Off to the AI Races 📧
As the world gears up for Apple Intelligence – spoiler alert: there's not too much to gear up for, in this early state – and Apple starts to ramp up some press around its presumed launch next week, it's worth re-visiting and thinking about how it plays out for Apple. I think it's fine (and perhaps even prudent) to take things a bit slowly in these early days of AI. But compared to their peers, they're basically walking while the competition is doing laps on a race course. Some are going to blow-out tires, crash, etc. And they have been. But they're also learning – multiple meanings very much intended – quickly. Apple probably needs to hop in a car at some point in this race. And I'd bet they end up buying one to get up to speed, faster.
With their incredible device scale, they have a unique opportunity here. "Not first, but best" is a tough mantra to sell if you're neither.
M.G. Siegler
I Think…
🔪 Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Raising Capital for New AI Startup – Straight from the least shocking yet still wild news department... The report is pretty light on details, including if she'll actually be the CEO of this company and what they'll be doing beyond aiming "to build AI products based on proprietary models". They throw out an "over $100M" funding amount, but that could just be a placeholder for a "big round"? Also, they seem unclear if Barret Zoph a key researcher who left OpenAI the same day Murati did, will join her effort, but he "could". As I wrote when she resigned: "But the most telling thing may end up being where Murati winds up." Fundraising for a new AI effort less than a month after you announce your departure from the highest profile AI startup wouldn't seem to indicate any sort of "burn out" – perhaps the opposite. And the fact that this keeps happening is really not good optics for OpenAI. [Reuters]
🤖 Can Greg Brockman Find a Future Back at OpenAI? – In other OpenAI personnel topics, this profile of Brockman would seem to make it pretty clear that he's coming back to OpenAI once his sabbatical is over at the end of the year, even with the additional turnover and turbulence. Of course, multiple reports have made it clear this sabbatical was not entirely of his own choosing so... there are still some wild cards likely at play here. Though OpenAI would seemingly need him back now more than ever with said turbulence. Also buried in here is the notion that Apple backed out of the recent fundraise because of the Murati news. It undoubtedly wasn't the only reason, but perhaps the straw the broke the proverbial back. She also, it seems, was pretty key in handling the Microsoft relationship, which probably isn't going over too well either... [Information 🔒]
⏸️ Epic Judge Grants Stay in Google Play Store Case – No surprise here given the incredibly short timetable that Google was originally given to implement some of these changes – though it's a little strange the judge didn't recognize that immediately. Given that Google has already announced they'd appeal the ruling, this could indeed delay any changes for months, if not years. To that end, it's a little strange that Microsoft pre-announced that Xbox games would be coming to the Play Store next month, presumably thanks to the ruling allowing them to use their own payment rails – which now, yes, is delayed indefinitely. Maybe they just wanted to add pressure to ensure this change (eventually) happens? [Verge]
🍎 Trump Says Apple Boss Called Him to Complain About EU – The immediate reaction by many to this last week was that Trump was likely lying about the interaction – but as far as I know, Apple has yet to refute it. Either they don't want to further escalate by calling the man who could be elected president once again in a couple weeks a liar, or it did happen. And clearly the previously boasted about call with Mark Zuckerberg happened. And it seems like the call with Sundar Pichai happened. So why do we think the call with Tim Cook didn't? (Unless it was Tim Apple on the other end of the line...) As for the contents of the call, complaining about EU fines/regulation also wouldn't be shocking! It's something I've long thought Apple may try to appeal to Trump to help with – and honestly, any US administration probably should help with as the whole scheme is ridiculously focused on US companies. Still, everything with Trump always has the air of quid pro quo around it... [BBC]
🐭 Disney Names James Gorman Chairman, Sets ‘Early 2026’ for CEO Change – While early chatter was that the company had been targeting 2025 to name a new leader, this firmly pushes the pick into 2026, the year Bob Iger's contract ends (yes, yes, that's never stopped him before!). Per NYT, it does feel like this is a bit of an attempt to calm the waters and speculation about the choice. My money has long been on Entertainment co-lead Dana Walden, but it does feel like there's been a groundswell of activity around Parks/Experiences head Josh D'Amaro of late... Mark Parker leaving the board is also interesting and clearly a sign that Nike needs his help quite a bit with their own CEO transition underway I didn't realize that he was asked to be interim CEO of Disney during the Bob Chapek debacle, before Iger (somehow) returned. While Gorman is clearly a good call to lead the success committee having a banker as Chair of Disney is... an interesting call. [NYT]
I Wrote…
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Link...
- Benchmarks confirm that the new iPad mini has 8GB of RAM – as expected since it will be able to run Apple Intelligence (when that's available). Also confirmed: the 5-core GPU (versus 6-cores for the same chip found in iPhones) – it's still not entirely clear why they're binning these chips. [9to5Mac]
- Byju Raveendran, the founder of the edtech startup that bears his name and was once valued at $22B, now says the startup is worth zero. Technically, it may be closer to $100M or so, but yeah, that's quite the destruction of value. [TechCrunch]
- Google clearly knows they have a hit on their hands with NotebookLM – agreed – and are working quick to both add new features and get it ready for businesses/organizations to use. How do I know? Not only is it no longer "experimental", it has its own logo now. [9to5Google]
- As it approaches nearly $100B spent and no one yet off the ground, Michael Bloomberg slam NASA's "Artemis" – the mission to get us back to the moon – in an op-ed in, yes, Bloomberg. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- A few months ago, Perplexity was valued at $3B, now it's looking to raise money at $8B. Thanks, OpenAI. [WSJ 🔒]
- Fresh lawsuits from Dow Jones and New York Post probably won't help the cause, but probably also won't derail it. See also: The New York Times suing OpenAI a few months ago. [Variety]
- A few more details on Chick-Fil-A's entertainment plans – yes, they're real! [Deadline]
- Microsoft and Salesforce are AI agent fighting... [GeekWire]
- While Apple and WB TV are ready to go with a fourth season of Ted Lasso, the ball remains in creator/star Jason Sudeikis court (pitch?). It seems to be inching closer... "I can tell you firsthand that he’s in a place where he’s feeling really excited and very good about it," says WB TV CEO Channing Dungey. [THR]
- Next year's iPhone 17 "Slim" or "Air" is likely to have similar specs to the regular iPhone 17 lineup, but just a single camera. The Pro models will likely get 12GB of RAM versus the 8GB (the minimum for Apple Intelligence) elsewhere. [9to5Mac]
- Penguin Random House tweaks their copyright wording to ensure their book can't be used to train AI language models without permission. [The Bookseller]
- Meta's 'Spirit LM' is their first multi-modal language model that the company is releasing as "open source" (read: open weight), but it's only available for non-commercial uses right now. [VentureBeat]
- With both Tim Cook and Nike in the news today, fitting that this piece talks directly about his role on that board, most recently helping to secure incoming CEO Elliot Hill (to replace John Donahoe, who Cook was also key in bringing in – which may have been a mistake, in hindsight). Cook joined Nike's board before the iPhone was even launched! [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Quote...
"The human brain has about 85 billion neurons. Llama 3.2 has 405 billion neurons. So there’s something we’re not getting here."
-- Joelle Pineau, Meta’s VP of AI research, speaking to Alex Heath for his Command Line newsletter. Her point is that getting to AGI – or even just closer to it – may require thinking beyond the transformer models.
She also notes that thanks to Meta's scale, they can and are trying other ideas in AI, such as Transfusion. That implies that startups may not have such luxuries, a point she more directly states later on with, "I would say a year or two ago, the startups had a good amount of compute equivalent to the big companies. We’re on an arc that very soon those startups are not going to be very competitive on compute." While she's obviously talking her own (Meta's own) book here, if that's true, that's highly problematic for a number of AI startups, obviously.
I Spy...
Anecdotally, it seems like Waymo has hit some sort of inflection point, at least in San Francisco. It feels like it's mentioned by nearly everyone who visits the city these day. And this Wall Street Journal trend piece would sure seem to back that up. But really, this chart below backs up that this is the real deal...
