(Photo: Andrej Sokolow, Getty Images)

Thick frames, full hearts

Either Zuck or nothing

Do you want chunky glasses called "Orion"? That's what Meta thinks you want.

9/25/24 2:30PM

Mark Zuckerberg just wrapped up the keynote address at Meta Connect, the company’s annual developer conference.

Clad in an oversized black T-shirt emblazoned with Latin text reading “aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Either Zuck or nothing”), the Meta CEO ran through several tech demos, suffered some minor glitches, and talked about Dame Judy Dench, avocado smoothies, cattle ranching tips, and showed off some THICK prototype holographic glasses.

Zuckerberg noted that the company’s multi-year effort working on glasses, AI, and mixed reality are starting to bear fruit.

“We can start to see how the future of computing and the future of human connection are going to look, and it's pretty awesome,” said Zuckerberg.

It’s also going to look a little weird! The big reveal at the end of the keynote was a pair of holographic augmented reality glasses called “Orion” that the company has been working on for a decade, according to Zuckerberg.

Unlike Apple’s face-hugging Vision Pro, Orion glasses look like — glasses — albeit so thick they look like they were pulled off the face of a Pixar character.

In a video of people’s reactions, the prototype glasses elicited a chorus of "that’s crazy" from various tech buddies such as digital marketer Gary Vaynerchuk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

It sounded like Orion wasn’t going to be ready to ship for a long time, probably due to the expense of the novel technology, which uses “tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses that shoot light into waveguides that have nanoscale 3D structures etched into the lenses,” Zuckerberg said. According to reporting from The Verge, the first generation of these expensive glasses will likely never in fact be sold to the public, who will have to wait for Orion’s second generation.

Other demos featured live language translation through Ray-Ban Meta glasses, AI-powered video translations of Instagram Reels, and virtual AI avatars that could answer questions on your behalf for... all your many fans?

Rani Molla

Tunnel Vision

Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

Jon Keegan

23h

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

9/11/25

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal