M.G. Siegler • #from afar • Jul 5, 2024

Summer in Session 📧

Week of July 1, 2024

Happy 4th of July weekend to those of you reading in America. Happy new Prime Minister day to those of you reading in the UK. The summer seems to be either a time to rush to get stuff done before heading off on holiday – like, say, all of the moves the EU is making against "Big Tech" right now – or trying to quietly do stuff which might otherwise garner attention – some "hackquisitions" perhaps?

We're probably going to see a lot more such deals in the coming months as more companies start to realize that they're not AI companies (with AI company rounds and valuations) but instead are "regular" companies that are building "regular" products that happen to leverage AI, as all companies will.

Apple seems extremely busy building up for the (piecemeal) launch of Apple Intelligence alongside their new operating systems in the fall and always their most important product, the next iPhone. The Vision Pro is starting to roll out worldwide, and there's still just not a lot of fanfare, as they work to re-think the market and on ways to drive down the price-point for the device.

It's still wild that they'll apparently be getting observer rights on OpenAI's board. This can play out in about 50 different directions in the coming months, almost all of them contentious in various ways...

When not wakeboarding in a tux with beer and the American flag, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to make the case for Meta's vision for AI. And also Threads, which turned one today. Sort of weird he didn't post the video on that network?

Skydance is back to buying Paramount again after almost buying them a few weeks ago only to crash and burn, Top Gun-style.

Bananaphone!

🍺

Enjoying a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (sadly, not as Americana as Zuck's Coors Banquet Tallboy, but a better American beer)

🌍

Sent from London, England

Briefly...

YouTube Dominates Streaming, Including to TVs – For all the talk about the streaming wars and consolidation it's extremely easy to overlook YouTube. Because of its UGC heritage, it's just not viewed the same as the Hollywood or even newfangled tech players' streaming services. But it remains not only massive, but king – including on television sets, per these numbers from Nielsen. Just about 10% all viewership on connected and traditional TVs in the U.S. in May – that tops number two Netflix at 7.6%. "Among streamers only, YouTube’s total viewership was close to 25% market share," reports Alex Sherman.

Something 'FacePod' This Way Comes? – MacRumors found some code on Apple's servers which indicates a new type of "Home Accessory" is coming from Apple. And signs point to it having a new A18 chip. This matters because Apple's current line of HomePod devices won't be able to run 'Apple Intelligence' given the specs stated to be required, but this new device could. And such a device would run tvOS, as the current HomePods do (perhaps soon to be rebranded as 'homeOS'), and there is talk of tests with a screen... Who knows. But yes, please.

He Helped Invent Generative AI. Now He Wants to Save It (💰)– Steven Levy dives into Near, a startup by one of the authors of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need" AI paper, Illia Polosukhin. Whereas he started working in Web3 post-Google, now he's back working on "user-owned AI", sort of a hybrid of the blockchain work mixed with "truly open" AI – increasingly a focus, it seems.

⭕️ The Inner Ring ⭕️

The following are the columns sent to paid Spyglass subscribers this week – sign up here for full access and future emails...

Amazon runs Microsoft's playbook to totally not buy Adept...

Mark Zuckerberg has some thoughts about AI and I have some thoughts on his thoughts...

There are a few market elements at play which are going to hurt AI startup exit potential...

Enter The Inner Ring

Quotable...

“It’s AI and clearly there’s money in that. This is the future, it’s the stuff of Cyberdyne Systems.”

-- "Adam", someone Tim Bradshaw spoke with for his Financial Times article on the rise of NVIDIA as the go-to AI stock to own. Yes, that's a references to the company which eventually builds the terminators in the movie of the same name.

Some Thoughts On...

💰 Apple's continued push into Services as we enter the AI era...

🎧 Those 'AirPods with cameras' rumors...

🇪🇺 The EU threatening Meta's business model...

💸 Startup funding levels in AI...

Quickly...

Microsoft's head of AI inadvertently teaches a class on What Not to Say to the Media 101 with regard to that technology. Content is like freeware! Steal away!
Verizon has a new logo which is... fine. Fairly generic but better than the checkmark one. They needed it to move on from "can you hear me now?" era which makes no sense in 2024. Instead, how about "you're mic is muted"?
Nintendo says it won't be using generative AI in the creation of its games (though doesn't rule out using other elements of AI)...
- The estates of Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds clearly have no issues with the use of such technology as they've sold the voice reproduction rights (that reads very weird) for use in a voice-over reading service.
Amazon's Kindle service seems to be completely broken and the company is clearly in no hurry to fix it, in the latest sign that they just don't care about it any longer...
The "Flintstone House" in the Bay Area is opening up to the public with a high end omakase pop-up restaurant inside. Naturally.
Saks Fifth Avenue is buying rival Neiman Marcus with the backing of... Amazon (in part). We'll see if this sets the stage for more Netflix Houses...
Denis Villeneuve's next "event film" gets a December 18, 2026 release date. Some think it will end up being Dune Messiah. There are signs. Lisan al Gaib!
Scientists in Japan have created a robot that can smile – and they could not have given it a creepier face!
Inside Out 2 crossed $1B in worldwide box office, which is great, but it signals little more than it's the biggest movie of the year and when you adjust the number to normalize for inflation, it won't be nearly as impressive. Movie theaters are still in trouble, and will be until many are closed, sadly.
- Shocking no one except perhaps audiences at Cannes, Kevin Costner's first Horizon film did not exactly blow the doors off the box office last weekend.
Robert Towne, who wrote what is considered by many to be one of the best screenplays of all time in Chinatown, passed away at 89. He also was one of the most famous "script doctors" adding, for example, Marlon Brando's garden scene to The Godfather.
Bruce Bastian, one of the creators of WordPerfect, also passed away this week at 76. Fascinating, complex backstory from the Mormon Church to a champion of gay rights. WordPerfect eventually sold to Novell in 1994 for $1.4B.
Is Character.ai going to be the next "hackquistion"?
Meta's new models pre-trained on multi-token prediction seem like they could be a big deal...
Apple and Epic are fighting again, this time over Epic trying to launch their competing app store in the EU and Apple blocking it for looking too much like their own App Store. Round and round...
Leave it to Limp Bizkit to call "top" of the Gen AI market with their own, mildly unsettling generated music video (NSFW)