Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the TechMe Write Home for Friday, January 24th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today OpenAI releases its agentic bot that can do things on your behalf on your computer. Has the Stargate controversy driven a rift between Musk and Trump? Will the US Government create a strategic crypto stockpile? And of course the weekend long Read Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech. OpenAI has released Operator AI, an agent that can automate web based tasks. It's launching in the US to subscribers of the $200 per month Pro tier, which is the bad news though in theory it is coming to lower tiers soon. But the promise is it can help book flights, plan grocery orders and even complete purchases for users. Now again, I wonder if anyone really will trust an AI with their credit card to make purch. And as we said recently, why does everyone use booking a flight as an example? But according to the blog post Quote, using its own browser, it can look at a web page and interact with it by typing, clicking and scrolling. Operator can see through screenshots and interact using all the actions a mouse and keyboard allow with a browser, enabling it to take action on the web without requiring custom API integrations. According to OpenAI, quoting the Verge, Operator can use reasoning to self correct and if it gets stuck it will give the user control. It will also ask the user to take over when a website asks for sensitive information like login credentials, and should ask for a user to approve actions like sending an email. OpenAI also says that Operator has been designed to refuse harmful requests and block disallowed content. OpenAI says that it's collaborating with companies such as DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, Priceline, StubHub, Thumbtack and Uber so that Operator addresses real world needs while respecting established norms. But the company cautions that not everything might work as you expect just yet. The tool currently has problems with complex interfaces like creating slideshows or managing calendars, End quote and quoting Bloomberg. Operator software works by combining some of OpenAI's computer vision features with multi step problem solving capabilities meant to mimic how people reason, the company said. Initially, OpenAI is releasing what it calls a research preview of Operator online to a limited number of US customers who pay $200 per month for the recently introduced ChatGPT Pro subscription. The company said it hopes to learn from Operator's early users so it can improve the product and plans to offer it to more paid customers over time. In a demonstration of the tool on Wednesday, Peter Wielander OpenAI's vice president of product, and Yash Kumar, who leads product and engineering for Operator, showed how the tool could look for a restaurant reservation or recognize the items on a handwritten list to prep an online grocery order. Operator can also carry out multiple tasks simultaneously. For example, a user might prompt the service to find a hotel in Vancouver that has peloton bikes in its gym, and then before it is finished, ask Operator to find an American Girl Doll bed on Craigslist. As long as a user has confirmed that Operator can carry out a transaction, such as buying a pair of leggings from an online store, and has input any required credentials and payment information, the tool should be able to complete a purchase, Kumar said. End Quote OpenAI says eventually developers will be able to use this to build their own agents. Hey, how about a quick hands on with this thing? The folks at every got one and their conclusion is at least right now that Operator is limited in what it can browse, but autonomously. It can perform repetitive workflows and can do lengthy tasks on its own with minimal prompting. One of the most important things about Operator is that it can do lengthy tasks on its own with minimal prompting. For example, we had it perform a task that took more than 20 minutes. We asked it to help us understand how Spotify Wrapped has evolved over the years. What did it start out as? What does it include? Now that's new. It needed a little encouragement here and there to keep going, but it ended up eventually accomplishing the task it had been set. This is a significant improvement from the agentic experiences of 12 or even six months ago that would frequently go off the rails after only a few seconds. That said, it still matters how you prompt Operator a higher chance of succeeding at the task you give it if you tell it more details about how you want it to be accomplished. For example, in our Spotify Wrapped example, we asked it to gather and summarize search results data from different years. It originally failed because it didn't know how to filter search data by year, but when we told it to use Google's advanced search tools, which provide a year by year filter to search, it worked. We've only played around with Operator for a few days, so we imagine there's much more advanced prompting that could get more out of its capabilities. Operator is only a research preview, so it's not a polished product, but the fact that it's a research preview is telling. Do you know what else was originally a research preview? ChatGPT OpenAI is going back to the original strategy that works so well with ChatGPT. Release early and often, even when there are rough edges. Not only that, but release consumer products rather than just APIs. Even though operator is limited today, we expect it to rapidly improve. It's a good time to take stock of the repetitive tasks you're doing on your computer every day. You may not need to do most of them a year from now, end quote. So more on that Stargate controversy quoting the Financial Times despite the flashy announcement, Stargate has not yet secured the funding it requires, will receive no government financing and will only serve OpenAI once completed. The people familiar with the initiative have said the intent is not to become a data center provider for the world, it's for OpenAI, said one of the people. Another person close to the project said it was far from a fully developed plan. They haven't figured out the structure, they haven't figured out the financing. They don't have the money committed. SoftBank and OpenAI intend to put forward more than $15 billion each for the project. The companies hope to raise a combination of equity from their existing backers and debt, which will be used to fund Stargate. Tokyo based SoftBank will also inject existing funds into Stargate, according to one of the people. While Altman's infrastructure plans had been in the works for well over a year, the idea of announcing it at the White House was not in the works for as long, according to one person with knowledge of the project. There's a intent to do this, but the details haven't been fleshed out, said another person involved in the project. People want to do splashy things in the first week of Trump being in office, end quote. Speaking of that, remember who is in the White House, Elon. And remember who first raised doubts about Stargate. Elon so noting this from Politico, quote, some of President Donald Trump's key aides and allies are furious with Elon Musk for publicly trashing his $500 billion artificial intelligence megadeal. A White House official said Musk quot very much got over his skis when the tech tycoon launched a day long screed against the AI project. One Trump ally said Musk abused his closeness to the president. Another Republican close to the White House went further, saying Trump's staff is, quote, furious over Musk using his massive social media platform to pour cold water on the infrastructure deal that Trump called tremendous and monumental just a day prior. It's clear he has abused the proximity to the president, said the Trump ally. The problem is the president doesn't have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero Fs. Trump, when asked by reporters about Musk blasting the deal, said they were, quote, putting up the money. Quote, the government's not putting up anything, they're putting up the money. They're very rich people, so I hope they do, trump said. And I mean, Elon doesn't like one of those people, end quote. Trump said it did not bother him that Musk criticized the deal, saying, quote, no it doesn't. He hates one of the people in the deal, end quote. President Trump has signed an executive order to create a crypto working group led by David Sachs to consider a national digital asset stockpile potentially derived from seized crypto. This has been spoken of for a while, a potential government strategic reserve of crypto. Quoting cnbc, Most of the order focuses on establishing technology and rules around crypto and its development in the U.S. one of the critical pieces is the creation of a working group to consider a national digital asset stockpile potentially derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the federal government through its law enforcement effort. Historically, the U.S. marshals Service has auctioned off seized bitcoin along with other cryptocurrencies such as ether and litecoin. Trump promised on the campaign trail that if he returned to the White House, he would ensure the federal government never sells off its bitcoin holdings, though Thursday's order does not mention Bitcoin. If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, United States of America, to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future, he said in July in a keynote at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The order goes on to outline other key priorities for the digital asset industry, including protecting individuals and private sector companies that use blockchain networks from persecution. The document spells out certain protections for developers and miners, noting that they should be able to freely develop and deploy software as well as participate in mining and validating a nod to the technicians securing the bitcoin network. The president has also pledged to defend the rights of those who choose to self custody their digital assets. That means they do not rely on a centralized entity such as Coinbase to hold their tokens and instead use personal crypto wallets, which are sometimes outside the reach of the Internal Revenue Service, end quote. I like having a secret weapon when I go into some sort of a business negotiation situation. An ace in the hole if you will. An advantage in my back pocket. That's how Mack Weldon thinks about clothing as a secret weapon. Timeless classic style that's infused with performance fabrics and hidden details to give you secret confidence in how you look. Mack Weldon has become my go to business attire. Some guys just want to look good without calling attention to themselves. Mack Weldon apparel gives you understated good looks for understated confidence. They're not flashy, just classic. 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That's Tech Meme to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See Terms for details. What did I say the other day about the money flowing into compute infrastructure, especially for AI. If the money keeps flowing at the level it has been, this mania will continue for a while. Mark Zuckerberg says Metta is planning to invest 60 to $65 billion in capex in 2025 and will end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs and plans to grow its AI teams significantly. Quoting Zuck himself, this will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people. Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model and we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R and D efforts. To power this, Meta is building a 2 gigawatt data center that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. We'll bring online around 1 gigawatt of compute in 25 and we'll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. We're planning to invest $60.65 billion in capex this year while also growing our AI team significantly and we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead. This is a massive effort and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation and extend American technology leadership. Let's go build I was listening to an episode of the Compound and Friends podcast recently and they made the assertion that something crazy like 7 to 10% of entire US economic activity right now. I could have those numbers wrong by a bit, but it was a huge percentage can be traced to this sort of build out more activity in the economy than during the dot com bubble. It's not just tech. The entire economy is being buoyed by this spending and that's either incredibly bullish or a worrying sign of a bubble potentially ready to pop someday. Okay, only one long read for you this week. I continue to be fascinated by Netflix blowout earnings this week. They claim that the incredible subscriber gains came directly from their live sport offerings. So from the athletic dig these numbers, the company was quick to point to the success of its late year sports programming, including the Paul Tyson boxing match and its NFL doubleheader on Christmas, which included a Beyonce fronted halftime show that Netflix also packaged on its own, ultimately drawing more viewers than the football games. Market research firm Antenna estimated that Netflix drove more than 650,000 new subscribers in the days surrounding the NFL games. According to Antenna, the Paul Tyson fight drove more than 1.4 million subscription signups. The company laid out its sports programming strategy in its letter to shareholders released Tuesday. We're not focusing on acquiring rights to large regular season sports packages. Rather, our live strategy is all about delivering can't miss special event programming, the company said that positions Netflix as a sort of anti espn. By design and necessity, ESPN spends its rights budget on amassing a huge volume of regular season sports packages. The network's currency is live games, so it spends prolifically on that programming. This tonnage of live games will become even more important to ESPN as it launches its own direct to consumer sports platform, currently codenamed Flagship, later this year. On top of that, ESPN ABC may have the most marquee events in the history of sports media, with upcoming Super Bowls, the NBA Finals, the College Football Championship and the Stanley Cup Final among the luxurious position Netflix finds itself in is evident in its acquisition strategy. It doesn't need all of the live sports, it just needs enough big, memorable, in its own words, live sports to keep its audience engaged. With a market cap north of $370 billion and growing if Wednesday's stock price surge off Tuesday's quarterly report is any indication, along with its massive global audience, Netflix can pick and choose what it decides is can't miss and presumably outspend anyone in the market. This is a big reason the Christmas Day football experiment was so important both for netfl and the NFL. Netflix needed to test whether fans would jump from traditional NFL broadcasting platforms to stream games on Netflix. Surely understanding that Amazon Prime Video's Thursday Night Football had proved the concept, Netflix went all out, hiring dozens of on air personalities from other networks and of course paying Beyonce to deliver a halftime show that would not have looked out of place at a Super Bowl. The payoff included being the most watched NFL game ever on a streaming platform. Netflix has the rights to do Christmas Day Games again in 2025. Given December 25th is a Thursday, they will be airing on the day as one of Amazon Prime Video's games. The NFL naturally has to be thrilled. They get a deep pocketed new entrant that can pay top dollar for rights fees, get the product in front of a global audience of a couple hundred million people and put on a broadcast that looks and feels similar to the ones fans are used to. Netflix is a natural top bidder for a new package of NFL games, whether that is the new 18th game, an international package, or something brand new like the NFL on Christmas Day, which used to be the providence of the NBA, now layer in WWE. Netflix poached WWE's Monday Night Live show and launched weekly shows earlier this month. While that would seem to fit the description of large regular season sports package it claimed to be Sidestepping Monday night, WWE's Roadshow feels more like a special event than multiple games a week. What qualifies as a sports related special event and also happens to be one of the few premium live sports packages that are available right now. UFC Fights Keep in mind that WWE and UFC share a parent company, TKO holdings, so Netflix's $10 billion investment in WWE could be a show of commitment related to future deals involving ufc. ESPN exclusively owns the full rights. Through next year, UFC will consider splitting the packages between multiple carriers, sources briefed on discussions told the Athletic. Netflix also made a big splash last month, acquiring the rights to broadcast the Women's World cup in 2027 and 2031. It should not surprise anyone if and when Netflix uses that as a step on the way to acquiring the Men's World cup that are next available in 2030. End quote. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend. Talk to you on Monday.