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“Every Democrat outside the Beltway knows he’ll lose,” a major Silicon Valley founder told me. “Hilariously, Biden thinks it’s the ‘elites’ who want him out when it appears some of them may be the only ones who want him in!” He added: “Here’s the reality: On Election Day, Trump supporters will vote for Trump in heaps, and previous Biden supporters will stay home, load up on anti-depression meds, and watch the Democrats get blitzed across the ballot.”
Another tech founder who has advised the Whit…
15 days ago
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Fast-forward to today, and we’re on the cusp of a similar phenomenon with the new wave of AI summarization tools being launched by OpenAI, Google, and Facebook. These tools, though impressive in their ability to distill information, are just a few steps away from creating an “Irtnog”-like reality, where the richness of human knowledge and depth of understanding are reduced to bite-size, and sometimes dangerously inaccurate, summaries for our little brains to consume on our tiny devices. Case in…
about 2 months ago
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It all began 36 years ago in the sun-drenched streets of Albuquerque, where William Woods was working at a hot dog stand, serving office workers and city dwellers. On an otherwise unremarkable day, his coworker—a large man with dark hair named Matthew Keirans—stole Woods’s wallet. With it, Keirans pilfered not just Woods’s Social Security number but eventually his entire identity. The theft was the seed of an existential usurpation and the beginning of a Kafkaesque nightmare for William Woods. T…
3 months ago
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This fear of missing out on another tech boom has not only engulfed Nvidia but also spread across the entire sector—particularly with AI, Bitcoin and all things crypto, as well as the makers of GLP-1 drugs being used for weight loss (think Ozempic). These surges are emblematic of a broader trend in which both seasoned and novice investors pour money into what they perceive as the next big thing, but risk causing the collapse of these potential next big things by doing so. Similarly, other AI-rel…
4 months ago
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One reason the industry is so much more taxing than other creative fields is because it’s so expensive to make anything. According to producers and studios I’ve spoken to, TV show budgets now range between $6 million and $25 million an episode, not including marketing costs. Most mainstream movies now cost between $100 million and $250 million to make. Years ago, you could make a blockbuster for a fraction of that. The first Top Gun (1986) cost $15 million to make. The 2022 sequel cost $170 mill…
5 months ago
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It was at Mariani 1, a nondescript low-rise building on the edge of the old Infinite Loop campus with blacked-out windows. This place is so secret, it’s known as one of Apple’s “black ops” facilities. Nearly all of the thousands of employees who work at Apple have never set foot inside one. There are multiple layers of doors that lock behind and in front of you. But Cook is the CEO and can go anywhere. So he strolls past restricted rooms where foldable iPhones and MacBooks with retractable keybo…
6 months ago
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By Saturday morning, after sifting through all the speculation, it became clear that Altman was likely pushed out, according to two people I spoke to close to the board, and reporting from other outlets, including The New York Times, because of safety concerns around the speed with which he was ushering the company into the AI future, and, what some feared was potentially an AI apocalypse. The board, after all, was not set up to pursue profits for OpenAI, but rather, to ensure the company didn’t…
8 months ago
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Which means many people are asking themselves (and a lot of people have been asking me): Do I really need to upgrade to something that looks almost exactly like the thing I just got last year? My answer is, yes and no. First, it’s important to understand why the last four iPhones look like quadruplets. It’s largely due to the current design philosophy at Apple, which is less “let’s change it for the sake of changing it” and more “we think this is perfect and we ain’t changing…” You get the point…
10 months ago
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Apple’s design may have stalled, but the latest iPhone still has the potential to disrupt through major photo and video upgrades (while the new Apple Watch could capitalize on gaps in the lucrative health care market). But are customers ready to drop upwards of $1,500 for the Pro upgrade?
almost 2 years ago
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Employees have long joked that “Twitter is the company that can’t kill itself.” This week, it seemed to be trying harder than ever. With Elon Musk turning on Jack Dorsey and a celebrated whistleblower due to testify before Congress, how long can CEO Parag Agrawal hold on?
almost 2 years ago
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Couples rarely commit crimes together. But Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan and Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, whose social media antics disguised an alleged plot to abscond with billions in stolen crypto, are no ordinary couple.
almost 2 years ago