Inklings #028 📧
I'm still not sure I quite understand the point of Apple's forthcoming new home device, but I'm also quite sure they wouldn't release it after months – if not years – of delays if they didn't have one. Especially under a new CEO seemingly hellbent on creating a leaner, meaner Apple (see below). So instead I'll mostly speculate on other fun things like the name, the cost, and the release date...
M.G. Siegler
I Note...
🍎 A More Nimble Apple – While Apple has had some layoffs here and there over the past few years, the reality is that unlike their Big Tech peers, they haven't done the big shakeup, both post-COVID and now to reorient for the Age of AI. As unfortunate as it is for those losing jobs, this is the most obvious and natural time for Apple to do this with John Ternus taking charge. That said, Apple has never operated like the other Big Tech companies, so the most interesting element will be if they can actually operate at a more nimble cadence, moving away from once or twice-a-year big launches and more towards constant iteration. The body may well reject such organs! But yeah, you sort of have to try if you truly believe AI is going to fundamentally alter the way business is done. [Bloomberg 🔒]
🛰️ AT&T CEO Scoffs at Notion of SpaceX Phone Service – Is it viable for Starlink to build out a network and service to fully compete with the big players in telecom? I don't know, Elon Musk says a lot of things, and his timetables are always off. But I do know that if I were John Stankey, I probably wouldn't be giving such juicy quotes on the record that can easily come back to bite him in the ass. This space already contains two of the most well-known scoffs in business history – Palm CEO Ed Colligan dismissing the notion of the "PC guys" figuring out the smartphone space ahead of the iPhone and Steve Ballmer laughing off the prospect of the iPhone competing with his Windows Mobile strategy – "Nothing beats it" (with regard to the fiber network AT&T is laying) seems like one to keep track of, but there are a few in here. Then again, Stankey is not new to the old foot-in-mouth game – this is the guy who nearly ran HBO into the ground before he was eventually elevated to CEO of all of AT&T and spun out/merged the media properties (smart move) with David Zaslav's Discovery. Which, of course, paved the way for today's MountDanceWarBroDisco mega merger. [Axios]
🏔️ MountDanceWarBroDisco's Musical Merger Chairs – Speaking of, Matt Belloni has the latest on who is staying and going, when the deal actually and finally closes next week. (One prediction I will have gotten decidedly wrong for 2026.) I cannot wait to hear/see what name and logo they actually choose; so many options! (I would still advise to keep it simple and have Skydance the overall parent with each studio retaining their names, that's it. Especially if Skydance keeps buying up some other brands down the road...) So many butts, so few seats. Casey Bloys gets all of streaming (Paramount+ Plus HBO Max – can't wait for that eventual new name/brand too!) as Cindy Holland seemingly gives her two minutes notice when not picked. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy are out after following up their insanely great 2025 with an insanely awful 2026. They'll be replaced by another duo, Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg to expand from running Paramount to Warner Bros as well with the comically bad mandate to hit quantity targets for film output (what could possibly go wrong?). Mark Thompson staying to run CNN with some sort of assurances that Bari Weiss won't go near it. Etc. [Puck 🔒]
🐉 Gemini 4 Argon's Conquest? – That sound you hear around the Gemini 4 'Argon' release is... near silence. Which is weird since it's the first flagship from Google in nearly a year – after failing to launch 3.5 Pro. Then again, it's only in select security preview with a few customers. But when Anthropic and OpenAI use that strategy – I mean, Mythos is still in such testing – there are seemingly endless headlines and talk still about the models. The major headline around Google's new model is that some people internally think it still might not be good enough. Oof. All Wall Street wants to know is: where is their Muse answer? One million output tokens seems wild though! [Bloomberg 🔒]
👊 David Fincher Backs Away from Netflix – First and foremost I'm sad that seemingly no headline went with 'Flight Club' here. Second, this does seems like yet more bad optics for Netflix. Not only does it follow The Duffer Brothers, Shawn Levy, and Noah Baumbach taking their talents elsewhere, Fincher was the OG in working with Netflix, starting with House of Cards and continuing on through many projects – including my beloved and missed Mindhunter. The upcoming Cliff Booth movie may not be his absolute last with Netflix, but it will be his last that's exclusive to them. Interestingly, that movie is getting a big theatrical release (thanks in part to Narnia shifting to next Spring), so presumably that's not the reason for ending the marriage, but it clearly was with both the Duffers and, to some extent, Levy, as Ted Sarandos directly confirmed in an interview this week (though he also downplayed the idea of it being a trend – yeah, I mean what else would he say?). So yeah, it sure feels like Netflix may be on the verge of doing a bigger theatrical push, with a literal vengeance. [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Quote...
"OpenAI will become the symbol of how Silicon Valley is thoughtlessly stepping into other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet."
– Jack Clark, then OpenAI's policy director, in a 2020 memo written to Sam Altman and Greg Brockman around the ingesting of news articles to held train their models. Perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that Clark left the company shortly after that memo to help co-founder Anthropic...
The recently unsealed documents that are a part of The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft are fully of juicy, and seemingly damaging quotes. Regardless, not a great look!
Thoughts On...
M.G. Siegler
Asides...
- With SoftBank closing out their investment into OpenAI's last round – ahead of the new, would-be round at $1.4T? – their total investment amount is now just under $65B (which makes Microsoft's $13.8B look quaint), giving them 13% (still probably half Microsoft's ownership). [Information 🔒]
- Amazon, Cloudflare, NVIDIA and Stanford all wasting no time coming for Jev. How long until Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, etc join the parade? [VentureBeat]
- DeepSeek and Huawei are coming for CUDA. [Reuters]
- Lest you think OpenAI no longer cares about consumers with the launch of the cute but enterprising Dots, here's a feature to try on clothes with ChatGPT. [TechCrunch]
- Apple may make a Whoop competitor. They should, along with an Oura competitor too. (Luckily that rumor didn't pop-up again lest it derail the smart ring's IPO, oh wait...) New, nimble Apple can have more options. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- That clever matte screen that helps hide the iPhone Duo crease is actually a nano-texture layer be fairly easy (and cheap?!) to replace. That doesn't feel like an accident! Let the accidents commence! [MacRumors]
- Would you like to own a piece of the NVIDIA chips that Amazon bought for their data centers? Soon, you may be able to via an SPV the company is setting up to back into a GPU-based financing model. These weird financial times continue. [FT 🔒]
- With Googlebook OS now out there, it didn't seem like ChromeOS would be long for this world. Now we have a date of death: 2034 (it should be dead well before then, but that's when support will stop). [Tom's Hardware]
- Speaking of Paramount movies, Bradley Cooper is G.I. Joe! Well, technically he's Duke (since the 80s, G.I. Joe has been the name of the unit). Far more interesting is the Danny McBride creative angle on this – the previous attempts were all mediocre-to-bad generic action movies, can this be the actual next Barbie (sorry, He-Man)? [THR]
- Speaking of Warner Bros movies, we have a date and a director to go with the name (Aegon’s Conquest) for the Game of Thrones movie: Owen Harris (most notably, several episodes of the awesome A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms) will target a June 1, 2029 release. Beau Willimon (most notably of Andor acclaim) is writing. [THR]
I Spy...
AI tells me that this picture that can't possibly be real by Reuters reports Edmund Lee is real. And AI never lies so... Also, how long until 'ChatGPT for Lovers'?
🎶 Listening to "To Whom It May Concern" by A Perfect Circle
🍺 Enjoying a Mad Squirrel Sumo APA
🇬🇧 Sent from London, England