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This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses what’s next for Apple as Tim Cook steps down from his role as CEO. They also go into the reasoning behind SpaceX and Cursor’s surprising deal, and why Palantir’s self-published manifesto drew a lot of heat online. Also, we discuss why some conspiracy theorists are leaving Trump’s side, and how a scammer created an AI-generated woman to attract and grift MAGA men.

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I’ve used ChatGPT to help me build a budget before, and it was genuinely helpful. After I input my monthly salary as well as my standard utilities and recurring expenses, the chatbot drafted a few solid options, and I tweaked them into penny-pinching perfection. I’m admittedly part of the growing number of people turning to chatbots, like Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for financial advice.

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With his deep brown eyes, wide grin, and almost comically chiseled body, Jae Young Joon is the platonic ideal of a hunky male influencer. On Instagram, where he has more than 320,000 followers, he regularly posts himself trying on sheet masks at home, enjoying soju and karaoke with his friends, or posing in front of the Ferris wheel at Coachella. Occasionally, he’ll promote his music, including his recent LP Pressure Release, which features a BDSM-inspired album cover, his back muscles rippling underneath a harness and chains.

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Sometime in the next year or two, Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, will step onto a stage and tell the world that his company has a revolutionary product. This product, he’ll say, will put the full and awesome power of AI into everyone’s hands. It probably won’t represent a breakthrough in AI research, and it might not let people automate work or perform tasks any better than a lot of technically minded people are doing today. It may or may not involve a new device, though if it doesn’t, one should be in development. But if it all works out, that keynote will mark the moment when Apple did to AI what it has done for desktop computers, the internet, mobile technology, wearables, and music distribution. That is, it’ll offer a solution to a troublesome technology that’s so delightful and right that it seems obvious in retrospect.

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