Shiny new Rivian(s)!

Rivian revealed not just one, but two new models this week – but can the company make it through Elon's infamous 'production hell' to get them on the road?

I’m coming off my first week on the job at OMERS Ventures, but it was plenty busy in the tech news cycle, too: New cars, new Claude, new controversy around Apple’s App Store and new congressional TikTok drama.

The lead: New Rivians — times two!

This week had a lot of mess, but the biggest headlines came from EV-maker Rivian unveiling its new, more affordable mid-sized SUV. The Rivian R2 is a very cool looking sequel to the R1S, and it’ll begin at “around” $45,000 USD when it arrives in (Rivian hopes) 2026.

The R2 has been hyped for a while and was even subject to some early leaks, but Rivian did manage to genuinely surprise everyone by also showing off two smaller still SUVs: the R3 and R3X. These don’t come with associated price or delivery estimates, however, so it seems clear that Rivian is thinking further out than two years from now for their arrival.

Rivian says it’s got plenty of reservations already for the R2 – and I’m among them – but take those numbers with a grain of salt because, as is typical with EV pre-orders, all you need to register your interest is an email address and a $100 refundable deposit. I don’t know where I’ll be in two years, but I do know I’d like to have the option to buy a sexy, boxy baby EV.

Sam Altman selects his new OpenAI board

• One of the results of Sam Altman’s brief ouster and return as OpenAI’s CEO is that the company’s governance got a shake-up, and now a new permanent board has been announced to take the place of the transitional one put in place post-kerfuffle.

• Altman regains his seat, most significantly, and the members of the interim board also get to keep their spots. Three new members are joining, including former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former Sony Entertainment president Nicole Seligman and current Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.

• That means the board has eight members in total, including ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers. Microsoft keeps its board observer seat, too, currently occupied by Dee Templeton.

• The reformation of the board also comes with other new governance changes, including the introduction of a formalized ‘whistleblower’ hotline and the formation of new committees

• The bottom line is that Altman’s new board is probably much more aligned to his mission than the one that tried to engineer a coup to replace him, and the new members genuinely do bring a ton of experience from both large tech companies and major non-profits – a mix that seems to jive well with OpenAI’s unique corporate structure

Anthropic bows Claude 3

• New week, new foundational AI model: Anthropic has introduced the third generation of Claude, with signifiant improvements that it claims will rival even OpenAI’s ChatGPT on a number of fronts

• The real winners in the ongoing LLM arms race are us, the users, since the pace of innovation is being pushed by fierce competition coming from both startups like Anthropic and titans like Google and Meta alike

• Claude 3’s model comes in three different sizes, and a researcher who worked on the ‘Opus’ variant prompted some raised eyebrows in the AI community by noting that during his testing of the model, it seemed to indicate what could possibly be described as ‘metacognition’ or limited self-awareness

• As with just about every instance of this that has occurred so far, it’s very unclear if this was actually that, or a weird quirk, or an intentional joke left in place by other researchers, so don’t go proclaiming the end of humanity just yet

• Maybe it is curtains for us, though – Geoffrey Hinton apparently thinks there’s a 1 in 10 chance an AI hive mind could wipe out humanity sometime in the next 20 years. Good riddance to bad rubbish?

Apple and Epic fight in public some more

• We talked about how revealing OpenAI’s response to Elon Musk’s lawsuit was earlier this week, and now there’s another unfolding drama that involves influential tech people publishing each other’s email conversations

• Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, opened a developer account in the EU in order to create and publish its own app store – newly permitted due to Apple complying with EU regulation

• Apple closed their account, citing a prior court ruling that said it could do so for any reason at any time

• Epic published emails between its CEO Tim Sweeney and Apple’s Phil Schiller showing Apple’s honestly pretty petulant responses to the whole thing and the stated reasoning behind the move

• Apple was definitely within its rights to do this, but it’s inviting major repetitional damage among its developer community by continuing to fight tooth and nail against backlash like Epic’s

• In the end, Epic now says Apple will reinstate its account, clearing the path for it to introduce its own Epic Games store on iOS – for EU customers only, of course

Will congress ban TikTok and if so, will it force a sale?

• US Congress looks poised to actually enact a ban on TikTok following a house vote this past week

• TikTok isn’t taking it lying down, though – users were greeted with pleas from the company to reach out to their representatives and make their displeasure known when launching the app in recent days

• Users apparently did exactly that – in huge numbers. Members of congress shared that their phones were ringing off the hook, driven mostly by teens furious at them for potentially damming the flow of their sweet, sweet short-form video feeds

• It’s unclear what will happen if the ban actually happens, but some are speculating it could force of sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent company ByteDance to a US buyer

• Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary has said he might pick it up if it is forced into a sale, but Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary says a lot of things