2025-08-22 03:25:50
Just about six months ago, I looked at the OpenAI "Constellations" – that is, the companies that were formed by teams that had previously worked at the AI behemoth. In particular, there were a handful of companies in that orbit which had raised absolutely bonkers amounts of money, undoubtedly in part thanks to that affiliation. And since then, things have just gotten more nuts.
First and foremost, OpenAI itself has not only continued on their path of raising $40B – more money than has ever been raised in any IPO – at a $300B valuation, they're now letting employees do secondary sales in the $500B range, setting a new record valuation for a still-private company. That valuation is undoubtedly driven not just by their own growth, but by those "Constellations" around them which are setting new high watermarks – again, just six months later.
Breaking them down once again by the categories I previously used:
All told, whereas the "Constellations" were previously valued in aggregate just under $200B, now that number is more like $413B – assuming xAI gets at least the $170B valuation they're seeking. But even without that, Anthropic alone is almost past the total combined valuation previously.
And when you add in the new $500B valuation for OpenAI – we're closing in on a $1T combined valuation for OpenAI and their diaspora...
1 As disclosed previously, GV, where I was a partner for over a decade, is an investor in Harvey. Also, Google, which is the LP of GV, also has a large investment in Anthropic, of course, but I have no financial stake there.
2025-08-21 05:28:32
Well, it was something worth trying, I suppose.
That's about the nicest thing I can say about watching the 90-minute extravaganza of cringe that was the Made by Google '25 event as hosted by Jimmy Fallon. To be clear, the announcements themselves seemed fine. Many of them potentially good, even. The problem was that I was too busy focused on the production of the event – mainly the strangeness of it – to really be able to gather much about the new devices.
I mean... what did I just watch?
Granted, I wasn't a Jimmy Fallon guy going into watching this event, so I might not be the best judge here. But the reasons Fallon annoys me were not just on full display, they were cranked up to infinity. It's one thing when you have to interview a celebrity and pretend to be excited about every little thing they're saying – that has long been the job of a late night talk show host1 – it's another to spit out exaggerated effusive praise time after time when being shown, say, a new color shade for the Pixel devices. The smarm was simply off the charts here.
The other celebrity guests were better, but still mainly distracting from what should have been the real stars of the show: the new gadgets!
Worse, the entire thing gave off some very real infomercial vibes. From the opening where Fallon sits down with the usual MC of such events, Google's head of devices, Rick Osterloh, to the next segment where the new Pixel phones were showcased and presented to Fallon in what really did seem to be a QVC set, as Sarah Perez pointed out.
Again, the devices themselves were not the issue, it was the presentation that made the entire thing seem staged. I mean, it was staged – all such events are. But the goal is to try to not make them feel that way. Google seemingly went the other way here. To the point where I have to think they had to have been going for that look and feel on purpose? What were they thinking?
Again, I can appreciate trying something different here rather than the same old playbook of trying to emulate the old Steve Jobs Apple keynotes. But the celebrity overload just made it feel like Google had something to hide – or at least nothing all that interesting to talk about. While often times the people that actually worked on the products aren't great presenters – that's not their job, after all – there's an authenticity that comes through in their presentations at least.
This felt like, well, watching an infomercial.
And while normally I'm a big proponent of doing such events live – as I was for Google's event last year and I wish Apple would return to them – if Google really wanted to go down this particular path, it probably would have been better pre-recorded? This was just so awkward at times, when you could watch Fallon squirm to try to figure out the right quip to say to keep the cringe rolling. But the best parts were when he would just sort of stare blankly into the camera, and not for comedic effect.
Well, at least Apple knows what not to do now if and when they bring back their own live events. And that includes letting the Jonas Brothers film a music video with your brand new, state of the art device where the output looks like the ironic throwback "Big Bang Baby" video that Stone Temple Pilots made almost 30 years ago.
Come to think of it, there's perhaps a warning in those lyrics:
Sell your soul and sign an autograph
Big bang baby, it's a crash, crash, crash
I wanna die, but I gotta laugh
One more thing: there was one moment with Fallon that I did actually appreciate. He mentioned Apple! By name! That never happens at such events, it was like breaking the fourth wall. Of course, Google clearly knew he was going to do this and it was part of the bit. But that was the one actually fun moment in this entire thing.
It lasted about 30 seconds.
Update: I had totally forgotten that just last year, Fallon was a part of Apple's iPhone 16 keynote! There he was, walking around with Tim Cook carrying a dumb selfie stick in a very Fallon-esque bit. But at least it was just a bit, and he wasn't MCing the whole event. Still, it must be asked: is Fallon the new Justin Long?
1 Sadly, the late night host job may not be around for much longer...
2025-08-21 02:44:21
Right before I left on vacation a couple weeks ago, I was back on Alex Kantrowitz's Big Technology Podcast. It was right after Mark Zuckerberg posted his spartan memo on "Personal Superintelligence" so we riffed on that a bit (I extended on those thoughts here). That morphed into a broader discussion about Meta's overall AI strategy here and how it may play out.
That goes right into a back-and-forth about the branding debate around AI/AGI/Superintelligence. Obviously, it's mostly marketing and all a bit silly, but there's also clearly some strategy involved behind the scenes – perhaps namely between OpenAI and Microsoft given "The Clause" in their contract around AGI. And now Meta, playing catchup, wants to make it clear that they're not just going to make the same type of "superintelligence" as everyone else. Anyway, we're now but a few steps away from Super Ultra Megaintelligence™.
Who will build that? Undoubtedly one of the current players in AI, but Big Tech might be okay if it's one of the "startups" because they actually own huge chunks of the various players in Big AI. With OpenAI now hitting a $500B valuation with a secondary sale going on, if Microsoft ends up owning 33% of the company, that's... $165B. Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot of money when you're worth $4T, but that would seemingly be larger than most of Microsoft's other business units. And let's just say that one day OpenAI goes public and is worth a few trillion itself. Well, you can do the math!
How do you value such companies anyway? It's all a bit finger-in-the-windy or pie-in-the-sky-y if you prefer. It's also all just clearly relative to what the any competitors valuation is currently... But to justify it all, will the current business growth be enough? They'll probably going to need to have their own Google or Meta monetization breakthrough. Not necessarily something completely new, but a new twist on an old way to monetize made more effective to scale...
Until then, the massive spend will continue – including on employees to leverage all the AI CapEx spend. At the same time, employees who aren't vital to that part of the business may be, unfortunately, expendable. It's an "enigma" of a time – the best of times, the worst of times...
Lastly, I truly believe and argue that AI isn't going to fully replace human-powered writing. For certain types of writing, sure. But just as important as the output with different types of writing is the input. That is what you're putting into it because that directly leads to what you're getting out of it. Said another way: the process of writing is just as important as the writing itself to many people, myself included. Many people who don't write for a living perhaps don't realize that. But they will. Or won't and be worse off for it.
Yes, cheating is an issue. But it's often an issue with new technology. The more problematic element is if you just end up cheating yourself...
2025-08-20 06:20:05
Last night, I was doing a bit of home-related work and wanted to have something on in the background so I chose BlackBerry, the 2023 film about yes, the rise and fall of Research in Motion (RIM). I had seen it before and liked it and now it's on Netflix; it's just a great rewatch. Anyway, there's a sequence about midway through that made me pause. Under threat from Palm, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie, realizes they need a game change.
"Okay, party's over," as he rushes in to tell his RIM employees, interrupting the sacred movie night. "You guys having fun? Because we're about to lose our fucking company."
A verbal back-and-forth ensues between Balsillie and co-founder Doug Fregin, who informs him that they can't possibly sell more devices because of the "network limit load" the carriers are facing. At that point, Balsillie pulls his co-CEO (and Fregin's co-founder) Mike Lazaridis aside to ask him what a network limit load is and how to fix it. Lazaridis tells him that without the carriers rebuilding their networks, RIM would need to figure out a way to shrink their data. "These guys can't do it," Lazaridis sheepishly admits about his current employees.
Balsillie: "What do you mean they can't do it?! You said they were the best engineers in the world."
Lazaridis: I said they were the best engineers in Canada.
When Balsillie asks who could do it, Lazaridis tells him that maybe the "top guys" at Motorola or Microsoft or Google.1
With that – after going to rally the sales team to kickstart his plan – Balsillie hops on his private jet and flys straight to Mountain View. The next time we see him, he's on Google's campus in the office of Paul Stannos, Google's head of physical engineering. The pitch is simple: "Come work for me." So simple that Stannos just laughs at the hubris. Of course he can't just go work for him – he works at Google. "How much money do you want?" Stannos gets up to close his office door.
Balsillie: "I'll give you a million dollars if you sign right now."
Stannos (as he unplugs his computer from the ethernet): "I am not moving to Canada. We are not having this conversation."
Balsillie: "Two million."
Stannos (very uncomfortable): "Stop."
Balsillie: "Three million."
Stannos: "I need you to leave."
Pause.
Balsillie: "Ten million."
Stannos (thinking): "Well you don't have ten million dollars."
At this point, Balsillie opens his briefcase and presents Stannos with a million dollar option deal. He says he'll backdate the options to make it so that if RIM can hit their Merrill Lynch target, those options will be worth more than $10M.
Now, there are two problems here. First, Paul Stannos is not real. Second, the whole backdating options element was real in so far as people – namely Balsillie and Lazaridis got in trouble for this and ultimately settled with the SEC – but it doesn't seem like it was specifically tied to the recruiting of top talent as portrayed in the film. (There are... a lot of liberties in the film, which was adapted from a book.) At the same time, the high level notion of RIM feeling the need to pay – and perhaps overpay – to lure top talent to Canada does seem accurate.
And so in a weird way, this movie that came out two years ago – and specifically that sequence – feel more like a representation of what is currently happening at Meta with their, and specifically Mark Zuckerberg's, attempts to lure the top AI talent in the world to the company. Again, there are Hollywood liberties, but the high-level notion of these outlandish pay packages tied to stock performance – it's all right there on screen.
Yes, the scale is different – $10M? Try $100M or even $1B these days! And yes, there's no fraud – I mean, hopefully! But the general mentality is the same. Mark Zuckerberg, like the fictional Balsillie in the movie, realized that his current team wasn't cutting it and that they needed to get the best people in the world in their sectors on board to win. No matter what. One imagines the fictional Stannos could have asked for $100M. It wouldn't have mattered. Balsillie, like Zuck, was going to pay whatever it took to get a "yes". The stakes were that high.
In the case of Alexandr Wang in 2025, that took $14B. For Meta to buy the stake in Scale AI – an offer Wang couldn't refuse. And while others have been refusing Zuck's offers of late, he's clearly going to keep making them. Because like RIM v. Palm, Meta can't afford to lose against OpenAI, Anthropic, and who else? Google.
Back to the movie, Balsillie gets back on his jet and he's off to continue his shopping spree. Microsoft. Nokia. Nintendo. Meanwhile, Stannos shows up at the RIM offices and Lazaridis and Fregin cannot believe he's there. The first of a new SWAT team – the Alexandr Wang of RIM.
Balsillie goes on to get another target out of Motorola – and hires his boss too. It all feels very Zuckerbergian – except it's not. Both because it's fictional but also because it's actually not new. Zuck is just the latest and most extreme example of willing to pay whatever it takes to catch up and win. And whether it works or not – it did for a bit with RIM, until it didn't – he won't be the last.
Anyway, great sequence, great movie.
1 Special shoutout to Fregin popping in to humorously mention John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software, in the scene.
Fregin: "The guy who made Doom."
Balsillie: "What's Doom?"
Lazaridis: "Have you played Wolfenstein?"
A dead stare from Balsillie.
Lazaridis: "Please just don't sell anymore phones.
Carmack, famously, worked at Meta for a time. Though not on AI – he left to go work on AI.
2025-08-19 18:41:16
I had been holding off on writing about this because I don't yet have the Instagram Maps feature. But as it turns out, that's likely because I live in Europe – and the feature undoubtedly isn't rolled out here yet, and may never be. For once, this may be a feature and not a bug of living here. Anyway:
Starting today, users will have the ability to repost public Reels and grid posts from other accounts. And similar to TikTok, reposts will be collected in a designated tab on your profile and sprinkled into the feeds of people who follow you. It’s a small but meaningful shift from how Instagram currently operates: until now, the most efficient way to share other users’ content was to repost it on your Instagram Story. Now, you can essentially reblog it.
Thanks, I hate it. I mean, honestly, at first, I find it a bit hard to get too worked up about this simply because Instagram overall is now so far removed from the original picture-centric vision and version that I loved. Also, get off my lawn, damn kids. But the way this has been rolled out from a UX-perspective is just so stupid that I'm worked up about it again. Multiple times while scrolling the Instagram feed I've now hit the 'repost' button by accident and boom, nice and awkward. I would normally chalk this up to user error, but my wife reported doing the same exact thing the other day. And it's terrifying! Hopefully they wait a bit to notify others that you just reposted, so that you can correct the error without anyone noticing. But who knows! It just feels like a pretty awful user experience to make users afraid to use the app.
And yes, it further changes what Instagram was because you no longer have to "create", you can just "curate". Which at a high level is fine – it ended up working out well for Twitter, after some initial worries about what it would do to that network (though many might say it ultimately ruined Twitter at scale because of all the spam and dunking, etc). But to shove this into Instagram – and again, so prominently – years after that network is already at scale carries different risks. Clearly though, Instagram is looking for new avenues of growth. We'll see.
Instagram is also pulling from Snapchat and adding an opt-in location map that lives in your private messages. The map shows the last active location for friends who have opted in to the feature; it also pulls content from specific locations, such as a music festival, where many people are posting from. It’s the Snap Map but redesigned for Instagram.
Again, while I don't have this feature yet (thankfully), many of those who do are clearly being vocal enough about hating it that we're getting non-stop articles about turning it off and privacy concerns, etc. Yes, yes, everyone hates change, we know that. But this feels a lot more like the case of "if Instagram had created Snap Map, they would be the creators of Snap Map". While I'm sure some data pointed to Instagram further hurting Snap by shoving this into the messages area of IG, it's undoubtedly true that a massive number of users simply do not use Instagram this way – chatting with friends – nor do they want to.
And sure, it's opt-in, but the problem here is that they just shove all this shit in your face and just as with my reposts complaint above, it's not clear who can see what, etc. For example, if you've geotagged a regular old image well... boom! And while the AI social sharing stuff they've been doing is opt-in too – how's that working out for Meta?
Further, in trying to find the Maps feature today, I was just clicking around in the settings of Instagram and my god it's a nightmare. I consider myself pretty savvy when it comes to apps, and I have absolutely no idea what at least half of the settings are for and/or do and where to find almost anything. It largely seems to be Facebook's fault – i.e. security and privacy settings that carried over from the "Blue App" – but it's just a total mess. As is the general usability of Instagram as a whole now, with 50 different features and feeds shoved into one app.
It's old school Instagram, and Snapchat, and Twitter, and Messenger, and YouTube, and TikTok, and now all the stupid social AI chatbot nonsense that Meta keeps trying to make happen, even after tragedy...
I would just quit but much like Facebook before it, it remains the place where a sizable chunk of my social graph is found online. Mostly I lurk and use Stories to post some travel pics to friends. I still try to post to the main feed mainly as a log of where I've been since I've been doing that since the service started, but it's honestly increasingly hard to do and really just seems pointless (putting aside the new backed-into stalking concerns). I'd much rather use a service like Glass which is focused on that use case.
I really can't wait to be able to quit.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2025-08-19 03:43:07
Oh boy.
MSNBC will have to take a new name in months to come as it seeks to carve out an identity that will have it competing for scoops and news with current corporate sibling NBC News. MSNBC will soon come to be known as My Source for News Opinion and the World, or MS NOW, following the spin off of the bulk of NBCUniversal’s cable assets into a new publicly traded company called Versant. The changes were detailed in a memo to staffers Monday by Mark Lazarus, who will run Versant as its founding CEO.
"My Source for News Opinion and the World" is just an amazingly awful acronym of gibberish. Truly impressive work. And it was so obviously backed-into, because they wanted to keep some semblance of the old name, but couldn't keep the 'NBC' part...
MSNBC had planned to keep its name, but NBCU recently decided to retain its famous Peacock design and markings and not share them, requiring Versant to make changes to some of its networks that use those insignia and the NBC logo, Lazarus said. “As we all know, the peacock is synonymous with NBCUniversal, and it is a symbol they have decided to keep within the NBCU family,” he said. “This gives us the opportunity to chart our own path forward, create distinct brand identities, and establish an independent news organization following the spin.”
That's a tough spot to be in – peacockblocked! – as it is with the other properties now a part of Versant – the equally awfully named spin-off from NBCUniversal. But opting to keep 'MS' which stems from the decades-ago partnership forged between um, Microsoft, and NBC seems, well, a bit odd. Since not only is Microsoft not involved, but they haven't been involved with the channel for – checks notes – twenty years.1
It was so long ago that you almost have to wonder if Microsoft isn't a bit annoyed that they're still using that element of the name! I mean, I, for one, cannot look at 'MS NOW' and see anything other than 'MS DOS'.2 But maybe that's just me – someone who is old enough to have had a computer that booted MS DOS. And while Microsoft doesn't really promote the 'MS' abbreviation anymore, it's still a part of a lot of their software!
Oh, but not to worry, because 'MS' no longer stands for Microsoft, it stands for... 'My Source'. Look, I don't hate it as much as I should. It's more than a bit weird to have 'My' when the common possessive adjective used in such situations would be 'Your' (i.e. "your source for trusted news"), but whatever. My main gripe there is that if they were going to go down this path, they should have simply gone with 'My Source Now' – why did the totally new and very common "now" have to be made into an acronym as well?!
And if you really need to do that, maybe pick three words that fully flow together, not two that do – news & opinion – and one that seems tacked on: world. This is basically Jim's Dwight Schrute "Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica" bit from The Office.
Yes, there's also a bit of "We Hear, For You" in here...
Also, wait, hold on a minute. I'm sorry. I was so preoccupied with the actual name that I just now looked again at the logo. What's that little flag thing?! Is that the Austrian flag?! What on Earth? (Because we apparently now know where on Earth!)3 Worse, it looks to be an Austrian flag tucked inside a white flag. White flags are not typically a signal you want to send as a media organization these days.
At least I think that's a flag. One billowing in the wind? I guess it could be a bookmark? A bookmark with an Austrian flag for some reason?
Corporate types might take comfort in the fact that MS NOW is probably easier to say and recall than MSNBC, Maddow suggested. “While I will admit to having no idea how to pronounce “MS NOW” (and I’m still not all that sure about pronouncing “Versant,” either), we’re at least dropping our syllable count from five to three!” she said. “An efficiency gain!”
Wait, now that they say that, I can't help be immediately be drawn to call it "Ms. Now". Maybe that could work for an influencer – sorry, only unmarried or empowered women using their maiden names may apply. Or I guess "Mississippi Now" – there are sort of elements of that state flag. Well, the old one. You know, the one with the Confederate flag also baked in? Now my mind is really drifting. Mississippi Burning. Apocalypse Now.
When you do a Google Search for the name, most of the results are dominated by information about multiple sclerosis, which, of course, many simply call by its abbreviation: MS. In that sense, 'MS NOW' very much sounds like a support group for people living with the condition.
Speaking of, Versant clearly wants it to be pronounced 'M.S. Now' but given that 'MS' is an abbreviation and 'NOW' is also an abbreviation, why wouldn't it also be pronounced with each letter: 'N.O.W.'? Also, MSNBC was, in fact, 'M.S.N.B.C' – if they want the space to stop the letter pronouncing, 'NOW' should be 'Now'. Which is to say, not an acronym. So, I'm going to go with 'M.S.N.O.W'. Back to five syllables, Ms. Maddow!
Update: Wait, you're telling me that while NBC is demanding MSNBC has to change their name, they're not demanding that CNBC do the same? How stupid is that? I don't care if the 'NBC' in 'CNBC' was said to stand for something else (Consumer News and Business Channel), everyone assumed it was the same as 'NBC' – because they also use the peacock logo! Presumably that will have to stop? Also, they undoubtedly backed into that acronym because CNBC launched in 1989 as a joint venture between Cablevision + NBC. So it's the exact same situation as 'MSNBC', I guess the latter's mistake was not coming up with a silly new acroynm sooner.
Also, thinking about it more, maybe the better solution would have been for MSNBC to buy (or license) 'MSN' from Microsoft. That is now it all started (it wasn't just 'MS' for Microsoft, it was 'MSN' + 'NBC'), and what is the point of MSN for Microsoft anyway in 2025? It's just sort of a crappy-looking news aggregator stuffed with ads. Shouldn't Microsoft want to direct all such traffic to Bing? Or maybe now the Copilot consumer-facing web app? How great would 'MSNBC' morphing into simply 'MSN' have been? It would have seemed like it's own, major three-letter player in news. Take that, NBC.
1 Though yes, they remained technically involved in the MSNBC.com website for another seven years after that.
2 The ALL CAPS element of the name doesn't help either...
3 Here's where I'll admit that I'm perhaps a bit predisposed to see an Austrian flag at the moment having just gotten back from two weeks traveling in the (beautiful) country. But still. IT IS THE AUSTRIAN FLAG. 🇦🇹
