Anthropic is ready, willing, and Fable

Top News

Claude Mythos is here, by another name: Anthropic dropped a public version of their secretive and allegedly dangerous Mythos model, with safety guardrails firmly in place. The public release has been rebranded Claude Fable 5, and the AI giant praises its abilities at developing software, computer vision, and “knowledge work.” When asked about potentially sensitive or hazardous topics like cybersecurity, biology, or chemistry, Fable automatically reverts to the dumber and therefore less-deadly Opus 4.8. Of course, government insiders and fellow tech giants have had full uncensored Mythos access since Anthropic first announced the model’s existence back in April, and are theoretically on the road to developing protective, anti-Mythos strategies allowing the model’s full release. For now, Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans can try out Fable at no additional cost. Starting June 23, Anthropic will start requiring usage credits to conserve compute.
Apple re-introduces Siri AI: At a pre-shot keynote presentation for its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple FINALLY debuted the long-awaited AI upgrade for its Siri virtual assistant. Siri gets its own standalone app, featuring a chatbot-like conversational interface, and has the ability to perform cross-app actions. (Actually USING the data, contacts, and applications you already have installed on your phone. Imagine that.) The whole thing is powered by Google’s family of models. Should Apple get some credit here for hanging back in the cut and saving on capex before jumping fully into the AI future, rather than throwing trillions at data centers and fresh power grids? SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi seems to think so; he pushed back at Apple’s competitors for “racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, with little regard for the people… it’s meant to serve,” while praising his company’s focus on the needs of the everyday user.
Standard Bots grabs $200M, goes full unicorn: The Long Island, New York-based startup has developed a line of robotic arms, designed to automate complex industrial tasks. Their new $200 million raise, led by General Catalyst and the RoboStrategy fund, sets their value north of $1 billion. The pitch: Standard’s AI-powered arms quickly learn new tasks after viewing a relatively simple demonstration. CEO Evan Beard tells Bloomberg the company is on pace to claim 10% of all US industrial robot deployments this year, and that they hope to eventually expand into domestic bot production once they’ve mastered factories.

TWiST 500

One of Jason’s personal favorite TWiST 500 entrants is Perplexity, the AI company designing applications and harnesses that sit on top of the model layer. At LAUNCH, we can have a quick chat with Perplexity Computer directly in Slack, which then routes our query to the most appropriate model. JCal’s also a heavy user of Perplexity’s Model Council, which runs queries across a panel of different models and then synthesizes and compares their takes, even resolving and reasoning through their conflicts.

Model-agnostic Perplexity seems uniquely situated to prosper in the potential future so many pundits have imagined, in which value in the AI industry drifts away from frontier model trainers and toward the apps relying on them for brain power.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Perplexity chief Aravind Srinivas is predicting the company will IPO in the foreseeable future. It won’t happen right away; Srinivas is pegging 2028 as the most likely debut for a Perplexity public offering. But he suggests it will happen regardless of how well the Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX IPOs go over this year.

Not to sound over-confident, Srinivas does concede that this year’s mega-debuts will have an impact moving forward, or “ripple effects if they don’t go well,” as he puts it. Still, it’s worth noting his efforts to differentiate Perplexity’s roadmap vs. their AI giant rivals. For example, he notes that — while the frontier model firms stand to benefit from compute-sucking trends like tokenmaxxing — Perplexity is positioned to actually help enterprises save money by auto-selecting the most appropriate (and perhaps less-costly) model for each individual task. “The future is still awesome for frontier intelligence, but it’s not going to be mindless spending, as we saw in the last few months,” he notes.

We recently hosted Srinivas on an all-star episode of the spinoff podcast, “This Week in AI,” alongside the very quotable Surge AI chief Edwin Chen. Check out the full episode here. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2298: Jason goes solo dolo this week, in a blockbuster episode capturing his reaction to the “Bad VC Stories” going around X, the Everything App. Jason recalls some of the high and low points of his career in venture fundraising, including an incredible story about legendary investor John Doerr going the extra mile to attend his Mahalo pitch. PLUS Jason chats with Sue Khim of Brilliant about the education company’s new AI tutor, Koji, and how actually empowering users can help the industry turn around its bad reputation.

E2297: Why does Anthropic want to slow down the development of AI? Aren’t they busy doing just the opposite? And what does Jason think about Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposal, that the American people should get 50% stakes in all the major AI companies? Is JCal really considering proposals around Universal Basic (or even High) Income policies? We dig into these questions in a news-heavy TWiST. Plus ComfyUI founder Yoland Yan demos the free, open-source platform, which simplifies and fine-tunes text-to-image and text-to-video workflows, and has been used on high-profile projects like the holiday Coca-Cola ads and “Wizard of Oz” at the Vegas Sphere.

E2296: Want to get to space? Several launch companies can help you. SpaceX, Rocket Lab, the Russians, the list goes on. But what about once you make it upstairs, then what? Impulse Space CEO and CTO Tom Mueller is building the next stage of our orbital economy. Meanwhile, venture capitalists are enamored with the idea of humanoid robots — robots share our shape, our work environment, and even our tools. But startups like Dusty Robotics are taking a different tack; instead of building human-shaped robots, it’s building more specialized ‘bots. Dusty’s CEO, Dr. Tessa Lau, joins Alex to go deep on purpose-built robots in today’s build-crazy market.

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