Signal: A Seat at the Fealty Table 📧
The seating arrangement for Trump's tech dinner was interesting. Obviously a lot of thought goes into that. So kudos to Mark Zuckerberg for prime placement, I guess. All the kissing up is paying off. Sadly, Tim Cook's gold bar present apparently wasn't enough for that seat, but it did buy him a seat next to the Google party – specifically Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai. And I find that interesting given that I just wrote about how it's starting to feel like the stars are aligning for the old band to get back together again...
M.G. Siegler
Others Wrote...
🍄 Nintendo: The Weird Genius of Gaming
It's almost impossible to read this profile of Nintendo by Vlad Savov and Takashi Mochizuki and not be reminded of Apple at numerous points. Yes, they likely delayed the launch of the Switch 2 – which was awkward at times – because they were obsessed with getting every little detail right. And it has paid off, quite literally, with sales exploding out of the gate. There's also an obsession with cash reserves, to make sure they can withstand any future storm and remain in control of their own destiny. One key difference: the 136 year old company has never thought of itself as a tech company. They're just focused on culture and creativity and most importantly, the games. [Bloomberg 🔒]
🤖 A Troubled Man, His Chatbot and a Murder-Suicide
In the opposite vein, the story of Stein-Erik Soelberg, the former tech worker who killed himself and his mother, perhaps fueled by his discussions with "Bobby Zenith" a persona he bestowed upon ChatGPT, is a harrowing read. The chat logs that Julie Jargon and Sam Kessler reviewed are troubling, to say the least. And specifically, it looks like the "memory" features of the service came back to haunt here. (This is an obviously beyond-extreme example of elements that I've been worried about with such functionality.) To be clear, there were other issues in Soelberg's life and it certainly seems like he was in a bad mental state long before the bot. But the bot clearly did not help. And may very well have hurt. Far too many of these types of stories coming far too fast these days... OpenAI, for their part, says they're at work on better guardrails due later this year. [WSJ 🔒]
A Few Notes...
- What's the record for saying "thank you" in a short span? I just counted NINE from Tim Cook in 90 seconds towards the Trumps in this clip. [Xitter]
- NVIDIA is renting NVIDIA chips from the NVIDIA-backed Lambda making NVIDIA Lambda's biggest customer ahead of their public offering. How's that for a new layer of the conflicted cake? [Information 🔒]
- The rare tech/sports angle with Steve Ballmer in the middle of a firestorm over payments to his Clippers star player, Kawhi Leonard, that may have circumvented salary cap rules. [Pablo Torre Finds Out]
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• OpenAI's Custom AI Chip
• The Pathetic 'Kiss the Ring' White House Dinner
• 'Nano Banana' Helps Gemini Go Viral
• Tesla's $1T Pay Package for Elon
• "The Robot Are Here"
• Superman is Coming Back
• and more...