LinkedIn finally pivots, crypto takes on the sphere

OpenAI is stealing your content, Amazon is now wikipedia, and robots took my job (and my apple)

Hello again.

As a reminder, I’m Chris Bakke, a Twitterer X-er, and I write about hiring, careers, investing, finance, web5, and tech.

Let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly from the past few days. As always, we’ll flip it so we don’t end the newsletter on a bad note.

The ugly

• LinkedIn pivots hard. I’ve got to give LinkedIn credit; they’re listening. After years of not shipping a single feature and paying their product managers $700K TC to do nothing, they’re launching something new. A streamlined hiring pipeline…Cutting down on spam… Literally any new job related feature that’s right! They’re pivoting to gaming. “We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations,” said a spokesperson. 

  Incredible innovation from the rest-and-vest capital of the west.

• OpenAI’s CTO hallucinates an answer. Things have been rough for OpenAI this year. This week, they got weird. Mira Murati, their CTO, was in an interview announcing their new text-to-video model named Sora. Out comes a basic question (what data was used to train Sora). Mira responded with “¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. Or more specifically, “I’m actually not sure about that.” Yikes. 

• We’re back to the clown part of the crypto cycle. Take a deep breath, and read this: “Solana-based memecoin DogWifHat (WIF) raised $650,000 to put a crypto meme on the Las Vegas Sphere.” Now exhale. What on earth happened to us? We used to be a country.

The bad

• McDonalds joins FAANG in one key area. McDonald’s suffered a worldwide tech outage this week, just like LinkedIn and Meta last week. When reached for comment, McDonald’s CTO didn’t understand the backlash, saying “I was told to make our company more like a technology company, and we had an outage just like Meta.” Everybody wants the tech stock revenue multiple, but no one wants to put in the reps like the golden arches.

• Amazon adds generative AI, forgets one key thing. Rough week for one of the 93,700 PMs at Amazon.com in charge of their product page. The good news: generative AI summarizes anything about a product and sends you the details. Bad news: there’s no limit to what you can ask for. But hey, now you can find out information about the 44th president from a product page on a home security camera.

The good

• Stripe keeps on trucking. Stripe, the only company keeping Silicon Valley sane, published its annual letter this week. The bad news? Still no IPO. Maybe because they’re newly valued at $50 billion, almost 50% off their last valuation in 2021. Pretty pathetic if you ask me; if I was CEO, things would be different. Worse. Different and worse. So much worse. Really bad. The good news is they passed $1 trillion in payment volume for the first time ever. After transaction fees, that’s about $547, but it’s still cool.

• Figure reveals new GPT-powered robot. Figure revealed the latest version of their humanoid robot that can handle basic tasks and talk to humans. So naturally, we started it off with menial labor. The demo shows the robot talking to a man, handing him an apple while cleaning up some trash. While this is cool to most, I’m pretty upset; I thought my job as an apple-hander was safe, but once again, AI has kneecapped another industry.

Okay, that’s all.

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