2026-06-02 21:06:31
Given how much was being telegraphed ahead of Jensen Huang's Computex keynote, I wrote up some thoughts on NVIDIA jumping into PC-focused CPUs a few days ago (of course, it was a long-time coming).
With 'RTX Spark' (what is with seemingly every company using the 'Spark' branding for a different element of AI?) now unveiled, it seems... pretty much as expected. It will start as a high-end chip for high-end PCs that's undoubtedly going to be expensive (no prices were given) simply because of the memory alone. Will they take off where "Copilot+ PCs" did not as personal "AI Supercomputers"? We'll see. A lot of that will fall upon just how well they actually run Windows (and the myriad software built for Microsoft's operating system). We'll undoubtedly hear a lot more about that at the Build keynote in a few hours... Forget Qualcomm, would love to hear Intel's thoughts on this!
M.G. Siegler
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
📈 Anthropic Files to go Public – Alex Kantrowitz and I were in the middle of recording our monthly podcast when this news hit, so we channeled Bill O'Reilly and did it live. It helps that I wrote about this very prospect (twice!) a couple weeks back: how complicated the narrative would be for OpenAI if Anthropic filed first. That was because it leaked that OpenAI was about to file, perhaps to take some wind out of SpaceX's S-1 sails – and well, it looks like Anthropic quietly beat them to the punch! So yeah, that's a problem for OpenAI optically, if nothing else. But that's also nothing new for OpenAI. Their hope would be that the market can digest all of these listings, but the fact that they're all likely to be listed in indices like the NASDAQ 100 and S&P 500 in relative short order, thus causing major portfolio rebalancing, could cause chaos. No surprise that OpenAI is out there today touting Codex growth, as they need to try to turn this story around, pronto. The other thing, not mentioned with Alex, that I'd expect them to lean on heavily here: ads growth. It's the one business area Anthropic apparently isn't touching. So OpenAI has a potential greenfield there – if they can get them working – at least from an IPO narrative perspective... How long until OpenAI files? [YouTube]
📺 Streaming Bundles Prove Popular – Yeah, duh. With up to a third of sign-ups now happening with one of these partnerships, don't be surprised to see Netflix jump into the game soon too. They've dipped their toes tangentially, but an official Netflix + well, anyone, would obviously immediately be the most popular one of these offerings. The more interesting play remains if they go down the "channels" route that Amazon has pushed so effectively, and let (made) other services use their app (and UI, and recommendation engines) to serve up the content. This is obviously a dangerous path for the other streaming services – and why Netflix hasn't given such power to any of the streaming boxes. But as YouTube keeps creeping up (and backing into being the actual new cable bundle via YouTube TV), it feels like Netflix will make moves here. [NYT]
✋ Don't "Dickover" Your Readers to Death – If I stop to think how much of my life has been spent dismissing pop-ups/overs on websites (especially in Europe), I immediately get depressed. Added together, it's a meaningful amount of our time on Earth spent doing this. But on an individual site level, it's both annoying and just rude to your readership, as John Gruber colorfully illustrates. It was definitely one key aspect of going with Ghost as a publishing platform over Medium or Substack for Spyglass. I just want the content to load and render in a way that's a great reading experience. Not, you know, this. [Daring Fireball]
🔊 Where is the Google Home Speaker? – I have been wondering this myself because, frankly, I want one. The first purpose-built Gemini-powered device was long promised and promoted to be "coming Spring 2026". It's now June, and while we may technically have a couple weeks of "Spring" left, I think everyone would consider this to be Summer. The fact that I/O came and went without a mention of the device didn't seem like a great sign. But maybe there's some hope in the product pages of Canadian Best Buy (though they have since removed the "June 25" date – replacing it with "coming soon")? Given the fact that AI upgrade work continues on various Google Home products, this clearly seems to be a software/AI issue and not a hardware one. Which is interesting because that would be the same issue that has bedeviled both Amazon with the Alexa+ roll-out and Apple with the new HomePods (and newfangled Siri in general, of course). I'll just reiterate what I wrote two years ago: sometimes being early is worse than being late. That is, because Amazon, Apple, and now Google have to upgrade old systems rather than just rolling out new ones, they're paying a legacy tax, as it were. And clearly none of them were quite ready for it. [9to5Google]
In other Microsoft news ahead of Build...
M.G. Siegler
"This reinvention of the computer is as big of a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone. Microsoft and Nvidia are going to reinvent the PC. This is the first completely re-engineered, reinvented line of PCs that has happened in 40 years."
– Jensen Huang, making the case for RTX Spark, and NVIDIA's place in the PC market. I haven't heard this much hype in at least a few months, when Jensen was telling us how OpenClaw was the most important software ever created. Now for both, we'll see...
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• Apple's iGlasses in 2027
• Intel's New AI GPU
• Surface Laptop Ultra
2026-06-02 17:16:32
Goodbye peach. Goodbye cloud blob. Hello "super app". At their Build conference keynote later today, Microsoft is widely expected to unveil a number of things, including new in-house AI models, Windows 11 tweaks, more about their 'Surface Laptop Ultra' NVIDIA-powered machines – but the thing I'm most interested in is their attempt at this Copilot "super app":
The software giant is working on a one-stop shop that would connect its GitHub Copilot coding assistant, Copilot chat function, Copilot Cowork tool, and a new agentic workflow capability internally named Autopilot into a single app, according to two sources familiar with the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a platform that hasn’t yet been released. The project is being spearheaded by Jacob Andreou, Microsoft’s recently appointed head of Copilot. One of Andreou’s primary tasks has been to unite the consumer and enterprise sides of Copilot into a cohesive product.
Some elements of the app, which is being developed internally with the slogan “Delivering one Copilot,” could be referenced at Microsoft’s Build developer conference next week in San Francisco, though there are no plans to showcase the app itself. The company plans to launch the super app by the end of summer. The plans for the super app could evolve and are not yet final, the sources said, but the idea is to be able to combine a user’s Copilots into one central interface, including accounts from the productivity-focused Microsoft 365 Copilot.
I'm shocked, shocked that the strategy of having 17 different versions of Copilot across 17 different surfaces (including yes, Surfaces) hasn't worked out for Microsoft. "Delivering one Copilot" is obviously the right approach and messaging. And yes, that puts Microsoft in the camp with Meta, X, Coinbase, Airbnb, Uber, Snap, Spotify – even Disney in going after the elusive (at least in the West) "super app" concept. And assuming the timeline above is right, they'll be in a footrace to get their take out the door with, who else? OpenAI.
I joked last week that it looked like Microsoft's IP rights with OpenAI may have included CSS files when a leaked image of the new Copilot looked a lot like ChatGPT. And by "a lot" I meant "exactly". Per above, gone was the peachy hues of the previous consumer-facing Copilot – seemingly derived from Pi, the first and only product from Inflection, the team Microsoft "hackquired" in the first such deal. Hardly a surprise that Mustafa Suleyman tried to make Pi happen within Microsoft, but also hardly a surprise that it didn't work. And now hardly a surprise that he's been reassigned elsewhere, to work on the frontier models he spent much of the past couple years insisting Microsoft wasn't interested in making.
Anyway, a couple days later, Alex Heath seemingly got a better leaked screenshot of the Copilot "super app". And actually, it looks less like ChatGPT and more like Claude – almost exactly like Anthropic's own "super app" right down to the toggles. Sure, they have four rather than three options, but you can chalk that up to Microsoft being Microsoft. Gotta clutter where you can. I will say kudos on the "Autopilot" naming – a clever riff to convey agentic work.
I think it's interesting how the design of all of these services has collapsed into the same basic one. While they all started trying to be a bit different, visually, clearly ChatGPT's "chatbot" paradigm won the day, at least for now. And Apple is apparently about to be included on that list too, when the new Siri app – and actually, the first Siri actual app – is unveiled at WWDC. Apple tried to keep Siri as a more nebulous system-wide thing, but again, clearly the chat app idea is what users expect right now. We'll see if that changes if/when the first true AI devices built around voice start hitting the market...
It sounds like we will indeed hear more about this new Copilot in the Build keynote, but likely just a preview as Microsoft races OpenAI to get the "super app" out the door and into the hands of consumers/developers this Summer.
Which do you prefer: ChatGPT Copilot or Claude Copilot?
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2026-06-01 22:55:03
This past weekend, a movie opened with $81M at the box office. A big number. But also one that Hollywood would undoubtedly expect for a marquee film in an early summer slot. But this movie cost just $10M to make. And was directed by a 20-year-old first-time director. Based off of the short films he put out there on YouTube. In that light, this isn't just a big number, it's a holy-shit-your-pants moment for Hollywood.
And while you might be tempted to write off Backrooms as a one-off box office blip a la The Blair Witch Project almost 30 years ago, there are a few reasons to believe this may actually be a sea-change moment for the entire industry.1
First and foremost, the movie that came in the number two spot wasn't the latest Star Wars epic, The Mandalorian and Grogu, in its second weekend. It was Curry Barker's Obsession in its third weekend. Yes, a movie with a $750k budget by yet another first-time director beat a movie that cost a reported $400M for Disney to make and market.
What is going on out there?
Well, YouTube, for one thing. Beyond Kane Parsons using the platform to perfect his craft and story for Backrooms, Barker also cut his teeth on the service. I wrote a blurb about this in a newsletter last week, but that was when there was some inkling that Backrooms might earn a "mere" $50M this weekend. The $80M+ opening plus the fact that Obsession has now risen at the box office each week – something that hasn't happened (outside of a few Christmas weekends) in 40+ years – all but ensures this movement draws Hollywood's attention much like the Eye of Sauron when Frodo Baggins puts on the Ring of Power.2
And, if history is any guide, the industry may smother this fire before it spreads. Barker is apparently getting eight-figure offers for his next project sight unseen. Parsons may just get a literal blank check after this weekend. Not that they don't deserve the paydays and bigger budgets, but this has always been the delicate balance and not-so-fine line in Hollywood. If something is working, money is thrown at it and everyone sets out to copy it. But this movement could be just as much about the "grassroots" nature of building an audience and fandom on YouTube – and using the platform to stress test your ideas.
And trying to sincerely engage there would be incredibly awkward for a Hollywood apparatus which has spent the past couple of decades first trying to sue such platforms out of existence, and later just generally dismissing the notion of "UGC" as any kind of competitive threat.
This has long been a simmering misunderstanding of the fundamental notion of attention. Hollywood assumed their content commanded it above all else. No one seemed to realize that the relative scarcity of entertainment options leading into the 1950s was not just a factor of their "Golden Age" but was the factor. The box office data over the past 80 years would have very clearly showed this to anyone willing to take an honest look. Per-capita spending first started to plummet, then overall attendance did. Instead, such data was sprinkled with ticket price increases and inflation pixie dust. As a result Box Office "records" continued unabated.
COVID punctured that dream, but rather than wake-up, the industry has been busy trying to figure out ways to go back to sleep.
Anyway, attention continued to shift. To television. To videogames. To smartphones. To streaming. It's not that people are consuming less content – they're consuming far more of it! – but where they're interacting with it has changed. These days, YouTube is king. That misunderstanding is now boiling over in the form of $80M+ opening weekends at the box office.
Which seems like a good thing for Hollywood, right? A legitimate record again, finally. But not one Hollywood controls the narrative around. It will undoubtedly be spun by some as "see, to really succeed, you must 'graduate' to movie theaters" – boy would that be a misreading of what's really going on here.
This weekend portends the end of the "traditional" model for Hollywood. The big studio gatekeepers have been eroding for years, and now it is being swept out to sea. Tidal waves are forming. YouTube is just the first.
Can Hollywood ride such a wave? They will try! But obviously it has to be about more than simply releasing movie trailers to their channels. There will be a rush to try and cultivate talent who are able to leverage the platform natively. But it must be paired with the realization that this is all part of an attention continuum. In 2026, the model cannot only be releasing a big budget movie into thousands of theaters (many of which sit completely empty while the content plays depending on the movie, city, time of day, etc) and keeping it there for a set number of days so as to unnaturally protect a distribution model that was created a hundred years ago.
Again, in a very different world.
That is not to say that movie theaters should die! If anything, this weekend proves their value. They should be utilized in new and interesting ways. Leveraging content that built an audience elsewhere, such as, yes, YouTube. But also television.3 Obviously, that model is nothing new, but what used to be thought of as shows "graduating" into being movies, should be far more fluid. Maybe something starts as a show but builds towards a finale in theaters. Or vice versa. Maybe a movie starts on streaming then builds towards an "event" showing in theaters, a la KPop Demon Hunters – which worked, by the way, because it aired on Netflix first, not in spite of it. Maybe a sequel goes directly to theaters. Maybe a movie opens in theaters for only one week – the horror! – for the super fans, then quickly spreads elsewhere. There are so many different ideas and experiments to try...
Also, they don't really have to be full-on experiments. You can track such things. We can build it, we have the technology.
Speaking of, perhaps the most fascinating meta layer here is that while Hollywood has been busy panicking and bracing for the onslaught of AI, it's YouTube which has come around to truly disrupt the system. This has been a long time coming, of course. But Hollywood was blinded to it because just as with the box office trends, they simply didn't want to see it. They convinced themselves they were looking at easy-to-dismiss "UGC", when they should have been focusing on attention.
In particular, amongst young people. Current tracking suggests that half of the audience for Backrooms was under 25. Half! And 86% may have been below 35. Eighty-six percent! These are not numbers that marketing drove. There's something else going on here, clearly!
Of course, there are smart players that already realized this. A24 is rightfully getting a lot of plaudits for Backrooms opening today. And Focus Features has continued to keep their eye on things like Obsession despite being a part of the OG Universal studio, itself long-since under the Comcast conglomerate. Jason Blum is out there being quoted left and right, which makes sense given the success he's long seen with his Blumhouse banner. The fact that all of this is tied to the horror genre doesn't seem like an accident. It's the one area of filmmaking where smaller budgets are not just tolerated, but are a part of the model. Again, that's not to say you can't do interesting art with big budgets, it just means that the big budget alone is obviously not enough and conversely, smaller budgets may lead to more creativity in the same way that any kind of constraint tends to...
As Brooks Barnes points out in The New York Times, the films of the 1970s that "reset" the industry were in part a response to the big-budget spectacles of the 1960s when Hollywood tried to grow simply by puffing out its chest – with its war chest. It feels like there are similarities here, but also the world is far, far different.
The streamers are at the gate. Hollywood was seemingly proud of themselves having fought off the Netflix "threat", only to wake up to the reality of the Paramount Skydance "synergies". Big Tech increasingly encroaching on this turf is inevitable. Amazon owns James Bond, he will not be the last. We'll see what Google does with news of now two massive movies having effectively started on their platform. Are they okay for YouTube to remain a "farm system" as it were, or do they start to flex? Unlike Hollywood, they do understand the modern attention economy. They've got Netflix and Prime Video and TikTok to fight.
Finally, Hollywood, as with pretty much every industry, seems to be standing on the beach screaming at the ocean as the AI tidal wave approaches. Maybe this YouTube jolt is a wake-up call, but probably not. And I fear that's really because of a broader situation brewing: attention aside, what both the YouTube model and AI may ultimately showcase is the true "democratization" of filmmaking.
For decades, kids have dreamed of growing up to "make it in Hollywood". For almost everyone, it was just that, a dream. Because even if you had the best idea in the world, the odds that someone was going to give you tens of millions – let alone hundreds of millions – to do it was well, impossible. And, as Hollywood well knew, that exclusivity continued to fuel some of the allure. But this weekend may have just showcased those gates shifting. And AI may throw them open for good. Because in order to make a movie, you'll no longer have to make it in Hollywood. Quite literally, you won't!
One more thing: one of the production units that co-produced Backrooms was 21 Laps. That's the group set up by filmmaker Shawn Levy – whose next film is next summer's next Star Wars: Starfighter.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 I was tempted to call it a 'DeepSeek Moment' but well, that moment ended up being complicated – less 'Sputnik' more 'Spendthrift'. In that way, this may be sort of similar! ↩
2 For context, The Mandalorian and Grogu fell nearly 70% in its second weekend. Yes, big drops are normal for blockbusters, but 70% is a very big drop. ↩
3 Yes, this is sort of ironic given that The Mandalorian started by streaming on Disney+ and they clearly thought that would give it more legs in theaters. But Star Wars is a whole other can of worms, dating in part to its long history, starting as a lower-budget genre-defining project by a renegade filmmaker in Northern California... ↩
2026-05-30 04:48:14
Have you heard? Intel is back, baby. A year ago, the peddlers of Pentium were all-but left for dead having missed not just the mobile revolution, but the AI one as well. Intel was an $85B company, while NVIDIA, long their GPU-focused little brother, was about 40x their size in terms of market cap – by far the most valuable company in the world thanks to that AI boom. Worse, Intel's actual main rival, AMD, was making them look silly too. But a lot can change in a year. Like a CEO. And a bail-out investment from the US government. And the promises of new partnerships with Tesla and Apple...
Anyway, suddenly Intel is back at all-time highs – now a $600B company! And right on cue, Microsoft, long Intel's most-important partner, keeps finding new and interesting ways to slight them. This time with, who else? NVIDIA.
The writing may not yet be on the wall, but it's all over Xitter. Both Microsoft and NVIDIA are teasing a big announcement – "A new era of PC." – with the exact same cryptic language (technically, coordinates of Taipei, where Computex kicks off next week). And this follows hints by Jensen Huang of a "surprising new product" set to be announced. It seems fairly obvious at this point that it's NVIDIA's new CPU – but not the data center/AI variety. The one meant for general-purpose PCs.
I wrote about this prospect back in February when the news of the initiative first leaked after months of speculation about 'N1' and 'N1X' chips. NVIDIA, of course, has been making general-purpose CPUs for years – most notably for the Nintendo Switch and its predecessor Switch 2. But also most infamously for the Surface RT. Yes, Microsoft's first attempt at an ARM-based PC, which was a disaster from the get-go – trash can-worthy, some might say. Well, this sure looks to be a do-over of that project.
If/when NVIDIA announces their new CPU – and full SoC – next week, Microsoft is clearly going to be a key partner. But the real question is if we might get a new device alongside a partnership with Windows.A tweet from Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's EVP of Windows + Devices would sure seem to suggest as much – perhaps to be unveiled during Microsoft's own Build keynote, which kicks off the day after Computex. It could very well be a new stab at the Surface RT! They obviously won't call it that, but it might be the same general idea.1 But perhaps this time powered by an NVIDIA in a very different place.
And again, Intel in a very different place too! After the RT debacle, Microsoft had to retreat back to the (quite literally) warm embrace of x86 for a while. But they kept the dream of Windows ARM alive undoubtedly because of the rise of not just the iPad, but Apple Silicon in general. That culminated in the launch of Copilot+ PCs a couple years back. While Intel was technically along for that ride, the initial and clearly key partner there was Qualcomm, providing the ARM-based chips.
While not as big of a bellyflop as the Surface RT, clearly the Copilot+ PC movement hasn't lit the world on fire either. That was in part Microsoft's own fault as a series of privacy and just general AI missteps stopped the latest PC revolution yet again.
So now it sure seems like Microsoft is trying yet again. With NVIDIA yet again.
And again, this is a very different world with a very different NVIDIA. This move actually may make quite a bit of sense given NVIDIA's status in AI if nothing else. Sure, their CPUs are unproven for such purposes, but if the focal point will be AI-native devices, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better partner. Certainly from a marketing-perspective! Which, I suspect, we're going to get hit over the head with next week. As I wrote back in February:
It's that full NVIDIA SoC that Dell, Lenovo, and others seem to be circling. Undoubtedly in part to play up the NVIDIA angle, hoping to get some halo effect for PC sales. You could see the angle being something like "forget about Intel and AMD, NVIDIA, the company building the future of AI, is here with PC chips". Yes, they'd be touting "NVIDIA Inside".
While Microsoft clearly isn't the only partner for NVIDIA's would-be new CPUs – ASUS, we see you! – they're also undoubtedly meant to be the flagship partner. This might be both Surface RT done right and Copilot+ PCs done right – but with newer branding. But probably not better branding. I mean, it is still Microsoft, right?
Anyway, it seems like a smart potential play from all sides. Certainly in the face of the new MacBook Neo currently assaulting the PC market in a way Apple never has before. And now with Google set to release "Googlebooks" to try to own the concept of an "AI PC" themselves.
This makes sense for basically everyone but Intel.2 Reinvigorated, but perhaps on the outside looking in here yet again...3 'Surface AI', anyone?
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 "Something new is coming for developers" is interesting framing. Might it suggest that Microsoft is aiming for new hardware that is solely (or mainly) focused on AI development? Maybe my 'Surface AI' branding isn't far off! ↩
2 This move by NVIDIA into CPUs could even help Qualcomm by helping to legitimize the ARM-based market for PCs... ↩
3 Though it should be noted that they're also partnering with NVIDIA now on perhaps other SoCs. After all, NVIDIA is a shareholder now too! ↩
2026-05-29 05:52:34
Hello from the road, where I simply had to weigh in on the Ferrari Luce design backlash. As well as a handful of other things here and there...
M.G. Siegler
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
🤖 Google Admits Being Behind in AI Coding – A refreshingly straightforward answer from Sundar Pichai when asked by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton to assess where Gemini is with regard to the all-important coding capabilities just after this year's Google I/O keynote: "I think we are a bit behind at this moment." He seems sheepish in the entire interview which I would chalk up to I/O being poorly timed with regard to announcing major breakthroughs – especially given that Anthropic is now the one keeping their peddle to the metal with Claude Opus 4.8 out the door, apparently even better at coding, and the first public-facing Mythos models approaching within "weeks". I would say that Google should go all-in on "world models" as Demis Hassabis clearly wants to do, but they also clearly believing the coding capabilities may be a key to unlocking something, be it agentic uses, or RSI, or AGI... [NYT]
💸 OpenAI Going After Mom & Pop Advertisers – It feels like OpenAI is throwing basically everything against the wall when it comes to their ads business at the moment. What started as massive brand CPM buys is now getting extremely granular with CPC – working with local car washes? Obviously, they need this business to work both for their IPO aspirations but also because it's a major point of differentiation against Anthropic, which has said it will not go down the advertising path – or at least made fun of it to the point of such a backtrack being all but impossible anytime soon. It's the most obvious narrative battle that OpenAI can win and own in this race right now – if they can get it working. And that's a massive "if", because I continue to believe that they face a major click problem and that it will take some new kind of format/model to make advertising work at scale. The good news for OpenAI is that they're not alone here: Google needs this to work too, and could end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting to figure it out, which could pass down to all the other players, including OpenAI. [Information 🔒]
💰 Samsung's Bonus Situation – Sort of a fascinating battle within the company at the moment on a few fronts. First and foremost, because of the massive success they're now seeing with their chips business – pushing them well past the $1T market cap mark – that group's union has demanded a payout based on profits. The company quickly agreed, but it caused the other units to revolt even though they're not responsible for such profits and in some cases, are floundering. But the point of the say, TV division, is that for years, they were the ones carrying the company. It's just a wild situation that's playing out across many Asian companies, it seems. Without question, profit-sharing is compelling in principle, but the second-order effects are proving to be a nightmare! [Reuters]
📽️ Baby Yoda Slightly Scores – Better than the (clearly sandbagged) $80M expectations, Mandalorian and Grogu came in almost exactly where Solo did 8 years ago. Of course, inflation is a bitch here, so Solo's $103M is about $138M today. Still, Disney can work with this given that Mando cost about $100M less to make (again not including inflation – so far lower than Solo). Will it make money? Hard to say now (AI extrapolates it out as a coin-flip). As always, will depend on the second week hold – and there are a lot of movies coming out soon, most notably Masters of the Universe (decent enough buzz, but I'm sort of skeptical) and Disclosure Day (great buzz, presumably not just a Spielberg bump). [NYT]
🍿 Hollywood's Coming YouTube 'Obsession' – Related to the above, the big movie opening this coming weekend isn't Big IP or Big Director focused, it's Backrooms, a horror movie made by Kane Parsons, who got his start on YouTube and may now have a $50M+ opening weekend at the box office. And the 20-ish year old is hardly the only one charting that path now. Curry Barker, at the ripe old age of 26, is said to be getting 8-figure offers to produce his next movie after Obsession blew up at the box office. This whole wave is both great and interesting that it's happening right before AI was presumed to do the same – truly democratizing Hollywood. How long until YouTube tries to capitalize, quite literally, directly? [THR]
📲 Apple's Local AI Dreams – With seemingly everything known (see: below) about what Apple will announce at WWDC this year with regard to their Apple Intelligence upgrades, it's not entirely clear how they'll frame everything. It stands to reason that they'll talk up Apple Silicon as enabling the ability to distill larger (Google) models to run locally. And also that the AI work requiring larger models will still be protected by "Private Cloud Compute" – even if they're pivoting that model a bit to now encompass workloads not just on their own servers, but perhaps on Google's too – maybe even with some running on NVIDIA's chips! It will be a delicate dance for Apple given the past rhetoric around data protection and AI. And while their local model aspirations may prove prescient at some point, we're clearly not fully there yet... [Information 🔒]
M.G. Siegler
"A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few."
– Pope Leo XIV, weighing in on the technology in his first encyclical, "Magnificent Humanity". In some ways, title says it all, but it's also an interesting, more nuanced stance than you might imagine given the broader rhetoric. And bringing an Anthropic co-founder in to his inner ring for this is certainly a choice and a statement in and of itself.
Another quote worth highlighting closes the NYT story: "Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence. Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine." That quote is not the Pope but Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and M.I.T.
I continue to be confused by this whole "Search or Ask" notion for New Siri. I don't care if these are two different things in Apple's mind – and neither will the user. There should be one box/option for all queries and the AI should sort out your intent. I'm hoping this new mock-up (apparently based on at least prototypes of how this will work in iOS 27) is just to showcase a long-press option or something and doesn't come up every time you bring up Siri. That would be stupid.
And well, I wouldn't put it past Siri!
🎶 Listening to "American Cars" by Noah Kahan
🍺 Enjoying a Flack's New Forest Classic IPA
🇬🇧 Sent from New Forest in England
2026-05-28 04:48:33
And there I was, ready to make fun of Google's rather ridiculous branding for 'Google AI Ultra'. One tidbit out of Google I/O last week was there are now two tiers for the highest end of Gemini access and usage – but they're both called the same thing. Google easily could have slotted in 'Max' to denote the new $100/month plan, as it would have worked quite nicely with 'Plus', 'Pro', 'Max', and 'Ultra' (thanks in large part to Apple's consumer hardware branding efforts). But no, there are now two 'Ultra' tiers, one at $100/month and one remaining at $200/month, seemingly just to confuse people.
Anyway, that's silly – to the point where Google has already had to clarify the plans. But into the bar walks Meta, going full-on "hold my beer".
It starts out simple enough. Meta, as has long been rumored (and tested – humorously by force in Europe), is getting into the subscription game for their myriad social services. So now worldwide we're getting:
While the earlier test versions were focused on fewer (or un-targeted) ads, these seemingly each will have new features and functionality. They're decidedly not for the masses, but instead for power users of each product. They're basically Meta's way to milk the whales. Can you actually milk a whale? Meta is going to find out!
With user growth continuing to slow, and in some markets retract, this is the old tried and true playbook of profit harvesting. It perhaps points to peak ad saturation. Or simply the need for new revenue streams for Meta – which is still beholden to one business and model far more than any of their peers.
Anyway, all of that makes sense and is relatively straightforward. It would probably make sense to be able to bundle such offerings altogether for, say, $9.99/month (about a buck off), but that will undoubtedly be tested too. I mean, they're already using the 'Meta One' moniker... But from here, for some reason, ideas and models keep flowing and going...
Alongside the launch, Meta says it will begin testing even more subscription plans, which is where things start to get confusing.
For Meta AI users, it will test two plans — Meta One Plus ($7.99/mo) and Meta One Premium ($19.99/mo) with the same features, but the Premium plan unlocks more capacity on higher compute queries. That means the Premium plan would offer deeper reasoning for complex tasks (i.e., more of “thinking mode” in the Meta AI app or on the web). It would also offer move video and image generation capabilities across Meta’s apps.
Okay, so much for my 'Meta One' $9.99/month plan when 'Meta One Plus' costs $7.99/month. And it seemingly has nothing to do with any of the social 'Plus' plans, but instead is only about AI. But it's also not called 'Muse Plus' – the new branding for Meta's latest AI efforts (RIP 'Llama'). Nor is it called 'Meta AI Plus', which would seemingly be more straightforward (in line with Google's premium naming for AI). 'Meta One Premium' offers a weird jump from $7.99/month to $19.99/month (why not $14.99/month?) and not only buys more compute, but also gets new capabilities across the aforementioned social apps.
But wait, there's more:
The Meta One Essential plan ($14.99/mo) will offer the Verified badge, impersonation protection, and an enhanced linksheet where users can link out to their online presence across social channels and the web, similar to Meta Verified.
The more expensive Meta One Advanced plan ($49.99/mo) will include the Essential plan benefits, as well as the ability to be featured in the Facebook feed, appear higher in Facebook and Instagram search results, gain attention with a bold “Follow” button on Reels, and automatically send “follow” invitations to people who engage with your content.
I mean, what? Now I'm legitimately confused. Seemingly the reason why 'Meta One Premium' isn't $14.99/month is because that's the price of 'Meta One Essential'. But that gives you totally different things than the other 'Meta One' plans, namely identity protection. That's great (and, of course, already offered), but maybe call it something else given these other offerings?
'Meta One Advanced' takes the confusion to another level by adding in the ability to be featured in the Facebook feed and Instagram search algos. This is basically the growth-hacky "Shit X Does Plan".
Again, fine. But it's going to be confusing as hell when it's all branded as 'Meta One' alongside the premium AI stuff. Let's just spell out the offerings here in ascending order:
So that's three social 'Plus' offerings, all collectively under the 'Meta One' idea, but not called that. Plus another 'Plus' that is called ‘Meta One’ but has nothing to do with social, but is about AI. Meanwhile, the other, more expensive AI offering does have some interaction with the social offerings under the 'Premium' moniker. Which is more expensive than the 'Essential' version of the same 'Meta One' brand, because that's only about identity verification. With the last and most expensive 'Meta One' product being all about brands (and I suppose individuals) being able to spam – er, market to – the various Meta social products.
Got all that? I'm not certain I do. We're not quite in Microsoftian territory, but we're close! Maybe Meta should just stick with ads.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
