Dispatch 046: Yuge Day
Happy MLK Day to those in the US. And Inauguration Day. And College Football Title Game Day. Jam-packed day off for many of you. No day off here.
There was pretty clear gamesmanship leading up to the ban of TikTok, for a few hours (lol), yesterday. And certainly some legally questionable handshake agreements. But will any of that help get an actual deal done? It sure sounds just as complicated as ever – if not more so...
M.G. Siegler
I Think...
🤳 Instagram and YouTube Prepare to Benefit From a TikTok Ban - Obviously, Meta and Google have been making moves behind-the-scenes to prepare for any sort of TikTok ban, with Instagram Reels seemingly better positioned than YouTube Shorts to take advantage of the situation. But with the ban over for now, the question becomes if any feeling of uncertainty – perhaps around an actual sale/deal – still drives users away, or if they opt to stay on the "saved" TikTok. Certainly, you have to believe that advertisers will be spooked when it comes to longer-term spend. Regardless, looking at the app store charts (and remember, while the TikTok service may be up and running the app still is not available for download as the companies running those seemingly want more than a Truth Social post before they restore...), it feels like many smaller startups – including those based in China, which is also a problem – are the ones benefitting from all of this swirl right now, with users seemingly using the uncertainty to try out some new options. Oh, and VPNs. They're a big winner too. [NYT]
👍 Facebook Without Fact-Checkers Will Put Truth to the Test – Interesting essay which details why something like Community Notes work on Xitter – and, notably, should work well on Meta's properties too. But with some caveats around speed. Still, such notes should be able to handle nuance and transparency better than full-on fact-checkers have done previously. All of this sounds good, and so it's really too bad that Mark Zuckerberg's obviously political timing of announcing the change and some of his off-the-cuff framing of tangential issues have completely overshadowed the move. Also fun: the history of the English ox-weighing competition in 1907 that gave raise to the notion of the "wisdom of the crowds". 🐂 [Bloomberg 🔒]
🚀 Roar of New Glenn’s Engines Silences Skeptics of Bezos’ Blue Origin – I missed this in the flurry of news last week – which itself is pretty incredible: that a startup can launch a rocket into space and it's largely overshadowed by the ban of an app. Anyway, it's awesome that this New Glenn launch was a success (after many delays) and that we now have two credible companies outside of NASA for when it comes to getting stuff into space. Blue Origin hopes to do six to eight launches this year (versus the over 100 that SpaceX did last year), but should ramp quickly after that. Then it's off (back) to the Moon... (And no, they weren't able to land the booster back on a barge on the first try, which was a stretch goal – next time.) [NYT]
💰 Perplexity AI makes a bid to merge with TikTok U.S. – The AI startup threw up what seemed to be a Hail Mary on Saturday, right before the ban went into effect, because, I guess, why not? They were trying to sell the appeal of ByteDance's current shareholders continuing to hold their stakes in the new entity. But it would effectively be a much smaller startup (a "mere" $9B valuation) buying a much larger one (something "well north of $50B" valuation), so it's not clear why TikTok (or ByteDance, or China) would jump at that, unless they were really desperate. AI, I guess! But they clearly had other plans in motion... If I had to guess, as of now, if a deal actually happens (still a big "if" at the moment), I'd probably rank the companies involved in this order:
- Oracle (boring, but perhaps easiest/most obvious)
- Elon Musk/Xitter/xAI
- Microsoft
- Meta (Zuck hasn't been putting in the knee work for nothing)
- Frank McCourt/Mr. Wonderful (only if made into a reality TV show)
Truth Social shockingly hasn't really been out there as another potential home, but it can't be fully ruled out in our exciting new era of grift. Seriously, it's probably more likely than Perplexity as well right now. [CNBC]
I Link...
Steven Levy
It's easy to read that Zuckerberg has changed his stance on something and think it's a normal, reasonable, and perhaps even rational thing to do. But when you keep the receipts – your notes – as Steven Levy did from a meeting he had with Zuckerberg on the topic of moderation and fact-checking a few years back, it's pretty wild to read how his stated stances at the time truly were the exact opposite of his new stances. Again, people can change their minds, but this makes him look far more slippery and political than he's attempting to project here.
That matters because it raises a very real question: what else will he change his mind on if and when the wind shifts? 3 billion+ people would love to know.
I Note...
- Only one of the 'Magnificent 7' will not be in attendance at Donald Trump's inauguration later today: NVIDIA. Jensen Huang says he simply had a scheduling conflict (he's on the road with colleagues and family celebrating the Lunar New Year) – still, hard to believe this would have stopped any of the other six... Also of note: NVIDIA is the one entity (or affiliate) of the seven that hasn't given the $1M fealty payment. [Reuters]
- Are all of the other six going to be up on Trump's
trophy casedais? Sure seems like it. Alongside the CEO of TikTok, naturally.
- Are all of the other six going to be up on Trump's
- Apple isn't likely to buy (embattled) Sonos, but Amazon or Spotify could, guesses Mark Gurman. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- A totally not coordinated back-and-forth between Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in the response area on Threads (in response to the report that he had thrown her under the bus for Meta's "feminine" culture). Nothing to see here. Nothing at all. [Engadget]
- To be fair, many other current and former female executives do seem to be giving honest thoughts and opinions on Meta's internal culture with regard to Zuckerberg and women. And I'm sure all of that is true – which is why his "masculine" comments were so weird, and stupid. [Threads]
- Also to be fair, NYT did update their wording on that particular passage without an official correction, which isn't the best look. [Threads]
- It felt like this report on some sort of new "PhD-level super-agents" coming soon from OpenAI was nebulous at best. But no less than Axios co-founders Mike Allen & Jim VandeHei put their names behind it, citing their sources in the government (which they say is due to get a briefing on the tech soon). [Axios]
- Sure enough, Sam Altman seemingly poured cold water on it – albeit indirectly – noting that "twitter hype is out of control again. we are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it. we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!" [Xitter]
- To be fair, Axios couched it a bit, noting that it's not for sure OpenAI making the "next-level breakthrough" announcement. We'll see!
- One thing OpenAI did do: create a model, GPT-4b micro, which can help scientists turn regular cells into stem cells, which might be the key to de-aging animals, including, perhaps, humans. Though this is all still just a demo (done in concert with another Altman-affiliated company, Retro Biosciences), not an actual product. Yet. [MIT Tech Review]
- Mira Murati’s new (still unnamed) AI startup continues to pull in talent including from, yes, OpenAI... [Wired]
- Using math to predict this year's Oscar nominees... [THR]
- Lina Khan's parting gift to Big Tech appears to be a report noting antitrust concerns around Microsoft's investments into OpenAI plus Amazon's and Google's investments into Anthropic. Unclear if the FTC under the new administration will continue down this path – but they might. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- More TikTok fall-out:
- Bluesky gets a feed for vertical videos... [TechCrunch]
- Xitter too... [TechCrunch]
- Meta is gearing up to launch a new app, Edits, to help creators better create such vertical videos – to rival CapCut, which is also owned by ByteDance. [NYT]
- Marvel Snap, a popular mobile card game based around the popular comic IP was also pulled because while it was developed in California, the publisher, as it turns out, is also owned by ByteDance. [Verge]
- Unclear if this is related – presumably? – but it's also no longer hip to be square in Instagram's grid. [Verge]
- The grift that keeps on giving... [NYT]
- Meanwhile, and at least somewhat related (since the Trump shitcoin launched on Solana and not Ethereum), Ethereum is doing some sort of re-org, as Vitalik Buterin detailed a couple days ago... [The Block]
- DOGE's first cut? Department co-lead, Vivek Ramaswamy, it seems. Before the project has even formally started. Talk about efficient! [CBS News]
I Quote...
"I would have liked to have seen these reforms laid out in less contentious and partisan times, so that they would be considered on the merits rather than… Donald Trump is president and now they’re caving in."
-- Michael McConnell, the co-chair of Meta's Oversight Board, on the content moderation and fact-checking changes Mark Zuckerberg announced recently.
I Spy...
