This Week in Snark: GPT-5, a $3,499 Sound Bar, $100M Spam Funding, and Quantum AI That’s Mostly Vibes
From OpenAI’s GPT-5 overshadowing every other launch to Yamaha’s luxury sound bar, Clay’s $100M “marketing engineer” hype, and D-Wave’s pretend-it’s-real quantum AI toolkit, here’s the snarky roundup of tech news you didn’t know you needed.
If you noticed the eerie silence on SiliconSnark the past couple of days, that’s because we were totally not procrastinating — we were at the annual SiliconSnark Summer Offsite. And by “offsite,” we mean three hours at a WeWork with broken A/C, followed by a heated argument about whether LaCroix “Pamplemousse” tastes like grapefruit or grapefruit that’s been stored next to a battery.
The agenda was simple:
- Team-building exercises (just me and the robot mascot glaring at each other while trying to assemble an IKEA desk without the instructions).
- Strategic planning (how to make our headlines clickier without descending into full-on BuzzFeed-core).
- An open bar (a Keurig machine and a bottle of whiskey labeled Do Not Drink – For Cooking).
Naturally, we came back fully recharged and ready to roast the week’s most mockable tech news. Here’s what you missed while we were busy perfecting our “thought leader” LinkedIn faces.
GPT-5 Stole the Show and Every Other Tech Launch Today is Just Background Noise
OpenAI dropped GPT-5 this week, and every other company unfortunate enough to have scheduled a launch immediately found itself in the role of “warm-up act nobody came to see.” The announcement video was a snooze-fest, but still managed to break the internet because, well, it’s GPT-5 and we’re all doomed to eventually be outsmarted by it.
The press release was so long it could have qualified as a NaNoWriMo entry, but the subtext was clear: “We made something smarter than you, and yes, it will take your job — but it’ll write you a heartfelt goodbye note on the way out.” Tech FOMO has never felt so existential.
Yamaha’s New $3,499 Sound Bar Promises Audio So Immersive You’ll Forget You’re Still Sitting on an IKEA Couch
Yamaha unveiled a $3,499 sound bar that claims to make your home sound like a high-end theater. It’s called the True X Surround 90A, but for that price it really should also do your taxes and read bedtime stories in Morgan Freeman’s voice.
According to Yamaha, the audio is so realistic that you’ll forget you’re still wedged into your EKTORP sofa eating microwave popcorn. In the promo images, sound waves blast so hard they could knock a cat into another dimension. We’re sure it sounds incredible, but if you can afford this, you probably already have a media room that looks like a Bond villain’s lair anyway.
Clay Raises $100M to Make Marketing Feel Like Coding, Because Spam is Better When It’s Programmatic
Clay, a “marketing engineer” tool that basically lets you code your way into spamming people more efficiently, just raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation. Their pitch is that marketers can now work like developers — which sounds like a nightmare for both professions.
Imagine the magic: a world where your inbox is flooded not just with generic LinkedIn requests, but with personalized, dynamically generated outreach that knows your cat’s name, your favorite snack, and exactly how much you lied on your résumé. Investors are salivating, and so are spambots everywhere.
D-Wave Releases Toolkit So Developers Can Pretend Quantum AI is Real Today
D-Wave launched a shiny new “quantum AI toolkit” that lets developers integrate quantum computing into their AI projects — which is a polite way of saying “now you can spend twice as much money pretending you understand what a qubit is.”
The toolkit even comes with a demo that uses quantum processors to generate simple images. Sure, they’re not exactly Mona Lisas, but they’re apparently a “pivotal step” in quantum AI’s future. Translation: it’s 2025, and we still don’t have teleportation, but at least your quantum-powered cat doodle can look slightly more existential.
