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Notes on aid: WFP staff question Palantir renewal, the fundraising strategy behind ration cuts, and the pope’s moral challenge on data extraction.

ALT: Splatoon 2 Inklings Ride Rail in Port Mackerel

Spring-Loaded Ternus • Endless Geminis • Mathpocalypse • OpenAI's "Missing" ARR • OK Googlebooks

Hard to remember a time when there was more going on product-release-wise for Apple. Obviously, the iPhone 18 Pro models just launched (along with the new Apple Watch models and AirPods 5) and we're still a week out from iPhone Duo pre-orders. But before we get to that, we're clearly going to have a handful of other new products announced next week. If the 'HomePod Hub' and new Apple TV and HomePod minis don't ship immediately, it will be presumably be soon. And then two weeks after that, we're likely to hear about the 'MacBook Ultra' – aka the touchscreen MacBook Pro. And a new iPad mini. And maybe a few other M6 products. Tim Cook was not lying when he said he was teeing up John Ternus well to hit the ground running. It's honestly almost too much in such a short span. A bit dizzying. ****Inklings**** is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from ****M.G. Siegler**** on timely topics found around the web. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. ### I Note... **💫** Google Announces Their 16th Agent and 12th Gemini**–** On one hand, I get it: Google is combating Microsoft, which just unified Copilot after a few years of confusing and conflicting sprawl. On the other, they're seemingly running the _old_ Copilot playbook, by launching Gemini anywhere and everywhere in such a way that no one knows what to use for what. This new 'Gemini Agent' is not 'Gemini Spark' nor 'CC' nor any of the other agentic projects they have at the moment. Nor is it Gemini (chatbot) itself. Even better: this new Gemini (agent) _can be powered by Claude_ and not Gemini (model). Too many cooks. Too many kitchens. Patrons confused. Going elsewhere. **[** VentureBeat**]** **🧮** The Mathpocalypse**–** First, they came for coding, and we said nothing. Then, they came for math, and... honestly, people are saying _a lot_ about this. And it's probably both overblown _and yet under-appreciated_ how much AI is impacting the field. The technology is seemingly solving things in ways we don't understand, which feels a lot like that Good Will Hunting scene, but with a robot. But here, it's yet another example of not just smarts, but scale. AI can run nearly infinite scenarios to brute force its way to solutions in ways humans cannot. And while everyone is just starting to gear up for the future where quantum computers can leverage similar dynamics to crack our encryption protocols, what if AI beats those machines to it? That feels like the real thing we should be focused on here and not academics complaining. **[** Scientific American**]** **💸** OpenAI's "Missing" $20B in Revenue**–** Immediately, another movie scene pops into my mind, the viral clip of Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, "You see how this looks, right?" And clearly, Wall Street agreed with that (damning) initial assessment. But actually, if you read beyond the headline, it's clear what happened here, and it's mostly optics (and a lack of visibility into private company numbers). As many are well aware by now, Anthropic and OpenAI's reported (as in via leaked reports and presentations, not by the company's themselves to the public) ARR numbers are not apples-to-apples. Because OpenAI largely strips out the cut of revenue that goes to their cloud partners while Anthropic does not (there are accounting reasons for doing this too, so it's not _just_ about number inflation). So OpenAI (or their investors) tried to showcase what their ARR number would look like if they used Anthropic's method and, well, it's a lot higher than the number they usually report. Duh. This is also why ARR is not a GAAP number (though those have issues at times too!) – because there are about two dozen ways to twist it for your own means. Better to just state revenue but that's obviously going to look less impressive (and, if we want to be fair here at all, doesn't showcase huge growth as clearly). Anyway, don't trust everything you read! **[** FT**🔒]** **🥧** First Googlebooks Taste Underbaked**–** _The Verge_ seems a bit kind in their initial assessment here. Everything I'm reading points to a product not just underbaked, but _half-baked_ at the moment. The move from Chromebooks to these should-be-called-Androidbooks seems filled with creaky or janky bits and the app ecosystem, while robust, sounds like a mess to actually use quite often (multiple versions of apps to choose from, issues with x86 compatibility, etc). Also, there's no Samsung phone support yet (they've said it's coming – but it's also interesting that Samsung is not actually _making_ any Googlebooks, at least not yet), which seems like a massive issue given the scale of those devices. At least the "Glowbar" sounds better than the Pixel 'HiLight'... **[** Verge**]** ### Apple Assassins... Microsoft Comes to Kill the MacBook AgainCan the ‘Surface Laptop Ultra’ use AI capabilities and NVIDIA to end the reign of the MacBook Pro? I mean…SpyglassM.G. SieglerAmazon Comes to Kill the iPad Again‘Alexa Tablets’ put out the ‘Fire Tablets’, finally…SpyglassM.G. Siegler ### Asides... * Sort of wild that **Meta** is blocking **ByteDance** ads now, _years_ after the company used the tactic to grow TikTok into what it became. It's obviously part of the back-and-forth about the US social media settlement. **[** Blooomberg**🔒]** * **Apple** makes a 'hackquistion'! It sounds like some of the **Huxe** team, which had originally helped built NotebookLM within Google could do some interesting AI product work... **[** MacRumors**]** * **Samsung** is set to take the profit crown back from **NVIDIA** , which had just taken it back from Samsung. They're guiding towards $80.1B in operating income for the quarter on the back of memory chips. Just insane. **[** Bloomberg**🔒]** * Recently thinking back on "Antennagate", it seems a little _underreported_ that **Apple** has a legitimate "Red Ring of Death" problem right now. I suppose it's just one specific model, **iPhone 18 Pro Max** , and only US models (thanks, Qualcomm?) but still, they have to _**replace** the entire device_ to fix! **[** MacRumors**]** * Apple may have dominated the **Emmys** , but Amazon now controls them, grabbing the rights for **Prime Video**. After YouTube grabbed the Oscars and Disney got the Grammys for Disney+ (and ABC, I suppose). **[** NYT**]** * Disney will also stream the next **Super Bowl** (and New Year's Rockin' Eve) on **Disney+** in an ongoing attempt to 'super app' it up. **[** Variety**]** * It sure feels like David Ellison wanted to tee up some big **_Transformers_** news for Paramount as they formally merge with Warner Bros. **Steven Spielberg** is back – perhaps to help creatively guide also-returning director **Michael Bay**. **[** Deadline**]** * More exciting to me: Blunt, Brolin, and Del Toro back for **_Sicario 3_**! No Denis Villeneuve (he's a bit busy) but the guy writing _Bond_ for him is writing this too. **[** THR**]** ### Thoughts On... AI as UI • The Datacenter NIMBY ProblemA tweak this week to the way ChatGPT is surfacing information and letting us interact with it may end up as a subtly bigger deal than their Dots AI assistant. Meanwhile, reading about China’s massive data center initiatives is pretty daunting, and honestly disconcerting in the face of theSpyglassM.G. SieglerApple’s LG Home Partnership • HBO Max/Paramount+ Super AppApple’s would-be ‘HomePod Hub’ device starts to make a lot more sense if it launches alongside a bunch of other technology products for the home – and the best way to do that, fast, is with a deep partnership with a current player. One which also, I should note,SpyglassM.G. Siegler ### I Quote... > "AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths." – **Bill Gates** from the top rope! Seriously, why not a trillion deaths? I can't be the only one who finds his doomer approach pretty weird? He's hardly the only one, but he's the only one who is Bill Gates, which lends credibility, warranted or not, to this specific topic. ### I Wrote... Ode to the AirPods 5They didn’t steal the show, but they stole my ears…SpyglassM.G. Siegler ### I Spy... The LG smart home devices, when rendered from the leaked skematics in the FCC filings look awfully Nest-y... 🎶 Listening to "Ted Lasso Theme" by Brandi Carlile****(good season finale)**** 🍺 Enjoying a Samuel Smith Pale Ale 🇬🇧 Sent from ****London, England****