Our Digital Pasts and AI Future

Apple & Fortnite, Big 2027, Leadership • YouTube + NFL • 'Fox One' • Bill Gates, Trillionaire • Trump's Anchoring • AI Pope • Cursor & Perplexity Rounds • Gemini iPad • 'Kung Fury' & 'F1' • The Paper

May 13, 2025

It seems quite possible that we’re at yet another turning point in the road of AI. As all of the services start to turn on and roll out "memory" features, that would seem hugely advantageous to two companies above all: Google and Meta. Because they’ve both been around for 20+ years, ingesting your personal information like that pudgy pink Nintendo character Kirby. That, of course, includes some memories. And so of course a company like Meta is going to jump at the opportunity to use such historical knowledge to power their new AI tools.

And I suspect it’s going to backfire spectacularly. It’s one of those ideas that sounds perfect on paper — especially if you happen to run an ads business — but in practice is basically the opposite. Remember 'Project Beacon'? Few undoubtedly will. But it’s a name we might see dropped again in the coming months — especially if Meta truly aims to make AI social. And Google should view all of this as a warning. Just because you have that past data — and again, the ads business — doesn’t mean it’s going to help your AI products. It might end up hurting them.

💀 Digital Skeletons in the AI Closet

I don't think we want our AI to know us before we knew it...

• Listening to "Dudley" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

I Wrote…

🏀 ESPN Minus the Plus

Disney keeps the branding simple, for once...

📽️ Hollywood's 'Black Bag' Problem

When it comes to more subtle adult fare, good luck...

I Note…

Apple

👾 WWAD? (What Will Apple Do — with Fortnite?)

The stage is set. Epic has re-submitted the game to the App Store. The ball is now squarely in Apple’s court to accept or reject it. The situation is all sorts of wild given all the swirl going on, legally. But also the fact that while Epic’s US account remains banned, the EU one (which submitted this build) has been active per the DMA rules. So Epic found a sort of backdoor into this submission. And yes, they included Apple’s in-app payments (undoubtedly alongside a miraculous link out to buy via Epic) to ensure it wouldn’t be rejected outright. Does Apple risk rejecting or do they just let it sit on ice while they appeal the decision? Neither is a great look. And I’m sure Tim Sweeney will just sit quietly, waiting patiently. [9to5Mac]

🍎 Apple’s 2027 Or Bust

Yes, yes the company won’t actually go bust in 2027 if some of this stuff doesn’t hit (or work out), but it is interesting just how many key initiatives are lining up for that same time interval, per Mark Gurman. It’s so many different projects — the 'iPhone Fold', the "all glass" and "curved" (?) 20th anniversary iPhone, the smart glasses, AirPods and Apple Watches with cameras, AI server chips, and the actually good (for real this time, they swear) Siri — that you have to imagine at least a couple of them may get delayed. Still, there’s plenty there to get people excited or at least interested. Of those, the smart glasses may end up being the most important, both following the failure of the Vision Pro to catch on and given how tied to AI (not to mention, any future “true” AR wearable) they’re likely to be. Oh yes, and that rivalry with Meta, which is the first-mover here (well, after Snap). Also, they may just inject some “fun” back within Apple. Imagine that. [Bloomberg 🔒]

🥧 Apple Turnover

Meanwhile, back in 2025 Apple, things are dark. Here’s John Siracusa with a soft yet scathing post calling for Tim Cook to step down as CEO of Apple. While it’s basically impossible to argue with any of his points, the reality remains that Cook remains uniquely suited — oddly, perhaps the best suited person in the world, it seems — to manage both various issues with President Trump and, relatedly, the current tariff fiasco. Apple is laying in the bed that Cook made in China, and he may be the only one who really knows how best to unmake it, which he’s clearly in the process of doing. But it will take time. Once that’s done, in a few years, I’d wager that Cook retires. That’s his exit here. He’d love to get one more hit product out the door first though — and his best shot may be the smart glasses (ahead of the “real” AR glasses, which are still likely too far out on the horizon). Still, the vibes are yikes amongst a core group in the Apple demographic right now. I think they need to do something bold at WWDC to combat it. And I think it will be related to bringing down the App Store walls. Perhaps not in the way the judge is currently making them (which they’re fighting), but something. [Hypercritical]

Streaming

🏈 YouTube In Line for NFL Season Opening

This is a bigger deal (though not literally) than YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket partnership, as it will put an NFL game on YouTube itself — worldwide — for free. How many people might watch such a game (which is being played in Brazil between the Los Angeles Chargers and a team set to be named this week)? In that way it’s also bigger than the Netflix NFL deal, but similarly, it’s undoubtedly a test for Google if they wish to expand the partnership and compete with the networks for prime time games (and live sports in general). Why does a largely UGC-driven platform care about such things? Ads, of course. But can Google make such economics work? It will be wild — and at the same time, not entirely shocking — if in the 2030s, the major US sports are primarily on Netflix, Amazon Prime TV, YouTube, Apple TV+, and the streaming version of ESPN. Oh, and maybe the one below? [The Athletic]

🦊 ‘Fox One’ Coming This Fall

Oh good, just what 2025 has been asking for: another new streaming service. That said, the branding isn’t awful here: ‘Fox One’ is pretty much exactly what it implies, all of the content from Fox in one place. Well, aside from their other streaming service, ‘Fox Nation’, which can be bundled together with Fox One. Why? Presumably because Fox Nation is meant as a companion to Fox News and they’re clearly worried about cable subscribers cancelling cable here to sign up for Fox One — which they actually might, if all they watch is Fox News. Also of note, this project largely rose out of the corpse of Venu, the DOA "sports bundle". How long until Fox One is paired with Paramount+ (CBS), Peacock (NBC), and Disney+ (ABC), perhaps in a package called 'Linear TV'? And then add in ESPN (ESPN — they got it right!) and Max (HBO + Discovery), and we have a nice, little package we can call 'Cable Bundle'. [Deadline]

Money

💰 Bill Gates, the Would-Have-Been-Trillionaire

Gates is currently the 13th richest person in the world at $113B, but that’s after a couple decades of selling down his Microsoft stock to donate it through his foundation. Had he not sold any shares, he’d be worth roughly $1.2T right now — roughly triple the current number one, Elon Musk at $388B. And in this hypothetical, close behind Musk would be Melinda French Gates, at $300B — assuming she got the same percentage of shares that she got in her divorce from Gates. There’s no takeaway here, just mind-boggling numbers. [Forbes]

🤑 Trump’s Tariffs Threats Are So Large, 10% Feels Like a Relief

I’m not saying this was the plan all along, still, I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t the plan of at least some in the administration (beyond the President) all along. And it clearly seems to be the plan now. And that plan seems to be working now, thanks to the magic of the anchoring effect and the fact that most people (and governments) don’t like operating under a cloud of pure chaos. [NYT]

AI

🙏 The AI Pope

Just in case there’s anyone not yet taking AI seriously, you can now look to… the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIV revealed that he chose his name, in part, to continue the work Pope Leo XIII did during the Industrial Revolution. "In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor." What wild times we live in. Also, the new Pope wears an Apple Watch — at mass! [CNN]

🧑‍💻 'Vibe Coding’ Cursor Hits $9bn Valuation

I might just point out that Thrive Capital is said to be leading this round while Thrive’s largest investment, OpenAI, just bought the main Cursor competitor, Windsurf for $3B. Such is the state of competition in AI right now. [FT 🔒]

🔎 Perplexity Hits $14B Valuation

A few ways to look at this one. First, $14B is roughly the amount of money Microsoft — itself — has put into OpenAI. Second, it’s roughly the amount of money Amazon paid for Whole Foods in 2017. Third, of the other, newer OpenAI “Constellations”, Safe Superintelligence (Ilya Sutskever) is valued more than double this amount while Thinking Machines (Mira Murati) is nearly on par (for a company that’s just months old). Fourth, there was no greater gift in free publicity than Eddy Cue gave them from the witness stand during the Google antitrust trial last week. Fifth, and related, they’re getting awfully expensive if, say, Apple wanted to acquire them… Sixth, their new Comet AI web browser should be hitting any day now… [WSJ 🔒]

♊️ Google Gemini Now Has an iPad App

Impressive speed to roll out on a platform often overlooked — especially by rivals. I expect we’ll get a Meta AI iPad app in about 30 years. [9to5Mac]

Movies

🥋 ‘Kung Fury 2’ Footage Leaks

I’m sort of shocked that I hadn’t heard about the project before — I’ll chalk it up to the fact that this “sequel” was being made around the time of the pandemic — but my god, obviously this needs to come out, pronto. Presumably that was at least someone’s intention behind leaking this footage — which yes, has spoilers for the plot, though I’m not sure how much that really matters for a movie like this! — and while it keeps getting taken down, others keep putting it back up, so a good old fashioned web search is your friend here if this link isn’t working either. Shockingly, it’s not IP disputes that held this one up (though I suppose it falls under parody of Marvel, Knight Rider, etc) but lawsuits with investors. Release this beast! Michael Fassbender deserves for this to be seen, if nothing else. As an aside, it’s wild that when I first saw this, I assumed it was an (awesome) AI-made trailer. Yeah, a lot has changed in 5 years... [Variety]

🏎️ “3 Laps is a Lifetime”

The new trailer for F1 — aka, the movie that will make or break Apple’s feature film ambitions after some comically bad decisions — continues to look great. The exact type of movie that demands you see it in a theater. Ideally, an IMAX. And it should cement Joseph Kosinski as the king of big budget action movies in Hollywood. Still weird that Apple isn’t pushing harder for the actual F1 rights in light of this? [YouTube]

I Quote…

"It’s a fruitful premise. There’s a tremendous history for local papers. The villain here is the internet and the ability to look at everybody’s news for free, and all the ad revenue going to Google."

— Greg Daniels, the showrunner of The Paper — the new Peacock series from some of the creative team behind The Office, set in the same universe (including, notably with Oscar Nuñez reprising his role as Oscar Martinez).

The setting has moved from Scranton, PA to Toledo, OH — a city about two hours west of where I grew up, and grew up driving through en route to Ann Arbor, MI.

And they’re no longer selling paper, but newspapers.

I Spy…

Let’s see how long this one stays up… "I eat lions every goddamn day." 🦁