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Lately, it feels like almost everything is going wrong for Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk.However, there’s some surprisingly good news buried in the carnage of the electric vehicle market.Tesla’s US market share actually grew in the first quarter. That follows a similar increase in the fourth quarter, according to EV sales data from Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book.Since the end of September, Tesla’s share of the US EV market has grown by 1.3 percentage points to 51.3%. That outpaced all other aut…
9 days ago
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Two decades ago, Google cofounder Larry Page had a dream to digitally scan millions of books. It turned into a long and bitter legal battle that the company eventually won.Today, the emergence of huge AI models is turning this book-scanning debate on its head.Google will soon release a powerful new model called Gemini 1.5 Pro that has a context window of 1 million tokens. That’s about 750,000 words, or the equivalent of 3 to 7 books depending on the length. It can also suck in 1 hour of video, 1…
about 1 month ago
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AI models hallucinate. But sometimes they can be right.Every Media CEO Dan Shipper recently posted a video of him playing with Google Gemini AI models, including the fancy 1.5 version. A VC friend Jesse Beyroutey played along, too.They tried to get Gemini to help them pick a stock to invest in. It’s an eye-opening harbinger of a future with giant AI context windows, which let users share mountains of information with models via prompts.Shipper and his buddy grabbed a pile of company earnings cal…
about 1 month ago
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Last year, Garry Tan, one of the most successful tech investors in Silicon Valley, questioned the business case for consumer-facing AI technology like ChatGPT.“Personally I am short chat interface and long on SaaS and Enterprise implementations that use LLMs,” he tweeted back in July.Less than a year later, his concerns are coming true.This week, startup Inflection AI partially imploded. The startup’s two main founders decamped to Microsoft, taking a sizable team with them.Inflection raised more…
about 1 month ago
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The AI community assumes that OpenAI uses vast quantities of YouTube videos to train models, including its new Sora offering.It’s almost an open secret at this point. The mystery is how OpenAI accesses enough YouTube content to make this work.Google’s YouTube prohibits the scraping of its videos by bots and other automated methods, and it bans downloads for commercial purposes.The internet giant will also throttle attempts to download YouTube video data in large volumes. Complaints about this ha…
about 1 month ago
businessinsider.com
By one important measure, TikTok didn’t grow in the final quarter of 2023. In the US, it actually went into reverse.This is shocking for an app that has experienced rocket-ship expansion since the Chinese tech giant ByteDance launched it in 2016.The question is why? A few folks might be deleting the app. More likely: There are simply no more hours left in the day for people to watch more TikTok videos. This is especially true for young users who are now entering a new busy time of life known as…
about 1 month ago
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Google’s latest AI product launch went so badly, there’s now a conspiracy theory floating around that the fiasco was actually something executed on purpose.Just like an AI model output, this theory is not really believable. But it says a lot about Google’s current predicament. Especially how exposed the company’s Search business is to generative AI disruption.To catch you up: Google had to pull part of its fancy new Gemini AI model after it spat out inaccurate pictures, including depicting Googl…
about 2 months ago
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Wall Street has been demanding more profit from tech companies, but this is overdoing it.On Tuesday, Lyft reported results and included a surprisingly bullish forecast. A closely watched profit margin should expand by about 500 basis points in 2024.This is based on adjusted EBITDA, which strips out a bunch of costs. But still, investors were paying close attention, and the stock surged more than 60% in after-hours trading.The problem is that this was a typo. Let’s call it an uber-typo.A short wh…
2 months ago
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Dogfooding is when tech companies test inventions on their own employees. Before you try to get everyone else to eat your cooking, you better taste it first. So the Silicon Valley thinking goes. It’s also a great way to spot problems and make tweaks ahead of a full rollout. Googler Anthony Vallone explained the approach in a 2014 blog.“Dogfooding is an important part of our test process,” he wrote. “This internal feedback has, on many occasions, changed product design.“A decade on, Silicon Valle…
2 months ago
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2024 has started with another wave of tech industry layoffs. This time, though, the cuts are way smaller.In early 2023, a decade of abundance came to a painful end for many tech workers. More than 200,000 jobs were eliminated in a few months as Amazon, Google, Meta, and other tech giants slashed costs aggressively.In January 2023 alone, more than 108,000 tech jobs disappeared. This January looks like a cake walk in comparison, with fewer than 45,000 positions eliminated, according to TrueUp’s la…
3 months ago
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The cloud industry is splitting into 2 distinct parts.There’s the “AI Cloud” future, where Nvidia GPUs and large language models form the foundation of new generative AI services delivered and rented over the internet. That’s hot and Microsoft, with help from OpenAI, is in the lead. (Google Cloud is trying hard here, too).Then there’s the existing “Cloud 1.0″ business, where CPUs and more traditional servers support apps, websites and other software services. This is not so hot anymore, in the e…
3 months ago
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Two things in tech shocked me this month. First: Apple has been trying to build an electric vehicle to compete with Tesla for at least a decade, and it’s still years away, according to Mark Gurman, the world’s leading Apple reporter. Second: After splurging tens of billions on the metaverse, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now spending an estimated $18 billion on GPUs to chase the generative AI craze.I asked my hedge fund manager friend about these hyper-expensive long-term projects. They are risky,…
3 months ago
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On Friday, former Meta product manager Dan Grover tweeted about a new service that he said will vie with Apple’s goggles and OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the “biggest/most impactful product launch” in tech. I’ll go further and say this offering is the most important tech product of 2024. It doesn’t need energy sucking AI data centers, or legally dubious data-siphoning to work. It doesn’t require you to download an app and pay a 30% App Store tax to Apple. It won’t make anyone in Silicon Valley rich. It w…
3 months ago
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In 2009, Silicon Valley luminary Chris Anderson went on The Colbert Show to talk about a book he’d written.In “Free, the Future of a Radical Price,” he explained how online distribution would mean many digital products and services would be given away for nothing.Stephen Colbert kicked off the interview like so: “You are the author of a book called Free, and it costs $26.99. I love a bait and switch. Well done, my man!” Then Colbert turned to the camera, pointed at us all, and said “Suckers!“For…
3 months ago
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Vehicles are getting bigger and heavier in the US, which makes them more dangerous. And the larger they get, the less efficient they become.I recently saw a Cybertruck up close and was surprised by its size. When I got to Japan a few weeks later, the contrast was shocking.Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and other locations were awash with tiny “kei” trucks, cars and vans. These cities have thin, weaving side roads that would never be able to handle most American SUVs and trucks. These small vehicles are pe…
3 months ago
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After two decades of mostly unfettered expansion, the internet’s biggest businesses are entering a new period of slower growth.That’s according to Bernstein Research, one of Wall Street’s top tech analysis firms.“There is a general concern amongst Internet investors that core revenue pools may be approaching saturation, with growth at risk of being structurally lower going forward,” Bernstein’s Mark Shmulik and Nikhil Devnani wrote in a research note this week on the outlook for 2024 and beyond.…
4 months ago
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Tesla will probably sell every single Cybertruck it makes in 2024 and 2025. That may not amount to many vehicles, though.CEO Elon Musk could be taking a page from Ferrari’s playbook by limiting supply, at least initially, to create scarcity value and keep prices high.This is also what sometimes happens with big new iPhone launches, when Apple ramps up production slowly, and fans are left fighting to get their hands on the latest technology.The Cybertruck is the most divisive new vehicle in at le…
4 months ago
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I’m a car nut. When I was a kid, I read my dad’s car magazines religiously.I love vehicle design and the driving experience. So, when Tesla’s Cybertruck came out, I put a $100 reservation down. When early versions began appearing on the streets, I devoured the photos and videos online.My beloved wife of 20+ years has threatened to divorce me if I actually buy this vehicle. It’s divisive, and not just because of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s controversial comments. You either love the Cybertruck’s angula…
5 months ago
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It’s rare to witness raw, naked panic in Silicon Valley. It’s happened twice this year, though.These moments strip away the carefully crafted thought-leadership blogs and backslapping social media posts that are the usual fare in tech circles. Then we get to see something closer to the truth.The first of these revelatory moments came in early spring when venture capitalists panic-tweeted their favorite bank, SVB, into an unprecedented failure.The second happened this month when OpenAI had a near…
5 months ago
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Elon Musk has multiple axes to grind when it comes to OpenAl and its cofounder Sam Altman. But the Tesla CEO made a valid point in the midst of a chaotic weekend for the artificial intelligence startup.The events kicked off Friday afternoon when OpenAl made it clear in a statement that Altman lied to the board about something so important that they decided to oust him as CEO.“He was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibiliti…
5 months ago
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If there was any doubt about Toyota’s commitment to electric vehicles, a new deal announced on Thursday should clear things up. Redwood Materials, a battery recycling startup run by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, unveiled a big new agreement with Toyota. The companies expanded an existing pact so Redwood can recycle batteries from older Toyota vehicles. The Japanese auto giant will also source Cathode Active Material and Anode copper foil from Redwood for Toyota’s new batteries that will go into f…
5 months ago
