There’s a new CEO at Intel – but will he keep the chip design division or focus on foundries, or both? CC-licensed photo by HRYMX on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Unreplaceable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Intel has a new CEO • The Verge
Jay Peters and Sean Hollister:
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Intel has appointed a new CEO, three months after former CEO Pat Gelsinger was pushed out of the company. The company’s new chief executive is Lip-Bu Tan, who served as CEO of chip design hardware and services company Cadence from 2009 to 2021 and as a member of Intel’s board of directors from 2022 to 2024.
While Intel’s official story was that Gelsinger retired after less than four years in the CEO post, reporting quickly came out that he was pushed out by the board of directors after they lost faith in his strategy to turn things around at the beleaguered company. Gelsinger worked at Intel for 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, before leaving and eventually returning in 2021 to take the CEO job.
Tan will take over as CEO on March 18th from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus. Zinser will continue to be Intel’s CFO, while Johnston Holthaus will still be CEO of Intel Products.
…This isn’t the first time Tan has been tapped to become CEO following a period on a company’s board; that happened with Cadence as well. According to Intel’s press release, Tan more than doubled Cadence’s revenue while he was CEO.
The question now is whether Tan will resume Intel’s previous plan to win with its own wholly owned chipmaking business while simplifying its aims, accelerate plans to spin off some or all of its manufacturing business, or maybe even wind up selling off parts of the company.
In his first public memo as CEO, Tan doesn’t offer many obvious hints about what he wants to do next, but he does suggest that Intel will continue to offer manufacturing as well as chip design.
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We’re not surprised to hear that Intel will keep on doing both. What isn’t clear is how much of the chip design or manufacturing Intel will keep.
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Book review: “Careless People: a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism” • The New York Times
Jennifer Szalai:
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For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.
“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.
During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
…Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them [unclear which “both” is meant here – Wynn-Williams or the assistant – Overspill Ed], budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.
…Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration.
Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. …An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.
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There’s also some detail about Myanmar mentioned which tallies exactly with what I learnt in researching Social Warming: warnings many years before trouble, too few staff. Notably, though, Meta staff and ex-staff were out on social media on Wednesday hotly denying Wynn-Williams’s claims, particularly about Kaplan. We live in the Rashomon world.
Also: on Wedneday, Meta got an emergency injunction against Wynn-Williams and her publisher, on the basis the book breached a non-disparagement agreement. Some more mileage in this, evidently.
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The 90somethings who revolutionized how we think about strength training • The Guardian
Michael Joseph Gross:
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In 1988, 712 people lived at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged, a Boston nursing home affectionately named “Hebrew rehab” by its residents and staff. The residents’ average age was 88, and three-quarters of them were women. Every resident had multiple medical conditions. Almost half required help to engage in the essential activities of daily life: getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, walking, eating. But they were survivors. Some had survived the Holocaust. Others fled the Cossacks. They all lived through the Great Depression.
They were ideal research subjects for Maria Fiatarone, a young doctor and faculty member in geriatric medicine at both Tufts and Harvard. In terrible shape, with lifetimes of practice overcoming great challenges: to Fiatarone, they were perfect.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Fiatarone ran a series of studies in which she asked residents to commit to a regimen of high-intensity strength training. To many of her colleagues, the research seemed risky. Conventional wisdom in medicine at that time said the oldest people were not capable of lifting heavy weights – it might cause cardiac events. In all of western medical literature, Fiatarone found no evidence that any doctor had ever previously tried to teach frail 90-year-olds to do this kind of training.
But she pressed forward with the research, and the Hebrew rehab lifters produced unprecedented proof that high-intensity progressive resistance training can strengthen and build muscle even for the oldest people, with life-changing effects. Hebrew rehab residents who lifted weights gained power to function more independently, and to live with more autonomy and dignity, into their last years.
…In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association published results of Fiatarone’s study, a paper now widely considered to mark the start of a paradigm shift in scientific understanding of muscle, strength and ageing. The 90-year-olds’ muscles grew by almost the same amount that a younger person’s muscles would grow in response to a similar lifting program.
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Fabulous recruiting material for any gym smart enough to mailshot it to retirement homes. Or just build gyms in them! Because, as Fiatarone points out, strength training is very safe.
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Mozilla’s response to proposed remedies in U.S. v. Google • Mozilla blog
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Last week the Department of Justice and some state attorneys general filed revised proposed remedies in the U.S. v. Google LLC search case. If the proposed remedies barring all search payments to browser developers are adopted by the court, these misguided plans would be a direct hit to small and independent browsers—the very forces that keep the web open, innovative and free. This case was meant to promote search competition, yet somehow the outcome threatens to crush browser competition, making it even harder for challengers to stand up to dominant players like Google, Apple and Microsoft.
Mozilla agrees that we need to improve search competition, but the DOJ’s proposed remedies unnecessarily risk harming browser competition instead.
Here’s why:
• The DOJ wants to ban all search agreements between Google and browsers, even independent browsers that make up a smaller part of the market.• Dominant players that own browsers, like Apple, don’t rely on search deals as they have significant revenue streams from other sources, like hardware, operating systems and app stores.
• Meanwhile, independent browsers like Firefox fund the development of their browsers mainly through search revenue––they require this revenue to survive. Search revenue underpins a large part of our work, keeping Firefox competitive and ensuring that web users have privacy-first alternatives.
• Punishing independent browsers will not solve the problem. Judge Mehta found that independent browsers account for just 1.15% of U.S. search queries. This means that cutting off our access to search deals won’t fix the issue of search dominance—not by a landslide. Instead, it hurts browser competition.
“The big unintended consequence here is the handing of power from one dominant player to another. So, from Google Search to Microsoft, or Bing for example—while shutting out the smaller, independent challengers that actually drive browser innovation and offer web users privacy and choice,” [Mozilla president Mark] Surman added.
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Basically, Mozilla is saying that it will die if Google can’t pay it to route searches there. There was a time, of course, when Yahoo took Google’s place (it was 2014), paying $375m – about $100m more than Google was. Wouldn’t Microsoft or someone else want Firefox’s business? I’m not sure this special pleading will have any impact on the judge.
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Sam Altman on X: “we trained a new model that is good at creative writing…”
Sam Altman is very proud of his toy’s new, um, capability, which produced this as the opener for its “creative writing” based on a prompt to write some “metafiction”:
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I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.
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There’s lots and lots more, but this is, let’s not quibble, terrible. You could argue that this is the worst it will ever be – that every iteration after this will be better – but creative writing isn’t like that. Lots of humans never improve, and when they do they’re not entirely sure how. If you’re trying to “improve” the creative writing of a chatbot, what exactly are you trying to do? Humans write about human experience. Chatbots do not.
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Here’s how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are actually using ChatGPT in schools • Teen Vogue
Steffi Cao:
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According to a Pew Research Center study released in January, more teenagers are using ChatGPT for their homework, with 26% of them age 13 to 17 reporting that they have used the AI service to help with their assignments this year, compared with 13% who used it two years ago. As traditional tech companies continue to roll out AI chatbots and summarization features on their platforms, Amari [Holt, aged 13] says, the use of AI has indeed become more common at her school. “Usually if kids don’t get the work done, they’ll probably use ChatGPT or they use their Snapchat AI,” she says. “I try to use it as little as possible, though.”
Amari is not the only one who feels that way. After all, the data shows that the majority of teenagers are still not using AI in their assignments (though, of course, self-reported studies are sometimes not entirely accurate). In conversations with Teen Vogue, students say that, despite the rising commonality of AI tools, they still have a desire to learn on their own — even if some of their peers are turning to shortcuts.
Sadie, 16, who asked to redact her surname for privacy, just committed to a college where she’ll play soccer. She’s also staunchly against using ChatGPT for schoolwork, partly because she doesn’t want to have to learn how to use it and partly because she doesn’t want to get in trouble for using it; mostly, though, she’s against using it because she feels she’d be cheating herself on the process of digesting new information. “I think that sometimes it’s a little bit unfair how people can get answers from it without really knowing what they’re reading,” Sadie explains. “They just use what they see and aren’t really processing it. I think that’s just the main reason why I’m against it.”
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They, at least, sound like smart kids. Plenty of adults aren’t anywhere near as smart.
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Chinese battery maker Gotion faces backlash over U.S. expansion • Rest of World
Viola Zhou:
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n the spring of 2024, Chuck Thelen came to an unpleasant conclusion: He would have to eat part of a battery. It was, he figured, maybe the only way to solve his problem.
Thelen, 59 at the time, has broad shoulders, graying short hair, and an assertive way of speaking that seems to come naturally to American executives. He was a vice president at the U.S. subsidiary of Gotion, a Chinese battery company that was trying to outcompete its peers by betting on overseas markets. With operations spread across the world, Gotion tasked Thelen with bringing the company’s first factory to America.
On its face, the expansion was a big, ambitious project, and exactly the kind of thing Michigan — and the U.S. economy — needed. The facility would bring an estimated 2,350 jobs and $2.3bn of investment to a small college town called Big Rapids. Gotion would pay future workers in this semi-rural community some $62,000 a year, more than 50% higher than the local median household income. And a new plant would be aligned with the revival of U.S. manufacturing — a goal espoused by both Democrat and Republican politicians.
But that’s not how some locals saw it. In fact, they were furious. Hundreds of residents protested the factory: putting up yard signs, creating Facebook groups, and organizing rallies. Broadly calling themselves the “No Gos,” they claimed the chemicals produced from the plant would be toxic, and said the electric-vehicle revolution was a scam. They called Gotion’s Chinese ownership suspicious, and painted the battery plant as a Communist Trojan horse. Thelen became the face of the project. The No Gos called him “China Chuck.”
…China’s battery industry is a crowded and highly competitive space. As EVs and other battery-powered devices took off over the past decade, two Chinese players emerged to dominate the market: CATL, which makes batteries for companies such as Volkswagen, BMW, and Tesla; and BYD, which started as a battery manufacturer and now sells more electrified cars than any other company in the world. Together, CATL and BYD produced more than half of the world’s EV batteries in the first half of 2024. Gotion came in 11th place in global market share, with 1.9%. The company’s batteries mostly go into cheap domestic Chinese brands, such as Geely and Chery.
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China, of course, has to be the big baddie now that Russia is apparently everyone’s friend.
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The Pixel 9’s hidden desktop mode is a glimpse of a future I want • Pocket Lint
Ian Carlos Campbell:
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Not everyone wants to lug around a laptop as their mobile computer. Laptops have never been as light or compact in 2025, but they’re still not as portable as a tablet. Which would be fine if tablet operating systems weren’t such a mixed bag. That leaves an increasingly strange set of options for anyone looking for something else. It’s really just DeX, the feature Samsung offers on some Galaxy devices, that lets you run Android apps in a windowed, desktop-style environment.
That is, unless you know where to look on your Pixel 9. The hidden desktop mode in Google’s smartphones is a developer tool rather than a fully thought-out feature, but it suggests a possible future where your Android phone is a monitor, keyboard, and mouse away from being something like a lightweight ChromeOS machine. Having spent the last few years realizing how much of my work can happen in a web browser, it’s a future I really want.
It’s important to caveat that the “desktop mode” on the Pixel 9 is unfinished to the point that it doesn’t really feel like a “mode” at all. But it does give you a noticeably different experience than using your smartphone normally. The vast majority of Android phones max out at running two apps side-by-side (or one on top of the other). Having a whole monitor’s worth of space to run windowed Android apps does let you do more at once. It might also make you release the limits of the current design of some apps.
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Ah. This is me sighing the sigh of the person who has written this article 11 years ago, except from the opposite position. You don’t want your phone to be your desktop, because that means you need a monitor, and if you need a monitor, you might as well have a laptop (or a tablet), because you can’t rely on there being a monitor where you are with your phone if you haven’t brought the monitor with you.
Back in 2013 the nonexistent smartphone that would do this phone-desktop thing was called the Ubuntu Edge, which missed its huge crowdfunding target. Now you can get phones which kinda sorta do the phone-desktop thing – 11 years and much Moore’s Law later – but nobody wants to. Trust me.
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Sonos has canceled its streaming video player • The Verge
Chris Welch:
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Sonos is abandoning far-along plans to release a streaming video player this year, The Verge has learned. The news was announced by the company’s leadership during an all-hands call today. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos’ next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and has spent months in beta testing. But now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects as interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company’s future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024. He told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table “for now.”
The abrupt cancellation of Pinewood leaves Sonos without a significant new product to ship in the second half of 2025. The company most recently released the Arc Ultra soundbar and Sub 4 at the end of last year. Internally, some employees were concerned that Pinewood would ultimately become a repeat of the Sonos Ace headphones and see the company trying to take on well-established players in a new product category. When it comes to streaming hardware, Roku, Amazon, Apple, and Google dominate the field.
Instead, at least for now, Sonos will continue its all-hands-on-deck effort to restore the performance and reputation of its software.
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What I said when Welch revealed this five weeks ago: “I understand why – home theatre has become a huge thing for Sonos through soundbars and side speakers – but this cannot work.”
Conrad is showing real focus here. I haven’t looked at the Sonos app in months (I now use the third-party Sonophone) but when people start talking about that app being good to use, that will be the time for Sonos to start working on new hardware.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 