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Apple To Bench The Vision Pro?
00:20:17
More fallout from the Sora explosion, including my take on using it. OpenAI is now officially the biggest startup in the galaxy. We now know what Mira Murati’s new startup is building. The Brave browser is hitting some impressive user milestones. And why are young people flocking back to… checks notes… AOL?
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Liberty Mutual Emu Voice
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Brian McCullough
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Thursday, October 2, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, more fallout from the SORA explosion, including my own take on using it. OpenAI is the biggest startup in all the galaxy. We now know what miramoradi's new startup is building. The Brave browser is hitting some impressive user milestones. And why are young people flocking back to checks? Notes aol. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, the Internet continues to be abuzz with Sora stuff. Two quick observations. First, how is it that OpenAI seems to have nailed an AI based social network on its first try, while Meta hasn't been able to do anything similar yet? And second, OpenAI's Sora 2 seems to be generating a lot of copyright infringing content. Quoting 404 Media video after video shows Pikachu and South Park's Cartman doing ASMR, a pixel perfect scene from the Simpsons that doesn't actually exist, a fake version of Star Wars, Jurassic park or La La Land, Rick and Morty in Minecraft, Rick and Morty in Breath of the Wild, Rick and Morty talking about Sora Toad from the Mario Universe, deadlifting Michael Jackson dancing in a room that seems vaguely Russian, Charizard signing the Declaration of Independence and Mario and Goku shaking hands. You get the picture with Sora 2. I think OpenAI, like X's Grok, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people's work that it did not pay for and that can easily recreate that work. End quote. Well, actually quoting from the Wall Street Journal, this is an article that I missed from last week. OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its SORA video generator that creates videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, according to people familiar with the matter. OpenAI began alerting talent agencies and studios about the forthcoming product and its opt out process over the past week and plans to release the new version in the coming days, the people said. Again, this is from last week, so obviously sora's out now. Quoting again the opt out process for this new version of SORA means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright materials and videos the tool creates. Given the intense competition in the space, I think they think maybe we will ask for forgiveness instead of asking permission, said Kristelia Garcia, a communications, entertainment and media professor at Georgetown Law School. OpenAI doesn't plan to accept a blanket opt out across all of an artist or studio's work, the people familiar with the new SORA tool said. Instead, it sent some talent agencies a link to report violations that they or their clients discover. If there are folks that do not want to be a part of this ecosystem, we can work with them, Veran Shetty, VP of media partnerships at OpenAI, said of guardrails, the company built into its image generation tool. As I said, I missed that last week, but I guess that explains that So I was able to play around with SORA yesterday. Actually, Chris Messina reverse engineered the public profile URLs for Sora accounts so you can check and see what I did over the last 24 hours. Bottom link in today's show notes is to my SORA page, I guess. But after messing around a bit I am even more convicted in my thesis from yesterday that this could be a major inflection point for social media. Here's why. Remember when all those years ago I first used AI to clone my voice? I had to read from a script for a full solid hour to give the AI enough of my voice to train on. You want to know what I had to do with SORA to train it not only on my voice, but my face? Yesterday I read three numbers. Three numbers popped up on screen and I just read them out and then I turned my head to the right and then I looked down and boom. It had an avatar of me that as you can see, looks pretty darn good. And then I was off to the races creating content of me doing basically anything. So here's the thing. At this point a theme of AI, of AI as the technology currently exists seems to be it just gets rid of the grunt work, the mundane work, the busy work, right? Well, social media of the last decade has been about creating content quick and dirty. You don't need a studio, a good camera, sure people have that and people do do high quality stuff. But also lots of people just take selfies of themselves in their cars. The smartphone made everything simple and cheap and convenient enough to do content juuust good enough. But now even the limits and constraints of that are going away. Instead of filming yourself in your car, why not have your video be you talking in front of the Taj Mahal? It can be. Or on the wall from Game of Thrones. Apparently it can be that now too. Or why do you even have to film yourself at all? Just have your avatar talk for an hour. On the one hand, think of me and what I do here on the show. Are we maybe six to 18 months away from me being able to create a full video of every episode of this podcast where it's like I'm doing the show behind a desk in a TV studio, like it's the nightly news. I won't need a studio. I won't need lights. I won't need a camera. I won't need to record anything. All I'll have to is upload my script. But take it beyond that. The physical constraints to produce content seems to be about to go away completely. And by physical I mean physics, in the sense of the laws of physics. Social media has been tied to actual people up until now, still tethered to faces and voices and places and taking a selfie of yourself in the real world. That can all go away now. Social media won't have to be people or places, just content, when it's literally a matter of typing in a few words and waiting 30 seconds. And I can have a video of me jumping out of an airplane, Mission Impossible style. All the constraints are gone. It'll just be pure content creation and it might not need me to do anything. It might not even need me at all. PS OpenAI is now technically the world's most valuable startup after completing a secondary share sale that let OpenAI staff sell around $6.6 billion worth of shares at a $500 billion valuation. Quoting Bloomberg, current and former OpenAI employees sold about $6.6 billion of stock to investors including Thrive Capital, Softbank Group, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi's MGX&T. Rowe Price. A person familiar with the transaction said that boosted the US company's price tag well past its previous $300 billion level during a SoftBank LED financing round earlier this year. The deal vaults OpenAI passed SpaceX's $400 billion valuation. When it comes to the business itself, OpenAI faces an increasingly competitive market for AI talent as big tech firms jockey for the resources they need. Meta for one has recruited researchers aggressively from OpenAI and other top labs for its new superintelligence team, offering Pay PAC, the nine figure range. A secondary sale could help OpenAI incentivize staff to stay at the company and turn down those lavish compensation offers. End quote. Well, Mark Gurman says Apple is probably doing something they should have been doing, or at least consider doing for a while now. Mark says Apple has paused work on a planned, lighter and cheaper version of its Vision Pro headset to instead redirect resources toward a faster, moving priority. Smart glasses that can take on Meta A lighter, cheaper Vision Pro follow up code named N100 and once targeted for 2027, has been deprioritized as staff shifts to accelerate Apple's glasses program, according to people familiar with the change. Mark says Apple is developing at least two models of smart glasses. The first, known internally as N50, will pair with an iPhone and won't include its own display. Apple is aiming to preview it as soon as next year, with a release still planned for 2027. A second version will integrate a display positioned to compete with Meta's new Ray Ban display glasses, and its timing is being pulled forward from an initial 2028 window look, this is dead obvious. Not only is Apple way behind Meta in this nascent category, you've got Jony I've and OpenAI coming up from behind with whatever hardware they're building. Apple's glasses are expected to ship in multiple styles with a new chip, onboard speakers for music, cameras for photo and video, and voice controls tethered to an iPhone. Health tracking features are also under exploration. Mark says Apple hasn't abandoned Vision Pro entirely. It could still deliver a lighter, cheaper model, and after spending a decade and billions on the platform, they might need to do that. But also, this is all in aid of the obvious end game. Both Apple and Meta continue to pursue true AR glasses that blend digital visuals into the real world, a step beyond today's simpler heads up displays one day. The obvious thing is true smart glasses. Something as thin and light as the glasses already on your face, but a full computing platform.
- [10:11]
Liberty Mutual Emu Voice
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- [10:42]
Brian McCullough
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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Brian McCullough
Learn more at WhatsApp.com Mira Muradi's Thinking Machines Lab has launched its first product, Tynker, an API for fine tuning language models in private beta with support for QEN and llama. Quoting Wired Big companies and academic labs already fine tune open source AI models to create new variants that are optimized for specific tasks like solving math problems, drafting legal agreements, or answering medical questions. Typically, this work involves acquiring and managing clusters of GPUs and using various software tools to ensure that large scale training runs are stable and efficient. Tynker promises to allow more businesses, researchers and even hobbyists to fine tune their own AI models by automating much of this work. Essentially, the team is betting that helping people fine tune frontier models will be the next big thing in AI. And there's reason to believe they might be right. Thinking Machines Lab is helmed by researchers who played a core role in the creation of ChatGPT, and compared to similar tools on the market, Tynker is more powerful and user friendly, according to beta testers I spoke with. Murati says that Thinking Machines Lab hopes to demystify the work involved in tuning the world's most powerful AI models and make it possible for more people to explore the outer limits of AI. We're making what is otherwise a frontier capability accessible to all, and that is completely game changing, she says. There are a ton of smart people out there and we need as many smart people as possible to do frontier AI research. Tynker currently allows users to fine tune two open source models, Meta's Llama and Alibaba's Quen. Users can write a few lines of code to tap into the Tynker API and start fine tuning through supervised learning, which means adjusting the model with labeled data or through reinforcement learning, an increasingly popular method for tuning models by giving them positive or negative feedback based on their outputs. Users can then download their fine tune models and run it wherever they want. End quote Might we have our first true IPO of the AI era, and might it come from someplace not a lot of people are considering? Sources tell Bloomberg that German AI language platform Deep L has held initial talks over a US IPO and may seek an up to $5 billion valuation if it does so. Deep L raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation back in founded in 2017 by chief executive Officer and founder Jarek Kudilowski, DeepL's platform provides AI driven translation. The company, which has offices in Japan and the US Is preparing to launch DeepL Agent, an autonomous AI assistant that can automate tasks for business users. DeepL has more than 1,000 employees and is backed by investors including Benchmark IVP and Index Ventures. Turns out Brave has gotten bigger than I realized. It has surpassed 100 million monthly active users across desktop and mobile worldwide. Quoting Thurat, 100 million users represents more than a growth milestone. They constitute a movement for a better web that puts users first, brave CEO and founder Brendan Eich says. Across the globe, users are choosing privacy and control over their online experience instead of big tech tracking and abuse. Every product we've launched since our browser, our search engine, our premium products, our ad platform has been built with privacy protections. As we expand our AI offerings, we will continue to design for privacy by default, which will fuel our next wave of growth. According to the company, it's been averaging about 2.5 million new users each month for the past two years. And in addition to having over 100 million monthly active users worldwide, it now boasts over 42 million daily active users, which Brave says indicates a very high engagement level. Brave also makes Brave Search, of course, and it says that this service is just one of three truly independent search engines in the Western world and the only one outside. Big tech users now make 1.6 billion queries on BraveSearch each month, or near 20 billion per year. It now handles over 50 million user queries and responds with over 15 million AI generated search answers each day. End quote. Finally Today, sources say Yahoo is nearing a deal to sell AOL to Italian app developer Bending spoons for around $1.4 billion. As ever, when we talk about either Yahoo or AOL, it's surprising to know that, say, AOL is still around. And it's surprising to learn its business is still that big. But the real surprise this time this. Apparently AOL.com's traffic has recently grown 20% year on year among users age 25 to 54. Say what? Quoting Reuters. Yahoo is owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which acquired a 90% stake in the company from Verizon in a 2021 $5 billion deal. A deal would mark a fresh chapter for the one time giant of the Internet age, known for its email service and you've got mail notification. AOL was at the center of the biggest merger in history at the time when it combined with Time Warner in the year 2000. But the megadeal resulted in regulatory probes and write downs. Bending Spoons has emerged as one of Europe's most prominent technology firms, with a strategy of purchasing struggling tech companies and revamping them. In February 2024, the company completed a funding round that valued it at $2.55 billion, making it a rare unicorn in Italy's tech landscape. A new deal would add AOL's vast user base to Bening Spoon's portfolio of mobile applications. AOL generates revenue from advertising and through its subscription services, including LifeLock, identity theft protection, LastPass, password management and McAfee multi access malware protection. More recently, AOL's website traffic has grown 20% year over year among users aged 25 and 54, outpacing the growth in the category of users age 55 plus. A source familiar with AOL's performance said the growth was driven by the introduction of multiple new content categories to AOL.com including health, fitness, animals, science and tech, home and gardens, Lighter side, True Crime, Local, among others, the source said. Bending Spoons, whose products count 300 million monthly users, has done several acquisitions recently, including file sharing service Wetransfer. Last month, it agreed a deal to take private video platform company Vimeo for $1.38 billion, its largest acquisition to date. Bankers see the firm as a candidate for an initial public offering. Luca Ferrari, who co founded bending spoons in 2013, told Reuters last year that there were no plans for an ipo, but that the firm was working to be ready for it and looking beyond Europe. End quot Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.