
Bots passed human web traffic for the first time, per Cloudflare's CEO. The S&P 500 rejected fast-entry for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX. Anthropic embedded engineers at the NSA, Meta hid face-recognition code in its app, and Cambridge trialed the first AI-designed vaccine.
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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Friday, June 5, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough Today, bots passed human web traffic for the first time ever the S&P
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500 rejected fast entry for mega cap
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IPOs like SpaceX, anthropic embedded engineers at
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the NSA Meta hid face recognition code in its app, and of course, the weekend long read Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
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Today's episode is brought to you by Doppel Social Engineering attacks don't bother to knock.
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Brian McCullough
well, it happened. The web is officially now more bot than human.
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Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says agentic traffic is growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time. Quoting Tom's Hardware the rapid increase in agentic Internet traffic means bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history, according to the CEO and co founder of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Prince awkwardly admitted making his previous expectations of the crossover happening sometime in 2027 seem way off the mark.
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Before going on, it's important to differentiate
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this new surge in Internet traffic from the traditional bots. Most will be aware of things like website crawlers, search indexers, and bad stuff like fraud or abuse bots. It is different now as Cloudflare is charting agents that browse the web much like humans on behalf of humans, and it is already at a massive scale. You might wonder what all these AI agent bots are actually up to, particularly if you're not running your own army of digital helpers.
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Thankfully, Cloudflare has addressed the scope of AI bot activity in previous articles and blogs.
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Also last year it started classifying traffic according to these new website visitors, for example signed agents and verified bots, which is why the charts don't go back very far.
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However, Cloudflare metrics measure HTTP requests, not engagement.
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Flesh and blood folks remain the primary users of the web in terms of total time spent in app, US streaming and infinite scrolling feeds.
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These mediums simply don't generate the same
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volume of rapid fire page load requests as automated agents do.
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We were also interested in looking at
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Cloudflare's breakdown of human bot traffic by country. The most bot ridden traffic comes from the tiny island of Gibraltar at 92.1%, followed by Singapore at 76.4% and then Iran at 76.4%.
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While some of these places have a
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lot of data centers and hosting infrastructure compared to population size, Iran's high bot count may rather come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Cloudflare has also previously flagged Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot activity. End quote.
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The S and P is not just going to roll over for these new
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mega cap IPOs coming down the pike. Quoting Bloomberg S and P Dow Jones
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Indices will keep its existing eligibility requirements for benchmarks including the S&P 500, closing the door to fast entry for big tech IPOs like SpaceX, and delaying billions
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of dollars in flows from passive funds.
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The index provider, in a press release Thursday said it will not shorten the 12 month seasoning period for newly public companies it currently has or waive existing
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profitability and public float requirements based on
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a company's size diverging from a broader
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industry shift embraced by rivals Nasdaq and
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FTSE Russell for new listings like Elon Musk's SpaceX, the denial means they won't be greeted by a Wal from funds
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that track the S&P 500. Their fast inclusion in the benchmark would
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have led to about $14 billion in forced passive buying for SpaceX, more than $8 billion for OpenAI and about $4.6
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billion for Anthropic, according to Bloomberg Intelligence estimates.
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The decision arrives as Wall street grapples with a new reality. Some companies are reaching unprecedented sizes before they ever enter public markets. The consultation launched earlier this year, effectively asks whether index rules written for a different era should bend to accommodate companies
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that now arrive once reserved for mature
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blue chips in what has become known
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as the fast entry in industry parlance.
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The push for quicker inclusion has raised concerns among some investors who say rules around profitability, float and trading history exist precisely to prevent benchmarks from chasing hype. Furthermore, adding IPOs too quickly, they say,
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could expose passive funds to greater volatility and force them to buy shares before reliable market pricing is fully established.
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Meanwhile, supporters say indexes should include massive companies as quickly as possible to reflect
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the market investors actually own, adding that these trillion dollar firms can be economically significant long before they satisfy traditional index requirements.
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The outcomes mean that SpaceX, which is
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preparing what could become the largest IPO
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in history, would not be eligible for inclusion in the S&P 500 until at least one year after its listing.
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The company would also need to satisfy the index's existing requirements for profitability and public float.
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I'm genuinely surprised, said James Seyffart, ETF
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analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
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But S and P is the market leader and they can buck the trend. Nasdaq changed its rules recently so Space
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Exploration Technologies Corp. As the company is
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formerly known, can Join the NASDAQ 100
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index, a cohort of the largest non financial companies listed on its Exchange, in just 15 trading days, down from a three month minimum.
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FTSE Russell adopted a similar approach, shortening
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the waiting time to five trading days. The S&P 500 is the most heavily
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tracked equity benchmark in the world world. About $7.5 trillion in passively managed funds
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follow it and another $3.4 trillion in actively managed assets are benchmarks against it, according to Bloomberg Intelligence data.
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Things might be cooling off in terms of Anthropic's relationship with the US Government. First of all, sources say that Anthropic has embedded around half a dozen forward deployed engineers within the NSA to help that agency deploy Mythos for offensive cyber operations.
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Quoting the fte, it remains unclear whether
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Anthropics engineers are assisting the NSA in active operations. However, one person close to the situation said Mythos would be useful for infiltrating
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the networks of nations such as China or Iran.
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The best way to build a good defense is to build a good attack,
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said a person close to Anthropic, who
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argued that adversaries are probably building their own AI driven offensive technology. If Mythos is not used to build attack agents, adversaries will find a way to do it.
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The arrangement comes despite the Silicon Valley
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startup's legal battle with the Defense Department, which includes the nsa, over how its
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technology is used in war fighting, end quote. And then this is from Reuters, quote A months long dispute between Trump administration
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officials and AI firm Anthropic is showing signs of easing across parts of the
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US Government as the company prepares to go public, according to sources familiar with the relationship.
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The relationship has improved since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodai visited the White House in mid April to discuss working together together for the first time since the dispute erupted. Even though Anthropic is still challenging the
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supply chain risk designation in court, the
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Department of Defense is still vigorously defending itself against Anthropic's lawsuit, said Franklin Turner,
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an attorney specializing in government contracts.
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Any broader damage to the company's business is unlikely to ease until the department's
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dispute with the company is resolved, he said.
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Anytime the government signals that it's washing its hands of a company, that's a
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major problem for that company, turner said. One of the biggest signs of a
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thaw was symbolic but important. The White House invited Amudai to Trump's planned May 21 signing of an executive order on artificial intelligence, according to two sources familiar with the matter, even though the event was later canceled because of
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Trump's dislike for some of the order's provisions.
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Trump signed the order on Tuesday. Anthropic, in a statement posted on X,
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said it looked forward to collaborating with
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the White House on implementing the order.
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Anthropic's relationship with the Trump administration is
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warming as it gears up for a
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stock market debut that could value it at $1 trillion. CEOs of large corporations have tried bolster relationships with the White House to avoid Trump's anger.
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Stronger ties could help bolster investor confidence in the short term, said Harrison Rolfs,
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a senior research analyst at PitchBook who covers AI companies.
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It's a near term bruise, rolfs said, referring to the dispute. Anthropic employees met with US Treasury Secretary Scott Besant this spring to talk about Mythos and potential presidential actions on AI,
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according to a US official. The discussions helped Trump's team develop June
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2's executive order, according to the official, where Trump asked leading developers to hand over their most advanced models for cybersecurity testing.
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The tensions with the Pentagon have not faded entirely.
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Both sides are still arguing over the supply chain risk designation as of Thursday,
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when they submitted briefs to the court.
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At the same time, Anthropic employees were not part of an April 27 army run AI simulation on cyber attacks, according to army spokesperson Sean Minton, which included cyber executives from leading AI developers including
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Google and OpenAI, according to an army statement. End quote Foreign.
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Wired says Meta discreetly added code for an unreleased name tag face recognition system for its AI Smart glasses over multiple Meta AI app updates earlier this year. Quote the discovery of name tag in the live Meta AI app shows that Meta had begun shipping face recognition code to users phones while publicly describing it
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as something the company was still thinking
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through In April, Meta said that if it were to utilize face recognition, it wouldn't be rolled out without first taking
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a very thoughtful approach. But Wired found that as early as
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January, core components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people. Though not yet enabled, Nametag sits Inside a Meta AI companion app that's been downloaded over 50 million times and is
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necessary for use of key features of
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its smart glasses, including Ray Ban and Oakley models. If activated, it will transform faces captured by Meta's glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as face prints, and check each one against face prints stored on
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the user's phone, a database that's currently configured to receive updates from Meta. Recognized faces will trigger notifications, while the
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rest are cropped, indexed and saved to a folder marked Pending. Nametag would revive a type of technology Meta said it had sunsetted in 2021 when the company announced it would delete more than a billion face prints belonging to Facebook users following years of controvers over its photo tagging system. Meta ultimately paid $650 million to settle
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a class action lawsuit brought by Illinois
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users and in 2024 agreed to a separate $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over
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allegations it had unlawfully collected biometric data from users. End quote.
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This is the inverse of yesterday's scary stories. The University of Cambridge say they have developed the first VACC key component entirely designed by AI and subsequently trialed it in humans.
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Quoting the BBC, the team at the
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University of Cambridge say it is the first time a vaccine's key component has been designed entirely by AI and then trialed in people.
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The vaccine was engineered to work on
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all coronaviruses, which would include all COVID variants, as well as viruses that currently
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infect animals, yet have the potential to start the next pandemic.
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The work is still in the early stages, but the team is already developing separate vaccines that could tackle both flu and Ebola.
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Normally, vaccines are designed using a current
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strain of a virus. The Cambridge researchers took known genetic codes, the instruction manuals of life, from a range of coronaviruses that had been recorded
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by surveillance programs hunting for potential viral threats.
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These genetic codes were analyzed by an artificial intelligence. It then designed a super antigen that could train the immune system in such
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a way it gave protection against a
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whole family of viruses, even if they mutated or a new infection jumped from animals to people. Antigens are the critical components of vaccines, as this is what the immune system learns to attack, Heaney said. This was the first time an antigen designed by AI had been trialed in people, he said. The technology was surprising all of us and it was amazing what we can do with it for the good of humanity, heaney told BBC News. This is about making vaccines that protect us not just from today's viruses, but protect us from what can cause the next outbreak or disease. This is a fundamental shift in how
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we prepare for pandemics End quote.
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Time for the weekend Long read Suggestions? I'm not going to quote from this
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one, but the first link is from Mark Gurman on what we can expect from wwdc, which starts on Monday.
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And then this has gotten a lot of chatter in the Atlantic. The dude who wrote the book that the movie Arrival is based on took a long look at AI consciousness debates. He says LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation.
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But that doesn't deny how impressive LLMs can be.
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Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being
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open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious. Or more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses
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are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are
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awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider consider the possibility that
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every time you open a Word document you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one
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you snuff their existence out?
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No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good
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use of your time.
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Even if the Microsoft Office team employed
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a philosopher who said you shouldn't be so certain because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously.
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We don't need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational
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transcripts fall in that category.
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The neuroscientist Anil Seth has noted that no one claims that AlphaFold, the program
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developed by Google DeepMind to predict the folding of proteins, is conscious, even though
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its underlying architecture is in many ways similar to that of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude. This indicates that it's not any intrinsic property of so called neural networks that
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leads people to believe that LLMs are conscious.
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It's simply the fact that LLMs emit grammatical sentences, and we are accustomed to reading intention into sentences, whereas we are not accustomed to reading intention into the
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way that amino acids fold into their protein molecules.
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By the way, if you've never read any of Ted Chiang's stories, you do
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owe it to yourself to do so. As mentioned, get ready for WWDC on Monday. We'll see what Tim alleged Apple has for us.
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The show will be late as always,
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because I have to actually watch the
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keynote myself, so be prepared for the
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show to drop a few hours later than normal.
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Talk to you then.
Wired Podcast Narrator
The Wired newsroom is known for award winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On WIRED's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories and tech while speaking directly with the people. Building, challenging and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Date: June 5, 2026
Host: Brian McCullough
Podcast: Tech Brew Ride Home
Brian McCullough delivers a rapid-fire breakdown of the day’s most consequential tech stories, with a primary focus on bots outnumbering humans in global web traffic for the first time—a milestone moment in internet history. Additional stories tackle IPO eligibility in major stock indices, the evolving partnership (and contention) between Anthropic and the U.S. government, Meta’s covert facial recognition rollout, an AI-designed vaccine breakthrough, and thoughtful perspectives on AI consciousness to set up the weekend’s long reads.
(01:51 – 04:05)
“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted.” — Matthew Prince (01:56)
(04:05 – 07:11)
“Rules around profitability, float and trading history exist precisely to prevent benchmarks from chasing hype.” (05:29)
Supporters say indices should reflect market realities more quickly when companies reach massive valuations pre-IPO.
"I'm genuinely surprised... But S and P is the market leader and they can buck the trend." — James Seyffart, Bloomberg Intelligence (06:18)
(07:11 – 10:28)
“The best way to build a good defense is to build a good attack.” — Unnamed Anthropic source (07:42)
“Anytime the government signals that it's washing its hands of a company, that's a major problem for that company.” — Franklin Turner, government contracts attorney (08:50)
(12:36 – 14:09)
(14:20 – 15:59)
“This is a fundamental shift in how we prepare for pandemics.” — Professor Heaney, University of Cambridge (15:59)
(16:08 – 18:29)
“Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious.” — Ted Chiang (16:40)
“We are accustomed to reading intention into sentences, whereas we are not accustomed to reading intention into amino acid protein folding.” (17:50)
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare:
“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted.” (01:56)
S&P Fast Entry Commentary:
“Rules around profitability, float and trading history exist precisely to prevent benchmarks from chasing hype.” (05:29)
"I'm genuinely surprised... But S and P is the market leader and they can buck the trend." — James Seyffart, Bloomberg Intelligence (06:18)
Anthropic Insider:
“The best way to build a good defense is to build a good attack.” (07:42)
“Anytime the government signals that it's washing its hands of a company, that's a major problem for that company.” — Franklin Turner (08:50)
Ted Chiang on LLM Consciousness:
“Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious.” (16:40)
Vaccine Breakthrough:
“This is a fundamental shift in how we prepare for pandemics.” — Professor Heaney (15:59)
This episode marks a technological and cultural inflection point as bots eclipse humans in web activity, explores shifting rules for blockbuster IPOs, and reveals tensions—plus warming ties—between Silicon Valley and government. Breakthroughs in AI-driven vaccine design and the demystification of LLM “consciousness” round out a comprehensive, expertly curated tech news briefing.
Perfect for anyone seeking a succinct yet richly detailed scan of the day’s most important developments in the tech world.