Winners and losers of the week

Author

Bay Area Times
December 09, 2023

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0. Weekly performance

Prices as of Friday at closing time (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).

1. Weekend reads

  • CRISPR: 1st treatment approved by FDA, may cure sickle cell disease.

  • OpenAI, Microsoft partnership being examined by FTC, UK's CMA.

  • X discussing Amazon Ads, PubMatic partnerships to attract SMB ad money.

  • EU's AI Act negotiations end in deal; EU seeks law before June elections.

  • Google launches AI writing assistant NotebookLM.

  • Google's Project Ellman: a chatbot that knows everything about you.

  • Epic v. Google does not settle, jury to decide verdict.

  • U.S. unemployment drops back to 3.7% in Nov., from 3.9%.

2. Winners of the week

2.1 Open-source AI model makers, including Meta, Mistral, and (maybe) Stability

Meta this week launched its Imagine text-to-image generator, available online or in Messenger

Meta, IBM, and 50 others announced the pro-open source AI Alliance

  • Unclear how exactly they will work together, but the group includes AMD, Cerebras, Dell, Hugging Face, Intel, Oracle, and Stability AI.

Mistral is closing in on raising $482M at ~$2B valuation from a16z

Mistral's open-source 7B LLM, and its derivative Zephyr 7B, are the best 7B foundational models today:

Stability AI released an open-source but non-commercial 3B model

  • Stability AI is reportedly up for sale, as it struggles to compete with closed-source heavyweights like OpenAI and Google and open-source alternatives like Meta's Llama and Zephyr.

  • But they're not dead yet — that's the message this release likely intended.

The launch of Gemini was also slightly positive for open-source models

  • Gemini was just a tad better than GPT-4, suggesting that closed-source LLMs, with current technology, have reached a plateau. This gives time for open source to catch up.

  • It is unclear how Google Gemini Nano stacks against the open-source Zephyr 7B. If it was significantly better, Google likely would have told us about that.

2.2 SpaceX

SpaceX became the most valuable private U.S. startup, priced at $175B+ in a tender offer

  • Widely seen as having a monopoly on cost-effective rocket launches.

  • Starlink's global internet can threaten internet providers around the world.

    • Its current $120/mo may not yet be competitive, but we expect prices to continue declining.

This further cements Elon Musk as the world's #1 richest

3. Neutrals, losers of the week, and weekend reads

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