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Mon. 07/01 – Now Brussels Sprouts For Meta Jul 01, 2024

Show notes

Meta’s turn to be accused of breaching the DMA. Smarter AirPods as part of an AR/VR strategy. Better AI leaderboards. And is the Surface Laptop finally a true MacBook Air killer?

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Dragon Ball Legends

Links:

Meta's pay or consent model in crosshairs for breaching EU tech rules (Reuters)
Kuo: Apple to begin mass production of AirPods with cameras by 2026 (9to5Mac)
‘Boring’ Bitcoin Sends Weekend Trading Volume to All-Time Lows (Bloomberg)
Amazon’s Bargain Store Would Use Same Trade ‘Loophole’ as Temu, Shein (The Information)
Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard — Alibaba runs the board as major US competitors have worsened (Tom's Hardware)
Surface Laptop review: Microsoft’s best MacBook Air competitor yet (The Verge)

(Profile) Casemark.ai Jun 29, 2024

Show notes

Find out more about Casemark at Casemark.ai.

Fri 06/28 – The Real King Of All Media Is… YouTube? Jun 28, 2024

Show notes

The growing backlash over Perplexity is getting interesting. OpenAI possibly exiting China will be interesting in terms of a massive land grab. AI Al Michaels will deliver personalized Olympics updates for you. And in the Longreads: is the real King of All Media… YouTube?

Sponsors:

ConstantContact.com

Links:

Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse (Wired)
OpenAI’s China Block to Reshape AI Scene as Big Players Pounce (Bloomberg)
OpenAI Wants AI to Help Humans Train AI (Wired)
An AI version of Al Michaels will deliver Olympic recaps on Peacock (The Verge)

Weekend Longreads Suggestions:

YouTube dominates streaming, forcing media companies to decide whether it’s friend or foe (CNBC)

Thu. 06/27 – Add Consultants To The List Of Big Winners Of AI So Far Jun 27, 2024

Show notes

Is Uncle Sam about to unload a ton of Bitcoin? AI has helped Google Translate almost double the number of languages it supports. No surprise, but Amazon is gonna take a page out of Temu’s book. Figma’s big redesign. And another way the AI era is rhyming with the DotCom era: the consultants are back.

Sponsors:

Miro.com

Links:

Bitcoin Falls After U.S. Sends $240M Worth of Silk Road-Related BTC to Coinbase (Coindesk)
Google Translate is getting support for more than 110 new languages (The Verge)
Amazon To Launch Temu-Like Discount Section With Direct Shipping From China (The Information)
Amazon Hits $2 Trillion in Value as AI Frenzy Fuels Rally (Bloomberg)
Figma announces big redesign with AI (The Verge)
Webtoon Entertainment to debut on Nasdaq as latest Korean cultural export success (Financial Times)
The A.I. Boom Has an Unlikely Early Winner: Wonky Consultants (NYTimes)

Wed. 06/26 – An eInk Phone That Might Be Worth Buying? Jun 26, 2024

Show notes

The ChatGPT macOS app is now available for everybody. Google drops continuous scroll for search. Waymo drops the waitlist in San Francisco. Are the AI characters on Character.ai somehow… changed? And is there an eInk phone that I might actually have to try out?

Sponsors:

Lumen.me/ride

Links:

OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Mac app is now available to everyone (9to5Mac)
Google dropping continuous scroll in search results (Search Engine Land)
Waymo ditches the waitlist and opens up its robotaxis to everyone in San Francisco (The Verge)
Tech Investor Sean Parker Leads Rescue of Struggling AI Startup (WSJ)
‘No Bot is Themselves Anymore:’ Character.ai Users Report Sudden Personality Changes to Chatbots (404 Media)
The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted (The Verge)

Tue. 06/25 – AI Music Startups Get The Napster Treatment Jun 25, 2024

Show notes

History is rhyming today as AI music startups get the Napster treatment and Microsoft gets dinged for product bundling. Google wants you to build your own AI celebrity. Amazon wants to go at ChatGPT directly. And two hella-interesting and hella-big AI raises.

Sponsors:

Miro.com

Links:

Major record labels sue AI company behind ‘BBL Drizzy’ (The Verge)
EU charges Microsoft with antitrust violations over Teams (FT)
Apple Spurned Idea of iPhone AI Partnership With Meta Months Ago (Bloomberg)
Uber Is Locking Out NYC Drivers Mid-Shift to Lower Minimum Pay (Bloomberg)
Google Develops Challenger to Meta’s Chatbots and Character.AI (The Information)
Amazon is secretly working on a ChatGPT killer (Business Insider)
Etched is building an AI chip that only runs one type of model (TechCrunch)
EvolutionaryScale lands $142 mln to advance AI in biology (Reuters)

Mon. 06/24 – Apple The First To Run Afoul Of The DMA Jun 24, 2024

Show notes

Could Apple soon owe Europe a ton of money as they are the first to run afoul of the DMA? Could Meta soon join OpenAI as part of Apple Intelligence. Why food delivery apps are seeing plunging usage in NYC and Seattle. And a big new AI focused bill in California that AI startups are worried about.

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Fri. 06/21 – Kaspersky Banned By The US Government Jun 21, 2024

Show notes

The government has banned Kaspersky antivirus sales in the US. People are losing their minds over Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic. Soon all devices can pair to your iPhone as easily as AirPods do. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions.

Links:

US bans sale of Kaspersky software citing security risk from Russia (TechCrunch)
Anthropic claims its latest model is best-in-class (TechCrunch)
Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet wows AI power users: ‘this is wild’ (VentureBeat)
New iOS 18 API brings AirPods setup experience to third-party accessories (9to5Mac)
SpaceX unveils backpack-sized ‘Starlink Mini’ satellite internet antenna for $599 (CNBC)

Weekend Longreads Suggestions:

Why are mobile game ads so weird and bad? (Sherwood)
From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction (ArsTechnica)
The song Stevie Nicks wrote to “haunt” Lindsey Buckingham (Far Out)

Thu. 06/20 - Ilya Sutskever’s New AI Startup Jun 20, 2024

Show notes

Ilya Sutskever wants to go straight to Safe Superintelligence, do not pass go, but do probably collect hundreds of millions of dollars. Is Perplexity ignoring robots.txt files? Xreal’s hybrid AR glasses play. And how many apps did Apple sherlock at WWDC last week?

Links:

Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence (Bloomberg)
Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine (Wired)
For Apple’s AI Push, China Is a Missing Piece (WSJ)
Xreal’s new gadget is a phone-sized Android tablet just for your AR glasses (The Verge)
iOS 18 could ‘sherlock’ $400M in app revenue (TechCrunch)

Wed. 06/18 – Apple Pumping The Breaks On The Vision Pro? Jun 19, 2024

Show notes

Does Apple pumping the breaks on the Vision Pro indicate problems for the category, or was this always the plan? What if AI means bots do the social media-ing for you? Actual RISC-V PCs coming to market. And a review of the new slate of CoPilot+ PCs that are available now.

Links:

Apple Suspends Work on Next Vision Pro, Focused on Releasing Cheaper Model in Late 2025 (The Information)
Former Snap engineer launches Butterflies, a social network where AIs and humans coexist (TechCrunch)
The Framework Laptop 13 is about to become one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops (The Verge)
Here are all of the Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X chips that were released today (Engadget)
ASUS VivoBook S 15 Copilot+ PC Review: Is the Snapdragon X Elite hype real? (Windows Central)

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