The recommendations of Wall Street analysts are often relied on by investors when deciding whether to buy, sell, or hold a stock. Media reports about these brokerage-firm-employed (or sell-side) analysts changing their ratings oft
The recommendations of Wall Street analysts are often relied on by investors when deciding whether to buy, sell, or hold a stock. Media reports about these brokerage-firm-employed (or sell-side) analysts changing their ratings oft
When deciding whether to buy, sell, or hold a stock, investors often rely on analyst recommendations. Media reports about rating changes by these brokerage-firm-employed (or sell-side) analysts often influence a stock's price, but
Bitcoin had its hottest streak in over two years this week, hitting two new all-time price highs. Meanwhile, pharma giant Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) briefly overtook Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) in terms of market cap size, potentially signaling the rise of new power players beyond Silicon Valley.Also this past week, a former Tesla employee joined Hugging Face as the startup embarks on a new hardware project, and Anthropic released the newest version of its language model family, Claude 3.Stay informed on the latest developments in the tech world with the Investing News Network's weekly round-up.
1. Bitcoin price reaches new all-time highs
Bitcoin posted two new all-time price highs this week, starting strong by approaching its November 2021 record of US$69,000 on Monday (March 4). On Tuesday (March 5), Bitcoin briefly crossed that threshold, reaching US$69,208, according to data gathered from CoinDesk; however it quickly fell 10 percent. The decline prompted talk of another “sell the news” event akin to the rapid spike and pullback seen in January, when the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved 10 spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Analysts believe these ETFs are the primary driver of the current rally, coupled with anticipation of the halving event scheduled for April. "The institutional race is on and it's driving demand," Bundeep Rangar, CEO Fineqia, said in an emailed note. "The high uptake of ETFs is causing its issuers to soak up available BTC supply in the market, driving up prices. And it looks like there might still be some more room to stretch along the price elasticity curve."Bitcoin stayed within the US$65,000 to US$67,000 range throughout the week, then soared above US$70,000 in the early hours of Friday (March 8). This increase was quickly followed by a price drop, taking Bitcoin back to just above US$68,000. As momentum gained, Ethereum and a handful of meme coins also saw dramatic price increases. Ethereum went above the US$4,000 mark on Friday, reaching levels not observed since December 2021. According to CoinGecko, the crypto market gained US$1 trillion in market cap in February alone, bringing its total market cap to US$2.7 trillion. Bitcoin’s market cap is now trailing just behind silver’s at US$1.38 trillion. At the time of this writing on Friday afternoon, Bitcoin was changing hands at US$68,632.05.
2. Big Pharma trumps Big Tech
The era of the Magnificent 7, a group of tech stocks that have dominated the stock market since the tail end of 2023, may be drawing to a close. This week, Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk surpassed Tesla in terms of market cap following reports of positive early stage results from a trial of amycretin, its experimental weight-loss drug. Following the announcement, which was discussed at an investor meeting, shares of Novo Nordisk jumped 8 percent, driving the company's market cap to US$609 billion, roughly US$40 billion more than Tesla's at the time the news broke. As of this writing, Novo Nordisk was valued at US$452.21 billion, while Tesla had a market cap of US$549.42 billion. Meanwhile, the Bank of America reported the largest weekly tech stock outflows ever recorded. The bank notes that US$4.4 billion in outflows occurred in the week leading up to Wednesday (March 6), the first outflows in nine weeks. The S&P 500 (INDEXSP:.INX) logged another record close on Thursday (March 7), unsurprisingly driven by gains in tech stocks. However, big players put on mixed performances. Shares of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) declined for much of the week following reports that sales have slowed in China, while NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) fell nearly 8 percent on Friday.The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite (INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC) closed the week 0.7 percent and 01.16 percent lower, respectively. The declines lend credence to analysts' warnings of over-concentration in the tech and artificial intelligence (AI) sectors, although some experts have attributed the market drop to disappointing US non-farm payroll data. Shares of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) also experienced steep drops on Monday, ending the week with retreats of 1.75 percent and 1.21 percent, respectively. Meta (NASDAQ:META) managed to keep its head above water, ending the week with a modest 0.55 percent gain. Finally, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), the parent company of Google, had recorded a relatively insignificant 0.22 percent decline by the week’s end.
3. Apple found in violation of new EU rules
On Monday, the European Union (EU) found that Apple was in breach of new rules regarding competition law. Specifically, the EU’s preliminary findings show that Apple’s App Store policies and high commission fees unfairly disadvantage rival music streaming services like Spotify (NYSE:SPOT), which filed a complaint against the tech giant in 2019. The court found that the App Store’s policies have effectively limited consumer choice, and the conglomerate was fined 1.8 billion euros as a penalty, the first of its kind for the iPhone maker. This marks one of the largest antitrust fines ever imposed by the EU, surpassed only by fines levied against Google in 2018 and 2017, which amounted to 4.34 billion and 2.42 billion euros, respectively. According to documents, the magnitude of the fine was intended to serve as a deterrent.
4. Anthropic releases Claude 3
Anthropic released the newest version of its language model family, Claude 3, on Monday. The family includes three models: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus. Opus and Sonnet became available immediately in claude.ai and the Claude API. Sonnet is also available through Amazon’s Bedrock platform and Google’s Vertex AI platform. Haiku will be available “soon,” but Anthropic's press release does not specify when. The company claims that Opus, Claude 3’s most intelligent model, “exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks,” and that all models have increased capabilities in English and other languages, putting them a step ahead of competitors like ChatGPT, which was created by OpenAI. Anthropic prompt engineer Alex Albert tweeted a story from Claude 3’s “needle in the haystack” evaluation, a test designed to assess its ability to identify and isolate specific, relevant information within a large dataset. During the test, the chatbot seemed to demonstrate a variety of metacognition, or the ability to monitor its own internal processes. According to Albert, the chatbot called out its developers for inserting a seemingly random phrase about pizza in a block of text that was about programming languages and startups. “I suspect this pizza topping 'fact' may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention,” the chatbot said when asked to locate the sentence in question. "Opus not only found the needle, it recognized that the inserted needle was so out of place in the haystack that this had to be an artificial test constructed by us to test its attention abilities," wrote Albert.Margaret Mitchell, an ethics researcher at Hugging Face and co-author of the Stochastic Parrots research paper, which examines the potential risks of large language models, responded with intrigue, but questioned the safety of an AI model that can tell the difference between deliberate instructions and exploitation. “The ability to determine whether a human is manipulating it to do something foreseeably can lead to making decisions to obey or not,” she wrote. Anthropic has stated that the Claude 3 model family was developed in accordance with the 2023 US Executive Order on AI and remains at AI Safety Level 2 (ASL-2). The company will “continue to carefully monitor future models to assess their proximity to the ASL-3 threshold.”
5. Hugging Face plans to expand into robotics
New York City-based startup Hugging Face is reportedly launching a new open-source robotics project that is being led by former Tesla scientist Remi Cadene. Cadene, who left Tesla in January after working on the tech company’s Autopilot and Optimus teams, announced the venture by posting on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. He also mentioned that Hugging Face is looking to hire engineers in Paris and included a link to the job application. This marks Hugging Face’s first major expansion into hardware and comes at a time when research on robots is at its peak thanks to innovations in AI and machine learning.
Don't forget to follow us @INN_Technology for real-time news updates!Securities Disclosure: I, Meagen Seatter, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
Despite exceeding their quarterly top and bottom line expectations on Thursday, Nike NKE and Lululemon LULU shares fell in today’s trading session due to softer-than-expected guidance.
(RTTNews) - Tesla (TSLA) has reportedly cut down its electric vehicle production at its Giga Shanghai factory in China due to sluggish growth in the sales of new-energy vehicles, tough competition and price war, according to Bloomberg.
After a two week hot streak, cryptocurrency prices experienced a modest pullback as Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) experienced outflows and spot Ethereum ETF expectations were dampened. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) hotly anticipated GPU Technology Conference delivered a host of new, innovative technology, including a project for building humanoid robots, and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares pulled back after the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit accusing the tech giant of anticompetitive behavior.Stay informed on the latest developments in the tech world with the Investing News Network's round-up.
1. Nasdaq closes at new record
The Nasdaq Composite (INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC) closed at a new record high on Friday (March 22) after the US Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday (March 20) and maintained its forecast for three cuts this year.Shares of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) peaked at US$429.83 on Thursday (March 21), a 3.75 percent difference from the firm's opening price of US$414.31 on Monday (March 18). Meta (NASDAQ:META) reached its highest valuation so far this month that same day, touching US$515 at market open before falling slightly, ending the week at US$509.58. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) traded around US$175 during the first half of the week before rising on the Fed news to over US$180 on Thursday. It remained elevated at the close of trading on Friday at US$178.87. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) experienced some volatility leading up to the Fed's meeting, but didn’t see the same sharp share price uptick as many of the other mega-cap tech stocks. And, after three weeks in a downtrend, Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) share price finished the week 0.53 percent higher to close at US$170.83.Apple was the only one of the major tech stocks to see an overall decline this past week. NVIDIA was unsurprisingly the biggest winner of the mega-cap tech stocks this week, closing 4.31 percent higher despite a sharp drop both before and after a conference it held on Monday.
2. Bitcoin and Ethereum record mild week
After last week’s surge, Bitcoin experienced a moderate drop over the weekend, starting the week at US$68,437 on Monday, 7.5 percent lower compared to its record high of US$73,580 on March 14. The cryptocurrency's price continued to fall through the week, dropping as low as US$61,494 just before midnight on Tuesday (March 19). By the end of Wednesday, it had mostly recovered, reaching US$67,883. Bitcoin was trading at US$63,117 as of 4:00 p.m. PST on Friday.Ethereum followed a similar pattern, hitting a high of US$3,566 on Thursday after starting the week at US$3,626 — that's 12.24 percent lower than its March 11 price level of US$4,070.60. Ethereum’s lowest valuation for the week was US$3,107 on Tuesday. It was trading at US$3,297 as of 4:00 p.m. PST on Friday. According to trader and economist Alex Kruger, reasons for the “crash,” from most to least important, include too much leverage, waning optimism that the US Securities and Exchange Commission will approve spot Ethereum ETFs, outflows from Bitcoin ETFs and inflated valuations.
3. NVIDIA delivers at GPU Technology Conference
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang kicked off his company’s GPU Technology Conference on Monday with a keynote, unveiling a new lineup of artificial intelligence (AI) chips and software for running AI models, the Blackwell architecture. Alluded to for the first time in October 2023 as part of the company’s developmental roadmap, Blackwell was rumored to be NVIDIA's most capable graphics processing unit (GPU) yet. During the presentation, Huang outlined Blackwell’s capabilities and how the company is poised to lead the “new industrial revolution” with its hardware and software. The Blackwell GPU, manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE:TSM), is the world’s first multi-die chip specifically designed for AI applications, with two large dies connected by cables to form one large GPU. In a computer chip, a die refers to the semiconductor material, usually silicon, that houses the transistors, resistors, capacitors and other elements that carry out the tasks the chip was designed for. The Blackwell platform consists of NVIDIA's B200 Tensor Core GPUs and the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, a powerful processor that connects the two CPUs to the NVIDIA Grace CPU over an ultra-low-power NVLink chip-to-chip (C2C) interconnect. NVIDIA developed C2C to allow high-speed communication between different chips within a single processor. With the increased processing power, AI companies will be able to train bigger and more complex models.NVIDIA also introduced NVIDIA AI Enterprise 5.0, which offers dozens of generative AI microservices that will help businesses create and establish their own applications on their own platforms, giving them full ownership rights over their intellectual property. Developers can run their models on their own servers or on cloud-based NVIDIA servers, and are charged based on usage. The microservices offered by 5.0 include the new NVIDIA Inference Microservices, which will make it easier to deploy AI and run programs, including on older versions of NVIDIA GPUs.The keynote concluded with a presentation of Project GR00T, or Generalist Robot 00 Technology, a foundation model that will provide natural language understanding and imitative learning for humanoid robots. The initiative is powered by a new NVIDIA computer for humanoid robots called Jetson Thor, which is available for developers through the company's upgraded Isaac Robotics Platform.
4. NVIDIA to build humanoid robots
“The ChatGPT moment for robotics may be right around the corner,” NVIDIA's Huang said as he revealed a new innovative project at the conference. Project GR00T is a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots built on a new computer called Jetson Thor. Jetson Thor is based on the newly designed NVIDIA Thor system-on-a-chip, which itself is built on the Blackwell architecture and an upgraded Isaac Robotics Platform. As Huang pointed out at the event, “Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today.” One obstacle he identified was the difference between large language model reinforcement learning on a computer and reinforcement learning with physical feedback. “We need a simulation engine that represents the world digitally for the robot so that the robot has a gym to go learn how to be a robot,” he said. “We call that virtual world Omniverse.”NVIDIA's Omniverse bridges the gap between the digital and physical worlds. By creating digital twins in Omniverse, developers can simulate real-world scenarios to test robot behaviors and optimize designs before physical implementation. Other tools to facilitate robot learning are the Isaac Lab, a robotic simulation platform for reinforcement learning that is powered by Omniverse; and OSMO, a compute orchestration service that helps developers scale their workloads across a distributed environment for scheduling multi-stage workflows.
5. Apple fined by DoJ and 16 states
The US Department of Justice (DoJ), joined by 16 other state and district attorneys general, filed a major antitrust lawsuit against Apple in New Jersey on Thursday, alleging that the tech giant has engaged in anticompetitive practices to maintain its dominant position in the smartphone market. The lawsuit claims that Apple has stifled competition, suppressed innovation and inflated prices by restricting the ability of smaller companies to offer competing applications and services on its iOS platform, thereby making it more difficult for users to switch to other devices. The government argues that Apple’s actions violate antitrust laws and harm both consumers and smaller competitors. The lawsuit seeks remedies that could include breaking up Apple; however, outcomes will depend on the court’s decision. This legal action marks a significant escalation in the ongoing regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech, and follows similar litigation brought against both Amazon and Alphabet’s Google last year. Overseas, Apple was issued a 2 billion euro fine by the European Commission on March 4 after the court ruled that Apple had broken the bloc’s antitrust laws by favoring its music streaming service, iTunes, over those belonging to competitors. US President Joe Biden has made this issue a priority as well, launching a task force on March 5 jointly led by the DoJ and the Federal Trade Commission to strictly enforce antitrust laws and crack down on unfair corporate pricing.
Don't forget to follow us @INN_Technology for real-time news updates!Securities Disclosure: I, Meagen Seatter, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
(RTTNews) - A group of experts from various American universities has uncovered a new vulnerability in Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) M-series processors that could be leveraged to extract secret keys from Mac devices during cryptographic processes.
Friday, March 22, 2024The Zacks Research Daily presents the best research output of our analyst team. Today's Research Daily features new research reports on 16 major stocks, including Booking Holdings Inc. (BKNG), Mitsubishi UFJ
(RTTNews) - Meta Platforms's (META) photo-sharing platform Instagram was down on Thursday, affecting a substantial number of users globally, according to a report from Downdetector.com.
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