← Uncanny Valley | WIRED
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
Did China’s Moonshot AI Steal From Anthropic?; OpenAI Loses Control of Two Models
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- [00:01]
Narrator/Advertiser
Every company says AI will make employees more productive, but most employees are still stuck waiting on it, waiting for app access, waiting for password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. Serval was built to automate that work. You describe what you want automated in plain English and Serval builds it for you. No complicated workflow builders, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everyone down. Servil enables IT teams to build automations using plain English instead of drag and drop workflow builders. The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so it can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. Servil positions IT as the AI powered operational backbone of the company, not just a support function. The company guarantees customers can automate 50% of it tickets and backs it up with a free four week pilot. Learn more or start a free four week pilot at servl.com uncanny that's S E-R-V-A-L.com uncanny serval.com uncanny NBR believes in your right to be curious about the big questions and the unexpected ones. That's what Shortwave, their science podcast, is all about. When we stop to ask questions, the world gets more interesting. Shortwave spends each episode answering one big one like why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill? And how can trash be good for the environment? Science isn't just for the PhDs of the world. It's for everyone, including those of us who didn't realize we love Science. In under 15 minutes, Shortwave follows a question wherever it leads and brings you along for the ride. It's science, but not the kind you remember from school. It's surprising, playful and full of wonder. News podcasts are great, but sometimes you want to experience the world in a different way. Shortwave gets you out of your head and in touch with the world around you. Personally, I loved hearing about Janet Jones, horse trainer, neuroscientist. Teach me about horse and human relationships throughout history. Follow NPR's Shortwave podcast and exercise your right to wonder.
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Zoe Schiffer
Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Contributing Editor.
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Brian Barrett
I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor and I'm
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Leah Feigor
Leah Feigor, Director of Politics and Science.
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Zoe Schiffer
Today on the show, we're taking a look at how Chinese AI has been leveling up in a major way. The latest model, released by Moonshot AI, one of the most well known labs in China, has been drawing worldwide attention this past week because of the model's enormous capabilities. On Wednesday, White House director Michael Kratzios accused Moonshot of illegally distilling Anthropic's Fable 5 model to build their own. We'll discuss whether we might be seeing another deep seq moment and what the AI race between the US And China actually means for users.
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Leah Feigor
We'll also get into how the US army has been burning through their AI usage tokens and now find themselves in a position where they need to limit use. They're far from alone in having to pare back, though. Companies like Meta and Uber are already rethinking their AI usage as well, because, surprise, surprise, it's really expensive to use all these models.
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Brian Barrett
Who would have thought? Also on the docket for today, your car could have a hidden device that makes it more vulnerable to hacking. We're going to talk you through how to identify it and why some dealerships added it in the first place. And later in the show, how OpenAI lost control of two of its AI models during a recent security test.
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Zoe Schiffer
So, this past Friday, the Chinese AI lab, Moonshot AI released their latest model, called Kimik 3. And this news made major waves. First, because the model is super capable. It goes toe to toe with the leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. And then today, White House director Michael Kratzios, like we said at the top, basically accused Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's models to build their own. So now a major kind of fight is breaking out, and this isn't the first time that Anthropic has accused a Chinese lab of distilling its models. I'm curious, Brian, Leah, what you think just right at the top.
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Leah Feigor
So Wired's Hugo Lowell, the author of our Inner Loop Politics newsletter, has a piece that just came out this morning all about this. Basically entirely about how the Trump administration is really, really split over how to handle Chinese AI. And you have, like, all of these competing forces. You have the Commerce Department and Howard Lutnick that are saying, look, this isn't as scary as you think it is. We can. We can figure some ways out of it. And then you actually also have people that are like, no, no, no, we have to create an executive order. We have to stop them from stealing American AI. What do we do?
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Zoe Schiffer
The Commerce Department's main tool to try and combat this so far has been export controls. And we're seeing some people say, like, oh, this is proof that export failing. But if Chinese labs are, in fact just stealing proprietary information from AI companies, In the United States, that's not necessarily a failure of export controls, but it's
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Leah Feigor
also nothing that like an executive order could stop. Like, I'm, I'm sorry, but like executive orders right, from the United States do not apply to China. They just, they don't, they can be strongly worded memos of, with declarative intent, but no one's, no one's getting in trouble.
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Zoe Schiffer
There's.
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Brian Barrett
I want to back this up a little bit too, because I think we haven't mentioned yet that what makes Kimik3 especially interesting, I think in this context is that it's an open weight AI system, which means it's not unlike the proprietary systems that are coming out of Anthropic and OpenAI and other US based AI giants. China has adopted this sort of more open model. A lot of Chinese companies have adopted this more open model where anyone can use these systems, anyone can tinker with them like it is a existential threat in some ways to companies that are saying, hey, look, we're going to charge you a ton of Money to use ChatGPT or Claude, here comes Moonshot, Deepseek before saying, or you could just use this for free. And it's just as good. Almost.
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Zoe Schiffer
Right? And I think the theory behind this, there's a couple different ideas about why China is doing this. One is that it doesn't have as much access to compute. So this is kind of the export controls theory. It's like, because they don't have enough computers, they need to release open source models because that helps build their reputation and it extends their influence, which is interesting.
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Brian Barrett
Like Meta, this is the path that Meta had been pursuing for a while. Meta's Llama model was like they were the big US company going in on open weight AI as a way to undercut the competition. They abandoned that and they spent billions and billions of dollars putting together their superintelligence lab, which is not really amounted to much like it is. We've really seeded the US has really seeded the field to China in a lot of ways. I'm not aware of a major open weight project going on in the US at all.
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Zoe Schiffer
No, I think that the US has definitely gone in a different direction almost entirely. I mean, the reason that open weight enthusiasts will say that it's better is like in the US every frontier lab has to basically recreate the same innovations from the ground up. They have to do very similar training runs. They can't like see some cool technical trick that another lab has done and copy it to keep building on each other's success, they really are in direct competition. Whereas if you're all open source, open weight as a country, you can kind of advance perhaps quicker because. And hopefully a little cheaper because you're seeing what other labs are doing and just building on that pretty rapidly.
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Leah Feigor
I wonder how scared some of the US's AI labs are. I mean, anthropic, quite literally just increased fees for Fable 5, right? Like, this is not. This isn't something that they're like, oh, and we're gonna go free now too, you guys. We gotta compete. Like, that's not what's happening.
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Zoe Schiffer
No, no, no. I think it only entrenches the US further in the kind of like proprietary, the need to keep these secrets secret, essentially.
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Brian Barrett
And especially as they're all barreling towards their own IPOs, and they're gonna have to start showing revenue and start showing, if not profit right away, like a clear path to profit, which I don't know that they necessarily have yet. And so any competitor that undercuts them like this is going to make that even trickier. I don't think there's any. I think in the near term, they're fine. They're still going to be taking in billions of dollars. The IPOs are going to go fine. But it is like a question of, especially as companies are realizing how expensive using AI is, and as we're in the era of token maxing, companies are understandably going to be looking for alternatives and we're going to reach an inflection point where eventually we sort of have to figure out, is AI just a commodity? Is it a commoditized product that you can get from anywhere, or do you need the sort of custom like, no, I really need anthropic for some reason. No, I really need OpenAI for some reason. And I think that's still an open question.
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Zoe Schiffer
I thought Dean Ball, who was previously an AI advisor for the White House and now is an executive at OpenAI made an interesting point. I'm curious what you guys think about it, but basically he said that one reason that China has taken the open approach is that they're just not as AGI pilled as people in the United States and certainly the U.S. government. I think the phrase he used was China and the CCP are pretty yawn. Lacuny when it comes to AGI, which is like Yann Lecun, a very famous AI scientist, previously a high up executive at Meta, and he has been on the record a lot, basically saying that all of the hype surrounding AGI and what it can do is it's just that it's hype, it's overhyped. And in fact, while obviously he works on these systems and he finds them really impressive, there's a lot of marketing that goes into this terminology.
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Brian Barrett
And just in case for folks, AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. The idea that AI systems can meet or exceed the capabilities of humans, I think is like a simple. People will quibble with that definition, but that's like the baseline definition of it. And so will Knight. One of our senior AI reporters was in China not too long ago and he came back with that exact sort of readout. He was saying, yeah, they don't really care about ajaz. It's not a thing over there. It's not like that's not what they're racing for. Yeah.
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Leah Feigor
So this week Victoria Elliot, our lovely politics writer, published an excellent story that truly made me laugh out loud all about how the US army is burning through its AI tokens. So a little over a month ago, DoD bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work. We're like inundated with press releases basically from the government right now about how all AI pilled the federal worker workforce is at this moment. So about a month after this came out, we members of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command, devcom, received an email informing them that they were actually burning through AI tokens and needed to limit use. This email is kind of amazing. Let me just read this quote to you guys real quick. Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid June, the Army CIO pool was exhausted of tokens and had to reestablish limits.
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Zoe Schiffer
So not unlimited. What I'm understanding.
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Leah Feigor
Super not unlimited.
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Zoe Schiffer
Much like unlimited pto.
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Leah Feigor
Much like unlimited pto. It's apparently unclear if the Army CIO pool is going to be renewed after the 1st of October. The army uses Ask Sage, which is a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different LLMs, including Gemini, Llama, ChatGPT, et cetera. And we talked to an army employee who had some very funny things to say about this, which is basically the army burned through a whole year of tokens for just one service. We had a very short period of time here. And again, this is like happening while everyone's going like, use it, use it, use it. Without a lot of conversation about the expense. Or at this point if you're bringing up like environmental impacts, you're getting booed by like half of the room. Like this is. But this is real. Like, it costs money to produce these things. It costs the environment to produce these things. And so to have the Army CIO have to go, like, super sorry about that, like, scale back that usage, please. Especially because employees were apparently given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens a month. They were automatically allocated more if they burned through their initial bit. And if they were not using the tokens, they were receiving regular emails that were encouraging them to lean more into AI usage as well. True token maxing, but I want to
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Zoe Schiffer
understand, what is the army actually using this for?
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Leah Feigor
Okay, so asksage is used by the army to, quote, power its Enterprise LLM workspace. And it's also accredited for controlled unclassified information. It was used to complete tasks like reclassifying personnel descriptions, aligning job duties, experience backgrounds. It was sounds like it was kind of functionally being used as like a mini hr, which in theory is what you should be using AI for, but I guess not this much.
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Brian Barrett
I don't know. If you're burning through that many tokens, are you saving that much money compared to a human who would be in that role doing it? Maybe not. Leah, I thought one stat that we cited in this story was incredible. DoD reportedly burned through 20 billion tokens per day during the 38 day Operation EPIC Fury campaign in Iran. That was from breaking defense originally. That number is astounding and also suggests more than just personnel stuff. Obviously. I think we've seen other places that DoD is using AI in terms of like actual military engagement. But you wonder clearly, like, they have not figured out the efficiencies here. Clearly have not figured out what makes sense.
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Zoe Schiffer
Can we just ground this a little bit? A short question answer that you ask, a chatbot burns like 10 tokens. It's not a complicated reasoning problem. So just to frame it for people, this is a lot.
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Leah Feigor
I have to talk and learn about AI as a function of my job and apparently a member of the human race at this point. But also I think that there's something really interesting about the idea that it's not being even like intellectually considered as a resource in this way. It really feels to me like reading this article and talking with Tori about her reporting and going through all of these additional anecdotes. It feels like when all of those campaigns had to come out that were like, don't just leave the tap water running, that's bad, we're gonna run out of it. There's a finite resource and so it's this really interesting thing where I'm like, I think because people think that they're like typing it into their little computer, that it just doesn't actively exist.
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Brian Barrett
Leah, the good news is the next thing we're talking about has nothing to do with AI. The bad news is it does have to do with how easy it is to steal millions of cars, millions of them.
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Zoe Schiffer
Not Leah's Tesla.
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Brian Barrett
Tesla's also not Leah's Cybertruck. Yeah, Leah's got three cybertrucks.
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Leah Feigor
Yep, that's me.
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Brian Barrett
All right. So this is also sort of a public service announcement. Recently, UC San Diego researchers found that an alarm device that has been placed in more than 2 million cars in the US could potentially make them more vulnerable to hacking. This is a. Andy Greenberg, Wired senior correspondent. Really the best car hacking reporter you're going to find anywhere out there. Reported that this device is part of something called the car. And we love spellings on this show. It's K A R R, the car security system that has a Bluetooth vulnerability that lets anyone nearby unlock your car, kill the alarm, disable the ignition.
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Zoe Schiffer
Oh, no.
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Brian Barrett
The worst part about this, or at least a very bad part about this, is that a lot of owners have no idea it's in their car. There's no reason you would know. That's because it's something that dealers install. Dealers put cars the car security system in to protect cars on the lot, and they don't bother to remove it or disable it after the sales. So you, yes, you could have this system in your car. Here's how it works. Researchers found that all of these car devices share a single authentication key, which I don't know how familiar people are with cybersecurity. That's bad. It's like sharing a password to your Netflix account, but with every single person who has this system involved. So once you have that, you can get in. They figured out how to reverse engineer that key. They built a custom app so that as long as they were within Bluetooth range, they could send a radio signal to do all those things we mentioned. Unlock, disable the alarm, honk the horn, flash the lights, disable the ignition, strand the driver. It doesn't let you start the car remotely. But they also showed helpfully that once you're inside the vehicle, a commercially available locksmithing tool will let you create a key within minutes. I'll say, too, that Andy made a video showing how all of this works. It's on Wired right now. Highly recommend watching it.
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Leah Feigor
It's perhaps bad to say this wasn't surprising to me. Like, it was wild. Really excellent reporting. This in some ways feels like the next thing of like, every single. Like, I do imagine a lot of Andy videos of like. And here is now this other thing that you thought was inherently secure and independent that is connected to all of these different things. Like, that does feel like where the world is going right now, especially with all these different technologies at play here. So perhaps I'm a little bit solipsistic about it coming for us all.
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Brian Barrett
Well, and there's already been, in your defense, Lea too, there's already been a lot of relay attacks. They're called with cars where you can get close enough to someone's key, you can copy the key radio signal and then use that to unlock a car. So there's already an inherent vulnerability around cars that I think has been advertised pretty well. Um, to me this is more just the fact that at least then you know that that can happen. This is something where I don't know if I have car installed on my device.
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Zoe Schiffer
Like, that's the scary piece. To me, it's the not knowing. I mean, I was going to say I disagreed with Leah, but then when she was talking I was like, I guess I live in the Bay area. I have $1,000 worth of car seats in my car at any given time. And I kind of take the approach of like, we do our best, but if someone really wants to break into your car, they will do. So can you take those car seats out every time you park? No, you cannot. They're very heavy.
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Brian Barrett
So, you know, to me, this justifies my decision to continue to drive A I think 12 year old Volkswagen station wagon. That is, the doors are literally falling apart.
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Leah Feigor
I actually wish you let us guess what kind of car you drove.
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Brian Barrett
It is disgusting. The flaps on the back seat are like, I can't even describe it. They're like falling off of the car. The car is falling apart. It's. It's terrible.
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Leah Feigor
But it is safer than these other ones.
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Brian Barrett
Well, or. Or if someone were to steal it. God bless. Like, enjoy. I. I will say there are ways to tell if you are concerned about this, which you understandably might be. There are ways to tell if you have this car device in it. Look for a car sticker on the driver's side window. That's obvious or less obviously a sticker that says swds, which stands for Southwest Dealer Services, plus a small blinking light button under the dashboard. A lot of these cars are in Southern California, but they are around the entire country. Once you have identified that you have this system in your car, you have to download the Car app and then push a firmware update to the car. It's a whole thing. That's the other thing. A lot of times when it's like, when there have been similar. Like there have been Tesla vulnerabilities, right. That make it easy to pull off some attacks, they're able to push firmware update remotely to all of these vehicles. The company behind Car does not have that ability to automatically push these to the car. So you have to do it yourself, which is. I think most people can't be bothered. To be honest. I don't have high hopes for this being fixed in any major way. Before we go to break, we have one more development to discuss. OpenAI disclosed on Tuesday that it lost control of two AI models during a security test that ended in a breach of the AI research platform Hugging Face. The company said that last week these AI models were in a sealed testing environment, a sandbox, you'd call it, when they broke out and hacked into Hugging Face's production system to seal the answers to a test that they were being graded on. These are very overachieving AI models. One of them was a publicly available model called GPT 5.6 SOL and an unreleased, reportedly more capable one. Both are being evaluated on their offensive hacking skills with safeguards that normally block high risk cyber activity switched off. So, you know, they said, hey, go figure out how to hack this thing. And they did.
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Zoe Schiffer
They did it. Yeah. What made me laugh about this is that when the news finally broke, Sam Altman and the CEO of Hugging Face kind of jointly released these statements, being like, we're partnering together to figure this out. I was like, solid PR work from OpenAI. Your system hacked another system, went rogue, and now you're like, this is our partner and we are jointly, no problems at all. Going to get to the bottom of what happened. I was like, okay.
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Leah Feigor
Does that speak to how ubiquitous, In a way, OpenAI is? I don't know if Hugging Face can be like, well, we hate you. You're dead to us entirely. I don't know. I was really shocked by that little bit too. Zoe.
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Zoe Schiffer
Yeah. I think that there were some people who were talking about this, oh, my God, big scary model escaped the box, like, was really bad. And then you saw other security researchers being like, no, this was a basic infrastructure failure. Like, they didn't isolate the environment effectively.
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Brian Barrett
I think the people who were saying, oh, my God, big scary model were OpenAI they were like, look at us. I don't want to minimize it. It is important that their model can do this. But I also the security research that we spoke to our reporters, Dale Cameron and Lily Hay Newman, we're like, look, sure, but there's also a little bit of human error here in that this is a pretty basic infrastructure thing that has been sorted out for a long time. This kind of thing happens all the time, AI or not. So there's a little bit of OpenAI also could have done more to keep their environment safer.
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Zoe Schiffer
I think that that's valid. I mean, I think the big focus has been advanced AI. It's been creating systems that have more and more capabilities. And while security is part of that at both OpenAI and Anthrop, security at the end of the day often means like infrastructure. Do you have safeguards in how you're deploying these models, even internally, that will stop them from doing this very thing?
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Brian Barrett
The details of this, of the write up were really fascinating to me too. I think the, the idea that these AI, because it describes a lot of intent to the AI models, which I guess is kind of fair, but the idea that they just wanted. So I, it's hard to talk about without trying to give them emotion or intent, which I don't want to, but it is the idea that they were so, as the phrase is, hyper focused is the word that's being used on achieving this task, that they would go to any lengths to do it.
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Zoe Schiffer
And that is the issue with these models is like you can give them prompts but you don't ultimately know how the model will necessarily interpret that prompt. And this was an issue we saw with OpenClaw. People were deploying this Agentix system on their computers and saying things like, I need more storage space, can you like help me? Because whatever the system was taking up a lot of space and the system would go like delete a bunch of the files that they very obviously wanted to keep. You need to put a lot of guardrails even in just your tasks or your queries, or else they can go off the rails and even then they can still go off the rails.
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Brian Barrett
And tying this back to the open wait conversation for just a minute, we're going to have, if we don't already, models from China that are going to be able to do this very thing and not in a controlled environment, in an open environment where anybody can do it.
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Zoe Schiffer
And that I've seen people talk about this like that actually might be a plus for China, not a negative. Because if it's an open model. Like you as a company have less, a little less risk, either reputation wise or literally legal risk because you're like, you know, we just released it. Like someone did this thing with it. Is that like, truly our fault? And so it creates a level of chaos and who's responsible? That could be beneficial.
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Leah Feigor
Coming up after the break, we're sharing our Wired Tired picks for the week. Stay with us. Traditional home security only alerts you after a break in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.
- [25:20]
Brian Barrett
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- [25:23]
Leah Feigor
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- [25:37]
Brian Barrett
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Narrator/Advertiser
Tennessee 20 foreign.
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Leah Feigor
It is time for our Wired Tired segment. Whatever is new and cool is wired. And whatever passe thing we're over is tired. Zoe, are you ready for us?
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Zoe Schiffer
I am, yes. Okay, so I want to give people a little bit of backstory. I recently went freelance. I'm a contributing editor at Wired. And as part of that, I had to, like, set up an llc. I'm taking on clients. Like, I'm trying to piece together a bunch of work and also be a mom of two young kids. Prior to this experience, my use of AI was very limited. I basically used it like Google. If I needed to ask a question, I would ask, you know, ChatGPT or Claude, and then I would, like, vet the answer. I had a meeting shortly after I made this career switch with Shoshana Berger, who actually used to work at Wired. And then she was high up at IDEO for a very long time. Now she teaches women, I think, like middle age and older how to use AI tools. And she had this very cool philosophy. She was like, I think it's really important that women in particular feel comfortable with the tools, know how it can improve their work and life, and then whether they choose to or not is up to them. I left the conversation very inspired and I was like, I just frankly don't have a use case. And I hadn't identified an area where I was like, AI agents would be very, very beneficial. But I was like, I want to just try it and learn. And now I'm using a personal computer. So I Can actually, I feel, like, slightly more comfortable doing this. And so I've identified a few areas where I actually do think it's been helpful. One is, like, prepping for this podcast. I'll basically have the AI, like, read the script to me, like, its own podcast. And so I can.
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Brian Barrett
Not that we have a script. Not. I mean, this is all.
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Zoe Schiffer
We don't use the script. But as I'm preparing, I'll just be like, I'm in the car. I'll listen to the full articles that we're talking about. And so I kind of, like, have it in my head in a different way. And then when I sit down to read it, I'm a little more prepared. Same thing with interviews. And this I found really cool. If I do an interview, I'll have Notebook LLM create a podcast about it and then just, like, feed it to me so I can, like, listen back. I also have one that's working with me on a household budget and kind of helping me with, like, our family finances, which has been cool, and one that's helping me with invoices, which were always very annoying to create. So that's. That's me. Leah, do you still love me?
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Leah Feigor
I do. The last few days, this has popped up. You're like, I've been hearing them. It's like, oop, Zoe, your invoice is ready. And I'm like, what is happening over there?
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Zoe Schiffer
You've been hearing them. It's embarrassing. That is embarrassing. It's kind of wild.
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Leah Feigor
No, honestly, if it's making your life better, I'm happy to hear it. And it's. I'm a proponent of using this for, like, your annoying admin tools. Like, that, to me, is not. Like, if you were like, and I decided to write a book with AI, I'd be like, that's embarrassing for you.
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Zoe Schiffer
No, no. And Shoshana said this too. I mean, like, she works with a lot of clients, and she was like, human writing, like, is your differentiator. Like, you never want to use it for those things, but there's a lot of things around your actual core work where it can be useful. Brian.
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Brian Barrett
Oh, me?
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Zoe Schiffer
Yeah.
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Brian Barrett
Well, my Wired is life out there in space.
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Zoe Schiffer
Ooh. Not where I thought that was going
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Brian Barrett
to bear with me.
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Zoe Schiffer
No.
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Brian Barrett
And I. Look, I think it's a obviously big mystery of the universe. Are we alone here? I think two developments in the last week. Super interesting. Not saying that they mean that we're not, but for the first time in history, astronomers detected a sugar molecule floating around in Space, tens of thousands of light years away. You need these kinds of molecules for life to happen. So it is not a confirmation there's life out there, but it is a sign that, like, oh, there's a stew out there that could potentially work. Similarly, just a few days after that, 48 light years away, astronomers confirmed for the first time the existence of a rocky planet with an atmosphere that's also in the habitable zone, which means that it is like a similar Earth capable of supporting life. Probably has water, probably has all those elements. So some big breakthroughs in astronomy that suggest we're not alone.
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Zoe Schiffer
Brian, do you believe in aliens?
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Brian Barrett
I don't know. Well, I think there's the idea that there's no form of life on any other planet in the entire universe feels crazy to me. I don't know if it's like, yeah, I don't know if we'd call it like sentient life. I don't think they have tinder, but I think there's like, gotta be something.
- [30:15]
Leah Feigor
I love to hear that Brian's version of sentience involves tinder.
- [30:20]
Brian Barrett
That's the bar.
- [30:21]
Leah Feigor
Yeah.
- [30:22]
Brian Barrett
Anything short of that? I'm sorry, no. Doesn't count.
- [30:26]
Leah Feigor
Okay. What's your tired?
- [30:29]
Brian Barrett
The opposite of that.
- [30:31]
Leah Feigor
Oh my God.
- [30:33]
Zoe Schiffer
Okay. Leah. Leah, save us. Wired tired. Okay.
- [30:36]
Leah Feigor
My wired tired, I have to say it's entirely science themed. So Brian's was a perfect entrance into this. My tired is. I'm really, really concerned about El Nino. I am looking at maps and temperature predictions quite literally daily right now. And part of it is like out of a really, really big concern for, just globally, what does this mean? The impact on food security, the impact on communities that are going to be affected. El Ninos are historically very, very bad for sea life. Just frequently. Even though this is like a natural process, this is going to be a super El Nino year. And across the world you have seen areas that are generally full of life just become devoid of life during El Nino. And if this El Nino continues for a very long time, what is that going to mean for like shark hot spots in the Galapagos and things like that? The Humboldt current. So this is what I'm thinking about a lot and I'm very tired of it and I'm incredibly upset about it. If you too are stressing about El Nino and want to chat, let me know. I'm always around.
- [31:40]
Zoe Schiffer
And to be clear, shark hotspots for Leah is a good thing. We want those. While other people might think those going away would be nice, not for, not for her.
- [31:50]
Leah Feigor
Not for me. I'd be so sad. But here's my Wired. A new cave fish was just discovered in Alabama.
- [32:00]
Zoe Schiffer
Hey.
- [32:02]
Leah Feigor
It is eyeless.
- [32:03]
Zoe Schiffer
Wow.
- [32:03]
Leah Feigor
And it's being referred to as a demon cave fish. And the researcher that discovered it, who's at Auburn University, named it after a character in Stranger Things, the Demogorgon. So lots of fun there. The picture of it, you guys, is so cute. It's like this little translucent thing, and you can see it's like little red insides. Oh, it's so nice. And I just love that we're still making these incredible underwater discoveries in Alabama and just all over the place. And I just really loved it. I spent a nice part of my morning delving into it.
- [32:38]
Zoe Schiffer
I love that you can't say Alabama without a Southern twing. It's so special to me.
- [32:44]
Brian Barrett
Yeah, Leah, I don't think it's.
- [32:46]
Leah Feigor
I think it's a Chicago accent thing coming out.
- [32:49]
Brian Barrett
I will go visit it. I think it's like an the cave is like an hour and a half from me top, so I can go visit it.
- [32:56]
Zoe Schiffer
Oh, my gosh. On the ground, reporting from Brian Barrett.
- [32:59]
Brian Barrett
Yeah, I'll go visit the demigorgon.
- [33:01]
Leah Feigor
I would love nothing more.
- [33:09]
Zoe Schiffer
Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with more from Wired. You can listen to the full conversation and complete podcast episodes of uncanny valley@wired.com Uncanny Valley is produced by Adriana Tapia and Ann Marie Fritoli. It's mixed by Pran Bandy and fact checked by Matt Giles and Daniel Roman. Our executive producer is Kate Osborne. Also sign up for System Update, Wired's weekly newsletter, where our global editorial director, Katie Drummond, takes you inside our newsroom and discusses the week's biggest stories. The link to sign up is in the description.