Good Morning!

Happy Good Friday! May your work-load be light and your cups full. Cheers to Jesus.

Today’s article is brought to you by: 100% human and 0% AI 

Market Update

📊 Stocks have been more or less flat this week as investors continue to evaluate the upside to owning stocks in a world where bonds are returning 5%+. More on this below.

🟢 Pharma company Catalent increased 5.4% after breaking ground on a $20 million expansion of a clinical supply facility in Germany.

🔴 Mosaic, the fertilizer company, fell 5.7% as JPMorgan downgraded the stock on slower earnings growth.

Banger Tweet of the Day

Google Releases Search AI

Google CEO Sundar Pichai officially announced plans to bring conversational AI features to their search engine.

The Chatbot Race: The announcement comes almost 2 months after Microsoft released its OpenAI-powered chatbot into Bing, and Google flopped on a demo for its internal chatbot, “Bard”, shortly after.

What to expect: Google will probably still be cautious (read: slow) to release the chatbot. They announced they are experimenting with a few different products, such as asking the chatbot a follow-up to your initial query.

Existential Threat: While Mr. Pichai dismissed the notion that chatbots are an existential threat to search, it’s not that hard to imagine a world where conversational AI disrupts the need for a traditional, ad-based search engine.

I already find myself using chatGPT over Google in many instances, and even if they aren’t “monetizable searches” — meaning they generate an ad — that’s seemingly just the next rung on the ladder for the AI to reach.

The death of traditional search wouldn’t mean outright failure for Google, as long as they can gather eyeballs online they can find ways to monetize. It would be a painful journey but they would have to disrupt themselves in order to remain as the ”starting point” for the internet.

Seeing as they’ve been developing AI models in private for a decade now, they should have a very clear path to competing here.

Business Bytes

🌯 Sweetgreen renames its Chipotle Chicken Burrito, Ending Days Old Legal Battle (WSJ)

• Okay so basically Sweetgreen released a new menu item called the Chipotle Chicken Burrito Bowl and Chipotle got really mad about it and said it was trademark infringement so they sued Sweetgreen but then Sweetgreen changed the name to Chicken+ Chipotle Pepper Bowl so now Chipotle dropped the lawsuit and everything is fine.

• And that’s how I imagine the story going down on the playground.

 🤖 Anthropic’s $5 billion, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI (Techcrunch)

• AI research company Anthropic is looking to raise $5 billion over the next two years in order to effectively compete with OpenAI.

• The company is on a mission to build a “frontier model” expected to be 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI model.

📱Vietnam to Probe TikTok Over “Toxic” Content (Reuters)

• Things are just not looking up for TikTok.

💻️ The Robots Have Finally Come for My Job (WSJ)

Money Market Funds are the Rage

As a result of the “Banking Crisis of 2023”, customers with idle cash are quickly moving their money into higher-yielding money-market funds.

Why: The rapid rise in interest rates, heightened fear of bank failures, and persistent inflation have caused customers to question why they are holding such a large amount of cash in a checking account yielding 0% when interest on a money-market fund is yielding ~4-5%.

Per the WSJ, “Bank deposits have fallen $363 billion to $17.3 Trillion since the beginning of March, Assets in money-market funds have risen $304 billion to a record $5.2 trillion”.

Pressure on Banks: The rapid shift of bank deposits to money market funds can have a drag on bank’s earnings and the overall economy:

• Rather than that money being lent out to customers, a large portion of those dollars are now being parked at the Federal Reserve, effectively removing them from the banking system & draining liquidity.

Solution: Cut rates? maybe. Or, banks could offer higher deposit rates, disincentivizing customers from moving their money out of their accounts. That would have the obvious impact of lowering margins for banks, but could lead them to garnering more deposits than otherwise.

Today’s Challenge: Have a Good Friday 😉 

Much Love,

Andrew