Lifeboat Foundation

The losses for short-sellers betting against Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company have ballooned to $7.6 billion over the past month, making it the least profitable short position for hedge funds, according to data from S3 Partners.

The swift one-month surge in Tesla stock has wiped out about half of the gains short-sellers made last year betting against the company. At the end of December, short-sellers had made a $15 billion profit in 2022, making Tesla the most profitable short of the year.

Shares of Tesla have been on a rollercoaster following vehicle price cuts and a weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter delivery number. But on the company’s most recent earnings call, Musk reaffirmed the company’s long-term growth target of 50%.

If you ask it the right questions, ChatGPT represents an incredible resource and tool. And people noticed fast — within five days it gained over 1 million users, and now Microsoft is in talks for a potential $10 billion investment in the company.

As a reporter, the hype surrounding the AI tool intrigued me, and a colleague of mine said it’s journalism chops were convincing (though only if you didn’t squint too hard to notice articles were riddle with misinformation).

Knowing that ChatGPT’s database cut off in 2021, I asked it to write a stock market story about trading trends in 2020, and in less than one minute it spat out a 400-word story that mapped out S&P 500 moves, meme stocks, and shares that rallied during the early days of the pandemic.

The results highlight some potential strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT.

Some of the world’s biggest academic journal publishers have banned or curbed their authors from using the advanced chatbot, ChatGPT. Because the bot uses information from the internet to produce highly readable answers to questions, the publishers are worried that inaccurate or plagiarised work could enter the pages of academic literature.

Several researchers have already listed the chatbot as a co-author in academic studies, and some publishers have moved to ban this practice. But the editor-in-chief of Science, one of the top scientific journals in the world, has gone a step further and forbidden any use of text from the program in submitted papers.

Continue reading “Science journals ban listing of ChatGPT as co-author on papers” »

Google announced in last week’s earnings call that it would pay millions of dollars to consolidate office leases across the globe.

“In the first quarter of 2023, we expect to incur approximately $500 million of costs related to exiting leases to align our office space with our adjusted global headcount look,” Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said. “We will continue to optimize our real estate footprint.”

Many of the lease terminations will be in the Bay Area. “We’re ending leases for a number of unoccupied spaces, and will work to consolidate under-utilized spaces in the future,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont wrote SFGATE in an email. “Our campuses remain a cornerstone of our culture, but we’re working to ensure we invest in real estate efficiently and that our investments match the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce.”

Saudi Arabian mining company Ma’aden, together with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Innovation Ventures Fund, are investing $6 million USD into Lithium Infinity (Lihytech). The KAUST startup’s battery-grade lithium will be a key component in driving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s commitment to developing the entire value chain of electric vehicles (EVs).

Lihytech has patented a membrane-based lithium extraction technology developed by Professor Zhiping Lai at KAUST. The innovative technology can extract the alkali metal from sources such as seawater, brine, red mud and more. Based on KAUST research, the startup was funded through the KAUST Near Term Grand Challenge, a research translation program, and the technology is being developed on the campus.

This investment will take the technology from lab to commercial pilot scale. Ma’aden is leading the investment with $4 million and KAUST Innovation Ventures is investing $2 million. The University’s venture capital arm, KAUST Innovation Ventures, supports deep tech startups that look to offer solutions to pressing scientific and technological challenges, such as lithium extraction. Lihytech will use the infusion of capital to build a pilot facility at KAUST to extract lithium from the Red Sea and other in-Kingdom resources.

Proto is betting that companies will view their 7-foot-tall holographic projection boxes as an alternative for in-person meetings. At least a half-dozen startups and giants like Google and Microsoft already are.

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Continue reading “Are Holograms the Next Zoom?” »

Last month, the Federal Reserve rejected crypto bank Custodia’s application to join its ranks, casting doubt over whether the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will give final approval to crypto companies Protego and Paxos’ applications for national trust bank charters.

“The U.S. government is using the banking sector to organize a sophisticated, widespread crackdown against the crypto industry,” Carter wrote.

“And the administration’s efforts are no secret: they’re expressed plainly in memos, regulatory guidance, and blog posts. However, the breadth of this plan—spanning virtually every financial regulator—as well as its highly coordinated nature, has even the most steely-eyed crypto veterans nervous that crypto businesses might end up completely unbanked, stablecoins may be stranded and unable to manage flows in and out of crypto, and exchanges might be shut off from the banking system entirely.”

(https://www.timothywittig.com/) is a conservationist, professor, and former defense intelligence analyst. He is a research fellow at Oxford University (Oxford Martin School), an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, and has served as Head of Intelligence for both the Royal Foundation’s United for Wildlife Transport and Financial Taskforces (https://unitedforwildlife.org/), and the wildlife investigations charity Focused Conservation.

Dr. Wittig has lived in 8 countries on 3 continents and worked in nearly 50 different countries. His professional background is in research & development and applied sciences, intelligence-led targeting of illicit financial networks, and African and global security.

Continue reading “Dr. Tim Wittig, Ph.D. — Applying Data & Intelligence To Defeat Global Wildlife Trafficking” »

Turkey’s stock exchange suspended trading for five days and canceled all trades executed on Wednesday, following a selloff that erased billions of dollars from the value of its main equities gauge after two devastating earthquakes.