Dossier #001 – Go Blue 📧
Happy Easter Monday. Hopefully everyone is rooting for Michigan tonight in the NCAA Championship Game. #GoBlue
I Note...
🦸🏻♂️ OpenAI's "Super App" – An interesting side note of this strategy: it shifts us back from a mobile-first and focused world, to a desktop-centric one. That's not surprising given the coding focus of Codex (and Claude Code), but it's decidedly not where the masses are these days, and ChatGPT is at such a scale – 1B actives any day now – that mobile will presumably always end up as the most-used surface for them (even if/when their own devices hit). The strategy – get Codex in front of non-engineers through ChatGPT and morph it into a general purpose agent – isn't a bad one, but there are real risks in execution. And given that OpenAI is full-on chasing Anthropic here, what might they be focusing on – shoring up Claude Code/Cowork or something new? [Sources 🔒]
🔀 OpenAI Shuffles Leadership – Holy Good Friday news dump. COO shifting to "special projects". CMO stepping down (to focus on health). CEO (of AGI Development) taking a leave of absence (to focus on health). This all comes on the heels of the $122B fundraise, a questionable M&A deal, and a mandate to kill off "side quests" and focus on the task at hand: taking on Anthropic. The latter two were spearheaded by aforementioned CEO of AGI (now on leave) Fidji Simo. Clearly they waited to announce all of this until the Friday before Easter. Will Simo come back as COO (since it seemed like that's what she essentially was anyway?). The company is saying no (that they won't appoint a new COO). Hard to give up a CEO title, I guess – even a secondary one. Never a dull moment at OpenAI. [Bloomberg 🔒]
📺 YouTube Leans Back – While "Stations" are essentially YouTube's answer to FAST channels elsewhere, it has nothing to do with price – since, of course, YouTube is already free (though you definitely should consider YouTube Premium to remove the insane amount of ads if you watch a lot of YouTube). It's all about the experience of just being able to put something on and not worry about it. Yes, like old school TV or cable. Not having to select something else when it ends. Just putting something on in the background and letting it wash over you. Endlessly. For hours. Sometimes, people simply like not feeling alone in their homes. I feel like I've been writing about this notion for a decade. Because I have. [Verge]
I Quote...
"This is horrific. I knew this kind of bullshit would happen eventually, but I didn't expect it so soon."
– Zach Manson, a software developer who noted that Microsoft had injected an ad into his GitHub pull request. What was the ad for? Copilot, of course. Microsoft quickly removed the "feature" after the backlash. Better than Apple in that regard, I guess...
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
Asides...
- The story of Steven Levy's night with John Perry Barlow in 1994 would itself be a wild (and sad) read, but add JFK Jr. into the mix... [Wired]
- Making banks sign enterprise deals for Grok in order to get a taste of the SpaceX IPO is quite the new BD tactic! [NYT]
- Ideally, they'd be advertising on Xitter too! (Of course, embarrassing levels of ingratiation is nothing new in such things...)
- Surf, the new federated social service from team Flipboard, which I wrote about here is (finally) live. [Verge]
- Burying news on a Friday, even before Easter, is one thing, doing so on your 50th anniversary is another. Oh look, Jay Blahnik is retiring from Apple. [NYT]
- In what was undoubtedly the greatest feat of space-based engineering since Apollo 13, NASA fixed the Microsoft Outlook issue aboard Artemis II. [Verge]
- I'm not sure if it's more wild that Apple hasn't updated the Apple TV box in 4 years, or that it still feels significantly faster than the latest TV boxes from Google or Amazon (the latter in particular is awful). [9to5Mac]
- Also wild that updated hardware has seemingly just been sitting around for a while, waiting on Siri. We all feel you, Apple TV.
- The rising price of oil (and thus, gas) may be reversing the downward slide of EV sales. Funny that. Maybe, just maybe, the car makers shouldn't have abandoned their electric plans so quickly? [NYT]
- Not to worry everyone, Disney and OpenAI are totally still friends post-Sora debacle. Josh D'Amaro totally got being completely blindsided his first week on the job. Totally cool. Totally. [THR]
- Look, it was just a billion dollar deal. Totally get it.
- You know who is not pulling out of AI video? Google. Here's Veo 3.1 Lite. Totally great for Disney. Not awkward at all. And I'm sure this won't come back to totally bite OpenAI in the ass... [9to5Google]
- The Rings of Power, which I do enjoy but is very hit-or-miss, seems to have a protector from above: the almighty Jeff Bezos. He has decreed: despite the costs, there shall be five seasons. Well, maybe four. [IGN]
- On that topic, Aragorn, sadly, will be recast in Andy Serkis' Gollum movie. So it will be only a big LotR reunion. Not a full one. [ScreenRant]
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• OpenAI's Internal IPO Tension
• OpenAI's Industrial Policy
• Cursor's Claude Code & Codex Competitor
• and more...