I'm excited to introduce our first speakers. Please welcome Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, and G2 Patel, president and chief product officer of Cisco. I think I see them.
Hey guys, how you doing? Great to see you.
What's up? It's great to see both of you. Thank you so much for doing this.
Good to see you. It was hard to take a couple minutes away from Fable, though. I'm surprised we got all these people in one room. There are tokens to be spending right now.
Did you give it a task while you were here?
Yeah, we got to check in on it in a couple minutes.
I really hope everyone has their agents in loops right now, because that would be really inefficient if you don't. So yes, actually let's start with Fable. That's a good...
I have a question. Does Max use AI now? Max is the son.
Max is my son. We're working on it. Okay.
These guys, they know each other. They used to work together. That's what's going on here.
Which I love, I love the banter.
He actually told me when I left, he's like, 'It's so great you left. I'd never work with you ever again.'
Only because at 2 in the morning, we would be debating existential strategy. So it's nice to get a little bit of sleep.
Right? Well, now you have your agents doing that for you. But speaking of Fable, this is super interesting. So there was a huge backlash today on Fable from AI researchers who use AI coding agents to build their software, which they use to train open-source models, which then compete with Anthropic and other frontier model companies. And the allegation against Anthropic is that they are secretly sabotaging that code. The model can tell that they're doing that.
Well, it's actually not even secret.
But not even secret. But you don't know how it works, right? They're just noticing the output and complaining about it. So I'd love to know, are you concerned that there's going to be anti-competitive behavior from these companies in the guise of AI safety?
I think I would far prefer that they didn't mitigate that in the model, because obviously AI progress is something we want as much as possible. But if you understand the DNA of Anthropic, you can totally understand why they would do that. It's anti-competitive, but it's tough to use that term because it's their product. They can choose how their product can be used to weaponize against them. I think that's a reasonable competitive dynamic if you're using somebody's product to compete with them. That's probably up to the core product to decide how that gets leveraged. The great thing is this is such a competitive market that OpenAI can easily not do that, and that would become the product that more researchers end up using. So I think these things can be worked out through the competitive forces of the market. I love the complaints that researchers have, and I also understand Anthropic's position, and I think these things work themselves out in the battle of the market.
Before you became president, you were running security products for Cisco. You're still in that purview. You're also a big proponent of open source. So how do you feel about what's happening in that space?
I think America needs to have a very strong open source strategy. In the absence of that, even if there's no technical limitation of using a proprietary model within your environment, there will be restrictions. You need a strong investment in open source in addition to proprietary models. Nvidia is doing a good job with Nemo and their portfolio. In the past 96 hours, a lot happened: new image models, new video models, new language models came out. I think that will be self-propelling because there's enough demand. Now, the costs of tokens are far higher than the actual value these tokens generate at scale. The big risk is if you don't create an equilibrium, people pull back on using tokens, which is not good for anyone. You need an intelligent routing layer and small language models. Not every query needs to go through a frontier model with 10 trillion parameters. As you redirect to small language models, open source will be used. Token economics will dictate that open source is very important, good for the national interest of America, and good for corporate customers to have choice.
Aaron says it's fine for Anthropic to defend their turf, but we know that's not what they're going to say if they get a call from regulators. They're going to say, 'We're doing this because it's safe. We're worried about AI safety, and this model's too dangerous. It's going to create a bunch of security flaws.' Are you worried? Now, Mythos already started this debate, but is it that much of a step change in security if they allow this to run free?
We were in Project Glasswing. We were the first of the companies to get access to the Mythos program that had 11 companies initially, where they made the model available without guardrails. Our product teams have been working hard to patch vulnerabilities before Fable came out. I feel there is a massive step function of vulnerabilities that will be found. The time from when a vulnerability is announced to when an exploit happens is now a matter of minutes. Patching is hard; it takes about 45 days, and only 20% of vulnerabilities ever get patched. 80% go unaddressed because you don't have enough resources. You have to patch the infrastructure, but also have mechanisms to address vulnerabilities at the root, like using memory-safe languages because most vulnerabilities happen with C and C++. The other area is providing compensating controls during the window when you're exposed before a patch is applied. It is a non-trivial risk that you should not take lightly, and it's a national security risk if critical infrastructure like power plants or hospitals go down, especially in coordination with adversaries.
You also mentioned cost, Aaron. Your customers are using all these different models, and you have a really interesting vantage point at Box because you see what people are doing. There's been this meme about sticker shock. Is that real? Do you see that in your customers?
