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Right tool for the job that I think people are processing and absorbing. What do you think in hindsight actually delayed these features because it does feel like the technology was there a year or two ago. Was it the negotiation, the deal with Google? Was this a technology problem or a business problem? It was a mix of both. One was the underlying stack and the underlying foundation. Models that Apple had two years ago were not very good and so they needed to go back to the drawing board because they couldn't roll these features out only for them to fail. Which is ironic given they rolled out the rest of the Apple intelligence and new Siri features that hardly worked well and were not impressive. If you've used the new betas, you can tell what has happened here. The under the hood models are so much better. Based on what I have heard internally, Apple believes that they're basically six months behind OpenAI and ChatGPT in terms of the use cases that they have right now. So Siri works great, Search works great. Image Playground, which is their image generation tool. The same underlying tech stack that powers genmoji. It's like close to what you're getting from Gemini and close to what you're getting from ChatGPT. So everything basically just works now. It's a great experience. I mean the first beta is sloppy and it's buggy as you would expect, but they've taken something that was way less than mediocre and they're giving people a baseline now that's actually functional. I would look at it as this way. When you take the iPhone out of the box, it has all these pre installed apps. They're not great, but they work. And you could use your phone based on what comes out of the box. What Apple had with AI was not that the pre installed stuff just didn't work, but then you can go to the app Store and you can get a much better messaging app and much better Browser email app. 10 times better versions of all the pre installed apps. That's the case with AI. Whereas now the pre installed stuff is baseline and it works great. But you can go out and get even better stuff if you want. Yeah. How high is how high?

Now that I'm using it, these are actually the only features that matter that they announced two years ago. They could have delayed Genmoji. They shouldn't have delayed look up your calendar because that's a functional use that people are going to do. Yes. And just to be clear, the new Siri is really good and 95% of the people, sorry to say this, are not going to need ChatGPT on their phone because they have Siri AI pre installed. The way I look at it is that ChatGPT does a bunch of amazing things that Siri AI can't do. But Siri AI also does a lot of amazing things that you'd go to for ChatGPT. So if you're 95% of the population using AI chatbots and you're using it for looking things up, it's basically the new age Google. It's going to be able to do that, it's going to be able to answer questions for you, it's going to be able to do edits for you. But there's like a ton of pro level things that ChatGPT does that Siri AI can't do. So I made a list the other day of things that ChatGPT can't do. Big time research, big time analysis of multiple different documents and PDFs and comparisons. People use it for tax preparation, people use it for in depth health things. So there's a lot you're going to want to use it for. So I could see people having both Siri on the pre installed and then you're going to subscribe to a ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or what have you for some of that extra oomph on top of it. But Siri is going to be useful for a lot of people. And you know, one easy way to say it. Yeah, we just, just hold on. Sure. Look at it as like imovie and Final Cut Pro. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean we, we, we debated this. Like have you ever googled anything? And I still google things pretty regularly and then I go to LLMs for more pro stuff and then I go to Agentic AI for other things and like there's like using a right tool for job that I.

Companies in the category, but I bet they print in the short term. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the training data. Data labeling. So the name, the name is like kind of perfect. Rage, baby. Taste labs. We're building Taste in a lab. We built it, we made it. Yeah. It is funny because you could do the inverse and say our job is to just identify things that are not tasteful and the end product would be exactly the same because that's just your negative data set and everything else is positive by that design. But a lot of the data labeling projects have just been. Does the button work? Does this render properly? Is this functional? Some of that's been able to be looped in a reinforcement learning environment. Some of it's been able to be encoded just tagging. Okay. Does the photo have six fingers or five fingers? Like, that was a useful piece of data labeling. That happened probably two years ago. Now there's a bigger question about what actually looks good. And then how do you represent like a diversity of tasteful designs such that everything just doesn't collapse into like the new corporate Memphis. Everything that's AI generated has the exact same flavor. Like the. It's not this, it's that. But for design would be the bad. Yeah. Which is like already extremely easy to clock right now. And I got a deck last night, friend of mine, company, and my first piece of feedback is like, are you okay with everyone knowing that you didn't put any effort into design because it's totally possible. The answer is yes. But at least you should go into your fundraise process knowing that everyone is going to know that you tried to. One shot this. Which again, for some businesses is fine and some investors is fine. But it's going to turn some people off. Yeah, yeah. People are going all back and forth on this. This highlights a fundamental misunderstanding in tech. Not everything can be.

Do all the technical stuff. Well, we'll have the taste. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word. Even the conversation. We've never even waded that deeply into the conversation. And I'd like to keep it that way. That being said, just to set the table on the critique, a lot of people outside of tech are critiquing it because a lot of SF people are in tech are saying taste is so important. And the outsiders don't see San Francisco tech as being tasteful people, as being particularly tasteful people. From a fashion perspective, from an art perspective or curation perspective, it's sort of known as the T shirts and athleisure community. And that's, it's sort of, it's optimized, it's devoid of taste by design. It's about efficiency, not taste. Yeah. And then I'll say one more thing and then, and then I'll steal man taste labs. Yeah, but so the main thing is like, when I think of, when I think of like, taste, like product taste, like, I think of like Linear, right? Like, Linear has like always been very opinionated, very quality driven. They want to grow quickly because of how great the product is. Like, you know, very, very design driven. Like, that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste. Right. The problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket, like copying you. Right. Then there's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear, right. From their website to the actual product. And so taste is something that people curate themselves. But then the, the as soon as it's copied, then it's like fundamentally like not tasteful in my view. Right. Then it's not original. I think taste has, you know, you need some originality and to be able to combine, combine, you know, do 1 plus 1 equals 2. And another example is like, is it 1 plus 1 equals 3? Sorry, sorry, sorry. 1 plus 1 equals 1 plus 1 equals 2 plus 1 equals 11. 1 plus 1 equals 2. That's the ad. Oh yeah, that fake startup ad. No, so another example is like Squarespace. Sure. Like Squarespace took like high end website design and then just democratized it, monetized it. Right. Anybody could have a pretty website. And then you started to just. I would just look like, okay, is this a squarespace website or this person make it okay, it's a Squarespace website. Like, and not, it's not really that much of a knock, but like it wasn't like the company's own taste that led to that output or the people, people that they worked with. So it commoditizes really quickly, and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, just helping AI labs create better looking outputs and working on that problem feels like a pretty good way to get to build, at least temporarily, a pretty big business, because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about, hyperscalers even care about. Right. And so I think that while taste labs, you know, got a lot of flack over the last 24 hours, they probably their pipeline probably exploded. And I bet they get a ton of business out of it. Yeah. And very unclear what what this business looks like in five years, like a lot of the other companies in the category, but I bet they, I bet they print in the short term. Yeah.

Acquire more companies, create a roll up. There's a piece in the Financial Times we can run through another day, but Bill Ackman shares a hall of fame opening sentence. One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. A tautological value argument. Of course, what he's actually getting at is that while the stock price is so high that that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can acquire companies very easily with your public stock. And so there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it on the back of the cursor acquisition closing or being announced that the option has been exercised. But it is a very interesting debate. We touched on it a little bit yesterday. Is there going to be an acquisition spree? Will there be a roll up? Will SpaceX buy Neo Cloud assets, energy assets, chip assets like Terrafab has been talking? What's involved in that? I mean, they're trading at what, 10 times intel at this point or something? I don't know what is intel market cap? But there's so much that they could do. It's not 10 times Intel. Intel's a $600 billion company, so that would be a big one. But there's a lot in the supply chain, there's a lot in the, in the AI world and the space world that they could partner up with if that's the direction that they want to go. But it would be a very different direction and so everyone will be watching it very, very closely anyway.

But we'll be continuing to follow that. In other news, much more tragically, many of you will have seen this by now, but Joshua Bayer, who is the CEO and founder of Capital Factory, was in a plane crash, plane crash in Laredo, I guess, early, early this morning coming back from Mexico to Austin. I unfortunately never, never got to meet Joshua, but only heard tremendous things about him. And he really was an important figure in the Austin startup community. So sending our prayers to Joshua's family and friends and yeah, really, really.

People. There's also a bunch of back and forth going on about Netflix buying Lionsgate, potentially. Sources familiar with the matter disputed Semaphores reporting There was a back There was a whole bunch of back and forth about is Netflix going to buy something else? Were they in the bidding war for Roku and they're taking shots at each other? Semaphore what you got? Ben Smith is congratulate. Congrats on helping with the cleanup. They could have gone to Variety and chose you. I'm not even sure what this tweet means. Sharon Cleanup on aisle Semaphore My dear Ben, All I'm saying is they are now saying on the record, that they're not interested in Lionsgate, never were. Would have been happy to amplify your scoop too. They're fighting. They're fighting the timeline.

You know what else is tasteful? Chris Larson from Ripple has been buying an absolute absurd amount of cars recently. He got an F1 GTR, a 918 Spyder, a P1, a T50, an Enzo Assesto. Assesto Elemento has probably spent like 50 million on cars in the past year. I think it's more than 50 million if you total all those up. The P1 he has is insane. Where is that? Is that in the comments? Green. It's a green on tan. P1. Green on tan. Looking good. Post them all. They're on the Cesario collection on Instagram. Wow. Yeah, the dark green is a good, good, good image. This is quite the collection that's emerging. Well, very tasteful. You can go check it out on Instagram because we love that. Speaking of, I mean, taste in Silicon Valley, what could be a Mansory body kit on a Model 3 is that says kind of like this high, low approach. It says like I'm practical, I want a car that gets me to point A to point B. Yeah. But I want to look, I want to look good. Yeah, it's sort of like, it's a metaphor for taking like a sort of slop filled base model and then stuffing taste down it with a bunch of fine tuning. Because everyone, when they think of Mansory, they think of like really high taste. Maybe. Depends who will be doing the labeling. Will it be Mansory people? There's also.

Better. Yeah. Well, the other story that's burning up the timeline is Taste Labs put the timeline in turmoil. People going back and forth. So yesterday, a former Exa AI Labs founding team member introduced her startup, Taste Labs, whose mission is to end AI slop. Quote, this requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We're starting with design, her post says. More specifically, Taste says they're working with Frontier AI Labs to improve their models along taste lines through data labeling and app layer startups to improve the aesthetics of their products. This has been a critique of vibe coded projects. They all sort of look the same. Of course there are examples of really cool projects, but people were starting to say, oh, this has like the Vibe code look to it, or this model's not good at front end, et cetera. Her goal is to fix that. Tai's post, her post was immediate. Immediately went viral, generating tons of opinions on X and getting over a million views in 24 hours. People's main complaint is basically you can't program taste. It's impossible. They say. But the steel man is that the AI's aesthetic output can be improved and that it's perfectly reasonable for, for a startup to try and capitalize on that opportunity. I wanna talk to you about taste, about your feed. Is it scalable? Is it not? Give me, take me through some of the critiques here, tell me what resonates with you and then I have a take about where the business. So I think the main thing is, main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't wanna hear that word anymore. I don't wanna hear that word anymore. The last six months, maybe last year, it's been like the code word, like, what will we do in the AI can do all the technical stuff? Well, we'll have the taste. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word, even the conversation. We've never even waited that deeply into the conversation. And I'd like to keep it that way. That being said, just to set the the table on the critique. Like a lot of people outside of tech are critiquing it because a lot of SF people in tech are saying taste is so important. And the outsiders don't see San Francisco as being taste, as being particularly tasteful people. From a fashion perspective, from an art perspective or curation perspective, it's sort of known as the T shirts and athleisure community. And that's it sort of, it's, it's optimized, it's devoid of Taste by design. It's about efficiency, not taste. Yeah. And then, and then I'll say one more thing and then, and then I'll, I'll steal, man. Taste labs. Yeah, but so the main thing is like when I think of, when I think of like, taste like, like product taste, like I think of like linear, right? Like, Linear has like always been very opinionated, very quality driven. They want to grow quickly because of how great the product is. Like, you know, very, very design driven. Like that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste. Right. The problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket, like copying you. Right. So then there's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear, right. From their website to the actual product. And so taste is something that people curate themselves, but then as soon as it's copied, then it's like fundamentally not tasteful in my view. Then it's not original. I think taste has, you need some originality to be able to combine do 1 plus 1 equals 2. And another example is like, isn't 1 plus 1 equals 3. Sorry, sorry, sorry. 1 plus 1 equals 1 plus 1 equals 3 equals 11. 1 plus 1 equals 2. That's the ad. Oh yeah, that fake startup ad. No, so another example is like Squarespace. Sure. Like Squarespace took like high end website design and then just democratized it, monetized it. Right. Anybody could have a pretty website and then you started to just, I would just look like, okay, is this a Squarespace website or did this person make it? Okay, it's a Squarespace website. Like, and it's not really that much of a knock. But it wasn't like the company's own taste that led to that output or the people that they worked with. So it commoditizes really quickly and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, just helping AI labs create better looking outputs and working on that problem feels like a pretty good way to get to build, at least temporarily, a pretty big business. Because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about, hyperscalers even care about. Right. And so I think that while Taste Labs, you know, got a lot of flak over the last 24 hours, they probably, their pipeline probably exploded. And I bet they get a ton of business out of it and very unclear what this business looks like in, know, five years. Like a lot of the other companies in the category, but I bet they, I bet they print in the short term. Yeah. I feel like a lot of the training data. Data labeling. So the name. The name is, like, kind of perfect. Rage, baby. Taste Labs. We're building Taste in a lab. We built it. We made it. Yeah. It is funny because you could do the inverse and say our job is to just identify things that are not tasteful and the end product would be exactly the same because you're just. That's just your negative data set, and everything else is positive by that design.

So let's read through Brandon's. Hit it. So Snapchat showed off specs its new augmented reality glasses at augmented World Expo 2026 yesterday. Interesting. I didn't realize that this was an industry conference for augmented reality, not a Snap specific event. The features are a mix of things you'd want in a daily driver, pair of glasses that you'd have on all the time, everywhere. Maps, hud, review of restaurants in your visual field, prosumer features like the ability to collaborate on shared virtual whiteboards. And more general AI powered assistance stuff like measuring distances for you so you don't have to use a tape measure. The broad mix of features combined with the facts that specs are fairly pricey. $2,200, basically, and that they look painful to wear. So Brandon Gorell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the specs. The. The. What do they call that? The bar? What's that thing on the glasses that goes in the back? I don't know. Whatever that thing is, it's a little thick, It's a little heavy. There's a battery back there, probably some compute. And so that is compressing his ear a little bit. You imagine wearing that for four hours. Maybe it gets a little bit tiring. We will see how other scenario. He's getting some cauliflower ear. He's training. He sees Zach is gotten into mma. He doesn't want to be left behind. Yeah. So we don't know. So Brandon asked. Tyler says it is the arm. The arm of the sunglasses. Where is Tyler, by the way? Oh, Tyler's Tyler. Yeah. Tyler's going to the midjourney event, which will also be interesting. There's a whole bunch of interesting hardware stuff happening in the midst of the AI boom. Midjourney's launching a hardware device tonight. No one knows exactly what it is. Surprising it hasn't leaked. They got it locked down over there. They got it locked down. It's great. Also, I think maybe journalists don't think it's like the hottest scoop to go after, but still really impressive. I'm on the edge of my seat to figure out what they launched because incredibly talented team, incredible business, incredible founder. And David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, started Magic Leap, an augmented reality or virtual reality company that would track your hand over this little device that was sort of the size of a stick of gum. Basically, you could strap it to the front of a Oculus Rift and it would track your hands while you were in VR. That Company at one point sold to Apple almost and then got rolled back and then sold to another company and raised a bunch of money. And then David ran it all up again with Mid Journey. It's a great story. Anyway, I love the midjourney story, but I'm very excited about that. Back to specs. Back to specs. Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really going to drop over 2k so they can put on their pair of specs just when they need to see how many yards they are from the pin? I think a lot of golfers do have disposable income. The price tag might not be the issue. The question is, does this look cool on a golf course? Is this a. Is this a. Is this something that has like badge value? If you pull out like a nice range finder, like a Titleist bag or something with a great brand, it feels like to make it cool, it's gotta be on the PGA Tour. The heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really. Yeah. And so many cool use cases. But are any of them killer use cases? No, I'm just saying. I'm saying, like, that's a cool use case. You're trying to understand how a piece of furniture is going to fit into your room. I don't. I do that mentally when I'm doing, like, if I'm doing an interior design project, I might need that. But that's like a specific moment in time. Maybe once every couple years at most for a lot of people. I feel like, you know, some people are kind of constantly adding furniture here and there, but a lot of people, it's kind of you set it and forget it. So, yeah, very, very. Like, again, unclear why this is something you would want on your face all the time. Glasses. I'm Googling Robert De Niro's casino glasses. Yeah, these are pretty bulky here. We can share this in the chat here. Boom. Pull those up. Let's continue. So you can buy rangefinders for around 150 bucks. They're not fragile. Also a lot of golf heads. They're out there for more than the battery life. They're out there for more than three, three and a half hours. Three and a half hours might be enough for nine on a busy course. They're doing six hours out there. Sometimes you don't want to be out there with your going to reality glasses and they die on you. Our DIYer is going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their Home projects. Our startups going to be willing to drop 2k for every employee who wants to collect, collaborate in AR. All of these are examples touted on Snap's spec's page as things you can do with the glasses. And the features do seem super cool. It's just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a 2k price tag, especially because they look painful to wear. And so that's your point about killer features. I disagree. I don't think that these products need a killer feature. I think the original killer feature of the iPhone was the phone. Like, people were already carrying phones and. And the iPhone was like, we debated this before, but it had some call dropping problems, but it was a replacement for your dumb phone. And then the fact that it also was an ipod was an extra feature. And then the fact that it was an Internet browser was another feature, but it replaced very, very basic things. And my thing is, I don't think as cool as the tech is, I don't think the tech is ready to be a daily driver computer. Yeah, well, I, I think it needs to replace a very, a very regular, everyday interaction thing like a screen. And so that's why I still think VR is like a replacement for the home theater, maybe a replacement for the 80 inch TV, but 80 inch TVs are like 500 bucks now. And so you got to get it to be better and you got to have enough for everyone in your household to have one, and it's got to be a better experience. But in that world, the other challenge is like a lot of these, I mean, like a lot of these use cases I don't feel like are that aligned to Snapchat's user base. And that's like the business. Like a $2,000. Yeah, yeah. A $2,000 device doesn't really align to their, what I believe is their core demo. Yeah. And so Google Capital blokes asking the question, how did this happen? Do you know how deeply broken a culture has to be to ship this product and let the CEO walk around like this again? I don't think they look that bad. But there is this question of, you know, is this a serious product? The fashion part must be addressed first. I guess the taste memo never made it to Snap. If you're enough of a dork to have these on your face and you won't even get the chance to say, may I meet you? Wow. People are very, very upset about these. JB says I legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit. That's ridiculous. They're going to sell a few to people that want to demo them. There's, there's fans that buy every product. Palmer Lucky has a collection of augmented VR glasses. You know, the collectors will get them. Let's put pull up this post from a capital because this might be.

Big show. Anyway, Snap. Snap spectacles. We talked about it a little bit yesterday. Feedback has been mixed. Not good. People don't like it. Pull up the picture from DJ Cows. Glasses. What glasses? Not this one, the next one. It's really. This one. It's really tough because if, if a startup shipped these, everyone like they would, they would, they would be able to raise the photo. After you're seeing this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now. There you go. Honestly, there you go. The funny, big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool. Now that. Not those. That's too much. But you flip back. I'm into it now. It's actually inoculated me to the. Oh, they're big. Because I saw a bigger version and I like these. They're a little bit blocky. Yeah. But it's like a stock style choice. I don't know. I'm getting, I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair. Here's the thing, I pick up a couple pairs. If a startup launched this product. Yes. And was able to do the demos that they can do. We've tried this product. We've done a number of the demos that startup would. Would be able to raise at, I would say easily a billion just based on current market conditions. But they're. A startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a public company that has spent somewhere in the range of three and a half billion dollars building this product. So yeah, the feedback from the market has not been great, from activists has not been great. 2% over the last five years and just in the last five days down another 8.5%. And Evan Spiegels has been having to defend his decisions, his investment here. Well, we'll see where all this goes. The questions like how, how expensive is this effort? How core to the business is it? How many Snap are working on this? They have a great ads business, a great social media with a network effect should be an AI winner. You know, just increase the ad load, increase the ad targeting, run a really lean, thin operation and you should be able to be a very, very profitable enterprise. The era, clearly a lot of these investments were green lit in the early days when the stock was up, when the market was booming. And now we're seeing them roll out and everyone's asking a wildly different set of questions because we're in the air. Not the wearables era, but Tyler in the chat says snap down 92% since peak. Yeah. So you can imagine a lot of the, A lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much, much, much bigger company. Yeah, but to be fair, Evan has been acquiring in this category and thinking about this for probably over a decade. I know. I actually talked to a founder that he sold his company to Snap, it must have been 10 years ago, and they bought a couple of companies and been working on this. And then of course, they did have the first version of Spectacles, which were like the Meta Ray Ban displays or the Meta Ray Bans. No screen, but just camera. And the rollout for that was really well received, but never quite got to Escape Velocity, where it really moved the needle for the business. But very clear, you know, interesting R and D thinking. Anyway, Evan Spiegel is going to have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gorell, because Brandon Grail came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, I don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine. We'll read through your piece. We'll steel man it. I'll steel man it. No problem. But first, I'm going to steel man. Crowdstrike.