Inklings: Newfangled 'Hackquisitions' • Epic v. Apple • Meta v. States • OpenAI v. Apple • 'Stripe of AI' • Vision Pro Pickle

Did you miss me while I was away? Not that I wasn't busy still writing in between planes and pools. But I come back bearing gifts. Well, a gift – albeit one long requested by many of you... full RSS feeds for paid members of The Inner Ring. Yes, over two years in the making – well, more like a few hours, thanks to our AI overlords helping me out – I finally cracked the code. Unfortunately, it still needs a fairly manual deployment at the moment – which is to say, if you're interested and a paid member, shoot a note to subs [at] spyglass.org. If not, carry on. The current RSS feed will continue to work just fine, albeit truncated.

Happy last days of Summer. And Friday.

Thoughts On...

💸 Yet Another New Flavor of Hackquisition – NVIDIA is paying $6B to the investors in Poolside for... something. Technically, it sounds like a license to access their "open" model "factory", which sounds a lot like technology created – perhaps after a couple pivots – to be acquired by NVIDIA. After all, Jensen Huang's two favorite words of late are "open" and "factory". Not on that list is "acquired" – this is the word that shall never be mentioned in such deals, lest regulators come calling. Again, this is just a licensing deal and some job offers – 109 of them, to be exact. But interestingly, unlike most other "hackquistions" to date, this one explicitly does not include the founders. In fact, they're staying back with the remaining parts (if any) of the company, and raising $1B from NVIDIA at a new $12B (pre) valuation for their troubles. I mean, what?! What could possibly go wrong? The only thing that is clear here is that NVIDIA has way too much money on their hands, and they seemingly can't give it away fast enough. [Newcomer 🔒]