Inklings #007 📧
If you feel like you've been hearing about/reading about "Super Apps" a lot lately, you're not crazy. It's a trend – one that repeats every few years. This time, unsurprisingly, AI is one key driver. But the old standards are there too: travel, social, entertainment, and yes, the holy grail: payments.
M.G. Siegler
Thoughts On...
🦞 Meta Hatches an OpenClaw Competitor – Once OpenClaw's founder turned down Zuck's offer, it was clear he would set out to boil the lobster alive. The fact that Peter Steinberger chose to join OpenAI just ensured it would be an all-you-can-eat buffet. I had assumed Meta would leverage Manus to try to take on and out OpenClaw (and they started the work there) but, well, there are some issues with that now. So we get 'Hatch', which apparently, much like early OpenClaw, is dependent on Claude at the moment, but the obvious aim is to shift it to Meta's own Spark models. And yes, to build a sort of "OpenClaw for normal people" – which makes sense and was/is inevitable to actually productize and scale such capabilities. Though Meta has their own unique challenges: "There’s a trust deficit as wide as the Grand Canyon," is the money quote in the piece as to why they may not be on better footing to build an agent with access to all of your data. To be clear, this is not the ZuckBot. [FT 🔒]
🕹️ A Quick Vibe Shift at Xbox – Remember when everyone was terrified that Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, was sent as an agent from the AI group (not to be confused with an actual AI agent) by Microsoft leadership to destroy the gaming division once and for all? You should, it was a whole two months ago. I took the other side, thinking that getting a fresh face in there would actually help the division. And while he AI background was interesting, it perhaps spoke more to her being good at being in the right place at the right time and adaptable to new roles and ideas. And, well... it's still early but the early reviews are now a 180 as Sharma puts her own team (of not just non-Xbox people, but people who, like her, haven't been at Microsoft itself for long) in place. They're wasting no time with big changes from Game Pass to overall branding. Again, it's early, but they're seemingly saying all the right things from Sharma on down about a return to actual gaming and taking actions like ripping out the Copilot AI nonsense, which they just put in place. The division remains a fiscal mess, so more hard decisions are undoubtedly to come, but still... this is a good start? [CNBC]
🦾 Apple's Choose-Your-Own-AI Adventure – Not a surprise that Apple is going to let you pick-and-choose which AI service you wish to use via "extensions" – this is just an, um extension of what they were doing already with ChatGPT from two years ago. But presumably they're going to implement it differently so that it's far less buried. Then again, it's still presumably going to be the secondary AI to their own model (now powered by Gemini) – unless they let you change the default? This report doesn't say that explicitly, but how great would that be? You could truly have a ChatGPhone (OpenAiPhone?) or a ClaudePhone. Regardless, it does sound like we'll be getting a much more malleable Siri, to the point where you can have different models using different voices, which would be great! And it might help Apple showcase when they don't specifically vouch for whatever the AI of your choice is coming back with (which was obviously long a fear in opening this up to third parties – get ready for disclaimers galore). One more thing: this approach should actually help Apple greatly in the EU, where they're already looking into issues with AI defaults and Google... [Bloomberg 🔒]
📽️ AMC to Screen Live Concerts – I mean, what took them so long? Movie theaters are in trouble for a whole host of reasons, but at the highest level, it's a secular decline. There is simply more to do and entertainment is far more accessible than it was in, say, 1950. I know Hollywood doesn't want to admit this, but it doesn't make it not true. At the same time, seeing movies in movie theaters – when those theaters are great, actual movie palaces and not dingy small rooms with screen slightly larger than your living room – remains magical. To keep this industry alive, new thoughts are needed. And this means breaking beyond the showing every movie released several times a day, even when there are zero people in the audience model. So yeah, show live concerts. And theater as is done in the UK. And sporting events. And premieres/finales of television shows (the horror, I know)! I don't even mind the higher prices as long as it's a good experience and driven by demand, not propping up box office numbers! Do what it takes to keep the business viable – windowing is fine to an extent but don't overdo it as it will not actually solve the secular issue – rather than pretending that one good year (as this year clearly will be at the box office) signals a return of the industry. Sadly, there is no going back, just forward. [CNBC]
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
I Quote...
"Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars. He did not – and I believe does not – know AI. That was a major concern. And Ilya and I did not think that he was going to spend the time required to actually get good at it."
– Greg Brockman, from the witness stand, speaking, of course, about Elon Musk. Of all the revelations and spilled tea to date, will any comment piss him off more?
Also, wild anecdote of the final negotiations which saw Elon walk away from OpenAI, where Brockman thought he might punch him – but instead he stormed out of the room with a picture of a Tesla that Ilya Sutskever had painted for him. What?!
One more thing: the revelation that under the old profit-share arrangement, the OpenAI nonprofit wouldn't see a dime until Microsoft and a few other select partners got $250B of the profits first (and that number rose over time), is new, right? I know there was a clause about Microsoft getting paid back first to some extent, but didn't realize it was that level. For context, Google, Apple, NVIDIA, and yes, Microsoft each made around $100B in profits last year. The four largest companies in the world, which are mature, decades old companies.
Asides...
- Speaking of Chrome and Gemini, um, there's a 4GB payload that gets downloaded automatically to run local models. Yuck. [Verge]
- Apple has agreed to pay $250M for their vaporware AI ads. If you bought an iPhone that Bella Ramsey promised you would remind you of someone's name in a pinch, you could get up to $95 back. [NYT]
- Speaking of, Google's Project Mariner has shut down before ever fully launching. Presumably ahead of some new agentic announcements at IO. [@ZeffMax]
- Obviously, the new trailer for The Odyssey looks great, but yeah, having everyone use American accents – even when they're British – is a choice. Upside: judging from Christopher Nolan's previous films, you may not be able to hear them anyway in theaters (IMAX FTW). [THR]
- Sorry AI, you won't be walking the red carpet at the Oscars anytime soon, it seems... Shocking, I know. [Reuters]
I Spy...
The best biopics tend not to be all-encompassing – obviously, how you can you possibly hope to encapsulate a full life into two hours? – but slices of time. So (unsurprisingly) I'm all-in on the Anthony Bourdain coming-of-age story, Tony.