2026-06-11 00:56:01
The trailer just hit so the take is especially hot, but I'm fairly concerned about where The Social Reckoning – the sequel/"companion" to The Social Network – is going to go. I'm worried no one was around to check some of Aaron Sorkin's worst instincts that often surface in some of his more charged work. And this seems to be especially charged. I'm mildly surprised he didn't title this "Fuck Facebook".
Truly great voice work out of Jeremy Strong though. Will it be enough to make us forget Jesse Eisenberg? And a nice call-back to the original's soundtrack in the title card – ruined by "she's disrupting". Some interesting wardrobe choices too... Aside: where's the trailer for Artificial – aka the OpenAI movie, which wrapped filming months ago?!
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
☁️ Apple's Models in Google's Cloud on NVIDIA's Chips – The biggest surprise out of WWDC may have been the acknowledgement by Apple that they're not only using Google Cloud to run their larger models (i.e. those that can't fit on device), but that they're doing so on NVIDIA chips (which had been rumored, but no one expected Apple to confirm directly). This is sort of wild both because Apple and NVIDIA have a contentious history going back years. Something which may or may not have played a role in Apple not getting into the AI arms races to begin with... But also because given the Google partnership already in place, why not just use TPUs? Especially since Apple went out of their way to train their models on TPUs – again, bypassing NVIDIA GPUs – in the past. This new set up is clearly about inference, but still, Google has TPUs built just for that! The answer seems to be in a feature called 'Nvidia Confidential Computing' and "ambiguous confidential compute" which Apple specifically called out in their Q&A after the keynote. Clearly, this was the way Apple felt most comfortable extending their Private Cloud Compute initiative (and branding) beyond their own servers. And it's a nice way to diversify a bit from the pure Google reliance, I suppose. Still, you can bet Apple would prefer to do this all on their own servers with their own chips. Perhaps someday... For now, another Big Tech AI Infinity Stone for Jensen. [CNBC]
🇪🇺 No Siri AI for EU – Perhaps the most unintentionally funny moment of the WWDC keynote was when Craig Federighi was trying to keep a straight face while announcing during his walk & talk that sadly, all of the new AI features that Apple had just unveiled would not be coming to the EU at this time. Why? The DMA of course. No one will be surprised that I side firmly with Apple here because it's both ridiculous to think that a government body should pre-regulate product feature development, but also because in this particular matter, the entire world is currently worried about the AI security nightmares starting to happen while acknowledging that they're completely unprepared for what is to come. Meanwhile, the EU would seemingly like to pour gasoline on such concerns. Obviously, that's not their intent but they're also obviously not smart enough – years into the DMA – to recognize what the second-order effects might be of say, allowing any AI provider to have deep and full access to all the content of your iPhone. EU to OpenClaw: hold my lobster. So while EU politicians think they look great as the competition police standing up to Apple, I just see a bunch of smug, naive fire starters. The bloc is constantly complaining that they don't have their own tech companies to rival those from America and Asia and yet they can't quite understand why that might be. Or worse, they do, but they'd rather take some lame political victory laps without realizing that they're running backwards and taking 450M people with them. (China is another matter, of course, which will now fall firmly at the feet of Tim Cook in his new ambassador-in-chief role at Apple.) I'm sure this blurb will inspire those living with acute cases of Stockholm syndrome in Europe to respond conveying their happiness in regulation slavery. May you enjoy the pop-ups forever and ever. [MacRumors]
📽️ 'Scary Movie' Screams, 'Masters of the Universe' Bombs – This latest box office battle seems quite different on the surface than the whole Backrooms/Obsession phenomenon. But actually, it may not be all that different. While by most accounts Masters is actually pretty good and Scary is actually pretty bad, one key driver here may have been demographics once again. That is, a younger group had nostalgia for the Scary Movie franchise, which is about 20 to 25 years old, while the Masters nostalgia is calling back more like 40 years. One cohort showed up, the other didn't. There are other audience variables as well here – horror movies, pure satire, R-rated, black audiences, etc – still, it feels like we're going to see a fast shift to cater to those younger demographics since the olds seem to being staying home. Personally, I'm right in the Masters demo – it was my favorite toy and cartoon when I was a kid – as I've somewhat embarrassingly written about a number of times! So I rushed out to see the movie, right? Well, no. I want to, but well, now I have kids! And I suspect a lot of the Masters demo is in that boat too – it's just a lot of time and effort (and money) to coordinate going to a movie that solely for my enjoyment. That said, I did take my oldest to go see The Mandalorian and Grogu, but in week three of release for similar reasons. We liked it! But not something we needed to rush out to see... [NYT]
M.G. Siegler
"It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of trade-offs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."
– OpenAI's official statement given to The New York Times alongside the news that they had confidentially filed for an IPO. Normally, such events are a cause for celebration, but this must be the most timid such announcement of all time.
It obviously suggests that the company doesn't actually intend to go public any time soon and clearly would prefer not to. But they've been sort of backed into a corner by their main rival, Anthropic, filing. And if the IPO of another rival, xAI (by way of SpaceX) founded by one of their co-founders (who just got done suing them), goes well, it might be the most prudent thing to tap the market now before any such window comes crashing closed.
At the same time, the best thing for OpenAI to do may be to wait a bit, to distance themselves from Anthropic which will clearly be going out with better metrics, certainly on the business-front. And perhaps to give them time to morph the products and get the ads business working and built out. It's a very complicated tension, obviously.
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• OpenAI's 'Third Phase'
• A Stargate Reborn in Ohio
2026-06-10 23:36:58
In the midst of Big Tech conference season, Alex Kantrowitz and I used our monthly discussion on his Big Technology Podcast to mainly go over Google I/O and preview WWDC.
Basically, it felt like I/O underwhelmed because it centered around a lot of stuff that wasn't ready to roll – namely, their new flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro. But there wasn't a risk this would be like Apple two years ago at WWDC with vaporware galore, it was more just strange to have a big event with many of your announcements not yet ready. Perhaps it's time to re-think such events in the Age of AI as the cadence of releases is just different, clearly.
Alex is worried that Google is once again falling behind in AI, and Sundar Pichai sort of admitted as much at least when it comes to the all-important coding capabilities at the moment. This matters because it could be the key to powerful agents and perhaps even AGI eventually thanks to recursive self-improvement. I mean, Google doesn't even have a "Super App" yet. What are they doing?
The answer seems to be working on "Omni Models" – read: "World Models". But those too aren't quite ready to roll, so... Instead, we got a lot of updates to Google Search, which are interesting, but there's a real concern that Google won't be able to fully push into uncharted AI territory because of their myriad legacy products. Is the PM on Gmail going to let their product die in favor of Gemini simply doing email on your behalf? No. While Google has done an incredible job righting there ship after the Bard stumbles out of the AI gate, Big Company issues will always persist on some level...
Meanwhile, with WWDC also now in the rearview, our preview and discussion seems to hold up well. I noted we weren't likely to see any hardware and that a lot of people would view the event as underwhelming because it would basically be a do-over – or mulligan – of the WWDC AI promises from two years ago.
I was curious how they would play up (or not) the new Google partnership, and to the surprise of many, it did get a nice, juicy mention during the keynote. As did Visual Intelligence, which may be the key to Apple's AI future on the iPhone and beyond. For now though, it will be more about voice, which again, the keynote made clear.
Alex is very interested in the iPhone Fold/Ultra and while I didn't think there was any chance they'd show that off early – which they didn't, the first betas of iOS 27 do actually give some major hints about it in the code. But we'll have to wait until early September for John Ternus' first keynote to actually see and hear about the device and it's perhaps funky new form-factor.
Maybe the most wild part of the entire show is that Ternus wasn't a part of it, at all! Instead, Tim Cook signed off one final time with a nice message. So if Ternus is going to pull a Satya Nadella and do something big to signal the start of his era – like, say, changing the App Store fees? – that will have to wait until the Fall as well.
For the last segment, we talked a bit about Meta's messy new premium tiers for their social networks and what the strategy is here (hint: operation diversify from their ads business, which is 98% of Meta's revenues, as we move towards the AI future). Will they actually roll out some sort of cloud offering as Mark Zuckerberg has suggested, or was that simply to throw Wall Street a bone amidst all the continued CapEx? I mean, if SpaceX is now a "neocloud"...
But wait, there was one more thing for us as well. While we were recording, news broke that Anthropic had filed confidentially to go public. This was a legitimate surprise since the word has already leaked out that OpenAI was about to file, but their rival beat them to the punch! And that's potentially a big problem for OpenAI as it makes for a very tricky narrative on their own would-be roadshow. They're now behind in both top-line and bottom-line numbers versus Anthropic, and Google has pulled even in terms of Gemini monthly active users.
Maybe the SpaceX listing goes so well that it raises all AI boats, as it were.1 But we're a long way from when Anthropic and/or OpenAI would list. A lot can happen between now and then. We'll see!
1 While we did talk about inclusion in the indicies almost immediately boosting these stocks, I did note that "maybe not the S&P 500" – and sure enough, they later rejected the notion of fast-tracking companies for inclusion (which is a good call). ↩
2026-06-09 21:25:20
From a pure AI perspective, nothing Apple showcased during their WWDC keynote yesterday was particularly groundbreaking. In fact, much of it featured capabilities long since available in other AI tools and services – in some cases, years ago. And guess what? That doesn't matter. Based on what we saw yesterday, Apple is set to win in AI. At least from a consumer perspective.
I know how crazy this sounds. It's not just that Apple has been viewed as behind in AI for the past few years, it's that they've been more or less a laughingstock given how they tried to roll out 'Apple Intelligence' two years ago and failed to the point of settling lawsuits around false advertising. But if Apple is actually able to roll out what they showcased yesterday – I'll get to the caveats below – and there's reason to believe they can this time, they're about to infuriate many people and companies across a wide swath of industries. That's because Apple seems on the verge of doing what they always do: watching new products and services come about and then jumping in later with a better user experience to win the day.
This annoys people because... they can't just do that! So and so was doing this long ago! FIRST! This is old! BORING! Lame. THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS! We saw it all on display in response to the keynote yesterday. And Wall Street seemed to agree with the angry mobs, sending the stock down in after-hours trading.
I'm here to tell you that none of that matters. Apple Intelligence and the new 'Siri AI' may seem underwhelming to those who live at the bleeding edge of AI. But 99% of people don't live there. And even more actually don't want to live there, but feel the need to in some ways lest they feel like they're being left behind in our Age of AI. If ChatGPT showed AI to the masses, Apple is set to bring usage mainstream.
I understood this immediately when I saw Apple's VP of Siri Engineering, Mike Rockwell – the man tasked with fixing Siri – do his demo during the keynote. It was simple and natural and that was the point. All he was doing was holding down the Side Button (maybe they should rename it to the Siri Button?) and talking to Siri AI. He didn't have to load up Terminal. He didn't have to download some coding app. He didn't have to download any app. Right out of the iPhone box, Siri AI will just work.
Well, provided Siri works, of course.
That's why this demo was key. While it wasn't live – and it would have obviously been more effective were it truly live, on-stage – it was clearly shot in real-time. There were slight delays here and there that weren't edited out. This was obviously intentional on Apple's part, to show you that unlike say, two years ago, this isn't vaporware. This is Siri actually doing things. Things she was previously not capable of doing.
Again, much of it wasn't particularly impressive from a pure AI perspective. But context matters – here, quite literally. This was always the promise of Apple Intelligence, that Apple would be able to pull in all the iPhone knows about you to handle any query and augment that with "world knowledge". Apple was unable to do that two years ago, but now Google is here to save the day. The fact that they got an actual shout-out tells you just how vital they are to this effort. Yes, Apple "distilled" Gemini to make their own, new "Apple Foundation Models", but it's the heavy-lifting that Google did in training these models which is going to make this all sing for Apple this time.
So why not just use Gemini? After all, there's an app for that. Well, you could and many will. But many more will not simply because Siri is baked in at the system level. This gives it capabilities no other AI service can match – at least until regulators try to force Apple to give others such access. But even if and when that happens, years down the line, the power will remain in the default. In not having to download and open an app, but in simply needing to hold down a button or saying "Siri" and everything just working.
Back to Rockwell's demo, the key to me was that the entire thing was done vocally. Certainly part of that is because it makes for a better demo than typing, but it's also likely how a lot of people are going to start using Siri AI. I say that because it's the way I interact with AI much of the time already. Perhaps I'm biased, but I also see the way my children have used Alexa and the like for years. They're growing up learning to use computers in more "natural" ways – not with a mouse and keyboard, but with touch and voice.
Obviously there are going to be times when you don't want to or can't use voice, but I highly suspect it's going to become the go-to way to interact with AI for many use-cases. And that's why we're about to see a rush of new devices hit the market focused on that interaction model. But just as we learned about cameras when the iPhone launched nearly 20 years ago, the best AI device is going to be the one you have on you. And at least for the foreseeable future, that's the iPhone.
That's what these demos were about yesterday. The iPhone is now an AI device. And so is the iPad. And the Mac. And Apple Watch. Even the Vision Pro.
Soon, AirPods. And a few other devices that Apple is clearly cooking up. And yes, Meta and others are already in the market with such devices, but they don't have the iPhone. But they still need the iPhone. And that's a problem. It will be a bigger one once Apple rolls out Siri AI.
Only Google and perhaps Samsung can meet Apple on the battlefield here thanks to their own smartphones. But while Google controls Gemini itself, they're going to have a hard time matching the product experience on every device beyond their own Pixel phones. And those hold a tiny sliver of the market. Google probably should aim to make the Pixel devices bigger to match Apple here – and perhaps their partnership will illuminate that opportunity, not unlike those early days of the iPhone. But that will involve complicated trade-offs with the broader Android ecosystem, including, yes, Samsung.
This is Apple leveraging their fully-integrated approach once again. The surprise is that they're seemingly able to do it without building their own frontier models from scratch. But they've perhaps lucked into a market where competition abounds and so Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all want to compete for their business. They might suggest they didn't want that business now that Google won it, but obviously they do. Who would turn down access to billions of highly engaged, active, and lucrative users?
Down the road, it's inevitable that Apple will have to do more on their own. Again, Google may force this issue once they shift focus as they always inevitably do. And we may be at the point where LLMs matter less than "World Models" at that point. But for right now, Apple did exactly what they need to do in order to "catch up".
Again, that doesn't mean they'll be at full parity with everything that Anthropic, or OpenAI, or even Google can do with their AI at the moment. But for the masses, for Apple's purposes, most of that won't matter. It will only matter if one of those players has a true product and/or consumer use-case breakthrough. And of those players, OpenAI was the best at creating those. But now they're reorienting their business around coding and enterprise use-cases. Because as Anthropic quickly showed everyone, that's where the money is.
But that's not where the money is for Apple. Their money is in selling devices which in turn leads to them selling services. There will be some level of AI upsell here with iCloud+, but it won't be to the same extent as the other AI players. And while never-say-never with ads, you can probably forget about those anytime soon for Apple too. That's in part because a huge part of Apple's pitch here is privacy. To the point where Apple was fine taking shots at their partners during the keynote, noting, for example, that while other web browsers with AI "track your every move" – I wonder who makes the most popular web browser in the world with AI now baked-in... — Apple will not do that.
But the biggest direct shot came early on from Craig Federighi: "Still, some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI. Without regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve." Gee, wonder who he could mean by that... Perhaps Apple's big AI partner from two years ago? The one, it should be noted, currently considering legal action against Apple over the failures and shortcomings of that partnership...
AI's perception issues are also an angle Apple is going to heavily hit upon because Apple has a level of consumer trust that basically no other tech company enjoys. And in an age when the world – and the US in particular – is worried about where AI is about to take us and perhaps displace us, Apple can offer a more credible story of simply leveraging the technology as a tool for humans to use.
To that end, while everyone is busy chasing down the promise of agents, bulking up their offerings into "super apps" so as to route such work through the desktop, Apple just showed off an agent fully running on a phone. Or an iPad. Or a Mac. All pulled together via their own new app called, wait for it: Siri. Not a super app, in fact, just a super simple app.1 A way to collect and continue your AI workflows across devices. But one that is also not necessary because Siri lives right there, in your Dynamic Island (or Spotlight on the Mac), always ready.
It can see your screen in ways that would require about 15 different levels of permission with Claude. Which is, of course, a good thing to protect users from themselves – something which will undoubtedly be one of the key lessons from the OpenClaw movement. But again, Apple has a level of trust that others can't match. And a device base that others can't touch.
That's going to turn Visual Intelligence into perhaps the most profound shift in all of this. It frankly already should have been the case, but Apple buried it previously. Now it's going to be front-and-center in the most-used app for many people: Camera. It points to a future where wearables don't just augment our reality visually, but they do so with information without the need to pull out your phone. Yes, Meta is already headed there, and others, including Apple, are soon to join, but it seems like we're not quite there yet. For now, it's a great use case for the iPhone camera and a fun demo for the Vision Pro.
All of this adds up to a world in which Apple seizes control of consumer AI. Well, unless you're in the EU – enjoy the regulations! Or in China – enjoy the oversight! But also in those places too, eventually.
Having said all that, it's caveat time. In my preview yesterday, I called back to the famous Steve Jobs "it just works" saying and while watching the keynote, I was quick to append a new variation "if it works" to many of my live-tweets. It's funny, but necessary!
Basically all of the above was also true two years ago when Apple Intelligence was first unveiled. But it ended up only being true on paper, of course. It's possible that the same thing happens this time, but you have to believe there's no way in hell that Apple moves forward with devoting 45 minutes of their 1 hour 15 minute keynote to AI if they're not confident this time.
The bigger issue may be that Siri AI doesn't fail to launch, but just isn't very good upon launch. Here, we can look back upon the past 15 years of Siri. Every year we've been promised that Siri is getting better. And while that may have been true in small ways, relative to the state of the art, first with Alexa and now certainly with the LLMs, Siri has been made to look worse relatively speaking, every year.
Again, I believe Google's involvement is what breaks this cycle. But there are a lot of questions there still. What happens if/when Gemini is constantly updated? Does Apple need to re-distill each time? Do they update their models on their own apart from Google? Do we need a full software update to update the models given how much is apparently going to run locally?! All of this would suggest a company that still may not be quite ready to operate in the Age of AI, where the state of the art changes constantly.
The good news is that increasingly, most day-to-day usage won't require the state of the art. And, in fact, it increasingly may prove too expensive to use the state of the art for most tasks. Again, Apple's timing could be good here. But we won't know that for sure until Siri AI is out in the wild and competing with say, Mythos.
Then again, I'm not sure how much they will actually compete. There will always be the AI power users – of which I'll certainly be one – but most users will not be AI power users. They'll be content to use the default, provided the default is good enough. But that's underselling Apple here since it's really about having a good enough base layer for things like world knowledge mixed with the contextual stuff around your personal data that only they can do. While it sounds simple, this complexity is not easy. It's entirely possible that we see a world where most iPhone users use Siri AI for, say, 80% of their AI needs and then pick another model/service for the other 20%. Or maybe it's even more granular, with two or more other AI services filling in specific niches. Again, we'll see.
But what I see based on what I saw yesterday is a world where Apple takes the AI consumer lead in relatively short order. Millions of people next year walking around talking to Siri AI, asking her all sorts of things and tasking her with all sorts of things. It's a mixture of the power of the default, Apple's own superior product instincts, OpenAI ceding the consumer high ground, Google being stretched in a million different directions beyond consumer (and, of course, helping out Apple here), Microsoft never being good at consumer, Anthropic not caring about consumer, Amazon not having a smartphone (yet?), and Meta not having the iPhone.
After being left for dead in AI, everything is coming up Apple, again. How annoying for some – THEY CAN'T KEEP DOING THIS. AI becomes a new reason to get an iPhone. Forget AI PCs, this is the first true AI device. If it works.
1 Which needs a better icon... ↩
2026-06-08 19:42:28
Golfers will know the term "mulligan". While the origins are murky, it undoubtedly came from someone with that last name taking a bad shot and requesting a "do over". It's not an officially sanctioned rule, of course. But even the best golfers in the world use a mulligan at some point. Now, one of the best companies in the world is about to use one.
Apple.
Later today at WWDC, Apple will unveil the new Siri – for real this time. Two years ago, the company laid out a vision for 'Apple Intelligence', which sounded good on paper and in presentation. A sort of "AI for the rest of us" – products not fully built around AI, but products you already use augmented with AI to make them smarter. While they were suspiciously light on demos, Apple Intelligence would be coming soon, mostly in the Fall with the usual OS updates, Apple promised.
Given the history of Siri up until that point – bad to the point of becoming Larry David punchlines – we had no real reason to believe Apple would get it right this time. But hey, it was the dawn of the Age of AI. And it was Apple. There's no way they would deceive us with vaporware, right? Right?!
What happened next was a shitting of the bed not seen since the Apple Maps debacle in Tim Cook's early days as CEO. And actually this would prove to be far worse. Because at least Apple could make a compelling business (and subsequently, privacy) case for why they needed to rip out Google Maps and roll their own. With AI, Apple was just in over their heads, but they couldn't see it. Worse, they thought everyone else was wrong. That chatbots were a silly toy. That LLMs would be a passing fad. Again, wrong.
Heads rolled, though clearly not as fast as they should have. WWDC 2025 came and went with Apple hoping that new UI would distract from AI. It didn't matter that 'Liquid Glass' was divisive, what mattered was that everyone was talking about it rather than talking about Apple's AI failures. When those were brought up, Apple was ready with some epic gaslighting. "As you know, Apple Intelligence is great..."
Behind the scenes, everything was not great, of course. Beyond making the wrong early calls and bets with AI, the problems were exacerbated by the nature of the technology itself. It was continuing to evolve so fast that even if Apple could ship their answer, it was likely going to be out-of-date by the time it did – we saw this with the few features that did actually launch. They were a day late and about a billion dollars short.
Many more elements just never shipped. And the constant delays even started spilling over into Apple's bread-and-butter: their tangible products which sat somewhere, probably in Asia, ready to be assembled but lacking the smarts needed to make them sing. So those too were delayed.
Apple faced the same problem that Amazon did in that they had a massive install base already using the old version of their "AI" – the Siri and Alexa voice assistants – for rudimentary tasks such as setting timers, checking the weather, and playing music. They perhaps thought they could just swap in the new tech to replace the old tech, but when they tried to do that, things started breaking at the edges.
Even Google was running into such issues, which is why it has taken so long to replace all the functionality of their 'Assistant' with Gemini.
But whereas Amazon and Google were deep in the weeds of AI, Apple was not. So it was a bit like trying to change an engine mid-flight not with a toolkit, but with a tuna fish sandwich.
I had a sense of what Apple probably needed to do about 18 months ago: replace Siri with an AI service that actually worked. Not just as a fallback, a role ChatGPT has obtusely served, but as the main brain of Siri. Sure, easier said than done, but well, it's eventually exactly what Apple would do.
Well, not exactly, as it sounds like Apple is technically "distilling" Google's Gemini models into a modified version for their own purposes. Still, this is obviously what Apple should have done from the get-go. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but it's also the playbook Apple often follows – with Google Maps, for example!
Outsource that shit until your version is ready to roll!
There was undoubtedly a mixture of arrogance and simply bad decisions at play here. But I also worry this aforementioned Age of AI requires a method of execution that Apple is simply not geared towards. Constant, rapid iteration and deployment. Not going under the shroud of secrecy for a year, emerging with a perfectly polished gem to showcase to the world. I think even Google is making this mistake to some extent as the most recent Google I/O showcased.
The difference is that Google, thanks to DeepMind, is an AI powerhouse. Apple probably should have acquired their own DeepMind, but now it's undoubtedly too late and certainly too expensive. So instead they're paying Google to use their DeepMind. Awkward. But the correct call.
And it's why I'm actually optimistic heading into this WWDC keynote. Again, I've remained skeptical of Apple's abilities to pull off AI over the past couple of years because I've been writing about Siri since before they launched it 15 years ago. Every year they say it's going to be the year that Siri gets good. And every year Siri continues to suck.
That's obviously a bit unfair. (But not fully!) Siri has been useful for certain things, like the aforementioned setting of timers and other such rudimentary tasks. But whereas Alexa quickly ate Siri's lunch as a toddler, now ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all the rest are full-on bullying Siri, Mean Girls-style, as a teenager. Can Siri join the cool kids table while also staying true to her roots?
Meaning, of course, Apple's roots in privacy and user experience.
Thanks to the Gemini-infused lobotomy, I'm cautiously optimistic. I also think Apple finds itself in an interesting place thanks to the fact that the product which has long been viewed as the leader in AI, ChatGPT, is in the process of morphing. Because OpenAI is under assault from Google above and Anthropic below, they're pulling back from a pure consumer-focus and going after the lower hanging fruit from a business perspective in the form of developers and enterprises. This might leave an opening for a great new consumer AI product, or suite of products. And who does consumer better than Apple?
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. First and foremost, we just need a Siri that actually works. And then I think we need proof that Apple has actually shifted their mindset under Craig Federighi (and Mike Rockwell – and soon, John Ternus at the very top) to transform the company into one that can actually operate in this Age of AI. I don't think that requires spending hundreds of billions in CapEx every year, but it probably requires spending more than the same $7B to $12B they have every year for the past decade.
Ultimately, the jury is still very much out if they need to own and operate their own frontier foundation models. Certainly they need some of their own models, and they've obviously been working on those. But how much does the frontier matter going forward? Microsoft used to say it didn't, which is why they were happy to let OpenAI own that space. Of course, they also technically had to let them own that space. Now that they no longer do, Microsoft is singing a very different tune...
If Apple can walk the fine line of distilling Gemini for their high-end needs while using their own models for the lower-end AI needs, there's perhaps a path there. But that was also basically the promise two years ago. And, well...
The real risk here is the same as it was with Google Maps all those years ago. That Google alters the terms of their agreement in ways that makes Apple uncomfortable. Apple can either pray they don't alter them further or...
At that point, the answer probably won't be to train their own massive LLM. For one, that probably won't be feasible, but for another, the world may have moved past LLMs at that point – or at least those being the only types of models. Maybe Apple will just skip LLMs (again, the frontier variety) and go right to "World Models"? You could certainly make the case that they're uniquely positioned there given the billions of devices they have out there in the wild ready to gather data.
Then the question becomes if Apple is okay using such data to train such models? Perhaps if they frame it in a "secure" and "private" way, as is the Apple way? But again, can that mentality actually cut it in the Age of AI?
Apple may find themselves backed into a corner at the moment, but the dominance of their devices – the iPhone in particular – also still gives them a unique opportunity. Yes, even now. Yes, even after all the soiled bed sheets. If AI compute moves more towards the edge, Apple may suddenly have a silicon advantage. Even if it doesn't, there's still no better hardware on which to use AI – at least not yet.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, and that's the hybrid approach Apple also promised two years ago. If they can actually execute on it...
Step one starts today. Or rather, step two that's a do-over of step one. A mulligan.
One more thing: the other past Apple debacle that keeps popping into my head was MobileMe. In the age before iCloud made it so that Apple's services "just work", Steve Jobs had to lay down the law. As Adam Lashinsky relayed in Fortune:
"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down."
"So why the fuck doesn't it do that?" is a pretty good encapsulation of Siri over these past 15 years. So far, there's been no good answer...
Update June 9, 2026: Some thoughts post-WWDC keynote...
M.G. Siegler
2026-06-08 03:33:56
Sending a Sunday edition as it's WWDC Eve – more thoughts on that, tomorrow – and I've been on the road. A lot below, starting with some thoughts on the latest wave of "AI PCs" and if any consumer might actually be enticed by these...
M.G. Siegler
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
🚪 S&P 500 Holds the Door – A genuine surprise as it seemed inevitable that the index would follow the NASDAQ 100 and FTSE Russell in allowing for near-immediate inclusion of new entrants. Instead, those hoping to join the S&P 500 will still have to wait at least a year, which has always felt like a far more sane situation given how much automatic buying (and subsequent rebalancing) is tied to these indices. This obviously would have boosted SpaceX (and perhaps soon, Anthropic and OpenAI) while also dinging their Big Tech brethren (including, of course, Tesla). But the real losers would have been those companies more on the fringe of such lists, which would have been booted as a result, thus hurting their own stocks immensely. Again, it's just all mostly automated, so better to do such things in a orderly manner, no? Well, not for NASDAQ and FTSE, it seems! One more thing: there are also profitability rules around inclusion in the S&P 500 – and SpaceX would currently run afoul of those, with xAI and their new AI push putting the company in the red. Of course, they were profitable before that deal, so we'll see how long it takes to get back there. This, obviously, would be an issue for OpenAI and perhaps Anthropic as well! [Bloomberg 🔒]
💻 ‘Surface Laptop Ultra’ Hands-On — It looks nice, in that it looks pretty much exactly like a MacBook Pro, though hard to blame Microsoft too much here as it’s 2026 and laptop design pretty much is what it is at this point, and Apple set that standard long ago. Well, except for the touch-screen element, which this will have, and the MacBook Pro doesn’t — yet. That plus the big AI specs comes at a cost — quite literally, which we don’t know yet but will undoubtedly be many thousands due to the RAM (128GB) alone — “I was surprised by the weight” and “hefty” are not two things you want to hear about a late 2026 laptop. And while I would say that most such developers will probably use this machine stationary, that begs the question of why not just get the undoubtedly more powerful (thanks to the power requirements) and perhaps cheaper (thanks to no screen) ‘Surface RTX Spark Dev Box’ (rolls right off the tongue)? I’m reminded a bit of the Chromebook Pixel here, which was also nice, but hardware-wise proved to be overkill, leading to a price-point that led to it not really selling. Will the local AI capabilities be enough? Still feels early for that… Ultimately, I wouldn’t be shocked if zero MacBook Pro users switch over. If nothing else, there’s the whole Windows element this device still has to overcome. Also, how awkward for Copilot+ PCs — are these new RTX-powered machines going to be Copilot++ PCs? [Verge]
🗣️ Microsoft’s ‘Project Solara’ — Speaking of Windows… sort of wild on the surface (not Surface) that Microsoft’s AI devices initiative will be built on top of Android. But also not that surprising given that Windows is 40 years old and simply not built for such things from name on down. The focal point will clearly be the cloud, which will allow a sort of orchestra of devices to work with one-another — a concept I’ve long been a proponent of as the future of computing (i.e. no single “iPhone-killer” but many devices working together in concert). The question will be what makes Microsoft’s offering compelling enough here, as presumably Apple and Google will be aiming to build the same around their own devices. Perhaps working with third-parties to make this more “Matter-like” helps, but seemingly Amazon would take such an approach as well. Maybe the Windows install base helps, but again, these devices don’t run Windows! So it may come down to who has the best AI and Cloud — and perhaps for enterprise, Microsoft has a viable shot. But in terms of devices that consumers actually want to use, may have been nice to be able to work with OpenAI and Jony Ive on such a flagship device, no? Maybe Microsoft can partner with Meta here? [GeekWire]
⚾️ MLB Proposes Salary Cap – Impossible to see the league's hard cap proposal of $245.3M happening – the Dodgers payroll right now is around $400M. Seven of the 30 teams are currently above the threshold. The players' union, the strongest in sports, would never go for that. They would undoubtedly go for a payroll floor (trying to force "cheap" teams to spend more) but that proposal of $171.2M is nearly $100M above the Marlins' current payroll – 13 of the 30 teams are below it currently. In ways, baseball now echoes the inequality in larger society – yes, my hometown Cleveland Guardians, with the second lowest payroll, constantly punch above their weight, but big-market/big-spending teams have won the last 10 World Series in a row. And it's largely fueled by TV money – but not the national deals, rather the owned/controlled regional networks bring in massive amounts for a few teams (namely the Dodgers and Yankees) while many others get basically nothing as some collective RSNs are constantly broke. Oh yes, and Steve Cohen doesn't help matters as he's roughly 3x as wealthy as the next richest owner (beyond the Rogers Communication company that owns the Blue Jays) and has been spending as such on the Mets – humorously, to no avail. Anyway, they need to get this sorted ahead of the next national TV rights negotiations in a couple years, with MLB trying to take over more control a la the NFL (good luck with that given those few RSNs). A strike seems pretty likely next year. [ESPN]
OpenAI is on the verge of morphing ChatGPT into something new. Is that a good thing?
M.G. Siegler
"We’re talking about it, where the American people can benefit from the success of AI. It would be a beautiful thing. And it would make them rich."
– President Donald Trump on the notion (per below) that the US government could acquire stake in some of the leading AI companies.
🎶 Listening to "Going Shopping" by The Strokes
🍺 Enjoying a Demory Paris IPA
🇫🇷 Sent from Paris, France
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• Big Tech Renewing Their IPO Vows
• Government Weighs Stakes in Big AI
• Anthropic Calls for AI Development Pause
• Google Lets Publishers Opt-Out of AI Crawl
2026-06-07 22:57:19
There's not a lot in here that we didn't already know about OpenAI's sprint towards making ChatGPT a "super app" but one quote, which I used in the title, is worth, um, chatting about perhaps.
The changes, which will give greater prominence and resources to OpenAI’s coding product Codex, reflect a growing conviction within the company that the future of AI lies not in chatbots that answer questions but in agents that perform tasks for users.
“Chat is dead,” said one senior OpenAI employee.
While the report cites "more than a dozen current and former employees" of OpenAI, the quote above is clearly from a current one. A senior one. That's interesting in so far as you can use it as a finger-on-the-pulse within the company. And it points to both an opportunity and challenge ahead for OpenAI.
First and foremost, it would be wild for the company to cede the chatbot ground. To be clear and fair, the rest of the report doesn't indicate that the 'chat' element of ChatGPT is going away, let alone dying – unlike, say, Sora – but it does indicate an effort and hope to move beyond it, and perhaps just use it as an entry point to get people in the door for the "real" services that OpenAI wants to push.
The company is embarking on the changes amid a belief that the advent of AI agents, which can perform multiple tasks for users from booking travel to organising calendars, will be a more valuable product than the chatbot.
This hunt for "value" is obviously increasingly important as OpenAI angles towards an IPO. There was a time, perhaps a year ago, when it seemed like their top-line revenue and user growth was enough, but a lot has changed in a year. While it has long looked like Anthropic was in a better position from a bottom-line perspective, due to less spend (and, at least somewhat related, more focus), the fact that they've now surpassed OpenAI with that top-line growth is also a problem, obviously. And ahead of the would-be IPOs, the private valuations of the two companies now fully reflects that.
At the same time, at least one report suggests ChatGPT has surpassed the all-important 1B MAU mark – though the company has yet to officially announce it [update: perhaps they're waiting to hit 1B weekly active users, which seems to be their preferred metric?]. While it remains record-breaking growth, they were hoping to hit the mark by the end of last year. Doing so six months into this year suggests that growth, while still amazing, also perhaps isn't as amazing as it once was. Also not great: the fact that Google just announced the 900M MAU mark for Gemini at I/O last month.
Anthropic is attacking the business while Google is attacking the usage. So yeah, something had to change.
The overhaul, which is set to begin rolling out in coming weeks, will initially appear as changes to ChatGPT’s website and mobile apps, encouraging customers towards using coding, image-generation and apps from external partners.
Given that timetable, they'll also likely be battling their old friend Microsoft on the "super app" front. Probably Google as well, depending on how long it takes them to pull their agents and coding tools into the Gemini app.
The "apps from external partners" element is interesting, the report goes a bit more into that further down:
To encourage users to adopt those services, OpenAI is redesigning ChatGPT’s interface, adding new prompts and features that direct users towards coding tools, image generation and applications built by partners such as Canva and Booking.com, according to people familiar with the plans.
Over time, OpenAI intends to ditch the prompts and features, betting that its models will be able to automatically understand users’ intentions when they are on the app or site.
In other words, anyone partnering with OpenAI on this launch be going in eyes wide open, knowing they'll be relegated back into the background eventually. But for now, this new "Super" ChatGPT will seemingly try to lean on partners for all it can do out-of-the-box beyond the things Claude may already be doing for you. Yes, we're still trying to make App Stores happen, in a way.
Outlining the changes, Thibault Sottiaux, who previously ran Codex and now leads all of OpenAI’s core product and platform, told the FT: “It will transcend the actual surface...what we’re building towards is where you have your own personal agent that is capable of helping you... across everything in your life, be it personally or at work.”
He added: “You can connect through it on your mobile, desktop or web. When you’re in the car, you can talk to it.”
To reiterate, that's a current OpenAI exec speaking on-the-record about these changes. And his comments also suggest a move beyond the chatbot but also that the company believes we may yet enter a world of "one AI to rule them all" – something I've explored more recently in thinking about if the AI world might play out in a similar manner to the old "bring your own device" strategy in enterprise. Is your personal AI going to be so ingrained in your life that it's also just most convenient to use it as your work AI?
Executives believe users will increasingly interact with a single AI assistant rather than a collection of separate applications. As agents become more capable, OpenAI expects the distinction between chatbots, coding tools, search products and other software categories to blur.
“When we have [artificial general intelligence], I don’t think there will be a large number of distinct brands,” said Alex Embiricos, OpenAI’s head of enterprise product. “Probably there will be a single entity that I can talk to that can do whatever I need.”
OpenAI sure seems to think so! Of course, the opposite might be true (or so Microsoft undoubtedly hopes).
“Approximately a year ago, OpenAI’s strategy was swing for the fences, whereas Anthropic’s strategy is make money first,” said Jenny Xiao, partner at Leonis Capital and former researcher at OpenAI.
“Now the two are converging, because both of them are trying to aim for an IPO and investors care more about money than dreams.”
Yeah, two roads diverged... until they suddenly converged when it became clear which was the better road.
Speaking of, I can't help but continue to think that the real risk here for OpenAI is in morphing ChatGPT from this consumer-facing phenomenon into this more enterprise-focused business. They wouldn't frame it that way, of course – again, 'one AI to rule them all', and all that – but this "super app" could certainly muddle the message of what exactly ChatGPT is.
Given the killer quote above, is it reasonable to think they might not even call such an app "ChatGPT" anymore? I mean, that would be truly crazy given that it has basically become the "Kleenex" brand of AI (no matter what Microsoft may think – lol).
Codex definitely seems to have some real momentum right now – both outside the company and within it. This report last week from Stephanie Palazzolo for The Information notes that the company feels like they built Codex the right way, that is a deep connection between model and product. That would suggest that they feel like ChatGPT itself wasn't built the right way, and was sort of backed into – which, yeah, duh. Further, some in the company seem to believe that using Codex for many of the tasks people now use ChatGPT for is just a better experience. So the question becomes if Codex is about to subsume ChatGPT?
It's not just about winning in coding to win in coding, but also the thinking that winning here will help OpenAI also get ahead in agentic workflows (and perhaps recursive self-improvement) and that, in turn, can pave the way back to consumers in the form of a true AI assistant. How's that for an Odyssey?
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
