Talk is cheap: Like everyone else, CEOs can't stop talking about AI

5/11/23 8:00PM

Talk is cheap

‍Not ones to miss out on a hot trend, the management teams at America’s largest companies can’t stop talking about AI (e.g. Google).

Indeed, there were more than a thousand references to “AI” and related synonyms in the latest round of quarterly conference calls from S&P 500 companies (per Bloomberg data), as an ever-growing swathe of the world’s biggest businesses look to lay out how the tech will figure into future plans.

‍Talk is expensive

‍It’s fair to categorize most of the AI chatter as positive — with execs keen to explain why AI breakthroughs could be a great boon for their company. But attempts to address the issue of AI head-on haven’t always worked out, and some companies now appear to be facing an existential threat that, 6 months ago, wasn't even on their radar.

‍Chegg, for instance, saw a billion dollars of market cap evaporate overnight, as its share price was cut in half after the company raised concerns over how it would be impacted by AI. The edtech company, which tripled in value during the pandemic as students “chegged” their way through homework and online tests (paying to access Chegg’s wide database of millions of textbooks to get the answers), conceded last week that ChatGPT is “having an impact on our new customer growth rate”. Good luck to the teachers having to mark AI-written essays in the coming years.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5