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☆ Asian hedge funds piled to China education, U.S. AI shares in Q1
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Summer Zhen | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

Investors poured money into private tutoring leaders, including New Oriental and TAL Education (TAL.N), that have come through a near two-year crackdown in China on after-school education. Greenwoods also built a new position in TAL Education by acquiring 2.2 million shares. The fund run by ex-Alibaba CTO John Wu bought 2.1 million more shares to boost its stake in the tutoring giant. Share prices of both New Oriental and TAL collapsed over 90% from its peak after Beijing’s ban on K-12 private tutoring. The price of two stocks have doubled from the low point in October after China dropped its strict controls against COVID-19.

☆ Appen launches cost-cutting plan as earnings drop, expands into generative AI
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

Shares of the company tanked as much as 19.4% to A$2.570 in early trade. Appen, one of the world's largest AI training providers, announced on Wednesday a raft of cost-saving initiatives expected to deliver annualised cost savings of about $36 million in fiscal 2024. "Going forward, costs will be managed in line with the revenue opportunity and market conditions," it said in a statement. It further launched a set of data products and services in a push to diversify its revenue by tapping into the hot generative AI market, on the back of its partnership with NVIDIA Corp (NVDA.O) to offer AI solutions to the latter's enterprise customers. Appen said it had "multiple projects underway that relate to generative AI model development and evaluation for both large tech and enterprise customers."

[1/2] The logo of SoftBank Group Corp is displayed at SoftBank World 2017 conference in Tokyo, Japan, July 20, 2017. The fourth-quarter earnings come after the Vision Fund unit posted four consecutive quarters of investment loss, with investors debating whether the value of privately held stakes have further to fall. Portfolio firms of the Vision Fund unit whose shares climbed during January-March include e-commerce firm Coupang Inc (CPNG.N) and robotics firm AutoStore Holdings Ltd (AUTO.OL). What matters is Arm for SoftBank to demonstrate it can get results as an investment company," said SMBC Nikko Securities analyst Satoru Kikuchi. Still, SoftBank executives are unlikely to offer meaningful new information about the Arm listing on Thursday, Kikuchi said.

Leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA Corp (NVDA.O), OpenAI, and Stability AI, will participate in a public evaluation of their AI systems. Shortly after Biden announced his reelection bid, the Republican National Committee produced a video featuring a dystopian future during a second Biden term, which was built entirely with AI imagery. Such political ads are expected to become more common as AI technology proliferates. In February, Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to eliminate bias in their AI use. The Biden administration has also released an AI Bill of Rights and a risk management framework.

☆ Meta Platforms scoops up A.I. networking chip team from Graphcore
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Meta Platforms Inc. has hired an Oslo-based team that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore. "We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. They bring deep expertise in the design and development of supercomputing systems to support AI and machine learning at scale in Meta's data centers," said Jon Carvill, the Meta spokesperson. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has become increasingly reliant on AI technology to target advertising, select posts for its apps' feeds and purge banned content from its platforms. The 10 employees' job descriptions on LinkedIn indicated the team had worked on AI-specific networking technology at Graphcore, which develops computer chips and systems optimized for AI work.

☆ Meta Platforms scoops up AI networking chip team from Graphcore
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Katie Paul | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

May 5 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) has hired an Oslo-based team that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore. "We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has become increasingly reliant on AI technology to target advertising, select posts for its apps' feeds and purge banned content from its platforms. The 10 employees' job descriptions on LinkedIn indicated the team had worked on AI-specific networking technology at Graphcore, which develops computer chips and systems optimized for AI work. A new category of network chip has emerged to help keep data moving smoothly within those computing clusters.

☆ Nvidia short interest down 18% YTD, while stock up 91%-S3 Partners
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: 1 min

NEW YORK, May 3 (Reuters) - Short interest in Nvidia Corp. (NVDA.O) is down by 7.04 million shares, or 18%, for the year to date, while the stock is up about 91% so far this year, according to S3 Partners. Short interest is currently 1.32% of the float, the lowest level since October 2022, the firm wrote Wednesday. 1 losing equity short so far in 2023, followed by Apple (AAPL.O) and Tesla (TSLA.O), it noted. Investors who sell securities 'short' borrow shares and then sell them, expecting the stock to fall so they can buy the shares back at the lower price, return them to the lender and pocket the difference. Reporting by Caroline ValetkevitchOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

But Nvidia has created variants of its chips for the Chinese market that are slowed down to meet U.S. rules. Even the slowed Nvidia chips represent an improvement for Chinese firms. The back-and-forth between government and industry exposes the U.S. challenge of slowing China's progress in high tech without hurting U.S. companies. Chip industry sources said that was an effective action. Some in the AI industry believe that is still plenty of speed.

☆ Big Tech’s Rebound Plays to Individual Investors’ Growth-Stock Bets
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Hannah Miao | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Shares of large U.S. technology companies are powering the broader market higher again, vindicating many individual investors who bet big on growth stocks. Together, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp., Netflix Inc., Nvidia Corp. and Tesla Inc. comprise roughly a quarter of the S&P 500’s market cap, according to FactSet. That means they have an outsize influence on the direction of the major stock index.

While SoftBank had said in March it planned to list Arm in the U.S. stock market, the company's IPO registration shows that it is pressing ahead with the blockbuster offering despite adverse market conditions. Arm plans to sell its shares on Nasdaq later this year, seeking to raise between $8 billion and $10 billion, the sources said. SoftBank and Arm declined to comment. There are signs that the IPO market is beginning to thaw. Arm's IPO preparations are being led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Barclays (BARC.L) and Mizuho Financial Group (8411.T).

☆ Intel climbs as Wall St cheers early signs of recovery
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

TD Cowen analysts said the company "was not out of the woods yet but this was a starting point." Intel's market capitalization is set to rise by nearly $8 billion to more than $130 billion, if premarket gains hold. "We see gross margin pressured for the foreseeable future reflecting aggressive process and new product spend as well as IFS (Intel Foundry Services) investment," Oppenheimer said. Intel posted its biggest quarterly loss in the first quarter as it ramped up production and investments in manufacturing plants. Reporting by Eva Mathews and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj KalluvilaOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Norway's sovereign wealth fund chief seeks state regulation of AI, Financial Times reports
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

April 28 (Reuters) - Norway sovereign wealth fund's CEO Nicolai Tangen has called upon governments to speed up the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), the Financial Times reported on Friday. The $1.4-trillion wealth fund, the world's largest, is set to reveal guidelines in August on how the companies it invests in should use AI ethically, Tangen told the newspaper in an interview. The Government Pension Fund Global operates under ethical guidelines set by parliament and excludes investments in companies that it says does not respect the guidelines. Norges Bank, the country's central bank, holds stakes in more than 9,200 companies globally through the wealth fund. Reporting by Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi AichOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Futures rise on Meta forecast ahead of key earnings, economic data
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

SummarySummary Companies Futures up: Dow 0.26%, S&P 0.42%, Nasdaq 0.70%April 27 (Reuters) - U.S. stock index futures rose on Thursday as an upbeat forecast from Meta Platforms lifted social media stocks, with investors looking forward to big-ticket earnings and key economic data. Shares of social media platforms Snap Inc (SNAP.N) and Pinterest Inc (PINS.N) rose 3.4% and 2.8%, respectively. Meta is the second best performer among the S&P 500 stocks with a 74% gain so far this year, next only to Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O). Analysts expect first-quarter earnings to have fallen 3.2% year-over-year for S&P 500 (.SPX) companies versus a 5.1% decline forecast earlier, according to Refinitiv data on Wednesday. ET, Dow e-minis were up 88 points, or 0.26%, S&P 500 e-minis were up 17.25 points, or 0.42%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 90.25 points, or 0.7%.

☆ Nvidia releases software tools to help chatbots watch their language
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

April 25 (Reuters) - Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), a major supplier of chips and computing systems for artificial intelligence, on Tuesday released a set of software tools aimed at helping chatbots watch their language. But the chatbots can still be unpredictable and say things their creators wish they did not. Nvidia's software tools, provided free of charge, are designed to help companies guard against unwanted responses from chatbots. U.S. lawmakers have called for regulations around AI systems as apps like ChatGPT have surged in popularity. Few legal rules or industry standards exist on how to make AI systems safe.

Generative AI gobbles up reams of computing power, amplifying the urgency of Meta's capacity scramble, said five of the sources. Executives also that spring set about reorganizing Meta's AI units, naming two new heads of engineering in the process, including Janardhan, the author of the September memo. According to four of the sources, Meta did not prioritize building generative AI products until after the launch of ChatGPT in November. Zuckerberg announced a new top-level generative AI team in February that he said would "turbocharge" the company's work in the area. Carvill, the Meta spokesperson, said the company has been building generative AI products on different teams for more than a year.

☆ Wall St Week Ahead- Tech earnings to test markets' 'most crowded' trade
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( David Randall | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

NEW YORK, April 21 (Reuters) - A blistering rally in megacap growth and technology shares has buoyed markets this year, and earnings reports in coming weeks could help investors determine if those gains are justified. Technology earnings are seen falling 14.4%. Earnings will show "whether this is really a safe haven if you are worried about recession." Still, gains could fizzle if the Fed does not cut interest rates this year, as widely expected. Growth stocks are especially vulnerable to high borrowing costs, which threaten to erode the value of their longer-term cash flows.

"The Tesla bull case has centered around the company's growth goals, which it is failing to meet." Tesla's stock is trading at about 43 times expected earnings, down from astronomical levels above 200 times in 2021, according to Refinitiv data. Tesla on Wednesday doubled down on the price war it started at the end of last year, as Musk said the company would prioritize sales growth ahead of profit. In the first quarter, Tesla posted its lowest quarterly gross profit margin in two years. You're investing in Elon Musk," said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer of Bokeh Capital Partners.

☆ Intel ends its bitcoin mining chip series
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-18 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

April 18 (Reuters) - Chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) said on Tuesday it has discontinued production of its bitcoin mining chip series, just a year after its introduction. A rout in the cryptocurrency market hurt some chip companies including Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), whose high-end graphics chips became popular for crypto mining. Intel expects to stop taking orders for the series, called Blockscale, by October 20 this year and end shipping by April 20 next year, according to a document on the company's website. "As we prioritize our investments in IDM 2.0, we have end-of-lifed the Intel Blockscale 1000 Series ASIC while we continue to support our Blockscale customers," a company spokesperson said. Argo Blockchain (ARB.L), Block Inc (SQ.N), Hive Blockchain Technologies(HIVE.V) and GRIID Infrastructure were Intel's first customers for the chips.

J&J (JNJ.N) shares fell 2.8% after the healthcare conglomerate cautioned investors over the lingering impact of inflation-driven costs this year. Goldman (GS.N) shares dropped 1.7% after the Wall Street firm's profit fell 19% as dealmaking and bond trading slumped. The early quarterly results from S&P 500 companies come as investors have been bracing for a gloomy reporting season, fearing the economy may be on the cusp of a downturn. S&P 500 company earnings are expected to have declined 4.8% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to Refinitiv IBES data as of Friday. The S&P 500 posted 28 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 66 new highs and 143 new lows.

☆ Broadcom releases chip for wiring together AI supercomputers
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-18 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

April 18 (Reuters) - Broadcom Inc (AVGO.O) on Tuesday released a new chip for wiring together supercomputers for artificial intelligence (AI) work using networking technology that is already in wide use. Broadcom is a major supplier of chips for Ethernet switches, which are the primary way the computers inside conventional data centers are connected to one another. But the rise of AI applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Bard have presented new challenges for the networks inside data centers. Broadcom on Tuesday announced a new chip, Jericho3-AI, which can connect up to 32,000 GPU chips together. The Jericho3-AI chip will compete with another supercomputer networking technology called InfiniBand.

☆ Activist investor urges Getty to partner with Meta, Microsoft to grow revenue
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-17 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/2] Meta Platforms Inc's logo is seen on a smartphone in this illustration picture taken October 28, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationApril 17 (Reuters) - Activist investor Trillium Capital said on Monday stock-photo company Getty Images Holdings Inc (GETY.N) should expand and create partnerships with technology firms and publishers to grow its revenue. Last week, Trillium asked Getty for a board seat and urged the company to evaluate strategic options including a sale. The investor, which holds more than 500,000 shares of Getty, said the platform should expand its library of generic stock photos to special events including religious functions, weddings, graduations and family celebrations. Trillium also listed Nvidia, Microsoft, Adobe and Meta as potential takeover suitors for the company.

Some are turning to startups who are pivoting to using powerful chips to run quantum-inspired software on regular computers as they bide their time. In the past 18 months, quantum software startups including SandBoxAQ - an Alphabet spinoff - raised about $1 billion, according to data firm PitchBook. Ultimately, the software inspired by quantum physics won't perform well on quantum computers without some changes, said William Hurley, boss of Austin-based quantum software startup Strangeworks. Still, he said companies that start using them will have engineers "learning about quantum and the phenomenon and the process, which will better prepare them to use quantum computers at the point that they do so." Strangeworks, which also operates a cloud with over 60 quantum computers on it, raised $24 million last month from investors including IBM (IBM.N).

☆ Nvidia's top A.I. chips are selling for more than $40,000 on eBay
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Kif Leswing | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Nvidia's most-advanced graphics cards are selling for more than $40,000 on eBay , as demand soars for chips needed to train and deploy artificial intelligence software. The prices for Nvidia's H100 processors were noted by 3D gaming pioneer and former Meta consulting technology chief John Carmack on Twitter. The H100, announced last year, is Nvidia's latest flagship AI chip, succeeding the A100, a roughly $10,000 chip that's been called the "workhorse" for AI applications. Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars on tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 chips to help build ChatGPT. Nvidia controls the vast majority of the market for AI chips.

☆ Amazon cranks up AI competition against Microsoft, Google with new cloud tools
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's biggest cloud computing provider, on Thursday jumped into that race with a suite of its own proprietary AI technologies, but it is taking a different approach. ChatGPT creator OpenAI, for example, offers a similar service, letting customers fine-tune the models behind ChatGPT to create a custom chatbot. The Bedrock service lets AWS customers test-drive those technologies without having to deal with the underlying data center servers that power them. "It's unneeded complexity from the perspective of the user," Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS, told Reuters. Those underlying servers will use a mix of Amazon's own custom AI chips as well as chips from Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), the biggest supplier of chips for AI work but whose chips have been in tight supply this year.

☆ Nvidia enhances mid-range video gaming chip with AI technology
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

The new RTX 4070 chip, which Nvidia will start shipping on Thursday, will cost $599, putting it near the middle of the company's range of graphics processing units (GPUs), which list for up to $1,600. The chip that it updates, the RTX 3060, is the fourth most popular gaming chip on the market, according to survey data in March from game distribution platform Steam. Nvidia's chips help PC video games render images on to high-resolution screens more quickly to make games look more realistic. The 4070 chips will be the cheapest available that use Nvidia's newest AI technology to do so. I have to really understand the motion between the two frames," Justin Walker, senior director of Nvidia's GeForce products, said in an interview.

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