AI Gets Weirder

In this issue of the Peel:

• ?? Young Americans have decent wealth, but housing is a sore spot.
• ?? Reddit’s business is booming after crushing its earnings estimates.
• ?? A mysterious chatbot popped up in the AI space… what the heck?!

Market Snapshot ??

Banana Bits ??

• Wow—the likes of Bill Ackman and Brian Carosielli (BofA’s global head of credit trading) have each donated $10k to the fundraiser for the family of Leo Lukenas III. If you can, please consider donating here . Thanks to everyone who's donated already!
• Teaming up to take on the big red streaming giant appears to be the only solution for competing streaming services
• Payment processor Toast leaped after earnings, leaving the rest of the market in the dust
• Arm beat on earnings, but not by enough, sending shares 9% lower after-hours
• Seems like FTX might actually be able to reimburse all the people they robbed blind

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Macro Monkey Says ??

Could Be Worse

For a group of people who far too often find greater difficulty in naming all the world’s continents than all the Kardashian sisters, it’s no wonder why it seems like young people today are worse off than ever before.

Thankfully, we had a world-destroying, once-in-a-generation global health emergency to fix that “problem.”

Young people have seen their wealth explode like never before in recent years. Despite all the complaining (especially from me), being young in the U.S. is actually a pretty good deal.

Don’t square up on me just yet—let’s get into it.

The Numbers

The Center for American Progress (CAP)—which I should mention does tend to have a fairly strong left-leaning political bias—recently published data suggesting that, economically, young Americans have been the biggest beneficiaries of C-19.

Source

Our immune systems could’ve told us that already, but the explosion in wealth seen post-2019 in the above chart is officially a new member of the group chat.

Now, I also should mention that they count younger Americans as “under 40 years old,” which is like counting Tesla as a value stock, so I’m just gonna go ahead and assume that most of this growth is concentrated in the 30-40-year-old range.

But then again, there were a lot of 16-year-olds on Twitter telling me to “have fun staying poor,” so maybe they made a bag when Sh*Coin #69420 finally landed on the moon.

Anyway, it’s clear that there is a discrepancy between how actual young Americans are feeling and how their finances are positioned. According to this report, wealth for the sub-40s among us grew by 49% in a few months after staying flat for ~30 years.

Source

The average wealth for this cohort before the pandemic sat right around $175k (keep in mind—outliers pull up the average), but as of Q4 2019, that average sat at $259k.

This should go without saying, but most of the wealth gains came from rising financial assets valuations. In English, the S&P 500’s 46.75% gain between the last trading day of 2019 and the last of 2023 was the key driver here.?

But surprisingly, the silver medal in wealth appreciation for young Americans goes to housing wealth, which—on average—grew $22k during the same period.

Source

Perhaps the most important development, however, was the broad extinguishing of non-housing debt. Sure, it only counted for an average of $5k worth of wealth expansion, but the simple fact the—again, on average—debt shrank during the period is a big W.

We also know that low-wage earners saw some of the most dramatic gains in income during the pandemic period, and who do we think dominates the low-wage category? That’s right, young Americans.

Still, the primary reason cited by young Americans as to why they’re feeling economically insecure all goes back to the same thing—housing.

Source

The Takeaway?

For most young Americans, their economic reality isn’t great, but it could be a lot worse. Without the explosion of wealth seen above, imagine how much more complaining on X/more protesting on college campuses we’d see.

However, the housing market remains a sore spot. And, if the ironically acronym-ed CAP surveyed actual young Americans, I’m sure any one of them would give up their portfolio’s gains to more quickly move out of their parent’s house.

Not only is this a question of magnitude in terms of wealth appreciation we’ve seen, but where that “appreciation” is coming from. In my own house search, I sure don’t appreciate seeing home values >50% higher than they were in 2019.

But once again—no amount of complaining is gonna fix the issues (but you’re damn right we’ll keep trying) the simple need is for more housing supply.

But then again, it could be worse. ????????????????????????

What's Ripe ??

Reddit (RDDT) ??4.1%

• If forum-based businesses can get this kind of single-day returns, we must be f*cking up big time at WSO. Anyway, Reddit crushed its first 10-Q.
• The social media site reported adj. EPS of $0.24/sh vs the expected $2.34/sh loss, marking Reddit’s first profitable period ever since its 2005 founding.
• Revenue of $243mn grew 49% from last year—mostly thanks to AI licensing contracts—while users and free cash flow beat expectations as well.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) ??4.0%

• It’s nice that my favorite beer is called Bud because then I can pretend I actually have friends, but the biggest friend yesterday was this company’s stock price.
• Alcoholic beverage conglomerate AB InBev beat on the top and bottom line, reporting $0.41/sh on sales of $14.5bn vs the $0.23/sh on $14.4bn estimate.
• Shane Gillis brought Bud Light back, but not all the way (yet). The success is mostly thanks to moving much more volume than expected.

What's Rotten ??

Shopify (SHOP) ??18.6%

• Like scoring on the wrong hoop, Shopify managed to win and lose at the same time. To analysts, it was mostly just a loss as earnings disappointed,
• Excluding one-time charges, the firm reported $0.20/sh vs the $0.17/sh estimate. With those charges, analysts expected $0.09/sh, but the firm lost $0.21/sh.
• Revenue grew 23% annually and beat estimates while guidance was strong, but analysts interpreted “high teens” growth as less than the 19% growth expected.

Uber Technologies (UBER) ??5.7%

• We’re all a little awkward when we hit puberty, but for companies like Uber, it’s downright annoying. Shares tanked on weak numbers, found in this video .
• Aside from the genius analyst’s take, shares fell primarily due to reporting a surprise loss thanks to investment losses and weak guidance.
• Becoming a mature company takes time, but compared to fellow firms like? Spotify or Uber is certainly the more rebellious of the group.

Thought Banana ??

im-a-good-daily-peel-writer

No, you didn’t have a stroke reading the above header.?

That’ll come a few years down the line—once your stress and cholesterol spike and your will to live, well…

The world of artificial intelligence continues to amaze, confuse, and, most of all, worry the entire internet. Earlier this week, the chatbot game got really weird.

What Happened?

Shoutout to Rowan Cheung’s coverage on X, but last week, a mysterious chatbot even better than ChatGPT-4 appeared on the scene.?

The new chatbot—sometimes named “im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot” and other times “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot”, this new tool outperforms most others by a long shot.

And no one knows where the hell it’s from. It took me a few tries to get it, but below we can see the skill and (worrying for me) writing skill of this new LLM.

Source

Both answers are good, but the one on the right is currently in the top of the HuggingFace performance leaderboard while this new entrant is acting like it doesn’t even exist.

Now, these new chatbots are probably from OpenAI, given Sam Altman’s classically cryptic post on X, saying “im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot ” from 4:45 pm on Sunday, May 5th.

Frankly, this is straight weird. Leading theories suggest this is a preview/beta test of ChatGPT-5, OpenAI’s long-anticipated new LLM that promises to ball on all others like Zion Williamson’s hoop mixtape.

The Takeaway?

The release of this chatbot kind of summarizes the entirety of the AI space—operating in the dark, creating a general feeling of unease for all those unfortunate enough to know about it, and scaring the world with its skill.?

Now, I might be going crazy, but this feels all too similar to Satoshi’s drop of the BTC whitepaper back in 2008. And I know because I remember that day so well—I was busy stunting on my 3rd-grade class in my Harry Potter Halloween costume.

It’s possible that Sam is demonstrating his master trolling abilities perpetrated against me and everyone else on X that got into this sh*t.

Hopefully, more info comes out soon, but for now, all we know is how little we know.

And because I know you’re all dying for it (like I was last night), you can test out im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot and im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot here . You just have to:

• Make sure you’re in the “Arena (battle)” mode as indicated in the upper left-hand corner
• Enter a prompt and wait until both models finished responding
• Then, you’ll see at the bottom which LLM provided which response, and you’ll be asked to rate which is better or worse
• If it doesn’t give credit to im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot or im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot at the bottom, keep entering prompts until it does… it took me 4 tries and Rowan 5 to get the right bot.

Best of luck. Try not to cause the AI apocalypse.?

?? The Big Question ??: What the hell is going on in AI? Why release a new, clearly capable chatbot in the shadows without taking credit? What’s next, and who the hell created this thing?

Banana Brain Teaser ??

Previous ??

What number is 108 more than two-thirds of itself??

Answer: 324

Today ??

Company P had 15 percent more employees in December than it had in January. If Company P had 460 employees in December, how many employees did it have in January?

Send your guesses to [email protected]

Wise Investor Says ??

“If it takes 200 years to achieve artificial intelligence, and then finally there is a textbook that explains how it’s done, the hardest part of that textbook to write will be the part that explains why people didn't think of it 200 years ago” — John McCarthy (guy who coined the term “artificial intelligence”)

How Would You Rate Today's Peel??

??All the bananas ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ???Meh ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ??Rotten AF

Happy Investing,

David, Vyom, Jasper & Patrick