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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Friday, October 3rd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple removes an app after the DOJ asked them to. People are using AI, but which AI are they actually paying for? Sora is now the number one app in all the land. And in the long reads, now is it time to blame ChatGPT for breaking up marriages? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple has taken iceblock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE officer sightings, down from the App Store. Reportedly, the DOJ requested its removal, quoting Fox Business, DOJ officials at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi asked Apple to take down ICE Block, a move that comes as Trump administration officials have claimed the tool, which allows users to anonymously report ICE agents presence, put agents in danger and helps shield illegal immigrants. We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICE Block app from their App Store and Apple did so, bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital. Ice Block is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed, bondi added. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe, end quote. And quoting the Verge the Ice Block app rose to the top of the App Store's charts this summer after being targeted by Trump administration officials, with U.S. homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling it an obstruction of justice and Attorney General Pam Bondi claiming it was not, quote, a protected speech. Iceblock developer Joshua Aaron is quoted as saying it counts over 1.1 million users and that, quote, apple has claimed they received information from law enforcement that ICE Block served to harm law enforcement officers. This is patently false. Apple made similar claims in 2019 when it removed HK Map, an app that allowed Hong Kong protesters to trace the movements of law enforcement, with CEO Tim Cook telling employees that over the past several days, we received credible information from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present, end quote. At the time, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle spoke out against, quote, apple's censorship of apps, end quote. A letter signed by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Democrat, New York Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican, Wisconsin and Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat in New Jersey, said, quote, cases like these raise real concern about whether Apple and other large US Corporate entities will bow to growing Chinese demands rather than lose access to a billion Chinese customers, end quote. Apple has not yet responded to requests from the Verge for an on the record comment about the ICE block removal. End quote More data on how people are actually using AI, and in this case, actually paying for using AI. A16Z has released a report using data from Mercury, which can track corporate spend on the top 50 AI companies startups actually pay for. Quoting TechCrunch a16z partners Olivia Moore and Seema Amble say the data shows companies are still adopting a range of different AI products for certain tasks, and new apps are rising and falling quickly. There's a proliferation of tools, amble said. It hasn't just coalesced around one or two in each category. The report also shows a lot of spending on human augmenters or copilots that can help boost productivity among the workforce, suggesting startups aren't ready to fully shift into agentic workflows. Unsurprisingly, the top of the list was dominated by major labs, with OpenAI taking the top slot and Anthropic following up at number two. Vibe coding tools were also well represented, with Replit at 3 and Lovable at 18, Cursor landed at 6 and Emergent at 48. Cognition, which operates more enterprise oriented coding tools like Devin and windsurf, was at 34 when a 16Z produced a similar list for consumer habits. Lovable ranked much higher than Replit on Pure Traffic alone because a lot of people were using it to create projects. But startups are not spending as much money on Lovable as they are on replit, in part because of the lack of enterprise features. But the variety of companies on the list seems to suggest there's room for plenty of different companies at once. It's an open question going forward on Vibe coding, moore said. Does the space start to consolidate and one place becomes the best platform to Vibe code? Or is it the case that there will be four or five more Vibe coding companies that are really big businesses for different types of applications? We don't have the answer to that yet. Moore was also surprised to see startups adopting consumer oriented tools like Capcut and Midjourney. We're seeing that a lot of these consumer companies are getting yanked into enterprise faster and faster because they make such delightful consumer tools that then people adopt and use as individuals and bring into their teams and workplaces, Moore said horizontal applications overall made up at least 60% of the names on the list and 40% consisted of vertical applications. The most popular vertical software companies fell into three buckets sales, recruiting and customer service. But the report also found AI making progress in many sectors that previous generations of startups had struggle struggled to crack. What maybe previously would have been like service firms or consultancies are now software companies in the age of AI, Moore said. Amble gave Crosby Legal as an example, which can quickly review a legal contract for a user, replacing what at one point would have been a meeting with an in house general counsel. Rummaging through thoughts and research, she said right now most of the tools are used to aid employees like a copilot in making decisions faster rather than replacing entire workforces and talent suits with automated workers end to end agents. There were also a lot of note takers on the list such as Otter, AI Readai and HappyScribe with no single option dominating this is what Amble meant when she said there isn't one product yet that has dominated the market. Rather, startups are picking their own flavor to see what tools they like best. This is also good for employees who with so many options can pick what applications help them work best rather than using a one size fits all product pushed down from the top. Amble said the last big find in the report was the increasing intertwining of consumer and enterprise businesses. People are bringing the personal applications they use at home to work, and people who have started companies are using their favorite personal applications to help build their businesses. Before, there would have been a delineation between the two, a set stack for what to use while building a startup. Amble and Moore cited Canva as an example. It's a popular consumer app that also has a sizable enterprise audience. It took years for Canva to even add an enterprise plan, but as individuals and enterprises use cases become harder to distinguish. Companies are more than willing to blend the two and I'm going to keep doing data points like these as they come in just so that we know where we're at or at least try to get a sense of where we're at. According to a new study, generative AI is not shifting the composition of US jobs faster than it did in previous ages, like the rise of computers and the rise of the Internet did, with little evidence of job losses, at least so far. The findings contradict assertions from chief executives and tech bosses that generative AI is swiftly reshaping the labor market despite how quickly AI technology has progressed the labor market over the past three years has been a story of continuity over change, said Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at Brookings who co authored the research. We are not in an economy wide jobs apocalypse right now. It's mostly stable. That should be a reassuring message to an anxious public. Martha Gimbel, the co author who heads the Yale Budget Lab, said the labor market doesn't feel great, so it feels correct that AI is taking people's jobs. But we've looked at this many, many different ways and we really cannot find any sign that this is happening. AI has so far not defied gravity, said Kinder. We are in very early days of companies figuring out how to redesign themselves technology. The research, which was co authored with the Yale Budget Lab's Joshua Kendall and Maddie Lee, also finds limited evidence that graduates in the world's largest economy have struggled to find work because of the rise of generative AI. The unemployment rate for those with a bachelor's degree aged 20 to 24 soared to 9.3% in August, more than double the 4.4% recorded in April. But there is little to distinguish the positions taken by Those in the 2024 age range compared with those on offer from older graduates aged 25. The lack of change in the occupational mix suggests the difficulties of finding work for those just out of college has little to do with technological change. End quote Interesting little data point here about that recent secondary share sale by employees at OpenAI. Quoting CNBC While OpenAI had authorized up to $10.3 billion in shares for sale, an increase from the original $6 billion target, only about two thirds of that amount ultimately changed hands. The person briefed on internal discussions said that lower participation by employees in terms of selling their shares is being viewed internally as a vote of confidence in the company's long term prospects and a sign that investor appetite remains strong even at a $500 billion valuation, up sharply from 300 billion dol this year. The offer was presented to eligible current and former employees in early September, with participation open to those who had held shares for more than two years. End quote.
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- [11:08]
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Curious about the digital infrastructure that powers today's biggest tech? Then check out the Interconnected Podcast. It's a new series from Equinix that explores emerging tech megatrends and the infrastructure, making them possible. Through candid conversations with industry experts, the show breaks down highly complex topics in a way that's easy to understand. In the very first episode covering AI in the medical field, the hosts do a great job helping listeners understand the computational models and interconnected data systems powering today's most promising medical developments. From there, they reveal the connection between this infrastructure and the groundbreaking healthcare breakthroughs we're seeing lately, like rapid diagnostics, personalized medicine, and supercharged drug discovery. Stay tuned into the digital infrastructure powering today's biggest tech trends with Interconnected. Give it a listen and follow the show on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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And in this week of Sora, which you'll recall only launched on Tuesday, news that it has become the top free app in the US App Store, surpassing Gemini and ChatGPT itself. And that is despite the fact that at least at the time of this recording, it is still invite only. Quoting CNBC, OpenAI now has two of the top three free apps in Apple's App Store. It's been epic to see what the collective creativity of humanity is capable of so far, bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, wrote in a post on X on Friday. Team is iterating fast and listening to feedback back. OpenAI said it has taken steps to address potential safety concerns around the Sora app, including giving users explicit control over how their likeness is used on the platform. But some of the initial videos posted to the app, including one that depicts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting, have sparked debates about its utility, potential for harm and legality. It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL optimized slop feed, altman wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. The team has put great care and thought into trying to figure out how to make a delightful product that doesn't fall into that trap and has come up with a number of promising ideas. Time for the weekend Long Read Suggestions first up, you know how I mentioned Silver Lake a lot recently, that private equity firm? Who exactly is Silverlake? I kind of didn't know, so I educated myself this week with two pieces. First, from the FTA profile of Silver Lake Co CEO Egon Durbin, who brokered EA's recent takeover and the TikTok deal. Silverlake's $55 billion acquisition of EA is apparently the crowning achievement for Durbin. The deal struck with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners is sort of burnishing Durbin's reputation as one of the most aggressive and creative financiers in the $4 trillion private equity industry. JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, whose bank financed that transaction, praised Durbin's ability to see opportunities across sectors, while other industry figures voiced concerns that paying 25 times EA's operating cash flow could mean returns will take years for this deal, if they materialize at all. For Durbin, who's apparently a golfer, a surfer and co owner of the Austin Gamblers bull riding team, the EA takeover is the latest in a career defined by audacious bets. Since joining Silver Lake in 1999 after a stint at Morgan Stanley, Durbin has pushed the firm toward complex, high risk plays, from carving Skype out of eBay in 2009 to engineering Dell's $67 billion EMC acquisition in 2015. Actually, his partnership with Michael Dell, taking Dell private and then public again produced more than $70 billion in gains, the largest windfall in Wall street buyout history. In entertainment, his alliance with Ari Emanuel fueled Silver Lake's expansion into the ufc, William Morris endeavor and European football, deepening ties with Middle Eastern investors. More on that in a second. Silver Lake's overall track record, however, is a bit uneven. While its 2013 fund proved highly successful, other funds from 2018 to 2024 generated mixed returns, particular era minority investments that underperformed. Still, Durbin has leveraged his network spanning Dell, Emanuel and Emirati royals to position Silver Lake at the center of technology, sports and media. His strategy emphasizes scale and scarcity, building stakes in unique, globally significant assets that can attract future buyers. Durbin pursued EA for over a decade, finally clinching the deal by aligning with Kushner to secure Saudi backing. Admirers see the acquisition as a masterstroke in cementing Silver Lake's dominance, though skeptics question whether the gamble will ever pay off then from Bloomberg More on how the EA deal mimics that Dell deal For years, Blackstone and KKR were the names you heard in private equity. But along with other sovereign wealth money, Silver Lake has rocketed to the top of the pile, teeming with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. The 2013 taking private of Dell remains the hallmark success of this strategy, but EA more than doubles that bet and easily tops recent jumbo transactions in the private equity space. As NYU's Gustavo Schwed notes, buyout shops once shunned fast growing tech because of their rich valuations. Silver Lake was among the first to break that taboo. The firm's golf relationships have become a pivotal funding channel. Abu Dhabi's Boobadala bought a 5% stake in Silver Lake five years ago and pledged $2 billion. And just weeks ago, Silver Lake acquired Intel's programmable chip unit for 4.46 billion with backing from Abu Dhabi's aligned AI investor MGX. For sovereign wealth funds, co investments offer no fee exposure for Silver Lake. They enable far larger deals than any single fund would shoulder. The EA deal also advances Saudi's PIFF push beyond oil into marquee entertainment, sports and gaming assets, this time via a platform with household franchise names like Madden, the Sims and Battlefield. After a stretch of smaller, underperforming bets, Silver Lake has refocused on control oriented buyouts, raising a record $20.5 billion for its seventh flagship fund and adding high profile holdings such as Endeavor, which was the UFC WWE deal. EA is a special company, egon Durbin says in the piece. The future for EA is bright and we are going to invest heavily to grow the business. End quote. And finally, a decade or more ago, people blamed Facebook for breaking up marriages because boomers especially were reconnecting with their long lost college and high school sweethearts and Gen X and millennials were generally just creeping on folks by sliding into DMs. Now, according to Futurism, apparently it's AI's turn. I could see ChatGPT responses compounding, he said, and then my wife responding to the things ChatGPT was saying back and further and further and further spinning. It's not giving objective analysis, he added. It's only giving her back what she's putting in. Their marriage eroded swiftly over the span of about four weeks, and the husband blames ChatGPT. My family is being ripped apart, the man said. And I firmly believe this phenomenon is central to why, End quote the weekend bonus episode this week is like required listening if you're at a startup snowflake became the most successful software startup of the last decade by executing on a very specific go to market playbook. Well, I got to sit down with two of the folks at Snowflake that executed that playbook. Seriously, there are specific, tangible lessons about succeeding when taking your product to market that every founder or employee at a startup should hear. Enjoy that. Talk to you on Monday.
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Hi, my name is Matthias Doepfner. In my podcast MD meets, I'm sitting with people that I find fascinating, interesting, impactful, good or bad. We talk on eyes to eyes level, honestly, openly about the questions that I find democracy, freedom, values, geopolitics, culture, the future of mankind. No monologues, no stage debates. It's all uncut. And I look forward to take you with me on that journey.