With Friends Like These...

Tim Cook 'F1' Photoshoot • WhatsApp Ads • News Sites Crushed By AI • Jurassic Park 7 • Meta/Scale Deal Tick-Tock • He-Man

Jun 17, 2025

You know how every few weeks we seemingly get a clearly carefully calculated sign that everything is fine in the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft. Yeah… it seems like this feud may be on the verge of actually spilling into the public, per the reporting of Berber Jin of The Wall Street Journal.

I started reading such tea leaves over a year ago — pretty much nailed it, if I do say so myself — so I went ahead and put together a page collecting all the posts about the ongoing saga (just as I had previously done with Apple’s own internal fight with AI).

Also seemingly nailed: the equity stake that OpenAI may be zero’ing in on for Microsoft (though they’ll undoubtedly have other ideas), as Sri Muppidi and Aaron Holmes report today for The Information: 33%, the exact number I landed on in trying to back into a would-be cap table (upon conversion to equity holdings) last October.

🔫 OpenAI and Microsoft Risk Open War

Forget biting hands and back-stabbing, this fight keeps escalating...

• Listening to "Nutshell" by Alice In Chains 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Notebook

📺 Tim Cook Reveals Apple’s Vision for Movies and TV

Despite the rather grandiose headline, there’s not a ton in here. Though, notably, it is the one interview Cook has done around the time of WWDC this year — and certainly the only fashion-forward full-on photoshoot. Apple’s vision for movies and TV is… basically what Steve Jobs long said was Apple’s overall vision, to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. And that’s fine! A nice framing that Apple’s history actually backs up. Of course, unlike some of those other cross-overs, television, and especially movie production, also can result in burning billions if you’re not careful — as Apple clearly wasn’t to start. But they also now clearly have confidence in F1, otherwise I don’t think Cook would be doing this cover story. That’s good because Apple needs it: while their television content has been great, as highlighted here, the movies… not so much, culminating in the Wolfs debacle (incidentally also starring Brad Pitt). The other thing I kept thinking while reading this: if Apple really did have these grandiose plans for movies, you’d think they would have picked a name better than 'Apple TV+'. Rightly or wrongly, it degrade a movie like this — one shot for IMAX, no less — to be under such a banner. [Variety]

💬 WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App

It was inevitable that Meta was going to put ads into WhatsApp eventually. There are just too many users and they paid too much for the service not to fully monetize it. And they need to fully monetize everything they can right now in order to pay for, say, $15B hackquisitions. Not to mention all those AI servers. And, oh yeah, all the metaverse stuff. So with that in mind, this feels like a reasonable way to do the ads, not in your actual messages, but in the "Updates" area. I don’t really use that area, so this shouldn’t bother me too much, but if the ads were to say, bleed into the "Chats" area, taking up valuable screen real estate, I may think about switching anything I could over to iMessage (which is obviously Apple device-only) or perhaps Signal (which has far fewer features). Meta is saying all the right things now about this but… we all know how this ends. With ads. Everywhere possible. [NYT]

📰 News Sites Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools

You can undoubtedly quibble over data on this topic from any one third-party site, but it’s hard to argue with many of the sites themselves now saying this — or even just their actions: mass layoffs to combat the declines they’re seeing. I wrote about this inevitability in March and it’s seemingly happening far faster than I imagined — though, naturally, I evoked the Hemingway Standard: "gradually then suddenly". Traffic itself is interesting from a pure reach perspective, but the real reason all of these publishers care right now is the offshoot of it: monetization. We clearly need a new model and while striking one-off licensing deals works well for someone like the NYT, that’s not scalable. We’re talking about the web here. The entire web. Does it all go behind paywalls? Does certain AI have the rights to certain content while other AI has the rights to other content? This all gets messy, fast. [WSJ 🔒]

🦖 'Jurassic Park 7' Tracking

Jurassic World Rebirth — which is at least the 4th movie where, wait a minute, there’s one more island! — is tracking to open at $100M - $125M, which sounds huge. But actually, it would be down from the last two installments, which opened closer to $150M. And Jurassic World itself — the fourth Jurassic Park movie — opened to over $200M a decade ago. And none of those numbers are inflation adjusted. My point is simply that while it seems like this is tracking to be a hit, it’s all relative. And it seems relatively reasonable to think that people are getting sick of the same general movies being recycled over and over again. The first Jurassic Park is absolute magic and a large part of that is not just that it was a dinosaur horror movie, but also the sense of wonderment. And, in a very Spielbergian Jaws-style, a more restrained use of the actual dinosaurs. The recent ones are just like "I heard you like dinosaurs, let’s put dinosaurs in your dinosaurs". Can we get a Godzilla Minus One-like reboot? [THR]

💸 How Scale AI Scaled the Offer It Got From Meta

A meaty behind-the-scenes look at the (wild) Meta/Scale AI deal as reported by Cory Weinberg. Amongst the details he pulled: Zuck’s first offer was apparently $5B, Alexandr Wang countered with $20B. Surprisingly, they landed closer to Wang’s number, but with some key deal provisions and control caveats for Meta — some of which seemingly won’t help them when the regulators come calling (including, perhaps, the right to block a future sale/fundraise — and a major liquidation preference if a sale were to happen). Which will happen any day now… You’d think Meta would have pretty much all the leverage given the reports that Scale was having trouble hitting their numbers (though this seems to be just as much about Wang constantly over-promising), but it also perhaps showcases just how badly Zuck believes they need to fully reboot Meta’s AI efforts. [Information 🔒]

Spyglass

🤖 Hey Meta AI, Is This Fraud? Publish.

I'm shocked, shocked that Meta has a new privacy nightmare on their hands – this time powered by AI...

🦄 Big Journalism Is Finally Losing... It

Another misguided NYT anti-tech op-ed…

Loose Leaf

Speaking of F1, let me be the last person in the world to tell you to watch the special "haptic" trailer that Apple made. You have to view it on the iPhone for it to work, but it’s fairly amazing. [Apple]
- In other Apple trailer news, the third season of Foundation continues to look darker and darker — and quite good! A lot of The Mule. [Verge]
This is so fun that I can’t believe it didn’t make the WWDC keynote cut, with macOS Tahoe, the Terminal app will now support 24-bit color. [MacRumors]
Speaking of Scale, OpenAI says they’re going to keep working with them (post Meta deal) for now (unlike Google, apparently). "We don’t want to ice the ecosystem," is the quote from CFO Sarah Friar. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Oracle CEO Safra Catz confirmed what everyone has assumed: six months after it was announced at the White House, the much-hyped $500B 'Stargate Project' is still "not formed yet". [Information 🔒]
- Progressing a bit better is OpenAI’s actual fundraise, with $10B (of the $40B promised eventually) said to already be in the bank. And with enough demand that SoftBank actually cut back their first initial slug of capital.
- Also of note: Microsoft apparently still invested in this first installment. Is that really possible? I mean sure, it’s possible! But weird given all the other reports… For optics? Protecting some of their position? [Information 🔒]
As an aside to How to Train Your Dragon winning the box office this week, a stat on not only how rare is it for a PG movie to be a hit now, but how increasingly rare they are, period. There were just 71 last year, down from 119 in 2011. People seemingly either want edgier, or the opposite — especially for live-action. [NYT]
The head of Apple Music thinks it’s "crazy" that other streaming services have free tiers, which you obviously have to read as a shot at a certain largest music streaming service in the world which is constantly battling with Apple. [THR]
A new paper, published by Alex Lawsen, a researcher at Open Philanthropy, pushes back on the paper Apple published "taking down" AI reasoning models (which it didn’t actually do). This paper’s takeaway? It’s a design issue, not a technical one. [9to5Mac]
- Naturally, Gary Marcus has a rebuttal to the rebuttal (and all the other rebuttals), which will lead to yet more rebuttals. [Marcus on AI]
Walmart and Amazon are exploring issuing their own stablecoins. Why? To get around credit card fees and to get paid faster. Oh is that it? Yeah that’s not great news for Visa/Mastercard/AMEX/etc. [WSJ 🔒]

I Spy...

He-Man! While there seemingly haven’t been any leaks from the new production of Masters of the Universe (which some of us have been tracking closely), star Nicholas Galitzine shared this one on the occasion of the end of filming. I know we’re in a toy renaissance now thanks to the Barbie movie, but can this really be any good? Can it be better than the 1980s version, which, if I recall, is not good but is also awesome? It probably can’t be better than the Netflix cartoon version, which is actually pretty good? If it is good, can we get Thundercats?