🎮 Disney's $300M Galactic Gamble, 🚀 New Frontiers in Space Imaging, and 💻 the AI-Powered PC Revolution
🎮 Disney's $300M Galactic Gamble, 🚀 New Frontiers in Space Imaging, and 💻 the AI-Powered PC Revolution
Thomas's Innovation Wrap #79
Greetings,
Here’s your weekly wrap of technology, innovation, and finance news.
💎 Artificial Intelligence
A new University of Chicago study suggests GPT-4 can predict earnings as accurately as human analysts, achieving 60% accuracy, “notably higher than the 53-57% range of human analyst forecasts.” This is accomplished using "chain-of-thought" prompting to emulate an analyst's process, including identifying trends in financial statement line items and calculating key ratios. This is particularly interesting if you’re a fund looking to leverage AI to enhance the investing process! My theory is that more and more of what we consider “human analysis” will be automatable over time, and the unique investment philosophies of investment firms will be codified in, well, code.
The AI industry continues to attract significant investment. Holistic AI raised $220M to build advanced AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, and complex tasks, with an Accel partner stating their "vision of creating a large action model to automate business tasks has the ability to be transformational across all industries." Similarly, Scale AI, which cleans and labels vast datasets needed to train AI models, nearly doubled its valuation to $13.8B in a recent funding round. DeepL, a German startup offering AI-powered translation, raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation, cementing its position as a leading online translation service.
Anthropic have developed a technique to "scan the brain" of AI models, identifying features representing different concepts and altering model behaviour by suppressing certain features. CEO Dario Amodei compared it to "scanning the brain instead of interviewing someone."
Google’s new AI-generated answers seem to be having some teething issues, with some questionable answers being widely mocked over the past week.
💻 Chips and Computing
Nvidia's recent earnings report shows the AI hype train is far from slowing down, with revenue tripling and net profit soaring sevenfold year-over-year. The company plans to start releasing new AI chips annually, with the R100 potentially coming next year. CFO Colette Kress said that demand was well ahead of supply, and “we expect demand may exceed supply well into next year." Nvidia stock rose 15% over the week.
Microsoft is integrating generative AI into its products, including the new "Copilot Plus" PCs with built-in ChatGPT-style capabilities. CEO Satya Nadella believes they have a competitive product that will outperform Apple (see the interview). "We're going to outperform them. We finally feel we have a very competitive product," he said, adding that the Copilot will be everywhere, from smart speakers to smartphones and VR headsets.
These AI PCs feature an on-device AI accelerator (NPU) for faster, more secure AI processing, enabling new Windows 11 features like Recall and Cocreator, with some arguing that these PCs could spur a PC market resurgence.
"We have completely reimagined the entirety of the PC – from silicon to the operating system, the application layer to the cloud – with AI at the center, marking the most significant change to the Windows platform in decades," Microsoft indicated.
Nvidia and Dell are partnering on AI PC hardware and the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, which aims to make generative AI more accessible and economical for enterprises, targeting advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and digital assistants specifically.
Nvidia may also challenge Intel's PC market dominance with a new AI-oriented CPU.
If the PC is now more of a memory machine, then selling a new style of CPU that has a closer coupling to massive amounts of DRAM opens the door to a shift away from the Intel-based PCs to date. That kind of "architecture" change is a big opening, as Huang clearly senses. it offers the prospect of the first major market-share shift from Intel in decades.
💊 Health
Sanofi has partnered with OpenAI and Formation Bio to leverage AI in accelerating drug development, aiming to make Sanofi the “first biopharma company powered by AI at scale.”
(translated) By joining forces, the three partners hope to “reinvent drug development in the pharmaceutical industry,” according to Benjamine Liu, co-founder and CEO of Formation Bio, quoted in the press release.
Novo Nordisk's diabetes drug, Ozempic, has shown impressive results in a clinical trial, significantly reducing the risk of kidney failure and death for people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
Nestlé has launched a range of foods designed for patients being treated with anti-obesity drugs. These foods aim to provide protein and nutrient supplements to address potential nutritional deficiencies.
At first glance, this is a disaster for both the giants of industrial and fatty food and for weight loss specialists. Weight Watchers, the most famous among them, is losing ground, and its stock price plummeted in February when Oprah Winfrey announced she was leaving the company's board after promoting these new drug treatments.
Microsoft is partnering with Providence and the University of Washington to develop GigaPath, a foundation model for digital pathology that can analyse whole-slide images to distil key diagnostic and prognostic information. A Nature study found the tool improved cancer sub-typing for nine major cancer types, outperforming all competing approaches.
Researchers have developed drug-like molecules that can bind tightly to influenza A viruses and block infection at the first stage.
"This is the most potent small-molecule hemagglutinin inhibitor developed to date," said corresponding author Seiya Kitamura.
💲 Finance
Tempus AI, a technology platform company aiming to revolutionise precision medicine, has filed for an IPO on the Nasdaq (see the S-1). The company uses AI to process medical data and create "intelligent diagnostics" and is expected to list at an $8.1 billion valuation, which compares to revenue of $532 million and a net loss of $266 million last year.
Founded in 2015, Tempus AI's platform connects laboratory results to a patient's own clinical data, and has been used by more than 7,000 physicians across hundreds of provider networks, the filing shows.
The SEC has approved a rule change that paves the way for Ethereum ETFs less than six months after approving Bitcoin ETFs. This is a sign that the SEC's stance towards crypto may be softening.
🌞 Renewables
Scientists at Cambridge have developed a breakthrough technique to recycle waste concrete and steel to produce carbon-neutral cement. The process involves crushing old concrete and using it as a flux material in electric arc furnaces to purify steel. The leftover slag is then cooled to form new Portland cement. If scaled successfully, this could save billions of tonnes of carbon by 2050.
"We are on course for making cement with zero emissions, which is amazing."
Microsoft and G42 have announced plans to build a $1 billion geothermal-powered data centre in Kenya, which will dramatically increase cloud computing capacity in East Africa and boost Microsoft's ability to sell its Azure services in the region.
Ultimately the data center complex will handle artificial intelligence services and could provide cloud computing to nearby countries like Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.
⚙️ Mobility
Vay, a German teledriving startup, is partnering with French automaker Peugeot to explore using remote-controlled vehicles for last-mile delivery. This alternative to autonomous vehicles could potentially reduce operational costs for logistics companies.
"We believe it can drive large cost savings for all logistics companies, in particular ecommerce delivery," Spratt told CNBC. "By decoupling drivers from the commercial vehicles at the distribution centres, it can reduce operational costs significantly."
🛰️ Space
Blue Origin has resumed its suborbital space tourism flights after a year-long grounding following a mid-flight failure in 2022. The latest mission saw a six-person crew reach the edge of space before safely returning to Earth under parachutes, despite one parachute not fully inflating.
The Huntsman Telescope, an array of 10 camera lenses working in parallel, is pioneering daytime astronomy and enabling continuous monitoring of stars and satellites.
Mastering daytime observation also delivers a big advantage in the rapidly expanding field of space situational awareness (SSA), which is the close monitoring of an ever-growing population of satellites, space debris and other artificial objects orbiting Earth.
Researchers have developed a superconducting camera with an unprecedented 400,000 pixels, enabling ultra-low noise and high-resolution imaging across a wide spectrum. This new technology could help detect faint signals from distant stars and exoplanets and even enable non-intrusive brain imaging.
"Right now, we have a proof-of-concept demonstration," says co-project lead Dr. Boris Korzh, "but we'll need to optimize it to show its full potential."
The Euclid space telescope has sent back stunning new images of the cosmos, exceeding the expectations of scientists who have worked on the project for years.
🔒 Cybersecurity
Mastercard is using artificial intelligence to identify compromised credit and debit cards faster before cybercriminals can use them. The new AI-powered fraud detection system looks for patterns in stolen card data to proactively flag potential issues and alert banks so they can replace the compromised cards quickly.
"Generative AI is going to allow to figure out where did you perhaps get your credentials compromised, how do we identify how it possibly happened, and how do we very quickly remedy that situation not only for you, but the other customers who don't know they are compromised yet," said Johan Gerber, executive vice president of security and cyber innovation at Mastercard.
⚡ Other Snippets
LG and Google are teaming up to create an AI-powered service robot called CLOi, which will be unveiled in June and go on sale in late 2024. The robot will use Google's Gemini AI to learn user habits and provide context-aware responses.
Google is building the first undersea fibre optic cable directly connecting Africa with Australia, called Umoja.
"Access to the latest technology, supported by reliable and resilient digital infrastructure, is critical to growing economic opportunity," said Meg Whitman, US ambassador to Kenya, and a former e-Bay Inc. chief executive officer. "This is a meaningful moment for Kenya's digital transformation journey."
The US Congress is set to fund a deep-sea mining feasibility study to secure non-Chinese sources of critical metals and counter China's dominance in the field. The US Department of Defense will explore whether it is possible to refine deep-sea minerals in the US once the annual defence budget is signed into law later this year.
Enifer, a Finnish startup, has secured full funding for the world's first fungal protein factory that will produce an ingredient called Pekilo. The new factory is set to bring mycoprotein, a sustainable substitute for meat protein, to the mass market.
OpenAI's decision to make GPT-4o only available to paid mobile users has proven lucrative.
On the day of GPT-4o's release, ChatGPT's mobile revenue rose 22%, the most revenue for the app ever in a single day. That was only the start.
YouTuber Jenny Nicholson released a deep dive into the failure of Disney’s 2-day Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser experience, which cost the company $300 million. It’s funny, eye-opening, and filled with sharp insights.
Have a great week,
Thomas
About Thomas Rice
Thomas Rice co-founded Minotaur Capital, a technology-driven, AI-led global equities fund, and is based in Sydney, Australia. He can be found on the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter at @thomasrice_au.