Spyglass - Bears of Seasons

Finally finished season 3 of The Bear last night, which was fine. I didn't actively dislike it as some people seemed to, it was just that... not a lot happened. It's almost like they shot too much footage and decided to cut it into two seasons – which is apparently what basically happened. In that regard, it's sort the opposite of the latest season of House of the Dragon.

But all good, Slow Horses is back today and I look forward to learning how Jackson Lamb rescued River Cartwright from Mordor.

Some Thoughts...

💰 Safe Superintelligence Raises $1B – No surprise here given that this is the new AI shop co-founded by Ilya Sutskever with the stated goal of, well, being more like what OpenAI was originally like. But importantly without OpenAI's original sin: SSI is a for-profit entity from day one. That said, the goal is not to focus on making money, but instead to focus on making AGI (or "superintelligence" as it were). The investor overlap with OpenAI – Sequoia, a16z, etc – is, of course, of note. One name not listed here: Elon Musk. Perhaps he was too conflicted with xAI, but certainly he would love to back a team making life even more complicated for his old company. Valued at $5B with 10 employees (versus the $100B+ OpenAI is seeking, with 1,700 employees) the talent wars are perhaps going to kick into another gear here... [Reuters]

🔎 SearchGPT Isn't Particularly Good at Search Yet – Speaking of OpenAI, WaPo spoke to some people with access to their new search product and the feedback isn't great. To be fair, it's early and this is limited for a reason. But also, it feels like this isn't the type of thing that's actually going to displace Google. Whatever eventually displaces Google is unlikely to look anything like Google. Hopefully OpenAI just views it as a sometimes useful tool in ChatGPT's growing tool belt. [The Washington Post 🔒]

📝 The Remarkable Paper Pro is Outrageous and Luxurious – I'm a big fan of Remarkable's e-ink tablets, I've had two of them. Now they're back with a new "Pro" version that brings color into the equation. It's expensive, but it does look great (especially that keyboard cover, which just adds to the expense). They used some clever hacks to get this all to work well, looking as good as it does. It all just showcases how far Amazon has fallen from the state of the art after ushering in the market with the Kindle. It's weird, but also not that weird. [The Verge]

Some Analysis...

Snap Goes Long on Ads and Longer on Words

They look to add some meat to the business, animal-style…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

No Fun: the Growing List of ‘AI PC’ Problems

‘Copilot+ PCs’ clearly have a major problem with a small little software category called ‘gaming’…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

As An Aside...

• There are bad days, then there are losing $279B in one day, bad days. NVIDIA yesterday had "the deepest ever single-day decline in market value for a U.S. company". That leaves it up a "mere" 118% year to date... [Reuters]
  • The drop came the same day the company got a DOJ subpoena, escalating the antitrust case against them... [Bloomberg 🔒]
  • BTW: Meta previously had the largest one-day drop at $232B in early 2022...
• Shares is Trump Media – the shell company for his Truth Social network – are off 70% from their highs as the lockup of shares nears expiration. They're still valued nearly infinitely higher than they should be, but that's obviously not what this is about – it's wild that a presidential candidate has such a clear path to funnel him money outside of the normal fundraising mechanisms. [NYT]
• Good news/bad news for Microsoft. Bad news first, the UK determined that their "hackquisition" of Inflection (the first of many such deals now) does indeed qualify as a merger. The good news is that they didn't view Inflection as relevant enough in the AI space to block it retroactively. [TechCrunch]
  • Here's Joel Bamford, the Executive Director of the CMA, writing directly on the matter [LinkedIn]
  • In other Microsoft news, an event entitled 'Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2' is just about the most Microsoftian name possible for an event. [The Verge]
• Adiós a Miami [Bloomberg 🔒]
• It's getting to the point where each new day brings more bad news for Intel – today's is that Broadcom's tests of their new "18A" process did not go well. Pat Gelsinger is more or less betting the company on these new processes... [Reuters]
• Following up on yesterday's bullet about xAI's new "Colossus" 100,000 NVIDIA H100 chip supercomputer, there's some skepticism that it's fully operational – that Elon Musk may be, get this, exaggerating – but if it is, OpenAI and environmental groups may be concerned that it's the Death Star. [The Information 🔒]
• A big new horror movie just dropped: it's Xitter, but on your TV. Is anyone going to watch this? People do slow down to look at car wrecks, so, maybe? (Probably not – but hey, TV = revenue if you're Linda Yaccarino.) [TechCrunch]

A Golden Oldie...

‘OpenAI Original’

Technically, Ilya Sutskever’s new startup is called ‘Safe Superintelligence’ but come on, this is anti-OpenAI.

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

And I Quote...

"If they took that away, or WhatsApp, it would hurt. But people don’t use X."

-- Shirley Sampaio, a 56-year-old jewelry saleswoman in Brazil, talking about the country's recent ban of the social network. It's notable because Xitter, when it was still Twitter, was a legitimately big deal in Brazil.