Happy Wednesday.
The current things in tech and business are Snapchat’s new AR glasses and Taste Labs, whose mission is to end AI slop.
Today’s LineupNewcomer Founder & Author Eric Newcomer at 11:30 AM
Graphite Co-Founder & CEO Merrill Lutsky at 12:00 PM
M13 Co-Founder Carter Reum at 12:10 PM
Amazon Web Services VP, AWS Agentic AI Swami Sivasubramanian at 12:35 PM
Raven Resonance Founder, CTO, & CEO Thomas Suarez at 12:50 PM
Bloomberg Managing Editor Mark Gurman at 1:05 PM
Crosby Co-Founder & CEO Ryan Daniels at 1:35 PM
Bland Founder Isaiah Granet at 1:45 PM
The Snap Spectacle
Snapchat showed off SPECS, its new augmented reality glasses, at Augmented World Expo 2026 yesterday. The features are a mix of things you’d want in a daily-driver pair of glasses you’d have on all the time, everywhere (maps HUD, reviews of restaurants in your visual field), prosumer features like the ability to collaborate on shared virtual whiteboards, and more general, AI-powered assistant stuff like measuring distances for you so you don’t have to use a tape measure.
The broad mix of features, combined with the facts that SPECS are fairly pricey ($2,195) and that they look painful to wear (notice in the image above that the SPECS are literally crushing CEO Evan Spiegel’s ears), does make it hard to understand what the killer app for this product is.
Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really going to drop over $2K so they put on their SPECs just when they need to see how many yards they are from the pin? Then remove them, put them back in their case, and put the case back in the golf bag for every hole? You can buy rangefinders for around $150, and they’re not fragile.
Are DIYers going to drop this much money just so they have easy-to-access tips for their home projects? Are startups going to be willing to drop $2K for every employee who wants to collaborate in AR?
All these examples are touted on Snap’s SPECS page as things you can do with the glasses. And the features do seem super cool. It’s just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a $2K price tag, especially because they look painful to wear. — Brandon
Taste Labs puts the timeline in turmoil
Yesterday former Exa AI Labs founding team member Thais Castello Branco introduced her startup Taste Labs, whose mission is to “end AI slop.”
“This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design,” her post says. More specifically, Taste says they’re working with frontier AI labs to improve their models along taste lines through data labeling, and app layer startups to improve the aesthetics of their products.
Thais’ post immediately went viral, generating a ton of opinions on X and getting over a million views in 24 hours. Peoples’ main complaint is basically that you can’t program taste, but the steelman is that AI aesthetic output can be improved, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for a startup to try to capitalize on that opportunity. — Brandon
Clip Spotlight: Luke Burgis muses on whether AI is creating a real-life ‘Pluribus’Cluny Institute’s Luke Burgis on yesterday’s show: “I wonder if AI is contributing to contagion and mimesis in a way we don’t fully understand.”
“Tim Ferriss was talking about how he had an 80% drop in sales of his books. And it coincided with 2022, when ChatGPT came out.”
“He was asking why somebody would read prescriptive, how-to nonfiction, when they can go to ChatGPT and say, ‘Here’s my life, here are all the things that are going on for me. What should I do? And by the way, summarize Tim Ferriss’ book, but make it highly personalized for me.’”
“Why would you read the book? You get instantaneous, highly personalized advice. I wonder, though, if that is actually going to lead to a form of contagion that we don’t understand.”
“There’s something happening in the AI — even the engineers don’t fully understand what it’s doing — and it’s giving us back something that feels really personalized to us. But the inputs are obviously being drawn by what LLMs and other people are putting into it.”
“I wonder if we’re entering a Pluribus (the Apple show) kind of situation, where the AI, while seeming highly personalized, is actually contributing to some form of social contagion.”
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KXAN: Joshua Baer, godfather of Austin’s startup scene, dies in plane crash
Odyssey ML raises $310M Series B at a $1.45B valuation led by Natural Capital
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FT: Jeff Bezos backs UK start-up CuspAI in $400mn funding round
Axios: PayPal Ventures to wind down
FT: Huawei’s big comeback tests limits of US chip controls
Legal tech startup Crosby launches Crosby Intelligence
The Wrap: Netflix Isn’t Interested in Lionsgate Despite Takeover Speculation
Bloomberg: VSCO Challenges Adobe With New App and a $500 Plan for Pros
The Times: The rise of social media ‘tasteslop’ — and how to avoid it
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