Disclaimer: The Bay Area Times is a news publisher. All statements and expressions herein are not financial advice. Please read our Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy before using Our Service.
Hey everyone, this Weekly Explainer is part of Bay Area Times PRO. If you are reading this, it means you are not yet a subscriber, and will only be able to see a small part of the explainer. Please consider subscribing if this information is valuable to you. In fact, you can sign up for 90-day free access here.
0. Weekly performance
1. Winners of the week
1.1 OpenAI
Its $86B tender offer is ongoing, even after Thanksgiving's chaotic situation which saw CEO Sam Altman fired and rehired.
We expect OpenAI to raise money at $86B+ in early 2024, this time a primary round for itself, rather than a tender offer to buy employee shares.
Altman previously said they would need to raise $100B to build AGI.
OpenAI managed to only give Microsoft a board observer seat, preserving the current structure where the now Altman-aligned non-profit's board has full control.
New board member Larry Summer said OpenAI's work is āextraordinarily important.ā
Only negative: OpenAI delaying the custom GPT store until early 2024, likely due to internal pressure to improve safety and aligment.
1.2 Chinese fast-fashion apps
Shein confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO
Shein's last valuation: $66B, in May 2023, from $100B in April 2022.
Estimated 2x P/S, 60x P/E.
Goldman Sachs, JPM Chase, and Morgan Stanley are the lead underwriters.
ETA: 2024.
Headquarters moved to Singapore, from China, in 2021.
Temu reached 172M MAUs in U.S. in 1 year after launch
1.3 Longevity
Life expectancy +1.1 year to 77.5 years in 2022, as heart disease, cancer, Covid lead as causes
The $101 XPRIZE Healthspan prize was announced, the largest of its kind
Loyal announced that its longevity drug for dogs received the 1st of 3 green lights needed for FDA approval
1.4 AI models
Perplexity AI launched āonline LLMsā that outperform GPT-3.5, Llama 2
Pika, AI video creator, editor, launched in beta with $55M fundraising
$55M led by Lightspeed, with participation from Adam DāAngelo, Nat Friedman, and others.
Google Deepmind threat: we're still skeptical about how smaller startups can compete with Google's to-be-launched text-to-video model, which should leverage its unrivaled YouTube video database.
Meta updated its Seamless models of text and speech translation
llamafile: easiest way to run LLMs on normal computers.
1.5 Anduril
Anduril launched its reusable anti-drone fighter RoadRunner
To cost ālow-6 figures,ā vs. $4M for a high-end Patriot missile, and $10K for an Iranian drone.
$10B valuation: in talks to raise $400M-$500M, it was reported in October.
1.6 Tesla
Tesla Cybertruck launched: it is the fastest EV pickup truck in market, by far. But current models are $80K+, with the $61K model only in 2025, vs. $40K+ announced in 2019
The quickest Cybertruck goes 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds, faster than even most sports cars
2. Neutrals, losers of the week, and weekend reads
Want to see who the neutrals and losers of the week were? Become a Bay Area Times PRO member and you can see who lost value and face headwinds after recent events!
