Peloton & Snowflake – Pandemic Pastimes.

Pandemic darlings tell different stories. Peloton FQ4 24 – The turn Peloton reported revenues that grew YoY dispelling fears of the company being in a death spiral which, combined with finally breaking even on a cash flow basis, gives hope that the ship has finally stopped sinking. The result was a 35% jump in the share price but given how...

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Summer Break – Back Friday August 23rd

RFM has taken the company camel on a tour of Southern France and Northern Italy and will return on August 23rd 2024   

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Tesla FSD – The Mannequin.

A dummy will be launched. The idea that Full Service Driving (FSD) will be a commercial reality in 2025 remains a fantasy but Mr Musk will strengthen the resolve of his fans with the launch of a vehicle that will look like FSD but lack the intelligence to offer FSD in any commercial capacity. In its most recent earnings report,...

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SearchGPT – Non Starter

SearchGPT unlikely to go anywhere. OpenAI’s latest attempt to take on Google is probably more about generating revenue and reducing losses but given Bing’s failure to make a dent in Google, it looks doomed to failure. Google has an enviable position in search with a 90% market share and an advertising business that generates well over $200bn in annual revenues...

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Artificial Intelligence – Apocalypse Now

Zuckerberg undercuts an industry. Meta Platforms has just dropped a bomb on the generative AI industry by offering more than OpenAI does and doing so for free. Combine this with the substantial cash burn going on at many of these startups and one can rapidly see how there is going to be a serious problem. Meta Platforms offering models to...

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Nvidia AI Foundry – CUDA II

Game changer that will be largely ignored. Nvidia AI Foundry is a consequential announcement as it looks like it has been designed to maintain Nvidia’s dominance in AI when CUDA is no longer the control point in the AI ecosystem. However, I am pretty certain that the timing of the announcement and the complexity of the topic will ensure that...

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Alphabet Q2 24 – The disconnect

Big disconnect between words, numbers, investments and revenues. Alphabet reported solid Q2 2024 results, but anyone would think from the commentary that all of the revenues were coming from its new AI products rather than advertising (75%), cloud (12%) and subscriptions (11%). I suspect the generative AI services make up a tiny percentage of the revenue despite massive investment and...

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Artificial Intelligence – Hot Summer

Valuations are still going up. Cohere, one of the current group of white-hot AI startups has raised money at $5.5bn confirming that the market’s appetite for overvalued paper remains unabated ensuring that when the correction comes, it is going to hurt some players. Cohere is a little bit different than many of its peers such as Anthropic or Mistral in...

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Nebius – The Phoenix.

From the ashes of Russia comes something interesting Nebius may not seem very exciting on the surface, but outside of AI infrastructure, the company also has some of the non-Russian Yandex assets which could be more interesting when the current craze around generative AI calms down. Yandex was viewed as the Russian Google and while it operated mostly in Russia,...

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Artificial Intelligence – Better, Smaller, Cheaper

The race to the bottom is beginning.   OpenAI’s smaller GPT-4o Mini promises to kick off a race to the bottom in terms of pricing as it is only slightly inferior to GPT-4o but is 60% cheaper which is likely to trigger a spiral of price cuts as users realise that there is not much that separates all these models from...