This week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ is about how OpenAI made $20 billion less than it thought. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers.

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

Table of Contents

What’s the Stock Market Up To, Eh?

$SPX ( ▼ 0.02% )   $DJI ( ▼ 0.35% )   $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies Mentioned in Today’s Newsletter

$AAPL ( ▲ 0.09% )   $AMZN ( ▼ 0.37% )   $GOOGL ( ▲ 0.3% )   $META ( ▲ 2.63% )   $JPM ( ▼ 0.86% )   $GS ( ▼ 0.23% )   $C ( ▼ 5.6% )   $WFC ( ▼ 3.1% )   $BAC ( ▼ 1.14% )   $MS ( ▼ 1.78% )  

Apple Unveils New Smart-Home Hub

Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 0.09% ) has finally solved the modern domestic crisis nobody asked them to: Attaching an iPad to a speaker base and calling it a lifestyle revolution.

Dubbed the "HomeView" ahead of Cupertino’s Welcome Home showcase, the device is essentially a glorified countertop altar designed to centralize your domestic life. It sports an A18 chip, an aluminum pedestal reminiscent of the beloved iMac G4, and an aggressively curated slice of iOS.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman described it as the “Siri command center of an Apple-powered home,” pairing a compact touch display with upgraded acoustic hardware. Meanwhile, Apple Marketing Chief Greg Joswiak teased the launch with the sweeping promise that the company is ready to bring “intelligence where you live.”

Translation: Apple wants a permanent, brushed-aluminum monument in your kitchen.

“The home device no one asked for. Hard pass,” wrote one vocal skeptic on MacRumors.

“Who is asking for this? I am,” shot back another commenter. “I have a smart home, and a dedicated multi-user hub will be perfect.”

Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 0.37% ) and Google $GOOGL ( ▲ 0.3% ) spent the last decade practically giving away smart displays with the purchase of a family-sized cereal box. Apple, arriving fashionably late as always, is betting that premium finishes, curated privacy, and a revitalized Siri will convince you to pay hardware-grade money for a screen whose primary job is showing you a timer while you burn garlic bread.

Will it redefine ambient computing? Probably not. Will millions of people replace their perfectly functional other products with a brushed-titanium orb running Apple Intelligence? Perhaps…

Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta Has Reached ‘AI Frontier’

Mark Zuckerberg has declared that Meta $META ( ▲ 2.63% ) has arrived at the artificial intelligence “frontier.” Forget his multi-billion-dollar ghost town of legless avatars; Zuck has traded the virtual headset for thousands of server racks, and he wants everyone to know he’s running with the big dogs now.

Touting Meta’s newly unveiled Muse Wonder model family, Zuckerberg told the Financial Times that the tech unlocks “much more sophisticated behaviors that are at the frontier of what is being done” in AI. Naturally, getting here didn't come cheap: “Getting to this point both required a large amount of compute and investment,” he explained, casually promising to burn even more cash.

While competitors obsess over coding benchmarks and white-collar automation, Zuck claims he has nobler, deeply relatable domestic ambitions. “Everyone else is focused on more knowledge work, automation-type cases, and we're much more focused on personal empowerment,” he said. In classic Zuckerberg deadpan, he admitted, “I don't know what that means, like, sociologically that you know that we got AI systems that could do these advanced mathematics stuff before we got something that could handle customer support reliably for everyone.”

Sociologically speaking, Mark, it means humanity mastered quantum calculus before Meta could stop grandma from getting hacked by crypto bots on Marketplace. Still, as for safety advocates pleading with tech titans to tap the brakes? Zuck isn't interested. He rejected calls for an industry slowdown, insisting, “I'm much more inclined to believe that AI is a technology that can be designed with proper safeguards and built responsibly” inside individual labs.

Funny how that position aligns entirely with his interests, don’t you think?

And what about users terrified of handing intimate personal data over to the Cambridge Analytica alumni association? Mark sees that as a feature, not a bug: “Most of the ways in which people might not trust the company can lead to technological innovations that could be quite productive,” he said.

Again. Funny how that position aligns entirely with his interests, don’t you think?

Quote of the Day

Big Banks Making More Money Than Ever, Eek!

Wall Street’s favorite party — the prolonged open bar of climbing interest rates — is finally facing the dreaded flick of the overhead fluorescent lights, The Wall Street Journal reports. For months, the mega-banks have indulged in financial heaven: Slapping eye-watering rates onto credit cards and corporate loans while paying depositors roughly two cents and a complimentary branded pen. But as the yield party stretches into overtime, bank chieftains are getting jittery about what happens when the punchbowl runs dry.

JP Morgan $JPM ( ▼ 0.86% ) , Goldman Sachs $GS ( ▼ 0.23% ) , Citigroup $C ( ▼ 5.6% ) , and WellsFargo $WFC ( ▼ 3.1% ) each reported higher third-quarter profit and revenue from a year earlier this week, in part because of the near-endless need for financing related to the artificial-intelligence boom, volatile equity markets, and continued strength in consumer spending. Four of the six biggest banks posted a combined profit of $32 billion, up 14% from a year earlier. Revenue across all four increased 9% to $115 billion. Bank of America $BAC ( ▼ 1.14% ) and Morgan Stanley