(Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) |
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If you wore pajamas on the plane during your Thanksgiving travels, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy might have some thoughts on your outfit. Last week, the US Department of Transportation rolled out a civility campaign called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” a nationwide push to restore old-school travel etiquette. In an interview with Fox Business, Duffy urged travelers to not wear pajamas and slippers at airports, saying, “People dress up like they’re going to bed when they fly.”
All major US indexes closed higher on Friday amid thin trading volume. Stocks seemed unaffected by an outage at CME caused by a cooling issue at a Chicago-area data center. The S&P 500 and Russell 2000 ended essentially flat for the month of November, while the Nasdaq 100 dipped 1.6% for the month.
See how well you digested last week’s news with our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s the first question: |
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The TL;DR trade within AI has recently been “long Google and its supply chain partners, short anything closely affiliated with OpenAI.” The Google ecosystem has been booming, while key OpenAI suppliers and investors have been languishing.
Early last week, a high-profile relationship with OpenAI was a millstone around your neck. The ChatGPT maker seemingly getting smoked by Google’s Gemini 3 while burning a lot of cash, with no end to the red ink in sight, made for a bad look for many of its allies.
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- SoftBank is a useful way to express a view on how OpenAI is doing because the Masayoshi Son-led firm is poised to own about 11% of the company. In the month of November, the stock fell 40%.
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Microsoft has a tighter partnership with and bigger equity position in OpenAI than SoftBank. On the plus side, it’s also a successful company in its own right, but that didn’t stop some pain early last week.
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Oracle’s stock peaked after it was revealed it had cut a $300 billion deal with OpenAI. More recently, credit default swaps tied to Oracle’s debt have also widened significantly, as the company’s infrastructure build-out is launching to fulfill demand from OpenAI, a customer that’s considered to be significantly less creditworthy.
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On Wednesday, at least, they got a little relief, as the Nvidia-CoreWeave-Oracle-AMD coterie of OpenAI-linked stocks did better. In what’s very positive for markets on the whole, outperformance of the OpenAI-linked cohort rather than intense pain for the Google group means that everybody’s ships rise a bit. |
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OpenAI has been scrambling to figure out how to generate enough steady revenue to turn the expensive AI services it offers into profits, as it spends dizzying sums on the infrastructure needed to scale its business (or at least, convinces its partners to shoulder debt on its behalf) to meet the expected demand. It has done a very good job of lashing together a raft of public companies in its quest to dominate what is hoped by Wall Street to be a remarkably lucrative business.
But just because it’s assembled a coalition of the shilling around the AI trend doesn’t mean it’s immune to competition, and Alphabet seems by far the strongest contender it’s up against. |
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Stories we’re obsessed with |
- Hollister is the hottest thing in Abercrombie & Fitch’s wardrobe again
Last Tuesday, the parent company of the coastal-inspired mall staple, Abercrombie & Fitch, reported earnings that crushed expectations and sent shares soaring, with Hollister’s growth cementing its position, once again, as the prize item in Abercrombie’s closet. Read how Hollister secured its status as the “number 1 apparel brand for female teens, disrupting Nike’s dominance,” per a Piper Sandler survey from earlier this year, and plans to capitalize on the nostalgia-driven appetite for all things 2000s with a new noughties-tinged Taco Bell collab.
- Chinese tech giants are training their models offshore to sidestep US curbs on Nvidia’s chips
Nvidia can’t sell its best AI chips in the world’s second-largest economy. That’s an Nvidia problem. But it’s also a China problem — and it’s one that the region’s tech giants have resorted to solving by training their AI models overseas in data centers across Southeast Asia, the Financial Times reports.
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We built a glossary of AI-adjacent vocab for words and phrases that have gone modestly viral at the various peaks and troughs of the hype cycle this year. We hope it will empower you to be more artificially intelligent yourself. |
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