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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Monday, June 9, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, all the headlines from WWDC. Microsoft unveils the first iteration of that handheld gaming strategy we discussed. Meta is considering its largest external AI investment yet. And did Apple researchers reveal that large language models have a structural ceiling and were basically there. Here. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So as I do every single year, I watched Apple's WWDC keynote so you don't have to. Here's what happened. The gag opening video was Craig Federighi driving an F1 car around a track that was the roof of Apple's world headquarters. It was fine, obviously tied into that F1 movie with Brad Pitt that is apparently an Apple original coming out. Soon after Tim Cook said hi, it was Craig that was first up and in fact was leading most of this keynote talking Apple Intelligence. He spoke about what they've already released, the writing tools, email summary, genmoji, et cetera. When they go down the list like that, it kind of feels like yeah, they've already released a lot of AI stuff. But then you remember, I basically never use notice that stuff. But then Craig said that the big thing they are doing this year is is what they're calling foundation models framework. Apple is opening up the foundational AI models that power Apple intelligence for developers to use in their apps. Finally, the models run locally on device apparently. Quote. We couldn't be more excited about how developers can build on Apple intelligence, Craig said. But that was it in terms of talking about AI specifically as opposed to sprinkling AI in among other innovations. Almost immediately it was onto the new OS visual redesigns. They say this is the biggest jump in design language since iOS 7. The key thing is that the design language is moving across all their platforms. Mac, the watch, et cetera, it's all going to look the same. They're calling it liquid glass and it looks okay. I'm not a designer, it looks nice, but to my eyes it's basically exactly what I'm used to. Again, to my dumb eyes it looks more rounded corners looks like translucent bubbles or I guess glass. That's the point. Although as I see more examples, is it a little too transparent? I don't know. Need to see it with my own eyes. Fine new design language, they're so excited about it, said Craig. And yes, as rumored, iOS 26, Mac OS 26, etc. Version numbers are now named for the years. So starting with iOS 26, the lock screen is updated liquid glass again. I feel like this is maybe too transparent. The wallpaper in the lock screen is more dynamic. They're also using the neural engine to make your photos 3D on the home screen. They react to movement. It look looks pretty good on the video. I have to say the camera app has done something I've wanted for a while in iOS 26. Your immediate options when you bring up the camera app are just photo and video. If you want the other stuff like panorama and Cinematic, it's a tap or swipe away. There's better search and photos, a new unified layer for the phone app. Also call screening on the phone app, which can automatically answer calls from unknown numbers. An AI agent answers for you. Once they identify themselves the caller, then Apple will actually put the call through, but not until then. And then this sounds great as well. Something called Hold Assist. If you get put on hold when you're making a call and the Muzak starts playing the Muzak, you can basically hang up and your iPhone will call you back when there's a live person to actually talk to. Apple leaned heavily into new features for group chats, taking a direct shot at WhatsApp. There's new polls on group chats and the ability to send Apple cache inside group chats. But there's also screening tools in messages so you can also screen those spam messages you're getting. Unknown senders are now shunted into a dedicated folder that you have to check separately. Yes, Pixel Phone users, I know you've had this for a while. I can hear you typing out the tweets to me as I record this. And then some aigenmoji and emoji stuff. Whatever. Live translation is now in FaceTime messages and the phone app. The translations run locally on device now. This might be something people actually notice. AI stuff that people will actually use now and again. Each text can be instantly translated. FaceTime will have live subtitling. Developers can enable live translation in their apps with an API. Seriously, remember what I said a few minutes ago about how people haven't really noticed the AI stuff on their iPhones yet? If this works as well as they demoed it, people will notice this. There was a brief mention for Apple Music music translation there as well. Lyric translation. Then on to Maps. Maps will now learn your preferred routes and offer them up to you in maps instead of having to choose from the different options for your route every time. Remember the golden age of foursquareswarm? They now have visited places inside maps to keep track of where you've been in the Maps Library or Search Wallet has announced 20 different car brands offering car keys to open your car and get going unlocking with 13 more coming soon. Digital ID is rolling out in Wallet. It's your passport, but only for domestic travel. Apple Games got its own special section a new games app. Goodbye and good riddance to Game Center. The new games app does have a dedicated tab for Apple Arcade, but also a library tab for what you've downloaded previously. There's a Play Together tab to see what your friends are playing. The games app works with external controllers. Something called Visual Intelligence lets you use AI to analyze photos or screenshots to query AI about them. Again, stuff Android has had for a while. I want to note that when they mention AI stuff, they keep mentioning that you can query chatgpt but no word on other partners like, I don't know, Gemini or Anthropic built in as AI partners. It's interesting that we're two years into this AI stuff and they've still not added other AI partners watchos new workout stuff like Workout Buddy, which tracks your recent workouts and then paces you, I guess shouts at you to run faster. I don't know, they called it encouraging you like a trainer, but it looked to me like Workout Buddy shames you passive aggressive. I'm sorry, did I say shame? I meant encourages you. This seems like something I would immediately turn off. Sort of like the stand up notifications. Hey. Taking a minute to point out that as we heard they're at least at this point only talking about AI stuff. They know they're going to release this fall, but has anyone else noticed they're not mentioning the AI stuff from last year that they still haven't shipped? Just pointing that out. Ooh, you can now do a sort of wrist flick thing on your watch to immediately clear messages and alerts. That's useful. But again, what are we doing here? We're an hour in notes is coming to Apple Watch. It wasn't already there. I'm not even going to bother with the tvos stuff. There's a new karaoke mode that works with Apple music on your Apple TV or TV us to turn your iPhone into a mic and then you can sing along like it's a karaoke machine. Then it was to Mac OS. It's macOS Tahoe this year as rumored. New design the Glass design. They basically pitched it as everything we told you about on the new features and stuff from iOS. Yeah, you're getting them on your Mac too. Why are they convinced that this new transparent glass design is a major step forward. I still don't know. You can change the color or design of your folders on macOS, Personalize wallpaper and theme colors. Live activities are coming to Mac Phone app is coming to the Mac fully synced to your iPhone. Basically this is making your Mac as live interactive as your phone is. Spotlight can launch apps from your iPhone in iPhone mirroring. Spotlight can also take actions in apps you can send emails from. Spotlight for example. They say this is the biggest update to Spotlight on the Mac ever. Actually, they went heavy on Spotlight combined with shortcuts. There's a lot of things here that remind me of using Superhuman for your email, but other people are saying this is like Raycast. Basically. Things like you can type the keys SM like a shortcut into Spotlight to send a message without having to click over to messages. Let me quote Nilay Patel from the Verge here. Spotlight turning into an AI powered command line of sorts is really fascinating and also wild that it's totally disconnected from Siri. Like if you think AI represents a platform shift, then a magic command line that accepts natural language prompts across everything you're using on a computer is pretty huge actually. End quote. Then stuff about Mac gaming, but not today, Tim. Apple. I've been burned about taking Apple seriously, about taking gaming seriously on the Mac too many times. Apple Vision Pro got a software update. They're moving from Vision OS 2 to Vision OS 26. It's got widgets, weather, clock, photos, widgets. Like if you still use your Vision Pro at all, you could say, put a clock on the wall above you and it gets this stays there in place on the wall. If you're looking through your Vision Pro, which again requires you to still be using your Vision Pro. Big changes to Personas. They look way, way more lifelike by pulling from your photo. But again, that would require you to still be using your Vision Pro, but also crucially, know a single other person in your life that owns a Vision Pro. Wait, I forgot that we never got to IPADOs, at least at this point. The big news here is that they have a new multitasking. And get this, I'm sorry, Steve Jobs rolling over in your grave. A windowing system for the iPad. This is basically just turning the iPad into a Mac, which is that a bad thing? So for the windowing, you can pull from the bottom right of any app to resize apps. They become Windows apps. Remember their size and position if you close and minimize them, y' all. If you've always wanted your iPad to look like the pile of windows on your Mac desktop. The future is here. It even has Expose to see all of your windows. It has a friggin menu bar Files. The Files app has basically been blown up to manage and access files across apps. There's a list view, there's folders, the same customization options on macOS. You can choose which app to open a file with people. You can have other apps running in the background while you're in another app. So why is the iPad not just a Mac yet? I feel like you could get to the point where you could get your iPad to like 90% of how you use your Mac right now. So why not just put macOS on iPads? We always worried that Apple would turn the Mac into an iPad, but it looks like they've thrown in the towel and now are going in the other direction. What else? Apple claims you can now record studio quality audio from AirPods. We shall see things not mentioned at this point as we wrap up the App Store. Even once, Siri. Even once? I don't remember. And that was that. About 90 minutes. Chock full of things, I guess. And yet if you were to meet me on the street in about an hour after I posted this and you said to me, Brian, what was the big news, big theme from WWDC today? My answer would be iPad is Mac now. 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Microsoft and Asus have unveiled two new Raj Xbox Ally handheld devices, featuring a redesigned full screen Xbox experience built specifically for portable gaming. This is a major step in Microsoft's broader effort to optimize Windows for handhelds and compete directly with Valve's SteamOS, which we have spoken of previously. The company has overhauled the Xbox app, game bar, and underlying Windows processes to improve performance, reduce idle power consumption, and streamline gameplay. When users boot up these devices, they'll enter a console like Xbox interface that hides the traditional Windows desktop. The game bar now includes quick access to system settings, ASUS's Command center, and Microsoft's Gaming Copilot. Players can also switch between apps with a newly handheld friendly task switcher. Using the Xbox button, Microsoft has trimmed unnecessary Windows processes, freeing up memory and extending battery life. The updated Xbox app aggregates games from Xbox Game Pass, Steam, Epic Games Store, and more. A new verification system similar to Steam Decks will identify handheld optimized games. This experience debuts on the new Xbox Ally models and will expand other devices next year with SteamOS also supported on the ROG ally. Microsoft's changes signal an intensifying battle between Windows and Linux for the future of handheld PC gaming. But what's it like? Hands on well, quoting ign so let's get the specs out of the way. The Xbox Ally X is the top of the line model sporting the amd Ryzen AI Z2 extreme APU, 24 gigabytes of RAM and a 1 terabyte SSD powered by an 80. The base level Xbox Ally rocks the Ryzen Z2A chip, 16 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabyte SSD with a 60 watt hour battery. Both use the same 7 inch screen which is a 1080p 1920x1080 resolution IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate and is capable of variable refresh rates and FreeSync to reduce screen tearing when performance fluctuates. Nothing has been shared on battery life as it's still being tested and fine tuned while the actual gameplay experience with the base level Xbox Ally is still in question. Since I didn't get to use it, I must say that the Xbox Ally X delivers an optimal gameplay experience. I played Gears of War reloaded for about 15 minutes running at 1080p with high settings amd FSR 3.1 and quality mode 16x anisotropic filtering and maintained a smooth 60 frames per second the entire time. It's worth noting that the system was running in Turbo mode, which increases power to get higher performance at the expense of heat and battery life. Granted, Gears of War Reloaded is a remaster of an Xbox 360 era game, which is not to diminish what seems to be a great overhaul of the original Gears of War, but there's a difference between that and trying to run say the Dark Ages at maximum settings. That's also to say we've yet to see the full potential of the Xbox ally X's Z2 extreme end quote. Sources are telling Bloomberg that Meta is in talks for a potential multi billion dollar investment in Scale AI. If they pull the trigger, this will be Meta's largest external AI investment. Scale AI was last valued at around $14 billion. Scale AI, whose customers include Microsoft and OpenAI, provides data labeling services to help companies train machine learning models and has become a key beneficiary of the generative AI boom. The startup was last valued at about $14 billion in 2024 in a funding round that from Meta and Microsoft. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Skale was in talks for a tender offer that would value it at $25 billion. Skale Co founded in 2016 by CEO Alexander Wang, has been growing quickly. The startup generated revenue of $870 million last year and expects sales to more than double the $2 billion in 2025, Bloomberg previously reported. Skale plays a key role in making AI data available for companies because AI is only as good as the data that goes into it. Scale uses scads of contract workers to tidy up and tag images, text and be used for AI training. Scale and Meta share an interest in defense tech. Last week, Meta announced a new partnership with defense contractor Anduril Industries to develop products for the US Military, including an AI powered helmet with virtual and augmented reality features. Meta has also granted approval for U.S. government agencies and defense contractors to use its AI models. The company is already partnering with Skale on a program called Defense Llama, a version of Meta's Llama large language model intended for military use. Skale has increasingly been working with the US Government to develop AI for defense purposes. Earlier this year, the startup said it won a contract with the Defense Department to work on AI agent technology. The company called the contract a quote, significant milestone in military advancement. End quote finally today, something that got a lot of chatter over the weekend was this paper Apple researchers released detailing the limitations, according to them, of top large language models and large reasoning models like OpenAI's O3, especially on classic problems that have already been solved. Basically the whole back and forth can be summed up by this tweet storm from Lux Capital's Josh Wolff. Quote Apple just Gary Marcused LLM reasoning ability Apple tested today's reasoning AIs like Claude and Deepseek, which look smart, but when complexity arises, they collapse, not fail gracefully, collapse completely. They found LLMs don't scale reasoning like humans do. They think more up to a point than they give up early. Even when they have plenty of compute left. Even when handed the exact algorithm, LLMs still botch the job. Execution does not equal understanding. It's not missing creativity, it's failing. Basic logic models overthink easy problems, exploring wrong answers after finding the right one. And when problems get harder, they think less wasted. Compute at one end, defeatism at the other. Apple's take is these models are not reasoning, they're super expensive pattern matchers, Net break as soon as we step outside their training distribution to which the aforementioned Gary Marcus responded with a long blog post mentioning how these models couldn't solve relatively simple logic puzzles like the game Hanoi. The new Apple paper adds to the force of many critiques and my own about LLMs by showing that even the latest of these newfangled reasoning models still even after having scaled beyond zero one fail to reason beyond the distribution reliably on a whole bunch of classic problems like the Tower of Hano. For anyone hoping that reasoning or inference time compute would get LLMs back on track and take away the pain from multiple failures at getting pure scaling to yield something worthy of the name GPT5, this is bad news. Look, that's why we invented computers and for that matter calculators to compute solutions large tedious problems Reliably AGI shouldn't be about perfectly replicating a human. It should, as I have often said, be about combining the best of both worlds, human adaptiveness with computational brute force and reliability. We don't want to an AGI that fails to carry the one in basic arithmetic just because sometimes humans do. And good luck getting to alignment or safety without reliability. The vision of AGI I have always had is one that combines the strengths of humans with the strength of machines overcoming the weaknesses of humans. I am not interested in an AGI that can't do arithmetic, and I certainly wouldn't want to entrust global infrastructure or the future of humanity to such a system. Whenever people ask me why I, contrary to widespread myth, actually like AI and think that AI, though not gen AI, may ultimately be of great benefit to humanity, I invariably point to the advances in science and technology we might make if we could combine the causal reasoning abilities of our best scientists with the sheer compute power of modern digital computers. We are not going to be extract the light cone of the earth or solve physics whatever those Altman claims even mean with systems that can't play Tower of Hanoi on a tower of eight pegs. What the Apple paper shows most fundamentally regardless of how you define AGI is that LLMs are no substitute for good, well sped specified conventional algorithms. They also can't play chess as well as conventional algorithms, can't fold proteins like special purpose neuro, symbolic hybrids, can't run databases as well as conventional databases, et cetera in the best case not always reached. They can write Python code supplementing their own weaknesses with outside symbolic code, but even this is not reliable. What this means for business and society is that you can't simply drop O3 or Claude into some complex problem and expect it to work reliably, at least for the next decade, LLMs with and without inference and time reasoning will continue to have their uses, especially for coding and brainstorming and writing. And as Rao told me in a message this morning, the fact that LLMs LRMs don't reliably learn any single underlying algorithm is not a complete deal killer on their use. I think of LRMs basically making learning to approximate the unfolding of an algorithm over increasing inference lengths. In some contexts that will be perfectly fine, and others not so much. But anybody who thinks LLMs are a direct route to the sort of AGI that could fundamentally transform society for the good is kidding themselves. This does not mean that the field of neural networks is dead, or that deep learning is dead. LLMs are just one form of deep learning, and maybe others, especially those that play nicer with symbols, will eventually thrive. Time will tell, but this particular approach has limits that are clearer by the day. I have said it before, and I will say it again, AI is not hitting a wall, but LLMs probably are, or at least a point of diminishing returns. We need new approaches and to diversify which roads are being actively explored. End quote. As ever rushing to get this out to you as soon as humanly possible. Talk to you tomorrow.