M.G. Siegler • • Aug 28, 2026

Inklings #024 📧

NVIDIA's Profit Crown • NVIDIA's Hugging Face Deal • Hugging Face's Duck Robot • Meta's 'OpenClaw for Normies'

Tim Cook's watch over Apple officially ends this coming Tuesday. And while I'm no OneRepublic, I will just commend and congratulate him on one hell of a run. He had perhaps the most impossible task imaginable in succeeding Steve Jobs and he executed what will undoubtedly be a new textbook example/case study of how to follow up a beloved founder/literal savior of a company. And now his watch has ended. ✌️🍎

I Note...

💰 NVIDIA's Regains the Profit Crown – While some headlines focused on the company closing in on $100B in revenue a quarter, plenty of companies do that – Walmart is nearly double that number, Amazon actually is. A far bigger deal is the $60B in profit NVIDIA just posted for the quarter. It has been bonkers for a while now, but it keeps getting more bonkers. And while Samsung briefly surged ahead last quarter due to the memory chip boom, these results puts NVIDIA back on top. And it's almost entirely actual profit, money NVIDIA gets to keep, not the silly (GAAP) net income figure which includes moment-in-time paper gains on investments – accounting which pushed Google's "profit" to a comically stated $112.2B last quarter. Their actual profit? Again, the money they keep? Closer to $30B. Roughly half of what NVIDIA just took home. [NYT]

🤗 NVIDIA's $12.9B Hugging Face Deal – Poolside. Perplexity. And now this. If you wanted a hint of how much profit NVIDIA was about to post, these deals – even if just rumored – were a good sign. I joked that NVIDIA clearly can't spend their cash quickly enough, but also, they clearly can't. Between bankrolling and backstopping data centers and investing in seemingly every company even tangentially related to AI at the moment, NVIDIA is essentially a bank. Yes, so was Cisco back in the day, but I digress... This particular deal actually makes quite a bit of strategic sense. I'm not sure the price does but again, does that really matter when you're making $60B in profit a quarter? Not if there was competition for the deal and you could keep it out of the hands of others to further your "open" AI narrative – not to be confused with OpenAI, which is also tied closely to NVIDIA, but is not open, and seems hell-bent on competing with NVIDIA in chips with the apparently quite spicy 'Jalapeno'. Or maybe you better know them as the company which just inadvertently hacked... Hugging Face. Wild times. [Information 🔒]

🦆 Hugging Face's $400 Duck Robot – Speaking of... while I don't think the 'Microduck' is contributing much to the $13B price tag here, it's also pretty fun and clever! Given the focus on robotics as a next logical extension of AI, I'm surprised nearly everyone seems focused on either the humanoid or warehouse variety. Why not just have a little fun while igniting some imaginations? Clearly they are over in Asia, and Amazon tried this to some extent – but as always, they were too early – but I bet there's a growing market in the US now too for people who want a Star Wars droid-like device, not an Ultron or Terminator-like robot – at least not yet. Especially as voice AI keeps leaping forward. Start small and fun. What's the old saying about big things that start out looking like toys? What if they actually start out looking like toys? Apple should be all over this. If for no other reason than it now seems like their longtime nemesis NVIDIA will be! [Bloomberg 🔒]

🐣 Meta's 'OpenClaw for Normies' Nears – I mentioned 'Project Hatch' earlier today as Meta's big bet on productizing AI for consumers. AI "Personal Assistants" are so hot right now – at least in the eyes of VCs, which, speaking from personal experience, at best doesn't mean much and at worst is negative signal. Everyone obviously wants agentic AI to work in consumer, but we need actual killer use cases beyond sorting your desktop icons or drafting email responses. Again, I would focus more on fun. What can these things do that is actually a delightful experience? Sure, easing the nightmare of booking travel sounds great, but, at least in my experience, that's also incredibly bespoke given various family requirements. Which is to say, I'm honestly not sure I'd ever trust AI to do that, even if it could. I realize that's a dangerous thing to say, but really I just want some obvious use cases for regular people and I have yet to hear any. Meta can shove this in front of 3 billion people, but without those use cases, it won't matter. Certainly if Meta is really going to charge money for this. Though I will say, being able to leverage WhatsApp as the potential UI here is interesting... Perhaps that's the real play for 'XChat' – Xitter's superflous chat app. Maybe it can be the Grok Bot interface? They just need to gain about 3 billion users first. [BI]

I Wrote...

I Quote...

"I’m very pro-A.I. in music creation. I don’t see the downside at all. There will be some crappy music. There’s crappy music now."

– Jimmy Iovine, with his assessment of the AI backlash. At which point in the interview, Dr. Dre enters the room to drop: "I don’t see it as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating."

Thoughts On...

Asides...

Was 'Ox Alpha' made by Google's big AI comeback? SpaceXAI taking the lead? A surprise new entrant? No, it was just the codename for Z.ai's 'GLM-5.3-Flash'. Which anyone who watches movies in China would have known? [Bloomberg 🔒]
I mean, 'Claudeforce' is better than 'Agentforce', only just. But hey, McConaughey! "Now you can just aaaasssk." (This is honestly a pretty good ad – kudos to Salesforce for the confidence to outsource the "UI for AI" to Anthropic!) [VentureBeat]
A resume that looks like Google -> OpenAI -> Thinking Machines -> OpenAI -> Google is just perfect in an age of circular AI concerns. Weirdness aside, just a generational run by Barret Zoph. [WSJ 🔒]
- Meanwhile, Google -> OpenAI -> Thinking Machines -> OpenAI -> Meta – Luke Metz with the zag there at the end! [Axios]
Cleanup of ice on aisle Hell, as Apple Pay comes to Walmart! [Verge]
Come for the news that Ridley Scott is at work on completing the 'David' Alien prequel trilogy (!!), stay for the quotes on AI. [LATimes]
And then there were six? (Actors supposedly in the final states of screen testing to be the next James Bond. With my original picks apparently out, I'm pulling for River Cartwright – you-know-who was also Scottish...) [Page Six]

I Spy...

Ah yes, billboards that look like disclaimers are really going to resonate with people. Especially the intended audience. Nothing to see here, why do you ask? At least they double as an eye chart, I guess? This is not trending well for Meta...

🎶 Listening to "Release" by Pearl Jam (happy 35th to Ten)
🍺 Enjoying a Meantime Pizza Pale
🇬🇧 Sent from London, England