Ep86 Dead Air

The Net Society crew is back together for a holiday-weekend episode. They begin with Chris’s frustrations around Fable before examining Meta’s struggling engineering culture, copycat tendencies, and surprising progress in brain-signal decoding. From there, the conversation turns to custom models, expert investor judgment, and the growing push for AI sovereignty as enterprises question how much control they should hand to frontier labs. The crew considers whether open-source models, fine-tuning, and intelligent routing will create a more fragmented AI ecosystem where models are selected by cost, reliability, and specialization. They also ask what happened to the inventive energy of the last NFT cycle and whether better tools, cheaper blockspace, and a little AI could make crypto fun again. The episode closes with America’s 250th anniversary, Europe’s resistance to air conditioning, and an unexpectedly serious debate over whether AC belongs among humanity’s greatest inventions.

Mentioned in the episode

Fable 5 returns https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756

Meta Engineering Culture https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/metas-months-old-ai-unit-is-a-soul-crushing-gulag-say-the-engineers-stuck-inside-it/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Nature Article decoding brain activity https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02303-2

Bridgewater and Thinking Machines https://x.com/ziv_ravid/status/2072171186620960908?s=46&t=3cJ-BS7Y1NeBdjntkS2hZQ

Backseats tweet https://x.com/backseats_eth/status/2072020616400757233

AC being a hot topic https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2072411003170472359

Show & Hosts

Net Society: https://x.com/net__society

Aaron Wright: https://x.com/awrigh01

Chris F: https://x.com/ChrisF_0x