Spyglass - The Chaos Ladder

Hopefully this evening isn't quite as chaotic as last night when just after the Meta Connect keynote – with their big "Orion" AR Glasses reveal – ended, OpenAI was seemingly thrown back into chaos, with CTO Mira Murati announcing her departure. You know that wasn't planned for the simple reason that if they wanted to bury it – or to at least attempt to bury it (narrator: they would not have been able to bury it) – they could have timed any announcement during said keynote. Ideally right as Mark Zuckerberg is putting on those giant shades while tossing shade at the competition.

Or, you know, wait til Friday afternoon like everyone else. We used to be a society.

Some Analysis...

Meta’s Frenetic Connect Keynote

Weird pacing, awkward timing, cool products, and eternal optimism…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

The Microsoft AI Newscaster

The company is clearly trying to create a daily consumer habit…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

OpenAI’s Wild Ride

Chaos is a series of coincidences?

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Some Thoughts...

📺 LG Smart TVs Now Show Screensaver Ads – Last year, I bought a nice, new top-of-the line OLED LG TV. It's great. I've long gone with LG mainly because I liked the webOS (old school!) interface more than the Android ones most other TVs seem to have these days. But the reality now is that I basically never use the actual UI of the TV beyond a few menus as the device is always set to the input with my Apple TV box. But the other day I clicked over to the main menu and was surprised by how cluttered it was with tiles that were effectively ads – the same bullshit Roku is pulling. Now LG is going a step further, adding such ads to the screen saver capabilities. This may be a bridge too far for me. I know you can turn them off, but unless LG plans to give me a massive rebate on my original purchase, my next TV will be some screen that doesn't shove ads into my family's faces after spending a lot of money on the device. (Save us, Apple, he says for the 20th year in a row.) At least these guys are honest about the trade! [FlatPanelsHD]

☃️ Kristen Bell Was Against Meta AI Before She Was A Voice In It – I'm shocked – shocked! – to learn that the actress was adamantly opposed to such technology, telling Meta to "get rid of the Ai program" in some sort of chain letter-like Instagram Stories post – until they offered to pay her millions of dollars to use her voice in said AI program. Now she wants to help build that snowman. Funny that. Anyway, she's probably wise to take the money since it will be shut down in a few months and no one will ever speak of it – or hear her speak through it, again. [The Verge]

☎️ AI Hardware is in its Flip-Phone Phase – It's more like it's in its Gordon Gekko/Zach Morris giant brick-sized cellphone phase – flip-phones were great and popular, and they're making a comeback! But I digress... The point is that it's early in AI and shipping hardware is extremely hard – we just saw more proof of that these past two weeks from billion and trillion dollar public companies who showed off AR glasses that should be ready to ship in anywhere from 3 to 30 years. I root for Rabbit because it's a startup, but the reality is that they're not doing themselves any favors by over-promising and under-delivering. They need to start so much smaller, doing things the big players would never do. Unless you're that new startup from Jony Ive and Sam Altman, I suppose... [Fast Company]

Some Links...

• The CEO of Masimo has quit the company after being replaced by activists on the board. Seemingly this is about a massive acquisition he made, but if you’ve heard of the company, it’s likely because of a dispute they’re in the midst of with a certain most valuable company in the world over blood oxygen sensing patents. Oddly, it’s not mentioned here, but well, the new leadership would like to exit the consumer health space. Who you gonna call? [Reuters]
• Meta takes control of the dot com domain for Threads. The startup that had owned it was acquired by Shopify earlier this year - and guess who is on Meta’s official advisory council... No word on if they’ll switch over or keep the dot net for cool cred. [TechCrunch]
• Is Megalopolis going to flop? Standing ovations – lol – and AI reviews – lol – aside, it sure seems like it. Some analysts are predicting as little as a $5M opening weekend. I hope not, but what a strange trip to theaters this has been for Francis Ford Coppola this go around. [NYT]
• Sadly, iMore is no more, as one of the second-wave of Apple blogs, it rose under the watch of Rene Ritchie and yielded an interesting diaspora notably with Ritchie going to YouTube (after initially finding success as a creator on the platform) and Serenity Caldwell now at Apple itself. [iMore]
• A bit lost in the jam-packed Meta Connect keynote yesterday: Facebook and Instagram are likely about to get inundated with AI-generated images thanks to prompting from Meta within those services. We're a long way from sharing real and/or filtered photos with your friends... [The Verge]
• The new trailer for The Last of Us season 2 looks great. And I promise I'd say that even if it wasn't set to a Pearl Jam song (from the game!). [THR]

And I Quote...

"For now, I think the way to look at these glasses is as a time machine. They are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting."

-- Mark Zuckerberg during his keynote address at Meta's Connect conference. This was his attempt to frame the "Orion" AR glasses he showed off, which are still years away from being in consumers' hands – largely because they would cost something like $10,000 to sell right now. Instead, selected developers will get to play around with this technology for now.

Apple had a similar framing when launching the Vision Pro, but pushed ahead on a consumer launch of their $3,500 device. I believe history will prove this to be a mistake and they should have taken Meta's (and Snap's) approach...