Why You Might Already Own SpaceX Shares; Inside the Knicks' Owner's Surveillance Machine

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1:22Shortwave spends each episode answering one big one, like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill? And how can trash be good for the environment? Science isn't just for the PhDs of the world. It's for everyone, including those of us who didn't realize we love science. In under 15 minutes, Shortwave follows a question wherever it leads and brings you along for the ride. It's science, but not the kind you remember from school. It's surprising, playful, and full of wonder. News podcasts are great, but sometimes you want to experience the world in a different way. shortwave gets you out of your head and in touch with the world around you personally i loved hearing about janet jones horse trainer and neuroscientist teach me about horse and human relationships throughout history follow npr shortwave podcast and exercise your right to wonder when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work use indeed sponsor jobs it gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills certifications and more Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

2:33Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Hey, this is Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoe, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to uncannyvalleyatwired.com.

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3:17I'm a little tired, but it's because I got to see Lionel Messi play soccer last night. and score a goal on a penalty kick. That's really fun. Yeah. It was a friendly of Argentina versus Iceland. You'll never guess who won. I literally won't. No. No. It was Argentina. Got it. Okay. Is that an obvious thing? They're very good at soccer. Cool. That's so nice for them. Happy for them.

3:45Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. And I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. On today's show, we're discussing Apple's key releases from their annual developer conference, especially the company's long-awaited AI makeover for Siri. It's far from their first attempt, but is it going to stick this time? We're also taking an early look at the SpaceX IPO this week, which is slated to become the world's largest IPO of all time. We'll get into who is slated to benefit the most, Elon Musk, who is already the world's richest man, but on track to become even richer, and why you might find yourself among the investors without even realizing it.

4:25And in case you missed it, Wired reporters recently uncovered that Meta had silently embedded code that would power a face recognition system for its smart glasses in the Meta AI app on millions of people's phones. A day after we reported that story, Meta removed the code. We'll talk about how all that unfolded. And later in the show, for all of the basketball fans who've been glued to the NBA Finals, we have a special guest who will tell us about his investigation into Madison Square Garden's surveillance system.

5:00So, Zoe, another week that we get to talk about a developer conference. I know. Leah's away, and wow, have you taken advantage of that situation. Oh, yeah. No, yeah. I'm pushing it through. You were so thrilled about Google I.O. This week we've got WWDC. I will say, slightly more excited because Apple, as you and I have discussed many times, a bit of a laggard in the AI race. And I feel like this was their opportunity to tell the world what has changed since the last developer conference. For people who aren't familiar with WWDC, this is Apple's annual event where it gathers a bunch of developers from all over the world.

5:34And they announced upcoming releases and changes to their software for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac. This year, the biggest announcement, which, as we said, has been their biggest announcement the last couple of years, was around Siri. They're rebranding it as Siri AI. Siri was always an AI product, but now they're for real serious about it. And it's a ground-up rebuild, or so they're billing it, of Apple's voice assistant. This version of Siri will be powered by the next generation of Apple intelligence, which is Apple's personal AI system. All of this probably sounds familiar, and that's because we've heard it before.

6:08Apple's senior VP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, first announced Apple Intelligence back in 2024 at the WWDC keynote. We are embarking on a new journey to bring you intelligence that understands you. And there are already some really impressive chat tools out there that perform a vast array of tasks using world knowledge. But these tools know very little about you or your needs. And they would still not for some time. Again, in 2025, more promises for even more powerful AI, or really AI that was powerful at all, and hinting at a rebirth for Siri. We're continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal.

6:50We're making the generative models that power Apple intelligence more capable and more efficient. Zoe, this is so much like when you and I are both reporters and editors to a certain extent, but it's very familiar when you are in a situation where you're going to your editor and saying, I'm just going to do a little more reporting. I have made so much progress on this story, but I just need like another week or two for more calls. Just a tiny bit more time. Just a little more time. I will say, distracted by how smooth Craig's voice sounds, he must practice so much for that. Well, and this is an audio medium, but his hair is also famously, I think, the best hair in Silicon Valley.

7:28So Craig has a lot going for him. Yes. just not Siri capabilities. But the changes brought by both of these announcements were underwhelming to say the least. And to say the most, we should point out that about a month ago, Apple agreed to pay a settlement of$250 million for a class action lawsuit that basically said that Apple intelligence is not that intelligent. It's not living up to the promises that Apple made. So it's sort of a situation of, you know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you, fool me three times. Go to Google and make a deal so you can actually be intelligent.

8:02Exactly. So yeah, that's what has happened. Now Apple is going to rely largely on Google Gemini to help power Apple intelligence under the hood. Zoe, what do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. Like frontier models are really expensive and difficult to build. Google has already done it pretty successfully. I think if you look at, say enterprise coding models. Gemini is not the best of the best, but in a lot of other ways, it is quite cutting edge. And so, yeah, it makes sense. These two companies have worked together before to great effect for both of them. I was curious and have been kind of chatting with sources at both companies to see like, is this partnership long-term?

8:45Like has Apple kind of thrown in the towel permanently and just said like, this is fine, we'll rely on it. Or are they furiously working in the background to try and build up their frontier capabilities and eventually make Siri run on Apple technology start to finish. People are, as you might expect, being very tight-lipped about that. And they haven't really said what the long-term future of this product is going to be. I'll say two things that if you dig a little deeper, not that much deeper, but a little deeper into the documentation from the conference, two things really stand out to me about Apple's approach to AI in this snapshot moment.

9:18One is a sort of relentless focus on on-device AI. Yeah. So where Apple has been putting in time and work in a way that's showing publicly right now is finding ways to make as much of the AI capabilities as possible happen on your device so that it doesn't go back to Apple. No one knows what you're doing or that there is a privacy angle to it. The other thing that was interesting to me, also privacy, is that for the first time, and a reason why Google makes a good partner is that Apple has something called Private Cloud Compute. They rolled it out two years ago. It is a fancy, very technical way to be a privacy-preserving AI service.

10:02It has made a deal and worked with Google and NVIDIA to make Private Cloud Compute work on Google Cloud. So previously, all of these things happened on Apple Cloud. Now you've got the infrastructure to support as well, which I suspect Google was in a better position to provide than some of the other competitors that would have been on their radar. Yeah. So this was kind of my takeaway for what is their big value proposition. In addition to saying this version of Siri is actually going to work and be intelligent, they're also saying, in parentheses, unlike all the other companies, we are really focused on privacy.

10:35And I think in this moment where there's a lot of open questions around if you are a lawyer and you're speaking to a chatbot, are those conversations private or are they discoverable if there's a court case? And by the way, they are discoverable. Yes, they are. Okay, so that's not an open question. But like basically how private are your communications with chatbots? And the reason that this is so critical is people aren't just having work conversations. They're using the same technology to kind of help with their homework as they are to have very private, you know, mental health conversations or what have you.

11:07And so this idea that, you know, if you're using an Apple device, you can trust a little more that it's just staying on your device. It's not bouncing around to different places. It can't be intercepted as easily. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I will say like Apple has gotten, this is a stand that they have taken again and again. And I think that while it has gotten them in some hot water, for example, when they refused to put a backdoor in an iPhone that would have allowed like the FBI to hack into the phone of someone who had committed a very serious crime. They've kind of stuck to their guns overall and been like, no, privacy is our core differentiator.

11:44And I will say, having talked to a lot of people at that company, they really seem to live it and believe it there, even though there are clearly trade-offs at times. Yeah, it's definitely predated AI, the privacy focus. And it also, So it plays to their strengths in other ways too, or rather plays to their weaknesses in other ways. Like Siri AI is going to be better. Our reporters who have played with it a little bit have indicated, yeah, it can do things now. Like you can actually have a back and forth conversation with it. It can pull context from your emails and messages and photos and sort of know more about you.

12:18Again, all within the context of your device. But it's really table stakes stuff, right? Right. It's Siri's going from being annoying and bad to probably being basically usable. So you need something else in there. Exactly. I was kind of curious about this decision to just stick with the Siri branding, because I feel like Siri has been around for so long. It has such a bad reputation at this point of just being not that useful. They have tried now multiple times to insert AI into it and been completely mocked and derided for their failures there. I was like, at this point, I might just start fresh.

12:53Say we have a completely new assistant. It's got a new name. But no, they're sticking with the branding. Well, I wonder, too, how much they need Siri AI to be that. Like, to my mind, if I'm Apple, which I'm not, but I think about this as the iPhone is going to be the AI device. So we just need an experience that is good enough for people who want the default. If you want to use OpenAI, if you want to use ChatGPT, you've got your iPhone. You're going to do that on your iPhone, regardless of what device Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are cooking up. They own the main portal through which you're going to experience these things no matter what.

13:31Yeah. For now. For now. For now. Okay, so we're going to see these changes roll out in the United States. They're not going to roll out in Europe or in China. Is that right? That's right. And that's happened before, either from delays or not rolling out at all, just because the European regulatory environment is a lot more strict than it is in the U.S. There are a few laws in there. There's the Digital Markets Act, which requires large tech companies to make their products interoperable, which means they have to be able to work with other companies' products. Apple doesn't love doing that. An EU spokesperson gave their perspective this week to reporters.

14:04The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is apples and apples only. because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU. What Apple is, however, not allowed to do, just like any other gatekeeper, is to close the market. It is not for them to decide who gets to innovate in Europe, and it's not for them to choose which AI tools our EU citizens get to use or not. I have one thing to say, which is I think Europe needs to write better regulations. I have talked to many people who do legitimately feel like these are prohibitive to innovation and honestly just very confusing.

14:47Yeah. It says a lot that Apple is just like, you know what? Fine. Yeah. We're out. Yeah. You know, like that's a pretty high bar. You can have an inferior product. Moving on to the tech reporting Super Bowl, which is on Friday. SpaceX is officially going public. Congratulations to all the newly minted billionaires. Thank you. Just kidding. We're not among them, but many people are, and we will get into that. It is slated to become the largest IPO in history. It set its price at$135 a share, which would value the company at roughly$1.7 trillion. Yeah. That is trillion. Yes. With a T and an R. So a lot of companies go public every single year, but SpaceX's debut marks the entrance of AI companies hitting the public markets.

15:41Anthropic is slated to go public, as is OpenAI. They've both confidentially filed their S1s and then announced those confidential filings very, very publicly. And so this is the first of a series of AI firms going public in a way that's going to really change the industry and also potentially the economy. It is a moment that we're going to look back on as being, oh, this is the moment that launched these AI companies into the stratosphere, in SpaceX's case, literally. Or this was the very height of the bubble that we've all been waiting to burst. And I don't know, Zoe, which is it? I honestly, it still feels like I'm not trying to hedge too much.

16:22It does genuinely feel like it could go either way. Yeah, I mean, it could go a lot of different ways. We don't know how the IPO is going to be received. So far, demand seems really, really strong. Obviously, if the IPO unexpectedly flops, it could be pretty bad for the entire market. It does seem like it is going to benefit Elon Musk quite a lot. He's already the world's richest man, net worth around$700 billion. But he stands to earn quite a lot more due to his 42 % stake in the company. and he could become the world's first trillionaire. We're saying that word quite a lot if the IPO goes well.

17:03One other thing that I thought was really interesting is that SpaceX reserved an unusually high amount of the stock for retail investors, 30%. I thought this was interesting for a couple of reasons, one of which was just that Tesla is one of the most widely held retail stocks on Robinhood and platforms like that. And I think that it has allowed Elon Musk to keep the company, like the company does pretty well, regardless of whether the kind of underlying business fundamentals are going exceptionally well because he has this very loyal fan base that is keeping the stock price really, really high.

17:39And so even when there's business issues, Tesla, you know, continues to, at least in the United States, perform. I think it's signaling from the jump, hey, we're very open to being a meme stock also. Like we will be a real stock, But we'll also be a meme stock. So come on in. And it is sort of like building on this sort of cult of personality and trading on that, which I think it increasingly is going to have to. And we've talked about this before, but I'll keep talking about it forever. that SpaceX was such an interesting company with good fundamentals and a real business model behind it and promising revenue growth.

18:18And then it absorbed XAI and became a much less stable company. I actually think that this is such an interesting part of assessing Elon Musk as a business person because obviously as someone who reported on his Twitter takeover, now X, for quite a while, it was so easy to look at that company and be like, advertising is way down. This company is entirely dependent on advertising. Like he has made very obvious mess ups in terms of the business. Like the business did not appear to be going well. But you can't really assess Elon Musk as the owner of a single company because he actually has an empire.

18:56So X isn't going well, merge it with XAI. Those companies are spending a lot of money and not making as much. Well, then SpaceX will buy them. And suddenly you're looking at a very different company. And even on a more granular level than that, You can't sell any Cybertrucks? Okay. SpaceX will buy Cybertrucks. It is this sort of, I would say a shell game, but a shell game involves hiding the ball. It's all out in the open. He's just doing it. But it's this really circular. And I'd say too, in terms of that sort of circular logic of everything being interconnected within his own companies, he has now made SpaceX a nexus for other AI companies as well by selling compute.

19:32Compute. Now we're looking at a point where if SpaceX goes down at some point, it's going to hit Anthropic and Google and other people who have bought into spending billions of dollars on compute through its Colossus data center as well. So it's a fascinating tapestry, Zoe, that he's woven. How about that? It is a fascinating tapestry. But at the top, we kind of mentioned that a lot of people could end up owning a little slice of SpaceX stock, whether or not they want to. And that is because the NASDAQ 100 recently relaxed its rules to make it easier and faster for SpaceX to be included, which forces funds that track the index to invest in SpaceX practically overnight.

20:12So this is now kind of integrated in vast parts of the economy that people might not even necessarily know about. Yeah, it's going to be in your 401k. If you have a 401k, all these places they can't really control. I hope that there's not a big bubble burst systemic failure because if there is, again, it would take down NVIDIA, which is already such a huge portion of the stock market. Google. Basically, the systemic risks are already there. whether you're in SpaceX or not. Before we go to break, there's one more story that's been unfolding this past week that we'd like to talk about, and it directly involves Wired in a good way.

20:51Last week, Wired reporters Dhruv Marotra and Del Cameron reported that Meta quietly embedded an unreleased facial recognition system into the Meta AI app, which is installed in over 50 million devices and is what you use to control Meta Ray-Ban and other smart classes with Meta AI. they never publicly activated it, but they also never disclosed it. Drew Vendell found it by looking at the code in the app. We called Meta AI, and that's when they confirmed that this code had been discreetly added over multiple updates this year. We'll get into more details about how it works, but here's the thing.

21:23One day after we published this piece, Meta deleted nearly all the code from the app. Impact journalism. They won't say why. They won't say whether it'll come back. But that is impact journalism. So great job, Drew Vendell and everyone else who worked on this story. The system was designed, and again, this is based on going through the code that was sitting right there in the app, designed to capture faces through Ray-Ban smart glasses, convert them into biometric face prints. Face print is a word that I wish we didn't have to use just in general. I know, same. And then match them against a local database on the user's device.

21:56So in other words, it would clock people's faces and put them into a database and just let it sit there on device. If it couldn't identify a face, it would just keep it there for future processing, which is to say, keep it in there until if and when you could actually assign a name to it. So really just capturing everyone's faces that you see. Oh my God. Publicly, Metta has said this is something that they're thinking through. Metta has acknowledged that face recognition is a thing that they are interested in potentially doing. They said they would first take a very thoughtful approach, quote unquote, before they did it.

22:31But while they're saying that publicly, the New York Times has reported on internal memos that show that Meta had planned to time the rollout for a, quote, dynamic political environment, waiting until people would be too distracted with other stuff going on to give meaningful pushback to face recognition in their glasses. Apple said, we care about privacy. Meta said, how about this? How about not? Yeah, how about not? I mean, this is really concerning to me for a few reasons, but the pushback that Meta seemed to give to this article was we haven't enabled the system yet, which seems like both acknowledging the reporting and completely beside the point.

23:12You are putting this code on these devices so that you can turn it on at any moment. You can like flip a switch and suddenly the glasses have facial recognition in them. Well, and tied to that, the direct response we got from Meta was we had Meta's VP of communications, Andy Stone, said at first that the feature does not exist. CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the reporting was, quote, absolutely dishonest. And then within 24 to 36 hours of those comments, Meta pushed an update that got rid of all the code. So if the feature didn't exist and if it was absolutely dishonest, why then remove it? I think that that language is actually very, very sneaky.

23:56I think saying like the feature doesn't exist is basically trying to get around that. But like the code was there, but they haven't designed a fully fleshed out feature to go along with it. You know what I mean? It's sort of like if you have a jack in the box, but you haven't wound the arm yet, saying the little guy inside does not exist. I love your metaphors. No one has. Thank you so much. They are strained. They are convoluted. Yeah, yeah. Meta's interest, like, there's an obvious interest for meta incorporating a feature like this. You know, I think I've heard some meta people say, look, this is for accessibility.

24:32A lot of people have, you know, vision problems or whatever other issues that this could potentially help with. I'll buy that there's a use case there. But I think the issue is you can't really push it just for those people. You know what I mean? You have to sort of push it to everybody. And the thing with face recognition glasses is you can't really opt out, right? Like you can't opt out of someone capturing your face and storing it on their glasses. Yeah. I mean, I will say this about Meta. The world that Meta is creating is just quite simply not the world that I want to live in. I do not think that their products reflect a vision of the future that feels exciting or inspiring to me versus companies where you are not fundamentally the product.