Dear Studio Fam,
Apple is famous for adopting new technologies years after the competition. More often than not, they do so in the most refined way possible. At last year’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced the Vision Pro four years after Mark Zuckerberg launched the Meta Quest. At next week’s WWDC, Cook is expected to make a similar late entry to the world of generative AI. As whatever AI experiences to be announced next week will almost certainly not be available until the fall release of the new iPhone, the Apple AI experience will come two years after the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatPT.
The concept of AI is not alien to the Apple experience. The Siri Voice Assistant is technically some form of artificial intelligence, but it’s not very intelligent. The ability for developers to connect Siri to their apps is limited and it’s rarely contextual. AI on Apple today is little more than a series of voice activated if/then statements. Siri can’t understand what is on your screen the way ChatGPT can, let alone do much about it.
We’re excited to see just how Apple pulls off its new AI experience as the privacy-centric settings of the iPhone prevent barriers to moving sensitive user data into the powerful servers necessary to run the latest AI models. We expect to see some kind of new local AI model, possibly accelerated by a custom Apple chip, in addition to extended capabilities from the cloud.
We’ll have a complete rundown of WWDC in next week’s edition. Read on for other tech news, including a major acquisition by Shopify and blowback around the latest memestock craze.
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Shopify Acquires Threads (Not That One)
Workplace messaging is a commodity, so much so that many companies end up paying for multiple versions of it. Every startup that uses Google Workspace could use Google Spaces, but probably uses Slack. Every enterprise employee with a Windows PC has Teams. That didn’t stop Sequoia from funding yet another chat startup called Threads (three years before Meta launched its Twitter competitor). This turned out to be a good bet, as it was acquired this week by ecommerce platform Shopify. The acquisition is expected to enhance Shopify merchants’ customer service channels.
Meme Stock Guy Under Pressure
Fintech influencer Roaring Kitty, made famous in the film Dumb Money for promoting viral memestocks, faced renewed scrutiny in the wake of the most recent swings in GameStop’s public stock. According to anonymously sourced reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Roaring Kitty’s brokerage E*Trade is considering banning the influencer as a customer. Brokerages like E*Trade have a legal obligation to investigate suspicious activity. Stock regulators are inherently skeptical about any publicly traded company subject to public promotion. Luckily for memestockers, Roaring Kitty won’t have much of a problem finding another brokerage unless the SEC opens an investigation of him directly.