Neural Newscast

[00:00] Announcer: From Neural Newscast, this is Model Behavior,
[00:03] Announcer: AI-focused news and analysis on the models shaping our world.
[00:11] Nina Park: Welcome to Model Behavior.
[00:13] Nina Park: Model Behavior examines how AI systems are built, deployed,
[00:17] Nina Park: and operated in real professional environments.
[00:20] Nina Park: Joining us today is a director-level AI and security leader with a systems-level perspective on automation and enterprise risk.
[00:29] Nina Park: It is good to have you here.
[00:30] Thatcher Collins: We're looking at a remarkably dense week for Anthropic, Nina.
[00:34] Thatcher Collins: They are currently pushing deep into the Office ecosystem.
[00:38] Thatcher Collins: On Tuesday, they announced that Claude will now live inside Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint,
[00:44] Thatcher Collins: allowing the model to generate slide decks directly from spreadsheet data.
[00:49] Thatcher Collins: This follows their acquisition of Verisept, a startup that specializes in computer use agents for a reported $50 million.
[00:58] Thatcher Collins: It's a strategic expansion, Thatcher.
[01:01] Thatcher Collins: By acquiring Vercept, Anthropic is trying to solve the last mile problem of automation.
[01:09] Thatcher Collins: However, this aggressive move into specific workflows like HR and wealth management is already rattling the market.
[01:17] Thatcher Collins: Um.
[01:18] Thatcher Collins: We saw software industry ETFs drop 6% earlier this month because investors fear Claude might make specialized enterprise tools obsolete.
[01:29] Thatcher Collins: From a systems perspective, the risk isn't just technology.
[01:33] Thatcher Collins: It's the friction with legacy providers like IBM.
[01:37] Chad Thompson: The speed of that development is actually leading to a retreat on the safety front, Thatcher.
[01:43] Chad Thompson: Anthropic has formally abandoned its signature promise to never train or release a frontier model without guaranteed safety mitigations in advance.
[01:53] Chad Thompson: They're moving to a framework of transparency reports and safety roadmaps instead.
[02:00] Chad Thompson: They've stated that unilateral restraint no longer makes sense in a market defined by geopolitical urgency.
[02:08] Thatcher Collins: That geopolitical urgency is manifesting quite literally at the Pentagon, Nina.
[02:13] Thatcher Collins: The Secretary is currently threatening to blacklist anthropic from U.S. military contracts.
[02:19] Thatcher Collins: The standoff is over the refusal to allow its models to be used for autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance.
[02:27] Thatcher Collins: Restrictions he has labeled as woke AI.
[02:31] Thatcher Collins: There are reports the administration might even invoke the Defense Production Act to force compliance.
[02:37] Thatcher Collins: This is a significant operational resilience challenge for Anthropic Thatcher.
[02:42] Thatcher Collins: The CEO is holding a hard line on AI-directed warfare.
[02:48] Thatcher Collins: But the Pentagon views this as a supply chain risk.
[02:52] Thatcher Collins: If the Defense Production Act is invoked, it essentially forces the company to hand over control of its tools.
[03:00] Thatcher Collins: It's a classic conflict between corporate ethics and national security mandates,
[03:06] Thatcher Collins: and it could impact their upcoming public offering.
[03:11] Nina Park: While this policy battle rages, we're seeing new data on what these models can actually do.
[03:18] Nina Park: A consortium of a thousand researchers just released Humanity's Last Exam,
[03:24] Nina Park: which consists of 2,500 expert-level questions.
[03:28] Nina Park: The results were stark.
[03:30] Nina Park: GPT-40 scored just 2.7%, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet only reached 4.1%.
[03:39] Nina Park: These are questions involving ancient inscriptions and micro-anatomy, areas where, you know, simple pattern recognition fails.
[03:48] Thatcher Collins: OpenAI seems to be addressing that gap through human partnerships rather than just model scaling, Nina.
[03:54] Thatcher Collins: They've launched the Frontier Alliance, a multi-year partnership with Accenture, McKinsey, BCG, and CAP Gemini.
[04:02] Thatcher Collins: The goal is to embed open AI engineers directly into these consulting firms to help enterprises manage AI agents that can perform real-world work.
[04:12] Thatcher Collins: It's a clear signal that model intelligence alone isn't enough.
[04:15] Thatcher Collins: You need human-guided implementation.
[04:18] Thatcher Collins: Exactly, Thatcher.
[04:20] Thatcher Collins: The HLE benchmark shows that AI still lacks deep specialized context.
[04:26] Thatcher Collins: By partnering with consultancies, OpenAI is effectively borrowing human expertise to
[04:32] Thatcher Collins: bridge the gap between model capabilities and enterprise requirements.
[04:39] Thatcher Collins: For leaders, the takeaway is that while the models are moving into our apps,
[04:45] Thatcher Collins: we are still a long way from fully autonomous expert systems
[04:50] Nina Park: The distance between the lab and the office continues to shrink, but the friction is increasing.
[04:57] Nina Park: Thank you for your perspective today.
[04:59] Nina Park: Thatcher, any final thoughts?
[05:01] Thatcher Collins: Thank you for listening to Model Behavior, a neural newscast editorial segment.
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[05:22] Announcer: This has been Model Behavior on Neural Newscast.
[05:26] Announcer: Examining the systems behind the story.
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