A Deal of Paramount Importance
Netflix Walks • AI Taste • Apple's Touchscreen MacBook • OpenAI's Round • NVIDIA's Earnings • AI Panic • Apple, Netflix, and F1 • D'Amaro's Disney
I almost jumped on the news as it was breaking yesterday, but decided to sleep on it and post some longer thoughts on Netflix walking away from their Warner Bros deal. I think the result is a pretty good 2,000-words. I don’t really delve into the politics, which is obviously at play, but I do wonder if it won’t lead to it all coming back around again one way or another. We’ll see!
🎬 TUDUMB
Paramount breaks the wrist, Netflix walks away from Warner Bros...
I Wrote…
👅 Tasty AI
Is AI “taste” a quixotic task?
🍞 Apple is About to Have *Two* Toaster/Fridge Hybrids
Will the quotes (and complexity) come back to bite the touchscreen MacBook?
I Note…
💰 OpenAI’s $110B Round
All largely inline with expectations — sort of surprised they didn’t boost it by a mere $10B more to hit a nice, clean $850B post. But then again, they’re still sorting out which investors will get to put in money beyond the three strategics cited: Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank. Speaking of, since we’ve moved beyond the fact that NVIDIA’s $100B announcement magically morphed into $30B, the fact that Amazon’s "$50B" is actually $15B now, $35B "in the coming months when certain conditions are met" is fun. An earlier report nailed the tranches, but noted that the key milestones might be OpenAI reaching AGI or going public. Um, reaching AGI "in the coming months"? Perhaps that’s just a fall-back clause, and it’s all about the IPO, which may or may not happen "in the coming months". Still, hasn’t Amazon learned from Microsoft about including stipulations around AGI in such contracts? Speaking of, did Microsoft cut back their "low billions" pro rata check to zero here? They’re not mentioned. Maybe they’re too busy investing in Anthropic, you know, the OpenAI rival in which Amazon is the largest investor. These are weird times. [CNBC]
💸 NVIDIA’s $43B Profit
If my data is correct — and if not, blame the many models trained on NVIDIA’s chips! — this is the second most profitable quarter of any company, ever. Behind only a quarter in mid-2022 by Saudi Aramco (due to an oil price spike during the initial Ukraine invasion) — yes, it beat all Apple quarters, including the most recent at a mere $42.1B. It also pushed NVIDIA’s yearly profit past $100B for the first time, joining just Apple, Microsoft, and Google as American companies in that realm. Three years ago, NVIDIA’s profit for the year was $4.4B. And they’re doing all of this almost entirely without China. If Jensen can pull that off, they’re going to be the first company with a $50B quarterly profit. But, it remains a challenge, with zero H200s sold, despite the ban being technically lifted on the US end. And the situation remains very delicate and complicated. Also wild: gaming (and auto) came in below estimates for NVIDIA. Not that it matters anymore. Revenue was up 73% y/y — another acceleration. And they’re projecting an even bigger acceleration next quarter. The stock is down for the week. It’s all just insanity. [NYT]
🤖 The Great AI Panic of 2026
I realize I haven’t really weighed in on the Citrini Research 2028 AI Crisis thing except as an aside in my post about AI and taste. I will say that I found it interesting as a thought exercise and actually, I’ve had in my drafts for a while some brief notes around the concept of Annie Jacobsen’s excellent book Nuclear War: A Scenario, but for our Age of AI. This is sort of that, but it also misses a number of marks by oddly, being far too pessimistic in ways that border on silly — or worse, Marxist! I would also just say that the reaction to it — certainly in the stock market, but even more broadly, was the really fascinating aspect. People are freaking out over some random post pretending to be written from the future. Okay. Everyone is clearly just primed to freak out about anything and everything AI at the moment. See also: the layoffs at Block. I mean, the numbers are (sadly) massive. But the idea that this is soley about AI is laughable. This is clearly "AI Washing". Maybe they shouldn’t have bought AfterPay at the peak of the BNPL market (at least in terms of valuations)? Or pivoted the entire company — including the name — around "Web3" stuff at the exact wrong time. Or, hear me out: maybe, just maybe, not bought Jay-Z’s streaming music service. The artist formerly known as Square has about 99 problems, but AI ain’t one. [Techmeme]
🏎️ Apple & Netflix Trade F1 Deals
A fun last-minute partnership to let Apple TV show the latest season of Drive to Survive — notably in "binge" style, per the Netflix way. In return, Netflix will get to show the Canadian Grand Prix race in May live (to US audiences at least) alongside the race being on Apple TV. I wish Apple would have held out for Netflix agreeing to have their content showcased within the unified Apple TV app — the lack of which is annoying and confusing for everyone, but clearly Netflix doesn’t want Apple to own this space — so, baby steps… For now, we can close our eyes and imagine if this was all unified in one place as it used to be… [Athletic 🔒]
🐭 The D’Amaro Kingdom
A pretty cushy profile of Disney’s new CEO (official first day: March 18). But buried in here are a few interesting nuggets. First and foremost, it sounds like there’s some real concern that The Mandalorian & Grogu may under-perform at the box office. It looks fun, but it also doesn’t look that different from an episode of the show? But Starfighter, the Ryan Gosling-led stand-alone Star Wars due next year is said to be very promising. Might it be extended, expanded?.. Everyone seems pretty sure that Avengers: Doomsday will be the biggest movie of the year (despite the IMAX issues — see: below). And Avatar 3, while still a behemoth, is expected to pull in $1B less than the previous one overall. Will D’Amaro greenlight another? Presumably he’ll leave that up to Dana Walden! Overall, D’Amaro sounds like he’s going to hit the ground running. Unlike his Parks predecessor… [Variety]
I Quote…
"The idea of reselling GPUs from a few years ago [after a default] is like beating a dead horse."
— An unnamed investor telling the FT why they constantly turn down opportunities to invest in GPU-backed debt deals — a now fairly common type of financing as the AI Bubble continues to inflate. What could possibly go wrong?
Asides…
Remember when Meta poached, Ruoming Pang, the head of Apple’s AI model team for a reported "Godfather" offer? Yeah, he’s already gone. On to OpenAI. I guess $200M doesn’t buy what it used to… [Information 🔒]
Remember when Amazon hackquired Adept? Yeah, nearly that entire founding team is now gone, including David Luan, the head of their AGI Lab. [GeekWire]
Two of that team bailed to Meta as well, but one has already left to found a new company with someone from OpenAI. [Information 🔒]
Meanwhile, a seventh xAI co-founder has left — the one tasked with building out “Macrohard” no less. The AI lab co-founder quitting epidemic continues. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Alongside Anthropic putting their Opus 3 model out to pasture, they’re allowing it — it? — to start a Substack. I’m entirely not kidding. [Claude Corner]
Perhaps it can investigate Chinese AI companies accessing Claude data to distill their new models as Anthropic (and OpenAI) allege… [NYT]
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap notes that making the ads work on the service will be "an iterative process", which, yes. [TechCrunch]
Perplexity appears to be pivoting to "orchestration" (so hot right now) in order to take on OpenClaw. I will say, there may be an opening for a well done model aggregator, at least for now… [DeepView]
To commemorate what would have been Steve Jobs’ 71st birthday, there’s a lovely new "Letters to a Young Creator" project. [SJA]
As movie theaters continue to struggle, IMAX continues to surge. And this year brings The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s movie is the first feature shot entirely for the format. Also fun: seems like Dune 3 will block Avengers: Doomsday from launching in the format. The "Dunesday" battle is on! [THR]
It sounds like the second movie to be shot entirely for IMAX may be Joseph Kosinski’s upcoming Miami Vice?!
I Spy…
Per above, quite the list…
