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Even Flow

Brexit 2, Custom Drinks, For-Profit OpenAI, Amazon Bloat, Apple OS Day…

By M.G. Siegler • 16 Sept 2024

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Last night I caught Pearl Jam in Boston, which was truly awesome. I hadn't seen them live in over 20 years. I hadn’t been to Fenway Park in even longer. It was also perfect weather. The trifecta. And now I’m traveling back to my normal time zone. Dispatches will shift back to our regularly scheduled programming, accordingly. 🤘

🌎

Sent from Boston, Massachusetts

Some Thoughts...

🇪🇺 Thierry Breton Quits as France's EU Commissioner – I won't pretend to understand all the politics behind the move, but reading the various statements, you can't help but wonder if this isn't at least in part a reaction to the Mario Draghi report last week, which more or less said that the commission was overly focused on the wrong things, namely regulation. With Margrethe Vestager already on her way out in a couple months, Breton was seen as one of the candidates to replace her and thus, continuing to move the regulation ball forward. Instead, France is appointing someone who is more focused on "European competitiveness", it seems. From his statements, Breton is clearly pissed and undoubtedly will not go quietly into the night. But hey, at least he wasn't fined on his way out the door. Hopefully this signals a change in the EU's stance going forward. [Reuters]

🧋 The Customized Drink Is Out of Control – I appreciate the desire for self-expression and personalization, but a lot of these drinks both seem incredibly unhealthy – more like a dessert than, say, a coffee – and also take an incredible amount of time for baristas to make. What started sort of sweet, quite literally, with pumpkin spice lattes for the fall or whatever is now pretty annoying and really just fairly gross. I'm reminded more than a bit of Brawndo – but that just continues the general trend of Idiocracy becoming a documentary as time passes. "Emotional support beverages" is a great term, though. [NYT]

💰 Sam Altman told OpenAI Staff the Non-Profit Structure Will Change – Specifically, next year, it sounds like. And perhaps that's why another recent report talks about structure around the in-process funding, changing terms if the company isn't able to execute the restructure. Presumably this is more about timetables – clearly this is both complicated and controversial (and also necessary at this point) – though it also implies going beyond just removing the profit cap currently in place for investors and also perhaps becoming a B corp like Anthropic. Meanwhile, the company is adamant in their statements (indirectly confirming the changes) that a non-profit aspect of the company will remain important to OpenAI (implying there will be a change to the overall structure of the entity). One thing that hasn't been mentioned: what this will mean in terms of equity for Altman himself? This was rumored months ago – making sure he has some "skin in the game", and presumably that will be a part of this shift as well. [Fortune]

📧 Amazon Shifts Gears – The headlines will all be about the move back to five-days-a-week in-office (which isn't mandated until January 2025, fwiw), as it is here, but the more interesting element of the memo is about Amazon's attempt to cut down on bureaucracy and "operate like the world’s largest startup," as Andy Jassy puts it. They aim to do this largely by cutting down on managers – something which Meta and others have had to do as organizations scaled and got bloated. But I especially appreciate the "bureaucracy mailbox" to call out examples of such bloat. Many big companies have similar initiatives, but Jassy says he's going to read all of them. That sounds painful, but also perhaps needed if various reports on the recent trials and tribulations around Alexa are accurate. [CNBC]

📲 Happy iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15, visionOS 2, and watchOS 11 Day – For those who celebrate, the entire Apple operating system lineup was updated today – not sure that's ever happened with all of these different OSes all at once? That's an impressive feat, if nothing else. And, at least in my testing, all of the OSes have been nice and stable for weeks. As everyone is well aware by now, none of these updates including 'Apple Intelligence' but there are plenty of other nice updates – such as iPhone Mirroring! [Techmeme]

Some Analysis...

People Aren’t Buying the Apple Intelligence Hype, Literally

It’s just one report, but it points to the marketing risk/challenge…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Intel Strikes Back

The company comes out swinging with a trio of announcements…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

As An Aside...

A merger between DirecTV and Dish looks like it finally may happen – it was blocked in 2002 (and has been rumored nearly every year since then), but the world was quite different then. Now, with cable TV (including satellite) in an absolute free-fall, this merger would prolong the inevitable, giving the companies time to try to shift to internet services. In a way, it's like when Sirius and XM Radio merged in the satellite radio space. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Case in point: DirecTV's lack of leverage is likely what proloned the carriage dispute with Disney... [NYT]
- That disrupt is finally resolved, by the way. Sort of wild that they let it impact some NFL games, but they got it done before most week 2 games. The key was once again letting Disney+ be sold through other DirecTV packages. [NYT]
The FDA officially approved Apple's new sleep apnea detection for the Apple Watch, which goes live soon with watchOS 11. Pretty great and powerful feature for folks who suffer from this (and more importantly, those who don't know they do). Wild they can do this via a software update. [TechCrunch]
- This follows the FDA approval late last week of usage of the AirPods Pro 2 as hearing aids. Apple was indeed rightfully confident in noting these features would likely be approved soon during their event. It feels like they were just holding back any formal filings until after the event so neither feature (which are both software updates) leaked. [NPR]
I suppose we have to wait to hear the details about World Liberty Financial, but I'll also point out that the phase "the grift that keeps on giving" remains right there for the taking... [NYT]
The most interesting element of Netflix holding talks to bring the 'Hot Ones' show to their service is that they want to do it live – continuing that trend for Netflix. But this makes more sense than, say, a standard talk show (or even sports), as re-watchability when it's not live will still be high. [Bloomberg 🔒]
A popular sub-game within Roblox, Dress to Impress, is all about fashion and is fairly massive, breaking out of demographic molds. Always fun/fascinating to see how the community shapes the service. [NYT]
Here's a breakdown of why OpenAI gave the new 'o1' (aka "Strawberry") model a “medium” rating for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapon risk. I'm not sure it's time to evoke Skynet just yet, but some of this is... worth a read at least! [Transformer]
- More along those lines… [NYT]
One interesting, smaller new feature in iOS 18 is "Music Haptics". It uses the iPhone's haptic engine to vibrate your device in sync with the music. It's an accessibility feature as a way to better experience music for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, but it's sort of interesting for everyone else too – and easy to toggle on and off in Apple Music. [MacRumors]