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The Spyglass Dispatch is a newsletter 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. Yes, yes, it's me again. I just had too much that I couldn't quite get to writing about this week, while still also managing to write quite a bit (linked to below). I'm still just about halfway through Jensen Huang's NVIDIA keynote. And I also recorded a three-hour podcast, largely on the Apple AI fiasco, with John Gruber, which should be dropping soon. Oh yes, and it's March Madness #GoBlue. For now, some links and thoughts. 💡 Listening to "Needle & the Damage Done" an Eddie Vedder cover of Neil Young's classic that just dropped. Both have obviously seen far too much that damage done within their peer groups, sadly.
I Think...🧠 CHM Releases AlexNet Source Code – The big news is right there in the headline, that this is being open sourced, thanks to Google, which technically bought the rights to AlexNet when they acquired DNNresearch, the company started by Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, and Alex Krizhevsky (the namesake of AlexNet). But the CHM's backstory on the history of deep learning is a nice, succinct read taking you from the first neural networks of the 1950s up to today. From Frank Rosenblatt to Hinton to Yann LeCun to Fei-Fei Li to NVIDIA. And from there, it's just wild how we went from the AlexNet paper being published in 2012 to the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. After 60+ years of all the pieces being put in place, the last mile was ten short years before everything exploded into the Age of AI we know today. [CHM] 🤑 An AI Startup Couldn’t Beat Microsoft. So It Joined Them – My title would have been "The Art of the Hackquisition". This excerpt from AI Valley, the forthcoming book by Gary Rivlin, seemingly closes the chapter on what actually happened to bring the Inflection team in house at Microsoft – even though it absolutely, positively was not an M&A deal – wink, wink – because that clearly wouldn't have passed the regulators of the last administration. So instead we got Microsoft paying around $650M to hold a job fair of sorts at the Inflection HQ after it was announced that the founders were bailing. Seed investors apparently got a 1.5x return, while Series A investors only got a 1.1x return – but both groups were allowed to roll over some of that investment into the newly gutted Inflection, pivoting to enterprise licensing with an entirely new team. You don't hear too much from them these days. Meanwhile, former Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman is trying like hell to get Microsoft's consumer AI business off the ground (with seemingly not much success so far). What an interesting moment in time for such deals – which Microsoft likely pioneered thanks to almost having to do the same thing with OpenAI, post-Sam Altman coup. These days, regular old fashioned M&A seems back on the menu... [Bloomberg 🔒] 📰 Yahoo sells TechCrunch to Investment Firm Regent – Not too much to say here – I wrote up some thoughts just over a year ago when TechCrunch went through some layoffs. I was involved what feels like a long, long time ago – when it first sold (to Aol), in fact. No, this isn't hugely shocking, though the timing seems a bit weird given the property is just about to celebrate its 20th anniversary and Yahoo itself is celebrating 30 years. On that milestone, Steven Levy sat down with Yahoo chief Jim Lanzone for a Wired interview published just today, but there was no mention that they would be dumping media properties (though the entire talk is basically how all that matters is finance and sports – and the hope that AI can supercharge those). Perhaps Regent, in the midst of hoovering up a bunch of other properties (PCWorld, Macworld, etc), just had good timing in inquiring about TechCrunch. Also weird that it was seemingly only TechCrunch, not any of Yahoo's other content brands, like Engadget? But it was always going to be sold/spun-off again. Bundling and unbundling and all that. [Axios] 💰 Microsoft Chose Not to Exercise $12 Billion CoreWeave Option – Yeah, this is essentially what I guessed was going on here. Not that hard to figure out as it's a continuation of a trend for Microsoft pulling back (sorry, not piling into, or however Microsoft would prefer it be framed) from external data center spend – while maintaining their own $80B in CapEx, as they're quick to note every time – in light of the change in status of the OpenAI relationship. And OpenAI just essentially picked up what Microsoft put down (the extra capacity). And as Rohan Goswami and Liz Hoffman note, fittingly, at least right now they are probably paying for it with Microsoft's money. (Any update on that SoftBank mega round?) Regardless, this last-minute maneuvering may have salvaged CoreWeave's IPO, which is seemingly coming in a bit soft. The Sam Altman quotes featured in the road show are clearly meant to calm nerves here... [Semafor]
I Wrote...Quite a lot, as mentioned (and more below!)...
I Note...- The new Pixel 9a, with the same Tensor G4 chip as the top-of-the-line (and far more expensive) Pixels, does seem like a pretty great deal at $499. And I dig the (nearly) flat back – which Apple's new iPhone 16e also almost gets, but overall looks weaker here at a higher price point. Google gives you actual color options too! [Engadget]
- Perplexity is said to be in talks for a new round which would value the startup at $18B – just three months after it tripled its valuation to $9B, which was triple its valuation just six months prior – which was triple its valuation just a couple months prior to that. So the big news here, I guess, is that they failed to triple the valuation again? Slackers. Still, the OpenAI Constellations continue to gain mass... At the same time, Perplexity is getting awfully pricey for would-be acquirers, just sayin... [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Bob Iger seems both for and against AI. A true politician in waiting. But seriously, it sounds like he fully understands that it can be a powerful – perhaps the "most powerful" – tool for Hollywood to leverage, and Disney does have a nice history at the forefront of certain tech. But, you know, he has a lot of mouths to feed too. [THR]
- Web search inside of Anthropic's Claude, at last. While I didn't see it mentioned in the coverage, ChatGPT tells me that DuckDuckGo is powering it. But perhaps that's a biased answer. [Verge]
- BYD's 5-minute-charge technology seems like a milestone moment for the EV space. But the Chinese affiliation also seems like it will harms some level of wide, fast adoption, might it be a sort of reverse-DeepSeek situation, where suddenly everyone can achieve it? [FT 🔒]
- Meanwhile, Tesla can't catch a break – well, unless you mean in the form of Cybertrucks actually breaking. They're recalling "nearly all" of them. [NYT]
- The Boston Celtics were just sold for $6.1B – the highest price ever paid for a North American sports team. Sort of wild that it topped all the NFL teams sales to date – ever so slightly (and clearly intentionally) beating the $6.05B the Washington Commanders fetched in 2023. Bill Chisholm, the managing partner of Symphony Technology Group, and a lifelong Celtics fan, is the lead. [Athletic 🔒]
- Talking on stage with Microsoft's Brad Smith, Bill Gates revealed that they nearly passed over Satya Nadella for the CEO role post-Steve Ballmer. He makes it clear that he and Smith wanted Nadella but others did not. Obviously no word on who those others wanted, but hard to imagine how things could have gone better for the company than they have under Nadella. [Fortune]
- Jensen Huang also directly credited AlexNet this week on stage with leading NVIDIA down the path of AI – first with self-driving cars which is directly related to all of the AI work now, of course. Talk about a hell of a decade... [TechCrunch]
I Quote..."My best assessment is that in the next five to 10 years, none of the startups in the consumer AI space are going to make it."
-- Mustafa Suleyman, giving his rationale for selling out totally not selling (per the item up top) to Microsoft. He and Reid Hoffman (also a Microsoft board member – um, yeah) made that call realizing the tens of billions of dollars they'd have to raise for Inflection to have any shot. It's a quote to bookmark, for sure – and while I generally agree, the thawing regulatory environment may help alleviate some of the main dynamics I was most concerned about.
I Also Wrote...
I Also Quote..."This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong."
-- Jensen Huang, humorously backtracking from his comments just a couple months ago that quantum computing was probably something like 20 years away from being viable. I mean, he sort of had to backtrack given he was addressing an audience at, um, NVIDIA's "Quantum Day" event...
I Spy...Beyond all the other things Netflix is great at, it feels like they could thrive in perpetuity simply picking up the obviously nostalgia plays (a tangent of something I once wrote about way back in the day on that site that was just sold again...).
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