This week on Uncanny Valley, the hosts dissect SpaceX’s historic public listing and the ripple effects for investors, Apple’s WWDC 2026 reveal, and the overhaul of Siri. They also examine how Meta quietly removed facial recognition capabilities from its smart glasses app following a WIRED exposé, and later explore an investigation into the extensive surveillance network operated by New York Knicks owner James Dolan across Madison Square Garden properties.
What This Means for Makers and Artists
For creators and developers, the biggest takeaway from Apple’s event is the shift from marketing promises to functional utility. The new Siri AI is no longer just a concept; it is a rebuilt voice assistant capable of genuine back-and-forth dialogue. It can now pull context from your emails, messages, and photos to provide relevant answers, moving the tool from being merely annoying to being actually usable. While the AI capabilities are significant, the real value proposition for users lies in the architecture: Apple is prioritising on-device processing to ensure your personal data stays local, though it is leveraging Google’s infrastructure for heavy lifting via a new private cloud compute partnership.
SpaceX Goes Public
Elon Musk’s company has officially become a public entity, marking what is expected to be the largest initial public offering in history. While Musk stands to become even wealthier, the listing means ordinary individuals may find themselves holding shares without realising it, as institutional and retail investors flood the market.
Meta’s Face Recognition Retreat
WIRED reporters recently uncovered that Meta had embedded code into the Meta AI app on millions of devices to power a facial recognition system for its smart glasses. A day after the report broke, the company removed the code. This swift action highlights the growing scrutiny around surveillance technologies embedded in consumer apps.
Surveillance at Madison Square Garden
James Dolan, the owner of the New York Knicks, has built an extensive surveillance machine within his Madison Square Garden properties. This investigation reveals the depth of monitoring available to the arena’s management.
Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: Hey, this is Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you’ve been enjoying listening to the show, would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. Second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected]. It doesn’t matter how big or how small we want to hear from you and get you answers. OK, onto the show. I’m a little tired, but it’s because I got to see Lionel Messi play soccer last night and score a goal on a penalty kick.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s really fun.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. It was a friendly of Argentina versus Iceland. You’ll never guess who won.
Zoë Schiffer: I literally won’t. No. No.
Brian Barrett: It was Argentina. Zoë.
Zoë Schiffer: Got it. OK. Is that an obvious thing?
Brian Barrett: They’re very good at soccer.
Zoë Schiffer: Cool. That’s so nice for them. Happy for them. Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry.
Brian Barrett: And I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor. On today’s show, we’re discussing Apple’s key releases from their annual developer conference, especially the company’s long awaited AI makeover for Siri. It’s far from their first attempt, but it’s going to stick this time.
Zoë Schiffer: We’re also taking an early look at the SpaceX IPO this week, which is slated to become the world’s largest IPO of all time. We’ll get into who is slated to benefit the most. Elon Musk, who is already the world’s richest man, but on track to become even richer and why you might find yourself among the investors without even realizing it.
Brian Barrett: And in case you missed it, WIRED reporters recently uncovered that Meta had silently embedded code that would power a face recognition system for its smart classes in the Meta AI app on millions of people’s phones. A day after we reported that story, Meta removed the code. We’ll talk about how all that unfolded.
Zoë Schiffer: And later in the show, for all of the basketball fans who’ve been glued to the NBA finals, we have a special guest who will tell us about his investigation into Madison Square Garden’s surveillance system.
Brian Barrett: So Zoë, another week that we get to talk about a developer conference.
Zoë Schiffer: I know. Leah’s away, and wow, have you taken advantage of that situation?
Brian Barrett: Oh yeah. No, yeah. I’m pushing it through. You were so thrilled about Google IO. This week we’ve got WWDC.
Zoë Schiffer: I will say slightly more excited because Apple, as you and I have discussed many times, bit of a laggard in the AI race and I feel like this was their opportunity to tell the world what has changed since the last developer conference.
Brian Barrett: For people who aren’t familiar with WWDC, this is Apple’s annual event where it gathers a bunch of developers from all over the world and they announced upcoming releases and changes to their software for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac. This year, the biggest announcement, which as we said, has been their biggest announcement the last couple of years, was around Siri. They’re rebranding it as Siri AI. Siri was always an AI product, but now they’re for real serious about it. And it’s a ground up rebuild or so they’re billing it of Apple’s voice assistant. This version of Siri will be powered by the next generation of Apple intelligence, which is Apple’s personal AI system. All of this probably sounds familiar and that’s because we’ve heard it before. Apple’s senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi first announced Apple Intelligence back in 2024 at the WWDC keynote.
Craig Federighi, archival audio: We are embarking on a new journey to bring you intelligence that understands you. And there are already some really impressive chat tools out there that perform a vast array of tasks using world knowledge, but these tools know very little about you or your needs.
Brian Barrett: And they would still not for some time. Again, in 2025, more promises for even more powerful AI or really AI that was powerful at all and hinting at a rebirth for Siri.
Craig Federighi, archival audio: We’re continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal. We’re making the generative models that power Apple intelligence more capable and more efficient.
Brian Barrett: Zoë, this is so much like when you and I are both reporters and editors to a certain extent, but it’s very familiar when you are in a situation where you’re going to your editor and saying, “I’m just going to do a little more reporting. I have made so much progress on this story, but I just need another week or two for more calls.”
Zoë Schiffer: A tiny bit more time. Just a little more time. I will say, distracted by how smooth Craig’s voice sounds, he must practice so much for that.
Brian Barrett: Well, and this is an audio medium, but his hair is also famously, I think, the best hair in Silicon Valley.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes.
Brian Barrett: So Craig has a lot going for him, just not Siri capabilities. But the changes brought by both of these announcements were underwhelming to say the least and to say the most, we should point out that about a month ago Apple agreed to pay a settlement of $250 million for a class action lawsuit that basically said that Apple intelligence is not that intelligent. It’s not living up to the promises that Apple made. So it’s sort of a situation of fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you, fool me three times.
Zoë Schiffer: Go to Google and make a deal so you can actually be intelligent.
Brian Barrett: Exactly. So yeah, that’s what has happened. Now Apple is going to rely largely on Google Gemini to help power Apple intelligence under the hood. Zoë, what do you make of that?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. Frontier models are really expensive and difficult to build. Google has already done it pretty successfully. I think if you look at, say, enterprise coding models, Gemini is not the best of the best, but in a lot of other ways it is quite cutting edge. And so yeah, it makes sense these two companies have worked together before to great effect for both of them. I was curious and have been kind of chatting with sources at both companies to see, is this partnership long-term? Has Apple thrown in the towel permanently and just said, “This is fine. We’ll rely on it.” Or are they furiously working in the background to try and build up their frontier capabilities and eventually make Siri run on Apple technology start to finish? People are, as you might expect, being very tight-lipped about that and they haven’t really said what the long-term future of this product is going to be.
Brian Barrett: I’ll say two things that if you dig a little deeper, not that much deeper, but a little deeper into the documentation from the conference, two things really stand out to me about Apple’s approach to AI in this snapshot moment. One is a sort of relentless focus on on- device AI. So where Apple has been putting in time and work in a way that’s showing publicly right now is finding ways to make as much of the AI capabilities as possible happen on your device so that it doesn’t go back to Apple. No one knows what you’re doing or that there is a privacy angle to it. The other thing that was interesting to me—also privacy—is that for the first time, and a reason why Google makes a good partner is that Apple has something called private cloud compute. They rolled it out two years ago. It is a fancy, very technical way to be a privacy preserving AI service. It has made a deal and worked with Google and NVIDIA to make private cloud compute work on Google Cloud. So previously all of these things happened on Apple Cloud. Now you’ve got the infrastructure to support as well, which I suspect Google was in a better position to provide than some of the other competitors that would’ve been on their radar.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. So this was kind of my takeaway for what is their big value proposition in addition to saying this version of Siri is actually going to work and be intelligent. They’re also saying in parentheses, unlike all the other companies, we are really focused on privacy. And I think in this moment where there’s a lot of open questions around if you are a lawyer and you’re speaking to a chatbot, are those conversations private or are they discoverable if there’s a court case if you—
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