Things To Know

VC —The Upfront Annual ‘invite only’ summit, is held this week

Politics — The US Supreme Court to hear challenges to social media laws this week

lol — AT&T: Here’s five bones. We good?

Berkshire nears the $1 Trillionaires Club. Here’s 3 nuggets.

So Warren Buffett just dropped his yearly note to his Berkshire Hathaway investors and he's kinda setting the stage to lower expectations. He's like, "Don't hold your breath for the crazy awesome returns we used to get." The problem, he says, is that all the big U.S. companies that could really make a splash for Berkshire have been scoped out already, and there's nothing much worth grabbing outside the States either. But don't worry, he's got his eyes peeled for any sweet deals that might pop up.

In the annual letters, you get a fascinating look into buffets thinking. Also, it serves as a brilliant standard for correspondence to share holders if you are funded backed founder.

Picking Winners

On market panics:

Birkshire has cash reserves rising to a record $167.6 billion in the fourth quarter. Buffet famously said : “Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful” And is saving for the opportunity if the market panic sells.

Markets can – and will – unpredictably seize up or even vanish as they did for four months in 1914 and for a few days in 2001. If you believe that American investors are now more stable than in the past, think back to September 2008. Speed of communication and the wonders of technology facilitate instant worldwide paralysis, and we have come a long way since smoke signals. Such instant panics won’t happen often – but they will happen.

A fond farewell to Charlie

Buffet ended with a tribute to his life long friend and partner Charlie Munger, how died in November 33 days away from turning 100

Charlie never sought to take credit for his role as creator but instead let me take the bows and receive the accolades," Buffett relayed of his longtime investing partner. "In reality, Charlie was the 'architect' of the present Berkshire, and I acted as the 'general contractor' to carry out the day-by-day construction of his vision

Google LOST 90M today. Here’s why:

Google has announced that it will relaunch Gemini in a few weeks, after the platform was hit by a racial controversy.

• Gemini Advanced is part of the Google One AI Premium Plan for $19.99 a month, kicking off with a trial for two months. Subscribers get Gemini baked into their Google apps, like Gmail and Docs, which Google detailed in a recent blog post.But people are jumping ship, not only on subscriptions. But also the stock after a racial controversy. The AI tool faced criticism for generating historically inaccurate depictions of race, such as altering images to make White U.S. founding fathers appear Black.

• “We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks,” said Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at a conference on Monday, as reported by Reuters. He also commented that the application had not been “working the way we intended.” The tool was not "working the way we intended", he added.

• Google also tried launching an AI image generator this month, but it struggled to create accurate images of white people, leading to accusations of reverse racism. The feature's been pulled for a fix, with a relaunch planned shortly, said Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at a conference, per Reuters. Hassabis admitted it wasn't performing as expected. For now, gemini has stopped generating people.

• Meanwhile, Alphabet's shares dipped 3.5% on Monday, dragging down the S&P 500 index with a loss of over $90 million.

The Insta Algorithm is Sick and twisted.

— The Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation revealing that Instagram's algorithms promote and connect pedo’s to content sellers through the recommendation engine. Meta, Instagram's parent company, has acknowledged the issue of child exploitation on the platform and has responded by saying that from 2020 to 2022, they have shut down exploitative networks and banned hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to such misconduct.

— To address the pervasive problem of child exploitation online, tools like 'Take It Down' have been created, enabling young people to erase explicit images from the web by generating a digital hash of the image directly from their devices. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children collaborates with platforms including Facebook and Instagram to proactively block the dissemination of child sexual abuse material through unique digital identifiers tied to the problematic content.

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