Have Mercy
Slow Startgate • DoE AI Supercomputer • Meta's Metaverse at War • The Never Boring OpenAI Board • ChatGPT's Go-Forward Plan
Since I’m in the midst of watching the Champions League final and PSG is about to mercy rule Inter Milan, and I’m just off a plane back home, I thought I might get another of these out…
• Watching the Champions League Final ⚽️
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 Notebook
🌌 The Invisible Stargate
It feels like the FT is right to keep pushing on some of the details around the Stargate Project. In a very Trumpian move, what was hailed as a $500B project for the US with an "immediate" $100B in commits is a lot of smoke at the moment, and even more mirrors — which was entirely predictable. The group has about $50B in those "immediate" commits so far and the only project underway is the one that pre-dates Stargate in Abilene, TX — which none of the stakeholders in Stargate actually own, but is a layer cake of deals (Oracle has a lease on the facility, which they’re in turn renting to OpenAI, which they’ll do using SoftBank’s money, etc). The 'Stargate UAE' project feels far more tangible at this point. Which Trump helped facilitate — much to the chagrin of Elon Musk — but has nothing to do with the US, other than the US companies involved and perhaps a commitment to equal the spending on future US projects. Odds the US part of Stargate ever gets anywhere near $500B? [FT 🔒]
💪 The DoE’s New AI Supercomputer
A big win for Dell and NVIDIA which were chosen to build the new 'Doudna' — named after Jennifer Doudna, the biochemist who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for her work on CRISPR gene editing — supercomputer at Berkeley. HPE typically won such contracts (stemming from their acquisition of Cray in 2019), but AI, as with everything, has changed the equation here. This will use NVIDIA’s forthcoming (Vera) Rubin GPUs — and interestingly, also CPUs that they’re building based on ARM architecture as their quiet CPU moves continue… Dell, meanwhile, clearly wants to build out of such machines in a way to become the new, more scalable Cray. [NYT]
🥽 Mark Zuckerberg Found a Use for His Metaverse — War
Dave Lee’s column is spot-on: there is no greater showcase of how much has changed in Silicon Valley in just a few years than this deal. The partnership itself is one thing — in particular because it is a potentially interesting use case of Meta’s technology (which stems from Palmer Luckey’s technology, of course). Microsoft swung and missed at such headsets for the military, but Microsoft’s technology mostly sucked (and Luckey mercifully took over the contract to put Microsoft out of their money pit misery). But the fact that this is a giant Silicon Valley tech company explicitly signing up for a defense project after the constant protests (from employees!) about such things just a few years ago is… something else. As is the fact that Mark Zuckerberg and Luckey are now doing photoshoots around their partnership a handful of years after Luckey was fired from Meta for his right-leaning political contributions. New Zuck loves Old Palmer tho. They bros. As for what happens when the political winds shift again… watch your back, Palmer — again — is all I’m saying. "So instead, maybe the 'killer app' for mixed reality is indeed a killer app." Great line. [Bloomberg 🔒]
⚖️ Nothing Remains Boring About OpenAI’s Board
If the OpenAI non-profit/for-profit saga ever ends, it will likely come down to two key things: the non-profit’s equity stake (and Microsoft’s) and the board(s) of the company. In following this over many months, I didn’t realize that the AGs of California and Delaware will get to determine the board of the non-profit — including keeping or not keeping the current one. And that matters because that non-profit board, in turn, gets to determine the eventual for-profit board. The former was always the case, but in abandoning the full for-profit plans, OpenAI is now putting those state AGs in an awfully explicit position to determine what to do with this board before signing off (or not signing off) on the PBC move. As for that equity stake, Elon Musk’s clever wrench may indeed come back to bite OpenAI. Never a boring moment. [Information 🔒]
🤖 ChatGPT’s Go-Forward Game Plan
It’s sort of wild that OpenAI wasn’t able to redact more of this given that it very clearly lays out their high-level goals for the first half of this year — which is now almost over, by the way — and presumably any number of rivals would love to know such plans. Then again, they’re all sort of already working towards this same concept of a "super assistant" — Google itself just talked about many of these same ideas at I/O last week — and branching beyond being a chatbot. Clearly, a lot of the redacted bits are about would-be devices that OpenAI just let the world know they’d be building in the form of a sizzle reel with Jony Ive. But I’d love to know who OpenAI views as their “biggest threat" — presumably it’s Meta given the stated concern about embedding their AI across their products (I would have maybe guessed OpenAI’s favorite frenemy, Microsoft, but they’re specifically talking about consumer here.) [Verge]
Spyglass
🍎 Profiles in Courage: Apple Edition
When an event decline is sign of decline...
🦾 Amazon Joins Race for "What's Next" After the iPhone
J Allard brings some device pedigree to Amazon's 'ZeroOne' team...
Loose Leaf
Amazon’s attempt to break into the car sector totally flopped, as Stellantis unwinds their deal without the "SmartCockpit" project even launching in a single vehicle. At least Apple got Aston Martin up and running! [Reuters]
Some in the current administration seem worried that a TSMC “gigafab” in the UAE could distract from the US build-out. But one idea previously floated was that it could be a good way to offload capacity in event of a crisis in Taiwan. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Warning: once you see the idea that the stars of the new Netflix series about the FTX situation should be reversed in their roles, you cannot unsee it. Also, Barack and Michelle Obama are producing it?! [THR]
You’d think Elon Musk leaving the White House with a literal black eye would be too on-the-nose for the script writers of our simulation. [NYT]
'Perplexity Labs' reads a lot like the continuing trend of every AI company trying to offer everything that every other AI company offers. [TechCrunch]
A new churn prevention tool for Disney+ (and soon, Hulu): membership perks! I suspect other streaming services will have to do similar things, but few can offer what Disney can… [Bloomberg 🔒]
I still cannot believe Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is getting a de-facto sequel. With Brad Pitt returning. And Quentin Tarantino writing. And David Fincher directing. For Netflix. "This film is more secretive than Star Wars." My god what fun. [THR]
The rest of my household is very excited about Taylor Swift regaining ownership of her first six albums — and I think it’s pretty cool too. Fascinating that the fund she ended up buying them from, Shamrock Capital, was founded by Roy E. Disney — the nephew of Walt, who was the last member of the Disney family actively involved with the company before he passed away in 2009. (Shamrock had bought the infamous collection from Scooter Braun in 2020.) [NYT]
While there may now be a pause on the last "Taylor’s Version", not to worry, we’re getting a "John’s Version" of the old Creedence Clearwater Revival classics. As in, Fogerty. Yes, really. [THR]
Brad Lightcap said he has "no idea" what device OpenAI is working on with the newly acquired IO team led by Jony Ive. This is notable since he’s, um, the COO of OpenAI. Does Fidji Simo know? Maybe he should read the redacted memo as noted up top? [WSJ 🔒]
I didn’t realize that the whole 'Tudum' thing — great name — started as a sort of organic event in Brazil. Now it’s the latest in a seemingly endless stream of live events that Netflix is putting on the platform. [NYT]
I Spy...
Just two guys who are having a good time, having a good time, having a good time…
(What ever you fucking do: always be sure to get the cargo shorts in the shot.)