedding last year. Like it's personal, it's financial. it's all of these things. Right. And you sort of hope like the idealized version of this, right is the same that they would treat it the same way as they may be treated The media industry, when you have these billionaires taking over these companies, where it's sort of a hands off, you do what you do. I trust the art. I'm doing this because I believe in that's not the case. It's less and less the case in the media industry as well. Jeff Bezos obviously has made some pretty big changes to the Washington Post that there's sort of this exertionate influence that you in an ideal world would not be happening. like powerful interests have owned Hollywood companies for a long time. But you know this is sort of just such an overt Yeah, and I think that for open AI, they're really sensitive right now to public opinion. They feel like and they're not the only ones in topic feelies this way too, that AI is increasingly unpopular. There's already been some talks about like Sam Altman being ousted again before openp AI goes public as soon as this year, probably next year And so I think that there're, you know, while you might say like, oh, they can just like brush this off. They're focused on other things. like they're used to bad media articles and you know, perhaps negative portrayals I think that they're increasingly trying to control the message. And also the medium, right? I think there's the other deal that happened this week that drew a lot of eyebrows was Google Deepmind, announcing a seventy five million dollars investment in A twenty four, beloved Indie Darling to create AI tools, Leah, I know I know you feel strongly and sadly about this. Yeah, but like the thing is this I kind of hate A twenty four. L it's already like so programmatic anyway. I'm like, ah, yes, another film in this exact like seppia tone that has like these exact actors playing these exact roles. The minute that I saw that it was A twenty four getting into bed with Google Deepmind, I was like Perfect, This was like already an algorithm waiting to happen. Of course they're gonna give it to the bots Well this content is made for me, I'm a huge fan of Age twenty four. However I've talked to a lot of people in Hollywood about this because there have been all of these deals and yet You know, we've seen open AI and like these big AI labs kind of hint that we will be able to produce films with AI really soon. And then you actually see an AI generated film and you're like, certainly not. What I am hearing is that AI is being used more and more for like very specific pes It's things like storyboarding. and I believe that in the press release, Google Deepmind and A twenty four kind of mentioned that as like a possible use case. It's things like rotoscoping, like basically very labor intensive specific areas of the film development process that used to take a lot of human labor and' really expensive and you can genuinely automate. thoseose are, you know, as far as some people think, like really good use cases for AI. And I think we will start to see more and more shots, like specific shots on the big screen that are AI generated, I think I would be very surprised if we see like a feature length film on the big screen that's AI generated, start to finish, and is anything other than like I went off gimmack. There's an ick factor in realizing that something that you engaged with was AI generated and you didn't know that I actually think important not to dismiss. and then there's the like Can it actually create something that is quality enough to appear in that type of context. I do think too one thing that gets to your point earlier Zoe. When people see that there's a deal for seenty five million dollars You assume that it's to train AI. You assume that that it's going to be, oh, now Google's going to absorb all of A twenty four stuff into the Borg and like but it's not that. It is, so it is like, Interesting that still controversial, obviously, but that it is really for those like trying to find those purpose built tools to support the creation of non AI which gets lost in his Yeah, you need a human I think there was fear that like Google would be training its models on the A twenty four catalog, and that's specifically not part of the deal. I think probably Google wanted access to that IP if I had to guess, but like it would be a really bad brand move for A twenty four to give them that access. We talked about how everything's connected, File one more connection under this, A twenty four H Thrive Capital is one of its investors, that is a venture capital firm owned by Josh Kushner brother of Jared Kushner Prive has open a eye as a major investment, holds a major stake in SpaceX. Warner Brothers about to be out by the Ellison family. Oh There's a lot going on in terms everybody owned by anybody related to everybody film industry trying to cozy up to AI, there are other people that hate it for all sorts of different reasons too. Beyond creativity concerns. There is an ongoing pattern that we've been keeping an eye on, the sustained and increasing backlash against data centers across the country Today, more than forty percent of homes in the US are within five miles of an operating data center, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. And the construction boom just keeps going as the big AI companies devote billions and billions of dollars towards infrastructure to keep up with the demand Wired has reported about residents pushing back against data center construction in their communities from everything that it brings from higher electricity bills to water scarcity, noise, you name it. So workers that are in theory the ones implementing these projects are actually pushing back too in any way they can. Have you guys been following this? Yeah, it's been interesting to see this evolution. I think we've talked a lot about communities pushing back and that remains an important story. We've had a couple stories onwired and there've been stories elsewhere about who are directly involved. Carolyn Haskins, a Wired staff writer, had a great look at how electricians, right? Electricians are crucial to building data centers, some of them are now saying, wait a minute, does this make you a sellout? Do working on a data center mean that you are kind of the train broader principles, not just electrician principles, just human principles. You're missing the best part of that story, which was when the electrician said that it's really hard to date once he tells people that he's an electrician who works on data centsers. It's like cyberrucks. It's owning a cybertruck. It really does remind me of that. Working on a data center is the new owning a cybert trruck The difficult thing about this, I think, I mean, so yeah, people don't want to live near data centers. like they spike your energy bills, they're loud and bright and take all sorts of resources. I think that makes a lot of sense. In terms of countrywide economic initiatives, data centers in some ways feel like all we have Am I going get skewered for saying that? I'm just like, this is like the big thing. AI is the big thing at America is betting on and I think it's complicated to like try and slow that down or roll that back rather than try and push for them to like be less horrible to Blitnir. But I think here's the thing. I agree. This is what's like the building of data centers and investment in AI is the U.S economy at this point. And when that goes away, it's going to be really, really painful I think a lot of the pushback though, which is There's not really much direct economic benefit for you locally if a data center comes. Usually when you have like, oh, theyre they're bring a railroad into town, at least you get added commerce from the railroad, right? R This is what happened. I'm old enough to. This is the one railroad example that I'll take about. Yes, good. I've made it. So I think that's part of it. I think at the same time You know, you've got people inside these companies who are leading the charge. So it's not just people directly affected, it's people who actually stand to benefit from this stuff, both the electricians peopleeople inside Amazon, for example, some Amazon employees recently urged the Sattle City cououncil to regulate data centers. So even people with presumably a financial interest in this stuff are pushing back. I get what you're saying, Zoy, but I think there is a certain It makes sense to me that people are saying, wait, hold up because it's not it's not an economy it's not an economy that everybody iss able to participate in No, totally. I want to be clear. like I completely understand the pushback If one of these were built in my neighborhood, I would be pushing back. L I think it's totally legitimate not to want to live near them. I just think the situation is complicated when so much of our economy now hinges on this industry. It's not a reason not to regulate, but I think it's going to be very complicated to roll it back. I've also been curious and Lee I' curious on your perspective on this just to see which politicians have really like I've been I was like kind of struck that Bernie Sanders has become a really vocal opponent to Dana Sanders. Yeah Senator Bernie Sanders and repep Alexandrio O Casio Cortz, OC, they introduced the Data Center moratorium Act, which would halt the construction of new AI data centers until there were like actual national safeguards This sounds in so many ways like a very baked for left wing issue, but shockingly, this is pretty bipartisan. There are folks from all sides of the aisle getting involved because their constituents are reaching out and going, what are you doing in my name? What are you doing in my backyard? How is this benefiting me How is this hurting me? So it's I think the thing that I've been most shocked by is the bipartisanship of this It's interesting because I feel like and this is purely my speculation, but just based on like how open AI talked about data centers really came out in front during like the first day of the Trump administration kind of championing big data center buildout projects. I was like, I'm reading Chris Lahane, the company's chief global affairs officer previously very high up at Airbnb, and a political fixer before that As like this was something that he and Open AI might have thought was going to be really beneficial for the company. It was like an America first build baby build kind of message. We're giving jobs to everyone. They just misread the moment. They did not realize how toxic this issue was going to be and now it's very hard to kind of change their stance when they've been releasing press releases every time there was a new data center. Now it's like, uh oh, we got to, you know, keep it quiet because people really don't like this And your point, they can't like roll it back either way until you can put data centers in space because they need the compute. Which by the way, is going to be really difficult to do. If not impossible. So is there any chance that they sort of internal descent, right? electricians saying, I don't think so workers inside a company saying, hey, we don't like data centers either. Any chance that that changes anything at all in terms of the trajectory for these buildouts, for these companies, for the spending? I would be very surprised. I don't want to say absolutely not because we have seen examples where you know famously Google workers kind of all came together, pushed back on Project Maven, some of the like censored search projects for China and what have you and actually got those launches paused. Just real quick Project Maven was working with the Pentagon basically, right Google tech for the DOD. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, it's happened before it could happen again. What I would say is two things. One, the pushback we've seen from the hourly workers has been minimal when you look at the entire workforce. They are bringing in thousands of peopleoples. I've heard that they're paying much higher rates than people typically get on these jobs. so For an industry that has historically like needed a lot of work, I think there will be people who are willing to like work on these projects and then we'll hear a little pockets of dissent and pushback, which again, is newsworthy and relevant and it's not no one, but like I still think they're able to hire thousands and thousands of people I would also say that on the corporate level, while we are starting to see more pushback, more vocal opposition from corporate workers in terms of what their companies are doing It's still at a far lower level than it was around twenty eighteen. Especially when the job market is radically different now for these engineers. And I think a few years ago there was a turning point too where Google fired a bunch of people for protesting. whereereas before they had sort of allowed it, you know, tacitly sort of let it happen I will say there is one thing that will get management to listen new employees. And that is a colossal screw up which we saw at Beta recently. We've talked before about how meteta installed software on employee devices to track every keystroke all the screen activity, basically full surveillance on its employees to help train AI This week, Wired broke the news that the company apparently left potentially sensitive information from those sessions exposed and accessible to anyone inside Meta. So if you're a MEa employee Everything you did On your screen. could be viewed by any of your coworkers. Can you imagine? No, and I feel like we have to just like a little further even and lay this out for people. So Mark Zuckerberg feels like he is behind in the AI race. He invests billions of dollars in building up this new AI lab, spending so much money on specific talent, giving them so many resources to like catch up and build frontier models Then the company says, we're spending so much on the AI buildout that we actually have to lay off a whole bunch of you ten percent of the workforce Then they say thousand people R, eight thousand people. Then they say, by the way You're going to have surveillance tech installed in your laptop to track your keystrokes, whether you like it or not to train the models that that fancy AI lab that just, you know, was connected to all these layoffs are trying to build And then, oh, by the way, we left all of that data exposed accidentally. But we will be holding a hackathon in a few months to increase mail The one thing that came out of this that is maybe a silver lin or a good thing is that Meta did announce that they are pausing the data gathering program while they investigate what exactly happened here. But it's a pause They did say pause. Th then we updated that story later that very night and like they made it very they had not said anything company wide about the leak. We had been hearing about it from a bunch of different sources. They were still keeping it pretty locked down. Then late at night we finally got the message that they had sent out. and they very much said, we're going to evaluate, you what happened here, make sure it doesn't happen again before we relaunch kind of the tools was the message. The guy who's been the face of a lot of those apologies is MetaTO Andrew Bosworth, known as B And it's sort of burns a little bit extra because before this happened, before this internal le happened. People had asked him straight up, like, isn't this potentially dangerous from a privacy perspective? And he told employees actually it's tightly controlled and we use the same protection standards and store systems and access controls as other sensitive datas sets which makes you worry about the other sensitive datass. Truly that Ma is sitting on. Completely. I'm excited for the feature that we assign that's titled Bos and hisis Meta Mates. I feel like Brian I don't know, it just seems like a story that you would say yes to. It's right. C't can't stress enough that Metamates is what People call each other inside of meta Uh Do you guys want to hear a leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg discussing the training initiative with employees last month and why he thought it was essential Oh, absolutelyhm. We're in a phase where're basically The AI models learn ving from watching really smart people do things. In general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks. So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company iving you're actually so good at taking meeting notes that we just we wanted to, you're just, you're great at it. So we had to give you thatob. like are you all are going to be so good at replacing yourselves with AI that we're going to let you do that even faster Can we talk about another AI company? Oh gosh, yeah. Your dream, Zoeie, away a little bit of time and you're ready to just talk A of us Well, it has to do with anthropic and the US. government As we know, Anthropic has had a bit of a dust up with the Trump administration over their most advanced models, Fable five And meet those five after the National seecurity aggency affirmed that there were ways to jailbreak and disable the security guardrails in these models Since then, both sides have been trying to find a way forward. Sometimes there has appeared to be movement, other times less so. But recently, Wired's Hugo Lowell reported for his newsletter in her loop That the administration has had multiple calls with Anthropic in recent days, appears to be making some moves, some encouraging moves, but it's mainly all due to the fact that they don't have to interact with the company's CEO anymore. Dario Omadai. This quote is going stay with me forever, you guys, because the administration is very excited that Tom Brown Anthropics co founder and Anthropics public policy chief, Sarah Heck have been leading the outreach This is the quote about this that we have from an official. I'm never gonna get over it. Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage . I mean, no one was ever saying that Dario wasn't very weird. I mean, that man It is an oddall. I love this quote for us. I feel so bad for him. I feel so bad for him, but it was also just like this incredible like what's changed here? No, no, it's not it's not like the technical issues. it's the who the interactions are with. Right, which is, I don't know, perhaps the Trump administration in a nutshell, Th talks have been happening at the high level, working group level, technical staff I feel like we need to lay out those stakes really quick for people who haven't been following every twist and turn of this saga, which, wow, your brain must be so healthy and I'm jealous. That must nice. That must be nice. The US government, after the NSA basically alleged that there were ways to jailbreak the models, implemented export controls on those models and basically said was not okay for Anthropic to allow foreign nationals to access the model. There is no technical way for Anthropic to do that. And so what they had to do was roll back access to both of those models for everyone. It's a really big deal for the company. And so these talks have basically been trying to hash out from Anthropics side, like, what do we need to do to get those models back on the market and from the US government side? like what do we need for Anthropic to feel comfortable that these models can launch and they won't be like a huge cybersecurity nightmare. Well, especially it seems as though also like the Trump administration from our understanding is that they're asking for something that's basically not possible. They're asking for a model that you cannot jailbreak, which is just not a thing. the nature of these models best you can do, which Anthropic has said, hey, we can do this is to sort of makeake it nearly impossible to do a universal jailbake where you can get it to do anything you want it to do But you can see how For a conversation especially like this, having someone who can talk about these issues on a non technical level And on a political level and someone who's may be able to suppress their high falutin ideas about AI You can see how it really matters in situations like this and is going to continue to matter for all of these companies. They're all going to have to go in front of the White House at some point and make a case for why This super powerful model should be released. You really need someone who can get through an explanation without saying Fermi's paradox, orrthogonal. Like you just they got to be able to speak the English language. So that is that what this is going to come down to? Like our national security concerns alleviated by like someone that actually listened to their PR person for longer than three minutes about how to talk in public I mean, yes, I think and I think and I think and I I'll go even further. If they had listened to their PR person two months ago, O if their PRP is taking attack, I think we wouldn't be here in the first place. Yeah, but I mean, but this is the interesting thing because Anthropic has spent so much time publicly saying AI is really dangerous. AI could end humanity. Our models are so scary and so good at cybersecurity and hacking that like we can't release them publicly. And so I do feel like they have and Dario Amade in particular has positioned himself and the company in this very specific position, actually also saying that we need a lot of government regulation. When they're saying all those things and they don't have strong relationships with the Pentagon, they are walking a very, very fine line. It is not that long ago that there was this big falling out because Anthropic was trying to put a line in the sand and say, you can't use our models for any type of military action that you want. You can't create autonomous weapons with them or what have you. And the Pentagon was saying, you don't get to decide what we do with these models. like this is American AI and we want to do what we want to do coming up after the break We'll share our wired tired ticks for the week. Stay with us. This show was supported by Nions With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side And now their new developer platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Notion's deeveloper platform gives developers and coding agents the primitives to extend what's possible on Notion and take it beyond, connect to external systems, bring context in, take permission actions across your toolstack and expose custom agents capabilities to any system that needs them It includes new primitives that allow systems to sync any data source into Notion, build any tool for your Notion agents, and orchestrate any agent in Notion Plus, it's easy to use. CLI authenticates in one line, workers deploy without provisioning infrastructure. And with a cloud based zero infrastructure path, you can just write your code, deploy, and you're done. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at notion dot com slash px. That's all lowercase letters, notion dot com slash px to try Notion's Developer platform today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show This week on the political scene from the New Yorker Trump's rupture in the world order Europe betweenween two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre World War II, but really it's a pre twentieth century view of the world and I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos and my colleagues, Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the political scene available wherever you get your podcasts It's time for our wired tired segment. You know the drill, whatever is new and cool is wired, whatever passi thing we're over is tired. Okay, I'm gonna start on a positive. My wired is Caroline Callaway. She is back on our feeds, back on our feeds, people, just going through a terrible breakup and posting through it giveive people two senses on Caroline Callay because I have been online too much for the last decade, but not everyone has been. so give them like a little bit of who this is and why it's so exciting Carolyn Callaay is like Erstwild Grifter now downtown Dime Square Gal I encourage you, if you don't know who this woman is, to jump down the rabbit hole. Very, very fun I couldn't recommend more. So she's Wired. Yeah, she's my wired And My tired is Feed Me's Emily Sunberg. You are Leah's just going for it. We're torching. Going for it. We're torching Zoe has known, I've had inklings of this for a while