The BBC caught scam call center workers on hidden cameras as they laughed at the people they were tricking. One worker bragged about making $250k from victims. The disturbing truth? Scammers don't pick phone numbers at random. They buy your data from brokers. Once your data is out there, it's not just calls. It's phishing, impersonation, and identity theft. That's what Incogni solves: they delete your info from the web, monitor and follow up automatically, and continue to erase data as new risks appear. | | AI eats the world Twice a year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. The latest edition: 'AI eats the world'. LINK | | The US TikTok deal finally happened This has been going on for so long that I think most people have stopped caring, but the deal is finally done. Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX (Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund) will each own 15% in a new US-only entity, other investors (including Michael Dell and Xavier Niel) have another 35.1%, and Bytedance retains 19.9%. For context - 43% of US 18-29s and 25% of 30-49s say they regularly get news on TikTok: this was a sensible reason to worry that the Chinese government would skew what people saw, but now it's a reason to ask whether the Ellison family would skew it based on whether they need Trump to help their companies. After all, they already did exactly that at CBS. DEAL, CBS, NEWS The week in AI If your online store uses Shopify, and you opt in to checkout through ChatGPT, you'll pay a 4% commission on any purchases, on top of other fees. (Gemini is not charging at the moment.) LINK OpenAI says it's on track to announce the first Jony Ive-designed hardware product in the second half of this year. Rumours say some kind of wearable pin. LINK Meanwhile, The Information says that Apple is working on some kind of wearable pin with cameras and speakers. This is a category of Apple rumour where it's 99% likely that they are indeed thinking about a product like this, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether they've decided to ship it - they work on lots of ideas. LINK Meta's Andrew Bosworth says the new models from the new Superintelligence team (bought/hired for several billion dollars) were delivered internally this month. LINK Twitter's NSFW experiment Elon Musk spent a week alternatively denying that his supposedly 'spicy' Grok chatbot was pumping out non-consensual nudes and near-nudes and laughing about it, plus a bunch of borderline CSAM. After a lot of shouting, he backed down, sort of. The NY Times ran a study suggesting it may have produced several million such images. LINK The BBC will do some YouTube-first The UK's BBC has done a deal with YouTube to do some YouTube-first content. If your viewing is dropping, go to where the viewing is - especially if, as a 'public service broadcaster', your mission is to be seen, and to be part of the national conversation and national identity. And 'the Beeb' itself, meanwhile, is funded by a national 'licence fee' that's harder and harder to justify if people don't watch it at all, and if children don't even know what it is. The trade-off, of course, is that now you don't own your channel or your audience. LINK, DISCUSSION Sony exits TV Sony exited the TV business to China's TCL. I was born in the 1970s, so I still have a residual sense of Sony as a premium consumer electronics brand, and there's a fascinating case study in how Japanese tech companies failed to make the transition to software. On the other hand, many of them, including Sony, remain major players in the underlying components (your iPhone uses Sony image sensors). LINK | | What matters in tech? What's going on, what might it mean, and what will happen next? I've spent 25 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. I'm now an independent analyst, and I speak and consult on strategy and technology for companies around the world. | Two big new studies in Australia and the UK on social media, screen time, and mental health in teenagers. As in many previous studies, there is no evidence of a connection. This field is starting to remind me of studies of whether mobile phones cause cancer (no evidence of a link) or vaccines cause autism (same) - people ignore all the studies that show there is no evidence and cherry-pick the stats that will look good in a book. COVERAGE, AUSTRALIA, UK OpenAI's CFO published a piece giving compute and revenue numbers for the last three years and saying that revenue scales roughly 1:1 with compute capacity. They present this as a virtuous circle. It is not. LINK Someone in marketing at OpenAI has invented the term 'capability overhang' to describe the fact that most of their users pick up the product every week or two, not every day, and struggle to think of things to do with it. That's a novel way to spin 'we don't have product-market fit'. LINK Tech PE investor Thoma Bravo says some SaaS companies are 'unbuyable' due to the level of stock compensation (which would have to be cashed out). LINK Unsurprisingly, OpenAI is asking super-premium prices for its first ads - aiming for experimental budgets, bragging rights, and premium ads for customers. LINK Cursor, last year's hot AI coding company, ran an experiment trying to get a set of agents to build an entire web browser. LINK Iran managed to degrade or shut down Starlink during the recent protests in Iran. China will be paying attention, if it wasn't involved directly. At the moment, this is not a big deal given the relative inaccessibility of the terminals, but in a few years, many high-end and mid-range phones on the market will have satellite fall-back. Oppressive governments will want to cut off satellite in the same way that they cut off cellular and the internet. Also - the latest reporting is that Iran probably killed up to 30,000 people in these protests. LINK Three videos to watch: Satya Nadella (saying almost nothing, but mentioning that AI inference costs are halving every 3 months - also, 'tokens per dollar per watt') and Demis Hassabis at Davos, and Jason Goldberg at NRF. NADELLA, HASSABIS, GOLDBERG A long piece about the state of SEO at the beginning of AI search. LINK The WSJ has some reporting on Amazon's upcoming big-box store outside Chicago. 230k square feet (the average Walmart is 173k), of which half will be groceries, general merchandise and prepared food, and the other half will be e-commerce fulfilment. LINK BCG on how agentic commerce might change online advertising. LINK | | In the last 18th century, a Dutch cloth worker built himself a real-time, working planetarium in the ceiling of his home. Beautiful. LINK Korg made an acoustic synthesiser. LINK, VIDEO A Ferrari artefact. LINK | | | Coatue points out a chart from Wells Fargo, noting that there has been a surge in apps on the iOS App Store since early 2025, almost certainly due to people using generative AI coding tools to spin up and launch personal projects. LINK Anthropic is at a $9bn revenue run-rate. LINK Andreessen Horowitz's banking team published a long presentation on venture markets and tech stocks. LINK | | Preview from the Premium edition | | | Premium subscribers get an excluive column every week - I decided to make this one free. Principles cost money Henry Ford was a brilliant, visionary industrialist, entrepreneur and engineer, who created modern mass manufacturing and the modern car industry. He also built up a nationwide newspaper distributed in every Ford dealership, whose sole purpose was to spread hatred of Jews. Elon Musk is also a brilliant engineer, entrepreneur and industrialist. He is the reason that Tesla as we see it now exists, and he's the reason we have self-landing rocket ships. He's also always been a bullshitter: he says a lot of stuff that isn't true, but there are the rockets! Now go read his Twitter feed. Scroll back for a few days and count how many times he's promoting white supremacy, political violence, far-right thugs, and deliberate racist lies of every kind. It's constant. Some people in tech just can't see this, or claim it isn't true. I get emails from them sometimes, saying I have 'Elon Derangement Syndrome'. These people are fooling themselves. Some people say it doesn't matter compared to the benefit to humanity of the rockets and the cars. That's one way to square your principles. And others are getting rich from doing business with him, which is another. The ad industry guru Bill Bernbach said "it's not a principle until it costs you money". I left Twitter two years ago. It probably cost me money. I've been thinking about that decision in the last few weeks, as I've seen video, twice so far, of an American federal militia killing an American citizen on the street, while the president's officials lie about the evidence of our own eyes. (We live in a narrow window where making video is easy and faking video is hard). I remembered the school friend of my brother who was killed fighting with the British army in Afghanistan, when Donald Trump claimed none of America's allies had fought there. In particular, I think about all those people in tech, in late 2024, who said that we should vote for Donald Trump because Joe Biden had really terrible policies on tech. The problem then was it was true. Above all, Biden's policy on AI was absurd. The whole thesis was that this was very dangerous and it had to be under the total control of Washington. There would be two or three companies that would be allowed to work on generative AI, under strict supervision. There would be no startups. There would be no innovation. A small group of doomers, lobbyists, pressure groups, and Substackers would set the agenda for the next 15 years of US tech, right at the pivotal moment where China was breaking in. You couldn't work in tech and startups and vote for that, could you? The trouble was, that means you voted for all of this instead. Since then, some of those people have their fingers in their ears and their eyes screwed tight shut, insisting that none of this is happening. They say 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' a lot. I get it. TDS is real, and I grew up in Britain when the left kept telling us Thatcher was the devil. But mostly, TDS means telling yourself it isn't true when you know it is, and that it doesn't matter when you know it does. Most of the others have gone very quiet. They'll talk about 'both sides' or say that Trump is 'badly advised', which is what people in the Middle Ages used to say about a tyrannical king - "I love the king, but he has evil counsellors!" And then they get very angry and loud and busy about a silly proposal for a silly tax in California. Sure. There are reasons to keep quiet today, but that was a very good reason not to vote for him. | | You're getting the Free edition. Subscribers to the Premium edition got this two days ago on Sunday evening, together with an exclusive column, complete access to the archive of over 600 issues, and more. | | | |
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