Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the TechMe Bride Home for Tuesday, June 10th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Zuckerberg's big ambitions for AI seem to be coming into focus. OpenAI is actively starting to play the field when it comes to compute more signs AI is kneecapping web traffic. And what do we think? Is liquid glass a good design choice? Or maybe a design cul de sac for Apple? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech Foreign the contours of several recent headlines are coming together in a recognizable shape all of a sudden. Sources tell the New York Times that Meta plans to build an AI lab dedicated to pursuing superintelligence, led by Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang. Quote Meta has tapped Alexander Wang, 28, the founder and chief executive of the AI startup Scale AI, to join the new lab, the people said, and has been in talks to invest billions of dollars his company as part of a deal that would also bring other scale AI employees to the company. Meta has offered seven to nine figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Google, with some agreeing to join, according to the people. The new lab is part of a larger reorganization of Meta's AI efforts, the people said. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has recently grappled with internal management struggles over the technology, as well as employee churn and several product releases that fell flat, two of the people said. More recently, Meta's AI division lost employees to rival companies, according to two people familiar with the matter. The departures were the result of a grueling pace of product development, infighting among team leaders, and a tight labor market. In April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new versions of Meta's Llama AI models, which he claimed performed equal or better than comparable models from OpenAI and Google, according to testing benchmarks compiled by Meta. Soon after, outside researchers found that Meta's benchmarks were designed to make one product look more sophisticated than it was. Some developers were incensed at what they saw as Meta's trickery, but not as incensed as Mr. Zuckerberg, who was upset that people thought he was trying to paper over the poor performance of his latest release. Two of the people said. Meta is now betting that Mr. Wang will help it get back into pole position in the AI race, end quote. Indeed, Bloomberg is reporting that Zuckerberg, frustrated with Meta's shortfalls in AI, is personally assembling this team of AI experts and met engineers at his homes in recent weeks. Quote Zuckerberg has prioritized recruiting for the secretive new team, referred to internally as a superintelligence group, according to people familiar with his plans. He has an audacious goal in mind, these people said. In his view, Meta can and should outstrip other tech companies in achieving what's known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the notion that machines can perform as well as humans at many tasks. Once Meta reaches that milestone, it could weave the capability into its suite of products, not just social media and communications platforms, but also a range of AI tools, including the Meta chatbot and its AI powered Ray Ban glasses. Zuckerberg aims to hire around 50 people for the new team, including a new head of AI research, almost all of whom he's recruiting personally. He's rearranged desks at the company's Menlo park headquarters so the new staff will sit near him, the people said, asking to remain anonymous, discussing private plans. Zuckerberg is building that team in tandem with a planned multibillion dollar investment in Scale AI, which offers data services to help companies train their models and builds custom AI applications for businesses and governments. Scale AI founder Alexander Wang is expected to join the superintelligence group after a deal is done. Bloomberg News first reported on the deal, set to become Meta's largest external investment to date. Spokespeople for Meta and Scale AI declined to comment. Zuckerberg has spoken openly about making artificial intelligence a priority for his company. In the last two months, he's gone into founder mode, according to people familiar with his work, who described an increasingly hands on management style. The latest Meta AI releases in April proved a disappointment to Zuckerberg, who had repeatedly told Meta insiders he wanted the best AI, offering both internal terms of utilization and performance by the end of the year. His demands piled pressure on AI focused staff working nights and weekends to achieve those goals, according to people familiar with the matter. Yet the model's performance has been questioned both internally by Meta's own leadership and externally by developers who saw them as overpromising and under delivering, the people said. Meta later delayed plans to release its largest model yet, known as Behemoth, which it had touted as superior to competing models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Despite those proclamations, leadership grew concerned it didn't sufficiently advance on previous models, the Wall Street Journal first reported. Those missteps pushed Zuckerberg to get more involved and led to his interest in building out the new team, according to people familiar with the matter. He seeded a WhatsApp group chat among senior leaders called Recruiting Party to discuss potential targets for the team. Members of the chat group have been engaged in discussions at all hours of the day to identify talent. Zuckerberg has been compiling his own list of recruits and likes to be the first point of contact during outreach, the CEO hopes with the new bench, Meta will see improvements to its llama models and better AI tools for voice and personalization features, the people said. Over lunches and dinners at his California homes in the past month, Zuckerberg pitched AI researchers, infrastructure engineers and other entrepreneurs on joining Meta's team, according to people familiar with the plans. He's argued that unlike rivals who are raising large funding rounds, Meta's advertising business is strong enough to finance the tens of billions of dollars needed to compete in the growing AI space. He told potential recruits that Meta has enough cash flow to fund a multi gigawatt data cent, which would give the company one of the most powerful server bases in the world, according to people familiar with his pitch. End quote interesting Reuters says OpenAI plans to add Google Cloud to meet its growing needs for computing capacity Quote the deal, which has been under discussion for a few months, was finalized in May, one of the sources added. It underscores how massive computing demands to train and deploy AI models are reshaping the competitive dynamics in AI and marks OpenAI's latest move to diversify its compute sources beyond its major supplier Microsoft, including its high profile Stargate data center project. It is a win for Google's cloud unit, which will supply additional computing capacity to OpenAI's existing infrastructure for training and running its AI models, sources said, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. The move also comes as OpenAI's ChatGPT poses the biggest threat to Google's dominant search business in years, with Google executives recently saying that the AI race may not be winner take. The partnership with Google is the latest of several maneuvers made by OpenAI to reduce its dependency on Microsoft, whose Azure cloud service had served as the ChatGPT maker's exclusive data center infrastructure provider until January. Google and OpenAI discussed an arrangement for months, but were previously blocked from signing a deal due to OpenAI's lock in with Microsoft, a source told Reuters. Microsoft and OpenAI are also in negotiations to revise the terms of their multibillion dollar investment, including the future equity stake Microsoft will hold in OpenAI. For Google, the deal comes as the tech giant is expanding the use of its in house chip known as Tensor processing units, or TPUs, which were historically reserved for internal use. That helped Google win customers, including big tech player Apple, as well as startups like Anthropic and Safe intelligence to OpenAI competitors launched by former OpenAI leaders. Google's addition of OpenAI to its customer list shows how the tech giant has capitalized on its in house AI technology from hardware to software to accelerate the growth of its cloud business. Google Cloud, whose $43 billion of sales comprised 12% of App 2024 revenue, has positioned itself as a neutral arbiter of computing resources in an effort to outflank Amazon and Microsoft as the cloud provider of choice for rising legions of AI startups whose heavy infrastructure demands generate costly bills. Selling computing power reduces Google's own supply of chips while bolstering capacity constrained rivals. The OpenAI deal will further complicate how Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai allocates the capacity between the competing interests of Google's enterprise and consumer business segments. Google already lacked sufficient capacity to meet its CL customers demand as of the last quarter, Chief Financial Officer Annette Ashkenazi told analysts in April. End quote Waymo has suspended downtown Los Angeles operations after at least five vehicles were destroyed during protests there. They are continuing to operate in other parts of the city, but apparently protesters called Waymos as if they were customers and then, I don't know, destroyed them. Quoting the LA Times, Waymo does not think the protests were directly related to its vehicles. The company said E scooters operated by Lime were also set on fire. We do not believe our vehicles were intentionally targeted, but rather happened to be present during the protests, a Waymo spokesperson told CBS News. Waymo's fleet of driverless electric Jaguars have become a familiar sight in Los Angeles, where they have operated since November. Waymo vehicles had driven nearly 2 million miles in Los Angeles as of January, but have been frequent targets for vandals. Waymo has not indicated when it plans to resume service in downtown Los Angeles. End quote As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24 7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is the same one I've used my entire career. It's LinkedIn jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it to your network and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in1place. LinkedIn's newest feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote because promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants and at the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn you can feel confident you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small and medium businesses using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com ride that's LinkedIn.com ride to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. While single AI agents can handle specific tasks, the real power comes when specialized agents collaborate to solve complex problems. Although there is a fundamental gap, we have no standardized infrastructure for these agents to discover, communicate with and work alongside each other. Well, that's where Agency agntcy comes in. The agency is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents, a global collaboration layer where AI agents can work together. It will connect systems across vendors and frameworks, solving the biggest problems of discovery, interoperability and scalability for enterprises. With contributors like Cisco, Crewai, LangChain and mongodb, Agency is breaking down silos and building the Future of interoperable AI shape the future of enterprise innovation. Visit agency.org to explore use cases now. That's agntcy.org back to Google with more data points like this. According to SimilarWeb, Google's AI tools are significantly cutting organic search traffic to news publishers, traffic to Business Insider, Huffington Post, Washington Post are all down more than 50% in three years. Quoting the Journal, Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication quote, endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control. Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from SimilarWeb. At a company wide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the atl, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model. Google's introduction last year of AI Overviews, which summarized search results at the top of the page, dented traffic to features like vacation guides and health tips, as well as to product review sites. Its U.S. rollout last month of AI Mode, an effort to compete directly with the likes of ChatGPT, is expected to deliver a stronger blow. AI Mode responds to user queries and a chatbot style conversation with far fewer links. Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine, thompson said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. We have to develop new strategies. The rapid development of click free answers in search is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated, said William Lewis, the Washington Post publisher and chief executive. Lewis is a former CEO of the Journal's publisher, Dow Jones. The Washington Post is, quote, moving with urgency to connect with previously overlooked audiences and pursue new revenue sources and prepare for a post search era, he said at the New York Times. The share of traff from organic search to the papers, desktop and mobile websites slid to 36.5% in April 2025 from almost 44% three years earlier, according to SimilarWeb. When dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for around 60% of the company's traffic. Today it is about 1/3. Overall traffic is growing thanks to efforts including newsletters and the myrecipes recipe Locker and Apple executive said in federal court last month that Google searches in Safari, the iPhone maker's browser, had recently fallen for the first time decades End Quote Couple of drips and drabs from WWDC Apple says Mac OS 26 Tahoe will be the last macOS release that supports intel based Macs with macOS versions from 2026 only available for Apple Silicon models quoting 9 to 5 Mac of course Intel Macs will continue to get critical security updates for some time thereafter, but users should not expect to be able to update to get new features from Mac OS 2027 onwards as no Intel Mac will be supported on Mac OS 27. In some ways, Apple has already stopped supporting some non Apple Silicon models of its lineup. MacOS Tahoe does not work with any Intel MacBook Air or Mac Mini for instance, but Tahoe does still support some Intel Macs. That includes compatibility with the 201916 inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 Intel 13 inch MacBook Pro, 2020 iMac and the 2019 MacBook Pro. Based on Apple's warning, you can expect that Mac OS 27 will drop support for all of these legacy mach. Therefore, Mac OS 26 will be the last compatible version. These devices will continue to receive security updates for another three years. However, going forward the minimum support hardware generations will be from 2020 onwards as that is when Apple began the Apple Silicon transition with the M1 M1 Pro and M1 Max. MacBook Pros followed in 2021. End quote. Finally today, obviously my knee jerk reaction to Apple's new liquid glass design paradigm is a bit premature as I've not gotten to actually use it on a device yet, but this piece in Wired suggests I'm not alone in being a little bit concerned. After the WWDC 2025 keynote concluded on Monday, many design focused developers Wired spoke with were impressed by the major update, but had lingering questions about how this translucent look could impact readability for users. It's hard read some of it, says Alan Yu, a product designer currently building the Workplace messaging app output, mainly because I think they made it too transparent. You suggest bumping up the blurring or adjusting the backgrounds to make on screen designs more readable, similar to the first beta for iOS 7. What we've seen so far is rough on the edges and potentially veers into distracting or challenging to read, especially for users with visual impairments, says Josh Puckett, co founder of Iteration, which helps startups with design. Still, Puckett is optimistic, based on Apple's past accessibility features, that readability will improve over time. Beyond readability concerns, the first impression from some designers is that this new look could be unnecessarily distracting for users. From a technical perspective, it's a very impressive effect. I applaud the team and effort it must have taken to mimic refraction and dispersion of light to such a high degree, says Adam Whitcroft, a designer@oner.com which makes apps and websites for restaurants. But sadly, I haven't seen a single example of where it's pulled off in a way that's complementary to the broader context it's presented in. Witcroft points to the dispersion and refraction of layers beneath the apps as visually distracting, especially as the user interface is changing layouts. If you've designed a UI that draws the attention of the eye away from the wider context, you've gone down the wrong path, he says. Puckett's initial reaction to the revamp is more positive than Witcroft's. He thinks the shift away from flatness is the right design move. I'm excited that Apple is reintroducing feelings to their digital surfaces, creating interfaces that shimmer, bend and breathe. Puckett hopes hopes this ignites a larger design trend of more expressive experimental software. Apple is doing a great job in trying to pull us forward somewhere. It's very brave to do this. I just don't know if the direction is the right place, he says. If anyone can do it, though, Apple can do it. I'm just scrambling to make our designs work. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.