Top stories today:

1. Elon sues Sam Altman, OpenAI for breach of contract, fiduciary duty
2. Microsoft launches Copilot for Finance in preview
3. Core PCE inflation +0.4% MoM / 2.8% YoY, much above Fed’s goal of 2%
4. Startup M&A transactions -11% YoY to 574 in 2023

0. Data and calendar

1. Elon sues Sam Altman, OpenAI for breach of contract, fiduciary duty

• Elon says Altman and OpenAI abandoned its “Founding Agreement” by keeping GPT-4 closed-source, with “no scientific publications describing the design of GPT-4.”

• “Its technology, including GPT-4, is closed-source primarily to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft. Indeed, as the November 2023 drama was unfolding, Microsoft’s CEO boasted that it would not matter “[i]f OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.” He explained that “[w]e have all the IP rights and all the capability.”

2. Microsoft launches Copilot for Finance in preview

3 main initial features:

1. Automatic data reconciliation.

2. Variance analysis.

3. One-click charts and reports.

TBD: public launch date.

Our view: AI is still not ready for most business uses

Currently available features, like variance analysis, have very limited use cases:

4. Core PCE inflation +0.4% MoM / 2.8% YoY, much above Fed’s goal of 2%