Read It And Eat 19/03

Welcome to ‘Read it and Eat’ — your go-to for bite-sized updates on corporate actions in finance, AI and anything I consider newsworthy. Join me twice a week for quick reads, where I serve up the latest insights that matter in the world of business and a bit of politics.

Major Headlines:

• FTX’s SBF, Sam Bankman-Fried, Could Serve up to 50 years for his crimes:

• Federal prosecutors are not playing around, they fully intend to make SBF, the cofounder of the disgraced sham and supposed crypto exchange platform that was FTX, as they petition the court for a sentence of 40–50 years. Convicted in November of 2023 for stealing Eight billion dollars of customers’ crypto held on the exchange platform and defrauding investors. “The enormous scale of the fraud at FTX is measured not just by the amount of money that was stolen,” prosecutors said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Friday. “The fraud at FTX may also be measured in the number and types of victims, in the fraud’s geographic reach, and in the breadth and frequency of the unlawful and unethical acts.” SBF lawyers are seeking no more than six and a half years. Under federal sentencing guidelines, Bankman-Fried could face a maximum sentence of 110 years. His fate will be decided on the 28th of March. [CNN]
  

• Putin 5.0:

• In Russia, Vladimir Putin campaigned hard, allegedly, and won 5th consecutive term as President. President Vladimir Putin sealed his control over Russia for six more years on Monday with a highly orchestrated landslide in an election that followed the harshest crackdown on the opposition and free speech since Soviet times. Putin has led Russia as president or prime minister since December 1999, a tenure marked by international military aggression and an increasing intolerance for dissent. At the end of his fifth term, Putin would be the longest-serving Russian leader since Catherine the Great, who ruled during the 18th century. As early results came in, Putin hailed them as an indication of “trust” and “hope” in him — while critics saw them as another reflection of the preordained nature of the election. [BBC]
  

• Elon Musk on Ket (Ketamine), says that it’s good for Business:

• Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs and owns Tesla, Space X, Twitter, and The Boring Company has disclosed that he does have a Ket prescription and insists he takes it only as prescribed. He further stated that it is good for business, and Tesla Investors in a video with former CNN anchor Don Lemon. Musk insisted he only took the drug as prescribed to treat low moods, was nearly always sober when making late-night social media posts, and that, given Tesla’s success, “from an investor standpoint, if there is something I’m taking, I should keep taking it.” [Youtube]
  

• Is Britain’s Bill Gate, Mike Lynnch, about to spend 25 years in a U.S. Prison for Fraud:

• In 2012, HP announced an $8.8 billion write-down and alleged it on “serious accounting improprieties” at Autonomy, the company Mike Lynch founded and sold to them. Usually, write-downs affect a percentage of the worth of the assets when CEOs overhype and overvalue their company, but this is the entire value of the company. Mike personally made $800 million on that deal and became one of the richest people in the U.K. at the time. In 2022, a London judge in a civil casefound Mr Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s former finance chief, liable for defrauding HP. His separate three-year battle to avoid being extradited to face criminal charges culminated in Lynch going to the High Court to argue that American prosecutors were guilty of legal overreach which threatened UK sovereignty and its citizens. His plea was rejected and, last May, he was flown to California, accompanied by the U.S. Marshals Service, still loudly protesting his innocence. The trial that starts today will be held in front of a jury in a city just 30 miles from HPE’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. [New York Times]
  

Minor Headlines:

• Goldman Sachs gives the top three execs a 24% raise. [Reuters]

• Driver arrested after crashing car into Buckingham Palace Gates. [New York Post]

• Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is organising a syndicate to purchase TikTok. [The Independent]

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. like his uncle John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated, and his father who also ran and was also assassinated, is running for President as an independent. [AP News]

• The Japanese-born Karaoke Machine inventor, Shigeichi Negishi, dies at 100. [TNN]

• A Volcano Eruption occurred in Southern Iceland for the fourth time in three months. [BBC]

• College Grads enter a cooling job market. [Wall Street Journal]

• Binance Labs spinoff from Binance as an independent $10B VC Fundc[Blomberg]

NEWS OF THE DAY:

What If Apple And Google Had An A.I. Baby?

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple’s smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. CEO Tim Cook has already confirmed that Apple is spending “a tremendous amount of time and effort” on artificial intelligence features, and plans to release them to its customers “later this year.”

Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple’s widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumours of Apple’s own internal frustration with Siri — and potential remedies — have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to power Siri.

Google launched Gemini, a language-based AI assistant similar to ChatGPT, in December and has updated it several times since. Many industry experts consider the larger Gemini models to be roughly as capable as OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, which powers the subscription versions of ChatGPT. Until just recently, with the emergence of Gemini Ultra and Claude 3, OpenAI’s top model held a fairly wide lead in perceived LLM (Language Learning Model) capability.

The potential partnership between Apple and Google could significantly impact the AI industry, as Apple’s platform represents more than 2 billion active devices worldwide. If the agreement gets finalized, it would build upon the existing search partnership between the two companies, which has seen Google pay Apple billions of dollars annually to make its search engine the default option on iPhones and other Apple devices.

This isn’t the first time these two behemoths of companies partnered together The iPhone maker already has a longstanding deal with Google to make Google Search the default on its devices, in an agreement that’s believed to be worth $18 billion annually. But such deals have been increasingly contentious with regulators, with the US Department of Justice accusing Google of using them to unfairly entrench its search engine’s market position. The European Union is also pressuring Apple to make it easier for consumers to change their default search engine away from Google.

With so much potential money on the line, selecting Google for Apple’s cloud AI job could potentially be a major loss for OpenAI in terms of bringing its technology widely into the mainstream — with a market representing billions of users. Even so, any deal with Google or OpenAI may be a temporary fix until Apple can get its own LLM-based AI technology up to speed. [Bloomberg]

GEN-Z Word Of The Day

Baskident

An accident or collision in a grocery store or other retail establishment between two or more shopping baskets.