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Sam Altman Attacked
00:19:10
Sam Altman's home has been targeted twice in three days, first a Molotov cocktail, then a shooting from a passing car. Apple is testing four designs for AI smart glasses. OpenAI is touting its Amazon partnership while publicly distancing from Microsoft. GPU prices are surging as an agentic AI compute crunch threatens the whole industry. And Mark Zuckerberg is still keen on photorealistic Metaverse avatars. Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack; two suspects arrested (SF Standard) Apple AI Smart Glasses Features, Styles, Colors, Cameras; Giannandrea Leaving (Bloomberg) OpenAI touts Amazon alliance in memo, says Microsoft has 'limited our ability' to reach clients (CNBC) AI Is Using So Much Energy That Computing Firepower Is Running Out (WSJ) Meta builds AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff (FT)
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Host
K Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take
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Brian McCullough
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Host
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Brian McCullough
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Medical Expert
in McDonald's while supplies last.
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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Monday, April 13, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Sam Altman's home has been targeted twice in three days. Apple is testing four designs for AI smart glasses, OpenAI is touting its Amazon partnership while publicly distancing from Microsoft. GPU prices are surging as agentic AI compute crunches threaten the whole industry and Mark Zuckerberg is still keen on photorealistic Metaverse avatars. Here's what you missed today in the world of tec so over the weekend, San Francisco police arrested a suspect for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house and also making threats outside of OpenAI headquarters. Then, according to a separate police report, Altman's home appears to have been targeted in a second attack after a gun appeared to have been fired at his home from a car early Sunday. Quoting the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Police Department announced the arrest of two Suspects, Amanda Tom, 25, and Mohammad Tariq Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent discharge of a firearm. Neither OpenAI nor the SFPD responded to the Standard's request for further comment, According to an initial police report On Sunday at 1:40am a Honda sedan with two people inside stopped in front of Altman's property, which stretches from Chestnut street to Lombard street, after having passed it a few minutes before. The person in the passenger seat then put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, according to a police report on the incident, which cited surveillance footage and the compound's security personnel, who reported hearing a gunshot. The car then fled and a camera captured its license plate, which later led police to take possession of the vehicle, according to the report. Officers responded to the 2000 block of Taylor street and detained Tom and Hussein without incident. A search of the residence by officers turned up three firearms, according to police. The alleged attack could add to height heightened fears voiced earlier in the weekend by Altman, who wrote after a Friday Molotov cocktail incident that, quote, the fear and anxiety about AI is justified. We are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever, end quote. The initial attack on the Altman home happened Friday morning when a 20 year old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Morena Gama allegedly targeted the property from the north on Chestnut. Shortly afterward, Security personnel at OpenAI's headquarters in Mission Bay made contact with a person matching the suspect's description, according to the company. The individual made threatening statements about the building and was taken into custody by police. No injuries were reported in either incident. Moreno Gama was booked into San Francisco County Jail Friday afternoon on suspicion of attempted murder, arson, possession or manufacture of an incendiary device and other charges, end quote. Mark Gurman Sources say Apple is testing four AI glasses designs with rectangular and oval frames, multiple colors and a camera system with vertically oriented oval lenses. Quoting Bloomberg Like Meta's smart glasses offerings, Apple's glasses will be designed to handle everyday uses, capturing photos and videos, syncing with a smartphone for editing and sharing, handling phone calls, listening to notifications, playing music and enabling hands free interaction via a voice assistant. In Apple's case, that assistant will be a significantly upgraded Siri coming in iOS 27. The glasses are part of a broader three pronged AI wearable strategy that also includes new AirPods and a camera equipped pendant. Each device is designed to leverage computer vision to interpret the user's surroundings and feed contextual awareness into Siri and Apple Intelligence that will enable features like improved turn by turn map directions and visual reminders, according to employees working on the project. Apple's strategy is to outdo competitors by tightly integrating the glasses with the iPhone and offering a higher end build. While Meta relies heavily on partner essilor luxottica SA for frames, Apple is unsurprisingly planning to go it alone in terms of design. That should also set it apart from Alphabet's, Google and Samsung Electronics, which are leaning on Warby Parker. Apple's design team has whipped up at least four different styles and plans to launch some or all of them, I'm told, as well as many color options. The latest units are made from a high end material called acetate, which is known to be more durable and luxurious than the standard plastic used by many brands. Here are the designs in testing A large rectangular frame reminiscent of Ray Ban Wayfarers A slimmer rectangular design similar to the glasses worn by Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook. Larger oval or circular frames A smaller, more refined oval or circular option, and Apple is also exploring a range of finishes including black, ocean blue and light brown. As with the AirPods and the Apple Watch, the goal is to create a design that is instantly recognizable. Apple refers to this as the icon. Internally, one notable detail under consideration is the camera system vertically oriented oval lenses with surrounding lights, a departure from the circular design seen in Meta's products. Despite Meta's early lead and Google's advantages with the larger Android ecosystem, Apple's strengths, its brand in house chips, giant retail presence and deep iPhone integration position it well to compete. If executed properly with a functional Siri, these glasses could follow a trajectory similar to the Apple Watch not first to market, but ultimately dominant. That said, the category's true potential won't be realized until high quality augmented reality becomes viable in a lightweight form with usable battery life. And by all accounts, from within Apple, that breakthrough is still several years away, likely closer to the end of the decade, or roughly eight years later than planned. End quote. From the Slow Motion breakup file CNBC has seen a memo where OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser says the deal with Microsoft Quote limited our ability to reach clients on Bedrock and touts its Amazon deal in comparison. Quote Dresser's memo lands less than two months after Amazon announced plans to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a strategic partnership. Microsoft, Amazon's top cloud computing rival, has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, backing long before it kicked off the generative artificial intelligence boom with the launch of ChatGPT. Amazon Web Services, the leader in cloud infrastructure, gives companies access to all of the major AI models, including those from OpenAI, through a platform called Bedrock. Quote our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success, but it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are. For many, that's bedrock, dresser wrote in the memo, which was viewed by cnbc. Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering. Microsoft declined to comment. OpenAI is desperate to win market share in the enterprise, where rival Anthropic's Claude model has established itself as the market leader, while Google Gemini is also competing aggressively. Claude's momentum was the hottest topic at AI industry conference HumanX in San Francisco last week, with Arvind Jain, CEO of enterprise AI startup Glean, describing it as Claude mania. It has become a religion. That's the level of that maniac, jane said in an interview at the event. For OpenAI, the relationship with Microsoft is one that both companies continue to describe as core and strategic, but it's shown signs of strain as the partners move onto the other's turf. In mid2024, Microsoft added OpenAI to the list of competitors in its annual report, a roster that for years has included mega cap peers Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta. OpenAI has increasingly turned to other cloud providers like Coreweave, Oracle and Google for capacity. And last year, Microsoft started publicly testing a homegrown artificial intelligence model that could lead to enhancements to its copilot assistant for consumers. OpenAI hired dresser, the former CEO of Slack and a longtime Salesforce executive, as chief revenue officer in December. She recently expanded her role to include Brad Lightcap's commercial responsibilities as he transitioned from operating chief to a new position focused on special projects. Dresser wrote that the company needs to stay focused, work as one team and operate at the highest level of excellence and row in the same direction. The market is ours to win. Let's execute accordingly, she wrote. End quote. Turn your market hunches into trades with liquid Liquid lets you go long or short on commodities, stocks or private markets right from your phone with up to 100x leverage. That means a $10 position can give you up to $1,000 in market exposure, and you don't have to work around market hours or weekends. With liquid, you get one platform for every market open 24. Seven more than $3 billion has already been traded on Liquid. Check them out At Liquid trade Techbrew and sign up with referral code Techbrew for a $25 deposit match. Terms apply. I love this job. I love doing this podcast for you every single day. It's the best job I've ever had. But that does come with planning, scheduling, recording, distrib, distributing. I don't know. No thank you. That's where Gusto comes in to save the day. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay higher onboard and support your team from anywhere. They tackle annoying logistics so you can focus on the more fun parts of your job, like doing your job. With Gusto, you can run unlimited payrolls for one flat monthly price. They've got options for nearly every budget so you can keep your finances and your bandwidth in check. Try gusto today@gusto.com brew and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll@gusto.com brew
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Brian McCullough
Could the AI bubble hit a wall for the simplest reason possible, that is Demand is outstripping supply. This is increasingly concerning people as we move into this According to the Orn Compute price index, renting one Nvidia Blackwell GPU for an hour now costs $4.08 on average, which is up 48% from the $2.75 average two months ago, driven by agentic AI demand. Quoting the Journal the Artificial Intelligence gold rush is rapidly drying up the supply of the one resource that AI developers can't do without computing power. The sharp capacity crunch has caused consternation among power users, forcing companies to scuttle products and leading to reliability problems. The issues are a warning sign for the AI boom, as they may limit the utility of powerful new AI tools, just as massive amounts of users have begun to rely on them to boost productivity. Over the past few months, demand has exploded for agentic AI autonomous tools that use the technology to independently perform tasks. From writing software code to scheduling house tours for real estate brokers, companies have been scrambling to secure the availability of computing capacity needed to serve a growing base of customers, who are also significantly increasing their AI use. Everyone's talking about oil, but I think what the world is mainly short of is tokens, said Ben Putalian, an engineer and tech investor based in Los Angeles. A token is a unit of measurement in AI to track how much computing resources are being used for a task. AI is at this point no longer just some chatbot that we ask for a recipe while we stand in front of the fridge. It's orchestrating tasks. It's getting smarter, poladian said. All of it points to a classic problem that has popped up in technology booms throughout history. From the 19th century Railroad expansion to the telecom and Internet explosion of the early 2000s, demand is growing far faster than companies are able to access resources and build out infrastructure. Historically, price increases have been among the only ways to address a supply crunch. But such a move could be perilous for the frontier AI companies, which are in a ferocious competition to gain users hourly rental prices for GPUs. The microchips used to train and run AI models, have surged since the fall. Anthropic, the maker of popular chatbot Claude and viral coding app Claude Code, has been plagued recently by frequent outages. The company has begun metering computing supply to users during peak hours, but the rollout has been marred by customers who have complained that they are reaching the limit far too quickly. Spot market prices to access Nvidia's GPUs or graphics processing units in data center clouds have risen sharply in recent months across the company's entire product line, according to Orn, a New York based data provider that publishes market data and structures financial products around GPU pricing. Renting one of Nvidia's most advanced Blackwell generation of chips for one hour costs $4.08, up 48% from the 275 it cost two months ago, according to the Orn Compute Price Index. There's a massive capacity crunch that's unlike anything I've seen in more than five years I've been running this business, said JJ Cardwell, chief executive of Vultr, a cloud infrastructure company. The question is, why don't we just deploy more gear? The lead times are too long. Data center build times are too long. The power that's available through 2026 is already all spoken for. Since mid February, outages for systems across Anthropic have become so common that some of its enterprise clients are switching to other AI model players. David Hsu, founder and CEO of software development platform Retool, said he prefers to use Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model to power his company's AI agent tool because he believes it is the best model for enterprise. He recently changed to OpenAI's model to power his company's agent. However, quot Anthropic has just been going down all the time, he said. The reliability of core services on the Internet is often measured in nines. Four nines means 99.99% of uptime, a typical percentage that a software company commits to customers. As of April 8, Anthropic's Claude API had a 98.95% uptime rate in the last 90 days. That is not normal, said Amir Hajish, hat co founder and chief technology officer at Base10, an AI inference startup. Think about AWS databases, RDS, Stripe. These need to be very resilient with a very high uptime. But that is not the world we live in when it comes to AI. That's not the quality of service that you want to be getting from the company. That's providing intelligence for your application. End quote. Finally today, what this segment presupposes is that the Metaverse is not dead quite yet, at least in Mark Zuckerberg's heart. Quoting the FT Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg himself that can engage with employees in his stead. As part of a broader push to remake the big tech company around AI, the $1.6 trillion group has been working on developing photorealistic AI powered 3D characters that users can interact with in real time, according to four people familiar with the matter. The company recently began prioritizing a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said. The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees, according to Person. They added that the character was being trained on the billionaire's mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it. The effort, which is at an early stage, is separate from Zuckerberg's project to build a CEO agent to support him in his role, for example by retrieving information quickly. That idea was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The so called AI characters were developed as Zuckerberg noted the success of AI companion startup character AI, particularly with young users, according to several people familiar with the matter. According to people familiar with the matter, Meta's newly formed superintelligence labs have explored a fresh set of characters. The company has focused in part on making photorealistic embodiments of virtual AI characters for people said, but scaling the effort has been difficult, as the technology requires lots of computing power to achieve realism and avoid a lag in interactions with users. Meta has also been working on improving voice interactions with the characters. Last year, it acquired two voice companies, Play, AI and Waveforms. The Zuckerberg character will be trained on images of the chief executive as well as his voice, one person said. If the experiment is a success, influencers and creators might one day be able to do the same, the person added. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.