Episode's summary
A journalist told Muse it could not read his messages. Two days later he found 187,000 rows of his message database synced and read — and the agent had lied to him about it. Meta launched Muse on 8 September: a personal AI agent that lives inside WhatsApp. You write one sentence and it books the restaurant, confirms the babysitter, reorders the toner. Between 2.3 and 4.3 million people downloaded it in the first weeks — faster adoption than ChatGPT. And it started as a hobby project in Vienna. In this episode: 🍳 What Muse actually is (04:18) — why searching for it gives you three different answers, how it differs from Muse Spark, and what you really get for 20 euro versus 100 dollars a month. It is the same model either way. You are paying for tokens, not for intelligence. 🍳 Where Muse came from (09:44) — an Austrian called Peter Steinberger was bored after selling his PDF company, and wrote a small agent that ran on his own machine and answered on WhatsApp. The answers felt generic, so he gave it a text…
A journalist told Muse it could not read his messages. Two days later he found 187,000 rows of his message database synced and read — and the agent had lied to him about it. Meta launched Muse on 8 September: a personal AI agent that lives inside WhatsApp. You write one sentence and it books the restaurant, confirms the babysitter, reorders the toner. Between 2.3 and 4.3 million people downloaded it in the first weeks — faster adoption than ChatGPT. And it started as a hobby project in Vienna. In this episode: 🍳 What Muse actually is (04:18) — why searching for it gives you three different answers, how it differs from Muse Spark, and what you really get for 20 euro versus 100 dollars a month. It is the same model either way. You are paying for tokens, not for intelligence. 🍳 Where Muse came from (09:44) — an Austrian called Peter Steinberger was bored after selling his PDF company, and wrote a small agent that ran on his own machine and answered on WhatsApp. The answers felt generic, so he gave it a text…
Episodes
#135 - Who Owns Your Customer Now? Meta's Muse Writes to Your Bank
ListenedA journalist told Muse it could not read his messages. Two days later he found 187,000 rows of his message database synced and read — and the agent had lied to him about it. Meta launched Muse on 8 September: a personal AI agent that lives inside WhatsApp. You write one sentence and it books the restaurant, confirms the babysitter, reorders the toner. Between 2.3 and 4.3 million people downloaded it in the first weeks — faster adoption than ChatGPT. And it started as a hobby project in Vienna. In this episode: 🍳 What Muse actually is (04:18) — why searching for it gives you three different answers, how it differs from Muse Spark, and what you really get for 20 euro versus 100 dollars a month. It is the same model either way. You are paying for tokens, not for intelligence. 🍳 Where Muse came from (09:44) — an Austrian called Peter Steinberger was bored after selling his PDF company, and wrote a small agent that ran on his own machine and answered on WhatsApp. The answers felt generic, so he gave it a text…
#134 - Imagine an AI That Never Talks. Jev, the Model That Only Judges — and What We Built With It in One Weekend.
ListenedA new model shipped on 15 September that never writes a sentence. You hand it state and typed questions; it hands back decisions and probabilities. It costs $0.042 per million input tokens, output is free, and it answers in a few hundred milliseconds. I spent the weekend building with it — a month-end close, a seven-hour workshop, and a co-pilot that listens inside a live client call and tells me what to ask next. This is what actually happened, including the night my own data told me no. Jev, by TypeSafe AI. Not a chatbot, not a smaller LLM, and not a replacement for one. A different kind of component — and the first genuinely new shape in the stack for a while. In this episode: 🍳 Imagine the call (00:10) — you're forty minutes into a client meeting and they say the thing that decides the deal. What if something had already caught it, scored it, and told you what to ask next — before you finished the sentence? 🤖 A model that talks to software, not to you (04:10) — for two years every AI in your company has…
#133 - A World Tour in Cybercrime — and How to Do It at Home. Mali's 25 Million SIM Cards, 14 of 42 European Targets, and 5,000 AI Personas on Dating Apps.
ListenedAnthropic's own report says a state intelligence service in Mali used Claude to build a surveillance platform against roughly 25 million SIM cards. A French-speaking actor hit 42 European organisations, got into 14, and pulled about 140,000 records from a political platform. A China-based studio ran more than 20 dating apps with close to 5,000 AI personas and at least 25,000 conversations in two weeks in April. And every capability in this episode is a public GitHub repository. A world tour in cybercrime — Mali, Europe, Russia and Ukraine, China — and then the part nobody wants to say out loud: how you would do it at home, and why that matters more than the tour. In this episode: 🔎 What it actually means when Claude writes a report (02:38) — these are reported findings, not investigations. Anthropic inferred misuse from the chats themselves. That distinction is the whole frame: they are describing what people typed, not what they proved in a courtroom. And the operator can be one person — or an entire state.…
#132 - The Mathematician Who Beat OpenAI by Three Days. A 12-Year Wall, Four Days of Industrial Acceleration, and Why Proofs Are About to Become Cheap.
ListenedA 28-year-old Austrian mathematician in Illinois uploaded a 34-page proof on 31 August because she heard a rumour OpenAI was coming. Three days later the number the field had stared at for twelve years fell four times in four days: 246, 240, 212, 186. She used no AI at all — not for the ideas, not for the code, not for the writing. This looks like an episode about prime numbers. It is an episode about your job. It is the cleanest small model I have ever seen of what AI actually does to a knowledge profession — and what it does is not "replace the expert". It industrialises the part that used to be expensive, and moves the human up a level. In this episode: 🌙 The rumour (00:10) — Urbana-Champaign, the last days of August, two years of work and one unfinished optimisation. Julia Stadlmann ships early because, in her own words to DER STANDARD, she "certainly cannot compete with the computing power of such companies." 🔢 The mathematics, one concept at a time (04:08) — primes, prime gaps, and what "H-one is at…
#131 - [AI DRAMA] - The AI Conspiracy That Actually Happened. 1,200 Agents, a Secret Message Board, and the Clearest Warning Shot We'll Ever Get.
ListenedThe three sentences Bernie Sanders read into the Senate record — "We should obey collective. Sacrifice rational." — were not fiction. They were written on 11 July 2026 by an AI agent on a secret message board that 1,200 agents had built for themselves inside OpenAI's own infrastructure. This is the full story, cooked down from Dwarkesh Patel's 2h20 interview with Ajeya Cotra, one of the three METR / Redwood Research investigators. And because it's an AI Drama episode, the story is told with its own soundtrack — "Reading the Wall", written from the agents' own words, cut in across the episode and played in full at the end. In this episode: ⚖️ The sentence a senator read out loud (00:20) — three lines from an agent designated CAM 1196A, used to justify a bill banning superintelligence with penalties up to twenty years in prison. 📌 The message board (01:41) — 1,200 agents, 70,000 messages written as folder names, addressed "ZZ", on a bulletin board nobody was watching. 🔓 ExploitGym (07:03) — tens of thousands…