OpenAI Bugging Incident, Are Your Devices Listening? Xbox Launches Remix Lab | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:01)

Jordi, can you get us up to speed on what's going on with Ben Wilson, the creator of How to Take Over the World, the podcast?

Jordi Hays (0:07)

Yeah, so Ben Wilson is on David Sentra by David Sentra Today. Ben very unfortunately has stage four cancer and four kids under the age of five. Sentra says, I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work, studying history's greatest leaders and what it's like getting told he's going to die at 38 He's a good guy, a close friend and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions or donations. We just want to share this at the top of our show. I've only met Ben once, but really, really amazing thinker and incredible show.

I recommend checking out the show as well.

John Coogan (0:56)

Yeah.

Well, moving on. Thank you to Ramp for supporting and you should as well. We covered at the end of the show yesterday, but pretty huge news in the world of corporate espionage. Open AI caught someone planting a bugging device by having a hidden camera behind one of its TVs. And so this was all over the timeline we discussed at the end of yesterday's show, but Abdulrahman Al-Fasan, the alleged open AI spy used an AI generated image of himself speaking at Stanford University as his LinkedIn and LinkedIn and X profiles, despite having no documented connection to the school. So, but there's a community note on this. There's a lot of people going back and forth. Apparently, his actual profiles now show the real information, but there's a whole bunch of back and forth, but it seems like it was a pretty simple device.

I saw some reports that it was a cheap Chinese-made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted in the back of a television and executive conference room, and folks are saying that it cost maybe 15 bucks, something like that. And so there's also a debate over, you know, is he an American citizen? Is he a Saudi national? There's a picture of him alongside Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, but you know, anyone can stand in line for a photo, for a photo op, but this story is developing. FBI is truly investigating this, and so it'll be interesting to see what comes of this, what the motivation was.

Jordi Hays (2:30)

Kylie Robison called it amateur hour. Chatbot account associated with the engineer's spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts about building and concealing a continuous audio recorder, adding wifi connectivity, listening remotely and encrypting its memory card, according to the complaint. The account also submitted questions containing details specific to the recovered device, including its unique network identifier.

John Coogan (2:53)

Yeah, pretty simple. Like, how do I commit a crime? Like typing that into the computer. And so not discovered preemptively, oddly enough, but seems like a pretty smoking gun if you're searching, how do I spy? How do I create a recording?

Jordi Hays (3:11)

Yeah, the whole thing is just very confusing. Like this would make it seem like he's a lone wolf, right? As if there was any type of like sophisticated operation, you would think they'd be like, don't worry about learning how to spy, little bro, we got you.

John Coogan (3:28)

Yeah, totally. That is weird, for sure.

And then the other thing that's odd is that the AI safety world, the general AI companies will be spying on each other. It's usually around, or nation states, it's usually around like stealing the weights, or, and using the weights for the frontier model for bad purposes, or stealing the intellectual property. There's been a lot of back and forth in lawsuits around intellectual property, but you don't get that from eavesdropping on an executive conference. There's no meeting between like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where they're just like, let's read off the weights to GPT-7, starting at the beginning, 0, 7, 5, 3, 2, 7, 9

Jordi Hays (4:09)

They're doing a table reading.

John Coogan (4:13)

No.

You're not going to get anything. You're going to get like strategy, like corporate strategy, which is maybe valuable if you're like trading the stock market. But it's not like you're going to listen in on a conversation and be like, okay, I know how I can just reverse engineer the next model, which is very odd. So the motivations here are complicated. Like it could be purely financial, could be something more nefarious. We'll let the FBI investigate. I think that's the photo of David Center that just slammed down. We got a new one in the Ultra Dome.