Back At It
Lina Khan & Figma • Roku's Cheap Streamer • Meta's Flirty Chatbot Tragedy • Gemini's Bad Day • Pixel Mocks iPhone AI
Just back from two weeks away in Austria. Which was lovely. While I did quite a bit of writing while on the road, I also have a backlog of reading/notes, which I'll work through below and over the next couple of days. I’m also now finally running the macOS 26 beta, now that it’s in public preview. Pretty smooth thus far…
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 I Think…
💸 Lina Khan Takes a Figma IPO Victory Lap
Congrats to Ms. Khan for her role in making sure that VC returns were optimized here (well, unless they sold in the IPO ahead of that pop). But really, this is obviously more of a broken clock sometimes being right – and this was a deal that probably did warrant more scrutiny than many of the others that were looked at under her tenure. Why don't we also see her celebrating iRobot at the moment? Oh, because after the Amazon deal fell apart under scrutiny (to be fair, it was mostly scrutiny in the EU that killed that deal – but the FTC telling Amazon they were also going to sue was the nail in the coffin), they laid off most of their employees and seem on the verge of going under. Another huge win for regulation. [TechCrunch]
📺 Roku Says 'Howdy' to a $2.99 Streaming Service
I actually think this is a very smart play, and framing: while other streaming services keep jacking up their prices north of $15, you can get this for "less than a cup of coffee." But this isn't a 'FAST' service as it's ad-free – it just focuses on older, "catalog" content. I've long found the relentless focus on "new" to be both silly and annoying amongst all types of content. Yes, it's human nature but obviously most of the great movies were not made in the past few months, but over years and years. If Roku can curate those well in a solid app, I think it could actually complement some of the other streaming services nicely – even if many also have such content! [THR]
🤖 Meta's Flirty AI Bot Lures to Tragedy
Jesus. This Jeff Horwitz story is both an incredibly sad read and seems awfully damning for Meta. Is it crazy to call this some form of elderly abuse? I'm not so sure it's not! It took a whole day for Senator Josh Hawley to launch a probe into the company – in particular around an element that is an incredible aside in this story: Meta guidelines said it was okay for the bots to have "romantic" or "sensual" conversations with children. I mean, what the fuck? Obviously, Meta is saying this was "erroneous" but there is quite the pattern of bad behavior – or at the very least, truly awful oversight here. Reminder: this is the company spending billions to race towards a "personal" "superintelligence". [Reuters]
I Wrote…
💸 Meta's 'Anti-Godfather' Offers
As we cross into ten-figure territory, people keep turning them down...
🍎 Apple Backed Into an AI Corner
Tim Cook tries to rally the troops. Can he?
🦹 Marvel, We Have a Superhero Problem
The fantastic fall of 'The Fantastic Four' at the box office...
🏈 Disney & Fox Bundle to Back Into Venu
But this new "sports bundle" makes a lot more sense than Venu ever did...
I Quote…
"I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes. I am a disgrace to all possible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe."
– Gemini having a bad day after failing to solve a user request. Google is working to fix this "bug" but clearly this makes the AI chatbot more relatable!
I Note…
The team trying to build Apple's own internal version of ChatGPT is called Answers, Knowledge, and Information (AKI) and it's being led by Robby Walker, who was last seen overseeing Siri. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Unclear if this project ends up as a stand-alone app or if it would eventually power Siri and the like – perhaps after Apple starts her own reboot by outsourcing her brain a third-party player like Anthropic or OpenAI. (Or if it goes nowhere.)
Speaking of those two, Anthropic pulled OpenAI's API access to Claude after they said it was being used to aide the launch of GPT-5. Echoes of the old Facebook/Twitter API battles from 15 years ago... [Wired]
While the roll-out strategy for GPT-5 within ChatGPT has clearly been divisive, the model(s) itself has also been generating a lot of debate, for many of the reasons Stephanie Palazzolo, Erin Woo, and Amir Efrati laid out well before it launched – it's a series of issues all of which made it more challenging to launch. [Information 🔒]
As predicted, Apple is now suing Apple Cinemas over their trademark after the latter moved to take over the largest theater in San Francisco. To be fair, the name apparently stems from their first location – at a mall in Rhode Island. But it will obviously be at least a bit confusing to non-Apple Valley Mall patrons in the rest of the country... [MacRumors]
You have to believe that Linda Yaccarino thought her role as the "head" of Xitter would propel her to be the next media titan. Instead, she's now the CEO of... eMed, a health tech company. Elon seemingly broke the "Velvet Hammer". [TechCrunch]
Meanwhile, post-Yaccarino, Musk's first order of business may be bringing back Vine after his engineers at Xitter found the video archive which was supposed to be deleted but apparently wasn't. Will "AI Vine" battle Meta for the most slop-py social network? [TechCrunch]
Also, while it's not clear that people are actually using Grok outside of the (humorous) fact-checking on Xitter, they're already looking to monetize it – which just reads a lot like advertisers are asking to place ads in AI tools, so Elon is happy to let them pay to try. [FT 🔒]
Sort of wild that Jeffrey Epstein hosted in AI summit way back in 2002 – on his island, no less – and no one really seems to talk about it in our current Age of AI, until Steven Levy talked to someone who was there... [Wired]
It will be hard to top Clancy Brown as 'The Kurgan' – Highlander's villain – but Dave Bautista has been chasing the role in the remake for a decade; much like star Henry Cavill, this seems to be a passion project. [THR]
After months of Hollywood touting summer box office records that actually seem pretty underwhelming when using appropriate comparisons, Weapons is clearly a legitimate hit. [NYT]
HBO's new show Task, from the creator of Mare of Easttown and starring Mark Ruffalo, looks fantastic. Coming September 7 (they clearly have high hopes putting it in the coveted Sunday night slot). [THR]
I Spy...
Normally, I hate these type of ads that try to mock Apple but end up just reinforcing how dominant the iPhone is in everyones' mind (and clearly belies competitors' insecurities about that fact), but this one is subtle enough and fast enough (with good enough music) that I think it actually works.
Well, for a subset of the market that actually knows what on Earth they're even referring to, at least... Also, in general these ads seem to work better as Apple itself keeps releasing their own tone-deaf ads.