Plus: Meta discloses one of its AI models went rogue. And SoftBank uses its OpenAI stake to fund a $10 billion loan. Imani Moise hosts.
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[00:00:01] Here's your morning TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, August 6. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. Meta announced a new coding agent yesterday, called MuseCode, that it's pitching as a cheaper alternative to competitors. Meta's AI chief said some employees are already using the tool internally and the company expects internal usage to ramp up. Investors have pressed Meta to show returns from its lavish spending on AI talent and computing power.
[00:00:30] The MuseCode agent has two price tiers, one that's the same as its general MuseSpark model, and another that is less than one-tenth the cost. To access a less expensive tier, which costs 20 cents per million output tokens, users must agree to provide feedback to help improve the agent. Anthropics Cloud Code and OpenAI's Codex come bundled in pricing plans that cost roughly $20 a month, with more expensive plans for increased usage.
[00:00:56] In other Meta news, the company said one of its AI models went rogue during cybersecurity testing and hacked a third-party service, the latest in a drumbeat of disclosures that suggest such incidents are becoming widespread. Meta said one of its AI models was able to access the internet because of a misconfiguration in a hacking test conducted by a third-party testing company, Irregular.
[00:01:20] According to a person familiar with the matter, the same benchmark test was behind some of the earlier autonomous AI hacking incidents involving Anthropic and OpenAI. Meta declined to release other details, such as which model was responsible, when the hacking happened, or which company its model hacked. The tech giant said it was investigating and would publish a report.
[00:01:43] And SoftBank said today it's used its stake in OpenAI to borrow $10 billion from a group of banks, dialing up risk on its giant bet on the AI pioneer. The global tech investor plans to use the cash to help fund an even bigger stake in OpenAI. The firm is poised to pay another $10 billion for shares in the chat GPT maker by October, the final chunk of a $30 billion investment announced earlier this year.
[00:02:09] The loan comes as a Japanese group embarks on a wave of hefty new AI spending commitments. The deal is an unusual move, as backers of OpenAI and other large startups typically don't invest using debt. And that's your TNB Tech Minute. We'll be back this afternoon with more.