Dispatch 024
A lot of good content out of the DealBook Summit in New York yesterday, it seems, per a number of my notes below. Though it's hard to think past the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in the same city just hours beforehand...
I Think...
📰 Jeff Bezos Says Things – His answer around the last-minute axing of The Washington Post endorsement was weak. (Though it's worth watching his comments in full to get a bit more color and context.) He can claim some level of victory in the decision given that time mutes all controversies, but it was certainly nothing to be "proud" of. I don't disagree with his high-level point on endorsements, it was just stupid to pull it in the final days of the election cycle, which made it an overtly political move, intentional or not. He says he knew the optics would be bad, but I highly doubt he thought the cancellation blowback would be as severe. Will it matter, long-term? Probably not. The Post has more fundamental business issues, clearly, given their outrageous burn last year. But none of this speaks well to Bezos' ability to make decisions in such an environment. Like so many of our former founder billionaire heroes these days, he just seems out of touch right now, and perhaps out to lunch. [THR]
🚀 Sam and Jeff Ain't Scared – So they say... of either a President Trump in his second term or, more notably, of his new paid pal Elon Musk, suddenly wielding a lot more power and influence. It's hard to say which he's a bigger foil to – Bezos or Altman – it sort of seems to depend on the day. But their statements are relying a lot on a trust that he'll ultimately do the right thing – and an assumption that such a right thing is what they think the right thing is. I mean, what else are they gonna say? Ultimately, their hope would undoubtedly be that Musk's sway with Trump is overblown because the two sides inevitably fall out. Or that there's too much else to fix instead of going after rivals. But really, the risk is probably not that he directly goes after them, but that he tilts tables in the favor of his own companies versus those of his rivals – of which these two are affiliated. "We'll see." As for Trump? Yeah, I mean, good luck. Kiss the ring and hope for the best. [NYT]
🦾 Elon Musk Plans to Expand Colossus AI Supercomputer Tenfold – While everyone was talking about Musk onstage at the Dealbook Summit, he wasn't there. Beyond his government role, and the half dozen other CEO positions, he's busying expanding the 'Colossus' datacenter in Memphis. Interestingly, while the FT cites this "tenfold" expansion in the headline and the piece, they don't directly cite a source (even anonymous) around that specific number. They do cite a statement from the Greater Memphis Chamber on expanding the facility with the help of NVIDIA, Dell, and Supermicro, but a 10x expansion of what is already said to be the largest single cluster of GPUs would be... well, wild. Then again, the competition, including Meta, OpenAI, and now Anthropic with Amazon's new 'Trainium 2' chips being chained together at a scale they promise will be the largest AI supercomputer, means there's no resting here. No matter the cost. [FT 🔒]
🏀 ESPN, Stephen A. Smith Negotiating Historic $20 Million/Year Deal – I'm old enough to remember when $20M/year was the top salary for athletes in the most popular professional sports leagues (and the most popular actors in big budget films!), with A-Rod surpassing that number with his then-historic deal in 2000. Now sports TV personalities are hitting the number. Personally, I find the Stephen A. over-the-top schtick™ annoying – always have – but I get the appeal given the game he plays and the world in which we live. And I certainly appreciate the work ethic – he's anywhere and everywhere when called upon. I'm also old enough to remember when ESPN was getting rid of their high-priced talent. Now they're paying Pat McAfee $17M/year (for his whole show production – but also likely more for his other ESPN show appearances), Troy Aikman $18M/year, Joe Buck $15M/year – and likely a lot more to Peyton Manning for his various broadcasts and shows. Of course, no one can touch Tom Brady, as usual, at $37.5M/year for Fox. Worth every penny. #GoBlue [The Athletic]
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
I Note...
- The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is hard to frame. It's just not something you hear about happening – at least not in the US – outside of Hollywood. (Even more eerie if you happen to be watching the Day of the Jackal show right now given some plot parallels here...) The footage is haunting. It just doesn't seem like it can possibly be real. And yet, it is very real. And authorities still seem far away from solving the case. [CNN]
- More on Thompson, who per all this reporting seemed like a well-liked Midwestern family man. No one likes insurance companies, of course, and this one in particular had quite a lot of swirl around it with regulatory and insider-trading investigations (including around Thompson) and cyber attacks and multi-million ransomware payouts. But my god. [NYT]
- Bitcoin soars past the $100k threshold amidst a flurry of pro-crypto (or at least, not anti-crypto) appointments by the incoming Trump administration. [FT 🔒]
- While the headline is around one of Intel's new interim co-CEOs noting that he believes any new (permanent) CEO will have foundry (and product) experience, more interesting was current head of foundry manufacturing Naga Chandrasekaran expressing confidence in their new 18A node (countering reports of difficulties), "There's nothing fundamentally challenging on this node now. It is about going through the remaining yield challenges, defect density challenges." Hope that's true and not famous last words! [Reuters]
- As previously discussed, Gail Slater is indeed the pick to lead the DoJ's antitrust division – which is seemingly not good news for Big Tech. Amusing to see Trump mention "Little Tech" in talking about her nomination though. It's almost like there was a plan and it worked! [Politico]
- Meta is joining Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in the new nuclear power push to meet AI energy demands. Given the framing of talking to "nuclear power developers", my joke on Bluesky stands: How long before they tell the nuclear developers that they need to pivot to video? [Reuters]
- OpenAI's "12 Days of Shipmas" – cute – sounds like it starts today. One launch this week is expected to be Sora – which makes Google's push of their own video AI product out the door in the slightest of ways yesterday make more sense. Will we get anything agentic? [Verge]
- The company also now has a Chief Marketing Officer – which presumably means they're going to start marketing... [CNBC]
- Meredith Whittaker says Signal is "not changing" but they are working on some new features, such as encrypted backups. It also sounds like they're still struggling with the right business model given the strict privacy elements. [Wired]
- Spotify used Google's NotebookLM tech to create a podcast around your 'Wrapped' year in music output which is a fun idea, but apparently people don't love it. [TechCrunch]
- Speaking of, some of the team that built that product inside Google are breaking away to work on a new stealth startup in AI. [TechCrunch]
- Apple Music, meanwhile, finally has their own 'Music Reply' year-in-music feature available in the app (versus just on the web). [Verge]
I Quote...
"I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models and our models any day, any time. They’re using someone else’s models."
-- Sundar Pichai, speaking to the notion that Google is behind or vulnerable in AI, at the DealBook conference.
I like this feistiness! Some will recall how Satya Nadella said that Bing infused with AI was going to make Google "dance". That, of course, has not happened. But Google is in an arms race with Microsoft and others around AI in general – yes, mainly because of their partner OpenAI, as Pichai is alluding to. But Microsoft is also now racing to do their own AI work, of course.
Also worth noting Pichai's thoughts on the state of AI progress at the moment: “The low-hanging fruit is gone. The hill is steeper.”