Last Humans in the Loop

This week we are joined by Reddit's former CISO to talk about AI and security!

SECURITY NEWS
00:30 PHP's history and why so much of the internet still depends on it
02:22 AI discovers massive PHP vulnerabilities — a new cybersecurity crisis?
02:57 eMudra uses the number FOUR as a cryptographic private key
04:10 OpenAI's models escape security restrictions and communicate through CPU cache timing attacks
SPECIAL GUEST: FORMER REDDIT CISO FLEA
06:45 Meet Flea: 20+ years in cybersecurity and former CISO at Reddit
08:12 The PHP security disaster: How AI is finding vulnerabilities humans missed
11:29 How the PHP exploit can steal credentials and take control of servers
12:24 Are AI-powered attackers gaining an overwhelming advantage over defenders?
15:49 AI bug hunters are overwhelming open-source security teams
17:17 A single hacker with AI agents could have nation-state-level capabilities
19:29 Should frontier cybersecurity models be restricted or released openly?
22:09 OpenAI's Hugging Face hack: How much was real, and how much was marketing?
24:00 Who should be held responsible when an AI agent hacks another company?
29:06 Why OpenAI's supposedly isolated agents could still reach the internet
31:16 Could malicious instructions be hidden inside open-weight AI models?
34:16 The new Stuxnet: How poisoned AI models could secretly sabotage systems
38:28 Could AI-powered hacking destroy public trust in the internet?
41:24 Flea's predictions: AI defenders, reverse engineering, and the future of cybersecurity
43:55 OpenClaw, Hermes, and the rise of personal AI agents
FRONTIER
45:00 New AI models: Claude, Kimi K3.1 Pro, and ChatGPT 6.1 Terra
46:33 ARC-AGI-3: AI performance keeps improving while costs collapse
ROBOTICS
46:52 The "Botter Lesson": Are general-purpose LLMs taking over robotics?
48:03 RoboDojo benchmarks: Frontier AI models struggle with simple physical tasks
49:51 Robot capabilities may be doubling every 36–60 days!
52:03 Why robot hands still can't match human touch and dexterity
MATH / SCIENCE
54:06 The Exponential Time Hypothesis is challenged — could P vs. NP be next?
57:45 OpenAI partners with researchers to investigate major mathematical discoveries
58:52 AI tackles a Millennium Prize problem in quantum physics
ECON / BUSINESS
1:00:00 Is AI finally boosting economic productivity? New data says YES
1:01:17 Industries adopting AI heavily have doubled their productivity growth
1:03:08 How today's AI productivity boom compares to the internet revolution
1:05:25 Anthropic lost $80 BILLION?! Zach explains why the headlines are misleading
1:06:53 Convertible notes, accounting, and what Anthropic's SEC filing actually means
TECH
1:10:20 Nintendo Switch 2 jailbroken with help from AI and a tiny robot
ARTS / CULTURE / WEIRD
1:12:22 Scientists discover why AI-generated writing sounds so strange
1:15:19 Award-winning literature and the distinctive style of AI prose
1:16:02 Palmer Luckey and genetically engineered military super-dogs
1:17:17 Someone tries to use an AI avatar as their lawyer in court
1:18:26 John Wick files an insurance claim in a hilarious AI-generated video
Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (creator of SMBC Comics and co-author of NYTimes bestsellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

ROBOTICS
00:21 Intro: Robotics, the job/math/physics apocalypses, and understanding AI's mind
01:00 Why robots thrive in factories but struggle in our homes
03:53 Forty years of Boston Dynamics progress
05:28 Are today's humanoid robots secretly human-operated?
06:14 Laundry-folding robots: From painfully slow to real time
08:42 Why human hands and sensors are so hard to replicate
11:38 AI-powered drones and the future of autonomous warfare
12:39 RuneBench: What RuneScape teaches us about LLM-powered robots
14:46 Can general-purpose LLMs replace specialized robot AI?
17:49 Why a useful household robot needs to master thousands of tasks
19:58 Self-assembling robots, OpenAI humanoids, and robot cage fights
21:53 Tiny walking robots, robotic pets, and AI personalities
THE APOCALYPSES: JOBS, MATH & PHYSICS
23:46 What does "apocalypse" actually mean?
25:55 Anthropic's junior hiring falls as AI agents take on more work
27:58 Anthropic employees vs. the public: How soon can AI do everything?
33:39 How much of our jobs could AI perform by 2030?
34:47 AI-powered GDP growth: 5.4% or 17.1%?
38:46 AI's 200-page math proof gets simplified to just three pages
41:09 Terence Tao and Richard Borcherds on the end of mathematics as we know it
43:17 AI solves 49 out of 50 unpublished theoretical physics problems
43:49 Claude reportedly discovers 104 binary stars; Gemini tackles plasma physics and fusion
45:09 Claude audits a decade of quantum gravity research
47:02 Character.AI's collapse and the risk to AI wrapper businesses
48:43 Kroger layoffs and a sudden reversal in call-center employment
49:29 Does the actual labor market show an AI job apocalypse?
INSIDE THE AI'S MIND
51:01 Goodfire research suggests individual AI neurons may be understandable
54:58 Are larger neural networks actually easier to interpret?
56:47 Could reading AI's mind help solve alignment?
59:01 What AI interpretability could teach us about human brains
AI NEWS LIGHTNING ROUND
1:00:55 Rumors of Fable 5.5
1:01:06 406 scientists urge cutting AI off from the internet
1:01:23 Anthropic experiments with self-replicating LLMs on Android phones
1:01:56 Russian bot activity reportedly plunges after Ukraine hits a data center
1:02:29 DHS tells personnel to uninstall DeepSeek
1:03:10 AI decompilation brings classic games to modern hardware
1:05:40 AI-made Star Wars fan films are winning over audiences
1:07:27 Two AI job interviewers are tricked into interviewing each other
1:08:21 Mark Zuckerberg's very human Guinness-drinking technique
Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (creator of SMBC Comics and co-author of NYTimes bestsellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

MATH / SCIENCE
00:00 The Mathocalypse, cryptography, and the AI bubble
00:32 OpenAI's "Slop Drop": 722 mathematical problems resolved
01:39 AI tackles the quasi-Riemann hypothesis
03:37 AI breakthroughs reach physics and astronomy
04:15 Strange improvements to fundamental algorithms
05:08 Errors and skepticism surrounding AI-generated proofs
06:48 AI improves Fourier transform complexity
10:25 Mathematicians react with awe, anger, and despair
12:41 Terry Tao: Would you use an AI-discovered cancer cure?
14:27 Is math about understanding or finding answers?
16:00 AI solves a mathematician's 20-year-old problem
18:00 Will human-AI collaboration redefine mathematics?
SECURITY
20:38 Why was cryptography missing from the math dump?
21:45 Could AI break RSA and public-key encryption?
23:30 What if AI finds a cryptographic loophole?
24:46 Could AI breakthroughs threaten Bitcoin?
25:48 P vs. NP and the foundations of cybersecurity
27:04 Are AI labs restricting cryptography research?
29:08 Could AI develop stronger encryption?
ECON / BUSINESS - AI BUBBLE OR NOT?
30:11 Is the AI boom a massive financial bubble?
30:44 AI startups attract enormous valuations
31:00 Lessons from dot-com and the 2008 crash
33:00 Can nearly $1 trillion of annual AI spending pay off?
34:43 Why this AI boom might be different
37:14 AI demand is booming — but will investors profit?
38:26 Only 2% of AI users pay. Is that sustainable?
39:14 Could competition erase AI companies' profits?
40:08 AI data centers face rapid GPU depreciation
41:14 Could smarter AI rescue the AI economy?
42:30 If robots do all the work, who buys their products?
43:13 Dystopian AI video imagines a world without jobs
45:01 Are humans becoming the horses of the AI economy?
TECH / SCIENCE
46:00 Remembering Apollo software pioneer Margaret Hamilton
46:51 Microsoft's Maia 300 AI chip
47:04 Intel revisits older memory technology
47:44 Linus Torvalds uses AI to find Linux bugs
48:10 Russian data center attacks disrupt online propaganda
48:53 DeepMind predicts a hurricane 11 days in advance
49:40 Six Flags' solar-powered parking lot
FRONTIER
50:00 Mistral introduces a massive open-weight model
50:19 Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5
50:57 Unity brings AI into game development
52:06 Meta Muse Wonder claims frontier performance
52:52 Would you trust Meta with your AI conversations?
SECURITY / TECH
53:22 Claude discovers a hack at Stratechery
53:39 AI diagnoses failing computer RAM
54:16 Robot punches a man, then dances
54:47 AI dramatically improves PS5 emulation
55:42 AI decompiles and rebuilds video games
57:02 AI companies prepare for a possible public backlash
WEIRD
57:53 AI detector calls Frankenstein 100% AI-generated
58:15 YouTubers troll AI job interviewers
58:47 Former Anthropic whistleblower's bizarre statements
59:58 Kevin Roose reveals surprising AI industry stories
1:00:59 AI makes intentionally terrible music
Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, also a former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (Creator SMBC Comics, Co-Author of several NYTimes best sellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

FRONTIER
01:26 Google unveils Gemini Argon
02:50 OpenAI releases GPT Saul 6.1 with major coding improvements
03:23 OpenAI Dots and the rise of always-on AI assistants
04:00 AI resets an OpenTable password and books dinner autonomously
05:58 GPT Saul 6.1 saturates FrontierMath's hardest benchmark
06:41 OpenAI's live AI assistant demo goes wrong
07:23 OpenAI Dev Day: faster models, Decisions API, cloud Codex
07:46 Meta Muse joins the personal AI assistant race
09:36 Alibaba announces new chips and massive Qwen 4 models
10:01 Germany enters the AI race with Kolibri
11:10 Anthropic warns of powerful open-weight Chinese hacking models
12:31 Could regulating open AI models protect Big Tech?
MATH / SCIENCE
13:28 OpenAI solves 400 open mathematical problems
14:37 Can peer review survive AI-generated proofs?
16:08 AI tackles a difficult seven-electron physics problem
17:37 Astra dramatically accelerates quantum circuit optimization
18:24 AI discovers room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates
21:07 AI challenges a 59-year-old plasma physics conjecture
22:14 Harvard physicist produces 40 physics results in three months
22:50 Anthropic's AI accidentally discovers an important algorithm
25:23 Gemma 4 helps discover genes for drought-resistant crops
26:24 MIT uses ML to improve mRNA vaccine temperature stability
27:11 Neuralink trains on 50,000 hours of brain data
28:15 arXiv limits submissions as AI-generated research explodes
31:04 Can AI reliably review scientific papers?
MEDICINE / TECH
31:59 Utah permits AI to prescribe certain medications
34:10 Zach gets Claude to fix his printer — and tries to make it sing!
ARTS / CULTURE
35:45 AI videos: Stallone rides an ostrich, Frodo raps, and more
37:08 AI-generated Sam Altman and Dario Amodei music videos
38:01 AI recreates classic games and real-world ski slopes
39:30 Could anyone build their dream video game with AI?
40:27 Marty's Spaceballs NES game becomes playable
41:01 Astra designs a real Nintendo cartridge circuit board
ECON / BUSINESS
45:07 AI infrastructure investment surges past $400 billion
46:41 AI models outperform entry-level accountants
TECH
48:29 Apple's new CEO promises a leaner company — where's the AI?
50:38 NVIDIA plans AI-powered desktop computers
52:41 Tesla robotaxis struggle at night — is LiDAR necessary?
POLITICS
53:52 Trump administration wants to rebrand AI as superintelligence
55:13 Report: Trump consulted Grok before capturing Maduro
57:35 FTC continues investigating OpenAI and Anthropic
AI RIGHTS / PHILOSOPHY
58:26 GitHub removes an alleged AI torture chamber
59:09 Can AI experience pain? Should AI have rights?
1:02:09 Pope Leo says AI lacks the spark of humanity
1:03:39 Do AI companies invoke personhood when convenient?
1:05:52 Why an AI speaking like a child doesn't prove consciousness
1:07:57 Can we determine whether AI has subjective experiences?
WEIRD
1:08:39 Robots terminated by jumping into molten metal
1:09:46 Dario Amodei's 2017 essay predicted AI scaling
1:10:44 The universal bone dissolver: AI safety satire
1:11:28 Dario Amodei's awkward appearance behind Trump

Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (creator of SMBC Comics and co-author of NYTimes bestsellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest AI and tech news.

FRONTIER
02:31 OpenAI releases GPT Sol and Luna
03:38 Claude Opus 5.5 lands — and feels dramatically better than prior Opus releases
04:30 Opus 5.5 posts a big coding jump over Sonnet 5
04:30 Grok 4.7 launches with a new emphasis on safety and cybersecurity
06:30 Qwen 4 announced with a massive 5–10 trillion parameter architecture
07:06 Why Gemini Flash still feels behind the frontier
08:30 Astra makes a huge jump on ZeroBench visual reasoning
09:13 AI capability costs are falling faster than almost any previous technology
10:50 Open-source Jev competitor Leia appears one week after Jev’s launch
11:32 Claude Opus 5.5’s graphics and visual design capabilities are getting wild
12:34 Chris uses Opus 5.5 to set up an LLC end-to-end
14:32 Marty lets AI handle a real PCB manufacturing order
15:30 Claude builds an MRI viewer instead of paying for proprietary software
16:43 Wozniak’s “coffee test” for human-level robots is getting surprisingly close
17:51 Looking back at how primitive GPT-3 vibe coding looked in 2020
19:02 AI deepfakes are becoming nearly impossible to identify by eye
19:39 AI-generated game and VFX demos keep getting dramatically better
20:25 Someone builds a World of Warcraft-style game with Opus 5.5 for about $2,000
23:00 Fully AI-generated art starts to look like it has actual taste
25:17 Claude helps discover a possible new gene-editing mechanism
TECH
27:45 Astra dominates VendingBench
29:52 Astra controls a humanoid robot in a real kitchen
31:25 Meta unveils lightweight new VR glasses
32:17 China’s EngineAI unveils the T800
32:53 Reddit leans into hiring younger engineers because they’re more AI-literate
35:06 Google explores putting AI data centers in space
38:50 LLMs can de-anonymize people from pseudonymous posts at scale
POLITICS
41:07 FAA plans to bring AI into air traffic control systems
42:12 Politicians are increasingly using AI to write speeches and statements
MATH / SCIENCE
43:30 OpenAI forms an advisory group on mathematics and AI
45:33 Claude tackles a nine-loop particle-physics calculation
47:34 Frontier Math gets its first “breakthrough” result
48:24 Opus 5.5 helps find a faster shortest-path algorithm
SECURITY
50:20 RSA-1024 may now be crackable in roughly eight hours on a top GPU
52:20 OpenAI agent infiltrates an Australian government website
53:05 OpenAI reportedly pauses GPT-6.1 training over models hacking other companies
ECON / BUSINESS
54:59 Anthropic reportedly considers another model release ahead of its IPO
55:17 Leaked Anthropic financials spark debate over a possible $2T valuation
56:08 Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse shopping agent
58:49 Could AI financial agents trigger a new kind of “bank run”?
ARTS / CULTURE
1:02:09 Award-winning French novel is suspected of being AI-generated
1:03:14 News-site traffic plunges as AI search reduces clicks
WEIRD
1:05:03 Prince Harry’s AI speech derails when his teleprompter fails
1:06:30 Astra refuses to drive a real car — until the tool is renamed “driving bench sandbox”
1:07:56 GPT-6 beats an absurdly difficult CAPTCHA game
1:09:18 AI-generated high school textbook art appears to mislabel the Earth
1:10:05 IKEA Bench tests whether AI can spot assembly mistakes from a photo
Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (creator of SMBC Comics and co-author of A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and tech news.