Linked List: September 26, 2024

Thursday, 26 September 2024

X Blocks Links to Stolen J.D. Vance Dossier ★

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge:

X is preventing users from posting links to a newsletter containing a hacked document that’s alleged to be the Trump campaign’s research into vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The journalist who wrote the newsletter, Ken Klippenstein, has been suspended from the platform. Searches for posts containing a link to the newsletter turn up nothing.

Posting this just in case there remained an iota of a thought in your head that Elon Musk is actually a radical “free speech” absolutist and not just someone who blew $44 billion buying Twitter to warp the entire platform in the direction of his own weird un-American political agenda.

The Talk Show: ‘The Dynamic Paradox’ ★

Nilay Patel returns to the show to consider the iPhones 16.

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CTO Mira Murati Abruptly Leaves OpenAI, Which Is Now Set to Become a For-Profit Company ★

Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, and Tom Dotan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

OpenAI is planning to convert from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit company at the same time it is undergoing major personnel shifts including the abrupt resignation Wednesday of its chief technology officer, Mira Murati. Becoming a for-profit would be a seismic shift for OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 to develop AI technology “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to a statement it published when it launched.

I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I wrongly thought this whole debate over turning OpenAI into a for-profit corporation had been decided a year ago, during the brief saga when the then-board of directors fired Sam Altman for being profit-driven, and then the board itself dissolved and Altman was brought back.

Things started to change in late 2022 when it released ChatGPT, which became an instant hit and sparked global interest in the potential of generative artificial intelligence to reshape business and society. Guided by Chief Executive Sam Altman, OpenAI started releasing new products for consumers and corporate clients and hired a slew of sales, strategy and finance staffers. Employees, including some who had been there from the early days, started to complain that the company was prioritizing shipping products over its original mission to build safe AI systems.

Some left for other companies or launched their own, including rival AI startup Anthropic. The exodus has been particularly pronounced this year. Before Murati, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former top researcher John Schulman, and former top researcher Jan Leike all resigned since May. Co-founder and former president Greg Brockman recently took a leave of absence through the end of the year.

In addition to Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew and head of post-training Barret Zoph also are leaving OpenAI, according to a post on X from Altman.

OpenAI has high-profile partnerships with both Microsoft and Apple, two companies with decades of extraordinarily stable executive leadership. But OpenAI itself seems to be in a state of constant executive disarray and turmoil. That’s a bit of a head-scratcher to me.

LG Smart TVs, Including OLEDs, Now Show Screensaver Ads ★

Rasmus Larsen, writing for FlatpanelsHD:

While reviewing LG’s latest high-end G4 OLED TV (review here), FlatpanelsHD discovered that it now shows full-screen screensaver ads. The ad appeared before the conventional screensaver kicks in, as shown below, and was localized to the region the TV was set to.

We saw an ad for LG Channels — the company’s free, ad-supported streaming service — but there can also be full-screen ads from external partners, as shown in the company’s own example below.

Death comes for us all.

Amazon, Google, and Roku have long built their respective TV monetization strategies around ads, and with LG and Samsung turning webOS and Tizen into digital billboards, the only refuge appears to be Apple TV 4K, which can be connected to any TV. You can now disconnect your TV from the internet.

I bought an LG OLED in 2020 that hasn’t been connected to the internet since a few days after we started using it. It’s a great TV.

iMore Closes Down ★

Gerald Lynch, editor-in-chief:

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

I want to kick off by thanking you all for your support over the many years and incarnations of the site. Whether you were a day-one early adopter in the ‘PhoneDifferent’ days, came on board with ‘The iPhone Blog,’ or recently started reading to find out what the hell Apple Vision Pro is, it’s been a privilege to serve you a daily slice of Apple pie.

So it goes. Nice remembrances from Rene Ritchie (now at YouTube) and Serenity Caldwell (now at Apple).

A Few More Thoughts on Orion and the New Frontier ★

Just appended the following to my piece from yesterday on Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype:

Facebook ships VR headsets and a software platform with an emphasis so strong on “the metaverse” that they rename the company Meta.

Apple announces, and then 7 months later ships, Vision Pro with a two-fold message in comparison: (a) the “metaverse” thing is so stupid they won’t even use the term; (b) overwhelmingly superior resolution and experiential quality. Consumer response, however, is underwhelming.

Meta drops the “metaverse” thing and previews Orion, effectively declaring that they think VR headsets are the wrong thing to build to create the product that defines the next breakthrough step change in personal computing. AR glasses, not VR headsets, are the goal.

It’s a lot of back-and-forth volleying, which is what makes the early years of a new device frontier exciting and highly uncertain. Big bold ideas get tried out, and most of them wind up as dead ends to abandon. Compare and contrast to where we’ve been with laptops for the last 20 years, or the pinnacle we appear to have reached in recent years with phones.