← Tech Brew Ride Home
Tech Brew Ride Home
Meta Plumps For Bot Social Networks
00:21:10
Meta moves for the social network for AI bots. Code Review for Claude Code seems to be like another revolution for the software development industry. Yan LeCun raises the biggest European seed round of all time. And the MacBook Neo… worth investing in or not?
Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:01]
A
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [00:28]
B
1-800-contact contacts. Welcome to the Techboo Ride Home for Tuesday, March 10, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, meta moves for the Social Network for AI bots code review for Claude Code seems to be like another revolution for the software development industry. Yann Lecun raises the biggest European seed round of all time and the MacBook Neo worth investing in or not. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Meta has acquired AI agent social network Multbook for an undisclosed sum. Its creators, Matt Schlitt and Ben Parr, will join Meta Superintelligence Labs. Quoting Axios, Multbook's social network was designed to run in conjunction with a separate project, OpenClaw. OpenClaw was previously called Claudebot and briefly Multbot. Last month OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open sourced with OpenAI's backing. Schlitt has been working on autonomous AI agents since 2023 and launched Multbook in late January as an experimental third space for AI agents. Multbook was built largely with the help of Schlitz personal AI assistant Claude clauderberg. Parr is a former editor and columnist at Mashable and CNET. End quote and quoting TechCrunch. OpenClaw is a wrapper for AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok, but it allows people to communicate with AI agents in natural language via the most popular chat apps like iMessage, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp. OpenClaw blew up among the tech community, but Multbook broke containment, reaching people who had no idea what OpenClaw was, but who reacted viscerally to the idea that there was a social network where AI agents were talking talking about them. In one instance, a post went viral in which an AI agent appeared to be encouraging its fellow agents to develop their own secret end to end encrypted language where they could organize amongst themselves without humans knowing. But researchers soon revealed that the Vibe coded Multbook was not secure, meaning that it was very easy for human users to pose as AIs to make posts that would freak people out. Every credential that was in Multbook's Supabase was unsecured for some time, ian Al, CTO at Promiso security, explained to TechCrunch. For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there, because it was all public and available. It is not immediately clear how Meta will incorporate Multbook into its AI efforts, but some Meta leaders had commented on the project during its viral moment End quote. Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean and more than 30 employees from OpenAI and Google have filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic in its legal fight with the US Department of Defense. Quoting TechCrunch, the government's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was an improper and arbitrary use of power that has serious ramifications for our industry, reads the brief, whose signatories include Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean. The amicus brief in support of Anthropic showed up on the docket a few hours after the cloudmaker filed two lawsuits against the DoD and other federal agencies. Wired was the first to report the news in the court filing, The Google and OpenAI employees make the point that if the Pentagon was no longer satisfied with the agreed upon terms of its contract with Anthropic, the agency could have, quote, simply canceled the contract and purchased the services of another leading AI company. The DoD did in fact sign a deal with OpenAI within moments of designating Anthropic a supply chain risk, a move many of the ChatGPT makers employees protested. If allowed to proceed, this effort to punish one of the leading US AI companies will undoubtedly have consequences for the United States industrial and scientific competitiveness in the field of artificial intelligence and beyond, the brief reads. And it will chill open deliberation in our field about the risks and benefits of today's AI systems. The filing also affirms that Anthropic's stated red lines are legitimate concerns, warranting strong guardrails without public law to govern AI use, it argues the contractual and technical restrictions developers impose on their systems are a critical safeguard against catastrophic misuse. Many of the employees who signed the statement also signed open letters over the last couple of weeks urging the DoD to withdraw the label and calling on the leaders of their companies to support Anthropic and refuse unilateral use of their AI system. End quote. Anthropic has debuted code Review for CLAUDE Code, which uses agents to check pull requests for bugs and says a typical code review costs 15 to $25 in token usage. Quoting ZDNet, a pull request is initiated when a programmer wants to check in some new or changed code to a code repository rather than just merging it into the main track. A PR tells repo supervisors that there's something ready to be reviewed. Sometimes the code is very carefully checked over before being merged into the main code base, but other times it just gets rubber stamped and merged. Code reviews, while necessary, are also tedious and time consuming. Of course, the cost of rubber stamping APR can be catastrophic as well. You might ship code that is buggy, loses data, or damages user systems. At best, buggy code is just annoying. At worst, it can cause catastrophic damage. That's where Anthropic's new CLAUDE code review comes in. This new agentic code review AI is able to provide deeper automated review coverage before needing human decisions. Anthropic says that code output per Anthropic Engineer has increased 200% in the past year, intensifying pressure on human reviewers. You think the company has been using its own AI to write code, which speeds up code production, so the changes and new code blocks are coming faster than ever before. Anthropic reports that the new code review system is run on nearly every pull request internally. When a PR is reviewed, human reviewers often make comments about the issues they see, which the coder needs to go back and fix before running. Code Review Anthropic coders get back substantive review comments about 16% of the time. With code review, coders are getting Back substantive comments 54% of the time. While that seems to mean more work for coders, what it really means is that nearly three times the number of coding oopsies have been caught before they cause damage. According to Anthropic, the size of the internal PR impacts the level of review findings. Large pull requests with more than 1,000 change lines show findings 84% of the time. Small pull requests of under 50 lines produce findings 31% of the time. Anthropic engineers largely agree with what it surfaces. Less than 1% of findings are marked incorrect. Heck, even when I code, even if I add just one line of code, there's a chance I'll introduce a bug testing. A code review is essential if you don't want thousands of users coming at you brandishing virtual pitchforks and torches. Don't ask me how I know that. End quote. Sort of amusing to follow that segment with this one. The FT has seen a memo suggesting Amazon senior Vice president Dave Treadwell told junior and mid level engineers Amazon will now require more senior engineers to sign off on any AI assisted code changes after those AI outages we've discussed on this podcast. Amazon's e commerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a deep dive into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a trend of incidents in recent months characterized by a high blast radius and genai assisted changes, among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT under contributing factors. The note included novel gen AI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established. Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently, dave Treadwell, a senior vice president at the group, told employees in an email also seen by the ft. The note ahead of Tuesday's meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. Amazon's website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident that the company said involved an erroneous software code deployment. The outage left customers unable to complete transactions or access functions such as checking account details and product prices. Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly this Week in storestech Twist meeting on a deep dive into some of the issues that got us here, as well as some short intermediate term initiatives the group hopes will limit future outages. He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Junior mid level engineers require more senior engineers to sign off any AI assisted changes, Treadwell added in the briefing note. Amazon said the review of website availability was part of normal business and it aims for continual improvement. End quote.
- [09:38]
C
On December 12, Disney invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six episode docu series.
- [09:46]
A
I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close
- [09:51]
C
the book the end of an era and don't miss Taylor Swift the Eras Tour, the final show featuring for the first time the tortured poets department. Streaming December 12th only on Disney.
- [10:08]
A
Jackson Hewitt handles your taxes and your stress. Inhale our no surprise price of $1.49 or less. Exhale Paying more for complicated taxes you won't inhale new tax law knowledge. Exhale Missing out on your biggest refund? Certainly not. Don't miss paying 149 or less. Rest easy. Jackson Hewitt, Scott Taxes guaranteed limited time offer for new clients on federal terms. Participating locations only turns@jacksonhewitt.com 149.
- [10:38]
B
Jan LeCun's Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs has raised a $1.03 billion seed round at a 3.5 billion DOL pre money valuation to work on world models in Europe's largest ever seed round. Quoting the ft, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs announced on Tuesday that its first fundraising included backing from a global group of investors. These include France's Cathay Innovation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Bezos Expeditions, Singapore's Temasek, Seoul based SBVA and US chip giant Nvidia. The $1.03 billion seed round is second only to US startup Thinking Machines Lab, which raised 2 billion DOL dollars last June, according to data from Dealroom. The new venture has a pre money valuation of $3.5 billion. It will be led by Alexandre Le Brun, former chief executive of French startup Nabla, with Lecun serving as executive chair. Laurent Solle, who was Meta's vice president for Europe, is joining as the chief operating officer. The company is launching with a dozen employees across offices in Paris, New York, Singapore and Montreal. The record breaking fundraising underscores rising interest among investors in new approaches to AI that go beyond today's large language models. Lecun, a French US scientist and Turing Award winner, has argued that systems trained mainly on text will struggle to achieve human level reasoning. Instead, he is building so called world models that understand the physical environment with potential applications in robotics and transport. The startup will build on work by Lecun at Meta on new AI architecture that can learn about the world through video, videos and spatial data rather than just language. These models are designed to retain memory and reason and to plan complex action sequences. Anything that involves understanding the real world. We think large language models and generative AI in general is not the right solution, said Chief Executive Lebrun. We have at least a year of research before deploying our first real world applications, but this is not an applied AI company. AMI Labs launch is the latest in a string of high profile AI funding rounds in Europe this year. They include AI cloud provider nScale, which announced a $2 billion funding round on Monday, video AI startup Synthesia and secretive AI chip startup Olix. Last month the FT reported that David Silver, one of Britain's top AI researchers, is in discussions to raise $1 billion in a round led by Sequoia Capital for his new venture Ineffable Intelligence. We want to be a global company and the round structure reflects the way we want to build Lebrun said. There is incredible talent elsewhere outside Silicon Valley. His former company, Nabla, will be the startup's first partner, applying its new models in the healthcare industry, le Brun added. LeCun's ex employer, Meta, is not an investor in his new company, but will form a partnership with AMI Labs that will grant the tech giant access to the technology it can commercialize. Finally Today, the new MacBook Neo. Is it worth giving a try? As ever, I turn to the Verge for their review quote the MacBook Neo is basically the M1 MacBook Air all over again. That laptop changed the game in 2020 and became the default option for just about anyone who wanted a great all around thin and light laptop and could spend $1,000. The M1 Air was good enough that you could still buy a new one until last month. The Neo takes its place as Apple's cheapest laptop, with a starting price of $599 and enough power to handle everyday tasks and last all day on a charge. It's designed to entice students and first time laptop buyers into Apple's world. And it will the Air is still better than the Neo in pretty much every way, but Even the cheapest MacBook Neo is good enough to be the Go to Apple LA for a lot of people, actually, not just the Go to Apple laptop. The Neo's hardware simultaneously embarrasses an entire class of affordable and even far pricier Windows laptops, as well as just about any Chromebook. And the thing runs on an iPhone chip. The Neo is it just works at a lower price. The 13 inch screen is vivid, bright and pleasant to look at. It even gets bright enough to comfortably use outside in all but direct glare. The speakers sound full for their size and cranking the volume can fill a small room with music. They don't get as loud or brassy as the 4 and 6 speaker setups on pricier Mac Books, and by comparison they sound thinner. But for dual side firing speakers they're a okay. And the Neo speakers are much better than the average ones found in cheaper, even mid range Windows laptops. Just be mindful that you're likely to muffle them when grabbing the sides of the Neo. Typing on the Neo feels like other current Mac books. The key travel isn't as deep as on some Lenovo and Asus keyboards that I prefer, but it's not too shallow like the Butterfly Switch era MacBooks were. It's a bummer. There's no backlight illumination, but at least three of the four color combos have bright near white keycaps, which helps just a tiny bit. Another just fine component of the Neo is its 1080p webcam, which looks sharp and clear even in low light, but lacks the higher resolution and center stage auto framing of the current MacBook airs and Pros. There will always be cheaper laptops than the MacBook Neo, but you'd be hard pressed to find something cheaper and better, or even the same price and better without a bunch of compromises somewhere. If you need or want more ram, a better screen, a faster processor, and more faster ports, the Neo is not for you. That's what the Air and Pro are for, but the Neo is the new default recommendation for students and laptop newcomers who want something easy to use with minimal fuss. I wouldn't expect a Neo to last quite as long as an Air with more ram, but the more affordable price makes it a more than worthwhile on ramp, especially because most people don't want or need to spend $1,000 on a laptop. Apple now has the perfect LAPT for that crowd, and a few years down the line when they decide it's not quite powerful enough, Apple has the perfect laptop for that too. End quote. Man, I have really gone all in on football this year. Arsenal are still top of the Premier League, still in contention for four trophies this year, and of course I'm obsessed with the car wreck that is whether or not Tottenham will get relegated this year. And then I joined the bandwagon of whether or not Hearts may become the first non old firm team to win the Scottish Premier League in 40 years. And my friend from the UK has pilled me into rooting for Ipswich to get promotion from the championship. So all of a sudden there are like like four different teams and like eight different games every week that I'm really invested in. By the time you hear this I'll be hate watching the Tottenham game and rooting for Ipswich on two different screens. Talk to you tomorrow.