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I’m coming to you a bit earlier than usual with a packed, scoopy issue. First up, I go inside Meta’s all-hands meeting today, where company leaders elaborated on their AI talent war with OpenAI and described their strategy for competing with ChatGPT.

Then, I chat with the AI hardware CEO who is suing OpenAI. And keep reading for my exclusive on a buzzy AI startup entering the gaming industry. 

Programming note: I’m taking a two-week summer break and will return with my next issue in mid-July. 

During a company-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday, some of Meta’s top executives were asked about the “$100 million signing bonuses” that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed they had been offering to poach his employees.

“Sam is just being dishonest here,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, said at the meeting when asked about Altman’s remarks. “He's suggesting that we're doing this for every single person… Look, you guys, the market's hot. It's not that hot.”

The “$100 million bonus” headline has rightfully become a meme on social media since Altman said the number on his brother’s podcast. “What Sam neglects to mention is that he's countering all these offers, creating a small market for a very, very small number of people who are for senior, senior leadership roles” in the new superintelligence AI team Meta is building, Bosworth told Meta employees today. “That is not the general thing that's happening in the AI space. And of course, he's not mentioning what the actual terms of the offer are. It's not [a] sign-on bonus. It’s all these different things.”

Bosworth then referenced recent stories about a handful of OpenAI researchers who are joining Meta and said there are “quite a few more in the pipeline that I can't announce or share right now.”

“Sam is known to exaggerate, and in this case, I know exactly why he's doing it, which is because we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI,” he said. “He's not very happy about that.” 

At the Thursday meeting, there were many employees present from the company’s engineering “bootcamp,” a multi-week onboarding program that assigns new hires to various teams. “For all the new bootcampers here, you didn’t screw up,” Bosworth said to laughs and claps from the audience. “You made a great decision. Comp is right where it should be.”

Bosworth wasn’t the only Meta exec to mention OpenAI during the internal meeting. CPO Chris Cox also acknowledged that, while Meta AI has one billion monthly users, engagement “is not nearly as deep as the way that people are using ChatGPT.” The standalone Meta AI app has only 450,000 daily users, he told employees, and “a lot of those folks” are using it to manage their Ray-Ban Meta glasses. 

“We are not going to go right after ChatGPT and try and do a better job with helping you write your emails at work,” Cox said. “We need to differentiate here by not focusing obsessively on productivity, which is what you see Anthropic and OpenAI and Google doing. We're going to go focus on entertainment, on connection with friends, on how people live their lives, on all of the things that we uniquely do well, which is a big part of the strategy going forward.”

Meta declined to comment on the internal meeting.

When I spoke with Jason Rugolo on Thursday, I wanted to understand why he is suing the most influential company in tech. 

Rugolo’s AI device startup, Iyo, recently won a temporary restraining order that bars OpenAI from using the “io” brand for Sam Altman’s new hardware division with Jony Ive. In response, Altman took to his X account to suggest that Rugolo filed his trademark lawsuit because OpenAI refused to invest in or buy Iyo, which is gearing up to release its first AI-powered, in-ear headphones later this year. 

Rugolo acknowledges (and documents submitted to the court confirm) that he pitched Altman on investing multiple times. He also discussed an acquisition with io team members this year. Still, he says his lawsuit isn’t part of some revenge crusade, but rather intended to eliminate any confusion between his forthcoming Iyo One headphones and Altman’s io.

Trademark lawsuits are a dime a dozen, but this one has broken through for good reason. There’s intense interest in what Altman and Ive are building (the first device apparently won’t be an “in-ear” product or a “wearable”), and the case is a Rorschach test for how you feel about Altman, who is undoubtedly polarizing.

“I had a massive change in opinion on the guy,“ Rugolo tells me of Altman. “While I was meeting with them, I was under the spell of Sam Altman being a great entrepreneur and a really interesting person. That broke pretty instantly after their public announcement [of io].” 

“Am I getting screwed here?” Rugolo recalls thinking. “When I talked to him on the phone and he made a Sopranos threat to sue me, I was just like, ‘Alright, this guy is a bad dude.’” Now, he says that Altman is trying to “manipulate the arguments in the public sphere” and “make me look like a money grubber or a sore loser, and I just don't think it's gonna work.”

“This is a baseless trademark dispute and not a case about stolen ideas or technology,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood says in a statement shared with me. “Iyo demoed a product in May 2025 that didn’t function properly or meet our standards in hopes that we’d acquire Iyo. We passed. Jason Rugolo was also well aware of the io name and never raised concerns before our announcement.”

Thanks to the millions of dollars he recently raised from his manufacturer, Pegatron, and a billionaire whom he refuses to name, Rugolo says Iyo has enough runway to last it through the end of 2026. When I ask if the device he teased in his viral TED talk last year is indeed shipping later this year, he says he’s about to fly to China to “basically be living at the factory.”

While he’s ready to go through the legal discovery process and take his case to trial, he hopes that OpenAI will “put their guns away” and “complete like grown-ups on product.” 

“I will meet them in the market,” he tells me. “We will both try to launch stuff that’s really cool and see if we can serve our customers. They'll just compete fairly and stop using the name. They have some of the best designers in the world, apparently. Think of a new name. You just can't use the one that I told you about already, and that I've been using since 2019.”

So far, Runway is known for bringing generative AI to Hollywood. Now, the $3 billion startup is setting its sights on the gaming industry.

This week, I was granted access to a new interactive gaming experience that Runway plans to make available to everyone as soon as next week, according to CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. The consumer-facing product is currently quite barebones, with a chat interface that supports only text and image generation, but Valenzuela says that generated video games are coming later this year. He says that Runway is also in talks with gaming companies about both using its technology and accessing their datasets for training.

Based on his recent conversations, Valenzuela believes the gaming industry is in a similar position to Hollywood when it was first introduced to generative AI. There was considerable resistance, but over time, AI has been gradually adopted in more areas of the production process. Valenzuela says Amazon’s recent show, House of David, was made in part with Runway’s technology, and that his company is working with “pretty much every major studio” and “most of the Fortune 100 companies.” 

“If we can help a studio make a movie 40 percent faster, then we're probably gonna be able to help developers of games make games faster,” he says. “They're waking up, and they're moving faster than I would say the studios were moving two years ago.”

Naturally, I couldn’t let Valenzuela get off our Zoom call without asking him about his recent acquisition talks with Zuckerberg: “I think we have more interesting intellectual challenges being independent, and remaining independent for now.” 

No one knows what AGI actually means. That much is clear from this excellent deep dive from The Information into Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI. There has been a lot of good reporting on the negotiations between the two companies, but this piece is the most comprehensive and detailed I’ve seen yet. It states that Microsoft will no longer receive exclusive access to OpenAI’s IP if it achieves “sufficient AGI,” which is contractually defined as when OpenAI’s board determines that the AI “has the capability to generate” the maximum profits its investors are entitled to. Amazingly, OpenAI doesn’t have to actually generate these profits. 

Two under-the-radar deals: Although they haven’t garnered many headlines, OpenAI announced an interesting partnership and a small acquisition this week. The first is a deal with Applied Intuition to “advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in vehicles.” The second is the acquisition of the small team at Crossing Minds, an AI startup that helped e-commerce companies offer more personalized product recommendations. “Personally, joining OpenAI’s research team to focus on agents and information retrieval is a unique honor,” Crossing Minds founder Alexandre Eobicque writes. “These are precisely the problems I’ve always been passionate about: how systems learn, reason, and retrieve knowledge at scale, in real-time.”

Some interesting career moves in tech:

The three founders of OpenAI’s research office in Zurich, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, confirmed they are joining Meta. (“No, we did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news,” writes Beyer.) Trapit Bansal, a former OpenAI researcher who “started the RL for reasoning effort with Ilya Sutskever” and co-created the o1 model, is also joining Meta’s new lab.

Elon Musk is cleaning house at Tesla. He reportedly fired Omead Afshar, his longtime fixer and head of manufacturing. HR leader Jenna Ferrua is also out.

Nate Mitchell has joined his fellow Oculus co-founder, Brendan Iribe, at the AI glasses startup Seasame, where he’ll be chief product officer.  

Databricks hired Alan Davidson, the former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for the NTIA, to be its head of government affairs. 

More to click on:

Anonymous tech workers describe how AI has killed their jobs.

Anthropic published research on how people are using Claude for emotional support. I’d love to see this kind of research from OpenAI.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap went on the live Hard Fork podcast. The beginning of this convo was quite fun — and a bit awkward —  to watch from the audience.

The state of consumer AI from Menlo Ventures. 

“Inside Silicon Valley's anti-college movement.”

How Venice is bracing for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding this weekend.

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