1/ In 2019 we made this video internally at ZUtA Labs. I've never shared it publicly. This week's reporting on OpenAI's first device made me dig it up. Watch it, read @markgurman's description of what's shipping - and let me tell you exactly what Sam Altman told me about this.

Amazon launched five new devices today and the interesting thing isn't a device - but a small tiny piece of hardware added to a device we already know. Today Amazon unveiled several devices, in an Amazon like style. A new Echo Dot that doubles as a smart home hub. An Echo Time, which is a bedside clock that senses your sleep. The Alexa Photo Frame, where AI picks your best photos. A thinner Echo Show with a better camera. And an interesting "new" device called "Echo Studio" which is a smart speaker, but now also has a camera. A camera on a speaker. We're used to having cameras on devices - but when we find them on a device, we most usually find a "screen" on the other side. Whether it's a front facing camera on a tablet/phone, or whether it's a camera in a Ring device for seeing who's on the other side of the door - the camera is one side, and we get with it "the other side" too to see what the camera sees. The camera is there for us to see. However, this is a speaker. This speaker has no screen. Not on it, and not necessarily connected to a device you own with a screen. Meaning, to spell it out, this camera isn’t there so we can look at someone, or even ourselves. It’s there so the device can look at us. Look at you. And Amazon isn’t hiding it. This smart speaker has a camera that recognizes faces, counts who’s in the room, lets Alexa see what you’re holding, oh, and it can also connect to a Fire TV for a video call (at some point in the future, as a side note - not the main use case). This camera is meant for recognizing and tracking. Show it a board game and it explains the rules. Show it a cereal box and it reorders it. Connecting this to what I've been writing about - this is the next step in how we talk to computers and creating the new OS and UI for the AI era. First we typed commands. Then we clicked icons, then we touched glass, then we talked. Each step removed a layer between us and the machine. Now the machine is learning to see. An AI OS doesn’t wait for you to open an app or even say a word. It sees the room, understands what's going on and acts. Screens were built for us to look at machines. Cameras are how machines look at us. What makes this an even bigger move, is that it's coming from Amazon. The company that owns Ring, the device that's main job is "to see", but also the company that in 2014 created the smart speaker category with the Echo. Everyone called it creepy to put a microphone that’s always listening in your home - to have an "always on" mic. Now, we're taking a step forward towards having a camera "always on" that sits in millions of kitchens. Amazon taught us to accept a device that hears us. Now it’s believes we’ll accept one that sees us. Will we? Twelve years ago we said no to the microphone, and then we said yes - and after Amazon, everyone followed. Will AI and its new UI bring us to a place where we accept an always-on camera in our living room...?

Israel’s elections are tomorrow, and we all get to vote. Actually, we don’t just “get” to vote. We “have” to. This is my elections post. By the amount of political talk and commentary, you’d think we have elections all the time. But this is actually the first time in 38 years that a government has served out its full term. After four years, Israel is going to the polls, and once again the whole world is watching a country you can barely find on the map. People always like to compare Israel’s size to “the size of New Jersey.” It’s a classic talking point, meant to show how a small country of about 10 million people can punch far above its weight and grab a seat at the main table. But I think that misses the point. The world doesn’t watch Israel because we’re small and impressive. It watches for a deeper reason, one that’s hard to put into words. With the elections here, I keep coming back to these powerful words Dr. @jordanbpeterson spoke in a talk here in Jerusalem a few years ago: “...as Jews in Israel, are you telling the greatest story ever told? Well, you decide that by how you live. And that decision will affect the world, because everyone looks here for one reason or another - it’s not so easy to understand. Everyone looks here to see, well, how are you actually doing under this tremendous assault of adversarial criticism, as this little, tiny people in the middle of no man’s land in some real sense, as a - what would you say - cardinal model of the nation-state and the city on the hill. You have a tremendous moral responsibility, like you have, perhaps, for your entire history, for reasons that are very difficult to understand, and I think it is true, in some real sense, that the fate of the world depends on the decisions of the people of Israel…” I grew up as a grandson of Holocaust survivors who survived with nothing but the pajamas on their bodies. I grew up in Israel in the ’80s and ’90s and lost too many friends to terror attacks. I grew up in the footsteps of Rashi, the Rambam and Rav Kook. I study Torah and Jewish history every single day and this passage echoes for me almost every day. Now, on the eve of the elections, its final line rings even stronger: “the fate of the world depends on the decisions of the people of Israel…” Whatever ballot you put in the box, it’s a privilege most people in history never had - to be part of this nation, to have a voice in its decisions, and to help write the next chapter of a story the whole world is watching. They’re not watching because we punch above our weight. We punch above our weight because we know our purpose and what we live for, and that’s why they’re watching. I’m proud to be part of this nation. And tomorrow, I’m proud to vote.

Bill, with much respect to you, and I’d love to explain this offline - but this talking point of “Smotrich and Ben Gvir”, is the same kind of talking point as “very fine people” by Trump that the media pushed. You woke up post 10/7. You’ll wake up to this too at some point.

Checked the comments - “good, I’m not the only that’s the first thing that came to mind” 😳

Getty Images just filed for bankruptcy. The writing was on the wall, even before ChatGPT existed. And the writing is still there. In September 2022, Getty banned AI-generated images from its platform. If you were around back then, you might have been playing with DALL-E. It was positioned as a tool for creating your own art, whatever that means. But in all honesty, it was pretty terrible: blurry faces, melted hands, six fingers. Or things that looked like fingers. That was before ChatGPT even existed. I posted at the time: “I guess the threat for stock photos is big... Who’s building the next Getty Images based on AI?” From a tool for creating art, the AI models themselves, and there are plenty of them by now, have become a self-serve Getty Images. Looking back, it all seems clear and obvious. That’s how hindsight works. But back then it didn’t look like a signal at all. It looked like a toy, a toy with no clear purpose. That’s how the future usually shows up. It’s blurry, a little embarrassing, easy to laugh at. The people who dismiss it judge it by what it is today. The people who see it ask what it becomes when it gets ten times better, then a hundred times. Getty looked at DALL-E and saw a legal problem. The answer was in the direction it was moving, not in how good it looked that day. So look at whatever seems clunky and half-broken around you right now, and ask the same question. I’ve written yesterday about Netflix, and before in general, about AI giving everyone their own Hollywood: no more shows made one-for-many, but shows adapted and personalized to each person’s taste, with live events as the only real communal viewing left. It’s hard to picture “your own Hollywood” today. But look at Getty: they had to give up the library of stock photos, and only thing left AI still can’t replace for them is photos of live events. So what’s the “terrible DALL-E” of 2026 that we’ll all be talking about in four years?

Writing was on the wall @YitzKemp

Did they actually just put all their chips on the Sixers?? 🧐

Netflix is crashing and slowly becoming irrelevant - and it’ll be eaten by the one thing it spearheaded. Netflix reports its Q3 earnings tonight, and I don't think Netflix its problem is competition. Last week Netflix cut about 1,000 jobs, the biggest layoff in its history. Its chief content officer is out. And in the first half of 2026, viewing on Netflix grew only 2%. A few weeks ago I wrote an article called "The Last Campfire", about a Hebrew concept called מדורת השבט, “the tribe's campfire”. It's a term to describe the shared story a society gathers around: the village fire. For many years, it used to be the culture, the tradition that connected us. Then in the industrial age, it became the morning paper, followed by radio and TV, to the point when in one night 106 million Americans watched the final episode of MAS*H together, at the same moment. Netflix is one of the companies that began to put that fire out. Netflix created the binge - watching shows on our own schedule, alone. But more than that, Netflix worked hard so that every person got their own homepage and their own recommendations, all driven by an algorithm built to keep you watching, as much as possible. It wasn’t about giving us something to share together - it was about maximizing engagement. Two people in the same house could watch Netflix every night and never see the same thing. Netflix wishes it could create a campfire - a show everyone talks about. But the tools and tech it built - drove the exact opposite - everyone having their own. No matter who you are and where you are in the world, you can find that one show that’s perfect for YOU. Doesn’t matter how different or obscure you are, from your own society that you live with - around you. And now, AI is of course taking it all the way. When a model can generate a show just for you - it can be shorter, or in your language, or even have the main character a redhead and don’t have the dog die - you don't need Netflix's library anymore. You don't need anyone's. The company that personalized the evening is about to be personalized out of it. Netflix seems to know it. The company that taught the world to binge-watch has gone back to releasing episodes weekly, and it's betting on live events. Those are exactly the things the old campfire had. Tonight's earnings will tell us how Netflix's business is doing. They won't bring back the evenings we used to share. And I doubt they’re even aware or care about the importance for a society to have a worthwhile campfire to gather around. Logging onto Netflix, browsing around and finding nothing to watch with my wife, has been my nightly routine for months. Maybe years. What's the last show you, your family and your closest friends all actually watched together?

Can Apple innovate? There’s a huge red flag that says they can't, and it’s not from its products. Some background. Back in July, Apple sued OpenAI, claiming former Apple engineers took confidential hardware files to help build OpenAI’s AI device. That’s the device Jony Ive is designing since OpenAI bought his startup io for $6.5B. Last week, OpenAI fired back. It claims an engineer who left Apple for OpenAI, then went back to Apple six months later, sent himself more than 100 files about OpenAI’s secret device on his last day, including device images and manufacturing data, and presented its product plans to Apple’s senior leadership. Two of the most valuable companies on earth are accusing each other of espionage over a device nobody has even seen yet. That tells you how big the prize is. I’ve written many times that killer software needs killer hardware, and whoever builds the device AI lives in takes the consumer crown Apple has held since the iPhone. Apple knows it, and so does OpenAI. But this is where the sign of a lack of innovation comes in. Jobs famously said that Apple has "always been shameless about stealing great ideas", quoting Picasso "Good artists copy, great artists steal". The Mac’s interface was born after a visit to Xerox PARC. Xerox, the behemoth, couldn’t find it within itself to turn it into a product and launch it. Apple, the up-and-coming underdog with a pirate flag flying over its building, moved fast and changed computers forever. Now the tables have turned. Apple is having a ridiculously hard time launching innovative products and moving fast, and OpenAI is breathing down its neck. Having nailed the software with ChatGPT over Siri, it “just” has to nail the hardware. And when an underdog moves fast and the market leader can’t seem to get its act together on innovation, the leader does what market leaders always do. It calls its lawyers. That’s the red flag. The company that grew up under a pirate flag is now the one guarding the gates, fighting in court over a category it hasn’t built yet. When Tim Cook handed Apple to John Ternus, I wrote that leading an underdog and leading a market leader are two completely different jobs. This month Ternus launched HomeView, a well-built device answering a question the market asked - ten years ago... And in the same month, Apple’s biggest AI headline came from a courtroom. There might be truth to the lawsuit, who knows. But history has taught us that courtrooms don’t win markets. Products do. So which way is Apple heading - toward groundbreaking, category-defining products, or toward gatekeeping and courtroom drama...?

You were surprised by @elonmusk's flying car? This is what he’s working on next. It's just as crazy. Back in 2017, SpaceX released an animation that looked like pure science fiction: a rocket taking passengers from London to New York in 29 minutes. Thinks about flying from Tel Aviv to anywhere in under an hour. Any city on Earth to any other city in under one hour. Most people watched it, smiled, and filed it under "Elon being Elon". It looked about as real as an AI video does today. Then in November 2024, someone posted that clip again, and Elon replied with four words: "This is now possible". After this weekend, when we all saw a Roadster drive off a ramp, flip and land on thrusters, exactly as Elon promised in 2019, when everyone laughed - I went back to these statements about suborbital point-to-point travel. The thing is, when I showed the Roadster video to people over the weekend, every single one said "that’s AI". That’s the world we live in now. AI has made the fake look so real that we’ve started doubting the real. But Elon keeps proving the opposite: what looks fake today is often just the real thing a few years early. The 2017 animation was a “fake video” too. It was a vision rendered on a computer, waiting for the engineering to catch up. Today, anyone can create a video like that with AI in minutes. Every crazy idea can look real on a screen. And maybe creating "fake videos" isn't only the danger of AI, but also its gift: we can finally see the impossible before we build it. Judging by Elon repeating the concept of a 30min flight from London to NYC different times over the years, he's probably working on it and well see this as reality very soon. Bending reality into animation with AI, or turning animations into reality with engineering - I wouldn't bet against Elon. Would you?xitter.cf/elonmusk/status/185421…

Sir, this is not the flex you think it is.

Can’t wait to hear the figures - if Apple ever releases them. I doubt they had a real significant amount of iPhone Duo even available.

"The new Roadster will actually do something like this" - @elonmusk Jan 9, 2019. How many people laughed and were skeptical back then? xitter.cf/elonmusk/status/108309…

I haven't felt this inspired and excited about technology for a very long time. I've already showed the video of the Roadster going off the ramp to a dozen people - and they all reacted with WHAT?? Is this real?? No way, it's AI! - every. single. one. I had that exact same feeling when I watched it the frist time. For a few seconds I felt something I’ve only felt a handful of times in my life - but why I love technology so much, and why I chose entrepreneurship as a way of life and building tech. It wasn’t about the specs, or whether a Roadster really “flies” if it only stays up for a few seconds. It was the feeling of watching something that was impossible a second ago become real in front of your eyes. Like magic - but real. Rarely do we get that feeling. But when it does, we remember it forever. It’s the feeling people had in 1969, watching a man step onto the moon. It’s the feeling people had when Steve Jobs showed the world a computer with icons and a mouse, and suddenly anyone could use one. It’s the feeling the iPhone reveal gave us in 2007, when Jobs scrolled a list with his finger with multitouch on the screen and the whole room gasped. It's the feeling I felt seeing the ZUtA Labs robot drive and move for the first time. It’s the feeling of typing your first question into ChatGPT and watching it answer like a person. And now a flying car. These moments are extremely rare. Most of technology moves in small steps, a little faster, a little cheaper, a little better. We get used to it so quickly that we forget to be amazed. Then every few years something breaks through, and for a moment we’re all kids again - witnessing this magic with "oh my God, it worked"! Do you know that feeling Im talking about? What was your reaction the first time you saw this car go off the ramp?

Showing the new Roadster's clip to people this morning - without telling them what they're about to see - and waiting for their reaction. Folks, this is the closest we'd get to getting a "moon landing" reaction in this generation.

Suddenly the conversation about merging Tesla and SpaceXai is making sense 😂

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" - Peter Thiel Now his close friend is bringing us both! @elonmusk 🤯

Amazing Elie!