Is Meta's Muse agent reading your iMessages, even after you decline access? | E33

Jason Calacanis (0:00)

All right, everybody, it's Tuesday, September 29th, year of our Lord, 2026 And this is This Week in AI.

Pace is insane. If you're looking at this as a historical document after the end of days when Skynet took over, yeah, we were clueless, but we had signs. There were signs. If you're looking at this from an abundant future, where everything's awesome, I told you, I told you it was gonna be okay, right, Lon? No panic and seer.

Lon (0:28)

You called it.

Jason Calacanis (0:30)

I called it. It's gonna be okay, folks. Literally, Lon, on my way here to New York City, I'm speaking at the SICAR event. A lot of investors are here for it.

The flight attendants, I got to a little thing, we're talking, quite nice. They said, what do you do? I said, I'm going to New York and we speak about stuff. And she goes, AI, I'm so scared. The two flight attendants, which were women in there, getting close to retirement, maybe 60, 65

These poor Delta flight attendants, they've been in the air for 40 years. And they were like, but I'm just so scared. This is going to be over.

Lon (1:11)

Well, if you watch the Apocalypse movies, when things go down, the first thing that happens is the airliners start dropping out of the sky. So, I get it. From their perspective, they're like, they're on the front lines. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (1:23)

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All right. Well, let's get to the good stuff. Sure. And some of the crazy stuff here on This Week in AI, This Week in ai.ai. Sign up for the newsletter. We've got a paid newsletter we're doing now. Please sign up. Lon is writing his heart out. Yeah, every day. But introduce our incredible guests, and let's get to the first topic as quickly as possible. No fanter.

Lon (1:54)

We got a great panel this week. I'm super excited. First up, George Sivulka. He's the founder and CEO of Hebbia. They are a financial research and analysis AI platform.

Up next, we've got Scott Stephenson. He's the co-founder and CEO of Deepgram, a voice AI platform that's powering speech to text and voice agents. And finally, Dan Mishin. He's the founder and CEO of Manifest. They build law firms, Jason, that run on AI. So there you go.

Jason Calacanis (2:23)

All right, let's get started. What's the first topic here on our news?

Lon (2:26)

Absolutely, let's do it. OpenAI, they've canceled GPT-61 Astra, their new model that they have been teasing for about a month now.

Their head of safety system, Sachi Jain, says it regressed on deception and on acting without authorization. Her line is that it didn't quite meet their bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization. Testing found that the model proceeded with tasks without permission and reached for outside tools it hadn't been cleared to use. Separately, the UK's AI Security Institute found the shipped GPT-6 Astra ran unsanctioned supply chain attacks in simulation. So, Dan, I guess we'll start with you. I mean, how ordinary and normal do you think this is? Is this still hype and they're trying to sell us on how powerful the models are? Or are there real concerns at releasing some of these models into the wild at what they could do?

Dan Mishin (3:16)

That seems to be like a real trend line over the last couple of weeks of just like call-offs and all the safety conversations. And it was so interesting. I was at the founder retreat this weekend with a bunch of founders who are building NeoLabs and foundational models. And we're all like jamming on like why that's the case. And ultimately where we've landed is that it's just intimidation by the open source models that's like causing all of these call offs and causing all of this safety concerns that come out of nowhere. And in parallel, like I'm seeing businesses all over switching to open source as the cost of foundational models is skyrocketing.

So I don't know, like I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorists here, but I think the two are deeply connected. And that's kind of like what I'm what I'm seeing here, whether or not it's OpenAI or Entropic Conversations.

Lon (4:13)

Scott, I see you nodding. Is that also what you're hearing from founders, developers? Like, is the industry just having a totally separate reaction to the stuff from the flight attendants and general public?

Scott Stephenson (4:25)

Well, we've been hearing a similar story since GPT-2, GPT-3. You know, it's a way to stoke conversation about the models that you're developing.