Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home from Monday, March 3rd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, maybe we really will be getting that national crypto reserve after all. TSMC doubles down on manufacturing in the US Return to the office is one thing, but Sergey Brin thinks RTO could lead to AGI, at least at Google. And Mark Gurman says there is an AI crisis inside Apple. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech foreign Might we get that US Government National Crypto Reserve after all, President Trump has named Bitcoin, Ethereum, xrp, Solana and Cardano as assets to be included in a strategic US crypto reserve, causing significant price surges across crypto. Quoting CoinDesk. Notably, Trump did not initially mention Bitcoin or Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, in his statement, but he later clarified that the reserve would include these assets as well. Trump made the announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform. A US Crypto reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administration. Which is why my executive order on digital assets directed the Presidential Working Group to move forward on a crypto strategic reserve that includes xrp, Sol and Ada, Trump stated, I will make sure the US Is the crypto capital of the world. We are making America great again. Following Trump's initial announcement, xrp, Seoul and ADA experienced significant price surges. The price of ADA soared by more than 63% within two hours after the President's post, while Solana increased by 23% and XRP by 32%. While fans of XRP, Ada and Solana celebrated the news, some Bitcoin and ETH fans initially responded with a mixture of disappointment and surprise. Around an hour after his initial post, the president clarified that BTC and ETH as other available cryptocurrencies will be at the heart of the reserve. End quote and quoting cnbc, Trump is hosting the first White House Crypto Summit on Friday, and investors will be watching closely for more clues about the direction of the reserve plans. This is the first time Trump has specified his support for a crypto reserve versus a stockpile. While the former assumes actively buying crypto in regular installments, a stockpile would simply not sell any of the crypto currently held by the US Government. Much of the industry had a lukewarm response to the language. In addition to the order specifying a stockpile over a reserve, use of the term digital assets suggested it could include other cryptocurrencies. However, many in the crypto community feel strongly that a crypto reserve should only hold Bitcoin, as it's the most battle tested and decentralized of the crypto networks. The inclusion of other coins could also invite the government to pick winners and losers in the crypto market, they say. End quote. More Presidential Announcements this is being announced as we speak, quoting the Journal Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing intends to invest $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the US over the next four years under a plan expected to be later Monday by President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The investment would be used to build out cutting edge chipmaking facilities. Such an expansion would advance a long pursued U.S. goal to regrow the domestic semiconductor industry after manufacturing fled largely to Asian countries in recent decades. Tsmc, the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, set down roots in Arizona in 2020 when it said it would build a chip factory there for $12 billion. Its ambitions for the site have expanded rapidly since, with two more factories on the same site and a total investment of $65 billion. The company's first fact mass production late last year. TSMC's announcement comes after years of deliberation regarding the future of semiconductor manufacturing in the US and the global tech sector. The company currently builds its most advanced chip making facilities only on its home soil, Taiwan. The chips it produces are critical for powering everything from the latest artificial intelligence systems to smartphones. Since the Biden administration, the US has expressed concerns about TSMC's near monopoly on advanced chip manufacturing and has been urging the company to relocate more of its cutting edge production, including advanced chip packaging facilities, to the U.S. advanced chip packaging is particularly critical for AI related chips as it enhances performance by integrating multiple semiconductor components, reducing size, improving power efficiency and ensuring faster data transfer. Key factors for AI applications. The US has supported TSMC's growth through 2022's Chips act, which earmarked tens of billions of dollars in grants to domestic chip manufacturing. TSMC was awarded up to $6.6 billion of grants and has recently begun to receive federal money from the program. Generous tax credits have also boosted chip making projects in the U.S. we're pleased to have an opportunity to President and look forward to discussing our shared vision for innovation and growth in the semiconductor industry, as well as exploring ways to bolster the technology sector along with our customers, tsmc said in a statement. End quote. Google has demoed some new Gemini features including Screen Share, to let users ask questions based on their phone screen and video search coming later this month. Quoting TechCrunch at the Mobile World Congress MWC 2025 in Barcelona, the company showed off a new screen share feature, which lets users share what's on their phone screen with Gemini and ask questions about the pictures. As an example, the company showed a video of a user shopping for a pair of baggy jeans and asking Gemini what other clothing would pair well with it. As for the video search feature, Google had teased it at Google I o last year. The feature lets you take a video and ask Gemini questions about it as you're filming and quoting Android Central Project Astro was first shown off at Google I O last year, where a woman is seen interacting with her surroundings through her phone, asking the assistant about various objects placed on a table, or even creating iterations about a golden retriever. It was fascinating to see how Gemini Live has pushed the boundaries of the mere Google search beyond just looking for something online. Now anyone could simply use Circle to search on their devices to look up something they spotted within a different app. With Project Astra, Google wants to make finding things easier not just on your phone, but out in the world as well. There have been some rumors recently on how Gemini will be replacing Google Assistant in the future. A deep dive into the latest beta version of the Google app revealed that hey Google could be replaced with hey Gemini. Now, with Google showing off Gemini's live video and screen sharing, this change could be coming sooner than we anticipated. The company stated it will start rolling out the above multimodal features to Gemini Advanced subscribers as part of the Google One AI Premium plan on Android devices. While the company didn't specify exactly when we can see it on our devices, it did say later this month. So we're hoping it could arrive in the next monthly update. End quote. Lots of bosses are like, hey, you need to come back to the office. You need to work extra hours in order for this company or this project to succeed. But Sergey Brin took it a step forward, telling workers that Google could reach AGI if employees worked harder and were in the office more, saying 60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity, quoting the Times. I recommend being in the office at least every weekday, he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by the New York Times. The Note Highlights highlighted Mr. Brin's belief that AGI, a long sought goal in computing, could be within reach, and it shed more light on how he believes Google could achieve that technological leap. Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot, he wrote. I think we have all the ingredients to win this race but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts. He highlighted the need for Google's employees to use more of its AI for coding, saying the AIs improving itself would lead to AGI. He also called on employees working on Gemini to be the most efficient coders and AI scientists in the world. By using our own AI, more companies have ordered employees back to the office full time to improve productivity. In September, Amazon said its corporate employees must return to the office five days a week starting in 2025. AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have also reversed hybrid work policies, End quote and quoting the Verge While his note was intended for a small audience of AI researchers at DeepMind and not all of Google, it's still remarkable in a couple of ways. For one, it came from Brin, who technically has no formal role these days besides being a board member and not Demise Hassibas who runs GOOG DeepMind. As some employees have pointed out to me, there's also irony in Brin recommending that employees work 12 hour days when he and co founder Larry Page arguably left Google rudderless when they retired in 2019, just before this AI boom cycle began in earnest. 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Quoting the FT, the leap in valuation to $13 billion puts Ramp among the most highly valued US startups outside of a handful of artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI. It follows rapid growth powered by an increase in spending on card transactions and bill payments. But Eric Gliman, RAMP's co founder and chief executive, emphasized that it had benefited from using AI across the company. It is not possible to use Ramp without using AI, he said, adding that the technology had quickly moved from simple chatbots into being deeply integrated in every part. Expenses that do themselves, books that do themselves, money that finds higher yield. We're living in a world where computers can talk and think and reason, and finance is really about reasoning, making sure your capital has more value each month, he said. RAMP's valuation hit $8.1 billion in 2022, but dropped to $5.8 billion a year later as higher interest rates hit consumer spending factors that also hit rival fintech companies such as Stripe and Klarna Fintech obviously went through volatility given the wild swings in rates and spending across businesses and consumers, said Karim Zakai, a partner at Thrive. The firm's investment into Ramp businesses that took share before the downturn continued to take share, but customer spending was down. Now the market has turned around and they are accelerating, he added, according to a person with knowledge of the company's finances. RAMP's annualized revenue, a metric often used by fast growing startups that multiplies the current month's revenue by 12, is 700 million. That figures up from 300 million in August 2023. The company is processing $55 billion in payments on an annualized basis, compared with 10 billion at the beginning of 2023. RAMP's aim is to become a platform offering corporate customers a range of than a single product, according to Gleiman. Finally today, I saved the Mark Gurman Apple Scoop Monday to the end because he has a really interesting look at what he calls Apple's AI crisis, as some in Apple's AI division believe that a true conversational LLM Siri won't be ready until iOS 20 at best in 2027, quoting Mark and Bloomberg with Apple Intelligence, the company was already trailing ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot, but it still had the opportunity to respond with something fun, conversational, well integrated and useful. And Apple seemed to be moving in that direction when it unveiled the technology last June, describing it as AI for the rest of us. But Apple couldn't pull it off. The system doesn't come close to matching the competition, and a miss in this area could have potentially devastating consequences for the company. AI promises to be a pervasive part of all our lives and change the way we interact with devices, communicate and get stuff done. An AI created the curated emoji feature isn't going to cut it, not while Apple's rivals are showing off fully conversational and personalized assistants that are eerily similar to human beings. Case in point, Amazon's Alexa, which was announced this past week. It's essentially a version of ChatGPT's voice mode, with knowledge of who you are, who the people in your life are, your interests, and the context of your home and surrounding environment. The next version of Siri will be a test of whether Apple can mount a comeback. The software will likely be released in May, a full 11 months after it was introduced. The current iOS 18 version of Siri essentially has two brands, one that operates the legacy Siri commands like timers and making calls, and another that handles more advanced queries. The latter capability will be able to tap user data and already is used to not get confused when people change their requests mid command. In order to get Apple Intelligence out the door as part of iOS 18, the company didn't have time to meld the two systems together. That means the software doesn't work as smoothly as it could for iOS 19. Apple's plan is to merge both systems together and roll out a new Siri architecture. I expect this to be introduced as early as Apple's worldwide Develop conference in June of this year, with a launch by spring 2026 as part of iOS 19.4. The new system, dubbed LLM Siri internally, was supposed to also introduce a more conversational approach in the same release, but that is now running behind as well and won't be unveiled in June before Apple can go full throttle on development of that Siri, which is supposed to finally work more like ChatGPT and the new Alexa, Apple will need to get the underlying system fixed, and that won't be easy. That's why people within Apple's AI division now believe that a true, modernized conversational version of Siri won't reach consumers until iOS 20 at best. In 2027, that would mean Apple is half a decade late to the game, an even bleaker timeline than many of us imagined. On top of that, Apple's rivals aren't standing still, given the speed at which they're operating now. Imagine where OpenAI and Google will be in two years. That's not to mention the AI startups cropping up every few weeks. Everything I've Heard suggests that iOS 19 will not include any significant consumer facing changes to Apple Intellig. A big reason for that is the amount of time Apple is still spending working to get the features announced last year out the door. It's challenging to move on to next year's release before this year's operating system updates have rolled out to customers. That's left Apple at a make or break point. Clearly, the company isn't moving fast enough internally to create the underlying AI technology it needs to keep up with the competition, and that suggests a change is required. People involved in Apple's AI work say its foundational and large language models, the basis for its homegrown AI features, are reaching their limits. There also have been problems with rivals coaching talent and what they deem to be ineffective leadership. The company is hoping its models ultimately get more capable, but getting its hands on enough chips has been another challenge. There's been an industry wide scramble to get AI accelerators, mostly from Nvidia, to train software. That's probably one reason the company is ramping up production of its own AI servers and has its chips team working on new solutions. The rest of the industry has scooped up much of the capacity, according to multiple employees. Once Apple realized it needed more resources after being caught off guard by ChatGPT, it was too late to get enough. Moreover, the AI industry is advancing so quickly that the team's work is often obsolete by the time it's ready to unveil, employees say. Apple management believes that despite being a laggard in AI, the company isn't in danger of losing its user base. Tight integration of hardware, software and services, its strength in in house chips and software user interfaces still give Apple an edge, executives argue. While that's all true, AI is so disruptive that it's creating entirely new ecosystems and technology around it that puts Apple's model in jeopardy. AI is a once in a generation technology. Apple probably still has time to turn things around, but that window is closing fast. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.