OK Computer
Vocal Computing's Moment • Meta's Compute Infra • Meta's VR Ending • Apple's SaaSy Move • Is Claude Cowork For Real? • Is Quantum Computing For Real? • There Is No Nintendo
From the soon-to-be Google-powered new version of Siri to the new Alexa+ to whatever device OpenAI is cooking up with Jony Ive to myriad devices at CES to myriad startups right now in general, it all sort of feels like vocal computing might actually be ready to have its moment in the spotlight. Finally. We’ll need it if robots are ever to become an actual reality…
🗣️ “Hello, Computer.”
With AI and an appetite for new hardware, vocal computing seems primed to take off, for real this time...
I Note…
🏗️ Meta’s Compute Initiative
When I read about this new initiative within Meta, I can’t be the only one who assumes it will eventually lead to a full-on Meta Cloud, right? Zuck has been dancing around this notion for a while — implying that any compute they overbuild could just be sold to others — and it obviously makes sense given how good those businesses are for their peer group. At the same time, Meta is not an enterprise company — which I continue to believe is part of the Manus deal — so it’s going to take a lot of time and learnings to build that muscle. All the mistakes Google had to make, etc. Still, given the AI infra needs right now, it’s seemingly a good time to do such a build (which clearly OpenAI and others are leveraging as well before the music slows — or stops). Interesting that Daniel Gross has already shifted to this project from Alexandr Wang’s "superintelligence" group. What are we to read into that? Certainly something! And yes, the Dina Powell McCormick hire seemingly makes sense for projects like this, which will need both banking and government connections galore. I’m not sure what to make of the "Vice Chair" title — she stepped down from Meta’s board in December, and what are we to read into that: it was not framed as moving into this position! — so it’s not about a board position. It’s just a lofty title to give her more gravitas in key partner meetings? I would also just note how many Republicans Meta has hired of late in key positions — I don’t think this is a purely political move; everyone praises Powell McCormick from Jamie Dimon on down (yes, President Trump too) — but it’s fairly wild just how much OG Facebook was filled with Democrats — is Sheryl running and all that — and now they’ve fully shifted with the winds… [TechCrunch]
🥽 Meta Carves Up VR Division
Staying on Meta, while they more or less previewed the job cuts late last year, this is a pretty brutal reality for many who assumed they were signing up to work for the most important initiative for a company that renamed itself Meta. But the rise of AI — and Meta’s stumbles there — alongside the complete and utter failure of a VR market to materialize made this inevitable. Meta simply couldn’t keep burning billions on the Metaverse when they were also going to be burning billions catching up in AI. They continue to give some lip service to the idea that headset work will continue, but undoubtedly with just a team big enough to keep the lights on, while everyone else focuses on Smart Glasses — aiming to double the output? — especially with Apple coming (wait a minute, haven’t we been down this road before?). [Bloomberg 🔒]
🎨 Apple Creator Studio
SaaSy Apple! They’re clearly looking to continue growing the Services narrative — which will one day surpass the iPhone as the largest business segment Apple operates. The good news is that you can still buy the apps in the bundle individually if you’d prefer to do that. The bad news is that the free ones are now suddenly "freemium" — and that slope will get more slippery as Apple will undoubtedly look to upsell the bundle (as all companies do when they go down such paths). At just $12.99/month or $129/year, this is obviously a lot cheaper than Adobe’s suite, but they also sort of have to be, at least for now. Also bundled in here is Pixelmator Pro, long my go-to Mac image editor of choice, which Apple acquired a year ago, and it’s coming to the iPad too. That new icon is pretty rough though… [Verge]
🤖 Is Claude Cowork the Next AI Revolution?
Some people are saying… well, technically this post wonders if Claude Code itself post-Opus 4.5 is the next watershed moment in the space. But I’m just as interested in Claude Cowork, the new Anthropic service in research preview. I like both the clever name and the framing of it as "Claude Code but for regular people", which is me putting words into Simon Willison’s mouth, but basically how he frames it. It got me to drop the $100/month required for a Max account to try it out, and I suspect I’m hardly alone there. Might OpenAI get some actual consumer competition from their longtime rival (following a strong recent push from Google)? I think it’s going to take some sort of viral agentic use case beyond just organizing the folders on your Mac, which, while impressive in that it’s AI doing things on its own outside the confines of your browser, is not really a thing I think most people absolutely need, let alone would pay for. Watch out for prompt injections out there… [Information 🔒]
I Quote…
There’s an awful lot of jumping on the bandwagon. Sometimes it feels to me like people are just rushing to get into the history books.
— Bob Sutor, a former head of quantum computing at IBM, on the current state of quantum — which is divisive, to say the least. A steady drumbeat of announced breakthroughs is always immediately met with skepticism about said breakthroughs. And mostly everyone wondering if any of this is actually useful, let alone practical. And the spectrum of when it might be seemingly ranging from two years until never.
Another IBMer, Jay Gambetta, their current head of research, compares the space to AI in 2012, when breakthrough in computer vision just started to occur. "The first neural networks were not actually meaningful, but they were significant scientific demonstrations that have now evolved into huge amounts of computation."
Asides…
If Brad Smith is so worried about China winning the AI race thanks to their open source models, why doesn’t he push Microsoft to go down that path? With Meta seemingly ceding leadership there, it could be an interesting avenue? [FT 🔒]
Then again, he’s a busy man, also pledging to pay more for electricity so that Microsoft's AI usage won’t burn the common man’s bills. It sounds nice, but nebulous. But you-know-who eats this stuff up… [NYT]
Caterpillar, yes, the yellow-tinted construction equipment company, is now a $300B company thanks to the data center build-out boom. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Context: they’re close to the market cap where Apple passed Exxon to become the most valuable in the world 15 years ago. [TechCrunch]
One week out from the shareholder vote, Netflix seems poised to make a "one more thing" offer to ensure they get the votes: all cash. That would seemingly answer one of Paramount’s loudest critiques (even though it seemed like the potential upside to the Netflix stock was a good thing?). [WSJ 🔒]
Will it stop the lawsuits? Of course not. [THR]
Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike — still the best name in tech — launches an encrypted, secure, and open source AI chatbot, Confer. [Ars]
For the what must be the 25th time, the US has cleared NVIDIA’s H200 sales in China, albeit with new convoluted hoops to jump through. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Not that it matters as China is apparently going to restrict them to "special circumstances" for purposes like research in universities. [Information 🔒]
Actually, China just summoned the domestic tech companies to tell them the sales were "not permitted" again "unless necessary". [Reuters]
Has any news cycle been so tiresome? It’s obviously all just jockeying for political leverage. Thoughts and prayers to NVIDIA’s financial team trying to do forecasts on such sales…
It sure reads like Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger wanted to go back to actually building rather than managing as he shifts from Anthropic Chief Product Officer to co-leading their "Labs" team. [Verge]
No surprise that we’ll get another Super Bowl ad from OpenAI this year, but I wonder how many AI-related ads we’ll get. All of Big Tech, I imagine. Surely Anthropic as well with their recent marketing push? [WSJ 🔒]
Alex Kantrowitz had some thoughts about the angle OpenAI might take in a commercial this year during our podcast this week. [YouTube]
Tom Brady needed another job, so he’s joining the C-suite (and board) of eMed as Chief Wellness Officer. If you’ve heard of the company before, you’re either interested in GLP-1s or know it as the company Linda Yaccarino took over after the "Velvet Hammer’s" clearly very normal exit from Xitter. [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Spy…
Look at that, good, fun content on LinkedIn! As Benjamin Dach writes:
Back in 1990, Nintendo issued a statement urging the public not to refer to video game consoles as simply “a Nintendo.” The company was concerned that their brand name was being used generically — the same fate that befell words like aspirin, escalator, and thermos, which all started as trademarks before becoming common nouns.
