Inklings #011 📧

Never, ever a dull moment with OpenAI. And so with their big trial just wrapping up (see: below), it seems it was time to pick another fight. Oh boy I hope they know what they're doing here (I'm not sure they do)...

OpenAI Picks An Apple Fight

With Apple expanding beyond ChatGPT, here’s the finger-pointing over what could have been if Siri didn’t suck…

SpyglassM.G. Siegler

Thoughts On...

⚖️ Closing Time for Elon v. OpenAI – The closing arguments have been made. The final quotes given (see: below). Jury deliberation starts on Monday. This is a good list of actual takeaways from the trial (and a good title!) by Elizabeth Lopatto. Is anything going to ultimately come from this – I mean, are we even going to get past the statute of limitations element? – beyond embarrassment for pretty much all involved? Directionally, very bad, you might say. Elon couldn't even be bothered to stick around to see it through to the end, instead taking off to China with his frenemy, the President of the United States. At least we'll always have the emails. And journal entries. [Verge]

🐦 Fall of the Twitter Clones – If nothing else, fun to read each of the companies try to respond to the data presented to them by Casey Newton that indicates their growth may not only be over, they may be in decline. They range from Meta giving their sort of typical condescending denial to Bluesky giving the friendly acknowledgment that growth has dropped, but not as bad as these numbers indicate. Regardless of the merit of the third-party numbers, certainly the trends are interesting and would seem to be backed up anecdotally by many. But the bigger point may be Casey's thought that while Bluesky and Threads may have successfully cloned Twitter to varying degrees, ultimately, it may not matter, as the time of text-based social networks is over. The social entertainment is now all video, all the time, while information is increasingly coming at us via AI-generated round-ups and push notifications. As for Twitter itself? It's now a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a space company. Bye, bye birdy. [Platformer 🔒]

🍪 Apple + Intel Details – While everyone knows that Apple has signed up to work with Intel, Ming-Chi Kuo seemingly has some details – including that the initial work has already kicked off for "low-end/legacy" chips for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. In other words, the cutting-edge chips will still be made by TSMC, but Intel will take up some of the older chip workload (pretty much as expected, though it wasn't entirely clear at first if Intel would just be used for tangential chips and not the main CPUs – but it will be the main CPUs, mostly for iPhones). Testing will happen this year, with a ramp in 2027 and 2028. TSMC will still handle "90% of supply share" but still, it's a huge validation for Intel's foundry, obviously. There is no bigger name than Apple. Well, there's maybe one bigger name now, and it's because of NVIDIA that Apple must diversify. Apple is no longer the dominant force in chips that can dictate everything... Who will be next to let Intel pick up some of their chip slack? [@mingchikuo]

💸 Anthropic at $900B+ – A real "changing of the guard" moment is upon us, it would seem. While Claude picked up a lot of usage momentum after DoD-Gate, and it seems like they may have passed OpenAI in terms of ARR (though yes, they measure it a bit differently), this would be the external validation. And really sort of wild given the gap between the two in terms of valuation just a year ago. That's how fast things can change in AI – just three months ago, the company raised at $350B. Presumably there's an intention to stay below the $1T mark ahead of any would-be IPO (though that clearly didn't matter to Elon Musk for SpaceX!). Sam Altman cannot be happy about the investor overlap here. Also, it seems like Google and Amazon squeezed their latest cash piles into the last round valuation just in the nick of time... [FT 🔒]

🔫 Amazon Casts the Woman Who Will Cast Bond – Nina Gold is touted as the woman who filled out Game of Thrones, but just as impressive – arguably more so – would be her work on The Crown. She also has done the past few Star Wars films, which are obviously problematic, but hardly for the casting choices. Sort of wild/fun that Amazon made a big to-do about this hire. I guess to calm rampant speculation (of which I'm guilty too) and to let everyone know the hunt is now truly underway. I'd guess we get an announcement this summer. [Variety]

Dueling Closing Quotes...

"Mr Musk has tried to persuade you that his years-ago donations to OpenAI came with strings attached, strong enough to last for ever, to tie OpenAI in knots as it pursued its mission."

– Sarah Eddy, OpenAI's lawyer in her closing remarks to the jury. Strings to knots. Nice.

"Imagine that you’re on a hike, and you come upon one of those wooden bridges that you see on a trail, and it’s over a gorge. There’s a river that’s 100 feet below and it looks a little scary, but a woman standing by the entry to the bridge says, 'Don’t worry, the bridge is built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth.' Would you walk across that bridge? I don’t think many people would."

– Steve Molo, Elon Musk's lawyer in his closing remarks to the jury. A hike, with a wooden bridge, built on... Sam Altman's truth? Less nice.

Asides...

• Sort of wild how little AGI was brought up during the Musk/OpenAI trial given how core it was to the Microsoft deal until very recently. Then again, that's probably for the best given it would be non-technical lawyers trying to explain the concept which is famously nebulous to jurors... [Information 🔒]
• Damnit, just as I make the case that Microsoft's stock is undervalued, Bill Ackman storms in to ruin the moment. While some follow the "Inverse Cramer" model, and you seemingly can't go wrong betting against whatever Cathie Wood is doing, I adhere to an Anti-Ackman playbook. [Bloomberg 🔒]
• The fact that Jensen Huang had to score a last-minute invite to China and that still didn't result in the country agreeing to allow his chips to enter the country (legally) seems to suggest that this year's "DeepSeek Moment" truly is the ability to use their own chips (at least for inference). [NYT]
• Microsoft is going to rip Claude Code out of employee's hands to try to make Copilot CLI better. I'm sure that will go over well. [Verge]
• About as well as Meta forcing their employee base to share their screens to help catch up in coding/agentic workflows – which has a real "digging their own graves" vibe (especially ahead of layoffs). [Wired]
• Meanwhile, xAI also shipping their first coding agent, which is mostly surprising given that it sounds more like exAI right now. [Bloomberg 🔒]
• Conan O'Brien will host a third straight Oscars – the first such feat since Billy Crystal in the early 90s. Something nice about such continuity. Also, this will be the 99th version, right before the 100th in 2028 – which will also be the last on ABC before they move to YouTube. [NYT]

I Spy...

The new Android 17 emoji look pretty good. Certainly better than before. And yes, definitely more iOS-like.