Tech Brew Ride Home - Sam Altman Attacked

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

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) Learn more at liquid.trade/techbrew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. College PC. 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 miss today in the world of tech. 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 opening eye 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 Muhammad Tariq Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent discharge of a firearm. Neither opening eye nor the SFPD responded to the standards request for further comment. According to an initial police report on Sunday at 1.40 a.m., 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 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 Open A'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. Morano 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 German's 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 metalize heavily on partner Esselor Luxottica S.A. for frames, Apple is unsurrediteders. Apple is unsurbeder surprisingly 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 Rayban 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 Meadows 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 opening eye chief revenue officer Denise Dresser says the deal with Microsoft, quote, limited our ability to to reach clients on bedrock and touts its Amazon deal in comparison. Quote, Dressor's memo lands less than two months after Amazon announced plans to invest up to $50 billion in Open AI as part of a strategic partnership.

Microsoft Amazon's top cloud computing rival has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, backing the company 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 Anthropics-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 Human X in San Francisco last week with Arvin Jane, CEO of Enterprise AI startup glean, describing it as Claude Mania.

It has become a religion. That's the level of that mania, 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 on to the other's term. In mid-20204, Microsoft added OpenAI to the list of competitors in its annual report, a roster that for years has included MegaCAP, Peers, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meadow. 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 co-pilot 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, quote, 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.

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monthly price. They've got options for nearly every budget so you can keep your finances and your bandwidth in check. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash brew and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash brew. 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. Could the AI bubble hit a wall for the simplest reason possible, i.e. demand is outstripping supply. This is increasingly concerning people as we move into this agentic era. according to the Orn Compute Price Index, renting one Nvidia Blackwell GPU for an hour,

now costs $4.8 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 Pudalian, 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. Palladion 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

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 $4.8, up 48% from the $2.75 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 the $4.00. in more than five years I've been running this business, said JJ Cardwell, chief executive of Vulture, 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 Sue, founder and CEO of Software Development Platform Retool, said he performed, he prefers to use Anthropics' 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, quote, 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 8th, Anthropics Clod API had a 98. 8.95% uptime rate in the last 90 days. That is not normal, said Amir Hadjish Hat, co-founder and chief technology officer at base 10 and AI inference startup. Think about AWS, databases, RDS or 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 F.T. 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 one 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 younger 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.

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