A New Paramount Decree
SoftBank's Intel Stake • Apple's Cheap MacBook • Perplexity's Browser Buys • Terence Stamp RIP • Meta's Washington Commanders • Daniel Day-Lewis Returns
Relative to say, buying just the rights — just the rights, mind you — to the UFC for $7.7B, I think the newly Skydance-owned Paramount buying IMAX would be such a cheap and easy way to make a bigger splash in Hollywood. More thoughts:
🎞️ I Decree: Paramount Should Buy IMAX
A new idea for a new company looking to double-down on theatrical...
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 I Think…
💰 SoftBank Buys $2B Stake in Intel
Suddenly, everyone is buying up Intel shares, it seems. Following the um, US government working on a deal to buy 10% (well, likely in exchange for their continued CHIPS Act money, which seems to have gone from a grant to an equity deal?), SoftBank will now own just about 2% – nice and clean since Intel is worth almost exactly $100B at the moment. It's a nice show of confidence in Lip-Bu Tan's turnaround efforts, though it still doesn't bring on board the major partner needed for the foundry business – which SoftBank may or may not also eventually buy – unless SoftBank intends to push ARM towards Intel as they look to start making their own chips... SoftBank will be the 5th largest owner of Intel – though pushed to 6th when Trump gets his taste. Yes, if that deal happens, the US government will be the largest shareholder of Intel. State-sponsored silicon, anyone? [CNBC]
💻 Apple's $599 12.9" MacBook
There's seemingly a lot of smoke now billowing around the notion that Apple is full-steam ahead on an A18-powered MacBook. Two new tidbits via DigiTimes – a 12.9" screen, which would be a bit smaller than the 13.6" screen found on current MacBook Airs, and a $599 price point. The latter would truly be a killer "feature" for many and I suspect sales would rocket out of the gate. (And it would seemingly undercut the "special" Walmart MacBook.) It would be interesting to watch what this did to Apple's margins, of course. But using a year-old mobile chip and a smaller screen (and probably less RAM?) should make it feasible. The next question: would it be branded as simply the 'MacBook' once again? Or a new 'Air'? I'm assuming the former, and it's essentially what many of us have long-wanted, a return to the 12" form-factor, now powered by Apple Silicon. Would it come in fun colors? [MacRumors]
🕸️ Before Chrome Bid, Perplexity Was Hunting for Browsers
I guess the most surprising thing here is that on the verge of launching their Comet browser, they were still trying to buy up others. I get that strategy for Chrome – there are 3.4B reasons to do that deal, if you can, which you can't – but for the others? Perplexity would then just have two (or more) browsers at sub-scale. I guess maybe they would have shifted the Comet strategy if they could have bought Arc from Browser Company (ahead of the launch of their own, new AI browser, Dia), perhaps taking that (small but passionate) user base and plugging it right into Comet? But that probably would have backfired as, in my experience at least, Comet isn't nearly as well-designed or thought-through as Arc (or Dia). More interesting here is that OpenAI and Browser Co also apparently held talks – which I've long thought made some sense. Still, no deals anywhere to be seen here. At least not yet. [Information 🔒]
🎭 Terence Stamp Dies at 87
There are a few fun and interesting nuggets in his obit. First and foremost, after a disastrous Broadway showing for Alfie! in 1964 – his only Broadway performance – he turned down the film version, which would go on to make Michael Caine a huge star. Caine also happened to be his roommate at the time. A few years later, Stamp quit acting and moved to an ashram in India. He only came back – after nearly a decade – for the chance to work with Marlon Brando in Superman. Mainly, I'm upset by how few of these obits mention his performance in Wall Street. But nice to see The Limey get its due. [NYT]
I Wrote…
🤑 Perplexity's Perplexing and Positively PR Offer to Buy Chrome
Why not offer a quadrillion dollars?
💻 That First Cellular MacBook Pro May Be Very Close...
...or Apple could simply be testing it.
🇺🇸 The US Government Inside Intel
Trump keeps right on wheeling and dealing with tech companies...
I Quote…
"Meta is the Washington Commanders of tech companies. They massively overpay for okay-ish AI scientists and then civilians think those are the best AI scientists in the world because they are paid so much."
– An (anonymous) AI founder talking to Forbes about Meta's AI recruitment efforts. A damning quote in pretty harsh piece about how Meta lost their way in AI (and suggesting the current, expensive new efforts aren't likely to help much).
I Note…
The UK has agreed to backdown on their demands for a backdoor into Apple's devices, something which the US government, security experts, and Apple were all in agreement was a dangerous bridge too far. [NYT]
Not the best sign that a key co-founder of xAI has already left the company after just a couple years. Igor Babuschkin came from DeepMind and before that, OpenAI – he says he's leaving to launch a VC fund... [TechCrunch]
Per ARM's chip ambitions above, they've poached Rami Sinno, who helped develop the Trainium AI chips for Amazon... [Reuters]
How important are chips? DeepSeek's new models seem delayed because they're trying to train on Huawei's offering not NVIDIA's. [FT 🔒]
Might NVIDIA's new 'B30A' chip, the apparent China-bound successor to the H20 built on Blackwell – though still about half the performance of the flagship NVIDIA chips – do the trick? Assuming Trump allows it, of course. [Reuters]
In other poaching news, Microsoft is trying to grab people out of Meta who are perhaps disgruntled by all the changes in the AI divisions (per below) – and, like Meta, seem to be willing to raise the level of pay substantially. [BI 🔒]
Presumably, a lot of the disgruntled people at Meta used to work on Llama, which is still around but seemingly about to undergo some major changes – including, perhaps, on the "open source" front – as they're now under a group appropriated titled "TBD Lab" in the new AI org. [WSJ]
Also buried in here: Thinking Machine Lab, Mira Murati's new and well-funded AI startup, has been trying to poach from Meta's teams – payback for the (failed) "Godfather" offers being made to her team, perhaps?
Those "Godfather" offers clearly aren't going over too well internally for those not getting paid $10M or $100M or $1B a year or whatever. Who would have thought? Besides everyone. [BI 🔒]
Still, it doesn't take squinting to see why Zuckerberg feels the need to be this aggressive in AI – beyond the Llama issues (but clearly related to them), the rebooted Meta AI app itself clearly just isn't any good. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Immediately after blond Bond, is the world ready for a ginger Bond? Scott Rose-Marsh would certainly be a left-field pick. But he's also seemingly a bit old at 37 if they're really trying to get someone younger who can be in the role for a while... [THR]
I Spy...
He's back. No, not Ned Stark, but the greatest actor of his generation if not ever, Daniel Day-Lewis (though Sean Bean is great too!). After 8 years away from acting, his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, coaxed him out of retirement for his directorial debut, Anemone. It sounds interesting too with Day-Lewis cast as a hermit. And given his famous brand of method acting, that undoubtedly means he has been living as a hermit somewhere in Northern England for a while...
