The AI Comp Equations
Apple Leaks • ChatGPT Agent • Uber Robotaxis • Substack's Valuation • Netflix's Q2 • Copilot Challenges • Netflix & AI • Emoji
With Meta's mega offers continuing to make their way through the market, the one thing I'm most interested by is if this will actually reset/change the overall market. That is, is comp about to go way up across the board? Or just for this very top echelon of AI researcher, as Mark Zuckerberg and others at Meta have been implying? Seemingly, it's already having trickle down effects, with reports of people jumping to Meta's ship for decidedly less than the "Godfather" offers. And then I say "less", we're still talking about perhaps tens of millions of dollars.
For some very senior engineers with stock-based comp, this was long the norm, of course. But now we're talking about many young people working at the cutting edge of the most cutting edge field. If Meta is poaching them with even "just" tens of millions of dollars, will the rest of the market move to match? Seemingly, OpenAI has been doing that in some cases. And perhaps Anthropic is starting to as well. Google has clearly countered some offers, but will large public company comp committees be okay with rising to meet this moment if it means jacking up comp across a broader board?
Meta is public too, of course. But unlike the other Big Tech CEOs right now, Zuck has full founder and voting control... The talking point here has been shifting to that perhaps he's doing the right thing because some of this talent was being underpaid relative to the value they create for these massive companies. But there are second order effects of such shifts...
⚛️ Meta’s AI Relativity Theory
Mark Zuckerberg defends his shift in strategy with AI...
• Listening to "Looking Back" by Lord Huron
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 Notebook
📲 Anatomy of an Apple Leak
How did Jon Prosser seem to know so much about the new iOS redesign months before the announcement – beating even Mark Gurman to the punch? According to Apple, it was an elaborate scheme involving a (now fired) employee and a friend who was staying with him who broke into his development iPhone running an early build of the new OS (now called 'iOS 26') and used FaceTime to call Prosser and seemingly shared his screen to show off some of the new look and features. Prosser denies there was a "plot", but Apple sure seems to have a lot of details in their filing... Wild. Also wild that Apple can track this down but not how the aforementioned Gurman gets far more information about much bigger details about not just Apple's future products and features, but the internal workings of the company... [MacRumors]
🤖 OpenAI's New ChatGPT Agent
The steps continue towards AI actually being able to do things for you. Interesting that they literally combined the Operator and Deep Research teams to make this new agent, which leverages both, happen. It's also a new (unnamed) AI model, tailored for this specific agentic usage. But it seemingly is still pretty guardrailed and fairly slow – but it also can run in the background, and you can have several running, so it might take a sort of mind shift to get used to this, taking what was an active process you previously did and being okay with it processing in the background as is the norm for other types of compute-heavy work. Of course, most people don't do that type of work. And also most people don't have assistants! Strange, exciting new world... [Wired 🔒]
🚕 Uber's Robotaxi Deal
While I like Uber's general game plan to try to be the aggregator for autonomous fleets (most recently teaming up with Baidu for Asian markets), they clearly have to hedge that bet as well just in case one of them – such as Waymo – takes off to become the clear market leader at scale. So investing in Lucid and Nuro to try to create their own "20,000 or more" robotaxi fleet also makes sense. That doesn't mean it will work, of course. Waymo has less than 2,000 vehicles on the road in total right now in a few markets. Tesla, maybe a dozen in Austin. Uber also risks inflaming the situation with their current driver "partners" – though it sort of feels like everyone views the autonomous future as inevitable now. It's just a matter of timing... [Verge]
💵 How Substack Might Live Up to that New Valuation
Good thoughts from Casey Newton – who famously abandoned the Substack ship last year – about what the company might have to do in order to ramp up monetization to eventually live up to their new $1.1B valuation. (They're said to currently be at around $45M ARR, so... long way to go!) The rhetoric from the company is already clearly shifting around advertising, so that's an easy bet. But there are a few other levers they might ending up pulling around data, subscriptions, etc. One thing he doesn't mention but also feels inevitable: a bundle. They unbundled newspapers/magazines in order to... [Platformer 🔒]
📈 Netflix's Strong Q2
They beat across the board and are closing in on becoming a $50B business, revenue-wise annually. Remember when people were worried they'd never turn a profit? Well, they brought in just over $3B for the quarter, up a billion on the year. Why? They're on track to double advertising revenue for the year, and they're still building out that stack. Expect more ads, and more lives sports, as they increasingly become well, television. (Though YouTube is seemingly becoming less and less of a sleeping giant here too, and more just a giant.) One thing that stands out to me: it's sort of wild just how mediocre their most popular movies continue to be – they're not alone there! But I'll write that up separately... [CNBC]
🛩️ Microsoft's Copilot Challenges
Never a good sign when an article kicks off with an anecdote about the main use case for something being accidental. Such is the case with Microsoft Copilot, at least as it relates to regular consumer usage with it being baked into Windows. Meanwhile, on mobile, the report cites 79 million downloads for their app, which sounds strong, ...until you consider that ChatGPT has 900 million. Microsoft keeps taking swings here with micro-pivots dating to trying to reorient Bing around AI only to pull back and totally miss the moment. We've been hearing for months that more "personalized" and "emotive" AI would change this equation, but it seemingly hasn't. Now it's going to be avatars and voice? Screen-sharing – for real this time? I'd say "we'll see" – but we probably won't. This remains a very awkward situation for Microsoft to be in, given that they funded the product(s) killing them in a market they so clearly want to dominate but are a second-tier player at best. And that's probably being generous. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Loose Leaf
Scale AI cutting 14% of their staff immediately after the mega Meta deal adds yet another wrinkle to the "hackquisition/hackquihire" model. This is almost like a PE takeover! (But also perhaps needed given that the deal seems to have torpedoed a bunch of Scale's business, despite pleas to stay.) Hopefully those leaving at least got paid out. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Speaking of such deals, are VCs taking cues from the movement to do quick deals within their own startup portfolios? They sound like more standard "acquihires" in ways, but one key "learning" here may be to take the founder and pay-out (in shares) the preferred investors. [Information 🔒]
Is the Stephen Colbert's 'Late Show' being cancelled due to politics or just the ever-declining talk show TV business? Both things, of course, can be true. But the timing here certainly doesn't look good given everything else going on with President Trump and the media... And the fact that despite declining revenue, it's still the most popular of the talk shows! [NYT]
Threads is getting its own dedicated head in Connor Hayes, while Adam Mosseri sticks to Instagram itself, as the two sides continue to diverge (which is a good thing for sure as they race Xitter). [Axios]
In a world where xAI may or may not be raising at $200B, it certainly seems like Anthropic should be worth well over $100B at this point. I don't make the valuation rules, but they are relative. Might a new mega round give another big company, like Apple, a way to invest? [Information 🔒]
Meanwhile, Perplexity just raised more money at $18B – just weeks after closing a round at $14B. ARR is said to be $150M. The constellations keep rising... [FT 🔒]
At these prices, paying $30.5M for a Ceratosaurus skeleton seems like a downright bargain. (Though the paleontologist is worried how this will drive up prices for their work, while museums worry there will be immense pressure to sell their treasures.) [NYT]
Oh good, airlines are starting to map out using AI for how best to fleece customers on pricing. How long until using VPNs to do travel bookings online becomes a thing normal people do? [Fortune]
OpenAI is now officially acknowledging that they'll be using Google Cloud to help bolster ChatGPT. I get that Microsoft didn't want to spend indefinitely to help build out services they're increasingly competing with, but sort of wild they're okay (they still have the ROFR) passing this business off to cloud rivals. [CNBC]
Karl Urban as Johnny Cage in the forthcoming Mortal Kombat II movie looks fun (if a bit Hugh Jackman/Wolverine-y). Sort of Dungeons & Dragons movie vibes, not trying to take itself too seriously. Though I wish they were bringing back Christopher Lambert to reprise his awesomely ridiculous version of Raiden from the 1995 movie. [THR]
Speaking of Urban, I'm guessing he's not reprising his role as Judge Dredd in yet another remake that Taika Waititi is working on. Probably not Sylvester Stallone either, as he just celebrated his 79th birthday – his Judge Dredd came out the same year as Lambert's Mortal Kombat! [THR]
In other purely nostalgic news, the members of Jane's Addiction are suing each other – er, everyone is suing frontman Perry Farrell – after he and Dave Navarro got into a physical fight on stage that has now destroyed the band and thus, their money-making abilities. [Rolling Stone]
Does everything need to eventually be an "everything app"? Coinbase aims to find out... [The Block]
I Quote…
"We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper."
– Ted Sarandos, continuing his talking points about the usage of AI with regard to Netflix productions. I don't disagree, but he's going to have to walk a fine line on this topic for a while – then again, he doesn't really do that with movie theaters so... maybe not!
Interestingly, he cites the first example of a Argentine sci-fi production which used generative AI footage of a building collapsing in Buenos Aires. "Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed ten times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and work flows," he said.
I Spy...
The Top 10 most popular emojis in the US in 2025, shared by Emojipedia (via their Emojitracker tool – fun to click around to see how different emojis are popular around the world, the heart is often #1 but not always, sometimes, as in India, in the hands making the heart symbol) in honor of World Emoji Day. This is also when the Unicode Consortium confirms – on their Blogpost blog – what new emojis are due in the fall. Bigfoot!
