Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- Apple Finally Ships Intelligence. Tim Cook’s final WWDC as CEO was in large part an effort to clean up a mess that Apple made two years ago, and even though Cook wasn’t driving the Siri AI presentations — that was Mike Rockwell, head of engineering and now head of Siri — the final product felt like an appropriate send off as his tenure nears its conclusion. Siri AI doesn’t dazzle, but it delivered. We saw working demos that were so slow they couldn’t have been faked. That’s distinct from the vaporware Apple displayed two years ago, and as Ben wrote Tuesday, competent AI that doubles down all the iPhone’s advantages may well be enough to keep Apple central in an entirely new generation of computing. — Andrew Sharp
- Anthropic’s Fable. Anthropic released a public version of its Mythos model on Tuesday dubbed Fable 5, complete with a set of very visible guardrails on cybersecurity and biology topics, and silent nerfing around LLM creation capabilities. The latter decision was reversed on Thursday after public outcry, but I wasn’t surprised: I explained on Sharp Tech why this sort of behavior was predictable from Anthropic — indeed, it’s exactly why I criticized the company in its standoff with the U.S. government. And yet, Fable is also remarkable: in Wednesday’s Update I explore how Anthropic’s fusion of belief and business makes the company feel unbeatable. — Ben Thompson
- The Future of European Industry. For anyone who’s missed it, the past few weeks have seen a steady rise in temperatures between the EU and China as various European leaders speak out about increasingly oppressive Chinese trade practices that are eroding European industries. Before next week’s G7 Summit in France and an EU summit in Brussels that will be dedicated to countering China, I wrote about all the dynamics driving the tensions and what comes next. In short: the smart money says that Europe will be more talk than action this summer, but even if a full blown trade war isn’t quite imminent, that destination may well be inevitable. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
- Google Buys Compute From SpaceX, Broadcom’s Outlook, Apple’s AI Politics — Google’s deal with SpaceX, and Broadcom’s earnings, both seem bullish for Nvidia. Then, what I’m looking for at WWDC.
- The iPhone’s Last Stand — Siri isn’t state of the art, but as long as it works — and it appears it does — it’s good enough for the consumer market.
- Fable 5, Anthropic Alignment, AI Tiers — Fable 5 is the public version of Mythos, and while it is very capable it sets some troubling new precedents.
- An Interview with Ben Bajarin About Apple, AI, and Compute — An interview with Ben Bajarin about WWDC and the status of the AI compute industry.
Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp
- Europe’s Final Warning — A closer look at Europe’s compounding China problems, and why a trade war is probably not imminent, but might be inevitable.
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop
Greatest of All Talk
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Stratechery video is on The Google Capital Company.