Happy Thursday! A special thanks to all of you who subscribed over the past week. On Sunday I’m headed to Marco Island, Florida for IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, where Matthew Ball and I will have a frank discussion about the state of the metaverse. If you'll be there, please say hi!

I also wanted to once more plug “Extremely Hardcore,” a story about the first 90 days of Elon Musk’s chaotic Twitter takeover that I reported with Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton. It’s in print on the latest cover of New York Magazine and also available on The Verge’s website, where we built a meter that tracks Musk’s declining net worth as you scroll. “I read it this morning on the subway to the first day at my new job,” a former Twitter employee who was laid off by Musk texted me. “It felt cathartic and like turning the page on a strange chapter.”

Speaking of ex-Twitter employees, 800 of them have now filed arbitration demands against Musk for laying them off without the payouts they were promised in his merger agreement, per an email update from the lawyer wrangling the cases that was passed my way. Twitter is potentially on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, since it has to pay for arbitration disputes. Meanwhile, the company’s revenue is down 40 percent year over year, Twitter Blue is a dud, and Musk is auctioning off the office furniture.

This week: Notion’s CEO explains why he is bullish on generative AI, my thoughts on the latest Apple headset rumblings, and I chat with the co-founder of Nest about his new climate tech startup. But first…

With this week’s news that Microsoft is laying off 10,000 employees, it’s looking increasingly likely that Google will need to follow its peer group and make significant cuts as well. In last week’s edition, I reported on the mounting fears inside Google about layoffs coming after the current performance review cycle wraps next month. Afterwards, a former Google executive who wished to remain anonymous weighed in:

“This is a super sensitive topic to every Googler. Google got itself into a situation where each and every engineering manager, director, and VP measured success via team growth. It is inevitable that there are organizations that are larger than they should be. Because Google has never done real layoffs, it will be seen as a breach of trust internally if it now starts to do them. But cycles are powerful. I really don't see how they can avoid them indefinitely.”

Generative AI is the tech industry’s topic du jour these days, with a lot of the focus on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and buzz that the company is putting together a massive funding round led by Microsoft.

With over 20 million users, Notion is one of the largest startups already using OpenAI’s tech in the wild. OpenAI helps power the productivity software’s writing assist features that were first announced in November. I recently gained access to the invite-only alpha, and while the results are far from perfect, it’s the slickest, most practical implementation of generative AI for text that I’ve used to date. It suggested I reorder and condense some lines in this section of the newsletter, which I did. But it also confidently wrote that Apple made the Hololens, a Microsoft product.

During a phone call yesterday, CEO Ivan Zhao was quick to stress that, even with how quickly AI progressed in the last year, we're still in the early innings. "Imagine asking someone in the late 1800s, 'What do you want to do with electricity?' We are at that stage with large language models." English is Zhao's second language, and he told me he is using the AI translation feature to check his grammar and tone. Zhao hinted that the plan is for AI to also assist with the non-writing capabilities of Notion, and that AI will eventually be something Notion charges extra for. There are over 1.4 million people on the waitlist for Notion AI right now.

Notion's office is physically near OpenAI's in San Francisco, and Zhao remembers getting a peak at one of the earliest iterations of ChatGPT before it was released. Has he seen ChatGPT-4? "I can't disclose this." Even though it's just one of the models Notion uses, he said OpenAI is the best of the current crop and became good enough to implement in Notion last year. (He wouldn't name the other vendors.) 

He sees AI abstracting the work of writing, or a future where you are "painting with your words rather than typing your words." He referenced the seminal 1962 research by the famous inventor Douglas Engelbart, who argued that, by using computers, people could improve their cognitive abilities and thus be able to more effectively solve problems. "If you read Engelbart's paper, this is it,” he said. “This is how we augment human intellect."

There were two significant updates to what we know about Apple’s AR hardware plans this week. First, my former colleague at The Information, Wayne Ma, reported that Apple is working on a cheaper, entry-level mixed reality headset to follow the release of the first, pricier version sometime this year. I have also heard that a cheaper version has been in the works. Work on it was spun up after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg started telegraphing that he would intentionally price his headsets as low as possible — or as Jeff Bezos once put it: "your margin is my opportunity.”

The second story is from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who adds that Apple has shelved work on its AR glasses — not to be confused with the aforementioned headset — indefinitely due to “technical challenges.” The last I heard was that fundamental technical decisions, such as whether the glasses would be tethered to an external power source or not, hadn’t been made, and that the glasses had yet to enter Apple’s industrial design phase, which normally takes several years for new products. This news, coupled with Meta deciding last year to make its first true pair of AR glasses a developer kit, indicates that mainstream AR glasses are still far, far away.

In the meantime, the headset war between Apple and Meta is coming. Buckle up.

Matt Rogers co-founded Nest with Tony Fadell and left in 2018, four years after Google bought the company for $3.2 billion. For the past two years, he has been quietly launching another startup with a co-founder from his days at Nest, Harry Tannenbaum. Called Mill, the company is now selling a high-tech trash can that composts food for you, coupled with a logistics layer for picking the compost up and repurposing it into chicken feed.

This is admittedly a bit off the beaten path for Command Line. But given my own failed attempts at trying to compost over the years, I’m intrigued by what Rogers is trying to do. He has had a long, successful career in tech, having worked on early iPhones and iPods at Apple before starting Nest. During a recent call, he confirmed raising “north of $100 million” in funding for Mill from a murderous row of climate tech investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, and John Doerr.

“I kind of enjoy working on these things that people don't care about,” Rogers told me. “My philosophy on product development is that great products need to have an emotional component and a rational component. Everyone's mom told them not to waste food and clean their plate. But also on the rational side, no one likes stinky kitchens, no one likes stinky trash, and frankly it’s an extra chore.” 

Given how he helped define the smart home category with Nest, I was curious what he thought of Matter, the new standard that finally lets smart home devices of all kinds communicate with each other: “Tony and I always dreamed of one day Apple and Amazon and Google all working together on the smart home. And this is like the first forefront of that work that we started 12, 13 years ago. So that's exciting… finally getting Apple and Amazon bought in actually is what clicked it forward.”

On the current climate for building tech companies: “The tech recession started a year ago. Tony and I built Nest coming out of the 2008 recession. It's really the best time for innovation. People are looking for new solutions, especially when new solutions are more economical… With my investor hat on, this is where we do most of our seed and Series A investing. The last 12 months have been incredibly active for us.”

“People are begging to be disappointed and they will be” - OpenAI’s Sam Altman on the forthcoming release of GPT-4.

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