Inklings #022 📧

Why did Amazon walk from their OpenAI movie? It doesn't seem too hard to figure out. Last I checked, $50B is bigger than $50M. And that, mixed with the notion that the film may not just be anti-OpenAI, but anti-AI in general and, well...

Amazon Meddles

Thoughts on Amazon MGM bailing on their OpenAI movie…

SpyglassM.G. Siegler

Thoughts On...

😎 The 'Meta Glasses' – I think their strategy is smart here. Meta started with a known/proven brand and style in Ray-Ban (and later Oakley) and are now branching out on their own (still with the help of EssilorLuxottica – in which Meta is now a large shareholder, remember). And they don't have Meta's dumb, droopy logo front-and-center (which must have been tempting given that the logo looks like goggles), but rather hidden on the back of the stems. And the glasses look... good? Pretty standard stuff. But one suspects it's easy to get this wrong given that they're front-and-center on your face. The most important aspect, of course, is what it means for the price: $299 – a full $80 cheaper than the latest Ray-Ban branded variety. It's a solid price point and a further poke in the eye of their old rival Snap, as this makes their um, $2,195, price point for Specs seem all the more untenable. Yes, they're different – one is pretty full-on AR while the other are just glasses with AI – but my point would be that we're not ready for the AR variety yet anyway so... releasing the Specs at that price point just looks like a sort of silly move to many, including Wall Street. Anyway, the "Kylie" variety of Meta's glasses are obviously not meant for me, but I'm genuinely curious how well (or not) those sell in the market. Meta loves to try to get celebrities involved in their products (I mean, so do all the tech companies with marketing teams) but it doesn't ever seem to work as they'd hope. But hey, they have a gemstone here. And yes, her AI voice. Will their 'Muse Spark' models be fully up to the task? Can Meta fully escape their brand baggage? The "glasshole" issue? Your move, Apple. [Wired 🔒]

☁️ Microsoft’s Hybrid AI Dreams — The strangest thing about Satya Nadella’s ongoing blitz against Big AI — well, beyond the fact that Microsoft is deeply partnered with all the players, and yes, owns 25%+ of OpenAI — is that they just started going full bore at creating their own frontier models. Is the goal not to get the most amount of people to use those? Or perhaps it’s an acknowledgement that no matter the work they may do at the frontier, they’re not going to be able to catch Anthropic and OpenAI at this point. Or perhaps it’s simply Nadella reading the room and tea leaves, thinking that the ‘Fable’ situation is another DeepSeek moment where it causes everyone to rethink how they’re working on AI. An acknowledgment that Anthropic’s tussle(s) with the US government is causing many to think that they shouldn’t be all-in with one AI provider — even if it’s one of the Big Tech players. That instead, they should seek a diversified provider of models, like, say, Microsoft. Which, by the way, is happy to offer you DeepSeek models! Why? Costs. The other elephant in this room Nadella may be reading. Even if Microsoft can catch up on the frontier, their customers may not want to pay for such compute — certainly not for everything. Here, open source models are their friend, even if they may have been distilled from their partner OpenAI… [WSJ 🔒]

📉 Is Google Behind In AI? Again?! — Speaking of, at least Wall Street seems concerned that the departure of both Noam Shazeer — not even two years after bringing him back on board for $2.7B, now bolting for rival OpenAI — and now their Nobel Prize-winning DeepMinder John Jumper — who is John jumping to rival Anthropic — signals a problem within Google’s AI ranks. Again. That mixed with the fact that their latest Gemini flagship models weren't ready for their I/O conference, and still have yet to be released, and whispers that when they are, they still won’t be Mythos/Fable caliber… It’s obviously hard to know exactly what is going on here until those models are out in the world but there are definitely some Meta Llama vibes out there at the moment. But if Nadella’s read per the above note is correct, how much should Google even care about being at the absolute bleeding edge? It’s optically a black eye, obviously when a company with basically infinite resources can’t compete with the startups. But those have their own advantages too in being more nimble and not being bogged down by the baggage of billions of users across a wide range of products in a wide range of industries. But if costs start to matter more and there’s a push for more hybrid AI systems… Google should be fine. Just like Apple, which of course fumbled the AI bag far worse! But it is a weird vibe! [Bloomberg 🔒]

👁️ OpenAI Takes Their Ads Pitch to the Ads Pitchers — Increasingly, this does feel like the single-most important thing for OpenAI at the moment. If they can jumpstart their ads business, they suddenly have a narrative that Anthropic can't — because they won’t — match. It won’t totally negate the fact that Anthropic’s top and bottom lines now look more attractive, but given ChatGPT’s scale, it can be compelling. If the ads work, that is. And the jury is still very much out there. I’m still of the mind that they need to come up with new formats that are AI-native as CPC and CPM models don’t seem to make much sense, at least with the way the chatbots are currently built and serve up information. For queries with commerce intent, you can probably see it — and OpenAI says 1/5th of the queries they see are in that vein? — but shopping has already had fits and starts for them. The fact that Google is already working on this too is actually good news for OpenAI. If anyone can figure it out… But the bigger concern may remain that OpenAI clearly wants to be in the business that Anthropic is currently dominating and has diverted most resources in that direction. Can they really do both here? [FT 🔒]

🕹️ The Chip War Could Kill Consoles — Valves new Steam Machine sounds (and looks) interesting. As with the Steam Deck, it feels like they’re one step ahead of Microsoft. But the problem, of course, is price. It starts at $1,049 and goes all the way up to just under $1,500. The latter is double the highest end Xbox price. It’s triple the Switch 2 price. Yes, it’s a PC too, but if you wanted to use it as a PC, you should… buy a PC? The whole value proposition is the ease of use and access to gaming in the living room, but it’s not exactly plug-and-play — at least not yet. And it’s apparently no more powerful than a PS5 — which is over 5 years old (that itself is sort of wild). Anyway, it points to the bigger issue in the console market itself which is under siege due to the component prices. That basically makes any PS6 or ‘Project Helix’ Xbox a non-starter anytime soon. Xbox may really want to get back to being Xbox, but it’s going to be tough if the next Xbox is $1,000 or more. [Verge]

I Quote...

"You can’t say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon and we will use all the power to build data centers."

– Satya Nadella, making a simple point about the rhetoric coming out of many of the AI companies. It's obviously exaggerated to make the point, but it's also not wrong! No one should be confused why AI has a bad reputation, certainly in the US. It may be more than a messaging problem, but it's also a messaging problem!

And yes, such talking points are coming back to bite in other ways too. Shocking, I know.

I Spy...

Not bad. Nothing groundbreaking design-wise. And they're certainly not Specs...

I Also Quote...

"I think you need to take anything they do seriously. They’re good at hardware, they’re good at design. There’s a number of places where we won’t necessarily be able to build the same quality consumer experience when paired with the phone, and so I think they’re taking advantage of that."

– Alex Himel, Meta's head of wearables, when asked about the prospects of Apple entering the smartglasses space. Kudos for answering the question, but he was also clearly coached to bring up the connection talking point.

I suspect we're going to hear this come up from Meta more and more over the next year – especially once Apple actually enters the space. There will obviously be a push to deem the pairing with the iPhone as anticompetitive. The EU will probably launch a probe just based off of the rumors of such a product.

Technical connection capabilities aside, the dominance of the iPhone clearly remains a problem for Meta. And will remain one for some time, one imagines...