21 September 2025
News
Meta glasses
Meta announced a new version of its smart glasses. See this week’s column. LINK
Gemini in Chrome
Google is adding a ‘Gemini’ LLM assistant into Chrome, barely a week after a US antitrust judge decided Google doesn’t have to sell Chrome. Gemini is also at the top of the US App Store, partly aided by the ‘Nano banana’ image generator going viral. With the models today largely commodities (no, not if you’re an enthusiast, but for any casual consumer), distribution is this month’s battlefield for consumer mindshare. LINK, TRENDS
TikTok resolution?
After a year of muddle, it now appears that the USA and China have a TikTok deal, with a consortium of US investors and tech companies reportedly including Oracle, Silverlake and Andreessen Horowitz (where I worked from 2014 to 2019) buying an 80%+ stake in the US operation from Bytedance, moving it to a new non-Chinese platform and running it locally. The US government would have a board seat. It’s not clear what any of that means, though, and we don’t have a price ($35-40bn has been suggested). WSJ, BLOOMBERG
Intel’s party round
After the US government took a 10% stake in Intel last month, this week Nvidia bought a 4-5% stake for $5bn, together with a deal for Intel to make custom CPUs for Nvidia. I wonder if they expect a quid pro quofrom Trump on Chinese export restrictions (though China has now supposedly decided to stop Chinese companies from buying, anyway). LINK
China’s Nvidia dance
Meanwhile, the FT reported that China’s government has told Chinese tech companies not to buy Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 6000D, the product launched in the last few months specifically for the Chinese market, to comply with US export restrictions. There are too many moving parts here to speculate with any confidence, even if you were an expert on Chinese semis and PRC industrial policy, which I am not: is this brinkmanship with Washington, pressure for a better chip, support for the domestic industry, or all of the above? LINK, BACKGROUND, NVIDIA COMMENT
ChatGPT usage data
I’ve observed a few times that we have few tangible metrics for actual LLM usage by consumers, besides a range of rather fuzzy (‘does your company use AI?’ is a particularly meaningless one asked by the US BLS) and quickly outdated studies by economists. This week, though, OpenAI co-published a 100-page study on sampled real usage data. Most notable to me is a breakdown of queries by type (analysed using, well, ChatGPT, obviously). While Anthropic reports 36% use for programming (see below), for ChatGPT this is apparently only 4.2% (though this doesn’t include API use by other tools). And the headline: 700m WAU in July were averaging 18bn weekly messages, an average of 26 each. LINK
Agents and democratisation
Advertising and e-commerce platforms have always struggled with how to help the long tail of smaller businesses use all of the sophisticated and complex tools that they create. This week, Amazon launched an ‘agent’ product to walk businesses through the selling platform. LINK
And reflecting a much broader trend, it’s also expanding its creative ad tools, with a new agentic model that it claims analyses your business and best practices to generate both display ads and video ads. I don’t think many people realise that there are going to be a LOT more video ads - both on the web and on ‘TV’, as every legacy broadcaster tries to open up streaming inventory to SMEs, and they all want to use AI to help create the ads for people who could never have afforded to shoot or run a traditional TV campaign. LINK
Meanwhile, YouTube is trying much the same for ‘Shorts’ creators. LINK
The week in AI
Reddit wants to be paid a lot more by AI model labs, since it has a window on a lot of current collective human opinions. LINK
Not just India - Google is launching its discounted Gemini package in Indonesia. LINK
Google launched a protocol for payment between AI agents. Of course, launching is a lot easier than traction. LINK
MCP (‘help agents talk to each other’) is further along the curve, and GitHub is trying to make it a feature by adding its own directory. LINK
Following Meta last week, OpenAI released new guidelines on teen safety. LINK
Musk chaos
Elon Musk followed the assassination of a right-wing American polemicist called Charlie Kirk by posting a bunch of inflammatory tweets calling for violence. I think most people have long since settled their opinion about Musk, but it does occur to me that there are twoMusk Delusion Syndromes - there are the people who ignore and deny everything he says, and the people who ignore and deny everything he's achieved. The challenge is that you have to see both - yes, he really did create that, and yes, he really did say that. We might remember that Henry Ford had two sides to his personality as well. LINK, FORD
H1B chaos
Each year the USA runs an annual lottery for 85k new H1B ‘skilled worker visas’ - about 400k people are in the US on this visa, of which about 250k are in tech (and about 70% from India and another 12% from China). On Friday Donald Trump announced that each visa would now have a $100k fee, beginning on Sunday.
The initial release of this rule was that this 1: applied to current visas and 2: would be an annual fee (the Commerce Secretary said this clearly and repeatedly). Google’s immigration lawyers advised that it also appeared that the $100k fee was chargeable on entry. meaning that if you had an H1B and flew into the US on Monday, you’d need to pay $100k at passport control, and so Google told H1B employees not to leave the country. Microsoft said the same. An Emirates plane leaving SFO held at the gate while the captain let Indian tech employees get off. After 24 hours, the government then said that this is a one-off fee that only applies to new grants.
While the announcement itself showed the level of competence we’re now accustomed to from this administration, the underlying issue has room for debate - there is a view that the H1B visa is abused by contracting shops to bring in cheap labour that could be filled in the USA. Adding a $100k fee addresses that - but also makes it a lot harder for startups without lots of ready cash to bring in a few key workers. In a normal world, this would be a detailed policy discussion, not something to bodge out on a Friday night, but part of Trumpism is a legitimate frustration with the very real decline in US state capacity - the ability to get anything done or any law passed - and that tempts it to do something, even if badly.
Another part of Trumpism is here too, though - the president can exempt anyone he feels like from this rule, which is a perfect opportunity for ‘favours’. LINK, GOOGLE, ANNUAL FEE, CLARIFICATION
Ideas
Search referral traffic to the FT is down 25-30%. For the Daily Mail, it’s more like 90%. LINK
This is a good list of the issues big companies have run into trying to deploy LLMs in the last 24 months. I’ve heard a lot of these as well. A lot of this boils down to ‘imagine you’d given everyone on your company ‘the web’ in 1997 and then looked for ROI” - that would not have gone well. Start with tangible use-cases and problems to solve and work out, not cool-but-unscalable demos and ‘AI-washing’. Also, sort out your data first. LINK
Scam centres in Myanmar might hold as many as 100k people against their will, forced to try to trick Westerners out of their savings. I don’t remember this in vintage sci-fi. LINK
Swarms are the new thing in Ukraine drone warfare. Sci-fi was all over this. LINK
Marc Benioff thought that Salesforce’s ’Agentforce’ AI product line would be a lot quicker and easier to set up than his own employees expected. They were right. LINK
Amazon is extending its logistics platform to competitors Walmart and Shein. LINK
A decade ago there were still a bunch of regional messaging apps, and Kik had 40m MAUs in India. Today it shut down: WhatsApp won pretty much everywhere except the USA and East Asia. The CEO had a post-mortem. LINK
Outside interests
Iran’s most famous translator was… not really writing translations. Fascinating. LINK
Data
Anthropic released an updated version of its activity report. LINK
The Daily Mail complained to the UK’s competition agency (the CMA) that Apple isn’t letting it into Apple News UK. You might or might not care about the complaint itself, but there are a lot of interesting internal operating metrics - Apple News is big. COVERAGE, COMPLAINT
How many web searches does ChatGPT have so far? Maybe a low single-digit percentage of Google? LINK
Dentsu’s 2025 CMO survey. LINK
Elon Musk’s xAI has 64m monthly consumer users (for context, OpenAI is reporting 700m weekly actives). LINK
Column
Glasses
There’s not very much we can say about ‘smart glasses’ today that we couldn’t have said at any point in the last decade. Imagine something that looks like a fairly normal pair of glasses, where the glass is a 3D display with depth of field, that works outdoors in bright light and has a field of view as wide as normal glasses. Give it sensors that can map the world around you, so that you can put a game onto a table, or images on a wall, or ask an AI assistant about anything you see, or ask it to remind you who this person is. And give it some form of control (hand gestures? Voice? Eye tracking? Brain waves?) that makes it useful. Now you have ‘augmented reality!’
That’s all easy to say, but try building it. There’s a lot of engineering and miniaturisation (anything like this would probably have to be driven by a phone to begin with), but that seems within reach. You’d need a lot of AI to light it up, but it’s very hard to bet against continued rapid improvement there. And then you need the optics, and this is a lot harder. Magic Leap and Microsoft’s HoloLens built bulky optics with a narrow field of view that needed a dim room. They also tried to be complete computers. Neither worked.
Meta is trying a different way to build towards the objective. Last year’s Ray-Ban collaboration had a camera and audio but no display at all and sold several million units, which is tiny compared to the scale of the global consumer electronics industry but also a lot more than a proof of concept or prototype. Now we have one with a display. But what kind?
Well. It’s only in the right lens, and only a small portion of your field of view. The screen is colour and has pretty good resolution - quoted at “over 42 pixels per degree” (comparable to or arguably a bit better than the image quality in Apple’s Vision Pro - people argue about this) and it’s hard for anyone else to see it’s there. And the glasses still look like ’chunky Ray-Bans’, not a headset. Meanwhile, there are cameras to take pictures, but no ‘SLAM’ - no attempt at mapping the room, no 3D, no, well, augmented reality.
In a sense, this is a much better version of Google Glass - it’s a wearable heads-up display. It has as much in common with a smart watch as it does with the full augmented reality vision that I opened with - a smartphone accessory that gives you a small screen that works better in different contexts to a phone. Obviously, that isn’t the final goal - rather, Meta is working its way towards the final objective by shipping things that are stepping stones, each viable as credible products in their own right. Meanwhile, Meta also has a wrist band that senses muscle movements to use as a control device - again, this will grow to encompass more (they hope).
All of this is an interesting contrast with the Vision Pro, which is essentially a high-end VR headset being used to deliver an AR experience. It does map the room, and it can place things into the world around you that (almost) look as though they’re really there. It’s amazing, but it’s big and heavy and $4000, and not a viable mass-market product. I’d call it a developer kit, but it has so few users that it struggles to attract developers either - really, it’s a proof of concept, or a technology demonstrator, which is not something Apple ever normally sells. Meta is being more Appley on this front.
The challenge of the Vision Pro, though, is not the size and price. The real challenge is that is that when you use one for a while, you realise that AR computing really means having two or three smartphone apps or iPad apps floating in the room with you, and that’s not actually much better. You can use it as a display for your Mac, yes, but I am pretty sure that the future of computing is not being able to see more rows and columns in Excel at once, nor being able to see more fields in Salesforce at the same time. The future is that the LLM will abstract and concentrate on what you really need to see. The future of software isn’t a bigger screen. Maybe, at least - this space looks a lot like ‘mobile internet’ in the early 2000s, when we knew that everyone would have some kind of internet on their phone but had no idea that it would be a small Mac. This time again, we don’t know.
That said, the bear case I often think about for VR is to look at games consoles, or AAA PC games - they’re rich, immersive, and amazing, and most people aren’t interested. You might be optimising on the wrong axis. So, for glasses, how much does a rich immersive 3D display matter, and how much might this actually be about the microphone and the camera? AI means you have a little magic spirit sitting on your shoulder, watching and listening and remembering for you. Do you want a bigger screen, or do you want ChatGPT to see what you see, and when you walk out of the supermarket, it tells you that I couldn’t see any milk in the fridge, nor in your shopping basket? Is that how Jonny Ive is thinking about this?
This makes me think of the new iPhone Air. Smartphones are now a very mature market, and I don’t pay much attention to it anymore - there are new questions. But the iPhone Air is the most Steve Jobs product Apple has done in a while. It deliberately pushes one specific kind of delight at the expense of the kind of things that a tech reviewer can measure and benchmark. Fewer boxes checked on the product matrix, and lower scores, but that isn’t the point - that doesn’t tell you whether you want to hold one every day. And maybe the point is wearable AI, not AR. Indeed, some people have suggested that 'augmented reality' also covers a smart watch and even AirPods: bring compute into the world with you instead of making it a new glowing rectangle to stare at.