Mentioned in today’s edition: Sam Altman, Signal, Beem, Life360, Google Home, Mark Gurman, Rockstar Games, and Gina Rinehart. Plus, deals on Bose headphones, Apple MacBooks, and Samsung portable SSDs.

The News

Violence is just the tip of the anti-AI iceberg headed towards big tech

Overnight, someone allegedly shot at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (SFStandard). It was the second attack this weekend. Two days earlier, someone reportedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the house before being arrested at the AI company's offices (Guardian). Earlier in the week, the house of a Democratic congressman who'd thrown his support behind a local data centre project was also shot at. The attacker left a note "NO DATA CENTRES". 

The Sizzle: Over the weekend, I was planning to write today about the new challenges facing these massive AI tech companies: how the Iran war is making everything more expensive and uncertain, the increasing pressure from banks and investors that are running out of patience for far-flung projections of profitability, and the lack of a killer consumer app yet. But it's another problem that — following the weekend's news — bears highlighting: AI is pretty unpopular.

Let's do a thought experiment: I have a technology that's supposedly powerful and magical, that could automate away drudgery and is being voluntarily included in every tech. That should be popular, right? Well, it's not and some AI people seem quite surprised — there's some real copium in the AI industry who are blaming it on mainstream media bias or misinformation — but I'm not really. How do you think people are going to feel when tech billionaires spend their time saying "this technology is more powerful than God, it will replace your job, it will compete with you for energy and water, and we won't even let you use it because it's too incredible"? 

What is important to note is that the anti-AI view isn't just popular among the Sizzle-type reader who pays attention to this stuff. It's the mainstream view. Good quality surveys on attitudes towards AI show that most Australians are more concerned than excited about it (Pew, KPMG, Roy Morgan). In the US, AI is less popular than the Trump paramilitary force ICE (Verge). This is a real problem for these AI companies. Not just because their leaders and supporters are facing violence — needless to say, that's bad, don't do that — but because there's a simmering rage that's curdling into real mobilisation against data centres. Like, Maine looks like it's going to ban big data centres for 2 years (CNBC). Violence is just the tip of the iceberg that's headed towards AI.

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Law enforcement can read some Signal messages because of iOS infrastructure

A story I missed at the end of last week is that the FBI was able to get copies of encrypted Signal messages from someone's phone using iOS's notification storage (404 Media, $). Even after deleting Signal, court records show that US law enforcement was able to access someone's incoming Signal messages because they had been saved in their iPhone's push notification database. Signal has a setting that blocks message content from showing in notifications or you can just manually turn off notifications altogether. 

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Australia's version of Venmo sold off

I didn't see this get much attention but Beem, the big bank-backed person-to-person payments app, has been sold to an AI fintech (AP+). Beem was launched by AP+ in 2018 to be a local version of Venmo but wasn't as successful as its US counterpart because, well, Australia has basic banking infrastructure that allows people to send money between banks without needing a third party platform. Beem's been bought by BaaS company Bolt, formerly Bano... which is a totally sensible sentence that I just wrote.

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

Gina Rinehart cheaped out on trying to buy a web domain then lost a legal fight over it

Friend of the Sizzle Sam Buckingham-Jones has a delightful story in the AFR about how Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart, tried and failed to buy hancock.com.au. Her company, Hancock Prospecting, made an unsuccessful bid to the World Intellectual Property Organisation that claimed that the domain's current owner owned it in bad faith. It's worth a read but just to share one detail that jumped out to me: Hancock apparently only offered a "low five-figures" amount for the domain. What a cheapskate! 

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.