Dispatch 030: Night of the Jackal

I recall taking a British film class in college where we went through many of the BFI Top 100 films, including The Day of the Jackal. Which was great. Then I recall The Jackal, the 1997 film starring Richard Gere and Bruce Willis. Which was less great. I'm happy to say the television version of The Day of the Jackal, starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch is much more in the former camp. As I quipped online, the opening song is seemingly 2x too James Bond and 10x too romantic, but it somehow works. And somehow, it's coming back (👈 spoilers).

I Think...

📍 Making “Social” Social Again – Mozi, the new app from Ev Williams, is certainly well-made. It's not trying to cram in dozens of superfluous social features just to prove its worth. It's just... a way to say where you're going and see where others you know are going. And if those happen to overlap, you can message them. Not in the app, but via iMessage. While this general type of app may have a graveyard with the most bodies – Foursquare, Gowalla, Path, DTH, even Dopplr back in the pre-app days when we still added an 'r' with no vowel to startup names – there's also clearly a reason why people keep building such services. And while you'd think 'Find My', an app that's pre-installed on over a billion devices, would have scratched such an itch, the reality is that it's overkill. I don't need (or want) to know where my friends are at all times in real time, just when they're near me and/or want me to know. All that said, another reason why these services keep failing is that a lot of people don't travel nearly as much as the people who build such apps do. And I think that's okay if you're not trying to build well, the next big social network! But when you raise VC money... they typically want a return on that money. And then we start sliding down the same old paths... [Medium]

💰 Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Plans to Donate $1 Million to Trump’s Inauguration – Mark Zuckerberg is now finally an influencer. But it wasn't his off-the-cuff (likely still on-the-cuff) remarks on various podcasts or the wake boarding or the cringe autotunes or even those glorious gold chains. It was his efforts to bury the hatchet with Donald Trump and get behind him, culminating in Meta giving a $1M donation to his inauguration. That clearly inspired Jeff Bezos to do the same by way of Amazon, the company he no longer runs, but still owns. To be fair, at least Amazon has given such a donation before. In 2017, they gave, um, a very specific $57,746. This time, they're not only stepping it up by 20x, they're throwing in another $1M worth of value by streaming the inauguration on Prime Video (which they also did for Biden). That probably makes Trump even more pleased than the money. But the reality is that no matter the amount of kissing up (or of the ring) done here, they'll never match the main chief rival to both of them – remember the wrestling match? – who is now quite close to the next commander-in-chief... Which of Big Tech™ will raise the paddle next to top this bid? Do I hear $3M? [WSJ 🔒]

💸 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Donate $1 Million to Trump's Inaugural Fund – I wrote the above a few hours ago, and we already have another bidder! You'll never guess the amount. But unlike the Meta and Amazon donations, this is Altman making the donation personally – though using the same wording that is clearly an OpenAI talking point (see my quote below from CFO Sarah Friar). Interesting and surely not coincidental that the only person perhaps more persona non grata with Team Trump's Elon Musk than Zuckerberg or Bezos is Altman (despite the recent kumbaya). Still, will this basically force the other tech companies to fall in line with the donation, lest they be seen as slighting the incoming President? Lunch may not be enough sadly, Google. Microsoft, Altman's money doesn't count for you here. Somebody send up the Jensen Signal. Hock Tan, where you at (see: below)? [Fox Business]

⌚️ Apple’s Next Ultra Smartwatch Will Be Able to Send Texts Via Satellite – This seems like great news for hikers/skiers/etc, and a true "Ultra" upselling point (and a reason to potentially upgrade from an older Ultra, which wasn't the case the past couple years). Though I do wonder how many people actually set out without their smartphones – perhaps such functionality finally starts to make that more commonplace... More interesting is that the blood pressure tracker is apparently close to being ready for Apple Watch. Assuming it works well, as Apple continues to add so many truly impactful health features to the device, it does feel like Apple Watch may go down as the great device of Tim Cook's era (he noted recently that he had hoped Apple's impact on health would be a big part of his legacy). Next up: the far more challenging non-invasive blood-glucose monitoring... [Bloomberg 🔒]

🤓 Smart Glasses Are Going to Work This Time, Google's Android President Says – This is probably a longer post, but first, a meta point: upon reading all the coverage of Android XR and Samsung's 'Project Moohan' headset, I'm fairly confused about the strategy here. And I suspect the market is as well, as none of this got nearly the buzz of either Meta's 'Orion' glasses or Apple's Vision Pro when they were unveiled. Even Snap's new Spectacles were better received, I think. It just feels like Google (and Samsung) are conflating a few different things here and not really offering a point-of-view as to where this is going. Other than AI. AI. AI. AI. Which I don't disagree with! But you still need a great product on which to use said AI. Google just wants to be everywhere, like with Android itself. But, I suspect, given that these devices will truly be wearables, they're going to require more bespoke work and attention to details. That said, it does sound like Project Moohan improves upon the Vision Pro in a few ways – namely in comfort. Which is pretty much the lowest bar right now. Everything shown remains nebulously coming next year or later. I think it's wise to try to seed a developer ecosystem ahead of a launch, but are they even really doing that here, yet? Why show this now? Because it's the end of the year? Lastly, I'll just note that 'Smart Glasses', like the Ray-Ban Metas, are the one part of the market doing well. They are working, and Google (and Apple) should play there, it's all the other stuff that Google is talking about (and has worked on), which has not, to date. [CNET]

I Link...

• I can't believe the NYT didn't use the full quote (which I pulled) about Google's new quantum computing milestone – as it casually suggests that "quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes". [TechCrunch]
• Harvard's data set with nearly a million books in public domain was funded, in part, by Microsoft and OpenAI... [Wired 🔒]
• As if we didn't have enough to worry about, a group of biologists are raising alarms over the prospects of "mirror cells" – left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins – that could overrun, well, all of life. Theoretically, at least. For a mirror opinion, here's Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota: "If we made a mirror cell, we would have made a second tree of life." [NYT]
• How will Netflix kick off their NFL event? A Mariah Carey performance of "All I Want for Christmas Is You", of course. Well played – quite literally – as every single human being on Earth will undoubtedly be sick of the song by the actual day. Hard to believe it's 30 years old. [THR]
• I appreciate the sentiment about the Vision Pro's Virtual Display upgrade and the specs reveal: 'Ultrawide' is 10240 x 2880 and 'Wide' (which I also prefer) is 6720 x 2880. I also appreciate the reference to Weird Al's "Frank's 2000-inch TV" which I don't think I've heard in 30 years. [Verge]
• Elon Musk is the first person to pass $400B in net worth following a surge in the value of his companies (both public and private) post the election of his new buddy. And actually, he's already at $430B, nearly double #2 on the list, Jeff Bezos, at a mere $240B – despite his best efforts (see: above). [Reuters]
• As expected, BuzzFeed has sold their "Hot Ones" show for $82.5M, which finally gives the company more cash than debt on their books. The buyer? Soros Fund Management, along with a range of affiliated folks, including the host of the show, Sean Evans. [NYT]
• Tim Cook is becoming quite the jet-setting diplomat. From tackling Trump to wooing China to hosting King Charles III. Hard to imagine Steve Jobs spending much time on such things, but such is the world in which we live and Apple sits atop, from a corporate perspective. [9to5Mac]
• A lot of (lofty) numbers in terms of where Perplexity currently stands as a business – and where they think they will in the next couple of years, as they aim to complete a new large round of funding at $9B. [Information 🔒]
• Buried in this post about Meta's new AI to help NPCs move more human-like is the notion of a new type of training model, a Large Concept Model (LCM), to predict the next concept or idea in a sequence, as opposed to what an LLM does with pure language. Perhaps just a marketing thing, we'll see. [Reuters]
• Microsoft wanted to join the year-end new model push too with Phi-4, a small model which they say can beat Gemini 1.5 Pro and other larger models on some tasks – math, in particular. [VentureBeat]
• Separating linear assets from streaming assets is so hot right now. Warner Bros Discovery's David Zaslav isn't being shy that this will help with "strategic flexibility" as he looks to enter the year of deals alongside the Trump administration. [Deadline]
• Broadcom hit $1T market cap with a massive surge following earnings – they actually missed on overall revenue but CEO Hock Tan noted that three of their customers would launch AI clusters of more than 1 million chips each by fiscal 2027 – unclear who those are, but Google seems like a good bet for one. OpenAI? Apple? [CNBC]
• One of Intel's new (interim) co-CEOs sure seems to be suggesting that Intel might have to fully spin out their chip manufacturing business. Though perhaps he's just leaving all doors open for whomever takes over. [Reuters]
• Also a larger post – which I feel like I've written before – but YouTube TV raising prices to $82.99 is a dangerous moment for them. It's a good service, but not that good. Sing it with me, "It's beginning to look a lot like Comcast..." [THR]

I Quote...

"He's going to be right there at the beginning of it, maybe even as things like AGI, we get there..."

-- Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI (the early clubhouse leader in quotes around these parts), talking about the notion that incoming President Trump could be the "president of this AI generation". Which closely echoes what Sam Altman said in making his $1M "personal" donation.