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The OpenAI defectors plot thickens https://lnkd.in/eVMyztX6
Mira Murati announced her new “Thinking Machines Lab” startup, and has hired 20 former OpenAI employees. Meanwhile, former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutsekever’s “Safe Superintelligence” is raising another $1 billion with a valuation of $30 billion. https://lnkd.in/ek9ndRhU
It’s earnings day for Palantir, arguably the hottest retail stock of the moment. https://lnkd.in/e3gUuhFy
Palantir ($PLTR) earnings are out today after the close. I was really surprised to see the reduction in profit that Wall Street is expecting, given the stock is up about 400% over the last year. Not sure the fundamentals matter much for this stock at the moment, given its valuations, and the LOL-nothing-matters quality of the markets right now. But the fact that the CEO has been selling a lot of stock — one analyst says upwards of $2 billion over the last six months or so — might look a bit different to retail shareholders if the numbers are bad. Fully accessible link here: https://lnkd.in/ednFeEcp
After announcing really strong earnings yesterday, Meta gave some clues as to how it will recoup its tens of billions in AI investments over the next few years. 2025 will be all about hitting a billion Meta AI users, then monetizing them. Unlike its competitors in the AI horserace, like OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta can pour tens of billions of profits from its other businesses into this effort (and the infrastructure needed to run it), and has lots of ways that it can turn the free product into a revenue firehose. On yesterday’s Q4 earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “We have a really exciting roadmap for this year with a unique vision focused on personalization. We believe that people don’t all want to use the same AI — people want their AI to be personalized to their context, their interests, their personality, their culture, and how they think about the world.” Anytime you hear the word “personalization” in a Big Tech product, that means it will be used for ads. None of the big AI players have integrated ads into their chatbot products, but if anyone is prepared for this, it’s Meta. Meta is an advertising company, after all. For all of FY 2024, the company pulled in over $160 billion in ad revenue, growing 21% year over year. https://lnkd.in/d_6sa_q5
If RFK Jr. is confirmed and follows through with his plan to ban pharmaceutical ads, it could destabilize two major industries—advertising and television. Pharma companies, with their massive budgets and desire to get mentions of their drug in front of consumers, have historically been willing to pay top dollar for airtime. Their removal from that airtime would leave a gaping vacuum that networks would have to fill, likely by simply decreasing their asking price. As annoying as those repetitive pharma ads might be, they do have their upsides—they keep potential patients informed about newly available treatments, and are legally required to inform consumers of potential side effects. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/dvvkPCuH
Sherwood News reposted this
On Tesla’s earnings call yesterday, Technoking Elon Musk spent a lot of time discussing Tesla’s other businesses: Optimus robots! Real-world AI! Autonomous ride hailing! Semis! Energy storage! Solar roofs! How the company could be the “ most valuable company in the world by far.” At one point, he muttered to himself, “Earth to Elon.” Very little time was spent on regular electric vehicles, the ones people drive and which make up the bulk of the company’s revenue. Partly that’s just what Musk does: Sells a dream, where Tesla is an AI, autonomous vehicle, and robotics venture instead of a lowly car company. “ My prediction long term is that Optimus will be overwhelmingly the value of the company,” Musk said. If you focus too much on regular EVs, the present, or, God forbid, last quarter’s numbers, you are dull and unimaginative. Partly, that's because the present day looks very bad. Telsa missed the Street’s expectations on a number of fronts. Tesla sold fewer cars in 2024 than it did in 2023, especially in the US. As such, automotive revenue was down 8% in the fourth quarter and down 6% for the year. Average sales prices were down — not because the company released its long-teased affordable car, but rather because Tesla has had to slash prices to move the meager number of vehicles it did. As a result its margins declined. Profit dropped a whopping 53% thanks to the declining sales price as well as increased operating expenses driven by AI and other R&D projects, the company said. That was despite a $600 million mark-to-market benefit from bitcoin. The richest man in the world can will outcomes into existence mortals can’t, and to some extent an investment in Tesla is an investment in Musk himself, but that doesn’t make it good business. And connections and clout can conceal a variety of ills. Pointing in every other direction doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your eyes on the road (the one that exists, now). Despite all the bad news, the stock is up 4% premarket.
Undaunted by a shocking week in the AI world that questioned the “go big, or go home” playbook that Meta and its competitors are following, the company is going full speed ahead. Meta reported strong Q4 earnings, posting a $20.8 billion profit for the quarter — a 49% increase year over year — with revenues of $48.3 billion growing 21% from last year, easily beating estimates of $46.9 billion. For the year, revenue was $164.5 billion, up 22% from 2023. https://lnkd.in/eyx4kCtK
The mind-numbingly boring “application services” company F5 Inc. is getting a moment in the sunshine today, as it tops the S&P 500 list of performers. The Seattle company, which has been around since the late 1990s tech boom, sells traffic management and security software that choreographs and combs through data pumping through the server systems that power the internet. More recently, F5 has been aiming their products at the surge of AI-related data center investment, which has had a healthy effect on its bottom line. https://lnkd.in/ez-HD58S
At the center of the story of DeepSeek’s breakthrough achievement with its R1 models lies the Nvidia hardware that powered the servers that trained those models. DeepSeek researchers said they were able to train their powerful, efficient model on a cluster of only 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs. That is a very small number of GPUs for a model that matched or beat OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model in some benchmarks. Now, DeepSeek’s claims are drawing suspicion from some observers in the AI industry. https://lnkd.in/eTYFRVeR
Sherwood News reposted this
Days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman praised DeepSeek’s new R1 models as “impressive,” the company is accusing the Chinese AI startup of using ChatGPT to help train its models. The authors, artists, news organizations, and content creators who have sued OpenAI for training its models on their copyrighted intellectual property may have little sympathy for OpenAI in this situation. https://lnkd.in/dBaFjnjk
The stock market put together a respectable recovery from the panic of Monday’s DeepSeek dive, especially market behemoth Nvidia’s recovery of a solid $125 billion or so in market value to retake the $3 trillion mark in terms of market cap. So clearly the AI trade isn’t dead. But the damage to stocks associated with capital-expenditure blitz on data centers that we’ve seen over the past few years continues to be deep: https://lnkd.in/eepQV9EE