Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- Facebook is Dead, Long Live Meta. Meta is spending billions on AI hardware, and hundreds of millions on AI researchers to leverage that hardware. It’s a speculative bet like the metaverse bet; unlike 2022, however, Meta has learned that they need to keep investors happy along the way. It seems to me that the company’s recents earnings are evidence that the company has the motivation and the means to turn the dials on revenue, even if that means abandoning Facebook’s original mission. — Ben Thompson
- GPT-5 Arrives. It’s been a week since OpenAI released the long-awaited GPT-5, and as the dust settles and Sam Altman continues to announce tweaks, reviews are decidedly mixed. Ben’s Daily Update on Wednesday provides a comprehensive survey of the various frustrations from users, the strategic logic of OpenAI’s changes, and questions surrounding the subsequent updates made by the company over the last several days. This, I think, is the key point: “What will be important for Altman and OpenAI going forward is to keep in mind that one of the burdens of having a massive consumer app is that every change will be met by loud resistance; the only way to know for sure if they are representative will be to look at the data.” Were OpenAI’s recent updates a response to data, or backlash? We discussed the entire affair on this week’s episode of Sharp Tech, including why the initial changes that many power users hated were actually more appealing to the mainstream, and more optimal for the company’s long-term future. — Andrew Sharp
- The Top 5 Airports. If you’re looking for lower-stakes content tailor-made for the middle of August, the Greatest of All Talk has you covered. Tuesday’s episode begins with discussion of the NBA’s recently announced schedule on Christmas Day this year, and I offer a proposed five-game slate that would have been better, but all of that is prelude to a listener’s request for Ben Golliver and I to rank our top five domestic or international airports. Golliver flies constantly as the National NBA writer for the Washington Post, so he had lots of takes on the state of American travel, although I have to warn you that his analysis was sobering (apologies in advance to fans of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport). Ben and I debate and rank non-basketball items all offseason long (fruits, sports movies, U.S. tourist destinations) and it’s some of the most fun we have all year. Stratechery subscribers have access to the full catalog here. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
- China AI Chips, A China Chip Control Framework, Whither HBM — President’s Trump plan for the U.S. to get paid by Nvidia and AMD for China exports is dubious, but overall policy is headed in the right direction.
- ChatGPT 5, Product Trade-Offs, Personality and Model Upgrades — GPT-5 seems fine; the more interesting questions are about the ChatGPT product and OpenAI’s tradeoffs.
- Facebook is Dead; Long Live Meta — Meta delivered blowout earnings the same quarter that Mark Zuckerberg doubled down on AI; I don’t think it was a coincidence.
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver
- Summer Top Fives: ‘Sweet Spot’ Moments and Fruit Follow-Up
- Summer Top Fives: Christmas Games and Airports
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Sharp Tech video is on AI doomerism.