Smash Notes

Back to Inside Anthropic’s IPO + How AI agents spy on your messages, with Meredith Whittaker.

Who Built Uncle Murray the Talking Skeleton?

Kevin Roose says a Halloween skeleton in his neighborhood was not the handiwork of a middle-aged dad. The talking skeleton is named Uncle Murray and is the creation of a very impressive and precocious nine-year-old girl named Natalie Chabas.

On a recent episode of Machine Gods, Kevin Roose had remarked on the decoration and read the details as the work of an AI-obsessed dad. He had not taken proper time to check, even though Machine Gods strives for accuracy. Natalie Chabas is nine. Back in August, she saw a plastic skeleton at Home Depot that could say three recorded sentences. A clip of the October visit opens by asking what brought the visitor over on a fine evening.

Uncle Murray is Natalie Chabas's creation, not the middle-aged dad project Kevin Roose had described.

Grokipedia·Halloween·Kevin Roose

Transcript

Inside Anthropic’s IPO + How AI agents spy on your messages ·

Machine Gods

More from this episode

  1. Which AI Company Filed to Go Public First?Kevin Roose says Anthropic has officially filed to go public, and he calls the listing potentially one of the largest IPOs in history.
  2. What Is Anthropic's 900% Net Revenue Retention?Casey Newton says Anthropic's filing reports 900 percent net revenue retention.
  3. How Can Anthropic Lose Money and Still Generate Cash?Kevin Roose says Anthropic reported an $80.7 billion net loss for the six months ending June 30, and that most of the loss comes from convertible notes.
  4. Who Gets Rich When Anthropic Goes Public?Casey Newton expects Anthropic going public to create hundreds, maybe a couple thousand new millionaires, multimillionaires, and decamillionaires in San…
  5. How Can an AI Agent Read Signal Messages?Meredith Whittaker says an AI agent on a phone or computer can erase the privacy Signal is able to offer. Encryption still hides a message on the way.
  6. Why Does Signal Want an Opt-out From Phone AI?Meredith Whittaker says Signal blocked screenshots on desktop a little over a year ago, after Microsoft Recall started watching what people did on their…
  7. Why Do Governments Still Want Encryption Backdoors?Meredith Whittaker says governments have tried to get through encryption since the crypto wars of the 1990s.

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