Can Hollywood Still Criticize Big Tech?

Hello World,

Good news! The official trailer for the film adaptation of Klara and the Sun just dropped. Directed by Taika Waititi, the movie will be landing in theaters this October, with Jenna Ortega playing Klara.

If you haven’t had the chance to read the book (which you totally should), the story follows an Artificial Friend named Klara who was purchased to keep a sick and lonely teenager named Josie company. It is beautifully written, the film has big shoes to fill!!!

We’ve been watching sci-fi about lonely machines and the founders behind the world’s biggest companies for decades. Now, tech is not only a hot topic, but some of the largest companies in the space are increasingly putting capital and resources behind the film industry. Let’s take a peek at what that looks like.

Amazon & OpenAI:

• A few days ago Amazon MGM dropped Luca Guadagnino’s nearly finished Artificial, a Social Network-style drama about Sam Altman’s 2023 firing and rehiring at OpenAI, with Andrew Garfield as Altman, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. (People who have seen it say Altman and Musk come off as the two characters you would like the least LOL)

• Amazon is saying that the film would be “better served” at another studio... HOWEVER, a few months earlier, it had put $50 billion into OpenAI as a strategic partner, which leaves it holding both the money and the platform. Amazon can bury a movie by cutting the check or by killing the release, and next to a partner that size, the movie is the cheap thing to give up.

Google & A24:

• Google injected $75 million into A24, its first stake in a movie studio ever, to build AI filmmaking tools with DeepMind. The deal reportedly keeps Google out of A24’s library and data, and A24 is saying the goal is to help filmmakers and not replace them. In this case, the money is moving upstream into the tools and the studio itself, where it stops being about any single film.

• DeepMind has collaborated on videos in the past, including one that made it to Tribeca Film Festival about co-founder Demis Demis Hassabis. I’m interested to see what comes of this, looks like they value creative direction.

Let’s hope Hollywood can still take a swing at Big Tech now that they are buddy-buddy. It will become increasingly hard to create movies that criticize tech, because the companies that are being used as examples are the ones backing the industry.

When Klara and the Sun comes out, I think we should all go see it together and break it down after :) There are more than a thousand of you here (THANK YOU) and plenty of you clearly have opinions about tech, culture, AI, and power.

Big Tech funding and platforming film isn’t slowing down, which is why it’s worth hashing out together. No single industry or company should be the only voice in the room, and that’s part of why I want to do this with all of you!

Maybe we do something even sooner and start a book club, an article club, a culture club, whatever we want to call it. We can pick a book, a long essay, a podcast, or a movie, talk it out in the chat, and turn some of them into meetups or something.

A few options to start.

Books:

1. The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. Two ex-game developers spend years raising digital creatures and run straight into the emotional and ethical mess of building something that might be conscious.

2. Annie Bot by Sierra Greer. A lifelike robot built to be the perfect girlfriend starts questioning her relationship, her autonomy, and what it means to want something for herself.

3. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, if enough of you haven’t read it!

Podcasts (long/series):

1. PODCAST: How Google Rebuilt for the AI Era (Acquired)

   1. There are two other parts for this that lay out the origin story that we can listen to

2. PODCAST: Meta and the battle for smart glasses part 1, 2, and 3 (Business Wars)

   1. This is the newest/most relevant

3. PODCAST: Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 (Search Engine)

   1. This is older, but still good IMO

Let me know if you’d be interested!

Tech News

Internal Updates

• OpenAI is testing “Bidi 1,” a voice model designed to talk over you, drop little “okay” acknowledgments when you pause, and reverse course mid-task. Leaked docs describe an “interruption classifier” that keeps audio on-device until it decides you’ve actually cut in, then ships encrypted audio to the cloud. (TestingCatalog)

• Mark Zuckerberg has directed Meta to build a Polymarket-style prediction market, internally called “Arena,” where users bet on events with video-game points instead of real money. It would run independent of Meta’s apps, which could funnel users in. Polymarket and Kalshi are both over five years old and already own the category. (TechCrunch)

Creatives & AI

• KC Green, who drew the “This Is Fine” dog calmly sitting in a burning room, settled fast with AI startup Artisan after it ran subway and bus ads putting his cartoon in flames to sell its AI assistant. Green had told followers to vandalize the ads on sight; Artisan pulled them in New York and San Francisco, and Green deleted his original post.(TechCrunch)

• Getty Images signed a deal to surface its licensed photos inside ChatGPT search, and the stock jumped almost 150% in premarket trading. This is the same Getty that banned all AI-generated images from its library back in 2022. CEO Craig Peters now frames licensed visuals as the thing that makes AI search “more trustworthy.” (Engadget)

Surveillance & Safety

• Anthropic updated its privacy policy so that starting July 8, Claude can ask users to upload a government ID plus a selfie photo or video, which gets converted into a face geometry template, the kind of biometric data Illinois treats as legally protected. The company frames it as an anti-fraud appeals process, with verification run through SF startup Persona. Convenient timing, given Anthropic is reportedly inching toward a public offering and trying to stay on the Trump administration’s good side over AI access! (TechCrunch)

• Meta paused a program that recorded keystrokes, mouse activity, and screen content from US employees to train AI agents, after a permissions slip let every employee see the surveillance data. The tool could pull from more than 200 apps and capture emails and DMs sent to US staff. Building a tool to watch your workers and then accidentally letting all your workers watch it is the most 2026 sentence imaginable. (The Information)

Money Moves

• A social-first trading app named Fomo, where you discover assets, follow traders, and copy their trades across blockchains from one account, raised a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures with Union Square Ventures and Benchmark. Naming a retail investing product after the exact psychological trap that wrecks retail investors is either honest or a warning label. (AlleyWatch)

  

  Fomo

• Peregrine, founded by ex-Palantir employees, raised $250 million at a $6.8 billion valuation to make police records, 911 logs, and permit databases searchable in real time. It now serves more than 400 agencies covering 125 million people and will run security for eight of the eleven 2026 World Cup host cities. Its valuation nearly tripled in 15 months. (Fortune)

• NYC: Micah Lasher won the Democratic primary in New York’s 12th, beating Assemblyman Alex Bores after the race turned into a roughly $20 million proxy war over AI regulation. Bores wrote the RAISE Act, which makes AI firms publish their safety protocols and report incidents, so Leading the Future, a super PAC funded by OpenAI leaders and aligned VCs, spent at least $8 million to sink him while an Anthropic-backed PAC spent nearly $7 million to save him. (CNBC)