---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 18, 2026"
date: 2026-05-18T00:00:03-05:00
draft: false
description: "Eric Schmidt gets booed at graduation, Apple plays the privacy card with Siri, ChatGPT wants your bank login, and graduates make clear nobody asked AI to ruin their job market."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

## [University of Arizona Students Boo Eric Schmidt's AI Cheerleading During Commencement](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/932203/university-of-arizona-students-boo-eric-schmidt-ai-commencement)

Eric Schmidt showed up to tell the graduating class of 2026 that AI is going to be amazing, and the graduating class of 2026 told him exactly what they thought of that. Turns out that "the future is bright and full of AI" hits a little different when you're holding a diploma and a pile of debt in a job market that's been actively reorganized around not hiring you. Consider this the canary in the coal mine for every executive planning to work "AI transformation" into their next public address.

---

## [Revamped Siri Will Reportedly Offer Auto-Deleting Chats](https://www.theverge.com/tech/932207/siri-apple-intelligence-auto-deleting-chats)

Apple is doing what Apple does best: arriving late to the party and claiming the moral high ground on the way in. The iOS 27 version of Siri will reportedly offer auto-deleting chat histories, leaning hard into Apple's privacy brand as a way to differentiate from Google, OpenAI, and everyone else who's been hoovering up your queries for years. It's a smart play — privacy as a competitive moat is real — but it's also a convenient narrative for a company that's been embarrassingly behind on the actual AI capabilities side.

---

## [A New Personal Finance Experience in ChatGPT](https://openai.com/index/personal-finance-chatgpt)

OpenAI is rolling out a personal finance feature for ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S. that lets you connect your financial accounts and get AI-powered insights on your money. The pitch is compelling: a tireless financial advisor who actually knows your spending, goals, and priorities. The obvious question — "what happens to all that banking data?" — is one OpenAI will need to answer loudly and repeatedly before most people hand over their Plaid credentials to a chatbot.

---

## [Chatbots at the Drive-Thru Are Just the Beginning](https://www.theverge.com/column/928096/chatbots-ai-drive-thru-mcdonalds-wendys)

A good deep-dive on how AI voice ordering at fast food chains — which started with McDonald's in 2021 and has had a famously rocky road — is slowly maturing into something more reliable, and what it signals about the broader automation of service jobs. The interesting tension here isn't just economic; it's about where customers draw the line between "convenient" and "I just want a human to take my order for a cheeseburger." Spoiler: that line is moving, whether we like it or not.

---

## [The Real Losers of the Musk v. Altman Trial](https://www.wired.com/story/musk-v-altman-trial-closing-arguments/)

Closing arguments are in, the jury is deliberating, and Wired makes the astute observation that the whole spectacle has managed to make everyone involved look terrible. Elon Musk comes across as a spurned co-founder who wanted control he wasn't given; Sam Altman's trustworthiness has been put under a federal microscope and found wanting by at least some in the courtroom. The real loser may be the industry's carefully cultivated "we're the good guys building beneficial AI" PR narrative, which has taken a fairly public beating for weeks.

---

## [IBM Asks DBAs to Trust AI to Act on Their Behalf](https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/05/05/ibm-asks-dbas-to-trust-ai-to-act-on-their-behalf/5228662)

IBM is pushing new AI automation into Db2, with Google and Intel along for the ride, essentially asking database administrators to let an AI agent take autonomous actions on production systems. "Trust us" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that ask. The technology is genuinely interesting — automated root cause analysis, self-tuning, proactive remediation — but the DBAs I've talked to over the years have a well-earned paranoia about anything they didn't personally write touching their databases at 2 a.m.

---

## [Listen Labs Raises $69M After Viral Billboard Hiring Stunt to Scale AI Customer Interviews](https://venturebeat.com/technology/listen-labs-raises-usd69m-after-viral-billboard-hiring-stunt-to-scale-ai)

Listen Labs, which uses AI to conduct and synthesize customer research interviews at scale, pulled off a legitimately clever recruiting stunt — a billboard displaying what looked like random numbers that were actually AI tokens, decoded to a job offer — and parlayed the attention into a $69M raise. The underlying product is interesting: replacing expensive human research panels with AI-moderated interviews that can run at massive scale. Whether AI interviewers can capture the genuinely weird, unexpected things humans say in research sessions is the real question.

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## [Sony Tries to Explain That Its AI Camera Assistant Doesn't Suck](https://www.theverge.com/tech/932133/sony-xperia-1-xiii-ai-camera-assistant)

After a demo post backfired, Sony is now clarifying that its AI Camera Assistant on the Xperia 1 XIII doesn't edit your photos — it just makes suggestions about lighting, depth, and framing before you shoot. Which is a fine feature, and probably a useful one, but "actually it just tells you what to do differently" is not quite the comeback Sony was hoping for. The bar for AI camera features has been set high by Google and Apple; "it gives suggestions" puts you solidly in participation-trophy territory.

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## Bottom Line

When graduates are booing AI hype at commencement and consumers are being asked to hand their bank accounts to a chatbot, the gap between Silicon Valley's enthusiasm and everyone else's trust has never been more obvious.