Mind the AI
Synthetic Thinking • AI Work • Illicit Distillation • Moon City • xAI Co-Founders Quitting • M&A Back • IBM's HR Play • YouTube on Vision Pro • & More...
Heading back on the road tomorrow, as always, will be posting here and there. For now, there’s a lot below. Including two essays that seemed to resonate with folks:
🧠 It’s The Thought That Counts
The diminished state of thinking could be decimated by AI...
📊 Love It If We Made It
AI will disrupt work. We will adapt.
I Note…
⚗️ OpenAI Goes After DeepSeek Distillation
One element of last year’s "DeepSeek Moment" was the notion that the company may have achieved their results, at least in part, by leveraging the work of the US AI labs. Certainly, this was true with Meta, thanks in part to their Llama models being "open" (open weight, not fully open source). But OpenAI — and Microsoft — put out the notion that DeepSeek also built on the back of their GPT models, even though, despite the company name, these models were decidedly not open. Then all of the fury faded amidst all the other AI chaos. Well, here we go again. Why now? Undoubtedly because DeepSeek is on the verge of another model release for which their are whispers that it could be another such "moment". That plus the ongoing NVIDIA/AI chip situation has OpenAI seeing an opening to push for US government action. Feels like this could be the next big battle in AI. [Bloomberg 🔒]
🌘 Elon Pivots to the Moon
On the surface, it seems weird that a person who has spent the past decade saying that we need to think bigger than the Moon and focus on Mars is now… focused entirely on the Moon. Why? To hear Elon tell it, it’s about building a lunar base that can shoot satellites into space. Why? Oh, you know, because it was in a book with a killer title. I mean, he says as much in his recent Cheeky Pint interview. Basing your strategy on 60 year old science fiction is one thing, but also when you’re a decade removed from your first claim of Mars within two years… the "distraction" becomes the attraction. But really, this all seems to be part of the narrative shift around "data centers in space" which Elon has successfully pivoted the conversation to, at least in the press. Creating $1.25T companies overnight will do that… Reset the timer, less than 10 years until Moon City! [NYT]
🧐 The AI Lab Co-Founder Quitting Epidemic Continues
Just days after xAI’s fifth co-founder left the company, a sixth joined him. That’s now fully half of the co-founders which are gone. This follows the tradition of OpenAI, where, of course, Elon Musk himself was one of those co-founders to have left. And the legacy has continued to the OpenAI "constellations" in the form of both Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab losing co-founders. This situation here seems to be overwork mixed with the aforementioned SpaceX tie-up creating immediate liquidity (versus being locked up for another year-plus if/when SpaceX IPOs). As a result, a re-org has xAI split into four divisions: Grok (chatbot), Coding (so hot right now), Imagine (video), and Macrohard (great pun, but also agentic software). [FT 🔒]
💰 It Looks Like Tech M&A Is Back on the Menu Boys
Gail Slater "resigns" after less than a year on the job. I had been tracking her appointment because it seemed like decidedly bad news for M&A as she was clearly going to be aggressive on the antitrust front. Maybe not Lina Khan aggressive, but certainly more so than what you might expect from the Trump administration. Then again, her stances seemed to mirror those of JD Vance, for whom she was a longtime close advisor. But with tech’s knees firmly bent in this second administration, it seems pretty clear she wasn’t greasing those deal wheels enough so… bye. This is seemingly good news for Netflix buying Warner Bros – well, unless the administration decides that Paramount should win that deal. [Axios]
💼 IBM Will Take Your Tired, Your Sick, Your Entry Level Jobs
While there’s obviously great PR optics around the company saying they’ll "triple" entry-level hiring for "all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do", if you read more of what IBM’s HR head is saying, it’s essentially that they’ll have these new workers focus on others things. And that’s in part just to get people in the door to build them up to become the next wave of managers and more senior folks at IBM. This is sort of the open-ended question and problem right now: if AI kills entry-level jobs, how do people, well, enter these companies? Are all of your senior hires going to come from other companies? Many of whom may face the same entry-level issues? So IBM’s move seems reasonable: bring people in to "learn the ropes" as it were and do different tasks. Of course, that still costs money! Yes, you’re "investing in people" — said like a true HR exec — but will Wall Street buy that? [Bloomberg 🔓]
🥽 Let There Be YouTube (on Vision Pro)
A very legitimate "finally". I dusted off the old device last night to try it out and it’s… YouTube on the Vision Pro! As an app, it’s about as barebones as they come — no special "environments" etc — but it’s all it really needs to be. It’s a great way to view YouTube videos — especially professionally produced ones. And yes, there is a dedicated tab for 3D/Immersive videos, but they’re honestly pretty underwhelming versus the "truly" immersive video that Apple produces. This is obviously because these weren’t shot for Vision Pro, but instead for any old VR headset. Still, nice to have. The Vision Pro is Apple’s TV; it needed YouTube. But this is all so simple that you have to wonder if releasing it wasn’t a part of Apple and Google’s broader recent situationship… I’m not saying YouTube released a visionOS app in exchange for Apple going with Gemini but… dangling such a carrot could not have hurt! [MacRumors]
The Inner Ring…
🛰️ Sometimes It’s Too Slow
With data centers in space. “For shure”...
📺 YouTube TV Finally Kills Cable
Their smaller bundles wound the beast, the sports bundle ends it...
I Quote…
"As I’ve got older and grumpier, who I work with is more important than what I work on, and that’s really driven choices about how I’m spending my time and who I’m spending it with. I’m done working with assholes. I’m so happy that we can place creative excellence right at the center of what we’re doing."
— Jony Ive, unplugged, talking to Alex Heath at Sources during the showcase of LoveFrom’s work with Ferrari for their all-electric "Luce" vehicle.
I Wrote…
🏎️ A Car By the People Who Would Have Designed the Apple Car
Let there be Luce!
🥴 Apple Cannot Be Sirious
What’s worse: that Apple can’t fix Siri, or that they can’t stop the leaks about how they can’t fix Siri?
Asides…
As it turns out, AI may not reduce workloads, but instead leads to people finding more work to do. Shocking, I know. [HBR]
What is a killer domain name worth in 2026? Around $70M, it seems. Though the crypto.com guy buying ai.com is clearly a playbook thing. [FT 🔒]
Apple to allow for system-level third-party AI… within CarPlay. Sort of. Imagine if you could just pick your own Siri brain? It would have saved Apple some headaches! (And created a lot more!) [Bloomberg 🔒]
Speaking of voice-based AI, thanks to a lawsuit, we now know that the first OpenAI device will ship after February 2027. (It could be announced sooner, of course.) And it won’t be named/branded with "io", which seems like a good thing for those of who will undoubtedly write about the device endlessly. [Wired]
Meanwhile, the reports that OpenAI might go public in 2026 was a surprise to many senior people inside the company. It’s going to take a while to figure out ads, and if that’s a key to monetization… [NYT]
SaaSpocolypse Now! [FT 🔒]
Um, will the next AirPods have cameras? Unclear, but Apple is clearly working on such technology. But will it be more about tracking Vision Pro-like gestures rather than capturing the world around you? Maybe a little of both? [9to5Mac]
I do appreciate that SpaceX’s internal version of Grok is called ‘Spok’. [WSJ 🔒]
Can Court TV work as a YouTube channel? Probably! [NYT]
Apple buys out all the rights for their hit show Severance to bring production fully in-house, apparently for just under $70M. Netflix started out the same way, and about half of Apple’s slate is now in-house. [Deadline]
I Spy…
The Information ran the most recent CapEx numbers from Big Tech and showcased just how close they are to running beyond their cash flows — or actually over them, in Amazon’s case. Let there be debt! Strange new methods that make auditors uncomfortable! Bonds! 100 year ones! Everyone but Apple!
