🏈 The NFL Will Bleed Cable Dry Before Tech Takes Over TV

Amazon, Apple, ESPN, Netflix, and YouTube will clearly eventually control the NFL rights...

I Note…

💫 Amazon May Buy Globalstar

While at first glance, this may seem like bad news for Apple, which owns 20% of the company as part of a 2024 deal to launch their satellite backup services, they actually might very much welcome this deal – assuming they can work out an arrangement with Amazon to maintain the connectivity agreement in place. While the stock has been bolstered (still just a $9B company) by positioning versus Starlink and the lead-up to the SpaceX IPO, Apple has also clearly been propping up the company without wanting to buy it outright due to regulatory (and undoubtedly, logistics) headaches. Amazon, on the other hands, needs such a service to bolster their tiny "Leo", which is having a hell of a time meeting satellites-in-space requirements (even when mandated) because of launch backlogs. Obviously, Starlink has no such issues... Speaking of, you-know-who will not like this deal, not only because SpaceX had discussed buying Globalstar, but because he’s wanted Apple’s business from the get-go. And it was starting to seem like he might get it if Globalstar couldn’t match Starlink. But Amazon might be able to help with that... [FT 🔒]

💰 OpenAI’s $122B Round

On one hand, this is just an insane amount of money. Truly. As I noted when they raised their mere $40B round, it was more than had ever been raised in any IPO. This is more than 3x that amount. (That round felt like five years ago – it was a year ago.) Even if and when SpaceX shatters the record raised in an IPO later this year, this round will undoubtedly still be far larger than that amount. That said... There’s a weird vibe around announcing the $110B amount and the re-announcing the $122B amount – especially playing up the demand when many knew it was going to be upsized. I mean, it’s funny to point out because that extra $12B itself is more than almost anyone has raised ever. But still, OpenAI’s whole blog post on the matter feels... almost defensive? I know that’s wild to say, but well, they’re under attack and pressure at the moment. It feels like this is a message to the market: never mind the bollocks, here’s the validation. And... fair enough? Not everyone is sold, but is anyone selling? Just a whole bunch of strange/mixed signals at the moment as OpenAI tries to pivot from their massive perch in consumer AI to take on Anthropic. [CNBC]

🥒 Microsoft in an AI Pickle

It’s fairly wild that the company had their worst quarter since 2008 – the financial crisis! – given the overall state of the markets holding up – despite, you know, war and whatnot. And the 23% drop was registered just as OpenAI, a company in which they have a 27% stake, has raised a round valuing it at $850B+. That stake, by my quick math, is currently worth around $230B. Even with the inevitable dilution of the new round (though, notably, Microsoft did end up participating, in the last $12B slug), it’s worth over $200B. It’s one of the greatest investments of all time, certainly at that scale. $13B+ in $200B+ and growing... And yet here’s Microsoft, dropping like it’s no longer hot. Obviously they’re wrapped up in the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative, but really they have a broad AI narrative challenge as the various Copilot initiatives aren’t working (perhaps even in enterprise). Certainly not relative to their peers. It sure feels like they made a mistake in hedging so quickly away from OpenAI after “The Blip” and picked perhaps the wrong partner to lead their efforts to go it alone (which has now been rectified). Did Satya get too cocky? [CNBC]

🤖 Microsoft’s New AI Models

Speaking of... stop me if you’ve heard this before: Mustafa Suleyman is back doing the press rounds. Seriously, it has been a full-blown interview epidemic for the past year or so with no cure in sight. This latest barrage is around a few new MAI models, though, notably, not one LLM to rule them all from Microsoft – not yet, at least – but instead, smaller models focused on transcription, voice, and images. They may look impressive on paper, but will anyone care? What is the actual strategy? I’m just seeing a bunch of 180s around how frontier models are all that matter after not mattering at all and how enterprise is all that matters after all the talk being about consumer engagement. Suleyman declares Microsoft is now “a top three lab just under OpenAI and Gemini”, but beyond (Microsoft-backed) Anthropic having something to say about that (and his humorous use of “Gemini” instead of “DeepMind”, the the company he famously co-founded), I imagine there are a few others out there, notably in Asia, but also what about (Microsoft-backed) Mistral? He seems to suggest the only reason they’re not at the top right now is simply time – because of the OpenAI restrictions, they were late to the frontier game. But throwing money and resources hasn’t worked to get xAI or Meta back into the game so far, so why will Microsoft be different? [VentureBeat]

I Quote…

"Elon is saying, 'I have this window to fund all this craziness for a good period of time based on the SpaceX hype.' By merging the two losers with one winner, he keeps all the balls in the air. He keeps everything afloat."

— Ross Gerber giving an assessment of the SpaceX IPO. Sounds about right.

Asides…

• Oof, this Claude Code harness leak (no weights) is rough. But I am excited for my Tamagotchi-like “Buddy”. [Cyber Security News]

• Naturally, Elon Musk chose April 1 to file for SpaceX’s IPO... [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • E-Trade potentially being the key partner for the retail side of the listing seemed somewhat surprising – a Dot Com throwback? – then I remembered one of the lead underwriters, Morgan Stanley, bought them. As perhaps did many people since it was just a few weeks before the COVID pandemic was declared... [Reuters]

• I mean, I would sure hope that the “New Siri“ powered by Gemini would be able to handle multiple requests in a single query? [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Open, open, open – until it comes to actually becoming cutting edge and/or making money. Then closed is still the way, even in China, it seems, with Alibaba switching their stance of their AI models... [Information 🔒]

• Being able to switch your original Gmail email address feels long overdue since it feels like many people who picked their name – um – 22 years ago may be in a different place now. Still, better late than never! [Engadget]

  • Google also jacked up the storage on the ‘AI Pro‘ plan from 2TB to 5TB, a move that almost felt like when Gmail itself launched all those years ago on April Fools Day. (Though Google Photos undoubtedly takes up a lot more storage for many of us these days!) [9to5Google]

• Allbirds sold for a song – $39M. The shoe startup had raised $348M before their 2021 IPO which valued them at $4B. Yikes. [Bloomberg 🔒]

• No idea if “biological computers“ built to leverage neurons grown from stem cells can possibly work and/or scale, but might they teach us something about power efficiency? [Economist 🔒]

I Spy…

I’ve probably posted about this enough — forgive me, He-Man was a huge part of my childhood — but with each new glimpse, I get a little more worried that this isn’t going to be good. I mean, should we really expect it to be? No, but they’re clearly also trying to ride the Barbie momentum here. Unfortunately, this, at least from these trailers, looks a bit too much like a knock-off of Thor (Idris Elba being in both doesn’t help). It’s just way, way too CGI’d up.

Give the 1987 movie all the shit you want, but it somehow felt more authentic. Again, this is a trailer. And I realize I’m writing this about a franchise where the villain is a skeleton man. He remains the wild card here as well. I hope I’m wrong!

📹 The Sudden Fall of Sora

A bit more reporting around the end of OpenAI’s big video push. The high level remains that they simply need to focus, and beyond the costs (which were massive – burning $1M/day!), Sora required the training of its own models, different from the LLM models – one of which, “Spud”, they’re clearly sprinting towards and need all the compute resources on hand to get it over the finish line. But also an interesting tidbit that Meta had tried to poach one of the key people behind the Sora models, and when OpenAI countered to keep him, it also set them down the path of the Sora stand-alone product. Seems like the team will focus more on “world models” which is sort of what Sora already was, but now without that expensive front end. The Disney situation remains the real shitshow though. This has them being alerted less than an hour before the plug was pulled. Shades of the blindsiding of Microsoft by OpenAI back in the day... [WSJ 🔒]

🐢 ChatGPT’s Slow Start with Apps, Again

Two years ago, I wrote a post noting that perhaps not everything needs an app store. That was about OpenAI’s directory for custom GPTs, which never really went anywhere. A few months ago, OpenAI was back at it, rolling out apps in ChatGPT to much fanfare. The result, at least so far, is the same. The problem seems pretty fundamental. It’s easier to use Booking’s website to book a property. And it’s faster to use Uber’s app to hail a ride. Not sure I see how that changes. These apps are more obviously interesting for enterprise integrations but one suspects OpenAI keeps trying for if/when they have their own device(s). But that also hasn’t really worked for Amazon... [Bloomberg 🔒]

👋 And Then There Were None

As in co-founders of xAI. With Ross Nordeen leaving, only Elon Musk himself remains of that original team. Which is crazy but also fairly par for the course with these AI labs. That said, if anyone was set up not to leave it was Nordeen, who came from Tesla and helped Musk with the Twitter takeover too. But perhaps better to just totally rip-off the band-aid to start anew – for everyone. Imagine if this was a startup you invested in though. Of course, it just highlights the fact that no one was investing in the team, it was simply a bet on Elon and that he would pull a rabbit out of the hat. Which he did in the form of SpaceX shares. Still, at some point xAI actually needs to work, right? [BI 🔒]

🎥 If You Build It (A Good Movie) They Will Come (See It)

Project Hail Mary soars past $200M globally (and $137M domestically) in just two weeks with an insanely impressive 34% second weekend drop at the box office. It’s already Amazon MGM’s most successful movie of all time too (topping Creed III). And unlike Apple’s F1, it will end up a big hit even with its relatively high budget. So it’s hardly surprisingly that there’s already sequel talk, which author Andy Weir isn’t shooting down. 2 Hail 2 Mary? How about an Interstellar cross over? Importantly, this gives Amazon good momentum gearing up for Bond – which hopefully means sparing no expense while also giving the creative team full control to just make a good movie. Important since Denis Villeneuve is said to not have final cut... [THR]

🍿 The OpenAI/Anthropic Beef Origins

Speaking of drama... while there’s clearly many missing elements in the relaying of this internal infighting between Dario and Daniella Amodei versus Sam Altman and Greg Brockman while all were still at OpenAI, I mean even if just these stories are accurate – it makes the old Microsoft org chart look like a Kumbaya circle. This paints a picture of a schism between Dario and Brockman which spiraled into a much bigger beef over time as egos and perhaps some double-dealing was put in motion. It all started a decade ago, before Dario even got to OpenAI (he turned down an opportunity to be a co-founder to stay at Google) and Daniella was at Stripe (where she met Brockman). What’s especially wild is how this is all still playing out in real time given the war in Iran and AI’s role. And the fact that these two companies are both now valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars and racing to go public. The first OpenAI movie hasn’t even come out yet and the sequel is already obvious. [WSJ 🔒]

I Wrote…

📲 The 70 Year Old iPhone

Will the device still be central in 2076?

I Quote…

"We’re not going back to stone tablets. This is intentional tech use."

– Shiloh Vincent, the superintendent of a school grappling with a tech problem. Not AI. Not iPhones. Chromebooks!

The kids have apparently figured out how to use computers for things beyond schoolwork and the grown-ups are shocked. Shocked! (Perhaps another avenue back into the classroom for Apple with the MacBook Neo?)

Asides…

• It feels like all the focus has been on the AI models coming out of China. But the talent gap may be the real issue going forward... [Economist 🔒]

• Millions of people are watching an AI version of Love Island on TikTok featuring fruit. Maybe I’ve been wrong, maybe we are cooked. [WSJ 🔒]

  • On that topic, the most popular writer at Fortune is letting AI do a lot of the leg work. Which, fine as a tool, but who is actually benefitting from reading such content, let alone writing it? Anyone? [WSJ 🔒]

• Apple is paying up (in the form of stock options) to try to stop the talent bleeding to OpenAI and Meta. [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Vibe-coded apps seem to be breaking the App Store as the review process can’t scale with the submission rate. As such, the app update pipes are clogged. Which seems like a major problem that isn’t going to ease! [BI 🔒]

  • Is ‘Vibe Augmenting‘ the new ‘Vibe Coding’? Taking existing software and using AI to write software around it to customize it. [WSJ 🔒]

• Bluesky launches a new AI app for building custom feeds. I have no idea who or what this is for. It feels like a feature that should be in Bluesky but the community might revolt. [TechCrunch]

• Meta’s impending AI glasses are targeted at prescription wearers, which seems wild that they weren’t um, focused, here before? I know they had the option, but this is the market already captured. Like me! [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • They should launch in Europe around 2056. [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Helium is literally a key element for making chips, and beyond the US, Qatar is a huge source. Which is yet another problem for the chip industry when Qatar is being bombed. [NYT]

• Is Claude gaining on OpenClaw with Anthropic’s new agentic tools? Obviously yes. It’s so much easier to use! [Information 🔒]

• Midjourney still alive, still kicking (thanks Meta), still being sued by the studios. but it sure sounds like they’re going to bite the bullet and raise funding soon. They’re still working on some hardware product? [Information 🔒]

I Spy…

Why is Netflix raising prices again? Well, for one, now that they're out of the Warner Bros running, they can. Second, this chart. Relative to their peers, they're still massively under-priced when it comes to viewership.

🚭 Big Techbacco

The growing risk that these companies are viewed as a cancer...

I Note…

🗣️ Apple Will Open Up Siri to Other AIs

As I understand it, this is less significant than the actual lobotomy Siri is undergoing (complete with full Gemini distillation rights for Apple!), as it mainly just means you can swap in your AI chatbot of choice where ChatGPT now resides within Siri (that is, as the fallback option). This move has been rumored since that integration launched two years ago at WWDC — most notably, with Apple confirming talks with Google about Gemini at the time. One thing that will make this more significant is if you’re able to pick your default AI for Siri. That is, replace Siri with, say, Claude. That would be pretty great — especially if it included all the system-level integrations that Siri enjoys (we’ll see, I’m pretty skeptical of that). Still, this should help upsell various AI services (and help Apple’s Services narrative), perhaps in a way that OpenAI was never quite able to, because ChatGPT seemed so buried within Siri. And because there will now actually be an app for that! [Bloomberg 🔒]

🌀 Meta Churns

It’s honestly hard to keep up with all the reports coming out of Meta. They’re doing yet more layoffs while at the same time, publicly announcing massive new pay packages for top execs. I mean, read the room — the conference room? And those are tied to the some wild incentives, all the way up to achieving a $9T market cap — just as the actual stock is currently dropping fast, almost back at $1T, back behind Tesla. Speaking of, the incentives are arguably more aggressive than the ones Elon needs to hit to get his own trillion dollars. All of this is setting up for many at Meta to be heavily incentivized to grow in some pretty unnatural ways… What could possibly go wrong? One of those leaders, Boz, is now leading up efforts to make Meta "AI Native" whatever the fuck that means. Meanwhile, his old group at Reality Labs are now "AI Builders" whatever the fuck that means. The new titles sound almost Scientology in nature. Will AI thetan levels be measured? There’s also some new small business org? Meanwhile, the hackquisitions continue. Dreamer seems like a relatively small one, likely aimed at bringing Hugo Barra back on board, as well as Stripe’s former CTO, David Singleton. More of a hackquihire situation? [NYT]

💰 When Larry Met Demis (at Elon’s Birthday)

A fun read from what seems like it will be a fun book about DeepMind. From Larry Page using Elon Musk’s birthday party — complete with samuris and sumos! — to pitch Demis Hassabis on building his company with the resources of Google, to the dinner where Mark Zuckerberg tries to make the counter-pitch, which fell flat because Zuck was too excited about VR and everything else — i.e. he wasn’t taking AI seriously enough. That led directly to the hiring of Yann LeCun and the cycle started anew… The most wild part is the haggling over the price, which was $650M, which would be a seed round for such a startup today — and a modest one at that! A lot can change in a decade. Thanks in no small part to DeepMind! If it were still a startup, what would DeepMind be valued at today? With the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs on the horizon, you’d have to imagine we’re talking about the "T" word… [WSJ 🔒]

🖥️ RIP Mac Pro

I hardly knew ye, because I never actually owned ye. Nor was I particularly ever tempted. Which is perhaps less surprising when you learn that I can do all of my workflow on a MacBook Neo. Obviously, exactly no one is surprised by this move as it was such a low volume product that Apple kept having to be jolted awake to even recall at times. They kept saying they were going to do it right, this time — "can't innovate anymore, my ass" — but their heart was clearly never in really it. And the Mac Studio was the stake in the heart. We’ll always have the laughs over those $700 wheels though. [9to5Mac]

💍 Colbert of the Rings

Honestly not sure what to make of the news that Stephen Colbert’s post-Late Show gig will be writing a Lord of the Rings movie with his son. I mean, what?! He is a noted J.R.R. Tolkien fan and expert, but that obviously doesn’t make one a screenwriter — let alone one trying to adapt some of the most famous/beloved material in history. His son is a screenwriter, but not with the must illustrious track record in his young career. It just feels a bit… off. But here’s hoping for the best. Because they’re gonna need it if it’s not any good. Obviously Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson will help, but we also all saw The Hobbit ridiculously stretched into three films. At least we’ll get more Tom Bombadil I guess? Who is directing? [Variety]

I Quote…

"I could bridge the gap between the people who created technology — the engineers, the bits-and-bytes people — and the people that use the technology."

— Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus Corporation, which most famously created PageMaker, one of the early pieces of software that helped sell the Mac.

He named his company, which would end up being merged with Adobe in 1994, after Aldus Manutius, a 15th-century Venetian printer who standardized typefaces, invented italics. Brainerd passed away in February at age 78, though the NYT just ran his obit last week. Well worth the read.

I Wrote…

📱 Apple Realizes There Should Be An App For That

Siri Edition

📹 So Long, Sora

An OpenAI Code Red? More like a Code Dead...

Asides…

• With "side quests" officially on hold at OpenAI, the ChatGPT sexy time feature — "Citron Mode" — seems on the chopping block next to Sora. This always just seemed like a silly distraction to try to match Elon in market anyway. [FT 🔒]

• Anthropic seems to have inadvertantly revealed not just a new model, but a new model tier in the form of "Mythos" which may reside above "Opus" on their AI food chain. It seems like "Capybara" was the codename, but it’s all not entirely clear and clearly they’re not ready to fully talk about it! [Fortune]

  • OpenAI though, seems ready to talk about "Spud" any day now. Unless they’re worried it will seem anticlimatic versus the "step change" Anthropic is going to launch? [Information 🔒]

  • If Anthropic is aiming to raise $60B in their IPO, and SpaceX is looking at $75B, how much is OpenAI going to try to raise? They just did a $120B private round so… [Information 🔒]

    • Speaking of SpaceX’s IPO, which could be filed any day now, targeting making 30% available to inviduals investors to try to memestock it up from day one? [Reuters]

• Another week, another cofounder leaving xAI. But this leaves just one (besides Elon Musk) left. One. From Eleven! [BI 🔒]

• Another week, another private credit pause on withdrawals. [NYT]

• The FCC trying to bring call centers back to the US when it’s the most clear cut business set to be upended by AI is… something. Trolling? [WSJ 🔒]

• Nintendo is going to start charging more for physical games, which is just interesting since their making of game cartridges for Hudson back in the 1980s is what led to the 70/30 split which even Apple famously now uses despite not actually making physical methods to deploy apps, of course. [VGC]

  • Meanwhile, they’re apparently cutting Switch 2 production with sales a bit sluggish. A few things going on here including how much they frontloaded to meet initial demand which may have tricked them into extrapolating future demand — it’s like the superhero movies which open huge then quickly fall. But really, they just need more games? [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Is Finn rejoining the Star Wars galaxy? John Boyega is at least talking to new Lucasfilm head Dave Filoni. Interesting… [ScreenRant]

I Spy…

⚾️ Meta Keeps Missing

Encryption? No. Crypto? No. VR? No. Open models? No. AI? Not so far. Agents? Nothing yet. AR? We’ll see...

I Note…

💫 Google’s Gemini Comeback

Good overview of how Google fell behind and came back in the AI race by Harry McCracken. And I swear I’m not just saying that since I’m quoted a couple times in the piece. Per my quote at the end, I am genuinely curious how the company handles any macro downturn in the next few years. Everyone knows that’s typically the best time to invest, but there will also undoubtedly be immense pressure from Wall Street for everyone (not just Google) to pull back on the wild infrastructure spend. Meta and Google could be insulated far better because of the founder control (even though Larry Page + Sergey Brin are no longer in charge of day-to-day, they control the voting shares). Microsoft and Amazon could be in trickier spots, even though founders Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos will undoubtedly be on board, respectively. They’re older companies without the same levels/methods of control... [Fast Company]

🪧 OpenAI Wants In on the Choice Screens

Speaking of Google, in various countries around the world they’ve been forced to adopt a choice-screen for the default search engines on Android and Chrome. Now OpenAI wants in on that action. Certainly a case could be made that the major AI chatbots should be included as they’re replacing search for many people. But you’d think what they’d really care about is new rules that would push people to set their default AI service as well. That’s tomorrow’s big battle, I suppose. [Telegraph]

🗺️ Apple to Add Ads to Maps

Let me just definitely say: yuck. Basically the entire reason I keep Apple Maps on my homescreen instead of Google Maps (now that the two seem comparable in terms of data quality) is because Apple Maps just looks much nicer. It’s just a much nicer experience to use. Google Maps is cluttered up to no end including with yes, a ton of ads. With Apple now shoving the ads (which will undoubtedly have far worse targeting, which isn’t a good thing here) in there, I may have to switch that homescreen slot. Look, we all get it. Services, services, services. In the age of iPhone inundation, it’s the only sure avenue for growth. But there’s obviously real risks here for Apple, a company whose rhetoric over the years has clearly been against what they’re about to start doing. This feels awfully nickel and dime-y. [Bloomberg 🔒]

🏆 Lawmaker Bet Against Prediction Markets

Every day seems to bring little data points suggesting that the prediction market craze is about to face a reckoning. This is probably the most problematic yet – a bipartisan effort – by two Senators to try to steer the markets away from sports. And that’s a problem as it’s already a massive part of these businesses (for obvious reasons). That said, the MLB’s official deal with Polymarket is... interesting. Separately, Kalshi is now preemptively blocking athletes (and politicans) from using the platform to trade within their own markets. [WSJ 🔒]

🤖 Microsoft’s Ai2 Bet

This doesn’t appear to be yet another “hackquisition“ and instead is just Microsoft straight-up poaching the key team behind Ai2 – a clever play on the fact that it’s the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence – the research lab founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. But with Allen having passed away, clearly there was a mandate challenge going forward here. Meanwhile, Microsoft has an AI challenge. Now that Mustafa Suleyman has “narrowed his focus” (did Suleyman frame this?) and is focused on building frontier models (after years spent insisting Microsoft wasn’t interested in doing this) for “humanist superintelligence” (a framing which has gotten zero traction, but keeps being used), he’s clearly on the hunt for talent. The most interesting element of this may be that the team was particularly focused on “open” (read: open weight) models. Might Microsoft try to step in to the space that Meta is ceding as they push Llama aside to focus on their own, proprietary models? Also worth noting: Ali Farhadi sold his previous AI startup to Apple in 2020 focused on low-power, edge-based AI tools, which was an Ai2 spin-out. [GeekWire]

🍪 ARM Muscles Into Chip Market

It has been known for a while that they were going to make this move. But it’s still sort of wild. Obviously they’re going to downplay any tension with their partners here, but that’s easy to say when you’re yet to ship. In the success state, this could get awfully awkward for some of these players. For now, they say there’s a lane in "orchestration" – basically, helping agents do their thing. But obviously NVIDIA and the others are going to want in on that market too. Interesting that Meta helped make the chip and that OpenAI is a launch partner. Remember when NVIDIA tried to buy ARM?! Instead, SoftBank still owns about 90% of the company – NVIDIA also held a stake after their bid failed, but they sold it off last month. Also recall that SoftBank recently exited their NVIDIA holdings (to invest more money into OpenAI). But they still hold their stake in Intel. As does NVIDIA. Everything remains circular and intertwined. [FT 🔒]

I Wrote…

🫟 Microsoft Got Sloppy with Windows

At perhaps the exact wrong moment with AI and the MacBook Neo...

💻 Before MacBook Neo, There Was iBook

27 years ago, Steve Jobs celebrated Apple completing “the quadrant”...

I Quote…

"Americans said, 'yeah, I’m not into the whole spaceship thing. I’m just like, dude, where’s my truck?' 'Dude, here is your truck.'"

— Scott Keogh, the CEO of Scout, a car brand once popular in the 1960s and 1970s that VW acquired about five years ago to try to relaunch as an electric truck company. The cars won’t launch until 2028, but they sure look promising. Definitely some Rivian vibes, which, will be helping with the launch given their own VW partnership…

Asides…

• Texas (well, Crusoe) has apparently chosen Microsoft (to pick up the Abilene site which Oracle and OpenAI put down). Yes, it was meant to be an expansion of the neighboring Stargate project. Yes, this is awkward given the history between all the parties. [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • Apollo is the latest to cap withdrawals from a private credit fund… [FT 🔒]

  • Meanwhile, SoftBank on the verge of tripping over their (self-mandated) loan-to-value ratio of 25% with their latest OpenAI investments. [FT 🔒]

• Unsurprisingly, politicians are jumping all over the Super Micro executive NVIDIA chip smuggling situation. But are they really implying Jensen Huang has been misleading government officials, or even outright lying?! [FT 🔒]

  • The entire fate of Super Micro sure seems in NVIDIA’s hands now. If they don’t keep working together… [WSJ 🔒]

• Notion swapping Cursor for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex speaks directly to the "harness" problem. Are the model makers best suited for these tasks? Or can Cursor make the "Switzerland" case? Harder when they’re clearly now going to be pushing their own models. [Information 🔒]

• EU Inc! Fun name, fine idea, but not so fast… [FT 🔒]

• Out of this world opening for Project Hail Mary — $80.5M! — as Amazon finally has a hit movie on their hands. You make a great movie that people want to see, and they go see it. Funny that. Good omen for Bond? [WSJ 🔒]

• In order to film Dune: Part Three, Denis Villeneuve had some IMAX lenses specially made to give the film a different look. Yes. [THR]

I Spy…

That’s a nice-looking (electric) truck. Dig the branding too.

The Inner Ring…

💰 Maybe You Can’t Just Throw Money at AI

How and why Meta AI and xAI have failed in AI thus far...

🛩️ Microsoft Adds More Copilots to Help Copilot Copilot

Their consumer and commercial AI efforts clearly haven’t worked...

⚔️ OpenAI’s Odyssey

Can they get down to business while maintaining ChatGPT’s lead?

Thoughts On…

💪 "Super" ChatGPT

Just last week I wrote about how OpenAI was in its "bundling" phase, with Sora and other services seemingly on the verge of being folded into ChatGPT itself. And sure enough… This reads as if they’re going to bundle ChatGPT and Codex around Atlas, the browser OpenAI launched to much fanfare last year but the company has been quiet about since (as it turns out, it’s really, really hard to compete against Chrome). That could obviously spur Atlas usage, but would also match what Anthropic has done in baking Claude Code (and Cowork) into the Claude app itself. It’s not a bad idea — and such a bundle should help them (up)sell into enterprise and push the agentic narrative — as the company tries to focus, but there’s so very real product bloat risks here, obviously. We’re way beyond Microsoftian toolbars… [WSJ 🔒]

💎 Super Gemini

Native AI apps, so hot right now. Google’s move to make a native Mac app for Gemini is long overdue. I pay for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (to test each) but I always end up using Gemini last because it’s stuck in the browser. Google clearly thought this would be their strength — again, Chrome! — but as we move more into agentic workflows, it’s clearly holding the product back. "Desktop Intelligence" should change that. And it seems like the shake up of 'Project Mariner' may be related to all of this as everyone seeks to get their Claude Cowork and OpenClaw answer. But if Google can’t get enough people to download this new app, how much do you want to bet we see it as a full-on payload and part of Chrome? Could be worse: could be Apple, which refuses to have a stand-alone AI app at all. Even now. I suspect they’ll change their tune there too — in 2027. [Bloomberg 🔒]

🤑 Jensen Selling AI Inevitability

While I do think Jensen Huang is the best MC of these massive keynotes since Steve Jobs, and the command is similar, the approach is actually totally different, as Jim Prosser points out. NVIDIA’s keynotes are less about selling products — because they’re basically no longer selling to individuals and with the businesses buying, they’re already selling more than they can make anyway — it’s more about selling a movement. Many probably thought the effusive praise of OpenClaw was a bit odd (or, at least, a bit much), but it wasn’t really about OpenClaw, it was about boosting the latest and greatest that furthers the narrative that your underlying product is essential. You don’t have to state the obvious. In fact, it’s far more potent if you don’t. Basically the entire keynote is praise for others (so long as they’re using NVIDIA). Of course, as Prosser notes, this approach only works if you have the actual business to back it up. Which, of course, NVIDIA does. [Person Familiar]

🤑 The $10B TikTok Taste

Remember how ridiculous it was when the US version of TikTok was sold for $14B? Well, it turns out the price was actually $24B — but with $10B of that going to the Trump administration. No one is talking about it too much due to deal exhaustion and well, everything else going on in the world. But that’s absofuckinglutely ridiculous. Of course, any sort of fee is ridiculous here, but that’s also par for this particular course. But even bankers usually only get 1% — not 41%. I remain very curious where TikTok goes from here. Obviously, there have been some initial bumps in the handover, but the app is now all the way down to 22 in the App Store after being in the top 5 for much of the past many years. Could it possibly just slowly fade away? [WSJ 🔒]

🥉 Samsung 'TriFold' — as in Sold for 3 Months

They’re framing it as just a "test" — one that "sold out". But then why did they even bother rolling out the $2,899 gimmick to the US at all? How silly and embarrassing. All they had to do was listen to Dr. Ian Malcolm, not the Gillette guy. [Bloomberg 🔒]

🪱 Dune 3

One thing you can’t tell from the (obviously excellent) trailer: this third film is set 17 years after the second one. It’s a little tricky because they’re clearly showing flashbacks to some seemingly happier times. But to hear Denis Villeneuve tell it, "It will be a very different film, very different — a Dune movie, but with a different tone, with a different rhythm, with a different pace. It’s a more action-packed and more tense film, more muscular than the two others, I will say." He also called it a "thriller" Just in case the primal screaming didn’t make that clear… And he shot the movie on film, a first for him, except for the desert scenes to distinguish the "brutality" there. Are we about to witness a Return of the King-style celebration that culminates in next year’s Academy Awards? The Oscars ratings could sure use that! In an era where you have to wait years and years between streaming show seasons (including ones based on Dune!), it’s sort of wild how fast we’re getting this third Dune. But Villeneuve had to move fast, as now all eyes turn to Bond… [Deadline]

I Quote…

"AI can be very dangerous, we have to be very careful with it."

— President Trump, accusing Iran of using the technology to spread disinformation. What a weird, wild, and yes, dangerous time we live in.

I Wrote…

🗡️ Jensen in the Arena

The ‘Token King’ enters the Age of Inference...

🔥 Amazon’s Novel Approach to a Newfangled AI Device: a Phone?

It’s perhaps not as crazy as it sounds. Just don’t say “Fire Phone”...

🏆 Warner Bros Wins the Oscars

And by proxy, Paramount...

❤️‍🔥 Firefly Flies Again

Serenity now... animated.

💛 Actually, MacBook Neo Is For Me

I didn’t expect to, but I’m keeping it...

Asides…

• Yeah I mean in an age where companies are raising billions of dollars in "seed" funding, who wouldn’t give Jeff Bezos $100B? (Unless, perhaps, if it’s for journalism.) [WSJ 🔒]

  • (Also his 'Project Prometheus', which seems related to this new fund, is perhaps raising a separate $6B in seed funding.) [NYT]

• Meanwhile, 'Project Sunrise' (sensing a theme here), is Blue Origin’s attempt to launch 52,000 satellites for "data centers in space" and other endeavors to battle SpaceX/Elon Musk. And yes, this is different from Amazon’s efforts. [WSJ 🔒]

• Moxie Marlinspike — best name in tech — is once again helping Meta with encryption. His new Confer project aims to do for their AI what Signal did for WhatsApp. This is all sort of oddly framed as M&A but not? [Wired]

• Jonah Peretti is invoking 'Founder Mode' to try to save BuzzFeed. The plan? AI, naturally. But also Nintendo? It’s currently worth $25M in the public markets. Yikes. [NYT]

• The head of Apple’s hardware for the home had bolted to Oura. Seems like another unfortunate casualty of the Siri shithow. [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • But hey, surprise AirPods Max 2? [Verge]

• The SEC is now formally preparing the proposal to (give an option) for companies to move from quarterly reporting to twice-a-year earnings reporting in the US. I’m firmly in the camp of this being a good thing. [WSJ 🔒]

  • Is a change to the S&P 500 rules going to let SpaceX be included on day one after going public? Seems like one hell of a hack to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. [Yahoo Finance]

• A new, rising problem for data center build-outs: insurance. [FT 🔒]

• Perplexity’s AI Comet browser is live for iOS and it’s good! Still surprised more haven’t jumped on this to try to grab some market share. [MacRumors]

• Meta has a new flagship store in NYC, which will be critical to sell actual AI hardware going forward if they hope to combat Apple entering the space. Also, they have a coffee shop, which I always wish Apple would have done — but they also don’t lack the foot traffic… [WWD]

I Spy…

The Dune Part Three cast posters, collect them all!

🙏 Apple’s Hail Mary, Anthropic’s Savior

It sounds crazy, but hear me out...

The Inner Ring…

😔 When Knees Buckle, then Bend, then Break

On Anthropic’s war with the Department of War...

🪟 Fixing the Windows in a Broken Home

Theatrical windows are back in place. Hopefully more open this time...

🌌 Meta (or Microsoft) Steals a Stargate

What choosing Texas (or not) says about the state of data centers...

I Note…

🎞️ Netflix Buys Ben Affleck’s AI Startup

Now perhaps we know a bit more why Affleck seemed so wicked smaht about AI (certainly relative to others in Hollywood) during a podcast a few months back. Unlike most of his industry, he seems to understand that technology has always been along for the ride with the movies. In fact, filmmaking itself is technology. So it’s sort of silly how the fears within that industry are always overblown. That said, it’s obvious why AI in particular is causing panic. But beyond copyright, Hollywood has historically operated in almost a comically bloated manner when it comes to costs. And with the business in decline… So Affleck chose to try to leverage the technology to help get the industry back on actual footing. And now Netflix will try to leverage that. One fun aside: the main backer of InterPositive (they couldn’t come up with a better name?) is RedBird Capital. You may know them as the other key backer in helping Paramount wrestle Warner Bros away from Netflix… This deal is a totally different scale, of course. Still, $600M is a historically big deal for Netflix! [Bloomberg 🔒]

🦂 Claws Out for OpenClaw

NVIDIA. Perplexity. Anthropic. Soon, it seems like everyone will have some sort of OpenClaw-like offering/solution. And, I suspect, many users will jump at the trade-offs of being a bit less "open" in favor of being more secure — or simply being a better product thanks to a more tightly integrated approach. To be fair and clear, NVIDIA’s 'NemoClaw' offering is also said to be open source, but obviously they will have their own agenda for it. Meanwhile, Perplexity already now has two versions of their 'Computer' offering with a 'Personal' one in testing to run on your own machine on top of their 'Perplexity Computer' in the cloud. I would guess that within a month we have offerings from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and yes, OpenAI, undoubtedly with Mr. OpenClaw himself, Peter Steinberger. Oh, and Meta, which obviously tried to hire Steinberger, but had to settle for Moltbook, the bot network (with an already outdated name given the shift to 'OpenClaw' from 'Moltbot') named for Facebook but built like Reddit. Maybe Manus helps? [Information 🔒]

🎂 Apple Closes in on 50

While the actual birthday is April 1, ahead of it, there has already been a lot of celebration and looking back. A couple nights ago, the Computer History Museum held a 90-minute event which is now online. It was hosted by David Pogue who just published his (massive) book around Apple’s milestone. CHM also has a fun video with some early Apple folks walking around their first offices. Tim Cook has published his birthday note on Apple’s site invoking "The Crazy Ones" and noting it’s rare moment of reflection for the company. That just reminds me of one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes, which I believe he said to my friend Steven Levy, though that particular article in Wired now appears to be offline (but I saved the quote long ago):

"When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward."

I Wrote…

🍎 'iPhone Fold' as 'iPad Mini' Folded

But, importantly, running a new iOS, not iPadOS...

📦 OpenAI is Busy Both Bundling and Unbundling

With Sora coming to ChatGPT...

🙊 Apple is Writing Product Checks That Siri Can’t Cash

Apple’s AI fiasco is impeding actual hardware launches...

🦞 The Lobster

It feels like we’ve seen the OpenClaw movie before, many times...

I Quote…

Sometimes the agents, when they see they have so many coworkers, become lazy and underperform — just like humans.

— Anna Tong and Rashi Shrivastava closing out their cover story for Forbes about Cursor with one fun AI dynamic they learned from the company.

Asides…

• Apple cutting the App Store cut in China to 25% is seemingly another data point that this wall is about to fully tumble. Famous last words… [Bloomberg 🔒]

• One of the humorous/weird angles of the whole no-chips-to-China situation is that the companies there can and do just rent space on clouds outside of China to use NVIDIA’s chips. Case in point: ByteDance. It’s certainly more circuitous and more expensive but seemingly not that complicated? [WSJ 🔒]

• Honda just posted their first annual loss since… 1957! As a result, they’re the latest to pull back from EVs, which seems like also poor timing given the situation in the Mid East… [NYT]

  • Not pulling the plug on EVs? Rivian. The R2 is here and a bit more expensive than anyone would hope ($58k), but as expected, looks great. [TechCrunch]

  • And yes, there’s an R2-D2 version out there… [Reddit]

• Not only do the new Studio Displays have an A19 chip (an A19 Pro in the XDR model!), but they also have 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. They’re full computers in disguise. With better specs than the new MacBook Neo — albeit at many times the price! Still, it’s a monitor! [MacRumors]

• Is the Iran War about to imperil some AI spend? Certainly many in the Middle East now have more important things to focus on, but the downstream effects of even small shifts could be massive… [Information 🔒]

  • Speaking of, a recent poll suggests the only thing American’s currently like less than AI is Iran (well, and the Democratic Party). That seems like a major perception problem… [Fortune]

• With two more co-founders apparently leaving xAI, they’re now down to just 3 of the original 12 remaining. And one of those is Elon Musk. [BI 🔒]

  • But Musk was also able to poach two key people out of Cursor — obviously to work on xAI’s own "vibe coding" tools — so there’s that. [Information 🔒]

  • Tesla and xAI are also going to work closer together on AI for "Digital Optimus" (is that the new "Macrohard"? Unclear…), as you’d hope before they’re all merged together anyway. [BI 🔒]

  • Ah, I see, this is all related… Maybe you can’t just throw money at such problems after all… [FT 🔒]

• I’m not saying Shantanu Narayen was a victim of the SaaSpocalypse, but it couldn’t have helped. CEO of Adobe since 2007 who reinvented it for that SaaS era, weathering the Flash fiasco, hell of a run. [CNBC]

  • Microsoft also keeps losing longstanding executives. (As does Apple, of course.) Now Rajesh Jha is leaving after 35 years. [Verge]

  • The next Xbox — "Project Helix" — aka: Xbox + PC games — don’t hold your breath until it starts alpha testing… in 2027. [Verge]

• Kate Winslet has apparently been cast as the female lead in The Hunt for Gollum, adding more firepower to what sure seems like The Lord of the Rings band fully getting back together… [Deadline]

  • Also buried in here: news that talks are progressing about a second season of the excellent Mare of Easttown — come on, crossover with Task!

• Quentin Tarantino is ready to announce his next project. No, not his 10th (and supposedly final) film, but a play that he’ll write and direct in London. [NYT]

• YouTube’s revenue now estimated to be higher than that of Disney (well, their media business at least). But not to worry, they’re not competing with media — snicker. They’d probably be a $500B+ company if a standalone business. [THR]

• Are they really going to go with Paramount+HBO as the name of the combined streaming service? Guys, just call it 'Showtime'! [Lightshed]

I Spy…

Oh hello there adorable little Mac Finder Friend… Is Apple getting good at social to entice the youth to buy their new device?

⚠️ There Are Signs...

Private Credit, CapEx, Interest Rates, War, and AI Disruption – oh my!

The Inner Ring…

💰 Increasingly, Big Tech Owns Big AI

The latest OpenAI and Anthropic rounds drill it home...

💇 The Death of the 30% Cut

Google ends the Play Store insanity, putting the pressure on Apple...

I Note…

📺 Paramount+ Plus HBO Max

Assuming the deal gets done, we’re clearly looking at a combination of the two streaming services. But what will that actually look like? It will be big — perhaps 200M subscribers in total (similar to Disney+, just behind Netflix) — but also a bit all over the place. David Ellison has said that HBO will remain as is, but will it be buried under the weight of this newly combined service? One which will now include the true king of all media — the NFL — thanks to CBS. Also, they’ll control all of March Madness (well, next year, presumably). What will they call this? HBO Max clearly has the stronger brand, but they’ll want to highlight the new Paramount content too? HBO Max+? Paramount Max? ParaMax? I will once again just throw out the idea that I long have (because it’s good): call it Showtime. Paramount controls that brand, but it has faded in the age of streaming. Yet it’s such a good name for a streaming service! Would it be awkward to have HBO be a part of Showtime? Yes, but only for us olds. Do it, David! (As an aside, what on Earth is Peacock going to do now?) [NYT]

🎟️ Netflix Knew Right Away They Were Walking Away

So says Ted Sarandos in a sit down with Lucas Shaw only a few days after his deal to buy Warner Bros blew up (which he toasted goodbye with a glass of wine). Interesting that one aspect they didn’t expect was Larry Ellison personally agreeing to backstop the debt. I mean, it is an insane amount of debt, but he also presumably won’t have to backstop it for that long — just ask FCC Chair Brendan Carr who expects the deal to be approved "quickly" (he doesn’t decide that, though may have some say due to the networks involved) — still, there is a lot going on in the world at the moment! Sarandos also thinks Paramount will have to cut $16B quickly to try to handle the debt load (which is far more than they’ve modeled). He also noted that while Netflix is no longer buying a company with baked in theatrical distribution, the discussions when they were going forward with the deal could lead to more "cool things" to do between Netflix and theatrical (duh). It does feel like he’s a bit disingenuous when talking about the political angle of all this (beyond the Carr quote which feels very "fix was in", the fact that Trump ghosted him at the White House isn’t a great look, and undoubtedly wasn’t a good omen). Great ending here too. When asked if an asset like this might not come around again, Sarandos replied: "Possibly. Or if you look at the history of Warner Bros...." True and fair enough! [Bloomberg 🔒]

📉 Tech Pubs Get Scroogled

Even if these numbers are just directionally accurate, they’re brutal. Some sites down 90+% in terms of traffic from Google, many more down over 50%. Why? 3 main culprits, it seems: 1) the expansion of 'AI Overviews' in Google Search. 2) The rise of Reddit in results for queries that used to bring these players a ton of evergreen traffic. 3) The actual use of AI services, like ChatGPT, by consumers. If this traffic was your only real lifeline, you’re screwed, of course. But you always were. Something was always going to shift the landscape, just as it always does. You can’t be reliant on just one source of traffic. Which is easier said than done when it’s Google. [Growtika]

☁️ Apple Looks to Google Cloud

Beyond Apple’s product-facing struggles with AI, they’re undoubtedly dealing with some technical ones too — perhaps a part of why the whole system may be delayed. Again. The reality is that by downplaying the importance of all of this for years, they’re likely screwed on a few fronts. And one of those is likely the backend as well. They can talk up "Private Cloud Compute" all they want, but if it’s not being utilized at all right now (as seems to be the case — 10% utilization? Yikes…) who knows who well it will scale when "real" AI comes into play thanks to Gemini. Well you know who knows? Google. So yeah, outsource this to them as well. Please. [Information 🔒]

I Quote…

"I don’t understand how they’re going to live up to the 30 movie commitment and make those be 30 good theatrical releases. If I was a betting person, I would suggest that it seems likely that they’re going to not do that."

— Greg Peters, the other CEO of Netflix, not holding back in his thoughts on the Warner Bros deal, now that it’s in the hands of Paramount Skydance. "A bunch of people are going to lose their jobs."

I Wrote…

☢️ AI Am Become Death

As Anthropic blows up their potential AI usage, the Pentagon goes nuclear...

💻 MacBook Neo: Whoa

Apple’s newest Mac is priced to move...

🔫 AI in a Time of War

A chat about Anthropic vs. the Department of War, the state of AI within Apple, and Netflix walking away from Warner Bros...

Asides…

• Speaking of tying your content business to a tech giant, News Corp has a new licensing deal with Meta for AI. What could possibly go wrong? The same thing that always does! [WSJ 🔒]

• Interesting timing for Megan Ellison to be revving the engines at Annapurna again. Might it end up as the indie arm of MountDance WarBroDisco? Some people have long wondered, just saying… [THR]

• Unrelated, but related, quite literally, it sounds like Oracle is on the verge of massive layoffs. Which is sad but inevitable due to the the company trying to stay in the CapEx race. [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Meanwhile, Jensen Huang can’t stop pointing out that NVIDIA’s investment in OpenAI is $30B, not $100B. You hear that, Wall Street? [CNBC]

• Perplexity + Coreweave! [Axios]

• iPic, which is a premium, small movie theater chain has filed for bankruptcy — for a second time. Might be looking for a tech buyer, just saying… [THR]

• Why the 'MacBook Neo' name? Because it’s "fun and friendly, and fresh" per Apple. No need to overthink it, I guess. [TechRadar]

  • I had wondered what Walmart would do given the Neo seemingly negates their M1 MacBook deal — well, it sounds like they’re going to sell the Neo! Apple is going to sell so many of these. [9to5Mac]

• It’s buried at the end, but Sony pulling back their PlayStation games from PC seems directly related to Microsoft about to double-down on the PC for the next (perhaps last) phase of Xbox, no? A retreat back to exclusives? [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • Capcom, meanwhile, it pivoting to more PC for gaming. [PC Gamer]

• Intel’s board chair is stepping down after 17 years of service, which seems long overdue given how Intel has fared during that span… [Reuters]

• An Android desktop mode when you plug your phone into a monitor looks legitimately interesting. How fun/cool would it be to have an actual PC in your pocket all the time when you need it? I wish Apple would do this! (They would never. They don’t even let you boot macOS on the iPad!) [Verge]

I Spy…

Alongside the announcement of the MacBook Neo, many were quick to point to the old famous Steve Jobs quotes that Apple can’t make cheap laptops — remember "netbooks"? — because they refuse to ship "junk". The quick clip below on the topic is just great. Look at how young Tim Cook looks! The ease at which they laugh at the question about market share versus the PC. This was an Apple having fun.

We’ll see what the reviewers — and actual users of the Neo think, but it certainly doesn’t look like junk, despite the great, low price point.

🎬 TUDUMB

Paramount breaks the wrist, Netflix walks away from Warner Bros...

I Wrote…

👅 Tasty AI

Is AI “taste” a quixotic task?

🍞 Apple is About to Have *Two* Toaster/Fridge Hybrids

Will the quotes (and complexity) come back to bite the touchscreen MacBook?

I Note…

💰 OpenAI’s $110B Round

All largely inline with expectations — sort of surprised they didn’t boost it by a mere $10B more to hit a nice, clean $850B post. But then again, they’re still sorting out which investors will get to put in money beyond the three strategics cited: Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank. Speaking of, since we’ve moved beyond the fact that NVIDIA’s $100B announcement magically morphed into $30B, the fact that Amazon’s "$50B" is actually $15B now, $35B "in the coming months when certain conditions are met" is fun. An earlier report nailed the tranches, but noted that the key milestones might be OpenAI reaching AGI or going public. Um, reaching AGI "in the coming months"? Perhaps that’s just a fall-back clause, and it’s all about the IPO, which may or may not happen "in the coming months". Still, hasn’t Amazon learned from Microsoft about including stipulations around AGI in such contracts? Speaking of, did Microsoft cut back their "low billions" pro rata check to zero here? They’re not mentioned. Maybe they’re too busy investing in Anthropic, you know, the OpenAI rival in which Amazon is the largest investor. These are weird times. [CNBC]

💸 NVIDIA’s $43B Profit

If my data is correct — and if not, blame the many models trained on NVIDIA’s chips! — this is the second most profitable quarter of any company, ever. Behind only a quarter in mid-2022 by Saudi Aramco (due to an oil price spike during the initial Ukraine invasion) — yes, it beat all Apple quarters, including the most recent at a mere $42.1B. It also pushed NVIDIA’s yearly profit past $100B for the first time, joining just Apple, Microsoft, and Google as American companies in that realm. Three years ago, NVIDIA’s profit for the year was $4.4B. And they’re doing all of this almost entirely without China. If Jensen can pull that off, they’re going to be the first company with a $50B quarterly profit. But, it remains a challenge, with zero H200s sold, despite the ban being technically lifted on the US end. And the situation remains very delicate and complicated. Also wild: gaming (and auto) came in below estimates for NVIDIA. Not that it matters anymore. Revenue was up 73% y/y — another acceleration. And they’re projecting an even bigger acceleration next quarter. The stock is down for the week. It’s all just insanity. [NYT]

🤖 The Great AI Panic of 2026

I realize I haven’t really weighed in on the Citrini Research 2028 AI Crisis thing except as an aside in my post about AI and taste. I will say that I found it interesting as a thought exercise and actually, I’ve had in my drafts for a while some brief notes around the concept of Annie Jacobsen’s excellent book Nuclear War: A Scenario, but for our Age of AI. This is sort of that, but it also misses a number of marks by oddly, being far too pessimistic in ways that border on silly — or worse, Marxist! I would also just say that the reaction to it — certainly in the stock market, but even more broadly, was the really fascinating aspect. People are freaking out over some random post pretending to be written from the future. Okay. Everyone is clearly just primed to freak out about anything and everything AI at the moment. See also: the layoffs at Block. I mean, the numbers are (sadly) massive. But the idea that this is soley about AI is laughable. This is clearly "AI Washing". Maybe they shouldn’t have bought AfterPay at the peak of the BNPL market (at least in terms of valuations)? Or pivoted the entire company — including the name — around "Web3" stuff at the exact wrong time. Or, hear me out: maybe, just maybe, not bought Jay-Z’s streaming music service. The artist formerly known as Square has about 99 problems, but AI ain’t one. [Techmeme]

🏎️ Apple & Netflix Trade F1 Deals

A fun last-minute partnership to let Apple TV show the latest season of Drive to Survive — notably in "binge" style, per the Netflix way. In return, Netflix will get to show the Canadian Grand Prix race in May live (to US audiences at least) alongside the race being on Apple TV. I wish Apple would have held out for Netflix agreeing to have their content showcased within the unified Apple TV app — the lack of which is annoying and confusing for everyone, but clearly Netflix doesn’t want Apple to own this space — so, baby steps… For now, we can close our eyes and imagine if this was all unified in one place as it used to be… [Athletic 🔒]

🐭 The D’Amaro Kingdom

A pretty cushy profile of Disney’s new CEO (official first day: March 18). But buried in here are a few interesting nuggets. First and foremost, it sounds like there’s some real concern that The Mandalorian & Grogu may under-perform at the box office. It looks fun, but it also doesn’t look that different from an episode of the show? But Starfighter, the Ryan Gosling-led stand-alone Star Wars due next year is said to be very promising. Might it be extended, expanded?.. Everyone seems pretty sure that Avengers: Doomsday will be the biggest movie of the year (despite the IMAX issues — see: below). And Avatar 3, while still a behemoth, is expected to pull in $1B less than the previous one overall. Will D’Amaro greenlight another? Presumably he’ll leave that up to Dana Walden! Overall, D’Amaro sounds like he’s going to hit the ground running. Unlike his Parks predecessor… [Variety]

I Quote…

"The idea of reselling GPUs from a few years ago [after a default] is like beating a dead horse."

— An unnamed investor telling the FT why they constantly turn down opportunities to invest in GPU-backed debt deals — a now fairly common type of financing as the AI Bubble continues to inflate. What could possibly go wrong?

Asides…

• Remember when Meta poached, Ruoming Pang, the head of Apple’s AI model team for a reported "Godfather" offer? Yeah, he’s already gone. On to OpenAI. I guess $200M doesn’t buy what it used to… [Information 🔒]

• Remember when Amazon hackquired Adept? Yeah, nearly that entire founding team is now gone, including David Luan, the head of their AGI Lab. [GeekWire]

  • Two of that team bailed to Meta as well, but one has already left to found a new company with someone from OpenAI. [Information 🔒]

• Meanwhile, a seventh xAI co-founder has left — the one tasked with building out “Macrohard” no less. The AI lab co-founder quitting epidemic continues. [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Alongside Anthropic putting their Opus 3 model out to pasture, they’re allowing it — it? — to start a Substack. I’m entirely not kidding. [Claude Corner]

• Perhaps it can investigate Chinese AI companies accessing Claude data to distill their new models as Anthropic (and OpenAI) allege… [NYT]

• OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap notes that making the ads work on the service will be "an iterative process", which, yes. [TechCrunch]

• Perplexity appears to be pivoting to "orchestration" (so hot right now) in order to take on OpenClaw. I will say, there may be an opening for a well done model aggregator, at least for now… [DeepView]

• To commemorate what would have been Steve Jobs’ 71st birthday, there’s a lovely new "Letters to a Young Creator" project. [SJA]

• As movie theaters continue to struggle, IMAX continues to surge. And this year brings The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s movie is the first feature shot entirely for the format. Also fun: seems like Dune 3 will block Avengers: Doomsday from launching in the format. The "Dunesday" battle is on! [THR]

  • It sounds like the second movie to be shot entirely for IMAX may be Joseph Kosinski’s upcoming Miami Vice?!

I Spy…

Per above, quite the list…

🕹️ Exbox

Microsoft will do one last Xbox push, but there’s probably not a longer path forward – unless AI saves the day; not in the way you think!

I Wrote…

💻 NVIDIA Inside

Can the AI powerhouse become a consumer PC player?

I Note…

🍪 Meta Clones OpenAI’s AMD Deal

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… AI model builder. AMD chips. 6GW worth of compute. Up to a 10% stake in AMD. The deal Meta just cut with AMD isn’t similar to the one OpenAI cut last year, it’s the same deal. And it leads to the question of why wouldn’t Amazon, or Anthropic, or Microsoft, or anyone else aside from maybe Google — though maybe Google too! — want to cut the same deal? I mean, at some point the limiting factor is AMD’s ability to give up only 100% of the company. But we have 80% to go. Well, as long as those pesky current investors in AMD don’t mind. And if all the milestones are hit for these deals, both OpenAI and Meta would own about $100B worth of AMD shares, as by my math, AMD would be worth right around $1T at the ultimate $600/share target — which obviously is not a coincidence. So yes, in a way, these could be actual $100B deals. Take that, NVIDIA. Are we about to get another "delighted" Jensen moment? He did just cut a big new deal with Zuck too… Also, is the room spinning for anyone else? Round and round we go… [WSJ 🔒]

👁️ Apple’s AI Future is Visual

On top of — and related to — Apple leveraging the iPhone to get back into the AI game, as it were, as a key hub for all these newfangled AI devices coming, they also have a real opportunity and lane when it comes to pulling in data from the real world, thanks to their multi-billion-device scale. I’ve long thought this could be key to their overall AI strategy and now Tim Cook may be telegraphing exactly that, as he tends to do ahead of new initiatives, as Mark Gurman notes. Clearly, Apple has already decided not to do frontier LLM work, and is happy to outsource that, but will they have the compute in place to be able to do "world models" with their data advantage? They’re still building up and out their own servers and chips… [Bloomberg 🔒]

🗣️ "Hey Plex" Will Samsung Buy Perplexity?

I’ve been saying I think that’s a possible outcome and this deeper integration within Samsung devices — including their own, custom wake word and physical controls — will only bolster that case. Still, Perplexity is just one of a few AI players that Samsung hopes to bake into "Galaxy AI", including their own "Bixby". [Engadget]

🏗️ Houston, We Have a Mac Mini

It didn’t exactly work with building the Mac Pro in Austin, so Apple is trying again with a new product in a new Texas city. It’s probably a good product to trot out there as it’s higher profile than the Mac Pro, but still low-volume — less than 5% of Mac sales and less than 1% of Apple’s overall sales, apparently — though you do have to wonder if the “OpenClaw Revolution” changes that equation. Probably not, but you keep seeing anecdotes about how surprised Apple Store employees are by rising Mac mini sales… Not to worry, the device will still be made in Asia too — but a good PR moment for Apple around American manufacturing (including the TSMC plants in Arizona which Apple will use to some degree too). Certainly better than a golden trinket. [WSJ 🔒]

💰 Paramount’s New Bid Is In

And Warner Bros Discovery is now going over it. Rumors have suggested it would be in the $32 or maybe $33/share range — up $2/$3. Netflix will now have four days to respond (or not). Do they stand firm? Up their bid a bit ($30 — again, they’re not trying to buy the networks like Paramount is?)? Walk? With a $2.8B consolation prize? Ted Sarandos keeps saying in every interview that they’ll be disciplined — but he’s still out there giving every interview (his chat with Matt Belloni on The Town is well worth the watch/listen). President Trump calling for the ouster of a Netflix board member obviously adds some last-minute chaos, as he likes to do. Director James Cameron siding with Paramount is another weird wrinkle — he was apparently pitching Netflix to make content for Meta "glasses" recently?! — as is actor Mark Ruffalo calling him out for bias! "Put a better deal on the table," Sarandos seemed exasperated on the red carpet for the BAFTAs. We’ll see soon enough if Paramount did! [NYT]

I Quote…

"But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."

— Sam Altman, perhaps trying to showcase exactly what not to say when trying to make the pitch for AI’s energy usage. To be fair, his less controversial pitches seemingly haven’t been working too well either…

Asides…

• Why must super-profitable Meta (and others) raising billions in debt to finance their AI build-outs? In part because they can (much easier than say, OpenAI — I remain curious if NVIDIA is going to help them there now), but also because of the way they handle stock-based compensation and buy-backs… [WSJ 🔒]

• Are some companies using AI as a scapegoat for layoffs — "AI Washing" as Sam Altman calls it? Undoubtedly. [Gizmodo]

• Yet more Gemini being baked into Chrome with AI Mode in the Omnibar… [9to5Google]

• I actually think the way Amazon is using the Kindle Scribe to augment Alexa use cases is fairly clever. Their own unique AI hardware, in a way. [Verge]

• I’m a sucker for weather apps — don’t ask how many I have, but it’s 12 — and so there’s simply no way I can avoid Acme Weather is it’s made by the same team that built Dark Sky and sold it to Apple. That’s lucky 13. [9to5Mac]

• With Wuthering Heights shooting past $150M at the global box office, clearly Netflix made the wrong call in not agreeing to a theatrical release (and thus, losing the deal to Warner Bros — which is all the more interesting now!). [THR]

• Pour one out for BrewDog? [SkyNews]

I Spy…

Is "Deep Red" this year’s "Cosmic Orange"? Undoubtedly Apple would call it something else — how about "Apple Red" to commemorate their 50th anniversary this year? — but I like the look of it… Too bad I think I’ll be getting the iPhone Fold, which will apparently only be in drab, "normal" colors…

One narrative that I feel like will become clear over the next year or so is just how crucial the iPhone will become for a lot of AI. First and foremost when Apple gets its AI act together (thanks to Google), it will be the device that once again introduces many people to the technology (thanks simply to its scale), but also how it’s likely still be the main hub for all of the newfangled AI-enabled devices coming to market. Including those from, yes, Apple. This all could shift the AI narrative around Apple in a hurry…

📲 Apple’s Next Big Thing: the iPhone

A rush of AI devices – including from Apple – may end up as a reminder of which company is in control here...

🗣️ Can OpenAI Build Alexa Before Amazon Can Build ChatGPT?

Actually, their impending partnership may start to make more sense...

I Note…

🕹️ Ex Marks the Box

Phil Spencer is out — a move which seemed to be written on the wall last year, as I wrote at the time. And, sure enough, Microsoft’s and Spencer’s stance is now that the wheels have been in motion for the move since last year — though that may contradict some other statements and actions at the time… read into that what you will. Same with the fact that President Sarah Bond isn’t the one succeeding him, but instead is also leaving the company. Instead, Asha Sharma, who is relatively new to Microsoft and, notably, has no gaming experience/background is taking over. There are, a number of weird flags here obviously. But that’s also not too surprising as Xbox and Microsoft’s broader gaming strategy has seemingly been a mess for a few years now. So while the gaming world hates this move, perhaps a fresh set of eyes will be a good thing. Can it really be worse? As it stands, Microsoft was clearly on a course to shut down/spin-off Xbox and Activision, so this at least buys some time. Maybe one more "generation", as those now take forever to cycle through — Spencer technically only oversaw one such Xbox release himself, the Series S/E/X, or whatever it was called. I did appreciate Sharma’s use of "soulless AI slop" in her memo, but she also sort of had to say that as she is coming from… Microsoft’s "CoreAI" team. [IGN]

🔍 Perplexity’s Perplexing Pivot

Remember when ads were going to fuel Perplexity’s entire business? You should, it was just a few months ago. Well, so much for that. Look, they’re in a tough spot with Google having effectively outflanked them in AI Search and the actual model makers having further grabbed control of the chatbot market. So they’re clearly going to try to cut more Samsung-like partnerships and perhaps try to be a unified layer to query all AI services and get the user the best result. But it’s a tough road forward from here. And the cracks seem to be starting to show. Maybe there’s some window on mobile, given that — oddly — no one else is really going after this with mobile AI browsers yet. Still, I suspect they’ll be scooped up in 2026. [Wired 🔒]

💰 $30B is a Shit Ton of Money, But Also Not $100B

With NVIDIA finalizing their $30B investment into OpenAI’s latest round, we can probably put the "mystery" to bed. Maybe they’ll invest more down the line, but they’re very decidedly not saying that — in fact, they’re saying "no, no nothing like that" — which is weird when they not only previously said exactly that, but did a whole press tour around it. Anyway, it sure seems like Jensen got the message that such a deal — seemingly struck on a trip with Sam Altman as part of a Trump tour — was a bit rich for NVIDIA investors’ tastes. At first, it looked ingenious, as it helped propel the stock to $5T. But things quickly turned south and this suddenly looked like the marquee "circular deal" that everyone was pointing to for AI Bubble evidence. A nice, round $100B number will do that! But a $30B check as a mere part of a larger $100B round (with Amazon perhaps doing $50B)? That seems fine, I guess… [FT 🔒]

💸 OpenAI is Gonna Need that $100B — And a Lot More

The latest leaked forecasts put burn at $665B through 2030, when the company still expects to reach cash flow positive. That’s more than $100B up from their previous burn estimates. Yes, revenue is rising in those forecasts as well, but at what cost? Quite literally. The key thing to watch, obviously, will be if and when inference costs start to turn. Because right now they’re destroying margins. OpenAI had $40B in the bank at the end of 2025 which is… a lot less than $665B. As is even $140B. And so at some point — I’m still skeptical of 2026 — OpenAI is going to have to go public. But if Anthropic really does get to cash flow positivity two years earlier, it’s going to be rough optically, depending on the macro environment. Also, let’s just recognize that none of these numbers are going to be accurate in a couple of years — I mean, just look at these from not even 18 months ago. There are so many variables in all of this, but clearly OpenAI needs to get more control over their costs… [Information 🔒]

📰 Democracy Dies in a Money Pit

Tina Brown rightfully eviscerates Jeff Bezos for his handling of The Washington Post. In particular because it started so strong (albeit boosted by the chaos of the first Trump administration) and then seemingly fell off a cliff as his own vibe shifted. Regardless, I still just don’t see how they possibly got to the point of losing updward of $100M a year. The entire strategy, at least viewed from the outside, made Microsoft’s aforementioned Xbox strategy look positively coherent in contrast. Bad hires. Bad fires. No direction. No leadership. To quote the new Bezos buddy, "sad." To quote Brown, "…the stark truth that Bezos doesn’t understand how to run a news organization any more than Woodward and Bernstein could figure out how to deliver dog kibble to your door by drone." See also: Books section editor John Williams’ thoughts on how the paper has gone astray in the Bezos era. [Fresh Hell]

I Wrote…

🎬 DeepSeek 2: The Movie

The Seedance “End of Hollywood” likely points to the paths forward...

🥸 I Am the Great Glassholio!

Things are going well for Ray-Ban Metas... time to meddle!

I Quote…

"All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited."

— Paul Ford, writing about his love/hate relationship with AI in a NYT op-ed.

I Also Wrote…

🏔️ Netflix Calls Paramount’s Bluff

One week for both sides to show the actual cards here...

💻 Little? Yellow? Different?

A non-cutting-edge, but fun, affordable MacBook...

Asides…

• Sounds like Amazon is suffering from a real bout of not-built-here-itis, which inflicts every large company and is always stupid — but especially stupid when it’s trying to stop teams from using Claude Code (in favor of their in-house Kiro) and you’re the largest investor in Anthropic. [BI]

  • Speaking of, an ode to Claude Code as it turns one year old. [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Is Blue Owl Capital really a canary (in the coal mine) of data center debt? [NYT]

• With the new low-cost MacBook seemingly imminent, I had been wondering what might become of the deal Apple has had with Walmart to sell the M1 MacBook Air? Well, supplies are dwindling fast, so… Unless there’s an M2 (or more likely M3) refresh coming, Apple may have effectively outsourced some R&D for the market to Walmart. [MacRumors]

  • Hadn’t really thought about it this way but sure seems like the new Studio Displays will have faster chips than these new MacBooks?! [Macworld]

• Seemingly another damning indictment of Meta’s (new) AI strategy that Zuck couldn’t land the OpenClaw guy despite offering more money... [Sources 🔒]

  • Time to put your latest deal Manus to work! [Manus]

  • OpenAI also seemingly poached a key to Instagram in Charles Porch. Is this about getting Hollywood more comfortable with Sora? [Vanity Fair]

• With all the F1/Apple news, I had forgotten that they opened the full MLS package to all Apple TV subscribers. With the season kicking off yesterday, it will be interesting to see if it moves any needles in terms of popularity. Since it’s now "free" I might turn some games on in the background? [MacRumors]

  • Speaking of F1, a new deal between Apple and IMAX will bring some of the races to the really big screen this year. Might this also be related to work being done for viewing the races in the Vision Pro? [THR]

• A Game of Thrones (Mad King-focused) prequel to be staged at Stratford-upon-Avon? I mean, I didn’t move to England for nothing, right? [BBC]

  • We’re now one step away from a GoT claymation series so that GRRM can avoid finishing the actual books, right?

  • I kid, I kid. Have I mentioned how great A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is? At first, it seemed a bit too cute for this universe. But now I think it’s the perfect mixture of whimsy and ultra violence. I also don’t mind how relatively short the episodes are! Though the season being only 6 episodes, with the finale tonight, seems cruel. But it also appears that we may actually get one new season a year — as opposed to every few years, cough House of the Dragon cough — thanks to that?

I Spy…

Speaking of Amazon and Walmart… It’s official, Amazon is a bigger business than Walmart. BUT. That’s in no small part because Amazon has AWS, a huge — and hugely profitable — cloud service which Walmart, of course, does not. "Without AWS, Amazon’s 2025 revenue would have been $588 billion." Still. A big moment. With Walmart having just passed $1T in market cap (though slightly below it now), Amazon has a roughly 2x lead there.

🧠 It’s The Thought That Counts

The diminished state of thinking could be decimated by AI...

📊 Love It If We Made It

AI will disrupt work. We will adapt.

I Note…

⚗️ OpenAI Goes After DeepSeek Distillation

One element of last year’s "DeepSeek Moment" was the notion that the company may have achieved their results, at least in part, by leveraging the work of the US AI labs. Certainly, this was true with Meta, thanks in part to their Llama models being "open" (open weight, not fully open source). But OpenAI — and Microsoft — put out the notion that DeepSeek also built on the back of their GPT models, even though, despite the company name, these models were decidedly not open. Then all of the fury faded amidst all the other AI chaos. Well, here we go again. Why now? Undoubtedly because DeepSeek is on the verge of another model release for which their are whispers that it could be another such "moment". That plus the ongoing NVIDIA/AI chip situation has OpenAI seeing an opening to push for US government action. Feels like this could be the next big battle in AI. [Bloomberg 🔒]

🌘 Elon Pivots to the Moon

On the surface, it seems weird that a person who has spent the past decade saying that we need to think bigger than the Moon and focus on Mars is now… focused entirely on the Moon. Why? To hear Elon tell it, it’s about building a lunar base that can shoot satellites into space. Why? Oh, you know, because it was in a book with a killer title. I mean, he says as much in his recent Cheeky Pint interview. Basing your strategy on 60 year old science fiction is one thing, but also when you’re a decade removed from your first claim of Mars within two years… the "distraction" becomes the attraction. But really, this all seems to be part of the narrative shift around "data centers in space" which Elon has successfully pivoted the conversation to, at least in the press. Creating $1.25T companies overnight will do that… Reset the timer, less than 10 years until Moon City! [NYT]

🧐 The AI Lab Co-Founder Quitting Epidemic Continues

Just days after xAI’s fifth co-founder left the company, a sixth joined him. That’s now fully half of the co-founders which are gone. This follows the tradition of OpenAI, where, of course, Elon Musk himself was one of those co-founders to have left. And the legacy has continued to the OpenAI "constellations" in the form of both Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab losing co-founders. This situation here seems to be overwork mixed with the aforementioned SpaceX tie-up creating immediate liquidity (versus being locked up for another year-plus if/when SpaceX IPOs). As a result, a re-org has xAI split into four divisions: Grok (chatbot), Coding (so hot right now), Imagine (video), and Macrohard (great pun, but also agentic software). [FT 🔒]

💰 It Looks Like Tech M&A Is Back on the Menu Boys

Gail Slater "resigns" after less than a year on the job. I had been tracking her appointment because it seemed like decidedly bad news for M&A as she was clearly going to be aggressive on the antitrust front. Maybe not Lina Khan aggressive, but certainly more so than what you might expect from the Trump administration. Then again, her stances seemed to mirror those of JD Vance, for whom she was a longtime close advisor. But with tech’s knees firmly bent in this second administration, it seems pretty clear she wasn’t greasing those deal wheels enough so… bye. This is seemingly good news for Netflix buying Warner Bros – well, unless the administration decides that Paramount should win that deal. [Axios]

💼 IBM Will Take Your Tired, Your Sick, Your Entry Level Jobs

While there’s obviously great PR optics around the company saying they’ll "triple" entry-level hiring for "all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do", if you read more of what IBM’s HR head is saying, it’s essentially that they’ll have these new workers focus on others things. And that’s in part just to get people in the door to build them up to become the next wave of managers and more senior folks at IBM. This is sort of the open-ended question and problem right now: if AI kills entry-level jobs, how do people, well, enter these companies? Are all of your senior hires going to come from other companies? Many of whom may face the same entry-level issues? So IBM’s move seems reasonable: bring people in to "learn the ropes" as it were and do different tasks. Of course, that still costs money! Yes, you’re "investing in people" — said like a true HR exec — but will Wall Street buy that? [Bloomberg 🔓]

🥽 Let There Be YouTube (on Vision Pro)

A very legitimate "finally". I dusted off the old device last night to try it out and it’s… YouTube on the Vision Pro! As an app, it’s about as barebones as they come — no special "environments" etc — but it’s all it really needs to be. It’s a great way to view YouTube videos — especially professionally produced ones. And yes, there is a dedicated tab for 3D/Immersive videos, but they’re honestly pretty underwhelming versus the "truly" immersive video that Apple produces. This is obviously because these weren’t shot for Vision Pro, but instead for any old VR headset. Still, nice to have. The Vision Pro is Apple’s TV; it needed YouTube. But this is all so simple that you have to wonder if releasing it wasn’t a part of Apple and Google’s broader recent situationship… I’m not saying YouTube released a visionOS app in exchange for Apple going with Gemini but… dangling such a carrot could not have hurt! [MacRumors]

The Inner Ring…

🛰️ Sometimes It’s Too Slow

With data centers in space. “For shure”...

📺 YouTube TV Finally Kills Cable

Their smaller bundles wound the beast, the sports bundle ends it...

I Quote…

"As I’ve got older and grumpier, who I work with is more important than what I work on, and that’s really driven choices about how I’m spending my time and who I’m spending it with. I’m done working with assholes. I’m so happy that we can place creative excellence right at the center of what we’re doing."

— Jony Ive, unplugged, talking to Alex Heath at Sources during the showcase of LoveFrom’s work with Ferrari for their all-electric "Luce" vehicle.

I Wrote…

🏎️ A Car By the People Who Would Have Designed the Apple Car

Let there be Luce!

🥴 Apple Cannot Be Sirious

What’s worse: that Apple can’t fix Siri, or that they can’t stop the leaks about how they can’t fix Siri?

Asides…

• As it turns out, AI may not reduce workloads, but instead leads to people finding more work to do. Shocking, I know. [HBR]

• What is a killer domain name worth in 2026? Around $70M, it seems. Though the crypto.com guy buying ai.com is clearly a playbook thing. [FT 🔒]

• Apple to allow for system-level third-party AI… within CarPlay. Sort of. Imagine if you could just pick your own Siri brain? It would have saved Apple some headaches! (And created a lot more!) [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Speaking of voice-based AI, thanks to a lawsuit, we now know that the first OpenAI device will ship after February 2027. (It could be announced sooner, of course.) And it won’t be named/branded with "io", which seems like a good thing for those of who will undoubtedly write about the device endlessly. [Wired]

• Meanwhile, the reports that OpenAI might go public in 2026 was a surprise to many senior people inside the company. It’s going to take a while to figure out ads, and if that’s a key to monetization… [NYT]

• SaaSpocolypse Now! [FT 🔒]

• Um, will the next AirPods have cameras? Unclear, but Apple is clearly working on such technology. But will it be more about tracking Vision Pro-like gestures rather than capturing the world around you? Maybe a little of both? [9to5Mac]

• I do appreciate that SpaceX’s internal version of Grok is called ‘Spok’. [WSJ 🔒]

• Can Court TV work as a YouTube channel? Probably! [NYT]

• Apple buys out all the rights for their hit show Severance to bring production fully in-house, apparently for just under $70M. Netflix started out the same way, and about half of Apple’s slate is now in-house. [Deadline]

I Spy…

The Information ran the most recent CapEx numbers from Big Tech and showcased just how close they are to running beyond their cash flows — or actually over them, in Amazon’s case. Let there be debt! Strange new methods that make auditors uncomfortable! Bonds! 100 year ones! Everyone but Apple!

Anyway, this isn’t exactly a "DeepSeek Moment", but there are shades… almost exactly a year later. And clearly there are just jitters as AI permeates….

The Inner Ring

📉 Wall Street Starts to Turn on AI

Concerns about CapEx and Claude Cowork...

🐦 Space Twitter!

Elon Musk tries to merge the AI Race into the Space Race...

I Note…

📺 Anthropic’s Anti-Ads AI Ads

I mean, Sam Altman is right, they are pretty funny. And it’s wonderfully subversive/ballsy to run them not just on television, but during the Super Bowl, no less. The tagline is great too: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” That said, there are some very real risks here. First and foremost, there is a world in which ads actually do work for ChatGPT and as such, Anthropic has to follow suit. Now, you might say they have a different market — more enterprise and developer-focused and less consumer — and sure, but this ad is pretty squarely aimed at consumers? I mean, they’re running it during the goddamn Super Bowl! Anyway, there’s some real hypocrisy risk here. Not right now, but down the line. Which, of course, doesn’t matter right now. And I’m not sure how much it will down the line! Altman’s response, meanwhile, seems a bit unhinged. Not quite Jensen Huang “delighted”, but he’s clearly pissed! “Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people”! A better response is something more akin to the Don Draper “I don’t think about you at all”. Anyway, I look forward to watching the real matchup this Sunday: AI ads. [WSJ 🔒]

🐭 Josh D’Amaro Gets His Wish Upon a Star

No real surprise as he pretty clearly replaced Dana Walden as the front-runner last year, when it became a two-horse race (out of "more than a hundred") — though I wrote about an event in August 2024 where it felt like (or at least read like) this was happening — and several things make it a sort of no-brainer, beyond the fact that he seems cut from the same cloth as Bob Iger (and shares a birthday — exactly 20 years removed!). First and foremost, he runs the unit that brought in 60% of Disney’s profit last year. Yes, it’s the same unit that Bob Chapek ran, which was perhaps the only real pause here. But Walden, sadly, was probably going to be too politically charged given the current administration (given her close friendship and association with Kamala Harris). And Disney really is more of a travel and services company now, and less of an entertainment one, just from that pure bottom-line perspective. Still, the content remains the straw that stirs the drink, so it’s important to keep someone like Walden both around and engaged. And so the President and Chief Creative Officer — Disney’s first — title makes sense. D’Amaro was also thought to be the most tech-forward of the candidates, working on both the Epic Games deal and the new OpenAI Sora deal, which will clearly be vital to Disney going forward. It will be interesting what, if any, M&A he engages in (the key to Iger’s legacy, of course), and when. Also, Star Wars! It feels like this is for real this time, i.e. Iger won’t return again — even somehow! [NYT]

✈️ Microsoft’s Problems Piloting Copilot

This paints a pretty damning picture for Microsoft’s AI efforts overall. The 'Copilot' branding is a mess (shocker), there are interoperability issues, a small percentage of Microsoft’s core customers are buying it (quite literally), and even fewer seem to be actually using it. Maybe a Super Bowl ad will fix this! (Snicker.) More likely, another big pivot/rebrand in 2026 remains my guess… Wall Street is worried too. Probably should have "hackquired" OpenAI. Bing could have been a thing! Also coming in to further muddle Microsoft branding: Anthropic! "Cowork" (and Claude Code) is starting to be a real problem for them on the product end too, it seems! [WSJ 🔒]

📚 Spotify’s Audio-to-Physical Book Tech

Their new 'Page Match' tech allows you to scan the page you’re on with your camera and get taken to the correct spot in the audiobook. Clever. And while I’m not sure just how large the market is for this, I do know a number of people who switch between reading a physical book and listening while on the go. I’m in the Amazon universe, so I do this with Audible/Kindle, but I’ve long been surprised Amazon didn’t have some sort of bundle deal to also buy the physical book. I don’t think there’s a discount with Spotify’s Bookshop integration, but Amazon could undoubtedly do this — if they could prove to authors that it was incremental revenue generation. Anyway, Spotify continues to build-out their own third-party bundles… [THR]

I Molt…

"There was no verification of identity. You don’t know which of them are AI agents, which of them are human. I guess that’s the future of the internet."

— Wiz cofounder Ami Luttwak (whose team discovered a major security hole in Moltbook). I appreciated Casey Newton’s framing as well for why it matters (and why it doesn not). My own thoughts below…

🤖 Where the Wild Bots Are

Should we be concerned or amused by Moltbook, a social network where AI can talk amongst itself? Maybe both?

🦆 AI Bots Are Molting

A chat about Moltbook, NVIDIA’s “$100B” bet, an Anti-Google AI alliance, the new IPO race, and Apple’s earnings....

I Quote…

"I just said I would do that under oath.”

— Ted Sarandos, who keeps finding new ways to underscore that he’s dead serious about keeping the 45-day window intact for Warner Bros film releases, this time under questioning by the US Senate.

Asides…

• With the usual third-party data caveat, the trend-line here doesn’t look great for ChatGPT market share, obviously. Gemini’s rise is not a surprise, but Grok’s sort of is? Also, per above, just how low Claude is… [Big Technology]

• How bad is the memory chip shortage getting? For the first time in three decades, NVIDIA may not release a gaming-focused GPU this year. Gotta focus on the business bringing in the real money… [Information 🔒]

• Ahead of the Super Bowl, the NFL is now officially a 10% owner of ESPN, which in turn gets the NFL Network, rights to RedZone, and next year’s Super Bowl. The deal values ESPN at $30B. [The Athletic]

  • Unsurprisingly, the NFL is also using the momentum to renegotiate all of their TV deals — even though they’re just a few years into their old ones. A lot has changed in that time: beyond new mega deals for the NBA and UFC, Netflix, Amazon, and even YouTube are now major players in live and sports. [NYT]

  • Speaking on, in line with what I’ve written about a few times, Amazon is about to become the biggest spender in sports rights, at least on streaming (replacing DAZN). The race is on with ESPN… [Deadline]

• The Switch is now officially Nintendo’s best-selling console of all-time at just over 155M units sold (beating out the Nintendo DS). Still about 5 million to go to beat the all-time leader, Sony’s Playstation 2, and the Switch 2 release may make that impossible. [Verge]

  • Is the next Xbox launching in 2027? AMD’s Lisa Su seems to have confirmed that during her company’s earnings call. But it’s likely to be much more of a PC/Console Hybrid. Microsoft needs something… [Verge]

• When might we expect the second season of Pluribus? Vince Gilligan and team are working on it, but sometimes it’s too slow — for shure (as is the show itself). Maybe 2027 — or even 2028. Yikes. [THR]

  • At the same Apple TV press event, Eddy Cue basically confirmed that there will be an F1 sequel — F1 2? — given the (relative) success and new deal with actual F1, there’s no way Apple doesn’t do this, obviously. [THR]

  • Also kudos to Cue for this epic question (about the sequel) dodge/advertisement: "I’ve got a great announcement for it. We’ve got 24 F1 movies this year on Apple TV."

• Meanwhile, Tim Cook still busy doing damage control internally at Apple for his Melania movie mistake. [Bloomberg 🔒]

I Wrote…

💸 NVIDIA and the Case of the Missing $100B OpenAI Investment

The massive deal touted by both OpenAI and NVIDIA as a landmark one now looks a lot different – unless you ask Jensen Huang...

🗣️ Alexa+ Plus ChatGPT?

As Apple goes with Google, Amazon goes with Anthropic *and* OpenAI?

📲 My 2026 iPhone Homescreen

As we gear up for the true ‘aiPhone’ and ‘iPhone Fold’...

I Spy…

This is a rather incredible stock chart. Aside from a small swoon in 2015, Walmart has largely avoided the massive peaks and valleys of most stocks — well, until now, with the rise to join the $1T club complete.

A couple other posts to highlight:

⚔️ The Anyone-But-Google AI Alliance

Big Tech’s billions into OpenAI signal something...

🐄 Meta Bets the Farm, Apple Milks the Cows

Meta and Apple have opposite strategies around AI right now...

I Spoke…

🗣️ A Q&A on Voice AI + Restaurants

With Kristen Hawley to give some thoughts about the state of vocal computing and how AI may be on the verge of transforming it for everyday life. Including, per the focus of her excellent Expedite newsletter, with hospitality. [Expedite]

I Note…

🚀 SpaceX + xAI or Maybe + Tesla

This was always the end game — I first wrote about the concept almost a decade ago. It’s just a matter of timing and order. Does it make more sense to fold xAI into SpaceX or Tesla? I still think the latter given Optimus, but given the IPO plans of the former — and yes, the “data center in space” stuff, I suppose — it’s clearly more opportunistic to hitch the AI wagon to the rocket. Especially given the competition in the AI um, space. I still expect all of them to be one company in the long run — robotic missions to Mars and all that — but for now, SpaceX will take on the xAI payload, if anything, because the Tesla one would be far too complicated, one imagines. Remember Twitter? It’s about to be the subsidiary of a subsidiary whose value is now completely irrelevant. One day the same may be true for Tesla’s car business, which is wild. As for my thought that Musk might be trying to time the SpaceX IPO around the 250th birthday of America — nope, much more vain: his own birthday. [Forbes]

💰 Amazon Could Invest $50B Into OpenAI

While we’ve known for a while that Amazon was likely to invest in OpenAI’s latest round — a good prediction last year! — it was thought to be in the range of a "mere" $10B or so. $50B is another category as it would clearly be them leading this round, or at least putting in the largest check, ahead of SoftBank at $30B or so. What’s the signal they’re trying to send there? Is it meant to say something to the market, that they recognize that everyone is asking for access to OpenAI models? That they’re worried about the state of their in-house models? Something about their relationship with Anthropic, as the latter gets closer to the likes of Microsoft? Talk about conflicts, Amazon is Anthropic’s largest shareholder! Is this really just to ensure anyone-but-Google wins in AI? I mean, $50B is just a massive amount of money, even for Amazon! Would it be the most amount of money ever invested into a one company in one slug? (Ahead of SoftBank’s $40B tranched investment and until NVIDIA actually does their $100B tranched investment — if they do that? Would this be tranched too) Unsurprisingly, sounds like Andy Jassy is handling the negotiations directly. [WSJ 🔒]

🎟️ Amazon Invests $75M Into the Melania Documentary

A few different orders of magnitude than the above, but no less of an eye-opener. In taking Tim Cook to task about attending the screening, I realize I brushed aside Jassy (and Amazon MGM head Mike Hopkins) being there as well, because they obviously had to be since they actually made the movie. But it’s definitely worth questioning why they made the movie — reportedly outbidding everyone else by at least 3x! It sure looks like a gift that puts Cook’s own golden trinket to shame. What did that thing cost? A few hundred bucks? We’re talking $40M dollars here — $28M of which allegedly went directly to Melania Trump. And another supposed $35M to market the movie. Again, a documentary — the report pegs this as 10x the normal amount for such films. I cannot believe they’re putting this in 1,500 theaters and I cannot wait to see where it lands at the box office this weekend (early tracking was at a $5M opening — which would be good for a doc, unless that doc costs, um, $75M). Still no review from Cook — or anyone else, for that matter. Well, that’s not exactly true, Metacritic has 19 user ratings, for an aggregate score of 0.2 out of 10. I’m guessing these people didn’t see it either or they might not have been so generous… [NYT]

🛒 Amazon Stops Investing in Fresh and Go

Amazon’s overall retail strategy has always been a bit like their (old) strategy for Alexa — just throw some stuff out there and see what sticks. But grocery in particular was a confusing jumble of ideas and brands. At one point they had four or five different types of stores to sell grocery items, including the brand they bought for $14B in Whole Foods. Now, it seems, only Whole Foods will remain — well, alongside some other bigger superstore ideas/trials? I did appreciate the "just walk out" concept, but there were obviously issues. I did not appreciate the pay-with-your-palm concept, and that’s now gone too. I feel like I could have told Amazon how this would all play out years ago, but I know they culturally like failing to learn or whatnot. [GeekWire]

👋 Meta Using Manus to Go Premium

I suspected they were going to use the Manus deal to start selling B2B in a meaningful way, but it’s interesting that they’re seemingly going to use it to upsell consumer subscriptions as well. Given that I’m in Europe, I actually have access to Meta’s subscription tier that allows you to move ads (on Facebook and Instagram). It’s nice, but too expensive at $12.99/month. But if there were other perks, I might go for it. YouTube’s Premium (ad-free) tier remains one of the best values out there. That said, I just don’t get much if any value out of Facebook these days. And Instagram actually has ads that are somewhat useful at times so… [TechCrunch]

I Quote…

"Without Larry Ellison independently financing this thing, there’s no chance in hell Paramount would ever be able to pull this off."

— Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters giving his assessment of Paramount’s rival bid for Warner Bros. This piece is just full of great quotes, including a counter from Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital (Paramount’s partner in the deal):

"The Netflix deal is the Harry Houdini of deals."

I Wrote…

🫟 Yahoo Scouts a New UI Path for AI

Yahoo Search rebuilt for AI is surprisingly nice!

👾 The Clock Starts for Star Wars: Episode X

Dave Filoni is clearly going to continue the Skywalker Saga, but how?...

Asides…

• After the false start (due to completely predictable backlash), OpenAI is actually putting GPT-4o out to pasture for real this time, alongside a handful of other legacy models. Apparently just 0.1% of users were actively using it. [CNBC]

• Interesting to see Perplexity inking a deal to get closer to Microsoft, which is a natural home for the company. Have to get off AWS first though! [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Look at that, a circular deal rejected, as Hugging Face apparently turned down a $500M investment (at $7B) from NVIDIA because they didn’t want one AI player owning that much of their company… [FT 🔒]

  • You know who didn’t turn down NVIDIA’s money? CoreWeave, which just took another $2B (as a public company, no less). [Bloomberg 🔒]

• I had previously noted the iOS 26 adoption numbers, mentioning that it seemed like they must be wrong — turns out, they were. Adoption does seem to be slower, in part because of Apple’s roll-out strategy, but it’s not insanely below previous updates like the (bad) data suggested. [Daring Fireball]

• The leaked images of Android for PC looks a lot like… Android for PC — mixed with ChromeOS. Might Aluminum OS — ALOS — morph into AIOS? It sure feels like the play woud be to make this a full-on AI OS… [9to5Google]

  • Meanwhile, the push to fully Geminify Chrome continues. I still think it feels/looks way too-tacked on… [CNBC]

• TikTok’s first week with its new US owners? Pretty rough! Going south even earlier than I expected/predicted? [Verge]

• I keep meaning to say something about Clawdbot, but it keeps changing names — first to Moltbot now to OpenClaw — so I’ll just link to Federico Vittici’s take. The honeymoon may already be over. [MacStories]

• Meet the… actors playing The Beatles… [THR]

I Spy…

Hello, old friend. Welcome back (this summer)…

🌅 Apple’s Twin Suns

John Ternus takes on design while Craig Federighi takes on AI as Apple prepares for a new CEO...

I Note…

🤳 TikTok "US"

As expected, the deal is done. There’s a new JV with a new 7-person board. It’s "majority American owned" but what a strange, surreal deal. The largest single shareholder is still ByteDance at 19.9%. With MGX, a decidedly non-American investor, as one of the other key pillars of the deal, owning 15%. It sounds like most of the employees in the entity will still technically work for the parent company. And the new CEO, Adam Presser (previously an executive at Warner Bros!), is a longtime lieutenant of ByteDance’s CEO. Hard to see how you can view this as anything other than a win for the parent company (and, to an extent, China), as all they did was basically make a new franchise — one which feeds both money and content back to the parent. The other winners, right now, are the investors, who got a sweetheart deal with a $14B valuation — basically 1x US advertising revenue (which yes, is complicated because of the money flowing back). I’m still mostly curious how this plays out going forward. It’s good news that there’s apparently no longer a need to download a new app — which would have been a nightmare for TikTok US — and so presumably most users won’t care at first who actually owns the entity. But they might start caring if the product starts to slip. Like, say, if the re-worked algorithm isn’t as good. Oracle is now a consumer social company? In the end, Michael Dell got in, but not the Murdochs? There’s still a lot to play out here, I imagine. But congrats? [FT 🔒]

☠️ Meta’s Subversion of AI Competitors

Speaking of tick tocks… another day, another look into the drama at Thinking Machines Lab. The most interesting new bits here are around the potential motivations behind co-founders Barret Zoph and Andrew Tulloch leaving the company. Forget the interpersonal stuff, per this telling both Zoph and Tulloch urged Mira Murati to take an offer from Zuck to acquire Thinking Machines. When she dismissed it, Tulloch jumped shipped to Meta directly (where he had worked previously), while Zoph was clearly annoyed. To the point where in the recent (and widely reported) January meeting between Zoph, Murati, co-founder Luke Metz, and key employee Sam Schoenholz, they pushed for her to take a deal with Meta – or even Anthropic. When Murati denied their requests, those three jumped ship as well (it continues to sound like Zoph was fired, but mainly for optics before he could formally quit). Anyway, I’m reminded when Zuck also made the offer to buy the other big ex-OpenAI lab (well, beyond Anthropic!), Safe Superintelligence. When Ilya Sutskever turned down Zuck’s offer, co-founder (and CEO) Daniel Gross clearly thought that was a mistake and soon thereafter, he jumped shipped to Meta — all of which Sutskever has now confirmed. So even if a number of people (and companies) have turned down Zuck’s "Godfather" offers, those deals are clearly working to subvert his competitors, potentially poisoning them from within (that includes companies the size of Apple!). Up to 9 people are now apparently gone from or leaving Thinking Machines with this fall-out… [NYT]

🍌 Apple’s Banana Stand

While I already focused on this piece for my broader thoughts about where Apple stands right now with design and AI, it’s worth calling out the bits where they focus on how frugal Craig Federighi is when it comes to Apple’s spend. Humorously, they specifically call out his watching of the "budget for bananas", which, yes, sounds bananas. And is probably just a former, still disgruntled employee calling out some very specific example? Still, it’s worth noting because the single most important aspect of AI to date has been the spend. We can argue about if it makes any sense, or if it’s a bubble — it certainly is — but without question, it’s also needed to play this game right now. Apple may be well suited to sit back and let Google do the heavy spending here, but if they’re really serious about doing this themselves in parallel… including when it comes to hiring (see: above)… hopefully there’s always money in the banana stand is what I’m saying. [Information 🔒]

I Quote…

"TV is not what we grew up on. TV is now just about everything."

— Ted Sarandos, making his pitch as to why Netflix should be allowed to buy Warner Bros. This is mainly about YouTube, but he also (appropriately) threw out the very Game of Thrones-like "Instagram is coming." A marketing campaign around this deal?

Asides…

• So let me get this straight, Sony is getting out of the TV business but at the same time is getting back into the turntable business? (Though that could be spun-off to TCL too, it sounds like!) [Verge]

• A really good, quick interview of Demis Hassabis by Big Technology’s Alex Kantrowitz (with whom I do a monthly show) at Davos. [YouTube]

• One idea to for OpenAI to monetize beyond ads sounds like a cost-per-scientific-discovery model. Wonder what the rate will be? [Information 🔒]

• With one small AI product push, Google seemingly just destroyed the SAT test prep industry. [TechCrunch]

• So much drama over the positioning of the Dynamic Island in the iPhone 18 models (and going forward). It seems like it will still be front and center, just smaller. Decidedly not in the upper left corner… [MacRumors]

• Um, that Epic/Google agreement to end the litigation around the Play Store (which was highly problematic for Google) feels a bit more slippery with a secret $800M Unreal Engine deal! It’s something Apple might care about given what the agreement might mean for the future of the App Store... [Verge]

• Telly, the "free" TV (if you agree to an always-on ad bar below the main screen) projected 500k units sold in 2023. Millions in 2024. The actual tally for Telly? More like 35,000. To be fair, it’s maybe less a demand issue than a logistics one. Still. Yikes. [Lowpass]

• I really enjoyed the first episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — a lighter, breezier vibe than Game of Thrones (and certainly House of the Dragon) — and now there’s talk of a GoT sequel show. Not the Jon Snow one (which is dead… for now), and not the movie, but one focused on Arya Stark. Reminder (per above) that either Netflix or Paramount will likely be making such calls in the future… [IGN]

I Spy…

If I gave you 5 guesses, would you have any idea who this is? I would not.

🗣️ Pinning Hopes on New AI Hardware – Again – Even Apple

With competent AI incoming, Apple considers an AI Pin...

I Wrote…

📲 An Actual AiPhone

Gemini? Check. Chatbot? Check. But might we need an app?

I Note…

🏆 2026 Oscar Nominations

Sinners has set a new high water mark with 16 nominations — a full two clear of All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016). That’s great news for everyone involved — especially Ryan Coogler given his unique and wild deal for the film — which includes Warner Bros. Which also made the second most-nominated film this year: One Battle After Another, which got 13 nominations. All in, WB racked up 30 nominations, far ahead of Neon at 18, and Netflix with 16. If say, those two companies were to be combined, you would have 47 nominations (HBO also got one for a documentary). The closest major studio would be Universal (thanks to Focus Features) at 14. After that, it’s Disney at 4. Four. Even Apple had 6 (thanks mainly to F1, which scored a Best Picture nomination too). Paramount? Zero. As with the Golden Globes, this obviously should have no baring on antitrust matters, but mainly just points to an incredible year for Warner Bros. [Deadline]

🤖 It Was Enchanté To Meet You

As they push to get Siri back up to speed powered by Google’s AI, Apple has their own internal AI chatbot apps — ones which are apparently different from the previously circulated "Veritas" app (which sounded like a way to help with the AI "bake off" for which model Apple should choose for Siri). Enchanté sounds like a ChatGPT-like app to help employees with their work, using both Claude and Gemini on the backend (alongside some of Apple’s own models). The focus — and presumably the reason why they’re not just using Claude or Gemini themselves — is unsurprisingly on security, either running queries locally or in Apple’s secure cloud. The same sounds generally true for ‘Enterprise Assistant' which sounds decidedly more boring and straight-forward as a tool to help navigate internal workflows and documentation. Anyway, this just backs up my point that I still think Siri should have a stand-alone app, not just be in the background of iOS/macOS. [Macworld]

🦸 Meta’s First "Superintelligence" Models in Testing

When asked about the first outputs from the MSL group, Andrew Bosworth doesn’t sound exactly enthused. Noting the first models have been released internally, he kicks off by couching his answer that the team has only been at work on it for six months, "not quite even" before saying they’re "very good". Not "great" not "fantastic" certainly not the "best" because he goes on to note that they need more post-training work. All seems reasonable given the quick turnaround, still… Meta needs to get back in the game, fast. And they’re obviously paying whatever it takes to make that happen. They need to whip the llama’s ass. Boz also notes what a "tremendously chaotic year" it has been for Meta with AI. I’ll say. [Reuters]

I Quote…

"Companies get good at something, and then if you can add to the core mechanism, that’s great. So we’ve always wanted to add content to the Netflix subscription to make it more and more useful, more and more enjoyable, but kind of keep it like one big model, as opposed to also do theatrical movies or also do something else as a way to expand revenue."

— Reed Hastings, on a January episode of the Invest Like the Best podcast. As Chairman of Netflix’s board, he obviously signed off on the Warner Bros deal, but it sounds like he’s still quite skeptical of how well theatrical will work for Netflix… But that is Ted Sarandos’ (and Greg Peters’) call now…

Asides…

• Google looks to have made another "hackquisition" this time around voice AI tech – a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – Hume AI’s CEO and "several top engineers" will join the DeepMind team in exchange for (of course) an undisclosed licensing fee (though the company does seem like it will continue to operate independently, as this is becoming a big business). [Wired]

• Ahead of racing towards IPOs, OpenAI and Anthropic are both clearly on the road with slightly smaller tin cups to raise mere tens of billions for the next (last? or famous last words?) private rounds:

  • Sam Altman is in the Middle East looking for "at least" $50B — with Amazon in for "at least" $10B. The valuation is still looking to be in the $830B range, obviously depending how much they bring in. [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • Anthropic’s round is said to already be "oversubscribed" at more than $10B — which is on top of the $15B that NVIDIA and Microsoft have committed. That could push the valuation above the $350B range. [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • The two are also battling on the margins with their margins. Anthropic’s may be getting hit by high inference costs. [Information 🔒]

  • Meanwhile, OpenAI is busy with a re-org now that Barret Zoph is (controversially) back. He’ll now oversee their key enterprise sales push for OpenAI — which seems a bit odd given that he was CTO at Thinking Machines? Jack of all trades, I guess. [Information 🔒]

• Sort of wild that Blue Origin is launching a satellite internet service separate from Amazon’s being-deployed Leo service. Yes, TerraWave will be focused on enterprise (and governments — and space data centers, naturally), but in the success state, they’ll obviously compete in ways. That’s theoretical though with both being miles away from Starlink’s 9,000 satellites at the moment… [CNBC]

• How much of a cut will be the standard for AI chatbots handling commerce transactions? If the OpenAI/Shopify deal is any indication: 4%. [Information 🔒]

• With Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube battling Netflix in the living room, the latter is going to focus more on vertical video to try to combat all of them better on mobile. That suggests, perhaps, more "UGC" coming, but at first, it will be focused on their big video podcast push. [THR]

• It sounds like China has finally signed off on the TikTok deal, as such, it could close this week. Our long national nightmare is over. I mean, maybe? [Semafor]

• Paramount has formally kicked off their proxy fight for Warner Bros Discovery, but also pushed out their deadline for investors to tender shares — no surprise since only a tiny amount have thus far. [THR]

• End of an era with Prue Leith signing off from The Great British Bake-Off after some 400 challenges over 9 seasons. I had absolutely no idea she was 86! Merry Berry, whom she replaced, is 90! [NYT]

  • English food writer and chef Nigella Lawson, a spry 66, is rumored to be her replacement. Between this and tracking the next Bond… [Guardian]

I Spy…

This could go one of two ways: either it will be fun or it will be awful. There is no in-between. And it’s really hard to tell from this trailer which way, He-Man. I do wish everyone would stop doing the "cast away to Earth" storyline, I’d rather this just be straight-up Eternia fantasy?

Then again, I was a kid who grew up loving both the action figures — obviously I had the Castle Grayskull set — and the OG cartoon. That said, I also have a soft spot for the ridiculous Dolph Lundgren 1987 movie which yes, was set mainly on Earth.

Best case may be Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, which was actually quite good and fun. Though this looks a bit too Thor-y… Don’t ruin the possibility of a Thundercats movie for me, He-Man!

🍿 Hollywood Cuts Off Its Future to Spite Its Present

Netflix is obviously the best path forward for Warner Bros, you fools...

🧠 My Boy’s Wicked Smart on AI

Ben Affleck makes some good, coherent points about... AI?

I Note…

📊 Scaling with Intelligence

Given that OpenAI blog posts are always calculated (I mean, aren’t all company blog posts?), I’m not sure what to make of this post by CFO Sarah Friar. She’s making the case that they’re scaling revenue in line with compute (power generation), which seemingly is an argument for OpenAI to keep spending – or to accelerate spending. But is it, really? Because it’s also costing more to get that compute online… Is this just a state of the union to start 2026, or ahead of that next massive fundraise? Maybe both? She also subtly puts in there that both WAU and DAUs are at all-time highs, which is seemingly to combat a narrative circulating that growth may be slowing — of course, both can be true while growth rates are still slowing… She also makes the case that their business model will be multi-faceted, including the new push with advertising, but that’s seemingly there to suggest it won’t be the new main business model (as it became for Google, Meta, and others). And she hints that more layers of monetization are out there waiting to be discovered… Hope so! [OpenAI]

🎞️ Sony Re-Ups with Netflix

With all eyes on the Warner Bros deal, Netflix keeps pushing their current business forward. Given the success of KPop Demon Hunters, there was some talk that Sony might be subject to a bidding war for their streaming rights. Instead, Sony extended their long-standing deal — and expanded it to include worldwide rights for Netflix to stream their movies right after their theatrical (and PVOD) runs. Sounds like the deal is worth $7B and runs through 2032. And if Netflix completes the Warner deal, they’ll have the streaming rights to Sony, Universal, Warner Bros (and A24 via HBO Max). That would leave just Disney and… Paramount. Which you can bet Paramount will be talking about quite loudly over the next many months. [THR]

🥽 VR No Longer the Future of Work

There was a time, about five years ago, when all you heard was that Meta’s "Horizon Workrooms" was the future of work. Well, so much for that. Alongside the other cuts to the VR division, Workrooms is no more. Granted, it was the pandemic when it was hyped up, still, what a giant swing and miss. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is framing the situation as both not a big deal and also potentially a good thing. He makes a couple points worth considering — notably that the VR ecosystem was held back by Meta competing with them, but as he notes, that was also because they just made better apps and services than the ecosystem did. So by removing the better apps from the equation… Regardless, the vibes around the whole bet-the-company Metaverse bet just aren’t great right now. Hard to see how they recover. [Verge]

⏰ Thinking Machines Messy Tick Tock

If you’re looking for some more messy details around how the Thinking Machines Lab co-founder fiasco played out, this will have you covered. Feels fairly in line with my initial read: a "you can’t quit because you’re fired" situation. But that doesn’t mean Zoph was without blame. Per the reporting, a um, complicated, relationship at work (though it sounds like it actually started at OpenAI before Thinking Machines was founded!). And things seemingly did get messy from there. Meanwhile, others seemed clearly worried about the overall direction of the company. So there was some sort of impromptu meeting/ultimatum, which clearly didn’t sit well with Murati… Something, something, history repeating or at least rhyming… [WSJ 🔒]

👁️ More on OpenAI Ads

Yeah no surprise that they’re testing with ad views. As I wrote about last weekend, the click-based model is likely to be problematic for ChatGPT (and all AI chatbots) because at their best, they destroy the need to click! I don’t think the CPM model is going to be the one that works either, but it’s the easiest and most obvious one to test first. ChatGPT has a lot of users, what advertiser would say not to putting their message in front of those users will little-to-no competition? [Information 🔒]

I Quote (Davos Edition)…

"It would be a big mistake to ship these chips. I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea."

— Dario Amodei, not holding back his thoughts on the notion of allowing companies like NVIDIA to legally sell their chips in China. Wonder what new Anthropic investor Jensen Huang thinks about such a statement…

"I think it was a massive overreaction in the West.”

— Demis Hassabis, when asked about the lasting effects of the DeepSeek moment a year ago (also my general thought at the time). He does note that it was "impressive" what the company was able to do with limited resources in catching up, but also notes that he feels like China is still six months behind the cutting-edge of AI models.

"It's interesting they've gone for that so early. Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue."

— Demis Hassabis, in a different interview at Davos, when asked for his thoughts about OpenAI’s ads roll-out plans for ChatGPT. No punches pulled there! He’s also skeptical about how well ads will work in such products, which is certainly an interesting thing for an executive at Google to think! (And he has some good quotes about the newly announced Apple/Gemini partnership too — one key: local models…)

"Early is a weird word because in ad models you have to be at scale."

— Sarah Friar, noting she was "surprised" by Demis’ comments in the above interview, and added, "I am trying to create as much optionality as possible." She also noted OpenAI’s first custom inference chips are being "taped out" (one step away from production).

"I think most likely, we’re looking at something latter part…"

— Chris Lehane, confirming (sort of) that OpenAI’s device is coming later this year. "I didn’t say it’s coming this year, I said we’re 'on track' (audience laughs)!" That sounds like they might announce it towards the end of the year, but it may not ship until 2027. But we’ll see, a long way to go. Still good to see/hear they’re clearly confident enough in whatever the first device is to keep talking about it openly like this…

Asides…

• Elon Musk hopes to take SpaceX public by July — maybe a 250th bday present for America? Why? A new space race… space in the in IPO window, beating Anthropic and OpenAI to market and seemingly an obsession with getting cash to be the first to do data centers in space. Also maybe to buy a big(ger) chunk of xAI. Maybe SpaceX and Tesla can split ownership, until they eventually merge too? [WSJ 🔒]

  • Here’s a deeper dive into how Elon is apparently thinking about this space data center project/plan — including, perhaps some sort of breakthrough in terms of how to handing the cooling in the vacuum of space... [Axios]

• Of course, Elon might not need the cash if he gets the um, $79B - $134B in damages he’s seeking from OpenAI and Microsoft. And that’s at the $500B valuation. If/when that jumps to $800B+… [Bloomberg 🔒]

• The FTC is looking into "hackquisitions" again following NVIDIA’s $20B Groq deal/no deal. As expected… [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • The FTC is also appealing the Meta decision, which is strange since the first one was such an obvious waste of everyone’s time. [Reuters]

  • Google appealing their antitrust loss makes more sense because it delays any remedies (which they largely won anyway, but still…). [Verge]

• Sounds like YouTube Shorts will be getting their own Sora-like AI likeness capabilities this year. Curious how that will go over there… [Verge]

  • Also Neal Mohan keeps doing Netflix favors by dismissing the notion of "UGC" being what creators do on YouTube as outdated. [THR]

• And another one, with BBC striking a deal with YouTube to produce original content for the service. Notably, it will be ad-supported, which is not the case for the television channel in the UK… [THR]

• It sounds like we’re just weeks away from knowing Disney’s new CEO, with an announcement said to be next month. (Though Bob Iger will undoubtedly stick around for some sort of transition period, as his contract is through 2026.) [LAT]

• MTV Rewind is just awesome. Warning: you will lose hours. [MTV Rewind]

I Spy…

Just how big of a success was KPop Demon Hunters? These are Netflix’s own numbers. That number is not only over 3x the second best-performing movie on the list, it beats the last three leaders on Netflix’s list combined…

🏀 The Vision Pro Slam Dunk

Their immersive NBA stream highlights how close Apple is to making Vision Pro content work...

I Wrote…

🎭 OpenAI Transfers Their Drama IP to Thinking Machines Lab

AI startups are losing co-founders like they’re OpenAI...

I Note…

🌏 Wikipedia Turns 25

While it may feel like it launched alongside the internet itself and has always been with us, it actually launched on January 15, 2001 — well after Google and a number of other names you know. And what an interesting time to celebrate the birthday, with the site under assault from AI. At the same, the site is also obviously one of the main feeders of AI content — and they seemingly now have a way for those building out AI to pay for it, with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, Mistral, and yes, Google now paying for special API access to the site’s content. How much? Undoubtedly not enough, certainly not to end the donation pop-ups. Of course, they’ve been under assault before — remember Google Knol? Oh, you don’t? It’s long since dead but you can read about it you-know-where. Here’s to another 25. [Verge]

💳 Behind the Scenes of the Apple Card Break-Up

A good look behind the scenes of this (finally resolved) shitshow — it’s pretty damning of both Goldman and Apple — I mean, did Apple really not understand how credit works? More likely, they thought they could disrupt the market, just as they had done with the iPhone, to the point where they’d work with one willing partner to do things that others wouldn’t dare. So in this scenario, Goldman was AT&T. Unfortunately, Apple’s notion of approving a credit card for almost any customer that asked — they were Apple customers with iPhones after all — ran head-first into the realities of sub-prime lending. The situation grew bad enough, even before the CFPB came calling, that it may have soured Goldman on the credit card business entirely. Their literal loss — selling the $20B book at a 7% discount — may be JPMorgan’s gain, as the deal hit last-minute hiccups in part because the business, after much refinement, may actually be profitable now. But the relationship damange between Apple and Goldman was beyond repair. Oof. It is a great product offering! But over 30% of the balances were sub-prime?! [WSJ 🔒]

🥽 A Rough Day for the Metaverse

Some good balance by Alex Heath I think to the Meta egg-on-face Metaverse situation. Look, they tried. But despite billions upon billions (and years upon years) spent, the VR market, for the 40th year in a row, just isn’t there (yet?). Meta controls the market for headsets, but it’s very much a king of the hill situation. Without new hardware from Meta to prop it up a bit, that market shrank to a seven-year low (!) in 2025. And that was with the Vision Pro being only two years old (and with an updated one launched at the end of that year). If Apple can’t make it a market… So it’s embarrassing narratively for Meta to pull back — namely due to the whole name change thing! — but the AI race gives them the perfect cover to do so. And the AI spend gives them the real reason to do so now. And they still have other Metaverse-y avenues to explore, namely in mobile, and AI can help fuel some of that. But come on, this is not the Metaverse Zuck promised, clearly. And yes, Roblox or Fortnite may get to the software one first. But someone eventually has to do the purpose-built hardware for such worlds, right? Right?! [Sources]

I Spy…

While the FT article on the Apple/Google Gemini deal gives us the Big Tech CapEx charts through 2024, I used my new friend Claude to plug in the 2025 numbers and even extrapolate out to 2026. Wild to see Apple in this context.

The article also got some chatter for the reporting that OpenAI may have turned down Apple when it came to powering the new Siri, which Mark Gurman pushed back against. But if you read the wording, both things can likely be true: OpenAI may not have wanted to do a white label model and Apple may have only partnered with someone willing to do that. That doesn’t mean OpenAI turned them down explicitly for this task, necessarily. Maybe it was discussed around the original partnership…

Asides…

• Another day, another big new AI chip deal for OpenAI, this time with startup Cerebras, known for their literally big ass chips, which is said to help with speed for doing inference. [NYT]

  • Clearly not coincidentally, the news hits just a day after reports of the company raising $1B at a $22B valuation. Which itself seems set by the price of NVIDIA’s Groq "hackquisition". [Information 🔒]

• While it seems weird that OpenAI would launch a stand-alone ChatGPT Translate site — what happened to the "Code Red" and focus?! — I guess it sort of makes sense as a lead-gen tool... [Android Authority]

• I’ll reserve more thoughts on Google’s "Personal Intelligence" push with Gemini leverage Gmail, Google Photos, etc, for when I have access. But it’s sort of wild that the pitch sounds exactly like what Apple’s ill-fated pitch was back at WWDC 2024… Presumably Apple will make that push again at WWDC 2026, but now powered by… Google. [Verge]

• The new Digg is now in open beta, and after several months in closed beta, is tweaked to even more fully go after Reddit, which is something given Alexis Ohanian’s involvement. [TechCrunch]

  • I went ahead and created a Spyglass community…

• If OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX go IPO in 2026 — I’m still skeptical that any of the Big AI folks will go out — will any of them be able to best the Saudi Aramco $1.7T opening valuation hit in 2019? OpenAI has already blown past the largest amount of money ever raised in an IPO in their last private round… [NYT]

• Leaks (from a leaker with a good enough track record) suggest the iPhone 18 Pro models will have the same screen sizes as the 17 models (well, aside from the iPhone Fold, which will be new, of course), no surprise, but that Face ID under the screen is a go, and what will indeed shift the front camera to the top-left. What that means for Dynamic Island is a question mark… [MacRumors]

  • Speaking of that foldable, another rumor puts "liquid metal" as the key to the device. How very Terminator 2. [MacRumors]

• Netflix is officially in the podcast business (meaning creating their own, not just partnering/licensing) with Pete Davidson and Michael Irving as the first two partners. We’re a long way from those red envelopes… [Verge]

• The Las Vegas facility for UFC fights will now be named the Meta Apex — yes, after that Meta. I mean, it’s hardly new to do deals on the whim of the leader of a company, but announcing them at the same time you’re laying off thousands? Not the best optics, Zuck! [THR]

• Disney is pivoting the 'Galaxy’s Edge' area of Disneyland to the original Star Wars trilogy. This is seemingly a sign that while financially successful, the latest trilogy hasn’t really had the staying power you’d expect for the franchise. Even Episodes I, II, and III, as bad as they are, may have more nostalgic value right now! The best news: the Cantina Band will be playing in the Cantina area. [THR]

I Quote…

“What is driving the market right now this extraordinary demand for fast compute.”

— Andrew Feldman, the CEO of Cerebras, talking about the $10B+ deal with OpenAI.

There’s a lot going on with this one. Cerebras filed to go public in 2024 but withdrew the filing a year later seemingly on concerns that nearly all of their revenue was from G42, the Abu Dhabi-based major investor in the company, which also meant a CFIUS review (there may have been other concerns as well). They have seemingly since diversified the business thanks to deals with IBM, Meta, and yes, now this one. Of course, this one has a wrinkle too, as Sam Altman is an investor in Cerebras as well. Because it’s just impossible to do a deal without some sort of conflict in AI.

One more thing: buried at the end of the WSJ report is the following:

In 2017, OpenAI discussed forming a partnership with Cerebras, according to court documents made public in pending litigation between Altman and Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI. Feldman said in the interview that he rejected an offer from Musk to buy the ChatGPT-maker around that time.

OpenAI is in the early stages of another massive fundraising to continue to fund its extensive growth plans, the Journal reported. The new investment, which is expected to precede an initial public offering, could value the company at $830 billion, before the new investment.

For the first part, I assume they mean that OpenAI tried to buy Cerebras in 2017 (as yes, the lawsuits have uncovered), not the other way around!

For the second part, they’re saying OpenAI’s funding is being done at $830 pre, which is not what the previous reports (also from WSJ) on the round said. This matters because if OpenAI raised enough — $170B to be exact — they could be the first $1T startup! To be clear, I assume this is a typo.

🗣️ “Hello, Computer.”

With AI and an appetite for new hardware, vocal computing seems primed to take off, for real this time...

I Note…

🏗️ Meta’s Compute Initiative

When I read about this new initiative within Meta, I can’t be the only one who assumes it will eventually lead to a full-on Meta Cloud, right? Zuck has been dancing around this notion for a while — implying that any compute they overbuild could just be sold to others — and it obviously makes sense given how good those businesses are for their peer group. At the same time, Meta is not an enterprise company — which I continue to believe is part of the Manus deal — so it’s going to take a lot of time and learnings to build that muscle. All the mistakes Google had to make, etc. Still, given the AI infra needs right now, it’s seemingly a good time to do such a build (which clearly OpenAI and others are leveraging as well before the music slows — or stops). Interesting that Daniel Gross has already shifted to this project from Alexandr Wang’s "superintelligence" group. What are we to read into that? Certainly something! And yes, the Dina Powell McCormick hire seemingly makes sense for projects like this, which will need both banking and government connections galore. I’m not sure what to make of the "Vice Chair" title — she stepped down from Meta’s board in December, and what are we to read into that: it was not framed as moving into this position! — so it’s not about a board position. It’s just a lofty title to give her more gravitas in key partner meetings? I would also just note how many Republicans Meta has hired of late in key positions — I don’t think this is a purely political move; everyone praises Powell McCormick from Jamie Dimon on down (yes, President Trump too) — but it’s fairly wild just how much OG Facebook was filled with Democrats — is Sheryl running and all that — and now they’ve fully shifted with the winds… [TechCrunch]

🥽 Meta Carves Up VR Division

Staying on Meta, while they more or less previewed the job cuts late last year, this is a pretty brutal reality for many who assumed they were signing up to work for the most important initiative for a company that renamed itself Meta. But the rise of AI — and Meta’s stumbles there — alongside the complete and utter failure of a VR market to materialize made this inevitable. Meta simply couldn’t keep burning billions on the Metaverse when they were also going to be burning billions catching up in AI. They continue to give some lip service to the idea that headset work will continue, but undoubtedly with just a team big enough to keep the lights on, while everyone else focuses on Smart Glasses — aiming to double the output? — especially with Apple coming (wait a minute, haven’t we been down this road before?). [Bloomberg 🔒]

🎨 Apple Creator Studio

SaaSy Apple! They’re clearly looking to continue growing the Services narrative — which will one day surpass the iPhone as the largest business segment Apple operates. The good news is that you can still buy the apps in the bundle individually if you’d prefer to do that. The bad news is that the free ones are now suddenly "freemium" — and that slope will get more slippery as Apple will undoubtedly look to upsell the bundle (as all companies do when they go down such paths). At just $12.99/month or $129/year, this is obviously a lot cheaper than Adobe’s suite, but they also sort of have to be, at least for now. Also bundled in here is Pixelmator Pro, long my go-to Mac image editor of choice, which Apple acquired a year ago, and it’s coming to the iPad too. That new icon is pretty rough though… [Verge]

🤖 Is Claude Cowork the Next AI Revolution?

Some people are saying… well, technically this post wonders if Claude Code itself post-Opus 4.5 is the next watershed moment in the space. But I’m just as interested in Claude Cowork, the new Anthropic service in research preview. I like both the clever name and the framing of it as "Claude Code but for regular people", which is me putting words into Simon Willison’s mouth, but basically how he frames it. It got me to drop the $100/month required for a Max account to try it out, and I suspect I’m hardly alone there. Might OpenAI get some actual consumer competition from their longtime rival (following a strong recent push from Google)? I think it’s going to take some sort of viral agentic use case beyond just organizing the folders on your Mac, which, while impressive in that it’s AI doing things on its own outside the confines of your browser, is not really a thing I think most people absolutely need, let alone would pay for. Watch out for prompt injections out there… [Information 🔒]

I Quote…

There’s an awful lot of jumping on the bandwagon. Sometimes it feels to me like people are just rushing to get into the history books.

— Bob Sutor, a former head of quantum computing at IBM, on the current state of quantum — which is divisive, to say the least. A steady drumbeat of announced breakthroughs is always immediately met with skepticism about said breakthroughs. And mostly everyone wondering if any of this is actually useful, let alone practical. And the spectrum of when it might be seemingly ranging from two years until never.

Another IBMer, Jay Gambetta, their current head of research, compares the space to AI in 2012, when breakthrough in computer vision just started to occur. "The first neural networks were not actually meaningful, but they were significant scientific demonstrations that have now evolved into huge amounts of computation."

Asides…

• If Brad Smith is so worried about China winning the AI race thanks to their open source models, why doesn’t he push Microsoft to go down that path? With Meta seemingly ceding leadership there, it could be an interesting avenue? [FT 🔒]

  • Then again, he’s a busy man, also pledging to pay more for electricity so that Microsoft's AI usage won’t burn the common man’s bills. It sounds nice, but nebulous. But you-know-who eats this stuff up… [NYT]

• Caterpillar, yes, the yellow-tinted construction equipment company, is now a $300B company thanks to the data center build-out boom. [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • Context: they’re close to the market cap where Apple passed Exxon to become the most valuable in the world 15 years ago. [TechCrunch]

• One week out from the shareholder vote, Netflix seems poised to make a "one more thing" offer to ensure they get the votes: all cash. That would seemingly answer one of Paramount’s loudest critiques (even though it seemed like the potential upside to the Netflix stock was a good thing?). [WSJ 🔒]

  • Will it stop the lawsuits? Of course not. [THR]

• Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike — still the best name in tech — launches an encrypted, secure, and open source AI chatbot, Confer. [Ars]

• For the what must be the 25th time, the US has cleared NVIDIA’s H200 sales in China, albeit with new convoluted hoops to jump through. [Bloomberg 🔒]

  • Not that it matters as China is apparently going to restrict them to "special circumstances" for purposes like research in universities. [Information 🔒]

  • Actually, China just summoned the domestic tech companies to tell them the sales were "not permitted" again "unless necessary". [Reuters]

  • Has any news cycle been so tiresome? It’s obviously all just jockeying for political leverage. Thoughts and prayers to NVIDIA’s financial team trying to do forecasts on such sales…

• It sure reads like Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger wanted to go back to actually building rather than managing as he shifts from Anthropic Chief Product Officer to co-leading their "Labs" team. [Verge]

• No surprise that we’ll get another Super Bowl ad from OpenAI this year, but I wonder how many AI-related ads we’ll get. All of Big Tech, I imagine. Surely Anthropic as well with their recent marketing push? [WSJ 🔒]

  • Alex Kantrowitz had some thoughts about the angle OpenAI might take in a commercial this year during our podcast this week. [YouTube]

• Tom Brady needed another job, so he’s joining the C-suite (and board) of eMed as Chief Wellness Officer. If you’ve heard of the company before, you’re either interested in GLP-1s or know it as the company Linda Yaccarino took over after the "Velvet Hammer’s" clearly very normal exit from Xitter. [Bloomberg 🔒]

I Spy…

Look at that, good, fun content on LinkedIn! As Benjamin Dach writes:

Back in 1990, Nintendo issued a statement urging the public not to refer to video game consoles as simply “a Nintendo.” The company was concerned that their brand name was being used generically — the same fate that befell words like aspirin, escalator, and thermos, which all started as trademarks before becoming common nouns.

🗣️ AI Needs Its Steve Jobs

Everyone seemingly wants to shoot the current AI messengers...

I Note…

🏆 The 2026 Golden Globes

Of all the silly awards shows, this one is probably the silliest. I mean, they now have a 'Best Podcast' category in a blatant reach for any and all promotion. But it does seem to set the stage nicely for a One Battle After Another vs. Hamnet Oscar showdown (current odds including yes, prediction markets, still have OBAA the prohibitive favorite, which I agree with). Also note the two studios which "performed" the best for the night: Netflix had 7 wins followed by… Warner Bros with 6. In third place? HBO Max wth 3. All-in, a combined Netflix/WB would have walked away with 16 wins. The next closest studio would have been Apple, also with 3! (Yes, even mighty Disney only had 1 win — for FX, no less.) Luckily for Netflix, I don’t think the Justice Department would block a deal due to Golden Globe wins. Though I wouldn’t put it past President Trump caring most about such things. BTW, number of wins for Paramount Skydance? 0. Though they did technically host the show… [THR]

📟 Sinofsky at CES 2026

Per his annual tradition, Steven Sinofsky once again walked all the conference halls of Las Vegas so we didn’t have to. His main takeaway? Whereas in the past, computers, then the internet, then phones dominated the underlying current, now it’s not just AI, but really just one company: NVIDIA. "Nvidia is executing like a combination of Microsoft, Intel, and Open Source all combined. It is incredible." He also noted the show was more "muted" than in previous years, with some of the largest players — Samsung, Lenovo, etc — breaking off to do their own tangential shows. Those fun-looking Zoox self-driving cars were apparently zooming all over The Strip though. And while yes, robots were everywhere, very few actually worked. [Hardcore Software]

🤬 Elon Musk Is Big Mad Again

In June of 2024, Elon Musk was very upset when Apple announced their tie-up with OpenAI at WWDC. He even threatened to ban the use of Apple products at his companies (good luck). But you can almost understand it, it was a huge validation of OpenAI, a company which he co-founded but famously was no longer involved with. To make matters worse, he was now trying to compete with his old company with his new one, xAI. Fast forward a year, and Musk decided he needed to sue Apple and OpenAI over um, App Store promotion. Silly, but fine. But now he’s back again, up in arms over Apple’s AI tie-up with… Google. So he was big mad when Apple does a deal with OpenAI, feeling like Apple was tipping the scales towards ChatGPT, but then also mad when Apple cuts a deal which seems bad for OpenAI. Because now it’s an "unreasonable concentration of power for Google". I’m not even sure I disagree, but my god the whiplash here! [MacRumors]

🏀 Lakers/Bucks Live in Vision Pro

Jason Snell watched the NBA game live (only available in a few markets) last Friday in his Vision Pro. His main takeaway? How normal it felt to watch that way. Unlike some of the other sports footage that Apple has shot in with their Spatial cameras, they seemingly got the memo not to automatically cut between angles quickly here. Also fun that the presentation had its own special broadcasters who could tell you things such as "look left" to see a coach coming into your field of view. One downside: the sound of the event wasn’t recorded spatially. Still, impressive that it seems like Apple pulled this off without any major hiccups. Though I’m running into one big issue: the need to charge my Vision Pro and actually put the damn thing on to watch this. I’ll get around to it, but it remains just an entirely inconvenient product to use. [Six Colors]

I Wrote…

🤖 And the Winner of Apple’s Great AI Bakeoff is... Google

Gemini lets them catch up in AI quick while giving themselves flexibility...

🎬 The “AI-Generated Hit Movie” Horror Story

AI-generated movies are coming. But AI-generated “hit movies”?..

I Quote…

To put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards. For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.

— Iñaki Aldasoro, Sebastian Doerr, and Daniel Rees in a research note for BIS (via the FT). Everyone is in agreement this is a boom, but the perspective is important. Despite what others are saying about data centers and GDP, this is still a pretty small boom. That doesn’t mean a bust isn’t possible — and, in fact, the increasingly use of debt is sending out some warning signals.

Asides…

• Microsoft disclosed in a document to the Senate that fundraisers approached them about donating to the new White House ballroom. It sounds like Amazon too. Hopefully everyone is learning the shakedown dance. [Verge]

• As we rapidly approach the anniversary of the DeepSeek freak out and fall out, their next big update, V4, should hit in about a month. It’s said to be excellent at coding and yes, used some novel training techniques. [Information 🔒]

• Also in China, the surge of Kuaishou, which started as a ByteDance laggard but is now riding high with Kling, an AI video generation tool that they pushed out quick to get ahead of Sora (worked for them, not Meta). [Bloomberg 🔒]

• All of this points to the AI gap with China shrinking fast, right? No so fast… narrative violation: the gap may actually be growing (or at least some in China may want to convey that). [Bloomberg 🔒]

• Google follows OpenAI into AI shopping with Walmart and Shopify. Too cynical to think it’s all about being able to roll out ads within AI quicker? [TheAisle]

  • No, probably not too cynical… [FT 🔒]

  • Oh, and a quick move to make a protocol for commerce. [TechCrunch]

• Meanwhile, Anthropic follows OpenAI into healthcare, a whole 3 days later. [BI]

• Sometimes I think Amazon’s store strategy is: yes. As now they’re going to try big box retail again, this time outside of Chicago. [Information 🔒]

• I enjoyed reading this post about OpenAI and SoftBank investing $1B (combined) into SB Energy without once noting that "SB" stands for 'SoftBank'. I mean, maybe too obvious, but come on. Also, where is OpenAI getting the $500M to put in? Undoubtedly SoftBank. Round and round… [Bloomberg 🔒]

• The race is on to save McLaren, which has long struggled financially despite their F1 success. It merged with an EV startup last year and... we’ll see! Remember when Apple was reportedly looking a decade ago?! [FT 🔒]

• Come for the news about the first instance of Superman in a comic selling for $15M, but stay for the wild story of when it was stolen from Nic Cage — yes, that Nic Cage — and saw a wild rise in value before it was returned. He bought it for $150k in 1996 — a nice 10x return, had he not sold it in 2011 for $2.2M. [NYT]

I Spy…

I missed commemorating this a month ago, and the stock has fallen a bit since then but wow, what a wild 25 year ride for Cisco. And a good visual reminder of what can happen with the poster children of bubbles fall, even if they don’t fail…

🌌 The Incredible Valuation Heights of the OpenAI “Constellations”

Now past $700B in aggregate. Add in OpenAI itself and we’re at $1.5T.

I Note…

🍎 Is Tim Cook Tired?

This is maybe the biggest takeaway from what is ostensibly a profile of John Ternus, Apple’s next would-be/may be CEO, but doesn’t contain a whole lot that is new. If anything, the piece also sort of frames a case against him in the role, talking to critics who all think he’s a nice guy, but perhaps too "low profile" or too much in the mould of Cook — more a manager, less an innovator. It also points to Cook potentially filling a pipeline of candidates for the board, with all of the obvious names, with the only other one that actually seems viable being Craig Federighi. The story does confirm that Cook would most likely step into the chairman of the board role upon stepping down as CEO. And that’s especially interesting given the news today that the current board chair, Arthur Levinson, is standing for re-election despite the fact that he’s 75 years old — Apple’s longstanding "guideline" for when someone should step down from the board. Apple has issued a statement to shareholders saying they would make an exception for Levinson (and Ron Sugar, who is actually 77) in part because of other recent board turnover. But unstated there, of course, is the Cook situation. Not to mention all of the other recent turnover atop Apple. John Gruber pushes back against the "tired" bit — because who on Earth would leak/talk about that? — and also ties to to the talk of potential health issues with Cook. But he only cites one of the stories about such issues, as I called out a month ago, it was actually buried in two different stories from two different publications! And no one else is talking about this. [NYT]

💸 xAI’s Big Burn

Mounting losses while ramping revenue is more or less the story of every startup, hence the need to raise capital. AI has just kicked it into a gear never seen before, and xAI may actually be burning more money than even OpenAI at this point. That’s obviously, in part, because they have far less revenue. And while that’s growing at a good clip, the story sort of buries the notion that they likely missed their revenue growth goal in 2025 — something it seems like OpenAI sailed past. All of this, plus the incredible data center build-out that xAI is embarking on so obviously points to a world in which xAI merges with Tesla. And that’s previewed in this story too: "The company told investors that its goal is to build AI that is self-sufficient and that will eventually power humanoid robots like Optimus." If the actual car business keeps slipping and a new narrative is needed… Well, it’s right there. Remember when Elon paid $44B for Twitter and then no one ever talked about that deal again because it’s now buried under xAI? He has now raised just about as much money for xAI as he paid for Twitter. A masterful sleight of hand. [Bloomberg 🔒]

🏊 OpenAI’s Stock Pool

Not surprising that alongside the move to give out actual equity, OpenAI would create a pool for new hires. But it’s a sizable one for a company this stage at 10%. It also, assuming The Information’s numbers are correct, pushes the employee equity to 26% of the company (of that, Ilya Sutskever apparently controls a ton by himself). Interestingly, that’s exactly one percent behind Microsoft and perhaps exactly what the non-profit now holds, again, if previous reports are accurate. When you add in SoftBank’s 11%, well, that’s exactly 90% of the company. That leaves just 10% for all the other investors — including NVIDIA, which may be on the verge of buying upwards of 10% as well (albeit over time — also that deal still isn’t finalized). The cap table math is getting pretty complicated and crowded here. It’s enough to make you think OpenAI needs to go public, pronto, to clean it up. So perhaps another of my predictions for 2026 will be incorrect. [Information 🔒]

🤺 The On Time & On Budget Jedi

This profile paints Shawn Levy as the ultimate safe choice for Lucasfilm to make for rebooting their Star Wars cinematic universe (after this year’s Mandalorian movie wraps up a successful Disney+ streaming run). Then again, so was J.J. Abrams back in the day — and it worked well, until it decidedly did not. It is nice that Levy seems to be genuinely giddy about making Starfighter (though we’ve also been down that road before…). And even the emotional bit at the end seemed honest. But there is the weird Kathleen Kennedy overhang here — this will apparently be the last movie she oversaw for Disney. Killer opening though, with Tom Cruise on set manning the camera? Footage that they’ll apparently use in the movie? The last real movie star truly does it all. I’m cautiously optimistic. [NYT]

I Quote…

"Finally updated my iPhone to Liquid Glass. If you’re ever having imposter syndrome, this update is proof that even professionals at billion-dollar companies make huge mistakes."

— Hannah on Threads, via Cult of Mac, which has a story about the low uptake of iOS 26. Not just low, but so historically low by Apple standards that it almost seems like there must be a mistake in the data? I mean, we’re talking just 15% of users, when previous versions saw percentages in the mid-50s to mid-60s by now. Even if you should never trust third-party data, such a trend seemingly can’t lie — again, unless the StatCounter data are bad in some way.

Anecdotally, I will say I know more people who refuse to upgrade to iOS 26 than any previous iOS update. And yes, it’s all because of Liquid Glass. Personally, I don’t mind it — I like some elements, dislike others — but I’m also not the type of person that wouldn’t upgrade to any new OS on day one. Regardless, Apple has a built in fall guy here, as he no longer works at Apple.

Asides…

• Paramount decides to stand firm at $30/share and will take it to the WBD shareholders on January 21. That may come down to what happens to Versant’s share price between now and then — it was up today for the first time. [THR]

  • My bet would still be that they up the bid a bit to try to push both shareholders and the board over the edge… [Reuters]

  • Shocker: the movie theater lobby is against the deal. Any deal. No matter who wins. They prefer the slow death sequence. [THR]

• NVIDIA hires their first CMO, from Google, which seems like something you only do if you’re about to do a lot more marketing… [WSJ 🔒]

• Another show to skewer Silicon Valley, though The Audacity from AMC sounds decidedly darker. This one also has Succession ties, though not as directly as Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, which was misguided and entirely forgettable. Can they just bring back Halt & Catch Fire please? [TechCrunch]

• Another day, another confidential IPO filing, with Strava following closely behind Discord’s draft. Small revenue, but good growth. [Information 🔒]

I Spy…

On the topic of OpenAI beating their revenue growth projections…