No one is thinking about economics at the moment. It looks like Intel’s requests for more subsidies to build leading-edge fabs in Germany will pay off, but the subsidies are still likely to be below those available in Asia once again underlining that semiconductors right now are all about geopolitics and not economics. Intel is currently in line to receive...
Money for nothing and company for free. Falling long-term estimates and substantial dilution have materially damaged the long-term outlook for the share price but the shares have fallen so much that there is enough upside even at a greatly reduced share price forecast to consider rounding down. Ouster has had a rough 18 months and the combination of difficult end...
CCP hurts the bug, not the feature. AI proponents will look at the immediate clampdown on large language model (LLM) chatbots by the CCP with dismay, but I think that for the use cases that I have identified for these systems, it won’t make much difference. At its 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Alibaba announced an LLM-based chatbot called Tonyi Qianwen...
Here we go again. MoviePass has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy with yet another crack at the cinema subscription market after two failed attempts and a short sojourn with crypto and although this time there is a shred of economic rationality, I am not optimistic regarding its future. MoviePass first showed up in 2018 (see here) offering a fixed subscription...
Samsung semi goes into the red. Samsung reported preliminary results where profit fell by 95% as semiconductors in all probability has become loss-making which in turn triggered Samsung to finally cut its production. Q1 2023 revenues / operating profit were KRW63tn / KRW0.6tn way below consensus profit forecasts of KRW1.14tn and yet the shares rallied 4% after the news. This...
Google fails to dent Nvidia. Google’s claims of superior performance for its AI chips is somewhat misleading as it looks like the performance difference is to do with inter-chip data transport rather than processing speed and it benchmarks its products against one of Nvidia’s older products. Google has published a paper (see here) lauding the capabilities of its in-house designed...
2 good use cases for LLMs Bloomberg’s implementation of a chatbot using its own data and my own assessment of Bard, ChatGPT, Bing and so on leads to my conclusion that there are effectively 2 good use cases for large language models (LLMs) which could be very valuable within a reasonable time frame. Every man and his dog are racing...
Will he or won’t he? Tim Cook’s change of tone combined with endless leaks suggest that a Metaverse device is imminent however it still makes no sense to launch now and I have my doubts it will launch at WWDC. Despite the probability of further delays to the launch of a Metaverse device, the Apple marketing machine is already beginning...
Japan: the samurai strikes. Japan has entered the fray and put in place restrictions on semiconductor exports that are more draconian than the USA and where the Japanese state has effectively taken control of its semiconductor capital equipment market. Japan is imposing export restrictions on 23 types of equipment used to make semiconductors but instead of limiting it just to...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
GM – The Fourth Estate
GM’s biggest problem is the media. GMs decision to end support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto has sparked a negative reaction from the Apple-loving technology press that seems to have put finger to keyboard to generate clicks rather than to inform. GM has announced that its EVs from mid-2024 will no longer support Apple CarPlay or Android Auto which,...