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The inside story of Dave Clark’s tumultuous last days at Flexport: Standoffs, politics, and spin
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1 year agoon
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adminDave Clark (L) and Ryan Petersen (R)
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On Sept. 13, Flexport founder Ryan Petersen took the stage at North America’s premier supply chain conference in Phoenix. It was exactly a week after he’d forced out his hand-picked successor as CEO, ex-Amazon executive Dave Clark, so Petersen could once again run the show.
Sitting in the first few rows of attendees was Clark, the man he’d ousted just a year into the job. Petersen was surprised that he showed up, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Days earlier, Petersen had excoriated Clark, alleging he’d secretly expanded the company’s headcount and taken on unnecessary leases without Petersen or the board’s knowledge. On X, formerly known as Twitter, Petersen wrote, “Strategic Plan, Day 1: Make better decisions!”
With Clark sitting a few feet away, Petersen struck a different tone.
“I think we’re going to look back and go, ‘Wow I’d probably do that all over again because of the progress that we’ve made,'” Petersen said, in an interview on stage.
Doing it over again would seem to suggest hiring Clark wasn’t a bad decision. Petersen went even further, personally commending Clark for orchestrating the $1.3 billion purchase of Deliverr from Shopify, picking up supply chain technology for last-mile deliveries. That deal was announced in May.
“I’m very, very lucky because I wouldn’t have had the courage to go and do that acquisition, but I give all the credit in the world to Dave Clark,” Petersen said. “There’s no one probably in the world who would be better at running that last-mile e-com fulfillment network. Personally, I don’t have any experience and I would’ve been pretty intimidated to try and go pull that off.”
The mixed messaging from the 43-year-old Flexport founder underscores the dysfunction surrounding the sudden firing of Clark, who previously spent 23 years at Amazon and built its mammoth logistics network on the way to becoming one of Jeff Bezos‘ top deputies. It’s also indicative of a bigger challenge facing Flexport, whose software is designed to simplify the process of transporting goods. The company was valued at $8 billion by private investors in early 2022, just as the economy was turning and the 10-year tech bull market was coming to an end.
As a high-valued company backed by powerful VCs, Flexport has been trying to simultaneously operate in Silicon Valley startup growth mode while also restraining expenses to reflect the new economic realities and to cope with supply chain bottlenecks.
This account is based on conversations with people close to Clark and Petersen. They requested anonymity to discuss confidential interactions. Their perspectives have been corroborated by internal documents and communications reviewed by CNBC.
Petersen has publicly said Clark overspent, overhired and overpromised, something his allies echoed to CNBC. He burned through cash and kept Petersen in the dark about key financials and an ambitious expansion into providing end-to-end supply chain tools for small and medium-sized businesses. People close to Petersen pointed to a number of previously unreported incidents that eroded his confidence in Clark.
But documents viewed by CNBC and sources close to Clark undermine those claims. They show that Clark, who arrived when the company was struggling to bill customers and track containers, worked closely with the board and Petersen to implement decisions that Flexport now suggests were ill-advised.
Evidence to support Flexport’s claims of financial mismanagement is lacking, raising questions about whether that narrative was put forward to justify Clark’s exit.
A Flexport spokesperson rejected that characterization.
“Ryan Petersen returned as CEO in order to restore Flexport’s culture of customer engagement, and drive the growth and cost discipline required to return the company to profitability,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Get IPO ready
Clark arrived last year as the perfect hire for a tech startup trying to disrupt the age-old logistics industry. He’d built Amazon’s logistics unit into a juggernaut that rivaled carriers like UPS and FedEx.
Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of Flexport, participates in a panel discussion during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Wednesday, May 4, 2022.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Since 2021, Petersen had been seeking a successor for Flexport’s then-operating chief, Sanne Manders, in part to address what several ex-employees described as lingering issues with the company’s troubled billing processes. Fixing that was Clark’s job.
Petersen and Clark worked together as co-CEOs for the first six months. In March, Petersen transitioned to executive chairman.
The co-CEO arrangement would free Petersen up to do what he loved – “getting beers with customers,” in the words of two former Flexport employees. Clark, a self-described “builder at heart,” was at the wheel.
Among Clark’s goals was to help Petersen prepare Flexport for an IPO, something the company had discussed doing within a two- to three-year window, according to a person familiar with the matter and documents viewed by CNBC.
“There’s a perfect complement of skill sets,” Petersen told Forbes in June 2022. “Mine are much more creative, zero-to-one founder time, and Dave is the supreme executor and a legend in the supply chain world.”
Buying Deliverr was meant to be the first step in turning Flexport into a more full-scale logistics service for its customers.
Shopify had acquired Deliverr in May 2022 for $2.1 billion. But the e-commerce software company was getting hammered by Wall Street as its Covid pandemic pop faded. By January 2023, CEO Tobias Lutke knew he needed to get rid of Deliverr. Around that time, Lutke first approached Petersen to float the possibility of a deal, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Petersen told Clark he should engage with Shopify’s team, according to a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations. Initial talks fell apart, but resumed when Flexport executives learned that Shopify was about to execute deep cost cuts and was eager to sell Deliverr.
Clark and Petersen flew to Miami to meet with Shopify’s leadership. As a transaction was nearing, Clark, who had a reputation as a deft negotiator, got Shopify, which was already an investor in Flexport, to sweeten it with $40 million in cash and the framework for a $260 million convertible note that could help Flexport on its path to an IPO, according to an internal document analyzing the deal.
The sale would be announced alongside Shopify’s first-quarter earnings report on May 4.
“We did not change the terms of a deal or rush it just to have it line up with an earnings call,” Shopify said in a statement. With Flexport, “we are tightly mission-aligned to ensure the success of our merchants, which is why we chose to deepen our partnership with them earlier this year.”
The night before the announcement, Petersen appeared at a “Tech Talk” at Flexport’s Bellevue, Washington, office to pitch the “Flexport vision” to hundreds of people. An attendee asked Petersen whether Flexport would ever get into last-mile logistics.
Petersen paused, glanced at his watch, and said to keep an eye on the morning news, according to a Flexport employee who witnessed the exchange and by a person who was told independently.
The comment alarmed Clark and Flexport executives, who were concerned that Petersen had disclosed material nonpublic information about a publicly traded company, according to people familiar with the matter.
Petersen didn’t respond to calls or messages from CNBC, and the company declined to make him available for an interview. A Flexport spokesperson didn’t respond to CNBC’s question about whether Petersen was aware of concerns about his statement at the event.
The ‘whistleblower’
Clark’s first quarterly board meeting as sole CEO was June 1. His second was Aug. 31, days before he was forced out.
The board was made up largely of investors who were betting on the founder. It included Founders Fund’s Trae Stephens, who had helped start defense-tech firm Anduril Industries, and Michael Ronen, who left SoftBank in 2020. Andreessen Horowitz was represented by Bob Swan, an operating partner at the firm and former CEO of Intel.
Bob Swan, then-interim chief executive officer and chief financial officer of Intel Corp., reacts during the inauguration of the company’s research and development facility in Bengaluru, India, on November 15, 2018.
Samyukta Lakshmi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
For much of the summer, Clark had pushed then-CFO Kenny Wagers and his financial planning and analysis team to realign Flexport’s year-end and 18-month forecasts, according to a person close to the situation.
The reasons were obvious. At the beginning of 2022, it cost around $14,500 to move a single container across the Pacific. By late 2022, prices of ocean freight from Asia to the U.S. West Coast were down 90% from a year earlier, due largely to weakening global demand. Because Flexport makes money by charging fees for the transportation of goods, the company’s business was getting hammered.
But Wagers and Stuart Leung, a Flexport finance executive and a close Petersen ally, were reluctant to pare back forecasts, frustrating Clark, who felt those projections were overly optimistic.
Wagers and Leung did not respond to CNBC’s interview requests.
Clark ultimately prevailed, but the revised forecasts distressed Petersen. Clark, Petersen and Wagers met in Texas in mid-August to fine-tune the forecasts.
A source close to Petersen told CNBC that the meeting went poorly for Clark because a so-called whistleblower — identified as a senior finance executive — stepped forward shortly before it began and told Petersen that the numbers being presented were “not real.”
The source referred to the senior finance executive as a whistleblower because of the information he disclosed to Petersen about Clark.
Documents seen by CNBC and conversations with people with direct knowledge of the board meeting make it clear that there were no substantiated whistleblower actions or allegations of financial impropriety.
Flexport’s spokesperson told CNBC in a statement: “There was no whistleblower nor was there any financial misconduct. Any allegations to the contrary are completely false.”
On Sept. 15, shortly after CNBC spoke with the Petersen source, legal counsel for Clark sent a cease-and-desist letter to Flexport. The letter, viewed by CNBC, instructed the company to preserve and retain all communications involving Clark’s departure. The letter disputes the existence of a whistleblower and lists specific allegations as false and defamatory, including Petersen’s claims that Clark was an unfit CEO because he overextended the company’s lease obligations.
Five hours after the letter was sent, the source close to Petersen contacted CNBC and asked to retract their statements and all details related to Clark’s firing or about the so-called whistleblower. CNBC declined to retract his statements.
Petersen has since deleted several of his posts criticizing Clark.
Dave Clark, Amazon’s former senior vice president of worldwide operations.
Lindsey Wasson | Reuters
The letter cited two documents that had been presented to the board. Both were viewed by CNBC. The first was a pre-acquisition financial analysis of the Deliverr deal, and the second was a review of Flexport’s first-quarter numbers. The Deliverr analysis was presented by the co-CEOs to the board for their approval and was shaped by multiple prior board meetings.
Clark’s camp suggested that other factors may have led to the abrupt firing.
For example, politics.
Days after Clark was ousted, Petersen sent him a message — seen by CNBC — blasting one of his key female executives for wasting her days at the company on “far left-wing political activism.” The executive is a registered Republican.
Stephens, the Founders Fund partner, also shared his contempt for that executive weeks before Clark’s departure, a person familiar with the board told CNBC. Stephens did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Petersen is also a venture partner at Founders Fund, the firm started by Peter Thiel, who was a prominent supporter of President Trump’s 2016 campaign and more recently bankrolled Senate candidates in Ohio and Arizona. Many of Thiel’s closest confidantes at Founders Fund and elsewhere in the venture industry are outspoken conservatives.
Petersen’s sole public political contribution in 2023 was to a Democratic political action committee associated with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He doesn’t talk much about politics on social media or in interviews.
Clark has donated to candidates on both sides of the aisle. Upon his departure, The Wall Street Journal reported that he was considering running for governor of Texas, but two people familiar with his thinking say it’s not happening anytime soon.
Flexport told CNBC that an employee’s politics are not relevant in personnel decisions.
“Ryan Petersen does not care at all about anyone’s political or personal affiliations. That is their business,” the spokesperson said. “It is inappropriate for any employee to spend an excessive amount of time during work hours on activities unrelated to their role.”
A person familiar with the female executive said her noncorporate endeavors were largely related to charitable organizations.
Clark has largely remained silent since he was forced to resign on Sept. 5, though in private he’s expressed frustration at how his former team was being treated by Flexport, according to people close to him. Many of his allies at Amazon who joined him at Flexport were summarily fired by Petersen shortly after his departure.
On Sept. 13, Flexport’s chief legal counsel, Chris Ferro, contacted Clark. Ferro told him that his resignation a week prior had not been accepted, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Instead, Ferro told Clark that Flexport’s board met the day after Clark resigned and voted to fire him for cause, the person familiar said. Ferro said the board minutes didn’t yet reflect why Clark had been fired, the person said.
Ferro allegedly told Clark that Flexport would be willing to give him a block of 2 million shares — worth millions of dollars — if he signed a separation agreement that included nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses.
Clark declined, the person said. Shortly after Flexport reached out with the offer, Clark took the stage at the same supply chain conference in Phoenix that Petersen spoke at earlier in the day.
He didn’t hold back.
“The only thing I really regret from the past year was I sort of picked the wrong founder,” Clark said. “Basically, it was a place of extending my reputational halo to a group that, in my opinion, didn’t deserve it. Largely, because about half the team was let go last week on Friday, the most brutal nonseverance packages I’ve ever seen in my life. It was about as disrespectful a way as humanly possible.”
Amazon showdown
On top of the public relations fallout from the Clark saga and any legal wrangling that may follow, Flexport faces staffing turnover and a growing threat from Clark’s former employer.
Flexport recently ousted Wagers as CFO and lost its human resources chief. More layoffs are expected soon, sources said, after the company cut 20% of its staff in January.
On Sept. 12, almost a week after Clark was fired, Flexport executives convened in Seattle to launch an end-to-end supply chain service that would allow sellers to move their products from factories to customers’ doorsteps through integrations with major online marketplaces.
The project was spearheaded by Parisa Sadrzadeh, an executive vice president at Flexport who Clark had poached from Amazon’s logistics unit.
Earlier in the day, and just up the street from Flexport’s event, Amazon had unveiled a strikingly similar service in front of approximately 2,200 attendees at its annual Accelerate seller conference. Flexport had planned to have a booth onsite but was told it couldn’t be an exhibitor, which some staffers suspected was due to the competing supply chain products, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Flexport discussed securing exhibit space at Accelerate months earlier but didn’t meet all the requirements to participate, and its launch wasn’t mentioned in those conversations, Amazon said.
Flexport’s event was underwhelming. In a conference room, about 50 people looked on as Sadrzadeh debuted Flexport’s service and then introduced Petersen, who spoke for roughly 20 minutes, according to Burak Yolga, co-founder of a digital freight forwarding company who was in attendance.
“Flexport announced pretty much the same thing that Amazon announced,” Yolga said in an interview. He said he left after about a half-hour.
The company paid rapper Nelly $150,000 to perform at the event. But in the days leading up to the launch, Petersen opted to squash the performance because the optics were bad after his post about rescinding job offers, a person familiar with the matter said. Despite canceling the event, Flexport still paid the artist.
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Elon Musk has a problem with X’s Community Notes when he disapproves of the results
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February 21, 2025By
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Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of social media platform X, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Feb. 20, 2025.
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For X owner Elon Musk, the solution to monitoring misinformation online has been the community, rather than a group of fact checkers. Since buying the social media company formerly known as Twitter in 2022, he’s touted the Community Notes feature as the best way to correct false posts.
That is, until he didn’t like the results.
Musk wrote in a post Thursday that he intends to “fix” Community Notes because it “is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.” He provided no evidence to support his claim.
What apparently set Musk off was information members added in Community Notes correcting posts on X that claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s elected president, had low approval ratings among its citizens.
The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, or KIIS, published survey results this week, based on February polling, that found that 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted Zelenskyy while 37% said they did not. The polling contradicted President Donald Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is deeply unpopular in his country.
Tensions between the Trump administration, which includes Musk as a central figure, and the Ukrainian government have escalated over the past week, NBC News reported, before bubbling into public view.
Echoing Kremlin sentiments, Trump has accused Ukraine of starting a war with Russia that actually began when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade the neighboring country in February 2022.
Senior White House officials met their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, with the aim of laying the groundwork for peace talks on Ukraine, while excluding Kyiv’s officials and EU representatives from participating in discussions.
Trump has called on Ukraine to hold new elections.
Zelenskyy said he would reject any plan that did not include Ukraine’s involvement. Under its constitution, Ukraine can’t hold elections while it’s at war and under martial law.
In his post Thursday, Musk wrote, “It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!” However, there are other available sources.
A consortium that’s been conducting extensive polling in Ukraine since 2014 found “63% of Ukrainians now approve of Zelensky’s performance as president, a notable increase from the previous year,” Joe Stafford, the news and media relations lead at the University of Manchester, wrote in a post Wednesday.
High favorability ratings for Zelenskyy undermine the narrative that Trump and Musk want to tell.
“If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election,” Musk wrote, again without evidence. “He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he canceled the election. In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine.”
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First introduced by Twitter in 2021 as Birdwatch, and rebranded as Community Notes after Musk’s acquisition the following year, the feature was meant to help the social network combat misinformation and disinformation by enlisting users to flag misleading posts and provide correct information instead.
Community Notes has worked in a manner similar to Wikipedia. Facebook owner Meta, which has been aggressively seeking Trump’s favor in the early days of his second term in the White House, recently announced its own version of Community Notes. Alphabet’s YouTube has been testing a comparable tool since summer 2024.
Neil Johnson, a George Washington University physics professor who studies how misinformation and hate speech spread online, said the Community Notes model is problematic, but not because it can be gamed by large institutions. Rather, crowdsourcing is an inherently “imperfect system” for landing on the truth and is a poor substitute for “formal fact checking,” he said.
“Like any crowd, crowds can be fickle, and crowds can be driven by other interests,” Johnson said. “It’s not a paid person with the job of fact checking.”
Musk is not immune
Additionally, while Musk has pitched Community Notes as a way to replace fact checkers, a recent study by the Spanish fact-checking nonprofit Maldita showed that many X users still rely on information from professionals. The authors of the study, published earlier in February, looked at more than 1 million notes from Community Notes’ public dataset.
“The evidence from X clearly shows that users rely on the work of fact-checking organizations often” when proposing Community Notes, they wrote.
Neither Musk nor a representative from X responded to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Musk’s latest comments on Community Notes mark a sharp contrast to how he’s discussed the service in the past, and underscore the lengths to which he’s willing to go in pursuit of Trump’s agenda.
When talking about Community Notes in earlier posts, Musk has said that it can’t be manipulated by him or anyone else.
“The system is completely decentralized and open source, both code and data. Any manipulation would show up like a neon sore thumb!” Musk wrote in a post Dec. 30. “No one at X, including me, has any editorial control.”
Musk has also acknowledged in past posts that he is not immune from being corrected in Community Notes.
And Community Notes isn’t the only technology in Musk’s portfolio that could present problems by responding in ways he may not like. There’s also Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot that is owned by Musk’s startup xAI and is used on X.
Fortune published a story in January about the many negative responses Grok provides when users ask if Musk is a good person. Grok’s reasons for saying he isn’t a good person include environmental hazards from SpaceX, Musk’s “erratic” management style and his political views, Fortune reported, citing Grok responses. Futurism published a similarly themed piece in December, with the headline “Elon Musk’s Grok AI blasts Elon Musk as huge spreader of misinformation.”
Musk calls Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke.” Earlier this week, xAI introduced its latest AI model, Grok 3, claiming it can outperform offerings from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek based on early testing, which included standardized tests on math, science and coding.
Musk did admit during the demo that the model isn’t perfect.
“We should emphasize that this is kind of a beta, meaning that you should expect some imperfections,” Musk said. “But we will improve it rapidly, almost every day.”
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Apple’s Vision Pro has a problem a year into its existence: Not enough apps
Published
4 hours agoon
February 21, 2025By
admin
Apple CEO Tim Cook (L) takes a selfie with a greets customers on arrival for the release of the Vision Pro headset at the Apple Store in New York City on February 2, 2024.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
When Apple revealed the Vision Pro in 2023, it called the $3,500 headset its next “major platform.” Two years later, and a year after going on sale, the device is thin on apps.
Apple doesn’t regularly release stats on the number of Vision Pro apps that are available, and it’s hard to tell how many new apps come out in any given month. According to consultancy AppFigures, which tracks Apple’s platforms, the number of new Vision Pro apps has declined every month since the device hit the market in February 2024.
When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, executives said that developers would be able to create new experiences that weren’t possible with traditional computers. But so far, top developers remain mostly focused elsewhere, and major tech companies like Google, Meta and Netflix have yet to release their most important apps for the headset.
Many of the new apps and ideas for the Vision Pro are coming from independent developers, hacking on the weekends while holding down day jobs.
One person in the indie camp is Adam Roszyk, a programmer in Poland who has created 17 Vision Pro apps since the headset was first released.
For $4, Roszyk’s Night Vision app lets a Vision Pro user tap the depth-sensing cameras of the device to see objects in the dark. If you spend $5, you can perform a chore in a Luigi’s Mansion-like video game using the app Vacuume, which overlays virtual coins on your floor that you can vacuum up, along with any real dirt or dust. And for $6, Roszyk’s app Scan Export lets users create a 3D digital scan of an entire building just by walking around, a useful tool for those in construction or real estate.
“We are still early, and we don’t really know how it can be really useful in your life,” Roszyk said. “There’s so many different ideas that just come to your mind.”
Roszyk continues to work on Vision Pro apps because he said he believes “spatial computing” — Apple’s preferred terminology for headset and glasses technology that can integrate 3D objects with the world around them — will be the next big platform. Roszyk is betting that developing apps now can put him in prime position when more people are walking around with a Vision Pro or, perhaps some day, lightweight glasses.
“This type of computing is the future,” Roszyk said. “I would definitely compare it to the first iPhones.”
Roszyk’s efforts have made him money, but not enough for Vision Pro development to become his full-time job. His 17 apps have cleared about $4,000 on the App Store in the last three months. That number is growing as he releases more apps and more people find out about them, Roszyk said.
Apple updated its most recent Vision Pro app count in August, with CEO Tim Cook telling investors on an earnings call that the platform had 2,500 apps. That number covers fully immersive apps that overlay virtual objects over the real world as well as 2D apps with some spatial components.
By AppFigures’ count, less than 1,900 of these apps remained active at the end of January.
Apple declined to comment.
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Rival Meta in 2023 said that it had 500 apps in its Quest store, and the company last year said that number had multiplied by 10.
The Quest 3S, which has many of the same features as the Vision Pro, starts at $300. Meta also sold millions of its predecessors in recent years. While Meta hasn’t revealed how many users it has, its Meta Quest app was downloaded about 6 million times in 2024, according to AppFigures data, a useful proxy because users need to download the app in order to set up the headset.
There are also about 1.5 million Vision Pro apps that are ported versions of iPhone and iPad apps. Apple automatically ports iPhone and iPad apps to the Vision Pro when they’re uploaded, but companies can decline. Those apps can be used inside the headset but appear as 2D flat screens. Meta started to emulate that strategy last year with 2D Android apps for Quest, but the company doesn’t have the same library of millions of existing mobile apps.
Apple doesn’t publish Vision Pro sales, but one estimate from IDC suggests fewer than 1 million devices have been sold.
Some services like Netflix and YouTube, and game streaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now can be accessed through the Apple Vision Pro’s browser. And existing apps often receive updates that introduce a spatial mode, such as the NBA scores app, which recently got an experimental feature that allows users to watch a live basketball game as if the players were miniature figurines on a table.
Apple Arcade, a monthly game subscription from Apple, does require that its titles support the Vision Pro in addition to iPhones and iPads. Apple Arcade developers are paid by Apple and their apps are free to subscribers.
Although many of those games are 2D, some are exclusive to the Vision Pro. In January, Apple released Gears & Goo, a Vision Pro app that enables the player to control an army of goofy frog-like characters on a table in the real world.
Meanwhile, Meta is actively courting VR developers with a promise that they can make money. Meta in January said that its payment volume for Quest headsets rose by 12% last year, although it didn’t cite a total number. Meta has also said it has 200 apps that have made more than $1 million through software sales.
No iPhone-like app gold rush
The Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed at the Fifth Avenue Apple store on Feb. 2, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Vision Pro app gold rush has seen slower uptake than the iPhone’s app boom.
A year after the iPhone App Store was launched in 2008, Apple was crowing about the platform having 50 million customers, 2 billion downloads and 85,000 apps. Apple regularly told investors and developers how much money it had paid from App Store sales — it hasn’t released any similar stat for the Vision Pro.
Many in the VR industry hoped Apple’s entry would kick off a boom like the iPhone did for mobile apps, creating fortunes as millions of users sought to fill their new devices with fresh software.
“My assumption back then was whatever Apple releases might be in that final form, so it’s a good idea to be ready as early as possible,” said Nikhil Jacob, who runs Vision Uni, which publishes content about developing apps for the Vision Pro. “But my assumption there ended up being wrong.”
Jacob said he believes that an app developer ecosystem for the Vision Pro will take a lot longer to build out than it did for the iPhone because key pieces are missing. Jacob hopes Apple improves the Vision Pro app store to help users find new apps.
The slow uptake, due largely to the high price tag, has led some to worry that VR and its related technologies are once again entering a lull.
“Winter has come,” said Jarrett Webb, who develops headset apps for Argodesign, a software consultancy. “Even Apple couldn’t produce a winner.”
Still, some optimism remains among Vision Pro developers.
They say that Apple’s hardware is solid, the company’s developer tools are improving, and that the Vision Pro lays the groundwork for future software and hardware updates. It also helps that Vision Pro owners still seem to be excited to try out new apps.
Apple’s entry into the headset market, combined with Google’s recent announcement of its own Android XR platform, as well as Meta’s billions of dollars of investment signals that there will be a market for VR content, said John Gearty, who worked on the Vision Pro at Apple and is the founder of PulseJet Studios, a VR production house focusing on music. Gearty is hoping for steady growth from the market, but he has tempered his expectations.
“I don’t think it’s ever going to be hockey stick growth,” he said.
Apple has not said if it will update the Vision Pro. According to analysts, the company is working on a successor. Developers want it to be lighter and less expensive. They welcome any improvements that would get it on more faces.
“Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal in October. “I think it’s just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view.”
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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5 hours agoon
February 21, 2025By
admin
Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek roiled markets in January, setting off a massive tech and semiconductor selloff after unveiling AI models that it said were cheaper and more efficient than American ones.
But the underlying fears and breakthroughs that sparked the selling go much deeper than one AI startup. Silicon Valley is now reckoning with a technique in AI development called distillation, one that could upend the AI leaderboard.
Distillation is a process of extracting knowledge from a larger AI model to create a smaller one. It can allow a small team with virtually no resources to make an advanced model.
A leading tech company invests years and millions of dollars developing a top-tier model from scratch. Then a smaller team such as DeepSeek swoops in and trains its own, more specialized model by asking the larger “teacher” model questions. The process creates a new model that’s nearly as capable as the big company’s model but trains more quickly and efficiently.
“This distillation technique is just so extremely powerful and so extremely cheap, and it’s just available to anyone,” said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, adding that he expects to see innovation when it comes to how large language models, or LLMs, are built. “We’re going to see so much competition for LLMs. That’s what’s going to happen in this new era we’re entering.”
Distillation is now enabling less-capitalized startups and research labs to compete at the cutting edge faster than ever before.
Using this technique, researchers at Berkeley said, they recreated OpenAI’s reasoning model for $450 in 19 hours last month. Soon after, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington created their own reasoning model in just 26 minutes, using less than $50 in compute credits, they said. The startup Hugging Face recreated OpenAI’s newest and flashiest feature, Deep Research, as a 24-hour coding challenge.
DeepSeek didn’t invent distillation, but it woke up the AI world to its disruptive potential. It also ushered in the rise of a new open-source order — a belief that transparency and accessibility drive innovation faster than closed-door research.
“Open source always wins in the tech industry,” said Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, which makes an AI-powered search engine for enterprises. “You cannot beat the momentum that a successful open-source project is able to actually generate.”
OpenAI itself has walked back its closed-source strategy in the wake of DeepSeek’s accomplishment.
“Personally I think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on Reddit on Jan. 31.
The combination of distillation’s newfound traction and open source’s rise in popularity is completely altering the competitive dynamics in AI.
Watch the video to learn more.
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