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|  |  | Wednesday, December 3, 2025 | |  | | Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, Apple hands its AI brief to a new boss, OpenAI orders a full tune-up for ChatGPT, Google sketches server racks with a view of Earth, and Christmas displays try their best to outshine the actual stars. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Costco is taking Trump’s tariffs to
court. The retailer wants a guarantee it can reclaim duties if the levies are struck down by the Supreme Court, arguing deadlines could otherwise trap the billions of dollars importers already paid. | The Dells are dropping baby bonds at scale. Michael and Susan Dell are using their fortune to boost “Trump accounts” for children 10 and
under in qualifying ZIP codes, stacking money on top of a federal newborn deposit. | Trump is stretching suspense over Powell’s replacement. He kicked a promised Fed chair decision into early 2026, while allies float Kevin Hassett and markets parse every insult the president flings at the current rate stance. | Google’s latest moonshot could soon be literal. Its CEO is backing a 2027 launch of AI hardware into space and a 10-year push to make satellite-based data centers feel routine, as Earth’s grids strain under the AI build-out. | | | SPONSORED |  | Your Personalized Blueprint for Health | What if a single test could unlock everything you need to know about your health? With TruDiagnostic, it can. From identifying your biological age to tracking key markers like inflammation, vitamins, and metabolic health, their reports are
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| | APPLE GETS SIRI-OUS | For a company that sells a good deal of magic, Apple’s AI act has barely made it onto the stage. After a year of talking up “personal intelligence,” Tim Cook is swapping the person in charge of it: John Giannandrea,
who spent seven years steering machine learning and AI strategy, is sliding into an advisory role ahead of a 2026 retirement. His replacement, Amar Subramanya, shows up fresh from a 16-year run at Google, a corporate VP stint in AI at Microsoft, and a recent tour running engineering for the Gemini assistant — and he has a to-do list that includes turning the company’s invisible AI push into something that actually shows up in daylight.
On Wall Street, the missing piece has a ticker
symbol. Apple’s AI strategy has weighed on the stock. Wedbush’s Dan Ives has called the innovation coming out of Apple Park “very disappointing” — and labeled this week’s move “a major reset.” He figures the AI layer sitting on 2.4 billion iOS devices and 1.5 billion iPhones could add $75 to $100 per share over the next few years if Apple ever turns it into a product investors can see, and yet he also argues that “no ‘AI premium’ is factored into Apple’s stock at current prices.” That gap sits right next to a year where Big Tech has happily
poached Apple AI talent and rivals have been shouting about Copilot, Gemini, Galaxy AI, and recommendation engines while Apple insists its quieter, on-device approach is thoughtful, not slow.
In the middle of everything is Siri, still waiting for its real comeback. Apple Intelligence shipped the smaller stuff while the headline reboot slipped into 2026 after what insiders described as “ugly” early tests that produced wrong answers nearly a third of the time. The new version is
expected to lean on a custom Google Gemini model, while a reshuffled power map hands Siri to Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell and brings Subramanya into Craig Federighi’s growing software kingdom. If Siri’s comeback lands, Apple finally gets the AI story its stock has been priced against; if it doesn’t, “personal intelligence” stays a slogan in search of a product. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on the pressure, the poaching, and the power map inside Apple Park. | | | RECOMMENDED READING | The
future of tech, decoded.
Semafor Technology unpacks the ideas, innovations, and power shifts redefining the global tech landscape. From AI and machine learning to the startups and policies shaping
the industry, each briefing delivers clarity and depth on the tech transforming our world
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| | | ALTMAN SEES RED | Sam Altman is sounding the alarm. According to an internal memo seen by the Wall Street Journal, the OpenAI CEO has declared a “code red” for ChatGPT, bumping up an earlier “code orange” in the company’s
yellow-orange-red urgency scale and telling employees to focus on the daily experience: better personalization, faster responses, more reliability, and answers that stretch across a wider range of questions. The push is big enough that other projects — advertising, health and shopping agents, and a personal assistant tool called Pulse — are being pushed back while temporary team transfers and a daily call are encouraged for anyone working on the chatbot.
The numbers say dominance;
the competition says drift. Google’s latest Gemini release, rolled out in November, has been beating rivals on key benchmarks and winning over testers such as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who said after two hours that he wasn’t “going back” to ChatGPT. ChatGPT still pulls in about 800 million users per week, while Google’s Gemini sees roughly 650 million users per month. But analysts say that wiring Gemini straight into Google’s search engine gives it a distribution edge OpenAI can’t match, and Anthropic’s Claude — particularly the Opus 4.5
model — has become a go-to for coding work.
Altman’s memo reportedly insists that OpenAI is still performing well and says a reasoning model due next week is better than Gemini, but the near-term marching orders are all about the product that made the company’s name. Nick Turley, who runs ChatGPT, said the priority is making it more capable, more intuitive, more personal, and available to more people worldwide. For an app that turned “chatbot” into shorthand for this whole AI era,
ChatGPT’s next few releases have to prove it can still feel like the future, not just the default. Quartz’s Alex Daniel has more on what
Altman’s memo reveals about the AI leaderboard. | | | SPONSORED | | Your Personalized Blueprint
for Health | What if a single test could unlock everything you need to know about your health? With
TruDiagnostic, it can. From identifying your biological age to tracking key markers like inflammation, vitamins, and metabolic health, their reports are fully customized to you.
You’ll receive actionable steps based on your results, giving you the clarity and confidence to make impactful changes. One finger prick of blood, one life-changing report. Quartz readers can save 20% today with code NEWSLETTERS20 | | |
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