Weekend Warp

A quiet couple of weeks, I suppose everyone in the AI world (including, perhaps the AIs themselves), were holding their breath on the US Presidential Elections.

These very elections were big for AI, primarily because one of its very own megastars, Elon Musk, was such an active participant in it. He donated hundreds of millions of dollars, days of his precious time, staff from his companies, and weaponised his latest acquisition X (formerly Twitter ) towards getting Donald Trump elected. As Trump swept the polls by a landslide, it is time for him to reap the rewards. Tesla (which, according to Musk, is an AI company, and not a car company) touched a trillion dollars in valuation right after the victory, SpaceX is poised to get billions of dollars’ worth of governmental contracts, and investors are falling over themselves to invest in X.ai and all his other ventures. “A star is born — Elon!” Mr. Trump said in his victory speech, and we can be rest assured that his superstar will work hard to get AI regulation and policy favorable to him and other Big Tech. What will be interesting to watch also is how this affects competition, primarily 谷歌 , which Musk is not a big fan of..

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Amongst all the brouhaha, Sam Altman and OpenAI made their own power move, buying the domain chat.com. It will be interesting to watch what they do with it – will ChatGPT be renamed just Chat? Genius move: Google worked hard to turn itself into a verb, Chat is a verb already. A bigger genius move, however, was by Dharmesh Shah , the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot , who bought the domain just last year in 2023 for $15.5mn. While we do not know how much Altman bought it for, Shah has claimed that he made a profit – speculation is between $20mn and $25mn. The genius move, however, is that part of the price was paid in OpenAI stock, and that could make much more than $25mn for Dharmesh!

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Talking of stock, 英伟达 ’s shot up again, to make it the most valuable company on earth again. As of November 8, 2024, Nvidia's market capitalization reached $3.65 trillion, surpassing 苹果 's previous record of $3.44 trillion and 微软 's at nearly $3.16 trillion.

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