A WWDC Trapped in Frozen Liquid
Snap's Specs • OpenAI's ARR • The Superintelligence Sales Pitch • Warner Bros Discovery Splits In Two • Tesla Robotaxi Spotting
What a strange WWDC keynote this year. Almost as if it were from another time — a time before AI. It feels like Apple did what they needed to, which is to say, what they could do on stage. But it also feels like they’re not doing themselves any favors afterwards now. Still, all that matters will end up being what they ship. With this awkward event out of the way, hopefully the right fires are now lit to do that…
🔎 Apple Tries to Hide AI Under Liquid Glass
WWDC 25 certainly wasn't six out of five stars...
⛽️ Liquid Glasslighting
There are no issues with AI within Apple, why do you ask?
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 Notebook
😎 Snap’s AR 'Specs' Set for Next Year
The company clearly knows they need to win the race to market here and it sounds like they could beat Meta’s 'Artemis' glasses (the artist formerly known as 'Orion' — the "true" AR glasses, not to be confused with the Ray Ban Metas or Meta’s myriad other plays here) by a year or so. Will they be too early? Undoubtedly. But Meta’s early success with the Ray Ban models may have primed the market a bit here for the next step (which may, in fact, be a pair of Ray Bans with a small AR screen…). Snap does have a unique advantage in this particular slice of the market thanks to all the AR lens work within Snapchat, so perhaps they figure out a way to leverage that (disclosure: they’re also partnering with Niantic Spatial, the newly spun-out company post Niantic’s gaming sale, focused on AI mapping, where my wife is on the board). And, of course, they were the actual first-movers here with Spectacles — just way too early. The new version of 'Specs' are said to be "noticeably thinner and lighter" than what Evan Spiegel showed off on stage last year. And it sounds like the price will be well below the Vision Pro’s $3,500 — you’d hope! — but above the $300 Ray Ban Metas. Feels like sub-$1,000 is key. Can they get close to $500? [Verge]
💰 OpenAI Hits $10B in ARR
It’s a nice, big round number to share. And it implies that they’re likely on pace for the revenue projections that have been circulated. While their internal projections last year put 2025 revenue at $11.6B, newer reporting earlier this year suggested that had been revised upward to $12.7B. Depending on their growth rate, at around $833M in MRR now, they could end up above even that mark. It’s also nice to have the ARR number as it puts their (business) size in context. Anthropic is said to be at $3B in ARR. While the newest, hottest, AI company on the block, Anysphere (makers of Cursor), is said to be at $500M ARR (obviously much younger and growing far faster — the fastest growing startup ever, ARR-wise, it seems). OpenAI is about to be valued at $300B. Anthropic is valued at $61.4B. And Anysphere just hit $9.9B. [CNBC]
🧑🚀 The Gentle Singularity
Speaking of OpenAI… Sam Altman’s latest essay at first seems curious in that it’s largely a rehash of things he’s said before about the future and where AI is taking us (and why humanity will remain important, etc). But buried all the way down in a bullet point in the end may very well be the reason for why he’s writing this now: it’s hard not to read the shot at "social media" as anything other than a shot at Meta, which, of course, was all over the news yesterday on the report that they’re "hackquiring" Scale AI — or more specifically, bring on their CEO and some of the team to build a new AI team within Meta focused on, what else, Superintelligence. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg is spending almost $15B on such a deal is nothing if not a signal to the market that they intend to be in the race towards AGI and beyond — a race they’ve seemingly been ceding to date while sort of stumbling in AI in general. Buried in the stories yesterday, it sounds like Meta is also making massive pay package pitches to people at Google and yes, OpenAI, to join Zuck’s new band of pirates. This post would seem to be Altman’s public counter-offer: get in social media losers, we’re going superintelligencing. As an aside: I’m not sure I fully buy into Altman’s vision for 2035. I suspect societal changes may be more mundane in many ways, and yet more profound in others. But, of course, he’s selling a vision and aspiration. [Sam Altman]
🍿 Warner Bros Discovery Splits in Two
One half will be studio and streaming, the other, all the legacy cable junk. Sadly that includes CNN, and unsurprisingly that includes the now NBA-less TNT. The wonderfully generic "Global Networks" holding name will be run by the CFO, while David Zaslav will continue to get paid an obscene amount of money to continue running the rest — both of which will undoubtedly be for sale with the parts now probably worth more than the whole was in the end. Humorously, there’s some talk that the two sides might revert to the names 'Warner Bros' and 'Discovery' because retro names are all the rage right now over there. And naturally, already talk that this new Discovery could merge with Comcast’s discarded toys over at Versant. That would leave a newly unburdened of most of its debt Warner Bros, which yes, includes HBO/Max/HBO Max. Might Apple be enticed? It still makes some sense! [WSJ 🔒]
Spyglass
📽️ Movie Theater Attendance Is An Issue So Let's Show More Ads
Great moments in long-term strategic thinking...
🥽 Can Meta Make Headsets Happen?
Can Apple? Can anyone?
Loose Leaf
Disney gets full control of Hulu for an extra $439M (on top of the $8.6B it already paid for the last 33% they didn’t yet own). Which seems like a lot but Comcast was asking for an extra $5B. So yeah, that’s a win. [NYT]
Speaking of spinning out legacy cable stuff, Bob Iger says Disney is unlikely to do that — at least under his watch, which ends soon! — and he makes a compelling pitch for how they’ve created a nice, diversified business loop with their various properties. It didn’t always look good! [THR]
In other AI revenue news, it sounds like Mistral is on track to pass $100M after a handful of large deals out of Europe, where companies perhaps don’t just want to rely solely on the US players. Surely such a data point being out there will help them with a new $1B fundraise… [FT 🔒]
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer says the UK wants to be an "AI maker, not an AI taker" as they try to woo more AI investment that Jensen Huang says they badly need. [FT 🔒]
Well, so much for that Anthropic AI-written blog… [TechCrunch]
Who might the person be behind the Arfur Rock anonymous Xitter account sharing many company funding details long before they’re announced? Certainly it’s a VC and the list likely includes pretty much the entire industry given how widely and loosely shared such information is behind those closed doors. It’s just no one shares because what’s the incentive there? "Who I am isn’t important." Okay Batman. [BI]
The actor/comedian hosts of Smartless are starting a cell service, which seems like just about the strangest non-sequitur possible, but it worked for Ryan Reynolds and they have natural and obvious ad spots in their podcast — why sell an ad when you can (eventually) sell a company? [Bloomberg 🔒]
Beyond the OpenAI device, Jony Ive’s LoveFrom seems to have helped Rivian design their electric bike side project before it spun out into its own thing called Also. Unlike Tesla, Rivian does seem to have good design taste. [TechCrunch]
Nintendo sold 3.5M Switch 2 units in just four days — that’s far more than the original Switch sold in its first month back in 2017. [Bloomberg 🔒]
That’s not just a Nintendo record, it’s now the fastest selling home console of all time, besting the pace set by the PS4. [Verge]
Not all good news out of Nintendo though, as The Legend of Zelda movie has been pushed back, but oddly, just by a few weeks: from March 2027 to May 2027. Presumably they’re still writing it? Don’t want to miss this current nostalgia wave, Nintendo… [THR]
Speaking of, we’re getting a new Care Bears movie — which I think was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater in the mid 80s… That evil face… book thing still haunts me. [THR]
Interestingly, Tim Sweeney says post-iOS web payments change (and Fortnite coming back to the App Store), the split of people using Apple’s payment rails versus going to the web is about 60/40. In other words, Apple is still "winning" here, as you might expect given their natural platform advantage! Which is why they should actually just compete for this business rather than trying to capture it. They’d win more often than not and developers would be happier! [Verge]
I Spy...
The Tesla “Robotaxi” service has hit the streets of Austin with… a logo that looks like someone keyed the car. I swear I thought it was a dent when I first saw the video!
Also, I’m still mildly confused on 'Robotaxi' vs. 'Cybercab'. I assume the latter is meant for the name of an actual vehicle and not the service, but I think it’s a better name for both? Especially since Tesla already lost an attempt to trademark the former? Maybe they want to distance it from Cybertruck though?
It sounds like rides will start in Austin on June 22 — subject to delays, naturally.
