Podcast: Kimi K3.1 Pro, the new cyber reality, and Muse musings

We — Nathan and Florian — wanted to discuss all the messy trade-offs of a busy week in AI and ask all the pressing questions like:
* Why did Kimi K3.1 Pro have a mixed reaction with such incredible benchmarks? Will it be adopted?
* Were we wrong about the risks of open-weight models and cybersecurity?
* Why do cyber experts discuss recent events so differently than AI experts?
* What comes next in the few months? What will change our minds?
We will write more about this subject, but wanted to bring you behind the curtain as we aspire to quickly learn more about the cybersecurity industry and trends across the last few years that have been leading us today. We conclude the podcast with some lighter topics, from Muse-maxing to excitement in still hiring junior technical talent. Please send us questions and topics, as we plan to record more of these podcasts going forward.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. For other Interconnects podcasts, go here. YouTube ↓
Chapters
* 00:00 Kimi K3.1 Reaction
* 08:15 Kimi’s open-weight cyber principles
* 11:23 You can hack everything era
* 15:54 PHP2Shell, LiteLLM, and the new internet
* 24:00 Abliterated APIs, safeguards, and trusted access
* 31:41 Anthropic not hiring juniors employees
* 36:16 Florian’s Muse addiction
* 45:30 Wrap-up
Links we discuss
* My thread with Dean Ball about the “boy who cried wolf” story of the frontier labs
* Kimi K3.1 Pro announcement blog
* Kimi K3.1 Pro on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
* Kimi K3.1 on Artificial Analysis defensive cyber benchmarks
* Program Bench
* Open-weight Mythos would’ve been fine take
* PHP “hasn’t caused a disaster yet” update
* Abliteration.ai serving abliterated models API
* Morph serving abliterated DeepSeek via API
* Joshua Saxe’s Substack on AI and cybersecurity
* Azeem Azhar, “The internet’s Wuhan moment”
* Anthropic, “How employment is changing at Anthropic”
* LiteLLM security incident report
Transcript
00:00:00 Nathan Lambert: We are back with another Interconnects podcast. We are with Florian, eval guy, recently moved to SF. Florian, is Kimi K3.1 Pro, name is a mouthful, going to live up to the benchmark scores, for example on Artificial Analysis, or where is it going to land?
00:00:17 Florian Brand: In the past, the Kimi models always lived up to the expectations, but this release is kind of weird compared to the others. I think it is also partially because they are becoming more professional, and the previous model drops were kind of out of nowhere. This time, which also got some criticism, they launched a bigger social media campaign, which allegedly also involved paying people to post about the model without disclosing.
00:00:56 Nathan Lambert: I think a lot of companies do this and tell you not to mention it, but it’s a mess. It’s bad form. No company should do it. Essentially, one person tweeted a screenshot of the press instructions for Kimi that said, “Don’t say this is a paid promotion.” And to my knowledge, no one has corroborated it after that.
00:01:15 Florian Brand: Yeah, and there are right now a few of these model launches, including by American companies, that are just very obviously astroturfed. We have seen launches where it’s thousands of retweets and a few hundred likes, because it works so well to get the attention. Some of them disclose that it is a paid ad while others don’t. But in general, we have seen the professionalization of model launches over time, and pretty quickly. A year ago, everyone just dropped the model, then patched vLLM afterwards, so no one was actually able to run any of the open models for a while. Now you get all the inference frameworks on day one, you get all the inference providers on day one. Or, which is also what we see more and more, the model creator has a few weeks of exclusive access before they release the weights. And that’s also what’s happening with K3.1 Pro. I think it’s two weeks of exclusive access before they release the m...