How Many Thumbs Up?
Cook's Movie Screening • Apple's Dark Knight Strategy • Anti-Google AI Alliance • Meta & Apple's Opposite AI Strategies • Voice AI Q&A • Elon's Empire • Amazon's Big OpenAI Bet • Amazon's Melania Bet
Busy week with record traffic and sign-ups for Spyglass, largely due to the Tim Cook/White House Movie Screening nonsense — which, for the record, I do think it more complicated than it may appear on the surface.
A couple other posts to highlight:
⚔️ The Anyone-But-Google AI Alliance
Big Tech’s billions into OpenAI signal something...
🐄 Meta Bets the Farm, Apple Milks the Cows
Meta and Apple have opposite strategies around AI right now...
I Spoke…
🗣️ A Q&A on Voice AI + Restaurants
With Kristen Hawley to give some thoughts about the state of vocal computing and how AI may be on the verge of transforming it for everyday life. Including, per the focus of her excellent Expedite newsletter, with hospitality. [Expedite]
I Note…
🚀 SpaceX + xAI or Maybe + Tesla
This was always the end game — I first wrote about the concept almost a decade ago. It’s just a matter of timing and order. Does it make more sense to fold xAI into SpaceX or Tesla? I still think the latter given Optimus, but given the IPO plans of the former — and yes, the “data center in space” stuff, I suppose — it’s clearly more opportunistic to hitch the AI wagon to the rocket. Especially given the competition in the AI um, space. I still expect all of them to be one company in the long run — robotic missions to Mars and all that — but for now, SpaceX will take on the xAI payload, if anything, because the Tesla one would be far too complicated, one imagines. Remember Twitter? It’s about to be the subsidiary of a subsidiary whose value is now completely irrelevant. One day the same may be true for Tesla’s car business, which is wild. As for my thought that Musk might be trying to time the SpaceX IPO around the 250th birthday of America — nope, much more vain: his own birthday. [Forbes]
💰 Amazon Could Invest $50B Into OpenAI
While we’ve known for a while that Amazon was likely to invest in OpenAI’s latest round — a good prediction last year! — it was thought to be in the range of a "mere" $10B or so. $50B is another category as it would clearly be them leading this round, or at least putting in the largest check, ahead of SoftBank at $30B or so. What’s the signal they’re trying to send there? Is it meant to say something to the market, that they recognize that everyone is asking for access to OpenAI models? That they’re worried about the state of their in-house models? Something about their relationship with Anthropic, as the latter gets closer to the likes of Microsoft? Talk about conflicts, Amazon is Anthropic’s largest shareholder! Is this really just to ensure anyone-but-Google wins in AI? I mean, $50B is just a massive amount of money, even for Amazon! Would it be the most amount of money ever invested into a one company in one slug? (Ahead of SoftBank’s $40B tranched investment and until NVIDIA actually does their $100B tranched investment — if they do that? Would this be tranched too) Unsurprisingly, sounds like Andy Jassy is handling the negotiations directly. [WSJ 🔒]
🎟️ Amazon Invests $75M Into the Melania Documentary
A few different orders of magnitude than the above, but no less of an eye-opener. In taking Tim Cook to task about attending the screening, I realize I brushed aside Jassy (and Amazon MGM head Mike Hopkins) being there as well, because they obviously had to be since they actually made the movie. But it’s definitely worth questioning why they made the movie — reportedly outbidding everyone else by at least 3x! It sure looks like a gift that puts Cook’s own golden trinket to shame. What did that thing cost? A few hundred bucks? We’re talking $40M dollars here — $28M of which allegedly went directly to Melania Trump. And another supposed $35M to market the movie. Again, a documentary — the report pegs this as 10x the normal amount for such films. I cannot believe they’re putting this in 1,500 theaters and I cannot wait to see where it lands at the box office this weekend (early tracking was at a $5M opening — which would be good for a doc, unless that doc costs, um, $75M). Still no review from Cook — or anyone else, for that matter. Well, that’s not exactly true, Metacritic has 19 user ratings, for an aggregate score of 0.2 out of 10. I’m guessing these people didn’t see it either or they might not have been so generous… [NYT]
🛒 Amazon Stops Investing in Fresh and Go
Amazon’s overall retail strategy has always been a bit like their (old) strategy for Alexa — just throw some stuff out there and see what sticks. But grocery in particular was a confusing jumble of ideas and brands. At one point they had four or five different types of stores to sell grocery items, including the brand they bought for $14B in Whole Foods. Now, it seems, only Whole Foods will remain — well, alongside some other bigger superstore ideas/trials? I did appreciate the "just walk out" concept, but there were obviously issues. I did not appreciate the pay-with-your-palm concept, and that’s now gone too. I feel like I could have told Amazon how this would all play out years ago, but I know they culturally like failing to learn or whatnot. [GeekWire]
👋 Meta Using Manus to Go Premium
I suspected they were going to use the Manus deal to start selling B2B in a meaningful way, but it’s interesting that they’re seemingly going to use it to upsell consumer subscriptions as well. Given that I’m in Europe, I actually have access to Meta’s subscription tier that allows you to move ads (on Facebook and Instagram). It’s nice, but too expensive at $12.99/month. But if there were other perks, I might go for it. YouTube’s Premium (ad-free) tier remains one of the best values out there. That said, I just don’t get much if any value out of Facebook these days. And Instagram actually has ads that are somewhat useful at times so… [TechCrunch]
I Quote…
"Without Larry Ellison independently financing this thing, there’s no chance in hell Paramount would ever be able to pull this off."
— Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters giving his assessment of Paramount’s rival bid for Warner Bros. This piece is just full of great quotes, including a counter from Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital (Paramount’s partner in the deal):
"The Netflix deal is the Harry Houdini of deals."
I Wrote…
Yahoo Scouts a New UI Path for AI
Yahoo Search rebuilt for AI is surprisingly nice!
👾 The Clock Starts for Star Wars: Episode X
Dave Filoni is clearly going to continue the Skywalker Saga, but how?...
Asides…
After the false start (due to completely predictable backlash), OpenAI is actually putting GPT-4o out to pasture for real this time, alongside a handful of other legacy models. Apparently just 0.1% of users were actively using it. [CNBC]
Interesting to see Perplexity inking a deal to get closer to Microsoft, which is a natural home for the company. Have to get off AWS first though! [Bloomberg 🔒]
Look at that, a circular deal rejected, as Hugging Face apparently turned down a $500M investment (at $7B) from NVIDIA because they didn’t want one AI player owning that much of their company… [FT 🔒]
I had previously noted the iOS 26 adoption numbers, mentioning that it seemed like they must be wrong — turns out, they were. Adoption does seem to be slower, in part because of Apple’s roll-out strategy, but it’s not insanely below previous updates like the (bad) data suggested. [Daring Fireball]
The leaked images of Android for PC looks a lot like… Android for PC — mixed with ChromeOS. Might Aluminum OS — ALOS — morph into AIOS? It sure feels like the play woud be to make this a full-on AI OS… [9to5Google]
Meanwhile, the push to fully Geminify Chrome continues. I still think it feels/looks way too-tacked on… [CNBC]
TikTok’s first week with its new US owners? Pretty rough! Going south even earlier than I expected/predicted? [Verge]
I keep meaning to say something about Clawdbot, but it keeps changing names — first to Moltbot now to OpenClaw — so I’ll just link to Federico Vittici’s take. The honeymoon may already be over. [MacStories]
Meet the… actors playing The Beatles… [THR]
I Spy…
Hello, old friend. Welcome back (this summer)…
Solid roundup. The SpaceX/xAI merger timing makes alot more sense when you frame it against the IPO plans. I hadn't considered how the data centers in space angle plays into this, but hitching AI to the rocket company feels like the obv move now given how crowded the AI space has gottten.