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- Adobe gives up on 20 billion acquisition of Figma
Adobe gives up on 20 billion acquisition of Figma
Plus: OpenAI buffs safety team and gives board veto power on risky AI
Cash Nut
December 19, 2023
In Today’s Edition
Jeff Bezos wants Elon Musk to know Blue Origin is serious now
Knowing and sharing your zero cash date
Meta's stock is wrapping up a record year, spurred by cost cuts that followed a disastrous 2022
OpenAI buffs safety team and gives board veto power on risky AI
DeepMind AI outdoes human mathematicians on unsolved problem
How CRISPR gene editing could help treat Alzheimer’s
🚀Startups Nuts
This article discusses a recent podcast that Jeff Bezos appeared in that focused on his leadership style and space company, Blue Origin. Bezos has made it clear that Blue Origin needs to speed things up. He has reconfigured leadership at the company and New Shepard is scheduled for its next launch as soon as December 18. Blue Origin predicts that its New Glenn rocket will launch next year with a NASA smallsat mission. New Glenn will pose a challenge to SpaceX as it will be used for cargo rather than for space tourism like New Shepard.
Knowing when you run out of cash is important. Without it, you can’t create a workback plan. Communicating this date to investors also helps align expectations and gives you something to work towards and beat–by raising funding or improving revenue.
🏭Business Nuts
Adobe has abandoned its acquisition of product design software company Figma as there was no clear path for regulatory approval for the deal. Both UK and EU competition regulators have probed the deal due to the impact it would have on the product design, image editing, and illustration markets. Adobe will pay Figma $1 billion as a termination fee as per the terms of the merger agreement.
Meta's stock is poised to have its best year ever, having gained 178% in 2023 as of Friday's close. The bounceback from a disastrous 2022 validates CEO Mark Zuckerberg's declaration that this would be Meta's "year of efficiency." After three straight quarters of declining sales last year, growth returned in 2023, and for the third quarter Meta recorded expansion of 23%, its sharpest increase in two years. The results were driven by a rebound in digital advertising and market share gains over rivals Alphabet and Snap.
📱Tech Nuts
OpenAI has announced a new safety advisory group that will sit above the technical teams and make recommendations to leadership as part of an expansion of its internal safety processes to fend off the threat of harmful AI. The company has updated its Preparedness Framework to show a clear path for identifying, analyzing, and deciding what to do about catastrophic risks inherent to models they are developing. Leadership will be able to make decisions on whether to ship products, but the board has the power to reverse those decisions.
FunSearch is an AI system that can interact with a specially trained large language model to create short computer programs that generate solutions to math problems. The system checks to see whether these solutions are better than known ones, and if not, it provides feedback to the LLM so that it can improve in the next round. It was able to discover new solutions to an old problem. One important feature of FunSearch is that people can see the code created by the model and learn from it.
🎁Miscellaneous
CRISPR therapies could potentially provide a one-and-done solution for forms of Alzheimer's disease caused by genetic mutations. There are several proposed strategies for using the technology to fight Alzheimer's, but CRISPR-based gene therapies still have a long way to go. Scientists are now laying the groundwork to start bringing CRISPR technologies to clinical trials. Transformative treatments are likely only a few years away, although they will be expensive.
💡What else are we reading and seeing?
Google’s True Moonshot
The stock market's "fear gauge" is at its lowest level since the pandemic
Private credit is the hot new thing, but its roots go back to the 1980s
Why success comes down to how hard you care
Why you should ask for advice, not permission
😎Fun Fact
The term "bankrupt" originated from the Italian words "banca rotta," meaning broken bench, as a symbol of insolvency
🔥 Hot Book of the Day
For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different alarm.
Rather than continuing to increase exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, that decline has already begun.
In Empty Planet, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker find that a smaller global population will bring with it many benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women.
But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security.
The United States and Canada are well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism leads us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever.
“An ambitious reimagining of our demographic future.”
🐦Joke of the Day
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