This week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ is about how August jobs numbers smashed forecasts, adding pressure on Fed Chair Kevin Warsh to raise interest rates to cool inflation, because he contends that the labor market is robust enough to take such a cut without pushing the economy into a recession. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers. (Don’t worry if you get a bounceback email. The mailbox is working, it’s just been inundated with haikus lately, thank goodness!)

Now, news!

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

Table of Contents

• Is Duo the Emperor's New iPhone?

• AI Could ‘Kill Us All’ Says Anthropic Researcher a …

• Meet the Man Building Self-Driving Tractor Tech

• States Curb Data Center Tax Breaks for Tech Firms

• OpenAI Claims To Have Solved Math Holy Grail

• Poll of the Day: Over-Infl-AI-ted

What’s the Stock Market Up To, Eh?

$SPX ( ▼ 0.48% )  $DJI ( ▼ 0.77% )  $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies Mentioned in Today’s Newsletter

$AAPL ( ▼ 0.28% )  $OPEAZZX ( ▼ 0.01% )  $ANTHZZX ( ▲ 1.74% )  $META ( ▲ 6.55% )  $AMZN ( ▼ 1.78% )  $GOOGL ( ▼ 2.28% )  

Is Duo the Emperor's New iPhone?

Apple’s stock was up $AAPL ( ▼ 0.28% ) yesterday following the announcement of the new passport-sized iPhone Duo, which should reassure analysts wanting to see how new CEO John Ternus fares in the top job:

Initial impressions suggest the new $2,000 phone itself could not be more blah, although wait…it works with the Apple Pencil! (Just don’t call it a “stylus” or Steve Jobs will be rolling in his grave). To add to the pressure on Apple, Samsung slashed $300 off its competing Galaxy Z foldable, which is now available on Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 1.78% ) for a mere $1,649. If you want the 2TB version of the Duo, you can pay a mere $3,199 for it (throw in a case, and that’ll be $3,328, more than a new MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip and 1TB of storage!), and the phone will be in stores on October 23. Someone joked that it’s called the Duo because “you’ll need two sources of income to afford it.”

Apple also added $100 to the price of its iPhone 18, with analysts concerned about whether the company can continue to grow revenue on the phones at its double-digit rate, year-on-year, given that pricing.

Personally, I am totally unconvinced by this new product. I bought an iPhone 16 Pro Max two years ago on promises of new AI features that never actually materialized (maybe I should see if I can get a payout on the class-action lawsuit?). Fool me once? Shame on you. But fool me twice? And for all this extra money? Even if you can do a backflip with one in your pocket, I’m very much here for the skeptical reactions on X.com.

It’s a cult! A cult! Right?

Quote of the Day

AI Could ‘Kill Us All’ Says Anthropic Researcher as He Quits

A 27-year-old researcher who worked at both OpenAI $OPEAZZX ( ▼ 0.01% ) and Anthropic $ANTHZZX ( ▲ 1.74% ) rage quit this week. Then he took to X.com warning that the technology he'd been developing “could kill us all by the end of the decade."

His resignation thread alleged that “neither company is acting responsibly." Tech firms are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." 

Jacob Coxon compared the development of AI to the Manhattan Project's work on the atomic bomb. Anthropic team lead Evan Hubinger validated the alarm, writing on X, “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade….We do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.” 

I can only imagine what Anthropic's lawyers thought of those Tweets. 

Samuel Marks, an Anthropic safety expert, said, “In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.” Even OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, sounded alarms in a blog post. He wrote, “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.”

Coxon warned that this is a “hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack." Although, if it saved us from sitting through the last hour of the movie Oppenheimer? I'd welcome the end of the world. Because that was some turgid stuff. Let's cast Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt in a film and make it almost unwatchable? Christopher Nolan sure is a boundary-breaker, huh?

Meet the Man Building Self-Driving Tractor Tech

Ouster CEO Angus Pacala is integrating self-driving tech into John Deere's tractors. The tech, LIDAR, is a remote sensing method using pulsing laser light to measure distances. 

Ouster’s technology provides the "eyesight of these tractors," Pacala told us. It creates a "3D superhuman view of the environment." "There's no better partner in smart agriculture than John Deere $DE ( ▼ 0.52% )," he added. The firm has been doing quiet work on self-driving tech for decades, he said. 

Farming isn't performed in a pristine lab. Fields present mud, dust, and unpredictable chaos. "You might have the family dog running into the orchard or your kids are playing among the trees," he said. LIDAR works in bad weather and the dark to help farms "maintain gaps in a labor force." 

The tech is working in real fields as you're reading this. Pacala sees self-driving tractors as part of a broader wave of "physical AI." Ouster, he said, will become a "unified sensing and perception platform," over the next few years. I’d recommend he reads the story above this one before he gets too carried away.

Song of the Day: Adéla, ‘Nicole Kidman’

Adéla’s track "Nicole Kidman" from her debut album PRIMA has elicited polarized reviews from critics. Some praise its chopped-sample beats and exploration of Hollywood glamour. Others criticize elements like the heavy horn instrumentation and “derivative” stylistic choices. So, it’s a lot like this newsletter.

States Curb Data Center Tax Breaks for Tech Firms

A decade ago, state lawmakers handed out generous tax breaks to tech giants for AI centers. Now, politicians are suffering from severe buyer's remorse and ripping up the contracts.

In Ohio, the tax breaks for companies like Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 1.78% ) , Meta $META ( ▲ 6.55% ) , and Alphabet $GOOGL ( ▼ 2.28% ) have exceeded $1.5 billion a year. “They seem to have more money than God and they’re able to build without the need for these types of incentives," said a state rep, explaining the rethink. 

The policy reversal has left tech lobbyists scrambling. Steve DelBianco, chief executive of NetChoice, said, “our industry has been knocked on our backfoot.” Even Donald Trump weighed in: “If you want to go through poverty, crime, and squalor, I would say don’t approve data centers," he said last week. 

Or, you know, go live in Gowanus, or something. 

Still, industry advisers remain unfazed by the populist pushback. Ian Boccaccio of tax firm Ryan dismissed the opposition, predicting, “This is a passing fad, and in two years we won’t have these issues with data centers."

Can you spell complacent? No, seriously, can you spell it for me? I appear to have overestimated my competence, a bit like Ian.

Free Yourself From Advertising Forever!

OpenAI Claims To Have Solved Math Holy Grail

For decades, mathematicians struggled with the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. I know you're as familiar with it as I am. But for the dummies in the room, it's a Millenium Prize Problem. That means it's about very hard math indeed. In this case, the problem is about the rules that describe how liquids and gases move. 

OpenAI tackled this centuries-old mystery by unleashing an army of 10,000 AI agents on it for 88 hours. They produced a 165-page proof demonstrating "finite-time blowup." That's where spinning fluid vortices speed up to infinity. As we all know. 

The result shocked even OpenAI’s internal team. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen woke up to frantic late-night calls in Tokyo. He told the WSJ, “I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night."

Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said, “Even a month ago, I don’t think we would have predicted that we would be talking about a Millennium Prize Problem.” 

Outside academics recognized the historic pivot point. Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers observed, “It’s undeniable that symbolically, it’s a big moment — and the next in a natural chain of big moments."

Meanwhile, h-AI-ters gonna h-AI-te. NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster questioned whether OpenAI's system had inappropriately accessed prior collaborative research sessions. And what about the $1 million bounty from the Clay Mathematics Institute for solving the problem? OpenAI is leaving the cash on the table. ”Our goal in releasing this result is to report on the substantial progress of our AI models,” the firm said. “We do not intend to claim the Millennium Prize."

Then again, the firm generates $40 billion in revenue every year. So, it's not like they need the cash. 

Should You Check Your 401(k) Today?

👎️ 

Nope.

Poll of the Day: Over-Infl-AI-ted

Poll of the Day: Emperor’s New iPhone

We asked: How stoked are you to pay $2,000 for a folding iPhone?

You answered:

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ I can't wait to surrender a month's rent to enjoy a permanent plastic crease form down the middle of my memes. (91)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ After five years of ruthlessly roasting every single Samsung user for carrying a glitchy makeup compact, I can finally pivot seamlessly and pretend Apple invented hinges. (53)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 If it survives my back pocket without snapping in half, that’s great. (133)
277 Votes via @beehiiv polls

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