AI's Pitchman Problem
AI Needs Steve Jobs • 2026 Golden Globes • CES 2026 • Elon Musk is Mad • NBA in Vision Pro • AI Bubble Perspective • Cisco Lives!
AI has a perception problem. One that seems to be growing, at least in the US, as more people hear about and think about using the tools of the trade. That seems like an issue. And I think it starts at the top: the people pitching these products…
🗣️ AI Needs Its Steve Jobs
Everyone seemingly wants to shoot the current AI messengers...
I Note…
🏆 The 2026 Golden Globes
Of all the silly awards shows, this one is probably the silliest. I mean, they now have a 'Best Podcast' category in a blatant reach for any and all promotion. But it does seem to set the stage nicely for a One Battle After Another vs. Hamnet Oscar showdown (current odds including yes, prediction markets, still have OBAA the prohibitive favorite, which I agree with). Also note the two studios which "performed" the best for the night: Netflix had 7 wins followed by… Warner Bros with 6. In third place? HBO Max wth 3. All-in, a combined Netflix/WB would have walked away with 16 wins. The next closest studio would have been Apple, also with 3! (Yes, even mighty Disney only had 1 win — for FX, no less.) Luckily for Netflix, I don’t think the Justice Department would block a deal due to Golden Globe wins. Though I wouldn’t put it past President Trump caring most about such things. BTW, number of wins for Paramount Skydance? 0. Though they did technically host the show… [THR]
📟 Sinofsky at CES 2026
Per his annual tradition, Steven Sinofsky once again walked all the conference halls of Las Vegas so we didn’t have to. His main takeaway? Whereas in the past, computers, then the internet, then phones dominated the underlying current, now it’s not just AI, but really just one company: NVIDIA. "Nvidia is executing like a combination of Microsoft, Intel, and Open Source all combined. It is incredible." He also noted the show was more "muted" than in previous years, with some of the largest players — Samsung, Lenovo, etc — breaking off to do their own tangential shows. Those fun-looking Zoox self-driving cars were apparently zooming all over The Strip though. And while yes, robots were everywhere, very few actually worked. [Hardcore Software]
🤬 Elon Musk Is Big Mad Again
In June of 2024, Elon Musk was very upset when Apple announced their tie-up with OpenAI at WWDC. He even threatened to ban the use of Apple products at his companies (good luck). But you can almost understand it, it was a huge validation of OpenAI, a company which he co-founded but famously was no longer involved with. To make matters worse, he was now trying to compete with his old company with his new one, xAI. Fast forward a year, and Musk decided he needed to sue Apple and OpenAI over um, App Store promotion. Silly, but fine. But now he’s back again, up in arms over Apple’s AI tie-up with… Google. So he was big mad when Apple does a deal with OpenAI, feeling like Apple was tipping the scales towards ChatGPT, but then also mad when Apple cuts a deal which seems bad for OpenAI. Because now it’s an "unreasonable concentration of power for Google". I’m not even sure I disagree, but my god the whiplash here! [MacRumors]
🏀 Lakers/Bucks Live in Vision Pro
Jason Snell watched the NBA game live (only available in a few markets) last Friday in his Vision Pro. His main takeaway? How normal it felt to watch that way. Unlike some of the other sports footage that Apple has shot in with their Spatial cameras, they seemingly got the memo not to automatically cut between angles quickly here. Also fun that the presentation had its own special broadcasters who could tell you things such as "look left" to see a coach coming into your field of view. One downside: the sound of the event wasn’t recorded spatially. Still, impressive that it seems like Apple pulled this off without any major hiccups. Though I’m running into one big issue: the need to charge my Vision Pro and actually put the damn thing on to watch this. I’ll get around to it, but it remains just an entirely inconvenient product to use. [Six Colors]
I Wrote…
🤖 And the Winner of Apple’s Great AI Bakeoff is... Google
Gemini lets them catch up in AI quick while giving themselves flexibility...
🎬 The “AI-Generated Hit Movie” Horror Story
AI-generated movies are coming. But AI-generated “hit movies”?..
I Quote…
To put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards. For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.
— Iñaki Aldasoro, Sebastian Doerr, and Daniel Rees in a research note for BIS (via the FT). Everyone is in agreement this is a boom, but the perspective is important. Despite what others are saying about data centers and GDP, this is still a pretty small boom. That doesn’t mean a bust isn’t possible — and, in fact, the increasingly use of debt is sending out some warning signals.
Asides…
Microsoft disclosed in a document to the Senate that fundraisers approached them about donating to the new White House ballroom. It sounds like Amazon too. Hopefully everyone is learning the shakedown dance. [Verge]
As we rapidly approach the anniversary of the DeepSeek freak out and fall out, their next big update, V4, should hit in about a month. It’s said to be excellent at coding and yes, used some novel training techniques. [Information 🔒]
Also in China, the surge of Kuaishou, which started as a ByteDance laggard but is now riding high with Kling, an AI video generation tool that they pushed out quick to get ahead of Sora (worked for them, not Meta). [Bloomberg 🔒]
All of this points to the AI gap with China shrinking fast, right? No so fast… narrative violation: the gap may actually be growing (or at least some in China may want to convey that). [Bloomberg 🔒]
Google follows OpenAI into AI shopping with Walmart and Shopify. Too cynical to think it’s all about being able to roll out ads within AI quicker? [TheAisle]
No, probably not too cynical… [FT 🔒]
Oh, and a quick move to make a protocol for commerce. [TechCrunch]
Meanwhile, Anthropic follows OpenAI into healthcare, a whole 3 days later. [BI]
Sometimes I think Amazon’s store strategy is: yes. As now they’re going to try big box retail again, this time outside of Chicago. [Information 🔒]
I enjoyed reading this post about OpenAI and SoftBank investing $1B (combined) into SB Energy without once noting that "SB" stands for 'SoftBank'. I mean, maybe too obvious, but come on. Also, where is OpenAI getting the $500M to put in? Undoubtedly SoftBank. Round and round… [Bloomberg 🔒]
The race is on to save McLaren, which has long struggled financially despite their F1 success. It merged with an EV startup last year and... we’ll see! Remember when Apple was reportedly looking a decade ago?! [FT 🔒]
Come for the news about the first instance of Superman in a comic selling for $15M, but stay for the wild story of when it was stolen from Nic Cage — yes, that Nic Cage — and saw a wild rise in value before it was returned. He bought it for $150k in 1996 — a nice 10x return, had he not sold it in 2011 for $2.2M. [NYT]
I Spy…
I missed commemorating this a month ago, and the stock has fallen a bit since then but wow, what a wild 25 year ride for Cisco. And a good visual reminder of what can happen with the poster children of bubbles fall, even if they don’t fail…
