Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 06/10 – Zuck’s Big AI Ambitions

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

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 a cul-de-sac for Apple? Sponsors: LinkedIn.com/ride Links: Meta Is Creating a New A.I. Lab to Pursue ‘Superintelligence’ (NYTimes) Zuckerberg Is Personally Recruiting New ‘Superintelligence’ AI Team at Meta (Bloomberg) Exclusive: OpenAI taps Google in unprecedented cloud deal despite AI rivalry, sources say (Reuters) Waymo halts service in downtown Los Angeles amid ICE protests (LA Times) News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools (WSJ) Apple will end support for Intel Macs next year, macOS 27 will require Apple Silicon (9to5Mac) ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Hard to Read’: Designers React to Apple’s Liquid Glass Update (Wired) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Tuesday, June 10th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Zuckerberg's big ambitions for AI seem to be coming into focus. Open AI 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 miss today in the world of tech.

Well, 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 in 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 has 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 in fighting among team leaders and a tight labor market. In April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new versions of Meta's Lama 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 Rayban 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 multi-billion-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 Super Intelligence 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, quote, 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 in 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 Metazone leadership and externally by developers who saw them as over-promising 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 ceded 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 that with the new bench, META will see improvements to its Lama 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 center,

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 Mark's 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 Open AI's existing infrastructure for training and running its AI model sources, said, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. The move also comes as OpenAI's chat GPT poses the biggest threat to Google's dominant search business. in years, with Google executives recently saying that the AI race may not be win-or-take-all. 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 discuss 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 multi-billion dollar investment, including the future equity stake Microsoft will hold an open AI. 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 Apple's 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 Open AI deal will further complicate how Alphabet CEO Sundarpa Chai, the capacity between the competing interests of Google's enterprise and consumer business segments.

Google already lacked sufficient capacity to meet its cloud customers' demand as of the last quarter, Chief Financial Officer Annette Ashkenazi told analysts in April, end quote. AMO 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 Waymo's, 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 Lyme 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 site in Los Angeles, where they have operated since November. Waymo vehicles had driven nearly two 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. Back to Google with more data points like this. According to similar web, 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 similar web. At a company-wide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, 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, denned 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 ChatGBTGBT,

is expected to deliver a stronger blow. AI mode responds to user queries in 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, quote, 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 journals 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 traffic coming from organic search to the paper's desktop and mobile websites slid to 36.5% in April 2025 from almost 44% three years earlier, according to similar web. When Dot Dash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for around 60% of the company's traffic. Today, it is about one-third. Overall, traffic is growing, thanks to efforts including newsletters and the My Recipe's Recipe Locker. An 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 in two decades. end quote. A couple of drips and drabs from WWDC, Apple says macOS 26 Tahoe will be the last

MacOS release that supports Intel-based Macs, with MacOS versions from 2026 only available for Apple's silicon models, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Of course, Intel Max 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 MacOS 27 onwards, as no Intel Mac will be supported on MacOS 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 2019-16-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 macOS 27 will drop support for all of these legacy machines, and therefore MacOS 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, Wired suggests I'm not alone in being a little bit concerned. Quote, 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 to read some of it, says Alan, you, 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 designs. 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 at owner.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. Whitcroft 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 Whitcrofts. 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 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. 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.