Inklings #014 📧
Hello from the road, where I simply had to weigh in on the Ferrari Luce design backlash. As well as a handful of other things here and there...
M.G. Siegler
Thoughts On...
🤖 Google Admits Being Behind in AI Coding – A refreshingly straightforward answer from Sundar Pichai when asked by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton to assess where Gemini is with regard to the all-important coding capabilities just after this year's Google I/O keynote: "I think we are a bit behind at this moment." He seems sheepish in the entire interview which I would chalk up to I/O being poorly timed with regard to announcing major breakthroughs – especially given that Anthropic is now the one keeping their peddle to the metal with Claude Opus 4.8 out the door, apparently even better at coding, and the first public-facing Mythos models approaching within "weeks". I would say that Google should go all-in on "world models" as Demis Hassabis clearly wants to do, but they also clearly believing the coding capabilities may be a key to unlocking something, be it agentic uses, or RSI, or AGI... [NYT]
💸 OpenAI Going After Mom & Pop Advertisers – It feels like OpenAI is throwing basically everything against the wall when it comes to their ads business at the moment. What started as massive brand CPM buys is now getting extremely granular with CPC – working with local car washes? Obviously, they need this business to work both for their IPO aspirations but also because it's a major point of differentiation against Anthropic, which has said it will not go down the advertising path – or at least made fun of it to the point of such a backtrack being all but impossible anytime soon. It's the most obvious narrative battle that OpenAI can win and own in this race right now – if they can get it working. And that's a massive "if", because I continue to believe that they face a major click problem and that it will take some new kind of format/model to make advertising work at scale. The good news for OpenAI is that they're not alone here: Google needs this to work too, and could end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting to figure it out, which could pass down to all the other players, including OpenAI. [Information 🔒]
💰 Samsung's Bonus Situation – Sort of a fascinating battle within the company at the moment on a few fronts. First and foremost, because of the massive success they're now seeing with their chips business – pushing them well past the $1T market cap mark – that group's union has demanded a payout based on profits. The company quickly agreed, but it caused the other units to revolt even though they're not responsible for such profits and in some cases, are floundering. But the point of the say, TV division, is that for years, they were the ones carrying the company. It's just a wild situation that's playing out across many Asian companies, it seems. Without question, profit-sharing is compelling in principle, but the second-order effects are proving to be a nightmare! [Reuters]
📽️ Baby Yoda Slightly Scores – Better than the (clearly sandbagged) $80M expectations, Mandalorian and Grogu came in almost exactly where Solo did 8 years ago. Of course, inflation is a bitch here, so Solo's $103M is about $138M today. Still, Disney can work with this given that Mando cost about $100M less to make (again not including inflation – so far lower than Solo). Will it make money? Hard to say now (AI extrapolates it out as a coin-flip). As always, will depend on the second week hold – and there are a lot of movies coming out soon, most notably Masters of the Universe (decent enough buzz, but I'm sort of skeptical) and Disclosure Day (great buzz, presumably not just a Spielberg bump). [NYT]
🍿 Hollywood's Coming YouTube 'Obsession' – Related to the above, the big movie opening this coming weekend isn't Big IP or Big Director focused, it's Backrooms, a horror movie made by Kane Parsons, who got his start on YouTube and may now have a $50M+ opening weekend at the box office. And the 20-ish year old is hardly the only one charting that path now. Curry Barker, at the ripe old age of 26, is said to be getting 8-figure offers to produce his next movie after Obsession blew up at the box office. This whole wave is both great and interesting that it's happening right before AI was presumed to do the same – truly democratizing Hollywood. How long until YouTube tries to capitalize, quite literally, directly? [THR]
📲 Apple's Local AI Dreams – With seemingly everything known (see: below) about what Apple will announce at WWDC this year with regard to their Apple Intelligence upgrades, it's not entirely clear how they'll frame everything. It stands to reason that they'll talk up Apple Silicon as enabling the ability to distill larger (Google) models to run locally. And also that the AI work requiring larger models will still be protected by "Private Cloud Compute" – even if they're pivoting that model a bit to now encompass workloads not just on their own servers, but perhaps on Google's too – maybe even with some running on NVIDIA's chips! It will be a delicate dance for Apple given the past rhetoric around data protection and AI. And while their local model aspirations may prove prescient at some point, we're clearly not fully there yet... [Information 🔒]
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
I Quote...
"A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few."
– Pope Leo XIV, weighing in on the technology in his first encyclical, "Magnificent Humanity". In some ways, title says it all, but it's also an interesting, more nuanced stance than you might imagine given the broader rhetoric. And bringing an Anthropic co-founder in to his inner ring for this is certainly a choice and a statement in and of itself.
Another quote worth highlighting closes the NYT story: "Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence. Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine." That quote is not the Pope but Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and M.I.T.
Asides...
- Amazon taking over Apple's 20% stake in Globalstar makes sense given the full takeover (and Apple not wanting to be in that business). The ongoing Apple partnership will simply be an business agreement. The holding company being named "Grapefruit" is just a nice touch. [PC Mag]
- Meta's would-be third-party cloud computing offering is "definitely on the table" according to Zuck. Which is obviously him pulling the "Elon Lever", to suggest all their CapEx spend could pay off in the way xAI's have with Anthropic and Cursor striking "neocloud" deals. [CNBC]
- After Apple's Siri debacle, the biggest AI vaporware peddler would seem to be Salesforce as they continue to push the nonsensical "Agentforce" branding – even after spending $20M years ago to acquire the rights to use "Einstein" for AI purposes! My god, use that! [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Meanwhile, a company that went overboard with their initial AI hype/branding (When Bob Met Watson), IBM, is clearly angling to own the would-be next thing: quantum. [Reuters]
- It sure feels like the Paramount/Warner Bros Discovery is about the get the greenlight. Good luck, Hollywood! You may not have got what you wanted, but you got what you asked for! [Semafor]
- X-Men '97 on Disney+ is finally almost back and with even better news: seasons 3 and 4 are not only confirmed, but already in the works, so there won't be a huge wait between them. [EW]
I Spy...
I continue to be confused by this whole "Search or Ask" notion for New Siri. I don't care if these are two different things in Apple's mind – and neither will the user. There should be one box/option for all queries and the AI should sort out your intent. I'm hoping this new mock-up (apparently based on at least prototypes of how this will work in iOS 27) is just to showcase a long-press option or something and doesn't come up every time you bring up Siri. That would be stupid.
And well, I wouldn't put it past Siri!
🎶 Listening to "American Cars" by Noah Kahan
🍺 Enjoying a Flack's New Forest Classic IPA
🇬🇧 Sent from New Forest in England
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