Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I will say those companies have much stronger relationships with the Trump administration than Anthropic does. I haven’t been in the rooms, certainly, but I can just see Dario Amodei not being able to speak “Trump” particularly well. You could see his advisers just being like, “Just say there’s no fucking way to jailbreak it. Just say the words,” and he’s like, he can’t do it. He’s like, “No, well, actually, it’s, you know, technically not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I just think there—
Brian Barrett: Great. That is a great impression—
Zoë Schiffer: Thank you, I’m so sorry.
Brian Barrett: —by the way.
Zoë Schiffer: All I’m trying to say is very different personality types. I think that Dario has a tendency to be a little didactic and specific in how he talks about these things, and the Trump administration, especially right now, doesn’t appear to have a ton of technical expertise, and so they’re relying on outside experts to understand how bad is bad here. The whole situation is really confusing and doesn’t appear to be resolving anytime soon.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, and I think it has woken up Europe and the UK a little bit to the reality that the US might actually cut off its frontier models to other countries, even trusted partners. Meanwhile, they’re pretty far behind on having anything that can compete or even come close. You’ve got Mistral in France, you’ve got some other things going on, but if we do get to this world where there are sort of these balkanized models, that’s going to be tricky for anyone not in the US, absent the rise of open source, which we’ve also talked about, but that’s still a little bit behind.
Zoë Schiffer: Really don’t see that. Really don’t see that for us.
Brian Barrett: Yep, yep, yep. Coming up after the break, we’ll share our WIRED/TIRED Picks for the Week. Stay with us.
Zoë Schiffer: It’s time for our WIRED/TIRED segment. It’s been a minute since we’ve done this, so just to give you a little refresher, whatever is new and cool is WIRED, whatever passé thing we’re completely over is TIRED. Brian, this week you get to go first.
Brian Barrett: Thank you very much. My TIRED is dumb phones that don’t do anything. There’s a trend towards dumb phones, where you can’t access any apps, whatever; it’s just a phone. It’s a good enough idea, but I think it’s like you want to—quitting cold turkey is really hard, but having some sort of manageable amount of a vice is better in the long run, and so my WIRED then is the Commodore. Do you remember the brand Commodore—
Zoë Schiffer: No, I don’t know—
Brian Barrett: —Zoë?
Zoë Schiffer: —what you’re saying.
Brian Barrett: They made computers in the ’80s. I’m too old. The Commodore Callback 8020, which is a dumb phone—it is a dumb phone, but it runs just enough. You can run Uber, WhatsApp, Spotify. You can have T9 texting or you can use your voice to text. It has classic games, like Snake. It comes in an edition where it’s a clear plastic thing so you can see the battery inside. The battery is swappable. The camera comes with a filter that makes it look like a ’90s home video. I think it’s wonderful. It’s great. It is the sort of classic flip phone Nokia style, but it allows you to stay just in touch enough with people and with the internet that you don’t feel like, “Forget this; I’m just going to go back to my smartphone.”
