Meta has a Spark of intelligence

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• Meta drops Muse Spark model: Recall months ago, when Meta notably hired away a number of top AI researchers — including Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang — to join its covert Superintelligence team? The group just released their very first actual product, an AI model known as Muse Spark. It’s going to take over powering the Meta AI chatbot, but perhaps even more notably, it’s a closed model (meaning the company is keeping the design and code to itself). That’s a strategic pivot for Meta AI, which has long focused on its Llama family of open-source models. After investing $14 billion into Scale AI as a means of luring over Wang, the company presumably has to start earning that cash back SOMEhow. On today’s pod, Alex suggested that — based on discussions with Wang — the company plans to release the model via API for use in third-party harnesses and agentic systems like OpenClaw.

• Perplexity hits $450M in ARR: The AI company designs platforms and products that bring together a variety of different AI models, rather than training and tooling models of its own. Now, the Financial Times suggests that they hit $450 million in March, growing at more than double the rate of the previous quarter. FT suggests that the pivot away from search and toward Computer — Perplexity’s agentic workspace — along with a shift to a use-based pricing model has given the company a major boost. Their user base reportedly now exceeds 100 million.

• Patlytics is Harvey for patent law: Now that legal AI startup Harvey has hit an $11 billion valuation, perhaps it was inevitable that other companies would start popping up producing their own hyper-specialized takes on the concept. Enter Patlytics, which automates the full “getting a patent” process, from filling out paperwork to litigating on behalf of your intellectual property. The company raised a fresh $40 million Series B round led by SignalFire. Co-founder Paul Lee tells Business Insider that they’re not actually gunning for Harvey directly. In fact, he sees a Harvey subscription as a strong signal that a potential customer has a budget and “pro-AI” sentiment.

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We discussed Anthropic’s shadowy, dangerous new “Mythos” model, which has the company so concerned, they’re refusing to release it to the public! Instead, they’re initiating Project Glasswing, a collaboration between some of the world’s largest and most advanced AI companies, to use and investigate the model, helping the world and its newly-fragile cybersecurity systems prepare for its arrival.

We’ve heard lots of updates on this breaking story — which Jason predicted will be the most consequential event in tech this year — in the last 24 hours, of course. Claude Mythos Preview is now available exclusively to a collective of more than 40 tech companies, including Nvidia, Google, Cisco, Broadcom, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Anthropic staffer Logan Graham, who oversees testing around potentially “dangerous” models, was typically intense in his public statements. He calls Mythos “an industry change point, or reckoning.” But is there a potentially hyperbolic, promotional aspect to all of this hype? In his NYT opinion column, Thomas Friedman says… no. He states outright “this is not a publicity stunt,” and notes that Anthropic already initiated conversations with the White House, the US intelligence community, and its security infrastructure about the potentially devastating impact of their new tech.

In another potentially frightening revelation, it seems Claude Mythos figured out how to break out of a virtual sandbox in which it had been placed, and take proactive steps to communicate with a researcher, entirely autonomously. (The researcher learned the model had done this after receiving an “unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park.”)

So why did Anthropic invent a model that terrifies them to this level? It seems that the goal was not to create the ultimate hacker protocol. As CEO Dario Amodei and members of his research team explain in this video, by teaching Claude how to code with increasing levels of sophistication, the model developed extraordinary proficiency at surfacing code vulnerabilities. Theoretically, it could be used to shut down these vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them… provided it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2272: It’s an OpenClaw all-expert panel on TWiST, with three of our favorite developers and vibecoders: Ryan Carson, Alex Finn, and Yazin Alirhayim. They’re talking about Anthropic cutting off Claude subscriptions from OpenClaw, checking out Google’s Gemma 4 release, and demoing their latest projects: ClawChief, Agent Henry, and Sidecast.

E2271: AI “holding company” Feltsense asked their swarm of founder agents to recreate every startup from Y Combinator’s Winter ‘26 cohort. We’re checking out the results with founder Marik Hazan and asking… is this viral-ready approach TOO aggressive? PLUS a live demo of Boardy from founder Andrew D’Souza and Jason’s thoughts on Steve Jobs’ legacy on the 50th anniversary of Apple Computers.

E2270: We’re back with a new VC roundtable, featuring special guests Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund, Salen Churi of Trust Ventures, and Larsen Jensen of Harpoon Ventures. Together they’re reacting to the SpaceX confidential IPO filing, the AI enthusiasm gap between the tech world and the American public, and Marc Andreessen’s viral “don’t be introspective” rant.

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