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- Microsoft briefly crosses 3 trillion in market cap
Microsoft briefly crosses 3 trillion in market cap
Plus: Prompts are tiny programs
Cash Nut
January 25, 2024
In Today’s Edition
Klarna to debut $7.99 monthly plan ahead of IPO
Bill Ackman bought nearly a 5% stake in an Israeli stock exchange
Microsoft briefly crosses $3 trillion in market cap
Google’s latest AI video generator can render cute animals in implausible situations
Prompts are tiny programs
China's new dark matter lab is biggest and deepest yet
🚀Startups Nuts
Swedish fintech firm Klarna is launching a monthly subscription plan in the U.S. to lock in its heaviest users ahead of an expected initial public offering this year, the company told CNBC. The product is set to be announced later Wednesday and will cost $7.99 per month, the Stockholm-based company said. Users of the subscription plan, named Klarna Plus, will get service fees waived, earn double rewards points and have access to curated discounts from partners including Nike and Instacart, according to Chief Marketing Officer David Sandstrom.
🏭Business Nuts
The announcement came as the Israeli bourse announced the pricing of a secondary offering of 18.5% of its market value. Bill Ackman, the CEO and founder of New York-based Pershing Square Capital Management, has been a vocal supporter of Israel, particularly since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terror attack. Ackman describes himself as both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, saying in late October that “it is not inconsistent to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian.”
Microsoft's market cap surpassed $3 trillion in intraday trading Wednesday. The milestone comes two weeks after Microsoft temporarily eclipsed Apple as the world's most valuable public company. Shares of Microsoft are up more than 7% year-to-date as investors remain bullish about its investments in AI.
📱Tech Nuts
Lumiere is an AI video generator that uses a space-time diffusion model for realistic video generation. The Space-Time U-Net architecture that it uses generates the entire temporal duration of a video at once with a single pass. It is designed to handle both where things are and how things move and change throughout a video. Lumiere can perform text-to-video generation, convert still images into videos, generate videos in specific styles using a reference image, apply consistent video editing using text-based prompts, create cinemagraphs, and inpaint videos. It excels in creating videos of cute animals in ridiculous scenarios - examples are available in the article.
Prompt engineering is just a subset of software engineering. Prompts are tiny programs written in natural language. Guessing the right 'function calls' with the clever use of vocabulary is a huge part of the game as the API isn't specified and varies between models. Thinking of prompts as code allows prompt engineers to generate model-aware syntax highlighters for favored keywords.
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🎁Miscellaneous
The world's deepest and largest underground laboratory is around 2,400 meters below the Jinping Mountains in southwest China. The enormous space, with a sprawling capacity of 330,000 cubic meters, is home to scientists studying dark matter, a hypothetical substance thought to make up more than 80% of the mass in the Universe. It opened in 2010 but only became operational in December 2023. The layers of rock above the laboratory shield it from background noise such as cosmic rays.
💡What else are we reading and seeing?
How hedge funds would trade Red Sea supply disruptions
High-income Americans are feeling really great
Private equity firms begin 2024 in sell now, buy later mode
Self-driving as a case study for AGI
Excel world champion’s top budgeting and productivity tips
10 little habits that drain 90% of our joy
3 ways to reprogram an insecure attachment according to psychologists
😎Fun Fact
The first recorded use of the term "credit card" was in a sci-fi novel titled "Looking Forward" by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp in 1932
🔥 Hot Book of the Day
The games you play for entertainment happen within a defined space. They come with a rulebook you can consult. And in the end, somebody wins and somebody loses.
If you think real life isn’t as tidy, you’d be right to some extent. But you’d also be wrong. Sure, reality is chaotic and people are unpredictable. Rules can be circumvented and even broken without consequence. But beneath all of this, the truth is we are all playing games with each other… all of the time.
Think of the argument you’ve been having for years with your spouse about who washes the dishes after dinner. As with any game you play for sport, these also have stakes, as well as winners and losers. What if your spouse could do the dishes more often? How about avoiding the argument altogether?
Those are just some of the outcomes you could achieve by adjusting your perspective. Even better, you’ll finally be able to join that secret club of people who seem to know what all of Life’s unwritten rules are. How?
Through a better understanding of game theory. Game theory is the art of making the best choices, particularly when outcomes are dependent on the involvement of others.
Von Neumann applied game theory to provide invaluable help during WWII, but his initial theories were the result of him trying to improve at poker. That’s hardly a scholarly endeavor.
Whether you’re bargaining your way to a higher pay grade, or less housework, this book distills game theory’s basic principles into easy-to-understand, actionable advice and gives you the power to optimize your daily decision-making.
“Life is a game. Learn the rules.”
🐦Joke of the Day
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