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The Spyglass Dispatch is a newsletter sent on weekdays featuring links and commentary on timely topics found around the web. Feel free to forward it to others who can sign up and view previous dispatches here. You can also view this particular dispatch on the web here.
Since I'm linking to a bunch of related items below, here's the take I wrote last week about the content moderation changes at Meta – and specifically, my read as to why Mark Zuckerberg is going down this path. Yes, it's political, but years of triangulation would seem to suggest that it's a bit more than that as well... (Meanwhile, the swirl continues into week two...)
I Think...🐕 Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs – The early DOGE details are starting to trickle out: they apparently aim for two reps for most government agencies and are currently coordinating everything over Signal. Most who join the effort will be doing six months of unpaid work, but some, including Elon Musk, will only be allowed to work for 130 days a year so as not to trip over into being actual government employees (and thus enable the disclosures and divestitures required there). I'm sure that will be followed to a 'T'. How are they going to do all this work in such a short amount of time? Insane hours and "AI" – naturally. DOGE itself isn't likely to become an official org outside of the government, it's more just a brand. Look, I hope they can make some real progress and change here. No matter your political bent, everyone can agree that the government is bloated and looking at the cruft built up over the years with fresh eyes is a worthy endeavor. But do I believe massive change is likely as a result of all this? If I'm being honest (and aiming to be correct), no. For the obvious reasons. DOGE will make recommendations. Congress will have to enact those changes. Narrator: Congress will not enact most of the changes. That will lead to tension, and a likely unravel the whole thing. But I do like the approach of aiming for more change and "settling" for less, which Musk has essentially admitted is the strategy. And it must be to hope for anything here. [NYT] 😎 Mark Zuckerberg Slams Apple: ‘They haven’t invented anything great in a while’ – Fun roundup of all the swipes Zuck took at Apple during his Joe Rogan interview (I'm not yet through the 3-hour slog listen). Does he have some points? Sure, but they're buried under about ten disingenuous layers of spin. Just be honest! Honestly, it's enough to make you worry that his other recent stances on things such a free speech and content moderation aren't sincere either... As Chance Miller notes, almost all of Meta's recent success is by way of acquisition – Oculus, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. Zuck must feel emboldened to make that claim though against Apple given the buzz the new 'Orion' glasses are getting – but those are years away from shipping (and CTRL Labs, another acquisition that I happened to be to have invested in back in the day, seems like it should get some credit there!). They do get credit for the Smart Glasses success (with Ray-Ban), but they weren't exactly first there. And it's early – as Zuck notes, Apple is likely coming for that world (see: below)... If they don't get "beat by someone" first. [9to5Mac] 🍎 Apple’s 2025: iPhone Overhaul, Smart Home Push and AI Catch-Up – Mark Gurman's latest report is more a summary of what's to come this year from Apple. And assuming he's correct, it certainly feels like more of an iterative year, with some stage-setting for bigger things to come in 2026. The big launch will clearly be the new 'iPhone Air' design, but given that it's not the top-of-the-line iPhone, while likely being more expensive than the lower-end models, it's not clear just how big of a deal it will be from a sales-perspective (though it will get buzz simply thanks to looking "new"). It sounds like the new 'HomeHub' thing might be delayed a bit to give Apple more time to get the right AI smarts into the software ('homeOS' derived from iOS/iPadOS?). I'm still slightly confused by the market for that device as well, but that's all based on the rumors about what it is right now. If Apple can showcase two-to-three real use-cases, and if the price is right, it could work to some extent. Or, as is often the case with Apple, it may take a couple iterations to get it right. Speaking of, it sounds like the second version of a Vision Pro is still more like a 2026 thing. Regardless, the "real" key in that lineup will be the cheaper/smaller variety which is undoubtedly coming after 2026. Though Gurman does note continued work/exploration on Smart Glasses like the Ray-Ban Metas, which probably should be a 2026 thing if they don't want to mistime that market. But yeah, 2025 sounds relatively boring. [Bloomberg 🔒] 📺 CES 2025: An Abundance of (AI) Experimentation – As always, a great, long report from Steven Sinofsky on the state of CES by way of his walking the grounds in Vegas so you (and more importantly, I) don't have to. That AI was permeating most things ("everyone at CES got the memo") is hardly a surprise given the state of the overall world – and certainly the technology world – at the moment. But just as with the broader trend, a lot of that infusion remains experimental it seems. The only company really, truly making a massive amount of money from AI right now happened to be the big keynote: NVIDIA – his picture of Jensen Huang's address (I'll paste it down below) is pretty incredible. Enough to make you think Apple should go back to live keynotes (more on that below too). As Sinofsky notes, despite the 'C' element of the name, CES isn't really for consumers these days, and hasn't been for a while. Thought yes, a lot of TV tech, as always. And in general, screens everywhere, on everything. [Hardcore Software]
I Note...- The new US AI chip export rules breaks the world into 3 tiers: the US and its clear allies, those at clear odds with the US, and everyone else. That latter bucket is the tricky one as it includes countries in the Middle East that are now aiming to invest a ton of capital in AI... [NYT]
- Probably not coincidentally, OpenAI released their own vision for 'AI in America' which includes a bit about the need to allow entities affiliated with the Middle East to invest in American AI companies... [NYT]
- The framing of them as "swing states" seems clever and relatable giving the just-behind-us-election season. And it should resonate with the US given the other deals they've made to help break such entities away from Chinese tech. Anyway, all of this is up in the air and subject to change with Trump entering the office next week...
- A couple months ago, I noted how wild it was that The Washington Post lost $77 in 2023. Well, in 2024, that loss was apparently closer to $100M. I'm honestly just not even sure how that's possible. [WSJ 🔒]
- It's too bad the Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man, isn't resonating at the US box office, earning just $1.1M last weekend. Then again, it "isn’t resonating on a larger scale after opting to feature the British pop star as a computer-generated monkey." Not just a scene, the entire movie. 🙉 [THR]
- Ghost looks back and forward to their Fediverse work to date. Ghost 6.0 coming at some point in 2025 will feature ActivityPub in a major way. I'm still not 100% sold on it taking off, but I like the big, bold bet. [Ghost]
- You don't hear much about HP these days (especially since it broke into two companies a decade ago), but HPE (the enterprise one) seemingly got a big recent win in the form of a $1B AI server deal with xAI (thanks perhaps to a bet on liquid-cooling tech – all the rage right now, with Microsoft and others perhaps having issues implementing). [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Just as OpenAI tries to a for-profit, Mastodon is now trying to go fully non-profit, with founder and CEO Eugen Rochko saying he'll fully cede control to such an entity. That will help differentiate the network against Bluesky and obviously Xitter and Threads. [TechCrunch]
- Sounds like John Gruber is coming around on the idea that Apple should start doing live keynotes again after seeing the buzz NVIDIA is generating out of CES. Of course, they're also at the forefront of the most exciting industry at the moment, with a charismatic and maverick CEO... [Daring Fireball]
- I still bet/think one of the Apple keynotes will be live this year. Maybe the iPhone 17 unveil. Gotta pull that 'iPhone Air' out of a manila envelope...
- The tick-tock of how Mark Zuckerberg carried out the new content moderation policies seems to place a large emphasis on the meeting with Trump after the election but also cites the "dual purpose" of the change: the other being to get Meta more in line with Zuck's actual stance (the point of my post on the topic last week) [NYT]
- One takeaway from Peter Thiel's op-ed is that he believes the new administration will lead to us getting to the bottom of the JFK assassination and the origins of COVID. The other: 2016 wasn't the aberration, 2020 was. [FT 🔒]
- TSMC is now making 4nm chips in Arizona (not 3nm yet though). But 2nm remains in the works for 2028. [Reuters]
I Quote..."After years of pretending to be Democrats, Big Tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration. Beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors."
-- Tim Sweeney, not mincing words in giving his thoughts on the current wave of support for President-Elect Trump from the Big Tech leaders. Of course, the Epic CEO has his own political reasons for such a stance (and comment). Sounds like he won't be making the $1M fealty payment.
I Spy...Steven Sinofsky on the Jensen Huang NVIDIA keynote: To say the Nvidia keynote was the big event would understate things. This is super weird for me to say since I was there when Bill Gates keynoted the conference and even announced Xbox (along with Tablet PC and Windows 2000). Microsoft was also the largest market cap company at the time (and also under intense antitrust scrutiny) and the darling of Wall Street. While waiting in line at the event to enter I even saw long-time CTA CEO Gary Shapiro (owners of the show) and had a quick word about this compared to those old keynotes before he showed me the shortcut to get in. The excitement, energy, and scale of this keynote dwarfed anything I could recall. It was at a scale we saw for some Windows events in China where getting large crowds wasn’t ever a problem. Estimates were 10-12,000 people at the keynote held in the Mandalay Bay theater. It was pure insanity to think this was happening because of…graphics cards ;-)
The picture is worth a thousand words. Or in Sinofsky's case: 9,000 or so... 😄
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