Chris O'Brien

“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in…”

Hey, Neo, my husband won't be home for hours...

I’m guessing few people who joined the backlash chorus against WIRED’s IX Neo piece actually read the full article, or watched the company’s video that sparked some of its inquiries. First, some acknowledgements: 1) This technology is incredible (especially when autonomous versus remotely human-controlled). 2) It’s always stressful to put yourself, your company and your product out there for judgement. An outsider is never going to understand all the context. 3) Media often impose a narrative - sometimes it’s in service of what’s most interesting/relevant to their audience, and sometimes it’s less noble. It’s appropriate to call stuff out that feels unfair, and social media has definitely shifted that power dynamic. That's a good thing! In this case, I personally thought the article was pretty balanced, and raised appropriate questions about privacy (re: the option to have a human take over remotely) coupled with the sexual nature of parts of the product video. For the former, this strikes me as a highly relevant frontier topic and the company had good responses! You should actually want media to ask these tough questions so you have a chance to address - always assume your audience/customer is smart. For the latter, you’ll have to judge for yourself...maybe I have a dirty mind, but looking at the YouTube comments, I am not alone 😇 Regardless, the Neo team did a good job capitalizing on the piece, and likely got far more attention turning this into an anti-media moment than they would have otherwise, especially since the article is behind a paywall anyway. TBD whether that helps or hurts them in the long run.

Uber is doing everything they can to slow down autonomous vehicles. This is absolutely absurd and will cost lives They want autonomous vehicle services to have human drivers serve 85 percent of rides???

there are a lot of benchmarks that suggest 5.6 sol is the best model in the world right now, but the most reliable way to tell is that elon is obsessed with me again

Hey, Neo, my husband won't be home for hours...

I am become Brett Adcock!

"gave" WIRED the exclusive. 🙄 This is why tech journalism is ridiculous. The company believes it is doing the publication a great favor, and therefore the pub is obligated to write the story the company wants. Meanwhile, WIRED gets dozens of such "exclusive" offers every week.

OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for a startup that had never shipped a single product. Fifty-five employees. That is about $120 million a head. What made them worth that price lived inside their heads: they knew how Apple designs and builds hardware. The startup was io, which Jony Ive co-founded in 2024 with Tang Tan and other Apple alumni. Tan spent 24 years at Apple running product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. OpenAI is worth around $852 billion, and every one of its products runs on hardware someone else made, the phone in your pocket, the laptop on your desk. To own the next device, it has to build one. Hardware knowledge does not come from training a model. It comes from people who have shipped hardware in huge volumes: which supplier to call, which step breaks once you are making millions, what a decade of expensive mistakes already ruled out. So OpenAI recruited from Apple, and it recruited hard. Apple's complaint, a 41-page suit filed Friday, says more than 400 former Apple employees now work there. Two of them are named as defendants. Apple alleges that Tan used Apple's internal codenames during OpenAI job interviews to ask candidates still at Apple about unreleased products, told them to bring "actual parts" like batteries and logic boards for "show and tell," and passed around an internal Apple exit document so new hires could slip past the company's exit security checks. The other defendant, an engineer named Chang Liu, allegedly kept his work laptop and downloaded dozens of confidential files on his way out. OpenAI denies all of it and says it has no interest in other companies' trade secrets. io's founders were paid in OpenAI stock, not cash. OpenAI has now filed to go public at a valuation of up to $1 trillion, as soon as this year. Everyone building the hardware division holds shares that turn into cash the day the stock starts trading. Ship the devices faster, and the payoff grows. That is the engine sitting under the story that went viral. The asset Apple owns is years of knowing what does not work, carried in the memory of the people who learned it. One leaked file barely matters next to that, and it is the one thing $6.5 billion cannot download. OpenAI wants to go public at up to a trillion dollars, and part of that price is a hardware business Apple is now asking a court to rule was built on stolen work.