🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-09-17
This week, I'm exploring huge AI funding, Microsoft's costly choices, and the quirks of smartphone tech.
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The numbers this week are once again big numbers.
These three stories caught my eye.
Techmeme: BlackRock, GIP, Microsoft, and MGX announce a new AI fund that seeks to raise $30B+ of private equity capital and $100B+ in total investment when including debt (Financial Times)
From Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 $100B+ is an interesting number (now that $30B+ has been raised within this AI specific fund) and it goes to show that even companies like Microsoft that could tap their cash reserves alone are facing funding crunch needs that require multiple parties. 🤔
Techmeme: Microsoft unveils a $60B stock buyback program, matching its largest-ever repurchase authorization, and raises its quarterly dividend by 10% to $0.83 per share (Andrew Pollack/Bloomberg)
By Andrew Pollack / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤑 Oh. Well. This is awkward. So, from a Microsoft perspective, AI is expensive… and so is a stock buyback program. Got it. Cool. Cool. 😳
Techmeme: A profile of Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, which aims to create “spatial intelligence” in AI and has raised $230M from a16z and others, reportedly at a $1B valuation (Steven Levy/Wired)
By Steven Levy / Wired. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 Spatial is fascinating, and it reminded me of how spatially dumb our smart phones (still?) are today — I still have fond memories of Fei-Fei Li on stage at a conference many years ago where the Googler entourage in the first several rows had not yet figured out their new Android OS updates for silence settings and it was HILARIOUS hearing their devices all chirping, dinging, ringing, etc. as they frantically tried to turn them off or make them go silent (unsuccessfully). 😂
Note: Some images via Unsplash
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