I can now confirm, the pubs were in fact crazy on Saturday night as I watched my Conflicted Cup – aka, the World Cup semifinal between England and Norway (I, of course, live in England but my maternal heritage is full-on Norwegian). It was close, but England pulled it out in the end – an end that occurred shortly before 1am local time, which was especially fun.
Anyway, while there was a sports angle of my usual tech talk with Alex Kantrowitz this month thanks to the VAR situation in said World Cup, for the most part, we stick to tech. Namely, 'The Summer of Super Apps', which ended up being a timely chat since just days later, we got the first such app in the form of OpenAI's updated – but hardly upgraded – version of ChatGPT.
Spoiler alert: it's a mess. So do we really believe Microsoft will be able to pull this off? I mean, at least they're coming at it from a place where they needed to change their strategy, OpenAI runs a real risk here of ceding the consumer space – the area of AI they've unquestionably dominated to date – potentially to Meta or even Apple! At the same time, OpenAI clearly feels the need to combat Anthropic and so it's hardly surprising that the new ChatGPT looks a lot like the Claude Mac app. Well, it is surprising in that it's sort of a UI nightmare when we're used to OpenAI making actually delightful product experiences, for the most part. Everyone is also chasing the notion, if not exactly the product, of OpenClaw for agentic AI.
Meanwhile, Google, which rather remarkably feels behind again at the moment, still has the biggest surfaces to naturally insert AI (well, more naturally than Meta at least, whose user base will undoubtedly
largely rejectsuch insertion). Is it wild to think that Google may turn to Chrome not just to spur Gemini usage (which
they've been doing, of course) but to turn it into the "Super App"? Would they dare?! Talk about risk – from both the user base and
[regulators](https://spyglass.org/google-antitrust-ai/)!
Does '[Bring Your Own AI](https://spyglass.org/bring-your-own-ai/)' come into play in all this? That could be a new can of worms!
Apple, though, does suddenly feel well positioned again. Perhaps best positioned even! Thanks, of course, to the iPhone. It sort of feels like we're going to see a lot of people over the next year transition into a mode where they walk around and talk to Siri – actually talk to her, not yell at her, angry with her previously poor responses. But here OpenAI may have a real opportunity thanks to their focus on superior voice-based AI. You'd think that's an opening for a new product category – or categories – but well, there's a potential
[new massive hiccup](https://spyglass.org/apple-vs-openai/)there as of a couple days ago.
Also, [don't sleep](https://spyglass.org/shudder-button/) on "[Visual Intelligence](https://spyglass.org/airpod-cameras-siri-ai/)".
If it all plays out this way, Apple will obviously feel very good about [their CapEx strategy](https://spyglass.org/apple-crazy-capex/). Which is to say, they'd be positioned well in AI [without having spent hundreds of billions of dollars](https://spyglass.org/meta-apple-ai-strategy/). And it's sort of [starting to feel like](https://spyglass.org/inklings-amazons-openai-movie-meta-glasses-microsofts-ai-narrative-pivot-google-falling-behind-in-ai-again/#:~:text=%E2%98%81%EF%B8%8F%20Microsoft%E2%80%99s%20Hybrid%20AI%20Dreams) Microsoft is moving more in this direction too. Or, at least, focusing on finding paths towards cheaper AI – both [for themselves](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-07/microsoft-replaces-openai-anthropic-with-own-ai-in-some-apps?ref=spyglass.org) and for their user base.
Lastly, stick around for Alex's VAR rant – are we trusting the robots too much and literally taking the fun and majesty out of the game?