Hey Reader,

Netflix is one of the world's biggest non-AI companies, and they made their biggest move ever this morning, buying Warner Bros. for $72 billion.

Let's put that into perspective, especially at a time when every other major tech company is pouring money into datacenters:

• This is 18x the price of Disney's acquisition of the Star Wars franchise
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• It includes thousands of hit movies and TV shows, including the whole HBO library
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• Warner will still operate as a studio and make new stuff
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• This probably makes Netflix far and away the biggest and best streaming library; it will be hard even for Disney+ and Paramount+ to compete

Remember, Netflix is the "N" in FAANG, the now-somewhat-outdated acronym for the biggest tech companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google). You've gotta think they're feeling a little left out now that Nvidia is the new darling and the top stocks are called the Magnificent 7.

And yet, Netflix has made a huge move that is entirely old-school, and largely the opposite of AI.

They've purchased a gigantic trove of beloved old movies and TV shows, plus a traditional studio that will make more stuff just like that. Maybe they'll use AI on the margins here and there, but fundamentally, this investment says:

So, if someone sends you AI-generated Christmas music 🤮 or frets about AI destroying film, remember that Netflix is staking billions on the belief that human creativity will always matter.

And speaking of old-school TV...

OpenAI is slowly becoming the next TiVo – an innovator who is being copied and replaced by the larger incumbents.

For the past three years, OpenAI has pretty much always held the lead in the race for "best AI model." But Google just released Gemini 3, which many power users are saying is as good or better than the top GPT-line models from OpenAI.

Whether Gemini 3 is slightly better or slightly worse than GPT-5.1 isn't the key question – instead, the question is, is there any chance that Google won't be equal to OpenAI in the next few years?

And if Google produces equal or better models, why would customers who value data privacy and enterprise-level security ever choose OpenAI, which has been flippant about privacy and safety for years, ever choose OpenAI over Google?

In short, Google is a sure bet for IT departments and for the millions of consumers who already use their existing suite of tools.

And the fact that they've caught up has made OpenAI "declare 'Code Red'", which strikes me as particularly comical, since they did not declare a 'Code Red' on things like keeping children from using their software in harmful ways. 🤷‍♂️

Whether the next "best model" comes from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or someone else, I have to say that I am not sad to see the shine removed from OpenAI a little bit. There are problems with all the companies I've mentioned in this newsletter, of course – and ultimately the best thing for consumers will be when free and open-source AI models like Mistral to match the commercial models. But OpenAI, in all its innovation, clearly has developed a culture of smugness and a lackadaisical attitude toward user safety that could use some shaking up.

Until next time,

– Rob
CEO of Innovating with AI

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​P.S. Next week I’ll share a new program we’ve been building for high-performance professionals who want to get ahead with AI in 2026. If you’d like a text when it opens, you can join the alert list here.