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
2026-05-26 18:42:08
Let's first address the iPhone in the room. When viewed from above, the Ferrari Luce looks a bit like that other product designed by Jony Ive. This is not helped by the fact that the main color variant that Ferrari seemingly chose to use for the roll-out is a light blue that looks decidedly like the blue model of the iPhone 5c – one of the iPhone designs most closely tied to Ive. But actually, Ferrari has a history with this shade of blue, 'Azzurro La Plata' the shade of blue used here.
Also aiding the comparison is the fact that the entire top of the Luce is apparently glass. Glass made by Corning, no less – yes, just like the the iPhone. If you're looking at this thing top-down from an airplane, it may appear to be an iPhone on wheels. The mythical Apple Car, at last.
Of course, this is not a flat smartphone and Ive and his LoveFrom team had many more surfaces to work with in designing their first car. I wrote about the interior a few months back when Ferrari unveiled that aspect but decided to hold back the big reveal – both the exterior and the price.
Now we know both and yeah, both are controversial. "Polarizing" as Ferrari puts it. Both of which are nicer ways of saying there's quite a bit of backlash at the moment. And while you might be able to discount the tweets given the leader of the most famous EV company also owns that network, it's hard to discount the stock price drop Ferrari is seeing at the moment. With the stock now down 6%+, they run the risk of falling out of the top spot when it comes to European automaker market cap. Yes, they're ahead of VW – but they used to be far ahead of the much larger car company (which also owns Lamborghini via Audi, FWIW).
Anyway, while 'Tesla Twitter' is making fun of the design, 'Design Twitter' seems more positive. I'm certainly in the latter camp. To me, the Luce looks like a futuristic car while still looking rather elegant. It looks like something you could imagine seeing on the road in 2030 or 2040.1 Or even 2054.2 The actual versions of those futures, not the flying car variants. LoveFrom kept the exterior decidedly simple, which obviously aides in a design being timeless. But it also can mean backlash right now. People demand to see things that look obviously new always and forever even if such designs tend to age poorly. Mix this with a move away from old, iconic design and you get... well, this reaction.
The Luce look is something that I assume most car people don't like – and presumably most Ferrari people don't in particular, as it doesn't particularly look like a Ferrari. But I'm neither really a car person nor a Ferrari person.3
I am a person interested in EVs, but have always found the look and feel of Tesla to be lacking. They can look fine from afar, certainly relative to many other cars on the road (except for the Cybertruck, which literally looks like a dumpster on wheels), but up close, you can see the seams – in some cases, quite literally. This is why I've long preferred the fit and finish of Rivian.
So it's interesting for me to read that Ferrari's goal with the Luce is not to appeal to current Ferrari owners, but instead to try to expand their market into the broader EV set. You could certainly argue that they're timing is awful here, given the trough of disillusionment in which the EV market currently finds itself thanks in no small part to the current US administration (how awkward for Elon Musk – though waging wars in oil-rich states may bring the market roaring back). And you could certainly wonder how much market expansion Ferrari is going to do with a €550,000 car (~$640,000). But if you're interested in an EV and looking for the highest-end variety, the Luce is now here for you.
We'll see how the Luce does in the market. Can it actually help Ferrari usher in the future or will it be more of an oddity – perhaps one that brought a lot of features forward, but didn't particularly sell well? Apple had a few of those products over the years, of course. Though I'm not sure the iPhone 5C falls into that camp. Personally, I loved it, but it was more or less a dud from a sales-perspective. A beautiful, bold, bomb. With a similar blue option.
One more thing: I do love this quote from the FT piece:
The electric model, which will be priced at €550,000 including taxes, will be profitable from the launch, which Vigna said was testimony to the fact that western manufacturers — not just Chinese rivals — can also succeed in building EVs.
I would hope that a car priced at €550k will be profitable from the start! Apple, eat your heart (and margins) out.
1 One wild stat: Ferrari has said they believe that something like 90% of the Ferraris ever made are still in operation. ↩
2 Which is the year in which Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is set. He famously summoned a group of technologists and futurists together back in the early 2000s when it was being made to imagine a realistic future 50 years from then. We're about halfway there now. And, well, the 2054 Lexus has some similarities with the Luce! ↩
3 Though you know who is? Apple SVP Eddy Cue who has long been on Ferrari's board... ↩
2026-05-22 21:37:18
Timing is rarely a coincidence. It's an opportunity. And we're clearly seeing quite a bit of jockeying right now amongst the three Big AI companies looking to go public. Over the next several months, we're about to see endless attempts to frame their own narratives so see what the public will buy. Quite literally.
M.G. Siegler
Happy long weekend (both Memorial Day and Bank Holiday). I'll be on the road next week. 🍻
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
💸 OpenAI's IPO Hedge – Beyond the obvious optics of leaking that you're going to file to go public right before your hated rival flips their S-1 public, assuming OpenAI does actually (confidentially) file today or early next week, it's clearly a maneuver to stay ahead of a would-be Anthropic listing. And a necessary one. If Anthropic goes out first, assuming their better growth and better margins hold, OpenAI's IPO is in a lot of trouble. The comp would have already been challenging from a bottom line perspective, as I detailed last year, but now that Anthropic has seemingly surged ahead in top line too... yeah. So the race is on. But as Sam Altman's comments to staff make clear, it's not a sure thing they're going to go public this year – many elements will factor in, including how SpaceX is received, overall macro sentiment, oh yes, and how their actual business is doing – but this clearly gives them optionality just in case they need to beat Anthropic to market (or, perhaps, if it looks like the market is about to collapse which could slam the IPO window shut for a long time, and as such, limit access to continued capital, which obviously would be very bad for OpenAI). [Information 🔒]
🎞️ IMAX Explores a Sale – Last summer, I had a new idea for Skydance following their purchase of Paramount: buying IMAX. As it turns out, they took my older, much larger idea, and bought Warner Bros Discovery instead. Still, given IMAX's relative price ($1.8B market cap before the pop on today's news), it could makes sense. Or it could make sense for the company that Paramount just paid a $3B breakup fee to in order to secure WBD. You know, the one that suddenly and surprisingly (except to me) loves movie theaters: Netflix. Certainly selling to someone right now makes some sense for IMAX, they're continuing to eat into box office share and 2026 is likely to be the best year for movies in quite some time (and perhaps for quite time after that). Sell high, as it were. [WSJ 🔒]
👶 Can Baby Yoda Save Star Wars? – Speaking of the box office. Sadly, signs are pointing towards "no" here as we head into the holiday weekend. An opening in the $80M range would be great for pretty much any movie, but sadly a Star Wars movie is not one of them. For context, Solo did $103M over the same weekend 8 years ago – and that movie was considered a disaster for Disney (it was fine, but unnecessary). Also, $103M is almost $140M in 2026 dollars. A bigger disaster for Disney (though not at the box office, but perception-wise) was what came next: The Rise of Skywalker. The last of the last trilogy and the last Star Wars movie we've seen until now was a retconning mess. Forget pent-up demand, it's wild that Disney let that after-taste linger all this time. And it's just going to be a hard sell trying to cleanse the palate while also trying to translate a Star Wars movie from streaming to the big screen for the first time. Anyway, Kathleen Kennedy is gone (though this is still obviously her Baby Yoda) and Dave Filoni is in place; a good transition as he co-wrote this film. His animated work has been generally excellent (including the current Maul!) but it's also a bit too in-the-weeds for the mass audience. Can he keep Star Wars truly mainstream? Next summer's Starfighter – well-timed for the 50th anniversary of the original movie, seems to have a decidedly better vibe around it. Could it be the start of a new trilogy? Something else? Moar Andor! Filoni (and Josh D'Amaro) is going to need to tackle it at some point... [Bloomberg 🔒]
Did NVIDIA just post the most profitable quarter in corporate history? Let's dive in...
M.G. Siegler
"I have a million ideas, from lab drug discovery to game design. I'd love to have some free engineers to go and do those kinds of things. I think it's a lack of imagination — and a lack of understanding of what's really going to happen."
– Demis Hassabis, talking about the movement to lay off engineers and replace their productivity with AI.
It's one of those quotes you certainly hope doesn't come back to bite if Google itself feels the need to follow much of the rest of the industry and do such layoffs (at some point, there will probably be pressure from Wall Street if nothing else).
"I didn’t want the second or the third in the company, I wanted only the top, and they’re here today to pay respects to you and to China."
– US President Donald Trump to Chinese president Xi Jinping during their meeting in Beijing with yes, many tech CEOs in tow.
Just a few days ago, I wondered if the tech company CEOs weren't starting to "outsource" their dealings with Trump to other "emissaries" on their teams, and if that in turn might annoy Trump. Well, I think we have our answer...
See also: the notion that Trump may have postponed the AI model executive order signing in part because a lot of the CEOs wouldn't be there and were sending "lower executives" in their place...
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• SpaceX's 'Fast Entry' to the Market
• Bezos on the Melania Doc
• SpaceX to Act Fast to Complete Cursor
• Murdoch Buys Vox
2026-05-22 00:31:19
Yesterday afternoon, news broke that OpenAI was preparing a confidential filing for an IPO. This was a few hours before the stock market closed for the day after which SpaceX filed their first public S-1. Shortly thereafter, word leaked about Anthropic's updated financials – notably that the insane growth they're seeing meant that they were likely to turn a profit this quarter well ahead of previous expectations. A profit? In AI?!
The fact that these stories all hit in the same general window on the exact same day... to quote Jeremy Culhane's impression of Tucker Carlson, "Huh. Really?" And I'm supposed to believe this is a coincidence? Really? It feels like jockeying...
2026-05-21 17:53:54
Mirror, mirror on the Wall Street, who's the most profitable of them all?
Meaning, what's the most profitable quarter any company has ever had? Following NVIDIA's (once again) blockbuster earnings yesterday, I had a feeling they may had just broken the all-time record. They were close last quarter, with only a Saudi Aramco quarter from 2022 (shortly after the Ukraine war broke out, sending oil prices surging) seemingly ahead of them. Yes, they had even managed to top Apple's insanely great most recent holiday quarter. So this latest quarter for NVIDIA with new all-time highs must be the best, right?
This is a question which is not as straightforward as you might imagine. So much so that even AI struggles with it a bit (mainly due to the data cut-offs, forcing web searches to augment any lists with newer data). Further, there are different ways that different companies report profit (I'll get to that). Anyway, I've done the legwork and helped guide some AI friends to what I think is the answer.
From a pure operating profit, Saudi Aramco's Q2 2022 likely remains king. But that too is quite complicated and perhaps a bit unfair given the whole state-owned monopoly thing. So if we want to just make it a bit cleaner and just consider corporate America. Yes, NVIDIA takes the crown.
$53.5B in operating profit in the just-reported Q1 fiscal 2027 is the record holder, just beating out Apple's Q1 fiscal 2026 (which yes, is their most recent holiday quarter, and technically would have lined up with NVIDIA's Q4 fiscal 2026 – again, complicated) of $50.9B.
Let's just take a moment to sit on that number. $53.5B in profit. In one quarter. Earned by one company.
Okay, moving on. I had previously thought NVIDIA had overtaken Apple in profit last quarter, but there I was looking at net income. That number, at least when it comes to GAAP standards, is bullshit. No less than Warren Buffett has long harped on this because Berkshire Hathaway's business involves investing in other companies and the accounting principles dictate you have to mark such investments to market when you report earnings. This means that Berkshire's "profit" swings wildly based off of how their holdings are valued. Of course, that's not profit in money you actually make – unless you sell your holdings, of course – but simply the value of it.
This has come into play in the tech world in recent years because of the investments the Big Tech companies are making. This has actually long been the case – I worked for over a decade at Google's venture arm which yes, made outside investments that from time to time would move the net income needle for Alphabet – but the difference is the size and scope of these investments in AI.
Case in point: the actual record holder when it comes to net income for a quarter is not NVIDIA. Nor Apple. It's not even Saudi Aramco! It's Google.
Last quarter, the company wowed Wall Street in reporting a staggering $62.6B in net income. It was so far above and beyond analyst expectations that everyone pretty quickly realized what was going on. That surge had little to do with Google's underlying business (which, to be fair, remained great) and everything to do with one or two massive mark-ups in large Alphabet holdings. Namely, Anthropic and SpaceX. A full $36.9B of that $62.6B – more than half – was a result of those mark-ups.1
Again, that's silly since Alphabet didn't actually see any of that $36.9B come into their bank accounts. It's simply a paper gain. Yes, they could have sold it, but they didn't. Also selling those stakes would have brought a massive tax bill which would have cut those numbers significantly as well. Sure, they could leverage those holdings I suppose, but it's Google, they don't need such leverage. So until they sell those holdings and get the actual proceeds,2 it's just a weird way to talk about profits.
Anyway, back to the land of actual profits, NVIDIA is now king. Again, at least in corporate America. Just to note the Saudi Aramco situation, it's likely that in that Q2 2022 quarter that they booked something along the lines of $80B - $90B in operating profit.3 Yes, wild. But again because of their structure, a huge portion flowed back to state royalties and taxes immediately. That left them with a "mere" reported $48.4B in net income.
Speaking of, because NVIDIA is now by far the most active corporate investor – far outstripping Alphabet at this point – their numbers are likely to be all over the place in the coming quarters and years. Because it's a relatively new operation for them (at least at scale) and more so because of the insane growth of the actual underlying business, the paper gains/losses haven't had a big impact on the numbers yet for NVIDIA. Though they did boost net income this quarter in a way that is visible.
When everything is up and to the right, this obviously looks great – including on the all-important earnings-per-share (EPS) line. But if the market turns and/or some of those investments start to lose steam and value... just be ready.
For now, just from a pure operating profit perspective, NVIDIA is still growing an absolutely staggering 147% year-on-year. Even if that slows quite a bit (as the law of large numbers must dictate at some point, though NVIDIA keeps pushing those limits!), we could be looking at $100B in quarterly earnings for NVIDIA in relatively short order.
At that point, there would be no question who is king of the profit hill.
One more thing: I would just continue to point out how much of NVIDIA's business is built on the back of Big Tech. In a way, they're basically vacuuming up all of their cash flow (aside from Apple, of course). This is great for NVIDIA given the current state of things, but if something shifts...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 And, I should note, it's going to happen again soon when SpaceX goes public in June. And then when Anthropic goes public after that... ↩
2 Again, see: said IPOs – though we'll see if Google exits as quickly as they can given the deals they're working on to use SpaceX rockets to get to their own payloads to space! It will likely remain a very strategic investment. Perhaps Anthropic too for the Cloud and TPU usage! ↩
3 This is a bit opaque without the same type of reporting standards, but can be sort of backed into knowing the low cost of producing a barrel of oil relative to the price surge back then (and knowing the reported net income, guesstimating the cut,taxes, etc). ↩
