What a Bug in OpenAI’s Office Says About AI Espionage: Uneasy Money

Video Transcript

So, this week, OpenAI's office, um, they revealed, I don't know if this, I don't know if they called the guy this week or whatever. Um I think I think they may have arrested him this week. So uh, OpenAI's office was bugged and um the guy put a uh recording device, so like somewhat homemade it seemed like that he had that he'd cooked up.

Um, he also asked Claude to help him build it, which is amazing.

No. Hardware Renaissance. I'm telling you.

Yeah, I was going to say Austin called this in a previous segment. He called this. He's like, people are going to be doing their own hardware.

Yeah. Okay, pro tip. This is like going to be the episode where Taylor teaches you how to be a criminal. Pro tip.

If you're going if you're going to have the AI help you turn into a hardware nerd, don't then use that information to hack the AI company. Yeah.

Come on, guys, what are you doing?

Yep.

Yeah, this is so, so basically this guy, and again, this is there's some interesting things about this and, you know, I'm so paranoid and cynical and suspicious, right? That like, I'm now like trying to work out is this guy playing 4D chess, right? So one of the things that everyone kept talking about is that he wrapped the device in toilet paper, right?

And no one would wrap the device in toilet paper. That's bad trade craft, right? Like, why would you wrap It doesn't it's not going to do anything. It's not going to hide the fact that

Toilet paper is white, by the way. And like the whole thing is so weird.

Okay, but, but, and again, this is I'm not trying to teach you how to do Espionage either. But there's something to be said for if you were a nation state actor looking retarded, and we've seen this in crypto many times, right? But looking retarded and like you've just had a psychotic break and like the agent has told you to go in and like bug the place, you're going to get a much, much, you're not going to get executed, right? Whereas if they believe that you work for like the Saudi Crown Prince and you are like a fucking guy that's been hired and planted there to exfiltrate the weights of these models for like the Saudis,

yeah, like you're probably pretty fucked, right? Um, so so this guy was the only Saudi employee apparently of Open I. Um uh and he like used his wife's account. But again, like these are things where you're like, even like a relatively smart person who could get hired at Open AI should be too smart for this. Like there's things where it's like this is it feels too dumb. Like this feels too

I have so many questions.

I don't know questions. How many people how many employees does Open I have? Like 10,000 or something? Like

I mean thousands for sure.

Thousands, right? Okay. So like let's say it's 5,000. So like the dumbest person out of 5,000. like some random people will get through the filters, right? Like there's going to be some retards at Open AI. Like they're not they can't all be smart, right? Um and so, you know, maybe this is like the dumbest guy that got through who also is trying to do espionage. I don't know. It's there's some stuff that seems a bit off on this, honestly. Um

I mean, when I first read the story or saw the headlines and hadn't dug into it. My first thought was like, wait, is this espionage or is this like someone had a crush on someone else and wanted to

He went to the, he went to the executive. Yeah, and that's room, right? Planted this thing behind the TV, you know, he he looked to see like which rooms the executives use like, he was looking for like the boardroom where they're going to be talking about whatever, right? Uh

The most important things.

Yeah, the most important things, planning like which fucking math problems they were going to break next week, like what I don't know, right? Um, maybe we should ask this guy if they broke crypto. He might know. Um, so, so, uh, so yeah, like, I mean, but again, you have to imagine that for every like fumbling, bumbling guy, right? That is doing this shit. There's got to be 10 guys that have like

crazy fucking like actual tradecraft, like

Oh, yeah. No, the funniest meme I saw was the one where it was like the NSA, Mizod and like the CCP all like spying and like the one Saudi guy with this like toilet paper implant and they're just like all like watching him like, what the fuck, bro?

Oh man. Um so so, you know, again, this is this is like if you have if you have valuable stuff in the world, people will want to steal it, right? And you know, um it's hard to imagine a more valuable uh intellectual property cash than inside of Open AI and anthropic, right? Like maybe at the CIA, but even that's like debatable right now, right? Like that the CIA has cooler shit than these guys. Like

I don't yeah. I don't I don't know if they do.

Yeah, I me either. Like genuinely, like what like they've got some shit for sure, but like these guys have things

But also the government has contracts and is using these models, right? So

So you can probably end run around it, right? Like if you can get into the yeah, get a back door into topic. So, so um, I mean, you know,

the interesting thing about this is like A, you can build your own stuff, right? You can make your own hardware as you were saying. Um

Yeah, it's like $20 on Amazon.

So yeah, so Have you have you been have you been do like are you building your own do you see this? Are you building your own spy stuff? Like what like what are you building? What are you building? How are you doing it? Like what's the yeah, give us the TLDR on on like whatever the fuck is going on.

I build all sorts of stuff, man. I build I mean like yes, I have spy devices in my house. It's I replaced my Alexa with my own Alexa. So there's a thing that's always listening and taking all of our conversations and Wow. Yeah, yeah. So dumb thing number one. Dumb thing number two, I made like a blood wallet that you have to like bleed sign. Uh so that that took like a ton of hardware. And it took a lot this was the worst. It's like

the psychosis loop of iterating with AI while it's like just one more fix, bro. If we just if we do one more fix, it's going to work. and I'm like over here like bleeding for this this wallet. I I'm making my own hardware wallets. Like I think DIY hardware is a thing. I'm going to be showing people at Devcon how to do that. so I I love it, dude. Just give the give the

set up Linux, set up SSH so your clanker can talk to your Linux. It can control your whole operating system. It's scary, but I let it rip. And then that thing has observability into my whole uh electronics bench and it can see things and I can plug things in. So it it can run the chips, it can see where I have the wiring and it can tell me how to, you know, do it better. Now if I was doing something nefarious, of course they would like track that back to, you know, the fourth thing or whatever.

That's why you that's why you run like a a GB 300 cluster with GLM 5.3 local. Um if you really

Criminal act number three on the show. Run your own local GPU. We're going to launch.

Do not send it to the cloud, guys. They'll catch you, okay?

you got a a cluster of uh, you know, I think it it's about um I I've got a group where they're a bunch of rich guys that are uh that are like, you know, crypto OGs that are hacking on this stuff. One guy, I think bought four GB 300s, it was like $2.5 million or something like that. as a cluster. But he's getting like uh 150 tokens a second using GLM 5.3.

your brain and everything is right there next to you. It's so beautiful.

It's right there. It's in his house. I'm so jealous. Yeah.

You know, I have a bunch of victims from the last decade who can't access their wallets. If this guy wants to throw some RAM at this shit, dude, like

I'm I'm not kidding.

Every time I see this every time I hear about this, I'm like,

Wow, there's power right there.

Like It's right there. And you know, it's funny because I I went down this path, right? Like I bought a um a Mac studio in like before they even cancelled like earlier this year, right? Before they 12s. Um and and you know, it's it's the gen it's the M3 uh ultra, whatever with 512 gigs of RAM. Um but the frontier models are just like that much better that it didn't make sense and you know, uh you have to run like a a quantized version of most of them because they can't fully run like a lot of them are like 800 gigs or even you know now like 1.6 terabytes of RAM. Um so, yeah, so so it just uh I don't know, it it um didn't feel positive EV

to go and buy these things. Um but I do think we are getting to the point now with like GLM, you know, GLM 5.4 comes out, let's say, right? And it's like fable 5.1 class. At that point, like I'm probably happy. I'm probably fine with that guy living in my house being as smart as they are. Um I don't know if it's worth like, you know, $2 million or whatever the fuck it would cost to to be able to run that locally, but like maybe.

It's probably not far off, right? Um, you know, uh

I mean, dude, I've just been falling back to the whatever, not chat GPT and not anthropic because I just I I'm just so annoyed with them nerfing me every second. Yeah. Like it's and it's even stuff that's like, like I'm asking about ledger, I'm asking about supply chains, but it knows that I'm investigating the ledger hack. They're just nurse me. But I'm not even asking about like I'm not even trying to be a hacker.

I'm rolling back models. I I was we were in Rocky Mountain National Park and I had Opus 5.5 getting me a ticket. They go on sale at a certain time. I'm like give me this ticket. It it like wailed through the capture, a bunch of other things that it needed to do, but it wouldn't sign up for an account on the website for me.

Yeah, dude.

So I had to drop to four, I had to drop to 45. 45 signed up for the account, handed it back to 55 and 55 did the rest.

I mean maybe that's what we doing this? Like what what are we doing here?

No, I look over and I'm like, Yeah, but that's the thing is like every time I have to like look over and be like, okay, so now you're stuck because you've decided this is a cyber or whatever. But then I yeah, I I like force it to fall back, but then even sometimes you just get a different nerf message with the cyber stuff. It's so annoying. Like it's so I've just been like, well, if I'm going to be dealing with these shitty models anyways,

might as well deal with one that's not like like I just go into it and I expect it, you know what I mean? But it's so pleasant to not have your workflows constantly sort of like nerfed and I have to like, you know, switch like my brain is in eight different places already. When I have to go and like address the fact that it's being nerfed and adjust the models and stuff.

Yeah, you like you've already spent the time prompting it and like getting it going and and then you're like, oh wait, it's not working.

Because it'll decide five minutes in that it's a cyber task.

Yes. Yeah, it's crazy. That's why like GLM 5.3 is fine. Like it's smart enough um and you know, they have fast mode as well. Uh the fast mode stuff is is pretty crazy. Like, you know, you you see these like kind of uh little indicators of what the world will be like in three months, I guess, or a month or whatever the fuck it is. Um but like the there's uh there's two models that have like ultra fast mode, like um you know, uh Astra 6, 400 tokens a second. Like it's so fucking fast. I I did a test. I was like, I'm going to just get two agents um 5.5 and and Astra to run uh the same thing. Like just build like a quick little uh test. I've got like a bunch of of little like test projects that I'll give them. This thing did it in like three minutes. It was insane.

It could be almost real time soon. Like software will be almost real time where it's building the software for you as you're like navigating through it like a

It was faster than I could reason about what it was doing. Like it was literally ahead of my ability to like figure out what it what was happening. It was crazy. So um, you know, like at some point you can get like a thousand tokens a second and it's thinking faster than than you can prompt it, right? Like it's it's crazy. So good times.

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