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Top stories today:
- OpenAI’s AI lead faces mounting pressure as Google closes gap
- Databricks said to raise $5B at $134B valuation
- David Sacks accuses NYT of willfully mischaracterizing facts
- Bitcoin briefly dips under $86K in risk-off Dec. start
- Taiwan Q3 GDP +8.21% on +32% AI-driven export surge
- U.S. startups increasingly adopt Chinese open-source AI
0. Data and calendar
All values as of 6 AM ET / 3 AM PT, other than S&P500 and NASDAQ close (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).
All times are ET.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. OpenAI’s early AI lead faces mounting pressure as Google, Anthropic close gap
Google’s Gemini app monthly downloads are catching up to ChatGPT’s:
Gemini app climbed to 650M monthly users, from 400M in May, helped by new AI updates and “Nano Banana.”
OpenAI still dominates the market, with 800M+ weekly users.
Performance was boosted “quite significantly” by training on Google’s bespoke chips, DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu said.
Alphabet stock has begun to pull ahead of Microsoft
Gemini’s users spent slightly more time than those of ChatGPT and Claude
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3. Databricks said to raise $5B at $134B valuation, with 2025 sales seen +55% to $4.1B
Insight Partners is expected to lead the new round with at least $500M investment.
The funding would be used to buy back shares from employees while covering taxes related to the share sales.
~$10M in free cash flow is reportedly expected by Databricks this year.
Gross margin has fallen to 74% due to increasing usage of its AI products.
