00:43:06 · Jasmine Sun
[00:43:06] S2: I mean, one of the crazier news stories from this week that I thought about was that startup Cathedral made ex DogeSafir, so our nation's best and brightest, literally hacking into Anthropic's Slack and IT systems. And Anthropic is supposed to be the ones that are building the best cyber defense internal models that they can't even release to the public, and yet their own technical systems were not secure enough to be able to block this crew of, like, young startup guys from accessing trade secrets in their Slack. And so I don't even think... You know, before I would have thought, like, man, some, you know, municipal governments are gonna really struggle if they get hacked by, some people with an open source model. But now it's actually, like, the best and most AI forward companies in the world are also as vulnerable. So
00:43:55 · Max Read
[00:43:55] S1: that's a great point. It's gonna be a very long few years, I think. I mean, I think the argument... I I read a great piece that I wanna recommend, by Joshua Saxe, who's a former Meta, AI guy. And his argument is basically that we are... As bad as it seems, we are still in a in a sort of defenders window... A defender dominant window that even though there's all these vulnerabilities being discovered, it in fact... I mean, his his point, which I admire because I think it's true, is that it takes cyber criminals actually a very long time to, like, figure out how to do their jobs because generally speaking, they're not that smart, and they're not that competent at, like, running businesses. So we have, you know, a certain period where we can lock down defenses and, you know, prevent... Certainly on the on the level of cybercrime, protect against some of the worst vulnerabilities. But he says on the other hand, you know, this is not a wholly positive story. You know, we're still thinking about nation state actors that have the resources and the will and desire to, as Jasmine says, like, hack into municipal government infrastructure and whatever else. So I suspect this is not the last time we're gonna be talking about AI discover vulnerabilities on this podcast. Great. That's right. Exactly. Go back to Hawaii, Mike. That's where... That's... There's there's nothing there's nothing left there. The one... The last thing I wanna talk about is the sort of... I I felt like it flew under the radar amidst a bunch of other news this week, but Microsoft offered bio packages to 60,000 people. Erin, what did you make of that?
00:45:21 · Erin Griffith, Max Read
[00:45:21] S3: Yeah. Well, I mean, that is an enormous number. And it... When you put in perspective of the fact that, you know, Microsoft has like 230,000 employees, it just reminds you of how enormous these companies are. Yeah. But... And just to be clear, buyout packages doesn't mean 60,000 people are gonna take them. Mhmm. They expect three to three to 5% of their employees to actually take them. So in reality, it's gonna be like, at most, probably 3,000 [00:45:48] S1: Right.
00:45:48 · Max Read, Erin Griffith, Mike Isaac
[00:45:48] S1: Right. [00:45:48] S3: Layoffs. But that's still so many. And I feel like, like, to your point, Max, over the last three, four years, we've just become so numb to these rolling layoffs from the giant tech companies because that is just the new reality that started kind of after the Zurp era kind of deflated. All these tech companies that got super bloated because they thought they needed a million engineers decided, okay, now we're just gonna, like, kinda be in this environment where we just, like, cut a thousand people every, you know, six months or something. And tech used to be this cushy job, especially at a place like Microsoft, which is, you know, very geographically focused, where you can just, like, have a thirty year career. And there are a lot of people at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, you know, even like Google and Facebook, which are a little bit younger, that have been there for so long. Mhmm. And that is no longer the case. That is, you know, maybe a sign of what's to come for the rest of the economy because tech is sort of always a little bit out ahead on on workplace trends as well. So that's a little bit depressing. And I guess the other thing that I'll add is like something that... It's like kind of darkly funny about the announcement, which is that the Microsoft said it was part of their efforts to give employees more control over their future. Woah. What the What? [00:47:07] S1: That's not the kind of control I'm [00:47:09] S4: looking for. That's not the control I would Really, [00:47:12] S3: really, really grim.
00:47:12 · Erin Griffith, Mike Isaac, Max Read
[00:47:12] S3: really, really grim. [00:47:13] S4: The the silver lining in there, I would say, as far as your, like, harbinger of what's to come is, like, a lot of this is because of their AI spin and infrastructure spin. And so, like, perhaps, like, accept... Whatever. Accenture or some some, like, giant employer that's not spending billions of dollars per quarter on AI is not gonna do the same level of layoffs. They're just gonna use the tools to justify different types of layoffs in lesser numbers. [00:47:37] S3: Oh my god. Mike, Accenture is the worst example because, like, if there's any company in the world that's going to be fully taken out by AI, it's consultants. Right? Sorry. [00:47:46] S1: Good lord. [00:47:46] S4: See, I'm gonna get taken out aback by AI because I can't even think of a good company. [00:47:50] S1: No. Actually, your mistakes is... That's that's what makes you human. Like, that's what that's what that's what people I [00:47:54] S4: love to serve. [00:47:55] S1: Okay. On that cheery bit of news, we're gonna go to break. When we come back, we're gonna be talking about stories that we're tracking this week.
00:47:55 · Max Read, S0
[00:47:55] S1: Okay. On that cheery bit of news, we're gonna go to break. When we come back, we're gonna be talking about stories that we're tracking this week. [00:48:13] S0: Every leader knows the moment. There's a critical decision to make, but the answers are scattered across teams, tools, and inboxes. So you wait, you guess, you schedule another meeting. Not knowing gets expensive. Knowing keeps your business moving. Atlassian brings your work and knowledge together so your teams and AI agents have the context they need to make better decisions. Less searching, more deciding. Learn more at atlassian.com. That's atlassian.com. Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We are leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all. Legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only, availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities.