In Today’s Edition 

• Flexport relaunches Convoy trucking marketplace

• Amazon joins the Dow, giving the index a needed upgrade

• Mistral AI releases new model to rival GPT-4 and its own chat assistant

🚀Startups Nuts

Flexport relaunches Convoy trucking marketplace

Flexport relaunched Convoy's digital marketplace less than four months after it acquired the latter's assets. The Convoy Platform connects shippers and truckers. Convoy shuttered in November last year after it failed to find a buyer. The startup struggled with heavy debt, declining freight volumes, and dampened investor appetite. The firm was valued at $3.8B at its peak after raising a funding round in April 2022. Convoy's co-founder and former CEO Dan Lewis, now a technical advisor at Flexport, was "proud to see Convoy's technology platform and marketplace relaunch this week within Flexport.

Other News

• Byju Raveendran informed employees that he is still the CEO of Indian edtech startup Byju's, despite a shareholder group's attempt to oust him on Friday. The shareholder group unanimously voted to remove founder Raveendran, but whether the group represented a majority is in dispute, with one source claiming the combined ownership was more than 60% and others claiming it's less. 

• DeepX is in the final stages of closing a $90M (120B won) funding round from investors. The AI chip startup is raising fresh capital to accelerate production and fuel global expansion, sources informed Bloomberg. 

• DatologyAI, a Data curation startup raised $11.65M in seed funding.

• Abridge, a clinical documentation startup, raised $150 million

• Napier AI, a financial crime software provider, raised $57 million

🏭Business Nuts 

Amazon joins the Dow, giving the index a needed upgrade

The Dow is a smaller average than the S&P 500, with just 30 components, and it's weighted by the share price of the stocks instead of the companies' total market value. The three largest tech stocks in the Dow by market capitalization as of Friday were Apple, Microsoft and Salesforce, while key companies such as Nvidia and Alphabet were excluded. Over the past 12 months, the S&P 500 is up 28%, while the Dow is ahead 19%. 

Other News

• Alphabet's stock fell 4.5% on Monday, its second-biggest daily decline in a year, following a controversy over Google's Gemini chatbot. Alphabet's market value dropped by over $70B after Gemini's image generator produced racially inaccurate portrayals of historical figures and occasionally left out white individuals.

• Workday said it is acquiring HiredScore, an AI-driven talent solutions company. Using data-driven insights, HiredScore improves recruiting and talent mobility processes for companies. Workday did not share financial details of the deal, which is expected to close by the end of Workday's fiscal Q1, ending April 30.

• Blackwells Capital called on Disney to adopt an AI strategy, saying it could boost the company's stock price by up to 129%.

• FTC sues to block Kroger + Albertsons merger on concerns about higher prices and hurting workers. In a news release, the federal agency said the deal would result in higher prices for grocery shoppers and lower wages for workers. Kroger and Albertsons had struck a deal to divest over 400 stores and other assets to try to overcome antitrust concerns.

• Julo, an Indonesian online lending startup is gearing up for an initial public listing. The news comes as the company reported a 73% jump in annual recurring revenue, reaching a $121M run rate in 2023. Julo is also in talks with investors to raise a pre-IPO round. 

• Goldman Sachs and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala ink $1 billion partnership to invest in Asia Pacific, with a particular focus on India. The news follows Goldman's 2023 expansion in the Middle East with the opening of its office in Abu Dhabi Global Market, the financial center of the UAE capital.

• BYD, the Chinese EV darling that outsold Tesla last quarter, is showing off its range (and not in the distance-per-charge sense): it launched both a $14k hatchback and a $230k supercar this week.

📱Tech Nuts

Mistral AI releases new model to rival GPT-4 and its own chat assistant

Mistral AI has launched a new language large model called Mistral Large to rival other top-tier models like GPT-4 and Claude 2. The company is also launching a new service called Le Chat to compete with ChatGPT. Access to Mistral Large costs $8 per million input tokens and $24 per million output tokens through the company's API. The model supports a context window of 32k tokens and English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Le Chat is free, but it can't access the web.

Other News

• Microsoft signed a multiyear partnership with French AI startup Mistral that includes taking a minority stake in the 10-month-old company. Under the partnership, Microsoft will launch Mistral's AI models to Azure cloud customers, making Mistral the second company after OpenAI to have its LLMs hosted on the platform. Azure customers will first get access to its latest model, Mistral Large, which competes with GPT-4. Microsoft said it's investing in Mistral to "unlock new commercial opportunities," though it didn't disclose financial details.

• Deutsche Telekom, Europe's biggest telecom operator, introduced a smartphone that relies on AI instead of apps to perform tasks for users. The company's "T-phone" features an app-less interface created in collaboration with Qualcomm and Brain.

• Google's most advanced Gemini models should be integrated directly into smartphones starting next year, according to Google Pixel executive Brian Rakowski. Google has made "breakthroughs" to compress the large language models to run directly on devices, he told CNBC.

• Arevon Energy, a renewable energy developer, has secured $1.1 billion in aggregate financing commitments to support the development of its 374 MW solar solar-plus-storage project in Kern County, California.

• Meta is forming a new team to help fight disinformation and AI misuse ahead of the European Parliament elections in June.

• SK Telecom partnered with U.S. AI startup Perplexity to offer its subscribers an alternative AI-powered search engine.

• Lenovo unveiled its ThinkBook Transparent Display laptop and it’s exactly what it sounds like — a laptop with a completely see-through, 17.3-inch screen.

🔥Newsletter Spotlight

🎁Miscellaneous

Microplastics Being Detected In All Human Placenta Samples

Researchers at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences are finding microplastics in every sample of human placentas being tested. The researchers found the most chemical was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. It accounted for 54% of the total plastics.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• AI and Education: An Annual Report

• Farmers’ protests continue across Europe

• With liquidity scarce, venture capital funds are getting creative to return capital

• BP exec’s husband guilty of insider trading $1.8 million after overheard phone call

• Tyler Perry halts $800 Million studio expansion after seeing OpenAI’ text-to-video model

• US DoJ names Princeton prof. as first Chief AI Officer.

• Tackling The Growing Threat Of Space Debris With Fusion Laser Technology

• The winners and losers in the bitcoin ETF world, one month in 

• Apollo’s Marc Rowan calls AI a ‘bubble’ worse than even the dotcom era

• How to develop emotional intelligence as a leader

• 3 red flags to spot toxic work cultures when interviewing

• Does giving make you happier?

😎Fun Fact

OpenAI continues to be seen as the leader in LLMs, according to prediction markets, followed by Google

🐦Joke of the Day

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