2026-04-01 07:01:03
Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+):
“Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy,” Simo, whose title is CEO of applications, told Business Insider.
Altman defers to Simo when he doesn’t feel strongly, she said, and they “debate it out” when he does.
I am deeply suspicious of any company with two CEOs. It occasionally works, like at Netflix, when they’re not just co-CEOs but co-equals. Simo does not seem Sam Altman’s equal at OpenAI.
As OpenAI races toward a possible IPO later this year, Simo, who oversees nearly two-thirds of the company, has a delicate balancing act. She must craft a strategy to make products profitable, while convincing staffers who joined a research-driven organization that commercialization won’t change the mission.
The stakes are high. Deutsche Bank estimated that OpenAI is expected to amass the “largest startup losses in history,” totaling a projected $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. (An OpenAI spokesperson said that figure is incorrect, and one person familiar with the numbers said OpenAI’s internal projections are in line with other reports of $111 billion cash burn by 2030.)
It’s really something when the number in the company’s favor is a loss of $111 billion.
One former Meta employee recalled a moment when, after a contentious meeting, Simo sent a one-line follow-up saying she was unlikely to change her mind, so the team shouldn’t waste time trying to persuade her. She has little patience for internal debates that lose sight of the product, the former employee said, and she’s skilled at “being super clear in her directive so teams don’t scramble and waste time.”
Debates that lose sight of the product quality, or lose sight of the product revenue? Given that Simo rose to prominence at Facebook, eventually running the Facebook blue app, and considering the product quality vs. product revenue balance of that app, I think we know the answer.
This whole dumb “superapp” idea that leaked last week sounds exactly like the sort of thing someone who ran the Facebook app would think is a good idea. The difference, I expect, is that Facebook is free to let product quality (and experience quality) fall by the wayside because their social platforms have such powerful network effects. People stay on Facebook and Instagram even as the experiences worsen because everyone they know is also still on those apps. There’s no network effect like that for ChatGPT. Claude is already rising to near-equal status in popularity, and Gemini isn’t far behind, and Simo hasn’t even started enshittifying ChatGPT yet. People will just switch.
2026-04-01 05:36:35
Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic:
Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the memory chips. Otherwise, the RAM harvesters would get them. Elsewhere, criminal groups are misdirecting trucks carrying RAM in order to loot them. All of this is happening because of a generational shortage of a part used in practically every electronic gadget on Earth.
Two of the best movies ever made, John McTiernan’s Die Hard in 1988, and Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995, revolved around plots to steal bearer bonds. (Also: Beverly Hills Cop — not quite one of the best films ever made, but a classic, for sure.) But bearer bonds have fallen out of favor as the world of legitimate finance has become almost entirely digital. A good heist film targeting a big shipment of RAM chips would be very 2026.
2026-03-31 23:54:25
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”
His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”
Huang, newly appointed to the aforelinked President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, seemingly doesn’t smell the growing stink.
2026-03-31 23:36:13
The White House:
The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:
Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg
Jensen Huang
John Martinis
Bob Mumgaard
Lisa Su
Mark ZuckerbergUnder President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.
Scientific American observes that 12/13 are executives, and only one, Martinis, is an academic researcher. But I mean, of course a council like this, from this administration, is going to be made up of big-cap corporate executives and founders. I’d say it’s more surprising there is even one academic researcher than that there aren’t more.
I’m more intrigued by the companies who aren’t represented: no one from Apple, no one from Microsoft, no one from Amazon. (That left room for two from Oracle, that well known bastion of corporate virtue.) Read into that what you will. Me, I can’t help but suspect that this administration is taking on a profound stink, and something like appointments to this council are akin to a game of music chairs where Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, and Jeff Bezos are happy not to have gotten seats.
2026-03-31 23:11:08
Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version:
Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.
Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (
lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. [...]Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Is it what you’d expect from an official government app? Probably not either.
Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
The app is, at least temporarily, popular. As I type this it’s #3 in the iOS App Store top free apps list, sandwiched between Claude and Gemini. I don’t know how similar the iOS app is to the Android one, but I took one for the team and installed it, and after poking around for a few minutes, it hasn’t even prompted me to ask for location access. It’s a crappy app, to be sure. A lot of flashing between screen transitions. When you open an article, there’s a “< Back” button top left, and an “X” button top right. Both buttons seem to do the same thing. There’s no share sheet for “news” articles, which seems particularly stupid. You can’t even copy a link to an article and share it manually.
But the iOS version has a clean privacy report card in the App Store, and I don’t see anything in the app that makes me doubt that. It seems like the Android version is quite different.
Update 1: Someone on Reddit claims to have analyzed the iOS app bundle and discovered similar code as in the Android app, but I still don’t see any way to actually get the iOS app to even ask for location permission. I think there might be code in the app that never gets called. Like I wrote above, it’s clearly not a well-crafted app. If anyone knows how to get the iOS app to actually ask for location access, let me know how. Here’s another analysis of the iOS app.
Update 2: I installed the Android version of the app too, and just like on iOS, the only permission it asks for is to send notifications. Maybe they will in a future software update, but as far as I can see, the app never even tries to check the device’s location, on either platform.
2026-03-31 05:23:19
Stop scaling headcount. Scale your workspace.
Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.
Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat.
Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.
