transcript

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[00:01] Today on the AI Daily Brief, how Apple's new CEO might change or not their AI strategy. Before that, in the headlines, a new feature that used to be controversial might become very commonplace soon. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and conversations in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. Right now, I've got an AI Credential Survey live. If you would do that, it'll take you about 10 seconds and would very much help us plan some next moves. But we got a loaded slate of headlines today, so let's dive in. We kick off today with an interesting new feature announcement from OpenAI. The company has shipped a new memory feature in Codex called Chronicle. This is something that we've seen a couple of times from a couple of different companies, although it's usually been surrounded by some amount of controversy, and in the case of Microsoft, a withdrawal of the feature entirely. Chronicle uses screen captures to build a running memory of your workflow. The feature runs as a background agents, taking screenshots and deciphering them to build memory as you work. Now, OpenAI framed the feature as being a quality of life improvement by improving Codex's understanding of your work. They write, with Chronicle, Codex can better understand what you mean by this or that, like an error on screen, a doc you have open or that thing you were working on two weeks ago. Over time, it helps Codex learn how you work, the tools you use, the projects you return to, and the workflows you rely on. Now, they did warn that because Chronicle runs as a background agent, it will chew through usage limits. Screenshots also carry some privacy and access concerns. All my old Bitcoin buddies are screaming at their screens right now as I talk about this. Yet it's pretty clear that OpenAI is aiming this at professionals who are working on secure systems with their company picking up the tab on usage. Apparently the feature is impressed internally with President Greg Brockman writing that it feels, quote, surprisingly magical to use, and Sam Altman saying the internal working name for this was telepathy and it feels like it. Codex developer Tebow wrote, This is early and consumes quite a bit of tokens, but it has changed how I and many folks at OpenAI use Codex. Now, like I said, when these types of features were first announced, they were announced as general Windows type features as opposed to something very discrete for a specific type of builder in a specific use case, and maybe for people to balance on the value of that context changes how people will receive it. I've always thought that this was one of those features that one group who is used to an old way of doing things will think is a complete privacy nightmare, but in the future people will just assume is completely normal. Staying on new features for a moment, Anthropic has shipped a new feature for Cowork that they're calling Live Artifacts. The feature allows users to build dashboards and trackers using live data feeds from connected apps. Cowork developer Felix Riesberg showed off the flexibility of the new feature. In one example, the feature produced a personalized morning brief, including a meeting schedule, correspondence summary and key status indicators. In another, the feature produced a dashboard for a fictional lunar mission. It feels to me like a lot of these features, from both Anthropic and OpenAI, are in some ways quote-unquote just UX upgrades on stuff you could already do. But given that the whole point is allowing you to do more faster and better, UX upgrades that cement and simplify workflows can be significant unlocks for the people using them. Speaking of Anthropic, CEO Dario Amore met with key White House officials on Friday to talk through the cybersecurity implications of mythos. Among others, the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were there. In a statement, the White House called this a productive and constructive introductory meeting. They released a very milk toast generic kind of statement. But given the hostile rhetoric towards Anthropic recently, many viewed this as the administration walking back hostilities in recognition that Anthropic's technology has big implications for national security. Anthropic's lawsuit against the Pentagon is still ongoing, and the State Department, Health and Human Services, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency have all terminated Anthropic contracts. Of course, at the same time, over the weekend, Axios reported that the NSA is actively using the Mythos Preview Model despite their parent agency, the Department of Defense, insisting that Anthropic is a supply chain risk. Axios writes, The government's cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon's feud with Anthropic. Adding more evidence to the idea that there may be a detente forming, President Donald Trump himself this morning said, They, Anthropic, came to the White House a few days ago and we had some very good talks with them, and I think they're shaping up. They're very smart. I think we'll get along with them just fine. Now the administration's actions mirror a fairly significant response to mythos on Wall Street. Central bank heads across the globe have put financial institutions on high alert and the mythos preview has expanded to cover numerous other banks. When it launched, the preview was only extended to JP Morgan, but around a dozen major banks across the US and the UK are now participating. To be perfectly honest, the whole conversation feels a little bit like big institutions just breaking up to the fact that models in general have gotten really good, as opposed to there being some massive leap with this one specifically. But we did kind of get a preview this week of what a heightened pattern of security incidents might look like. Two big ones were AI development platform Vercell disclosed a major security incident. Describing the attack on Sunday, Vercell said that hackers had gained access to an employee's credentials through a third-party tool. The hackers then accessed additional Vercell systems and exfiltrated user data. Vercell said the incident impacted only a limited group of users who had been contacted. The attack was attributed to criminal hacking and extortion group Shiny Hunters. The group has carried out dozens of sophisticated attacks since 2020, claiming responsibility for last year's Jaguar and Land Rover and Ticketmaster attacks, and more recently hitting Rockstar Games through their Snowflake integration. Vercell CEO Guillermo Roche commented, We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercell. Lastly today, in some financing news, DeepSeek is taking outside investment for the first time in order to compete with the US. Megalabs. Until now, the lab has been entirely funded by their parent company, Chinese hedge fund High Flyer Capital. The information reports that DeepSeek is now seeking $300 million at a valuation of at least $10 billion. Worth noting that while the sum is nothing to sneeze at, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the war chests being assembled in the US. Cursor is seeking $2 billion in funding in a round that would see them valued at $50 billion. Bloomberg reports that fundraising talks are active, with previous backer entries in Horowitz leading the round. NVIDIA is also said to be planning to participate along with Thrive Capital. The round would be a significant boost to Cursor's valuation, which reached $29 billion last November. Separately, rumors are swirling that XAI plans to provide compute to power Cursor's next training run. Business Insider reports that Composer 2.5, Cursor's proprietary model, will be trained on tens of thousands of GPUs housed in XAI's data centers. In public markets, TSMC has booked another quarter of record revenue and are forecasting even more over the coming year. The company reported a 35% boost to revenue over the past year and also lifted growth expectations above 30% for the coming year. Now the news isn't all good. Bloomberg, for example, discussed a range of factors that could weigh on TSMC's profitability over the coming year, including rising input costs from the Iran War and questions about the continued growth of the data center build out. But for now, the story is mostly about capacity constraints. Fab manufacturer ASML can't supply lithography machines fast enough to keep up with TSMC's expansion plans. Memory chip supply is another limitation. EKAsia reports that the memory shortage is expected to continue until at least 2027. Chip producers are only focusing on high bandwidth memory for AI chips to the exclusion of consumer memory, with analysts saying the current pace of production is only sufficient to meet 60 percent of demand. New facilities are being constructed by all the major producers, but the first plans are scheduled to come online only next year. Industry figures have flagged that the shortage will continue much longer, with some suggesting that supply constraints will continue all the way out into 2030. Finally, today, the vague posting has reached a peak and it seems very clear that we are going to get some new OpenAI goodies in short order. Just as I was finishing recording this, OpenAI posted a screenshot suggesting that at 3 p.m. Eastern today, there would be a live stream from the company, and given that they labeled the screenshot with the caption, this is not a screenshot, it seems pretty clear that we're getting their latest image model today. I'm sure we will be discussing that tomorrow, but for now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief headlines. Next up, the main episode. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Apple has had a weird relationship with AI. For the first part of the post-ChatGPT period, they just did nothing. The leader of their AI efforts, John Gianandrea, was reportedly skeptical of LLMs and it certainly showed in their non-action. Now, eventually, the pressure got too much and they did announce Apple Intelligence, that was back in the middle of 2024. Only to promptly do literally nothing with it and not even deliver on the most basic features that they had promised, including the one that really everyone wanted, which was just an updated Siri. On and on time went, these problems didn't get fixed and people basically were counting them out of the AI race. Then something interesting happened at the beginning of this year. That was, of course, the emergence of OpenClaw, a new open source harness for agents that really encapsulated the shift to the agentic era that we've experienced in 2026. Now, even though it was not a requirement, a huge number of people raced out to get dedicated hardware for their OpenClaws, and of course the device of choice was the Mac Mini. So much so that it led to the Mac Mini being sold out in stores everywhere, all around the country. On top of that, every time some new feature came out, Claw desktop, Codex computer use, it's always for Apple hardware. Max Weinbach recently wrote, If you don't have a Mac and are trying to keep up with the cutting edge AI, you literally can't. Everything is Mac only or Mac first. This is a huge deal. Leading AI products are essentially built for Mac with everything else being an afterthought. This is significant. What's more, as people started to become skeptical of the hardware build out that's going on, Apple's complete non-participation in that build out started to seem like an act of genius rather than an act of omission. AI commentator Ejaz wrote, Apple really nailed AI by doing nothing. 135 billion in the bank stole Google's model for a measly 1 billion by which he's talking about the fact that Apple announced this year that they would be using Gemini to power Siri. Now forcing competitors to plug their models into Siri if they want to access 2.5 billion Apple users. Patience or laziness paid off massively. Chicago Booth professor Alex Emass wrote, A while ago people were ripping on Apple for not investing in AI like the other tech companies, but Apple's edge has always in the Jobs Cook era been to know its strength and play to it. Apple is primarily a hardware company. Its hardware is extremely popular because of its usability. This allows Apple to create a closed system, app store, and charge software and platform providers fees to get access to its huge user base. In AI its strategy was always going to be wait out the race, which is still ongoing and make a deal with who they perceive to be the most compatible with its hardware. Instead of burning through huge amounts of money without any comparative advantage in the space, cough meta, Apple kept making money and now has access to one of the top models while sitting on a pile of cash. So for Alex here, the strategy in his estimation was intentional. Tech journalist David Pogue agrees, saying as summed up by Big Brain AI that Apple's AI slowness was actually a deliberate privacy strategy. Now, I'm a lot more skeptical that this was super intentional as opposed to just the default result of doing nothing which happened to work out. But in either case, that sets the context for the news that Apple's CEO Tim Cook is stepping down and John Ternus, who heads their hardware division, is stepping into the role. Cook is leaving a 15-year legacy as the head of Apple. When he took the role in 2011, it was obvious that he was not just trying to follow in Steve Jobs shoes, that he was indeed a different type of Apple CEO. Cook was promoted from the COO role and led huge initiatives to outsource production to China while maintaining quality standards. Cook doubled revenue and profit within a decade and transformed Apple from a $350 billion tech giant to the $4 trillion force they are today. Now the skeptical take, as summed up by Polymath on Twitter, is that that's an 11x market cap increase while in the same period Microsoft saw a 14x, Google saw a 20x, Amazon did 28x, and Facebook did 35x. As they put it, Cook led Apple through a period where every tech company expanded, and Apple was able to create a new AI for Apple, which was a big success for Apple. Indeed, he had a conservative view on product, consistently choosing iteration rather than innovation. Outside of the enormously successful AirPod, his tenure featured no breakthrough product that could match the iPhone, the iPod, or the MacBook in a way that reshaped tech. Now, where the chinks in the armor started to show was following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Reports at the time suggested that Apple didn't understand the appeal of chatbots, instead doubling down on Siri's voice interface, even though that voice interface was already by that time behind relative to other voice assistants. Now, holding aside the Mac mini renaissance that we've been talking about, Polymath again sums up the Apple screwed it up argument writing, Apple had the most compelling pre-AI experience in Siri. They had everything. They had mountains of user data, audio and transcription training data, the biggest and most sophisticated user data network in the world by far, and they blew it. They should be so far ahead of the competition on AI that it makes their competitors fall into despair. Instead, they are a non-player in the biggest tech revolution since mobile, maybe even since the Internet. They could have leveraged their data advantage to create astonishingly powerful models. They make their own Silicon. They could have beat NVIDIA to the punch on hardware if Cook had any foresight. Instead, they just make high-end devices, and now they also make TV shows and won an Oscar for a movie no one saw. I'm sorry, but that's underwhelming. So wherever you find yourself between these two extremes, this is the state of play that John Ternus steps into. And what's very clear is that the number one question that Ternus is going to face is around Apple. Whether he could get Apple's AI strategy in order was one of the three big questions the information suggests that he faced, with the others being will he be able to actually navigate the transition with Tim Cook still around as executive chairman, and whether he would be able to successfully decouple Apple from Chinese suppliers. Other publications squarely pointed AI as the thing. The Economist podcast chose to highlight his, quote, incredibly daunting task of remaking the company for the AI era, and the Financial Times article was called Apple's Next Chief John Ternus Faces Defining AI Moment. Now some think that Ternus is exactly what's needed at Apple. Ben Bajor and the CEO of consumer research firm Creative Strategies said, Ternus is the right person at the right time to take on the next stage of growth at Apple. The company is drastically increasing new product launches in the next few years. They want to go on another growth cycle with new and existing products. Now in terms of who Ternus is, he is a long-term Apple employee, having joined the company in 2001 and risen through the ranks. It is a very Apple-y strategy to promote from within, and as the Wall Street Journal puts it, Ternus was known for deft politicking inside the giant company. Now for some, the promotion of Ternus as opposed to product lead Craig Federighi, actually itself had to do with AI, said one anonymous former Apple leader quoted by the Financial Times. For a time, it might have been Craig Federighi as successor, but in my opinion, he fumbled the bag on AI and Siri. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who is possibly the most well-informed journalist when it comes to Apple, thinks that Ternus is up to the task. He argued that Ternus will bring back Jobs' era decisiveness, noting that he will be stuck between maintaining the juggernaut of the iPhone business while taking chances on new product. One of Gurman's sources actually pointed to decisiveness as the central difference between Cook and Ternus. They commented, Ternus will make decisions. If you go to Tim with A or B, he won't pick. He'll ask a series of questions instead if he has concerns. With Ternus, the source said, it could be right or wrong, but at least it's a decision. Certainly the lack of decisiveness has marred Apple's AI story over the past years, and even if you think they landed on their feet, Apple went through multiple reorganizations within their AI research team, replaced their AI leader, partnered with OpenAI, partnered with Google, and of course, released their own AI product that, as I mentioned before, didn't deliver on any of the advertised features. Still, given the significance of Apple hardware, some are wondering if Apple is going to simply double down on hardware as their AI strategy, with the appointment of Ternus coming over from hardware providing evidence of that approach. Overall, the market seems cautiously optimistic. While the AI industry itself, I would suggest, is a little more skeptical. We've got WWDC coming up and a new iPhone slate in the fall. But honestly, as it's been for a very long time, just releasing an actually good Siri would go a long way to getting people excited about Apple AI once again. Now, moving over to another company in Big Tech that seemed to have incredible wind in its sales coming into the year, but has subsequently faced a new headwind, Google has reportedly created a strike team to catch up on AI coding. The information reports that DeepMind researchers have knowledge that Anthropic has the lead on coding, and this so-called strike team aims to get Gemini up to snuff. The reporting is that Google co-founder Sergey Brin will be directly involved with the team. In a recent memo, Brin told DeepMind staffers, To win the final sprint, we must urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution and turn our models into primary developers. Now, interestingly, one nuance is that this project isn't necessarily about releasing more advanced coding models. Instead writes the information, Google is now putting more emphasis on models that write code the company can use internally, a strategy shift from focusing primarily on coding models for external customers. That requires training the models on Google's code, which is important for performance because Google's private codebase differs significantly from the external code it uses to train general purpose coding models. The article noted a recent quote from Claude code developer Boris Cherny, who recently said that pretty much 100% his words of Anthropics code is now written by AI. By contrast, Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi said that coding agents write around half of Google's code now during their February earnings call. Even if with the agentic coding onslaught this year, Google has once again fallen behind when it comes to the AI narrative, it seems to me that there's still a fair amount of optimism about their ability to get back into it. Yuchen Jin writes, It's surprising to me that Google has the world's largest internal codebase yet lags behind Anthropic and OpenAI encoding and agents. I think Sergey and Foundermode can fix it again this time. Now, quiet as they might have felt, Google IO is right around the corner in May, so I expect we'll be hearing a lot more from Gemini and the entire Google team in the pretty near future. Over in Amazon, the company continues to hedge their bets with a big investment in Anthropic. So far this year, Amazon's AI strategy has been in something of a transition phase, shifting away from homegrown models to focus on placing big bets on the leading labs. They shuttered their AGI lab and instead pushed their chips in on OpenAI, committing to a $50 billion investment. Now, it seems as though they want to own a slice of the entire segment, also committing to a $25 billion investment in Anthropic. The deal consists of $5 billion of commitment now and an additional $20 billion tied to commercial milestones. The companies framed the deal as an expansion of their existing partnership, which saw Amazon invest $8 billion over the past 18 months. Functionally, the deal looks a lot like Anthropic paying for chips with equity. Amazon will provide 5 gigawatts of compute using current and future generations of their in-house Tranium chips. This will include both training and inference, with Amazon noting that significant Tranium 3 capacity is expected to come online this year. The deal could help resolve Anthropic's painful inference shortage. Anthropic said that the additional capacity will start coming online this quarter, with 1 gigawatt expected to be added by the end of the year. As part of the deal, Anthropic will continue to serve Claude through AWS, ensuring the platform has full access to Anthropic's product lineup. Lastly today, an interesting story out of Meta. On the one hand, sources suggest that Meta is planning a 10 percent headcount reduction beginning in May, impacting around 8,000 workers, with those sources also suggesting that this is the first round of layoffs with more expected the second half of the year. This has not been confirmed yet, but has been widely reported. But one interesting story that is official is that Meta is launching a new training program focused on the physical trades. Called Level Up, the initiative provides training for fiber technicians in partnership with construction firm CBRE. The free four-week training program is available to Americans with no prior experience, and is suitable, they say, for high school grads as well as mid-career professionals. It includes classroom instruction, hands-on lab and team activities. Successful graduates will be offered work opportunities through Meta's contractor network, primarily working on data center construction. These roles, Meta claims, are highly paid and in high demand. The company says they're aiming to train thousands of people through the program to address an acute labor shortage, writing, We built this program with CBRE because the fiber technician field and broader construction industry is facing a nationwide shortage at a time when data center demand is higher than ever. Said Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president and vice chairman, The future of the AI revolution depends on a highly skilled US workforce, one that rises to the challenge of building and maintaining the complex systems to power innovation. Meta is proud to invest in technician training to support our ambitious infrastructure goals. Obviously, this is ultimately one small initiative, but what I would say is yes, more of this please, the more that the AI industry can show the creation side of creative destruction, the better off we're going to be. For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Thanks for listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace!