2025-11-24 23:51:23
After his last op-ed in The New York Times completely and utterly failed to sway the judge in Google's antitrust case to enact harsh remedies, Tim Wu is back with another essay, aiming to escalate the general argument to a higher level. Here, his target is Meta, which just won their own antitrust case, with a different judge ruling that the government failed to make the case that the company had an illegal monopoly in the social apps space. "How Can Anyone Seriously Doubt Meta Is a Monopoly?" is the headline I got served in my RSS feed, but it has seemingly since been tweaked to "The Bad Reasoning in the Meta Antitrust Ruling Isn’t Even the Worst Part". The first headline was clearly better – albeit silly, as a federal judge literally just did doubt that, legally – the second one is a mouthful, but again, aims to take the argument broader.
In this way, Wu's op-ed is similar to one that the NYT ran last February from Lina Khan. It was a remarkable read because nearly every point she made was wrong. And now Wu is trying to give her a run for her money.
But to dwell on the shortcomings of Judge Boasberg’s reasoning is to overlook something even worse: the message that his ruling sends to the country. The United States is in a precarious moment when it comes to the rule of law and democratic accountability. Unchecked wealth and corporate power have led many to doubt that our system is fair. Judge Boasberg’s ruling only fortifies the impression that the world’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations are above the law.
I mean, maybe the ruling gives that sense to others, maybe it doesn't. But obviously it's not the judge's job to make legal rulings so that the country will nebulously feel better about inequality. This is, basically the argument Wu attempts to make in the entire peace. Forget the law, judge, think about the vibes!
A chief goal of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which the government accused Meta of violating, is to make clear who is actually in charge of the county. As President Theodore Roosevelt explained in 1901, the “vital question” is whether “the government has the power to control the trusts.” He understood that unaccountable power is a threat to the Republic and that the spectacle of untouchable elites fosters widespread resentment.
Humorous typo aside – "county"? I thought we were thinking bigger Tim! – as the name itself highlights, this law is 135 years old. It pre-dated the Wright Brothers flight by just over a decade. Basically no piece of technology we use today had been invented yet, except perhaps the automobile, but only just barely. To say that the world is different today would be the understatement of the century – actually, of two centuries. We can all agree with President Roosevelt's general sentiment – outlined a mere 124 years ago – but that doesn't change the fact that the antitrust theories of not just the 19th century, but even the 20th century, are wildly outdated and unequipped to suit the 21st century. And yes, both the Meta and Google cases highlighted this reality in different ways.
Tuesday’s ruling is clearly wrong on the merits. The government charged that Meta, then called Facebook, broke the law when it bought up its competitors Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014. Judge Boasberg threw out the case by concluding that Meta lacks monopoly power now, when the relevant question should have been whether it had monopoly power at the time.
No, it was not wrong on the merits. The argument against Meta was poor and misguided – to the point where it was initially thrown out before getting reworked with the bare minimum tweaks to get it to trial. One major issue with these antitrust cases is that they're being litigated in hindsight – which is both obviously but obviously an issue with tech in particular, as it moves so fast to as make most central arguments moot by the time of trial. So Wu's argument here is that they should punish Meta (then Facebook) for past rule-breaking even though the government obviously looked into and approved their deals at the time. Why? In part because both deals weren't taken all that seriously back then by many. The Instagram deal, in particular, was mocked. Not by all of us, mind you! But my blog post at the time clearly failed to convince anyone that perhaps in the future, these would grow into massive companies under Facebook.
Essentially, Wu would prefer the judge makes the ruling based on the success of the deals that most at the time didn't think would be successful – and probably no one did to the extent that they have! And he doesn't want the judge ruling on the case for how things stand now. So he would like the judge to rule on the case based on some random moment in time where Facebook held monopoly power over social networking. Okay.
But even to deny that Meta now holds a monopoly in personal social networking (sharing with friends and family) means ignoring a lot of direct evidence to the contrary. The government presented records of the company’s extraordinary and durable profits ($87.1 billion operating profit on $164.5 billion in revenue in 2024, for example), which is a textbook signal of monopoly power. The company has also subjected users to more and more ads, removed privacy protections and otherwise reduced the quality of its service without losing its user base, which is hard for a company facing competition to do.
Then perhaps the government should make the case about Meta's ads business – as they're also currently doing with Google – not with the "personal social networking" silly moment-in-time made up market definition. But again, that's not the case that the government made – and undoubtedly in part because of Google's position in said ad market.
Those failings aside, Judge Boasberg’s ruling is also flawed in a broader sense. Does anyone seriously doubt that Meta is the kind of company that antitrust laws were designed to restrain? In the 1980s and 1990s, judges held AT&T and Microsoft to account for antitrust violations, despite their protests. In the 1940s, when the federal judge Learned Hand pondered a similar case against the Alcoa company, which dominated the aluminum market in the United States, he granted that there were “legal niceties” in which one might get “entangled.” But he concluded that “if we hold that it is not a monopoly,” everyone not caught up in those niceties would “quite rightly I think, write us down as asses.”
Why yes, I do have some doubts that laws written 135 years ago would foresee the rise of a social feed ad network. The rest of Meta does not make any real money – famously so in the case of VR and now AI – so it's all just that one business. Also, the Microsoft "victory" was more similar to the Google one in that nothing really changed as a result. People like Wu love to argue that it changed everything, leaving out what happened after the victory that neutered the remedies. What disrupted Microsoft was natural market forces. At best, you can say they were slightly distracted by the case, but they would have been disrupted regardless.
Also, Microsoft is now a $4T company. What a great victory for antitrust!
I don't know enough about the 1940s aluminum market to have a strong opinion there. But it strikes me that the market and time were probably different from, say, mobile applications in 2025. At least the 1940s were closer to the 1890s than we are now...
Judge Boasberg’s ruling in the Meta case follows a ruling last year by the federal judge Amit Mehta, who found that Google is an illegal monopoly — yet this year could not bring himself to impose on Google a strong remedy. Such decisions effectively bless one of the major power imbalances of our age. They signal to companies that spending millions of dollars on lawyers will be repaid with billions of dollars in profit. And they reinforce the tech industry’s sense of impunity — its belief that it is an untouchable sovereign above the control of any mere human.
Project much, my guy? Again, it is not the judge's job to make a ruling that Tim Wu believes will better balance power inequality in the US. The job is to look at the case in front of you and rule on that. And Judge Mehta did rule that Google was a monopoly, but he also rightfully concluded that the remedies put forward wouldn't actually change where Google had the monopoly. And that the market was already doing its own thing to change that market dynamic.
I do think there was a better case to be made about not being able to leverage the Search monopoly going forward to unnaturally prop-up Google's other services – which is something Microsoft was also regularly found in violation of for years after their antitrust issues – like, say, AI.
Despite a decade of Meta-related scandals and whistle-blowers, no public authority in this country has been able to hold the company meaningfully accountable for its behavior — a striking failure of our political system. Unfortunately, this ineffectuality is part of a broader trend. Many policies enacted in the 20th century to maintain economic fairness in the United States have been undermined or gutted: labor law, financial regulation, telecommunications law and taxation, among others. For decades those laws forestalled a collapse into a two-class society, avoiding the extreme class tensions that have upended other republics.
This is obviously oversimplified, but I'm not even sure I really disagree with this at the highest level. But the issue here is that this is unrelated to this antitrust case, which was a weak case around a very specific set of circumstances. It was not the judges job to rule if Meta should be punished for, say, privacy scandals here.
When Roosevelt embarked on his antitrust campaign in 1902, he did so with the view that it was necessary to preserve democracy. His was a moment like ours, with a dangerously unbalanced economy, extremist ideologies vying for adherents and a near-revolt of American farmers in the Midwest. But the federal and state governments diffused that anger by taming the railroads, regulating the banks and breaking up most of the big trusts.
This time around we are on track to do nothing of the kind. Congress has done little to restore economic balance and courts are showing themselves to be out of touch with economic realities that any American could describe. It is no wonder the population is growing increasingly cynical — and more and more ready to look to ideologies that promise to upend the entire system.
Beyond the overtly political statement, here we go again with references that are over a century old. Even if you agree that there are some parallels with the United States as it was 123 years ago, obviously, the same laws and policies aren't going to make sense in 2025. Instead, what Wu should argue for here is a new Roosevelt, someone to rally the country to come up with and pass new laws to handle such issues. Laws written in the 21st century, to tackle challenges in the 21st century.
But that's a lot harder than bringing forward weak cases and making outdated arguments around old laws. And it's certainly harder than writing endless and pointless op-eds.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2025-11-24 06:56:56
Let's talk about Pluribus. Admittedly, I was a bit late in starting to watch it, but after hearing non-stop buzz about how good it is, I gave in...
The first episode is good, but also a bit misleading for the rest of the show thus far. It's a full-on zombie apocalypse situation. Yes, people are raised from the dead Night King-style with smiles upon their faces, but still, that's what it is. And this leads you down the path of thinking this is setting up to be a social commentary on the "hive mind". That is also nothing new with it comes to science fiction, of course. But it does feel more timely than ever in our current culture.
But then it keeps going. And now I'm here wondering if this isn't in fact meant to be a commentary about AI? To be clear and fair, that's probably projecting a bit much just given what I tend to write about. But it also works! Almost perfectly. Large Language Models in particular. Watching Pluribus feels like a statement about using ChatGPT, or Gemini, or any of the AI "chatbots"!
Granted, the allegory may break down if you simply look at the timeline for when Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, etc) was writing this show. ChatGPT, of course, launched in November 2022 – happy 3 year birthday next week! – and that very tool tells me that Gilligan was writing the show in 2023 and into 2024. Now it's certainly possible that he was ChatGPT-pilled by then, but it also feels fairly unlikely as he's not a person who, say, lives and works in Silicon Valley. Still, it's possible!
Regardless, it doesn't really matter. Because at least through these first four episodes, Pluribus works as a pretty great analogy for LLM-based AI. To wit: All of humanity's knowledge is involuntarily uploaded to the collective "cloud", as it were. With this, any of the beings on Earth – aside from a handful that the virus couldn't infect for unknown reasons1 – have access to all of this information in real time. And any of the "unenlightened", when they ask any question of these connected beings, they get back a seemingly factually true, but often bland response in real time.
The consensus view, quite literally. Have I mentioned the responses are highly sycophantic? Always said with a smile on the face.
I'm watching this and as the story unfolds, I'm thinking at times that it's almost too much on the nose for our current situation. Again, I'm not sure Gilligan meant this as an AI allegory versus simply a "hive mind" one about broader culture – and I'm specifically not reading about such things so as not to spoil anything for me, or alter my own thoughts on the matter – but it feels almost too perfect.
Beyond just the high-level stuff, it actually goes deeper with power/resource conservation and, in the most recent episode, even prompt injecting! By literal injection!
How's that for on the nose?!
Again, maybe I'm reading too much into this. But I'm not sure that I am. And I'm going to keep going with it until proven otherwise in future episodes.
Overall, I like the show thus far, but don't love it in the way that others seem to. It's fun and interesting and at times good, but also slow. The same could be said of Gilligan's other shows at times, I suppose. But this one has the most clear Lost vibes. But you know, hand grenade aside, there's not a lot of action.
I'm assuming that changes as the season crosses the halfway point. Maybe we don't get smoke monsters, but instead some agentic beings meant to convert Carol at all costs – perhaps quite literally. Something to watch, quite literally.
2025-11-22 04:30:15
Stocks seem to be whipsawing right now to close the week – up, down, up, down, up. It's like a Contra or Zelda code (more on that below). Regardless, the swirl (thanks, NVIDIA) seemingly has pushed Google ahead of Microsoft to be the third most highly valued company in the world from a market cap perspective. Sort of a wild ascent given that just six months ago I was writing about how undervalued Alphabet seemed as a stock relative to its parts. The company has gained over $1.6T in market value since that post – the stock is up nearly 80%.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
🌎 World Models, So Hot Right Now – With Gemini 3 out the door, what is Google DeepMind's Demis Hassibas now spending most of his (research) time on these days? The same thing that Yann LeCun and seemingly many others are... And he thinks we may be closing in on a "ChatGPT moment" for the "World Model" space – if we can get the costs down. Luckily, Google has the "huge advantage" of TPUs – something which is seemingly becoming more clear by the day. And it may become more clear yet if and when the AI Bubble bursts. "It feels like there’s obviously a bubble in the private market. You look at seed rounds with just nothing really being tens of billions of dollars. That seems a little unsustainable. It’s not quite logical to me." That's a bit self-serving, of course. But that doesn't mean it's wrong! [Sources 🔒]
📽️ Netflix's Warner Bros Bid Includes Theatrical Promise – It seems like each week now brings a new sign that Netflix is thawing their stance against theatrical releases for their content (a prediction I made a year ago). To be fair, this one is probably necessary if the company wants any shot of competing for the Warner Bros movie studio (which has agreements already in place for theatrical distribution). Still, it once again signals that Netflix is not as militant on this stance as they have historically projected in public. And this will continue soon with the release of the final season of Stranger Things, which is (smartly) paired with a theatrical experience. And there will be more calls and pressure when the third Knives Out is released, which would obviously be a huge theatrical event because Netflix has helped make it a big franchise. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing here, Netflix should leverage theaters where it makes sense both for marketing and to make money, imagine that. BTW, those first bids from Paramount, Comcast, and Netflix are now in David Zaslav's hands... [Bloomberg 🔒]
📲 Perplexity's Mobile AI Browser – For all the talk and hype about the "AI Browser Wars", I've been surprised that none of the major players have tried to immediately go after the green field: mobile. I get that it's harder to do – in particular on iOS which remains locked-down when it comes to browser technology, which is undoubtedly part of the reason why Perplexity is starting with Android. Still, as someone now fully sold on using an AI browser, I find it weird/frustrating to use a mobile browser and have no such AI options to do what I regularly do on the desktop now. Instead I have to use a separate app, like an animal. There might even be a real opportunity on iOS as Apple should add AI functionality to Safari in about 15 years. I still regularly use The Browser Company's (clever) Arc mobile app, even though they've abandoned ship on Arc for the more AI-centric Dia. [TechCrunch]
📺 Big Streamers Bet Big On 'Pause Ads' – As much as I generally dislike advertising – certainly, when it's say, crammed into your TV UI, or certainly your refrigerator! – I think I'm actually okay with this. Right now when you pause content, it's just frozen as a static image. Some people obviously pause to try to catch something, but most of the time it's just to do something else. So I'm okay with using this otherwise dead space – especially if the ad is actually relevant to something you just saw on-screen. You can imagine a world in which some consumers may even pause on purpose to see if they can buy something they're seeing. This may sound like the definition of dystopia to any filmmaker, but you could see this being a thing if it worked well enough. Certainly for Amazon TVs! And in general, I'd be more in favor of this type of ad if you got something back in exchange for seeing it, such as a discount on the streaming service. Sort of like the lock screen ads on Kindles. Or even that free TV set that has the ad bar at the bottom. This all sounds like a nightmare to me, but I get it. And I don't think it has to be all bad. [Variety]
💸 Sam Altman's 'Rough Vibes' Memo – Three interesting elements here. First, that Altman felt the need to write this just ahead of Google's release of Gemini 3. Clearly, he knew it was going to be good. And second, that's a problem for OpenAI because if nothing else, it highlights a fear that many investors and watchers have that Google's sheer size and scale – and most importantly, profits – will allow them to ride ChatGPT's first-mover advantage into the ground. This is obviously why OpenAI is trying to move heaven and earth to create their own infrastructure – but do they have enough time before the bubble bursts? That's the million dollar question. Actually, the trillion dollar one. Perhapsseveral trillion. Finally, the specific notion that Google has in some way overcome the pre-training hurdles that the other LLM makers have run into is interesting... Google itself is playing this up – is it something specific about TPUs (versus NVIDIA's GPUs) or something else in the process? That's also a several trillion dollar question! [Information 🔒]
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
"You can’t go through 50 states. You have to get one approval. Fifty is a disaster. Because you’ll have one woke state and you’ll have to do all woke. You’ll be back in the woke business. We don’t have woke anymore in this country. It’s virtually illegal. You’ll have a couple of wokesters."
– The President of the United States with some very deep and serious thoughts as to why he might issue an Executive Order to stop states from enacting their own AI laws.
Interestingly enough, this notion is something that at least some of the MAGA base is pushing back against. That's right, AI and Epstein are the issues dividing the party.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
It feels like I've been waiting my whole life for a Legend of Zelda movie. While I loved Mario, my favorite Nintendo game was always Zelda. From the golden NES cartridge on down, it was absolutely magical to me. I even tolerated Zelda II, which was rewarded in the form of A Link to the Past, the Super Nintendo sequel which is still my favorite of the series (undoubtedly for nostalgic reasons). Anyway, just seeing this one shot (and some spy cam footage) is insanely exciting to me. They better not fuck this up, and at least from this, it doesn't look like they will.
2025-11-21 18:54:05
I have a simple method for my own AI rankings: product delight. That is, when I use the various services from the players in AI, do they constantly surprise and delight me with not only the outputs but also the user experience details. Put simply: is it the best product for me, the end user, to use? It's subjective. But I trust my taste. For it is my own.
Anyway, this very scientific approach is why I've always considered ChatGPT the best product in the category. And judging from usage, I'm obviously not alone there. Sure, some of that is the first-mover advantage that OpenAI enjoys – which, in turn, has helped from a branding perspective as ChatGPT (a rough name to say and even spell out for many) is becoming sort of the "Kleenex" of the field. But beyond any technical capabilities, I've just always found OpenAI's strength to be in productizing AI in a way that their peers haven't been able to match. At least when it comes to consumers.
To be clear, I still think that's the case (see the recent Sora vs. Vibes "battle" and Group ChatGPT), but I also can't help but wonder if Google is closing the gap.
Yes, Google, the company famous for amazing technology but often flubbing the product when it comes to the roll out. That included, naturally, their first stab at AI. "Bard" was a comical flop, but they were quickly able to regroup and find their footing with "Gemini". And over the past year or so, it has felt like they were really making some strides and perhaps stepping on the gas.
Gemini 3 feels like the culmination of that. And the early technical benchmarks look impressive. But just as impressive to me are the product touches Google has been dishing out. NotebookLM was perhaps the start of this, but more recently, I was impressed by Google's ability to actually create a sort of viral product moment with "Nano Banana" – going so far as to lean into the silly codename (taking my advice?). There are now bananas – literal banana emojis – all over the UI. This mixed with the little, colorful graphical flourishes when using Gemini are just... nice.
Then last night I stumbled into Gemini's "Dynamic view" option. This is decidedly not a good name as it hides a product output that's truly profound in a sheath of blandness. But I mean, you have to try this.
From describing the end of Heat (spoilers) to explaining Interstellar (spoilers), it's wild what Gemini is able to do here. Basically, it takes what would be a useful AI text-based answer and wraps it in an interactive, visual output. It's honestly a bit hard to describe, but each result contains about a dozen little bits that are beyond impressive. Especially for something that Gemini is able to create in about a minute.
From the background sound (which you can toggle on and off) for the Interstellar result, to the time dilation relativity calculator for 'Miller's Planet', to the "landing lights" button to illuminate Neil McCauley's shadow in Heat. I mean, it really made this. Out of the blue. Again, in 60 seconds.
All of this sounds almost silly, but it also points to a world in which increasingly complex creations are able to be made on the fly by these tools. For "vibe coders" this may seem like nothing new, but this type of tool opens the aperture on what's possible for regular users to do. Are you more of a visual learner? Why not use Gemini 'Dynamic View' to create an explanation of stock buybacks for you?
Why not use it for anything and everything?
Have I mentioned that this product is still technically in "Labs"?1 Not only is it going to get better, there's hope Google will launch it with a better name.
Anyway, color me impressed. Google is on a bit of a roll when it comes to product delight, which isn't something I expected – and yes, I worked there for over a decade. And that – beyond the inherent structural, technical, and monetary advantages that Google has here (aside from that, what did you think of the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) – should have OpenAI a bit worried. There's a crocodile in the product moat.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2025-11-20 21:35:03
Well, they did it. I'm happy to report that Jensen Huang saw his shadow and so we will have at least another three months of AI euphoria. I'm "happy" about this because it means that NVIDIA's stock won't collapse when it opens today and thus risk bringing down the entire stock market which is so heavily wrapped around the Big Tech bet. At some point, this seems inevitable, but not today. Phew.
The reason why is because NVIDIA continues to bring in boatloads of money selling their AI wares. They even managed to defy the Law of Large Numbers this quarter and saw that mythical uptick in revenue growth – the first on a sequential basis in a couple of years. Even more impressively, they're projecting another uptick next quarter. No matter how you choose to look at this situation, it's insanely impressive growth.
At the same time, it's growth that is largely fueled by a handful of players. This makes sense, NVIDIA's Big Tech peers are really the only companies that can afford to spend the amounts of money that makes up most of what NVIDIA is now bringing in. This is obvious, but often overlooked: much of NVIDIA's revenue is coming from Big Tech.1
2025-11-20 04:14:08
It's November 22, 1996 and Steve Jobs has a cold. But unlike Frank Sinatra 30 years earlier, Jobs actually sits down for his interview,1 because it's the one year anniversary of the release of Toy Story, Pixar's first film released in collaboration with Disney. And now, to mark the 30th anniversary of the movie, the Steve Jobs Archive is sharing this never-before-seen footage.
Jobs is just 41 years old at the time but it has been 11 – eleven! – years since he was pushed out of Apple. That was the same year that he started NeXT, which he's still the CEO of in this video, not yet reunited with his first company (that would happen just weeks later). He's also been the CEO of Pixar for just over a decade here, having bought the business from George Lucas, out of Lucasfilm – for $10M. It took that entire decade to make their first feature film. But it worked. Boy did it:
Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-animated feature-length film. An instant hit with audiences and critics, it also transformed Pixar, which went public the week after its premiere. Buoyed by Toy Story’s success, Pixar’s stock price closed at nearly double its initial offering, giving it a market valuation of approximately $1.5 billion and marking the largest IPO of 1995. The following year, Toy Story was nominated for three Academy Awards en route to winning a Special Achievement Oscar in March.
The largest IPO of 1995 would be a seed round for an AI startup today – and in some cases, not even that outlandish of one.
The entire 22-minute video is obviously worth the watch. There are a lot of good nuggets about both Pixar and Disney, but the one part that really stood out to me was about how he thought about building teams – in particular at Pixar, which wasn't necessarily a world, filmmaking, that he was close to. But he did know technology and knew this would have to be a sort of hybrid of Silicon Valley and Hollywood – even though he also knew previous attempts to fuse those worlds never worked. The cultures were simply too different. Or were they...
When asked about how he's different than the studio heads of old, Jobs takes a moment to think about it – a very Jobs-ian move in such interviews – and he starts to talk through how they're building something different with Pixar. But as he talks through it, he seems to realize that actually, it's not that different from what he's done in technology when it comes to building teams:
"This is the same in technology as it is at Pixar and on the creative side. Which is: where you’ve got incredibly talented people that are also rare and in-demand, if you don’t treat them right, they can go get another job in 10 minutes. So this strange thing happens, which is sort of the hierarchy of power inverts. And the CEO is actually at the bottom [laughs]. So I sort of feel like I work for most of these people. Because they’re the ones that are doing all the brilliant work. And it’s the same in software. It’s the same thing. The best people are very hard to come by. And so it’s managements job to support them. Because they’re on the front lines doing the work. So that’s kind of how we run the place."
"I play the orchestra" anyone? But really, there are similarities to the answer he gave in a Q&A all the way back in 1983 about attracting and retaining talent at Apple. And obviously this will resonate with anyone building teams – in particular, perhaps those building teams working on AI at the moment. "They can go get another job in 10 minutes."
When pressed how he's been able to build such a culture to foster success:
“We do that by creating the right environment. A very rich environment. And removing obstacles out of their way. And putting together the right teams of people together. And getting the right projects. Keeping the quality levels very high, both in terms of people and strategy and projects. Those kinds of things.”
He keeps going:
“As an example our studio has grown tremendously this year. We started off at about 175 people and we’ll be at about 300 people by the end of this year. And one of our major challenges was not to lower the quality bar one iota. And we managed to accomplish that. We put together a very strong recruiting group. We did a lot of other things that I’d rather not talk about cause they’re competitive advantages. And we were able to hire you know, 125 A+ people this year.”
He played the orchestra, but he also assembled that orchestra.
It would be interesting to know what Jobs would have thought about our current Age of AI – in particular, AI as a tool to augment creative endeavors, such as filmmaking. Hollywood is obviously up-in-arms about it right now, but there was a time when digital animation was the new technology cast aside. The same has been true of basically all new technology.
While many would undoubtedly jump to say that Jobs might hate something as seemingly "soulless" as some of the creative output we get right now from AI, I'd like to imagine he would find a way to fuse the creative talent with the technical talent to make something magical. Something like Toy Story.2
One more thing: the other stand-out bit is when Jobs is explaining how Walt Disney realized that to make filmmaking work with this new technology at the time, animation, he would actually have to invert the way movies were typically made – something which Pixar had to do as well: "You have to edit your film before you make it."
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Issey Miyake shirt and all. ↩
2 Incidentally, we just showed our youngest part of Toy Story this past weekend as her very first movie. Have to gear her up for Toy Story 5 with it's antagonist... the um, tablet! ↩