Would You Believe? 📧
Reading it over again today after writing it last night, I realize my post about Cullen Hoback's documentary where he attempts to track down Satoshi Nakamoto seems a little harsh. I really enjoyed the film! If anything, I found myself feeling overly swayed that he was correct in his conclusion – he's a persuasive filmmaker! – so I was trying to test that a bit more in my head by listing out some things I'd want to see/hear to be more certain. But the reality is that we're never going to be certain, as Peter Todd makes quite clear. Which seems like definitely something Satoshi Nakamoto would say and want!
Also uncertain: just how much money OpenAI is going to need in order to become a sustainable business. It's clearly a lot. And it's clearly a lot more than they have right now. Which means they're going to need to raise a lot more even after just raising $6.6B. I tried to dive into it a bit more...
Some Analysis...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
Some Thoughts...
🥽 Apple’s Dan Riccio to Retire – This had seemingly been in the works for a long time – Apple loves their loooonnng exits for execs, especially those that dated from the Steve Jobs era, as Riccio did. While he was leading all of hardware at one point – including that pesky car project – more recently, he shifted to oversee the XR proejcts, which, of course, meant Vision Pro. We presumably won't know for some time if he was able to shift that group in the right direction before heading out. Hopefully (undoubtedly) they're also working hard on some AR glasses as well. John Ternus, who may or may not be the next Tim Cook, will oversee Riccio's group now. 26 years at Apple! [Bloomberg 🔒]
₿ 69,000 Bitcoins Are Headed for the US Treasury – Speaking of wild Bitcoin-related stories... First, these Bitcoins – technically, 69,370 – are now worth some $4.4B in the market. That makes it "the largest criminal seizure of money of any kind to be added to the US federal budget". But even more crazy: the IRS agent who was a point person in securing the stolen proceeds from the Silk Road is now himself in prison in Nigeria. Not because of anything to do with the seizure, but because he left the IRS to try to help clean up Binance, and while on a trip to Nigeria to negotiate a fine for money laundering on the company's behalf, the country took his passport and locked him away, where he remains as the billions he helped the US nab enter the balance sheet... [Wired 🔒]
🅱️ OpenAI Pursues Public Benefit Structure to Fend Off Hostile Takeovers – While it's been widely known for some time that not only was OpenAI in the process of shifting into a for-profit entity but also that such an entity was likely to take the form of a public benefit corporation, this article goes into the why. Namely, in this telling, it naturally protects the company from hostile takeovers and activists. It's also, of course, the same structure that rivals Anthropic and xAI use. Also worth noting that it's similar, but not exactly the same as a "B Corp" which is a private certification. And yes, there's a nice story in the "positive impact on society" aspect of the structure, which may help alleviate at least some of the tension in formally shifting the business to make money. Especially since the non-profit aspect of the business will remain, but will likely be run by a separate group, with a (likely sizable) stake in the for-profit. [FT 🔒]
Some Pods...
I was a guest on a couple of podcasts recently – both wildly different!
Brian McCullough of the Internet History Podcast (which I was on back in the day) and the Techmeme Ride Home podcast (which I was also on back in the day) is back with a new podcast. A fun one. RAD! 80s 90s History! is... exactly what it sounds like. When Brian asked what I wanted to talk about, I chose video rental stores in the 80s and 90s – which, of course, mainly meant Blockbuster.
Here's the video version, if you prefer.
Meanwhile, I also popped into This Week in Startups to talk about my recent post about the dangerous/opportunistic state of the VC industry with Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm. But we also managed to squeeze in quite a bit about the state of reporting/journalism given all of our backgrounds in that world. And some various AI/VC talk as well.
There's a video version here as well, if you prefer.
Some Links...
- The ability to add tabs in a Google Doc looks like a great feature and is long overdue. But why can't a tab be a spreadsheet/other type of document? I know you can add a table, etc to a doc, but I want access to other documents too. [The Verge]
- Amazon is adding Apple TV+ to its 'Channels' offering in Prime Video, which is not a big surprise given all the other moves Apple has made to try to expand the reach of their content. Disney and Netflix remain hold-outs... [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Instagram and Threads are erroneously banning users en masse. I know the feeling. They really need to clean this whole process up. [The Verge]
- About that 'AI PC' boom... yeah, not so much. PC shipments were down in Q3. Hardly surprising given the early struggles of these machines and the lack of tangible features. Still, what a hype fail thus far. (Apple has the same general issue with the iPhone 16, of course.) [Yahoo Finance]
- On that topic, Intel put out their new flagship 'Arrow Lake' CPUs – but they're intentionally short of the NPU requirements to make them 'Copilot+ PCs' and Intel's VP of client computing didn't mince words as to why: "We also talked at length about the enthusiast market’s disposition on AI as a whole, and I think it’s fair to say it’s somewhat reluctant." [The Verge]
- Here's a useful implementation of AI in the real world: easily showing Amazon delivery drivers which package to deliver at which stop. It's a simple red light/green light system using computer vision in the vans. [Bloomberg]
- That first scripted Apple Vision Pro content is here – Submerged clocks in at 17-minutes, which is better than I was expecting, but hard feature, let alone sitcom-length. Baby steps. Will report back after I watch. [MacRumors]
A Golden Oldie...
M.G. Siegler
We might...
A Couple Quotes...
"I was particularly fortunate to have many very clever students – much cleverer than me – who actually made things work. They’ve gone on to do great things. I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman."
-- Geoffrey Hinton, fresh off his Nobel Prize win, during the University of Toronto Press Conference to celebrate his honor. At first I thought perhaps he was having a bit of fun during the Q&A, but no, this was said in his opening remarks (3:33 in to this video). Wow. He does elaborate a bit during that Q&A about his immense disappointment around OpenAI's turn from research into a quest to make money, for which he clearly blames Altman. That student he's referencing, of course, is Ilya Sutskever. [via TechCrunch]