I forget who: but the gist of it is as follows. Mark Zuckerberg designed an ‘AI*’ assistant – like you do – and he wants to get a voice for it (Zuckerberg is calling the ‘AI’ ‘Jarvis’). Enter Robert Downey (who gets to be in every Marvel movie from now on, if he likes), who replied:
I’ll do in a heartbeat if Bettany gets paid and donates it to a cause of Cumberbatch’s choosing…that’s the right kind of STRANGE!
Bettany is Paul Bettany, who is the voice of Jarvis/Vision in the Marvel movies, and you know perfectly well who Cumberbatch is. Anyway… somebody found this potential deal weird, although I don’t. Zuckerberg gets Downey’s voice for his personal not-Siri. Bettany gets a nice charitable-giving tax deduction for free. Cumberbatch gets to give money to some charity just before his next movie (which is a Marvel movie) comes out. And Downey doesn’t have to get Zuckerberg, Bettany, and/or Cumberbatch Christmas presents this year. It all seems perfectly reasonable to me…
*It’s not a real AI. If it was a real AI, my wife would have told me about it two years ago.