Signal: Looking Back at Hardware 📧
With all eyes about to be on Meta tonight and what they have in store for our eyes (and wrists), I took a look back to Apple's event last week and specifically how it was framed. With both in relative positions of weakness when it comes to AI, it feels like both are now trying to use hardware as shows of strength...
M.G. Siegler
Others Wrote...
⚖️ Teen Safety, Freedom, and Privacy
Sam Altman takes to the OpenAI blog (versus his own, this time) to make the case for the trade-off the company will try to make with user privacy for ChatGPT going forward. Not a lot of details, but it's easy to read and understand the needle they're trying to thread. They essentially want the doctor/patient and/or attorney/client privileges with exceptions for 'the most critical risks". There are going to be a lot of gray lines there, one imagines – in part because another principle is to "treat adult users like adults". And that leads to the safeguards they're working on to better identify and handle under-18 accounts. All of this will be easier said than done – understatement, obviously – and it's not clear it will be enough. But they're clearly moving fast as this all feels pretty existential for the company (and broader sector). [OpenAI]
📚 I Wasn’t Sure I Wanted Anthropic to Pay Me for My Books
On a tangential, but related topic, given the book theft settlement proposed (which the judge has yet to agree to) by Anthropic, Steven Levy has decided he would like to be paid for his many works. But beyond any would-be bathroom renovations, his real point is that there should be a technical and scalable solution for this symbiotic relationship between author and AI. [Wired 🔒]
🎭 Robert Redford Dies at 89
As all of his obits zero in on, Redford was clearly – clearly – not a person who liked to be pinned down. He was obviously a great actor but just as he found success in a certain genre, he would change course. The same was true with his directing. And even with his business endeavors and activism. I mean, he first went to college on a baseball scholarship only to get kicked out! Pretty wild that he only got one Oscar nomination for acting (The Sting) over a 60-year career, but then won the Best Director Oscar for his first such movie (Ordinary People). And of all his movies, his biggest hit, monetarily, was Indecent Proposal – well, perhaps until his last (small) role in Avengers: Endgame! He was also instrumental in getting All the President's Men both written and made – same with The Candidate. Just as Paul Newman was instrumental in securing Redford's stardom by going to bat for him with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (their ongoing friendship after that was quite humorous). He also starred in endless underrated movies that get better with age from Sneakers to Spy Game. He was, in many ways, The Natural. [NYT]
I Note...
- Is OpenAI ramping up their robotics work (again) to compete with Elon and a growing number of others on humanoid robots – or is it to help train future models with real world literal hands-on data in the push towards AGI? Probably both? [Wired 🔒]
- Microsoft is being more explicit in their recent favoring of Anthropic's models over OpenAI for an increasing number of use-cases. [Verge]
- With another slight of GPT-5, OpenAI updates their Codex tool with a new version of the model better geared towards vibe coding. [TechCrunch]
- NVIDIA seems to be pulling back from their 'DGX' attempt to compete with AWS and other third-party clouds, instead using the capacity itself. It was probably both too expensive and created a weird dynamic with the other partner clouds which have become vital with such a high concentration of revenue tied up in Big Tech buying chips... [Information 🔒]
- Remember LimeWire? If you had access to a broadband connection in the early 2000s you do. Well after an attempt to be re-born as an NFT thing, now they're buying Fyre Fest because of course they are. [Fast Company 🔒]
- The price? A very specific $245,300. And Ryan Reynolds apparently couldn't afford to pay that much as he was "outbid" (which is undoubtedly just some lame viral marketing gag). [NYT]
- Remember AOL? Apollo is exploring a sale of the internet powerbroker before said broadband. Yes, another sale. Yes, for a fraction of the price ($1.5B) of the last sale ($4.4B, a decade ago by Verizon – though it was sold more recently in a bundle deal with Yahoo to Apollo for $5B). [WSJ 🔒]
- We can make the joke about the dial-up business, but it's ending soon. Still, the company is apparently doing $400M in EBITDA thanks to software, ads, and yes, email. Who might buy?
- Should we panic over the impending fertility crash? Pretty wild that pretty much all models have global population peaking at or around 10 billion – and all before the end of this century. Still, there may actually be upsides and certainly there are many unknowns... [Economist 🔒]
- Soundgarden has a new album with unreleased Chris Cornell tracks! About 8 of them, according to drummer Matt Cameron, who also gave a bit more color as to why he recently departed Pearl Jam (just sounds overworked from touring). [Billboard]
- Apple continuing the renew-the-show-just-as-the-new-season-debuts trend with The Morning Show starting season 4 tonight and now season 5 greenlit. [9to5Mac]
I Quote...
"I want the ambush marketers — the vodka brands and the gift-bag people and the Paris Hiltons — to go away forever. They have nothing to do with what’s going on here!"
– Robert Redford talking to a reporter at and about his Sundance Film Festival in 2012. Again, as he found success, he would zag. Though Sundance did seem of particular importance to him and it's impossible to argue with his legacy with regard to independent filmmaking there.
Incidentally, the festival shifts to Boulder in 2027. The very same place where Redford was booted out of college....
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• The TikTok Deal
• The iPhone Air Flop?
• A Touchscreen MacBook?
• Spies and Scotch and Martinis
• and more...