Something's Afoot... 📧
College football is back – #GoBlue – with the NFL looming. And just in time, ESPN has reinvented TV Guide to help you find where you can actually watch games in our era of streaming. This may very well set ESPN on the path to owning sports streaming – though Amazon may have a thing or two to say about that...
Speaking of, it sounds like Alexa will soon have more to say. But Amazon has been saying that for a while. But maybe now Anthropic can have a say?
If they're really going to power Alexa though, might they need more funding? OpenAI clearly does and so it's a good thing they teed up Apple for it long ago. In case you weren't aware, Apple has a ton of cash, even though they remain stingy on iPhone RAM – which will have to change at some point in our era of AI.
Mark Zuckerberg took a brief break from greenlighting AR hardware projects in order to write to a US Congressman because he's totally and completely and utterly neutral in this upcoming presidential race.
Back to reinvention, Apple Podcasts could probably use one (more on that soon). Sadly, Jony Ive is no longer around Apple as he is now busy reinventing buttons. But you know who is coming back to Apple? The character in a show about that other futbol. Well, the show is coming back, at least. #Believe
Some Thoughts…
🤖 Meta’s AI Assistant Wins Millions of Users in Challenge to ChatGPT – "Wins" is doing a lot of work in this headline as much of the article is about how Meta is essentially forcing or worse, tricking, users into engaging with their AI products. I'm reminded of the early push to put Google+ everywhere in an effort to use Google's scale to counter the rise of Facebook. Now Meta seems to be doing the same to counter the rise of OpenAI. Though shoving shit in our faces is nothing new for the company either... [The Information 🔒]
🥊 They're Active User Fighting – The above story also noted Meta AI now has 400M MAU and 40M DAU – which seems like not a coincidence when just a couple hours beforehand, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT now has 200M WAU. But the lengths companies will go in order to say "we're big and growing too!" while still trying to obfuscate direct comparisons is humorous. OpenAI touts WAUs, so Meta touts MAUs and DAUs. Who will first tout hourly active users? Bi-weekly active users? To OpenAI's credit, this was clearly more an attempt to show they're still growing as the number is double what it was last year (there had been questions...) and they have no Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram products to game such usage. Did you know they're fundraising as well? Meta seems unlikely to participate. [Axios]
🫵 Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse – I like this framing by Aaron Ross Powell comparing a lot of the increasingly loud nonsense we're seeing online – and especially on Xitter – to "model collapse", something which seems top-of-mind in our age of AI. Essentially, the nonsense is getting worse because it is primarily being fed off of other nonsense. This is causing model collapse in these human beings just as might occur in LLMs if they're fed with bad data – something many are currently concerned about with the fast rise of AI-created "synthetic data". Said another way: bullshit in, bullshit out. [(Re)imagining Media]
💰 NVIDIA Aims to Invest in OpenAI As Well – Apple made all the headlines yesterday, but NVIDIA is said to be also joining the new mega round coming together. While it's not clear how much Apple would put in, this report pegs NVIDIA as coming in for $100M. While such an investment is new for Apple (last meaningful one was probably Didi, which didn't go well), NVIDIA is very active when it comes to investing – including in OpenAI competitors Mistral and Cohere. But in this market, capital matters more than conflict, it seems. As long as it's not Anthropic. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Some Analysis…
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
As An Aside…
- Why is NVIDIA struggling with manufacturing their new Blackwell chips? It’s sort of a perfect storm of trying to bond two large chips together with a new TSMC process in a new tight turnaround time. [WSJ 🔒]
- Intel is looking at options for a turnaround including splitting off the foundry business and, as noted yesterday, M&A. For now, the boring old “spend less money” seems more likely, meaning pausing some expansion plans. [Yahoo Finance/Bloomberg]
- Well this sucks, AnandTech is shutting down after 27 years (started by one guy, Anand Lal Shimpi, in his bedroom!) covering the chip industry. Why? "The market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again..." Thankfully, it sounds like the archives (and forums) will stay live and sister-site Tom's Hardware will keep going. [AnandTech]
- Gmail will allow you to have a Q&A session with your inbox thanks to AI. This sounds like a recurring nightmare I have. (I kid, I kid, this could actually be useful – it was testing on the web, now on mobile if you pay for Gemini.) [TechCrunch]
- In this week’s very special episode of Oprah, Sam and Bill will learn a hard lesson about the perils of trying to explain a technology no one fully understands to neighborhood parents; antics will ensue, allowances may be withheld. [SFist]
- It seems like it's time for our once-a-quarter Vision Pro content drop again. "4 Minutes Inside Super Bowl LVIII" should be good – and well, 4 minutes long. Such content really needs to get longer and drop more often. I understand it's not easy, but neither was shelling out $3,500 for the device. [MacRumors]
And I Quote...
"I thought the remake was a cynical cash-grab. Not much cash to grab it seems."
-- Alex Proyas, director of the 1994 film, The Crow, remarking on the box office bombing of the new one. He's been vocal about the remake as he thinks it dampens the legacy of Brandon Lee, the star of the first film (and son of Bruce Lee) who was tragically killed during an accident while filming.
When it comes to soundtracks, there's no contest.