Tech
The Energy Exception & Socialites

The Energy Exception & Socialites

David Crowther

The energy exception

‍As alluded to in the previous story, 2022 was a tough year for the stock market. As of Dec 15th, the S&P 500 Index was down 17% this year — with 338 of its ~500 members losing ground. The exceptions, of course, were energy companies — many of which raked in record profits during the year.

The Energy Exception & Socialites

The tech and media sectors in particular had something of a reckoning. PayPal and Tesla lost more than 50% in value, while countless others — including Amazon, Alphabet and Disney — shed more than a third of their value.

As public market malaise fed through to private markets, VCs became cautious, despite a record amount of dry powder sitting on the sidelines. As startups struggled with funding, finances were squeezed  — bringing the end of the hiring spree for big tech and more substantial layoffs at startups.‍

Socialites‍

With tech stocks souring and Tesla shares tumbling, Elon Musk’s $44bn Twitter takeover offer in April looked more-regrettable with each month that passed, with Musk recently dethroned as the world’s richest person.‍

Eventually, the 6-month+ will-they-won’t-they saga concluded, and Musk completed his acquisition in October. It is, of course, hard to say exactly what will happen with Musk as Chief Twit, but with sharp staffing cuts, an advertiser exodus, and a subscription-focused revamp of the verification system, it’s clear that a shifting business model is afoot.‍

Beyond Twitter, it’s been a busy year across social media — the fickle industry we all love to hate — where platforms come and go at breakneck speed.

The Energy Exception & Socialites

Mark Zuckerberg has been betting big on his Metaverse ambitions... and finding it hard going. Meta has shed some ~$800bn in value since its market cap. peak — suggesting many aren’t quite as invested in Mark's new online world.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s been doing, well, what TikTok does — getting bigger and bigger. Even as regulation threatens to slow the Chinese-owned platform’s meteoric rise, TikTok has been hitting huge revenue milestones at unparalleled pace this year. In a completely unrelated set of events, every other social platform has decided that short-form vertical video is a really cool idea.

‍TheRealTRUTH

‍It’s also been a big year for socials looking to take things back to basics, like BeReal. The app invites users to shun the carefully-crafted style that other platforms encourage, which proved to be a huge hit this year. Donald Trump's TRUTH Social also launched to much fanfare, though the platform is yet to breakout beyond the ex-president's core fanbase.

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Rani Molla

China just blew up one of Meta’s key AI bets

China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese startup (since relocated to Singapore) that makes AI agents and was central to Meta’s push to turn its massive AI investments into a real business. The move is part of the Chinese government’s effort to stop US firms from gaining access to Chinese talent and intellectual property, as Washington continues restricting sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.

Unlike its tech peers which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a standalone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

Unlike its tech peers which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a standalone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

tech
Jon Keegan

DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

$28.5T
Rani Molla

SpaceX thinks its total addressable market (TAM) is a whopping $28.5 trillion for its businesses, according to an S-1 filing for its upcoming IPO reviewed by Reuters. And most of that market isn’t rockets. The company says roughly 90% could come from AI — largely selling artificial intelligence tools to businesses.

“We believe that our enterprise strategy, which is focused on serving the digital needs of the world’s largest industries with Al solutions, positions us competitively to pursue this rapidly ⁠growing opportunity,” ​SpaceX said in the filing. “We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human ​history.”

TAM, of course, assumes capturing every possible customer. But even a small slice of a $28.5 trillion market would be enormous.

tech
Rani Molla

Tesla Cybercab production has begun

On Tesla’s earnings call earlier this week, CEO Elon Musk said production of the company’s steering-wheel-less Cybercab had begun. Since then, Musk and Tesla have posted videos showing the gold two-seater rolling off the line at its Texas Gigafactory and onto the road.

The Cybercab — meant both for consumers and Tesla’s Robotaxi network — is widely seen as central to the company’s future. “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large scale and large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots,” Musk said last year.

Whether these cars actually make it to consumers is another question. For now, regulations generally require steering wheels, and Tesla still has to prove the vehicles can reliably drive themselves.

On the earnings call, Musk said production would be “very slow” but would ramp up and go “kind of exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year.”

tech
Rani Molla

Meta signs deal to use Amazon Graviton chips

Meta said it will deploy “tens of millions” of Amazon Web Services Graviton CPU cores to power so-called “agentic” AI systems — tools that can reason, plan, and act on their own. The move makes Meta one of the largest customers of Amazon’s in-house chips.

The deal also underscores a broader shift in AI infrastructure, as companies move beyond Nvidia GPUs and use different chips for different tasks.

Meta, which is working on its own custom inference chips, also has chip deals with Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

Meta Partners With AWS on Graviton Chips to Power Agentic AI

Meta Partners With AWS on Graviton Chips to Power Agentic AI

The deal also underscores a broader shift in AI infrastructure, as companies move beyond Nvidia GPUs and use different chips for different tasks.

Meta, which is working on its own custom inference chips, also has chip deals with Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

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