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Top stories today: 1) China announces draconian AI regulations, 2) U.S. Commerce Department requests AI regulation comments, 3) Twitter's private "Circle" tweets are being exposed, and Twitter legally becomes X Corp., and 4) 2022's top 3 hedge funds are quant-focused.

0. Data and calendar

1. China announces draconian AI regulations

The Cyberspace Administration of China just released the draft of its generative AI guidance, which is now open to comments until May 10. - CAC, Bloomberg

Most of the guidance is essentially applying China's already draconian internet and speech laws to generative AI, but here are some of the worst contenders:

• Security review: "Before using generative artificial intelligence products to provide services to the public, a security assessment shall be submitted to the national network information department..."

• Complete censorship: "The content generated by generative artificial intelligence should reflect the core values ​​of socialism, and must not contain subversion of state power, overthrow of the socialist system, incitement to split the country, undermine national unity..."

• User ID and monitoring: "The provision of generative artificial intelligence services shall require users to provide real identity information..."

This came right after Alibaba officially announced its ChatGPT competitor, Tongyi Qianwen

• Business focus: Tongyi is mostly integrated to Alibaba's business applications:

  • DingTalk, their messaging app, where Tongyi will summarize notes, write emails, draft proposals, etc.

  • Tmall Genie, their voice assistant, where Tongyi can develop and tell stores, provide diet recipes, offer travel tips, etc.

  • Alibaba Cloud, their version of Azure/AWS, where clients can use Tongyi to build customized models.

• Only available in closed beta for some enterprise customers. - Bloomberg, Press release

Alibaba gave up part of its gains after the government announced its AI rules

2. U.S. Commerce Department puts out formal public request for comment on AI regulation

• "In a first step toward potential regulation, the Commerce Department on Tuesday put out a formal public request for comment on what it called accountability measures, including whether potentially risky new AI models should go through a certification process before they are released."

  • Comments will mostly inform the President: "The comments, which will be accepted over the next 60 days, will be used to help formulate advice to U.S. policy makers about how to approach AI, Mr. Davidson said. He added that his agency’s legal mandate involves advising the president on tech policy, rather than writing or enforcing regulations." - WSJ

Too much of a coincidence...

• It's just too much of a coincidence, that this is released on the same day as the Chinese announce their regulations.

  • "We're watching the space, but we're not totalitarian like the Chinese." -- that's how we're interpreting this release.

3. Twitter's private "Circle" tweets are being exposed

• Elon Musk has acknowledged the bug: "Our initial release of the so-called algorithm is going to be quite embarrassing, and people are going to find a lot of mistakes, but we’re going to fix them very quickly." - Techcrunch

• Twitter Circle was launched pre-Elon, so the media can't even blame this on him. Even though they will try.

Twitter legally became X Corp., a Nevada Company

The app changing its name is unlikely, but we expect Super App features

Something similar to what WeChat, Alipay, and Douyin (ByteDance) are in China: messaging + e-commerce + delivery + ride-hailing + financial services + anything else you want to add.

Elon also tweeted a mysterious X

Elon now says Twitter is looking for a VP of Public Relations

This is after having fired the entire PR team, and having a 💩 emoji as the auto-reply message of [email protected]:

In related news...

• Ex-CEO Agrawal, 2 others sue Twitter for not reimbursing $1M+ in legal expenses.

• Elon posts then deletes DM history from Matt Taibii.

4. Top 3 hedge funds (in 2022 earnings) are quant-focused

• Citadel's $16B profit was the highest ever. Surpasses John Paul's $15B gain in 2007 on his bet against subprime mortgages. Data is from LCH Investments, a fund of funds.

  • Top 20 managers returned 3.4% in 2022.

  • Other funds lost 8.2%. - Bloomberg

• Investing in hedge funds continues to be a bad bet:

  • Most equities and macro hedge funds underperform the S&P500 (they have to, on average, given their high 2/20 fees).

  • The great quant funds are closed to the public, as they have limited capacity, so the good ones are usually reserved for partners and employees (e.g. Renaissance's Medallion, which is not even on this list as they have been closed since 1993).

5. Most Americans are not confident in the safety and reliability of crypto

Crypto investors (like most tech investors) are skewed male, under 50

69% of crypto buyers are holders; holding correlates positively with wealth

More Americans have lost than won with crypto, as most crypto winners are very long-term holders

A few people made the most money:

6. Other headlines

Tech

• Poe AI now lets its users create their own bots.

• Tonal raises $130M at $550M-$600M, vs $1.6B valuation in 2021; CEO steps down.

• Eclipse Ventures raises $1.2B across 2 new funds.

• Mac shipments down 40.5% to 4.1M in Q1, according to IDC.

• Kite.co, focused on buying DTC businesses, launches with $200M.

• TikTok Shop failing to attract U.S. merchants.

• NYT launches new math-based puzzle game: Digits.

• SpaceX updates its Mars mission demo reel.

• Youtube Premium now has special 1080p, exclusive access to SharePlay (co-viewing).

• Meta Verified: sex workers complain that it requires displaying legal name to public.

Business

• 400+ biotech executives condemn judge's attempt to revoke FDA authorization of abortion drug.

• Uber sells 50.03% stake in Careem spinout (EMEA super-app) to Emirates for $400M.

• FTC fines supplement company 600K for gaming Amazon reviews (via merging).

• Apple's Mumbai store to open April 18; Delhi one on April 20.

• Amazon starts charging for some UPS store returns, as company cut costs.

• Poor countries will use 17% of revenues for debt services, highest since 1998.

• San Francisco: Whole Foods closing downtown location citing safety concerns.

• Katie Cotton, former Apple's communications chief, dies at 57-58.

Crypto

• Winklevoss twins lend $100M to their company Gemini, after failing to raise money.

• BTC tops $30K for the first time since June 2022.

• Microstrategy is now close to break-even on its 140K BTC investment.

• Coinbase senior director Vishal Gupta leaving to start crypto venture.

• Signature Bank's new lawsuit alleges executives downplayed crypto risks.

• Etherscan hides zero-value token transfer that facilitate scams.

• Dogecoin documentary being produced by PleasrDAO, others.

World

• Ukraine: U.S. doubts counteroffensive will lead to big gains: leaked docs.

• UAE: Russian officers boasted about having country on their side "against U.S. and UK", says leaked docs; UAE denies.

• Egypt planned to produce 40K rockets for Russia in secret: leaked docs.

• U.S. spied on Zelensky: leaked docs.

• Dalai Lama apologizes after video leaks of him asking kid to suck his tongue.

• WSJ journalist: U.S. finally officially designates him as "wrongfully detailed."

• Taiwan detected 12 warships and 91 jets after Beijing's final day of drills.

U.S. politics

• Trump almost a month late on FEC financial disclosure.

• House Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing on Manhattan DA who charged Trump.

• Trump rape civil trial: judge asks if parties will be present, trial to start April 25.

• Trump $250M civil fraud lawsuit: he's returning to NY for a 2nd deposition.

• Biden officially terminates the COVID-19 national emergency.

7. Interesting tweets, memes, and images

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