0. Weekly performance

1. Winners of the week

1.1 OpenAI

• Its $86B tender offer is ongoing, even after Thanksgiving's chaotic situation which saw CEO Sam Altman fired and rehired.

  • We expect OpenAI to raise money at $86B+ in early 2024, this time a primary round for itself, rather than a tender offer to buy employee shares.

  • Altman previously said they would need to raise $100B to build AGI.

• OpenAI managed to only give Microsoft a board observer seat, preserving the current structure where the now Altman-aligned non-profit's board has full control.

  • New board member Larry Summer said OpenAI's work is “extraordinarily important.”

• Only negative: OpenAI delaying the custom GPT store until early 2024, likely due to internal pressure to improve safety and aligment.

1.2 Chinese fast-fashion apps

Shein confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO

• Shein's last valuation: $66B, in May 2023, from $100B in April 2022.

  • Estimated 2x P/S, 60x P/E.

  • Goldman Sachs, JPM Chase, and Morgan Stanley are the lead underwriters.

  • ETA: 2024.

  • Headquarters moved to Singapore, from China, in 2021.

Temu reached 172M MAUs in U.S. in 1 year after launch

1.3 Longevity

Life expectancy +1.1 year to 77.5 years in 2022, as heart disease, cancer, Covid lead as causes

The $101 XPRIZE Healthspan prize was announced, the largest of its kind

• Money will fund 1-year clinical trials.

Loyal announced that its longevity drug for dogs received the 1st of 3 green lights needed for FDA approval

• ETA: 2026.

1.4 AI models

Perplexity AI launched “online LLMs” that outperform GPT-3.5, Llama 2

Pika, AI video creator, editor, launched in beta with $55M fundraising

• $55M led by Lightspeed, with participation from Adam D’Angelo, Nat Friedman, and others.

  • Google Deepmind threat: we're still skeptical about how smaller startups can compete with Google's to-be-launched text-to-video model, which should leverage its unrivaled YouTube video database.

Meta updated its Seamless models of text and speech translation

• llamafile: easiest way to run LLMs on normal computers.

1.5 Anduril

Anduril launched its reusable anti-drone fighter RoadRunner

• To cost “low-6 figures,” vs. $4M for a high-end Patriot missile, and $10K for an Iranian drone.

• $10B valuation: in talks to raise $400M-$500M, it was reported in October.

1.6 Tesla

Tesla Cybertruck launched: it is the fastest EV pickup truck in market, by far. But current models are $80K+, with the $61K model only in 2025, vs. $40K+ announced in 2019

The quickest Cybertruck goes 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds, faster than even most sports cars

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.