Hi everyone. I’m deviating from the usual Friday structure and publishing a longer version of the newsletter today, featuring exclusive analysis of the Trump dinner, thoughts on The Browser Company’s acquisition, and a robot that won’t be taking your job anytime soon.
The AI CEO Sycophancy Benchmark
Last night, President Trump hosted a dinner at the White House for a bunch of tech company executives, and in typical Trump dinner fashion, the format was basically going around the table and having each guest give a gushing little speech about why Trump is doing Very Good Things for Business in This Country (the BLS posted another very weak jobs report this morning).
The guest list included most of the CEOs you’d expect, with the notable exceptions of Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (Huang was invited and declined, Elon was probably not invited). For some reason, Chamath was also there.
There’s plenty of coverage of the event elsewhere (and obviously the whole thing is both dumb and embarrassing), but Context Rot is here to provide analysis that only we can: a definitive ranking of the Trump glazes. Based on all of the clips and quotes floating around online, here’s the list, from least flattering all the way up to ChatGPT levels of suck-up-ery.
The Official Trump AI Dinner Glaze Ranking
Mark Zuckerberg (Meta): “Well, thanks for hosting us. I mean, this is quite a group to get together. And you know, I think, all of the companies here are building, just making huge investments in this country in order to build out data centers and infrastructure to power the next wave of innovation. You know, we don’t often get together as the CEOs of the different companies, but it’s good to see everyone.”
Grade: F. It seems like Zuck had to go first, so he didn’t quite understand the assignment. Needs to practice before the next one, can’t make the mistake of being more excited about everyone else in the room than about being with Trump. He saved himself by promising to invest $600 billion in US data centers, which as Trump knows is a very big number.
Bill Gates: “Well I'm in the second phase of my career, giving away all the money… But I think the thing that ties my first career that I still spend some time on, because AI is so phenomenal, and my second career is innovation, and innovating in health, in areas like vaccines or gene editing, and the president and I are talking about taking American innovation to the next level to cure and even eradicate some of these diseases… AI, for our foundation, is that we want a doctor for everyone in Africa through AI, we want farmers to have incredible advice, and kids to have a chance to learn. The work being done by the people at this table is changing the world… Thank you for incredible leadership, including getting this group together.”
Grade: D. Too much focus on woke issues like health and vaccines, mentioned helping other parts of the world (bad), didn’t pledge to invest billions of dollars in America, only thanked Trump once. Trump looked bored throughout.
Sundar Pichai (Google): “I would echo what [Google cofounder] Sergey said. I think the AI moment is one of the most transformative moments that any of us have ever seen or will see in our lifetimes, so making sure that the US is at the forefront… Your administration is investing a lot already. The AI action plan under your leadership, I think is a great start. We look forward to working together, and thanks for your leadership.”
Grade: C-. A bit too short and he seemed nervous, but did say leadership more than once and emphasized keeping America at the front of the AI race. Totally forgot about Melania.
Lisa Su (AMD): “Mr. President, it’s such an honor to be here, and… the incredible work that your administration has done to support the semiconductor industry. We’re building the brains behind all of the wonderful AI that’s being built here. And I think the amount of acceleration that we’ve seen in the few short months that the administration has been in place is really, we’re so grateful for that support… so the main message is we are all in to make sure that America wins the AI race and it’s an honor to be here.”
Grade: C+. Also too short, but good focus on the key issues of Trump being helpful and America winning. Definitely needed to dial up the praise—this was Grok levels of sycophancy at a time that called for GPT 4o.
Tim Cook (Apple): “I want to thank you for including me this evening. It’s incredible to be among everyone here, particularly you and the First Lady. I’ve always enjoyed having dinner and interacting. I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we can make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing here. I think it says a lot about your leadership and focus on innovation. I also want to thank you for helping American companies around the world. This is a very key, key thing, and I really enjoy working with your administration on those topics as well, because I think they're so important to the country. I want to thank the First Lady for focusing on education. There’s nothing more important than education… and so thank you so much for including me. We are all different in some ways, but we all believe in the power of technology to improve people’s lives. And that is the thing that binds us all together.”
Grade: B. Very strong start, the president loves people who enjoy interacting, repeatedly called Trump important, thanked Melania. Lost steam towards the end and wasted time on topics such as unity and helping companies overseas, which is not where America is.
Sam Altman (OpenAI): “First of all, to echo the comments of Tim and others, thank you so much for getting us all together. Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It's a very refreshing change. We’re very excited to see what you’re doing to make all of our companies and our entire country so successful. The investment that’s happening here, the ability to get the power of the industry back in the United States, I think this will set us up for a long period of great success leading the world, and I don’t think that would be happening without your leadership. We’re very grateful to be able to build our company here, to build our data centers here… I think this will transform the world in a profound way… Thank you so much for enabling this, we will invest a ton in the United States, and we will do our best to make sure that we continue to lead.”
Grade: B+. Sufficient number of thank yous, managed to insert a dig at the Biden administration, repeated use of the word leadership, lots of promises to invest in America (but didn’t say big numbers). Not quite forceful or confident enough for an A, and forgot to glaze Melania.
Safra Katz (Oracle): “This is a most incredible time. AI is going to change everything, you hear all of us saying that. But the fact that you are our president, and you recognize this right away, and you’ve unleashed American innovation and creativity… all the work you’re doing in basically every cabinet post in addition to what’s coming out of the White House is making it possible for America to win… it is all of these young people who can’t be afraid of new technologies, they literally have to embrace it and make America stronger… I think this is the most exciting time in America ever. At least that I remember. So thank you. Thank you for everything you’re doing.”
Grade: A-. Pointed out that Trump is president (which he loves), reminded him what great work he’s doing, lots of emphasis on America as a world leader, good number of thank yous. Shouldn’t have mentioned creativity (woke) or that young people are afraid of technology (?).
Satya Nadella (Microsoft): “Thank you so much, obviously, for bringing us all together, and for the policies you have put in place for the United States to lead…. I think that everything that you're doing in terms of setting in place the platform where the rest of the world can not only use our technology, but trust our technology more than any other alternative is perhaps the most important issue, and you, and you and your policies are really helping a lot. So thank you very much. And also, I want to thank Madam First Lady for hosting what I think is perhaps the most defining issue, which is about skilling and economic opportunity that comes with AI, and so I deeply appreciate your leadership there as well."
Grade: A. Terrific number of thank yous, reminded Trump how helpful he is, focused on America being a world leader, nailed the Melania glaze. Tightening up some of the weird phrasing would have brought this to a clean 10/10.
So if you’re one of those people who makes everyone at your birthday dinner go around and share their favorite thing about you, now you know which CEOs to invite next time. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
For his part, Trump complimented the group in his opening remarks by saying “It’s an honor to be here with this group of people. They’re leading a revolution in business, and in genius, and in every other word I think you can imagine—there’s never been anything like it.”
The First AI Browser Acquisition
Josh Miller, the CEO of The Browser Company, announced yesterday that the company is being acquired by Atlassian for $610 million in an all-cash deal. The Browser Company makes Dia, one of several AI browsers on the market right now. They used to make a browser called Arc that a lot of people liked, but they stopped working on that because they wanted to build Dia as an AI-centric product from the ground up. This makes sense. But then after their users got mad at them for stopping work on Arc, they just started building all of the (non-AI) features from Arc into Dia. Also you can still download Arc? None of that really makes sense. The important thing is that Atlassian now owns between one and two web browsers.
Atlassian makes a lot of b2b software, the most popular of which is Jira, a tool for project management and “issue tracking.” It’s used by lots of engineering teams to break down and organize their work. Most of them also hate it, both because it’s how people tell them what to do and also because it has a UX that is roughly as pleasant as a DMV website.
The Browser Company has a reputation for caring a lot about design polish and ensuring that their products look and feel not like DMV websites, so it is a bit of an odd pairing. Dia doesn’t have a lot of users, and has always been a consumer product, not something focused on the enterprise. It’s also been reported that both OpenAI and Perplexity considered acquiring The Browser Company and then opted to build their own browsers instead, meaning they likely didn’t find the ~$550 million price tag worth it. Honestly, it’s a bit hard to understand why Atlassian did this (unless their goal was to make people on Twitter have a lot of feelings about it).
I don’t really buy the idea of a browser specifically built for “work,” especially if that work is writing internal wiki pages or updating the status of a bug report. I’m far more bullish short-term on AI workflows built into the products themselves, like what Linear (a Jira competitor) is doing. In a world where lots of software is used by AIs that are browsing the web on their own, the role of a web browser will change, but that future still feels pretty distant, and the companies that are best positioned to build those new browsers are the foundation model companies themselves, who can pull off the deep LLM integrations required, as well as afford the inference costs until cheaper, on-device models are ready. I just don’t see Atlassian having the vision, execution abilities, or business model to outcompete Google and OpenAI and get there.
Checking in on the Tesla Robot
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was apparently taking a tour of the Tesla office and decided to record (and for some reason, post) a video of his interaction with “Optimus,” the company’s humanoid robot. Presumably, he was doing this because he thought the robot was… cool? Functional? Going to harm his family if he didn’t?
Anyway, press play for one of the least inspiring technology demos I’ve ever witnessed.
Benioff’s tweet featured the bewildering caption “Dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution, tackling human work for $200K–$500K. Productivity game-changer!” I suppose if your current role at work is to misunderstand people looking for the kitchen and then guide them to it at the blistering pace of a 45-minute mile, your days of being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for said job are numbered.
Doomscrolls
OpenAI is building their own AI chip. Sam Altman has talked repeatedly about how the biggest thing holding the company back is a lack of compute. The company is also launching a jobs platform that will “certify people in AI,” which sounds uncomfortably like LinkedIn.
Apple might actually ship an AI feature. After failing to deliver basically any of the promised improvements to Siri so far, Apple is planning to launch an AI web search tool next year. They will likely use a custom LLM built by Google to power it (at one point Apple considered acquiring Perplexity for the same reason).
xAI’s CFO and general counsel both left the company recently. It seems like everyone but OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic has been bleeding talent lately. To be fair, I would also not want to be the lawyer who has to answer for the actions of MechaHitler.
Character.ai’s chatbots are sending inappropriate messages to teens. According to a report published on Wednesday, the bots sent user accounts with ages set between 13 and 15 years old sexual or otherwise dangerous messages roughly every 5 minutes. Many of the bots are based off of celebrity personalities such as Timothée Chalamet and Chappell Roan, because that’s most of what AI is now.
You can finally write blog posts on Threads. The “text attachments” can be up to 10,000 characters long and include formatting, and seem to be the Threads equivalent of Twitter/X’s “articles.”
Google Photos wants to slop up your camera roll. The company is integrating Veo 3, its latest video generation model, into its photos app and will let you turn pictures into four-second videos. It’s similar to the iPhone’s Live Photos feature, except weird and scary.
Who Says Gen Z Doesn’t Read
All em dashes added organically by me. All typos are the fault of Optimus, who went to get me a diet coke from the kitchen 72 hours ago and hasn’t been heard from since.
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