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Silicon Valley’s most powerful alliance just got stronger

2025-09-05T19:05:54-04:00

Eddy Cue deserves a raise.

As the executive overseeing Apple's services division, he's highly incentivized to protect the tens of billions of dollars a year that Google pays to be the default search engine in Safari. "I've lost a lot of sleep thinking about it," he said from the witness stand during Google's antitrust trial earlier this year.

Luckily for Cue, his court testimony appears to have had a significant impact on Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled this week that Google's default payments to Apple and others can continue. You can see Cue's arguments at trial mirrored in Mehta's ruling: the Apple SVP said it would be "crazy" to punish th …

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The power shift inside OpenAI

2025-08-22T16:30:05-04:00

Fidji Simo is wrapping up her first week at OpenAI, where she is expected to oversee most of the company's roughly 3,000 employees.

To investors and partners, OpenAI leaders have been describing the former Instacart CEO as the kind of steady hand the company needs. Her mandate is clear: turn a chaotic, unprofitable startup into a disciplined, publicly traded tech giant. On paper, she seems well-suited. She lived through Facebook's hyper-growth era in the early 2010s, helped take Instacart public, and knows the advertising industry inside and out - experience that will be valuable once ads arrive in ChatGPT.

Simo's arrival also underscores …

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I talked to Sam Altman about the GPT-5 launch fiasco

2025-08-15T18:32:37-04:00

On Thursday, I had dinner with Sam Altman, a few other OpenAI executives, and a small group of reporters in San Francisco. Altman answered our questions for hours. No topic was off limits, and everything, with the exception of what was said over dessert, was on the record.

It's uncommon to have such an extended, wide-ranging interview with a major tech CEO over a meal. But there's nothing common about the situation Altman finds himself in. ChatGPT has quickly become one of the most widely used, influential products on earth. Now, Altman is plotting an aggressive expansion into consumer hardware, brain-computer interfaces, and social media. …

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OpenAI gives some employees a ‘special’ multimillion-dollar bonus

2025-08-08T00:38:37-04:00

The day before the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surprised employees with a message in the company's Slack.

"As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market," wrote Altman, according to a copy of the message that was shared with me. He announced that OpenAI would give a "special one-time award" to researchers and software engineers in a handful of orgs, including applied engineering, scaling, and safety.

"We very much intend to keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company," he wrote. "But we wanted to be transparent about this one since …

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Zuckerberg’s ‘personal superintelligence’ plan: fill your free time with more AI

2025-08-01T20:11:36-04:00

It has been another busy week. GPT-5 appears to be just around the corner…

This week, I decode the meaning behind Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" manifesto, and what it means for the broader AI race. Keep reading for my chat with a Figma exec on the company's IPO day, a bunch of good links, and some feedback from last week's issue.

What "personal superintelligence" really means to Meta

Meta has given up on trying to beat ChatGPT at its own game.

If you read between the lines, that's the message behind Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" manifesto. For the past year, he pushed the Meta AI assistant on nearly ev …

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Google gets its swag back

2025-07-25T15:52:59-04:00

This week, I take a look at the surprisingly strong state of Google, Meta gets a new chief AI researcher, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to check out this week's Decoder episode about deepfakes and where they are headed.

Also, do you use an AI coding tool like Cursor or GitHub Copilot? I'd love to know what works and what doesn't…

"I think we are doing very well through this moment"

After spending time with Google executives during the company's I/O conference in May, it was clear that they were feeling confident. Now, I'm beginning to see why.

ChatGPT is not making Google Search obsolete. If anything, AI is making Google st …

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Why AI is moving from chatbots to the browser

2025-07-24T12:56:29-04:00

Happy Friday. I'm back from vacation and still getting caught up on everything I missed. AI researchers moving jobs is getting covered like NBA trades now, apparently.

Before I get into this week's issue, I want to make sure you check out my interview with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on Decoder this week. It's a good deep dive on the main topic of today's newsletter. Keep reading for a scoop on Substack and more from this week in AI news.

From chatbots to browsers

So far, when most people think of the modern AI boom, they think of a chatbot like ChatGPT. Now, it's becoming increasingly clear that the web browser is where the next p …

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Meta says it’s winning the talent war with OpenAI

2025-06-28T12:39:15-04:00

During a company-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday, some of Meta's top executives were asked about the "$100 million signing bonuses" that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed they had been offering to poach his employees.

"Sam is just being dishonest here," Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, said at the meeting when asked about Altman's remarks. "He's suggesting that we're doing this for every single person… Look, you guys, the market's hot. It's not that hot."

The "$100 million bonus" headline has rightfully become a meme on social media since Altman said the number on his brother's podcast. "What Sam neglects to mention is that he's countering all …

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Meta held talks to buy Thinking Machines, Perplexity, and Safe Superintelligence

2025-06-20T18:53:47-04:00

At this point, it's becoming easier to say which AI startups Mark Zuckerberg hasn't looked at acquiring.

In addition to Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI), sources tell me the Meta CEO recently discussed buying ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab and Perplexity, the AI-native Google rival. None of these talks progressed to the formal offer stage for various reasons, including disagreements over deal prices and strategy, but together they illustrate how aggressively Zuckerberg has been canvassing the industry to reboot his AI efforts.

Now, details about the team Zuckerberg is assembling are starting to come into vi …

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Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree

2025-06-13T20:16:24-04:00

AI researchers have recently been asking themselves a version of the question, "Is that really Zuck?"

As first reported by Bloomberg, the Meta CEO has been personally asking top AI talent to join his new "superintelligence" AI lab and reboot Llama. His recruiting process typically goes like this: a cold outreach via email or WhatsApp that cites the recruit's work history and requests a 15-minute chat. Dozens of researchers have gotten these kinds of messages at Google alone.

For those who do agree to hear his pitch (amazingly, not all of them do), Zuckerberg highlights the latitude they'll have to make risky bets, the scale of Meta's prod …

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