Tech Brew Ride Home - Apple To Bench The Vision Pro?

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

More fallout from the Sora explosion, including my take on using it. OpenAI is now officially the biggest startup in the galaxy. We now know what Mira Murati’s new startup is building. The Brave browser is hitting some impressive user milestones. And why are young people flocking back to… checks notes… AOL? OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus (404Media) OpenAI Valuation Reaches $500 Billion, Topping Musk’s SpaceX (Bloomberg) Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses (Bloomberg) Mira Murati’s Stealth AI Lab Launches Its First Product (Wired) Google Translate Rival DeepL Explores US IPO (Bloomberg) Brave Now Has Over 100 Million Users (Thurott) Exclusive: Yahoo nears deal to sell AOL to Italy's Bending Spoons for $1.4 billion, sources say (Reuters) https://sora.chatgpt.com/profile/brianmccul Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Thursday, October 2nd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. More fallout from the SORA explosion, including my own take on using it. Open AI is the biggest startup in all the galaxy. We now know what Mira Marotti's new startup is building. The Brave browser is hitting some impressive user milestones, and why are young people flocking back to Czech's notes? AOL? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Well, the internet continues to be a buzz with SORA stuff. Two quick observations. First, how is it that OpenAI seems to have nailed an AI-based social network on its first try, while meta hasn't been able to do anything similar yet? And second, OpenAI's Sora 2 seems to be generating a lot of copyright infringing content. Quoting 404 media. Video after video shows Pikachu and South Park's Cartman doing ASMR, a pixel perfect scene from the Simpsons that doesn't actually exist. A fake version of Star Wars. Wars, Jurassic Park or Lala Land, Rick and Morty in Minecraft, Rick and Morty in Breath of the Wild, Rick and Morty talking about Sora, Toad from the Mario Universe, deadlifting, Michael Jackson

dancing in a room that seems vaguely Russian, Charazard, signing the Declaration of Independence and Mario and Goku shaking hands. You get the picture. With Sora 2, I think OpenAI like X's GROC, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people's work that it did not pay for, and that can easily recreate that work, end quote. Well, actually, quoting from the Wall Street Journal, this is an article that I missed from last week, quote, Open AI is planning to release a new version of its SORA video generator that creates videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, according to people familiar with the matter. Open AI began alerting talent,

agencies and studios about the forthcoming product and its opt-out process over the past week and plans to release the new version in the coming days, the people said. Again, this is from last week, so obviously Sora is out now. Quoting again, the opt-out process for this new version of SORA means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright materials and videos the tool creates. Given the intense competition in the space, I think they think, maybe we will ask for forgiveness instead of asking for permission, said Christelia Garcia, a communications entertainment and media professor at Georgetown Law School. Opening Eye doesn't plan to accept a blanket opt-out across all of an artist

or studios' work, the people familiar with the new SORAT tool said, instead it sent some talent agencies a link to report violations that they or their clients discover. If there are folks that do not want to be a part of this ecosystem, we can work with them. Verenchetti, VP of media partnerships at OpenAI said of Guardrails the company built into its image generation tool, end quote. As I said, I missed that last week, but I guess that explains that. So I was able to play around with SORA yesterday. Actually, Chris Messina reverse engineered the public profile URLs for SORA accounts, so you can check and see what I did over the last 24 hours. Bottom link in today's show notes is to my SORA page, I guess. But after messing around,

bit, I am even more convicted in my thesis from yesterday that this could be a major inflection point for social media. Here's why. Remember when all those years ago I first used AI to clone my voice? I had to read from a script for a full, solid hour to give the AI enough of my voice to train on. You want to know what I had to do with SORA to train it not only on my voice, but my face yesterday? I read three numbers. Three numbers popped up on. screen and I just read them out. And then I turned my head to the right, and then I looked it down, and boom, it had an avatar of me that, as you can see, looks pretty darn good. And then I was off to the races, creating content of me doing basically anything. So here's the thing. At this point,

a theme of AI, of AI as the technology currently exists, seems to be it just gets rid of the grunt work, the mundane work, the busy work, right? Well, social media of the last decade has been about creating content quick and dirty. You don't need a studio, a good camera. Sure, people have that and people do do high-quality stuff, but also lots of people just take selfies of themselves in their cars. The smartphone made everything simple and cheap and convenient enough to do content just good enough. But now, even the limits and constraints of that are going away. Instead of filming yourself in your car, why not have your video be you talking in front of the Taj Mahal? It can be now. Or on the wall from Game of Thrones. Apparently, it can be that now, too. Or why do you even have to film yourself at all? Just have your avatar talk for an hour. On the one hand, think of me and what I do here on this show. Are we maybe six to 18 months away from me being able to create a full video of every episode of this podcast where it's like I'm doing the show behind a desk in a TV studio? Like it's the nightly news. I won't need a studio. I won't need light.

I won't need a camera. I won't need to record anything. All I'll have to do is upload my script. But take it beyond that. The physical constraints to produce content seems to be about to go away completely. And by physical, I mean physics in the sense of the laws of physics. Social media has been tied to actual people up until now, still tethered to faces and voices and places and, you know, taking a selfie of yourself in the real world, that can all go away now. Social media won't have to be people or places, just content. When it's literally a matter of typing in a few words and waiting 30 seconds and I can have a video of me jumping out of an airplane Mission Impossible style, all the constraints are gone.

It'll just be pure content creation, and it might not need me to do anything. it might not even need me at all. P.S. OpenAI is now technically the world's most valuable startup after completing a secondary share sale that let OpenAI staff sell around $6.6 billion worth of shares at a $500 billion valuation. Quoting Bloomberg. Current and former OpenAI employees sold about $6.6 billion of stock to investors, including Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group, Dragonere Investment Group, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T-Rowe Price, a person familiar with the transaction said. That boosted the U.S. company's price tag well past its previous $300 billion level during a soft bank-led financing

round earlier this year. The deal vaults OpenAI passed SpaceX's $400 billion valuation. When it comes to the business itself, OpenAI faces an increasingly competitive market for AI talent as big tech firms jockey for the resources they need. Meta, for one, has recruited researchers aggressively from Open AI and other top labs for its new superintelligence team offering pay packages in the nine-figure range. A secondary sale could help Open AI incentivize staff to stay at the company and turn down those lavish compensation offers, end quote. Well, Mark Ehrman says Apple is probably doing something they should have been doing, or at least consider doing, for a while now. Mark says Apple has paused work on a planned

lighter and cheaper version of its Vision Pro headset to instead redirect resources toward a faster-moving priority, smart glasses that can take on meta. A lighter, cheaper, Vision Pro follow-up code named N-100, and once targeted for 2027, has been deprioritized as staff shifts to accelerate Apple's glasses program, according to people familiar with the change. Mark says Apple is developing at least two models of smart glasses. The first, known internally as N50, will pair with an iPhone and won't include its own display. Apple is aiming to preview it as soon as next year with a lease still planned for 2027. A second version will integrate a display position to compete with meta's new rayband display glasses, and its timing is being pulled forward from an initial 2028 window.

Look, this is dead obvious. Not only is Apple way behind meta in this nascent category, you've got Johnny Ive and OpenAI coming up from behind with whatever hardware they're building. Apple's glasses are expected to ship in multiple styles with a new chip, on-board speakers for music, cameras for photo and video, and voice controls tethered to an iPhone. Health tracking features are also under exploration. Mark says Apple hasn't abandoned Vision Pro entirely. It could still deliver a lighter, cheaper model, and after spending a decade and billions on the platform, they might need to do that. But also, this is all in aid of the obvious end game. Both Apple and Meta continue to pursue true AR glasses that blend digital visuals into the real world

a step beyond today's simpler heads-up displays. One day, the obvious thing is true smart glasses, something as thin and light as the glasses already on your face, but a full computing platform. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit redbull.com slash bright summer ahead to learn more. See you this summer. Mira Mirati's Thinking Machines Lab has launched its first product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning language models in private. at Beta with support for Quinn and Lama, quoting Wired. Big companies and academic labs already fine-tune open-source AI models to create new

variants that are optimized for specific tasks like solving math problems, drafting legal agreements, or answering medical questions. Typically, this work involves acquiring and managing clusters of GPUs and using various software tools to ensure that large-scale training runs are stable and efficient. Tinker promises to allow more businesses, researchers, and even hobbyists to fine-tune their own AI models by automating much of this work. Essentially, the team is betting that helping people fine-tune frontier models will be the next big thing in AI. And there's reason to believe they might be right. Thinking Machines Lab is helmed by researchers who played a core role in the creation

of ChatchipT. And compared to similar tools on the market, Tinker is more powerful and user-friendly, according to beta testers I spoke with. Marotti says that Thinking Machines Lab hopes to demystify the work involved in tuning the world's most powerful AI models and make it possible for more people to explore the outer limits of AI. We're making what is otherwise a frontier capability accessible to all, and that is completely game-changing, she says. There are a ton of smart people out there, and we need as many smart people as possible to do frontier AI research. Tinker currently allows users to fine-tune two open-source models, Meta's Lama and Alibaba's Quen. Users can write a few lines of code to tap into the Tinker API and start fine-tuning through supervised learning,

which means adjusting the model with labeled data or through reinforcement learning, an increasingly popular method for tuning models by giving them positive or negative feedback based on their outputs. Users can then download their fine-tune models and run it wherever they want, end quote. Might we have our first true IPO of the AI era and might it come from someplace, not a lot of people are considering? Sources tell Bloomberg that, that German-A-I-language platform Deep-L has held initial talks over a U.S. IPO and may seek an up to $5 billion valuation if it does so. Deep-L raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation back in 2024, quote, founded in 2017 by chief executive officer and founder Jarek Kudilowski.

DeepL's platform provides AI-driven translation. The company, which has offices in Japan and the U.S., is preparing to launch DeepL agent, an autonomous AI assistant that can automate tasks for business users. DeepL has more than a thousand employees and is backed by investors including benchmark, IVP, and index ventures, end quote. Turns out Brave has gotten bigger than I realized. It has surpassed a hundred million monthly active users across desktop and mobile worldwide, quoting Therot. A hundred million users represents more than a growth milestone. They constitute a movement for a better web that puts users first, Brave CEO and founder Brendan Ike says. Across the globe, users are

choosing privacy and control over their online experience instead of big text tracking and abuse. Every product we've launched since our browser, our search engine, our premium products, our ad platform has been built with privacy protections. As we expand our AI offerings, we will continue to design for privacy by default, which will fuel our next wave of growth. According to the company, it's been averaging about two and a half million new users each month for the past two years, and in addition to having over a 100 million monthly active users worldwide, it now boasts over 42 million daily active users, which Brave says indicates a very high engagement level. Brave also makes Brave Search, of course, and it says that this service is just

one of three truly independent search engines in the Western world, and the only one outside big tech. Users now make 1.6 billion queries on Brave Search each month, or near 20 billion per year. It now handles over 50 million user queries and responds with over 15 million AI-generated search answers each day, end quote. Finally today, sources say Yahoo is nearing a deal to sell AOL to Italian app developer bending spoons for around $1.4 billion. As ever, when we talk about either Yahoo or AOL, it's surprising to know that, say, AOL is still around, and it's surprising to learn its business is still that big. but the real surprise this time is this. Apparently, AOL.com's traffic has recently grown 20% year-on-year among users aged 25 to 54. Say what? Quoting Reuters. Yahoo is owned by private equity firm

Apollo Global Management, which acquired a 90% stake in the company from Verizon in a $2,21, $5 billion deal. A deal would mark a fresh chapter for the one-time giant of the internet age known for its email service and you've got mail notification. AOL was at the center of the biggest merger in history at the time when it combined with Time Warner in the year 2000, but the mega deal resulted in regulatory probes and write downs. Bending spoons has emerged as one of Europe's most prominent technology firms with a strategy of purchasing, struggling tech companies, and revamping them. In February 2024, the company completed a funding round that valued it at $2.55 billion, making it a rare unicorn in Italy's tech landscape. A new deal would add AOL's vast user,

base to Benning Spoon's portfolio of mobile applications. AOL generates revenue from advertising and through its subscription services, including LifeLock Identity Thet Protection, Last Pass, password management, and McAfee Multi-access Malware Protection. More recently, AOL's website traffic has grown 20% year-over-year among users age 25 and 54, outpacing the growth in the category of users age 55 plus, a source familiar with AOL's performance, said. The growth was driven by the introduction of multiple new content categories to AOL.com, including health, fitness, animals, science, and tech, home and gardens, lighter side, true crime, local, among others, the source said. Bending Spoons, whose products count 300 million monthly users, has done several acquisitions

recently, including file sharing service We Transfer. Last month, it agreed a deal to take private video platform company Vimeo for $1.38 billion, its largest acquisition to date. bankers see the firm as a candidate for an initial public offering. Luca Ferrari, who co-founded Benning Spoons in 2013, told writers last year that there were no plans for an IPO, but that the firm was working to be ready for it and looking beyond Europe, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.