The End of Email
PE-Like AI Roll-Ups • WhatsApp iPad • WWDC UI Not AI • Meta's Puffin & Puck Headset • Is AI Lying To Us? • 20 iPhones For 28 Years Later
The early AI features in email right now may not look like much — nor are they particularly useful — but if you squint, you can see a world in which they actually lead us to doing less email. But if that’s the case, it will largely be because email will have been transformed into something agentic bots do, while the way you interface with it is in a more to-do list-like setting, via your AI assistant. I can’t tell yet if this sounds good, awful, or both. You decide:
📨 With AI, Email May Actually Morph Into a Task List
The end of email might look like bots emailing other bots for you...
• Listening to "Instant Crush" by Daft Punk 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 Notebook
🤖 The PE-Like AI Roll-Ups Rush
Given how many different entities are now running this same playbook — buying up "legacy" businesses to "update" them with AI — it’s obviously a trend. In many ways, it just feels like a new flavor on the old tried and true private equity model of rolling up companies and squeezing them for "efficiencies" often through "synergies", AI just makes it all much more streamlined, and potentially far more capital efficient, if played correctly. I would say it’s a weird model for VCs to be trying, but well, the "old" VC model hasn’t been working too well in recent years, at least when it comes to returns — at least the fully realized and fully liquid variety. Still, the type of investor that gets excited about investing in the "next big thing" probably isn’t the same one that gets excited about investing in a decades-old nuts and bolts company — perhaps literally — that can be squeezed into better margins by AI. Also, the return profile is likely to be far different here, with better downside-protection but upside that is also undoubtedly far more capped. Still, money beats no money. [Information 🔒]
💬 Meta Finally Unturdifies WhatsApp on iPad
We’re all well aware that Meta is not going to do Apple any favors when it comes to helping to sell their devices, but having now used WhatsApp for iPad this past week, it’s absolutely ridiculous that it took them this long to release it. It’s so much better than using the web app — which, as John Gruber notes, you had to do before (versus using a scaled-up iPhone app) because of the security restrictions. That web app was a total nightmare to use. It was insanely slow and constantly refreshing. Copy and paste didn’t work most of the time. It was just a turd. The same has long been true of Instagram. And now it’s true of Threads too. (Though at least you can use the iPhone versions scaled up with those two.) The former is also seemingly on the verge of getting the iPad treatment — 15 years later. So we should expect the latter around 2039. Aside: remember when web apps were going to destroy native apps? HTML5 was going to be the end of Apple! [Daring Fireball]
🛥️ WWDC to be All About UI, not AI
Mark Gurman says Apple’s event this year will feel more like a "gap year" because while they’re now hard at work on the AI features they should have been hard at work on a few years ago, they’re unlikely to come until next year’s WWDC. And to make matters worse, Apple can’t really even say that because they used that "preview" card last year and it backfired when they failed to ship much of what was promised — and what did ship, underdelivered. And clearly — clearly — Apple is feeling embarrassed by all this, and so they want to try to change the conversation. As such, we’re likely to get a strange keynote where the elephant in the room — AI — isn’t discussed all that much, even though last year’s keynote was all about it — er, sorry, "Apple Intelligence". Totally different. Instead, they’ll aim to distract with new coats of paint for the OSes you use every day. UI not AI! It’s not the worst strategy from a user-facing perspective, but it doesn’t change the very real underlying issues with the company. And will make the company look rather silly in many circles relative to their peers. Will throwing developers an on-device AI model bone — a small 3B parameter one — placate them? Maybe some small ones, but overall, no. But hey, macOS Tahoe! [Bloomberg 🔒]
🥽 Meta Prioritizing Ultralight Headset With Puck
This feels like Meta wanting to beat whatever Apple is cooking up with a more lightweight (and cheaper) Vision Pro to market (just as Apple races to match Meta in the tangential smart glasses market). Mixed with the fact that outside of the holiday shopping season, Quest headsets don’t seem to be moving any needles in terms of sales. Meta may increasingly dominate the VR market, but it’s once again a shrinking one until a truly game-changing device comes out. And the Vision Pro clearly wasn’t it. And so it makes sense for Meta to pivot to "Puffin" and leverage some of the learnings from the AR projects and utilize a "puck" design to offload much of the computing — and thus, weight (and heat). Apple clearly should have done this too given that you know, you already have to lug around a ridiculous power brick with Vision Pro. But they may be able to leverage something Meta cannot: tethering a headset directly to a Mac (and maybe one day, an iPhone). Is Meta’s Quest over, or would they re-brand this to the next version (and vision) of Quest? [UploadVR]
🙊 'Godfather' of AI Says Models Now Lie to Users
"Evidence of deception, cheating, lying and self-preservation…" "Very scary, because we don’t want to create a competitor to human beings on this planet, especially if they’re smarter than us." "The next version might be strategically intelligent enough to see us coming from far away and defeat us with deceptions that we don’t anticipate. So I think we’re playing with fire right now." "Extremely dangerous bioweapons…" "The worst-case scenario is human extinction…" "If we build AIs that are smarter than us and are not aligned with us and compete with us, then we’re basically cooked." I would say Yoshua Bengio is bearish on the prospects of AI going forward. Of course, he’s also talking his own book, with a new (non-profit) focused on building safer systems. Still, his high-level point about deception seems to be playing out in real-time, as Anthropic flagged recently. Of course, there are also all the effective altruism ties across the board here so, grains of salt… [FT 🔒]
Spyglass
🍿 'Stranger Things' Ends In Binge Installments
Just as I thought it always should...
📱 "We've gone sideways."
Laurene Powell Jobs on OpenAI/IO's iPhone antidote...
🕵️♂️ Bring Back the True Detectives
As in, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson...
Loose Leaf
The details of how Ukraine executed the "Spiderweb" attack of Russian Air Force bases, via drones "hidden in the roofs of wooden sheds" in Siberia — some 2,500 miles from Ukraine — are nuts. [Guardian]
The "Big Three" music labels are in talks to end their lawsuits with the AI music startups Udio and Sudo in exchange for compensation rights for artists and equity stakes in the companies — it would be interesting, though sort of weird, if both startups got the exact same deals. [Bloomberg 🔒]
There are companies going out of business, and then there are companies started in 1670 going out of business. Such is the case with Hudson’s Bay, the company which started 355 years ago as a fur trading outpost — one that owned 1/3rd of Canada! — for the colonial ruler Britain. The eventual pivot to department stores looked good for a while, until it didn’t. [NYT]
As your eyes would tell you, Bluesky is attracting far more left-leaning "influencers" than those on the other side, but, despite a few high-profile defections and deactivations, most aren’t fully abandoning Xittter. [TechCrunch]
FWIW, Gurman says he doesn’t believe Apple’s new gaming-focused app will change any of Apple’s policies with regard to the App Store — something I wrote last week — and I’d just reiterate, it’s unlikely to change anything now, but it could eventually be a lifeboat, as it were… [Bloomberg 🔒]
I was surprised that Stanley Tucci’s new travel show, Tucci In Italy, premiered a couple weeks ago as I had heard almost nothing about it. I enjoyed his last one — it’s not, of course, Anthony Bourdain-level, but it’s food and travel, what’s not to like? — which was abruptly killed during the CNN+ fiasco. This is pretty much the same, perhaps even a bit better judging from the first couple episodes. I guess it’s somewhat buried on NatGeo, but it’s on Disney+ too! [NatGeo]
Unions continue to creep their way into Big Tech through tangential fields, this time with ZeniMax, the gaming company Microsoft acquired in 2021. They just agreed to a contract which includes wage-increases and yes, some protections against the use of AI… which is clearly is going to spur more unionization. [NYT]
Speaking of WhatsApp, they’re seemingly on the verge of rolling out usernames as well — something which will be most valuable if you don’t want the world knowing your phone number. (And hopefully will cut down on all the spammy groups you get added to via that vector.) [9to5Mac]
It should also help keep them ahead of XChat, the not-at-all-porny-sounding DM replacement Xitter is in the process of rolling out with completely unclear security features. [TechCrunch]
Walmart had 2,165,465 staff worldwide at the end of last year — that’s actually 70,000 fewer than five years ago. The AI movement is too new to blame for all of that, but it’s clearly going to shift the dynamic going forward at the largest private sector employer. [FT 🔒]
Regardless of what you think about the Knives Out series — I thought the first was great, the second, less so — Rian Johnson kills it when it comes to switching these up thematically each time. Wake Up Dead Man looks like it will be fun on December 12 — presumably Netflix will do another small theatrical release for awards consideration, but they really should think about going big here. They’re just leaving money on the table. [THR]
I Spy...
The entirety of 28 Years Later, the sequel to 28 Weeks Later, which was the sequel to 28 Days Later, was shot with the iPhone — the iPhone 15 Pro Max, to be specific. And yes, sometimes 20 of them at once.
