Good morning. Andrew here. It’s a big day for us: I’m thrilled to announce the lineup for this year’s DealBook Summit. We’re celebrating 25 years since the founding of DealBook, making this year’s gathering especially meaningful to me. Every year, my goal is to bring together the most consequential people shaping our world. I hope you’ll join us. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Our interview lineup for the DealBook SummitWe are pleased to announce our lineup for the DealBook Summit, to be held Nov. 18 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. Andrew will interview the biggest newsmakers in business, politics and culture. This year’s interviews will include:
You can apply to attend in person here.
JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo lead an inauspicious start to earnings season. Both lenders announced revenue that fell short of analyst expectations, which hit their stocks in premarket trading. Investors have braced for an end to volatile markets that have bolstered Wall Street giants’ trading desks. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are also expected to report results today; Bank of America and Morgan Stanley announce theirs tomorrow. The I.M.F. warns that the war in the Middle East will worsen economic inequality. The organization said that the conflict, combined with the artificial intelligence boom, could lead the G.D.P. of countries like Iraq and Qatar to decline by double digits, while chip-making centers like Taiwan and South Korea are expected to post strong growth. Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia’s main international airport, in Riyadh, will remain closed until Saturday after several deadly attacks by Houthi rebels from Yemen. Broadcom’s C.E.O. may have depressed A.I. stocks. The executive, Hock Tan, compared many A.I. investors to casino gamblers and said they “have no clue.” That may have contributed to a rout in the stocks of chipmakers, with shares in Samsung Electronics down about 7 percent and those in SK Hynix down about 10 percent. U.S. home sales plunge to a near-12-year low. Pending home sales dropped 4 percent between August and September, reaching their lowest level since 2014 except for the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the online brokerage Redfin. The drop comes after the average 30-year mortgage rate hit 7.4 percent last week. Behind the inference boomAnthropic and OpenAI may be the biggest names in artificial intelligence. But as more businesses race to adopt A.I., demand is soaring for companies that specialize in inference, or the process of actually running models and products. Demand is so high that it’s driving up business, and capital, for an emerging category of start-ups, Sri Muppidi reports. Inference is a fast-growing market. Data center demand for inference is expected to grow 36 percent a year through the end of the decade, according to a report last month by the consulting firm McKinsey. By 2030, inference is projected to account for 42 percent of data centers’ workload, compared with 28 percent for training and 30 percent for non-A.I. processing. The rationale behind the industry: Anthropic and OpenAI provide everything needed for their models, including inference. But companies that use open-weight models — and there are more of them — increasingly rely on inference providers to actually serve up the models, handling user requests and optimizing the computing power needed to run them. Compared with traditional cloud computing platforms, like those operated by Microsoft, Amazon and Google, the hardware and software that A.I. companies need require deeply technical expertise, Dan Fu, a vice president at the inference company Together AI, told DealBook. OpenAI and Anthropic have spent billions on computing power with the hyperscalers, and they have large teams focused on optimizing inference. “If you’re a start-up, or you’re actually anybody else in this space, it’s quite expensive, quite challenging” to take that on, Fu said. Investors see lots of opportunity.
All three have raised billions in venture funding. Inference providers are offering more services. Baseten, for instance, helps customers customize their A.I. models with their own data, Tuhin Srivastava, Baseten’s C.E.O., told DealBook. And “different flavors” of inference companies are emerging, Tomasz Tunguz, a general partner at Theory Ventures, told DealBook. For example, Sail Research, which Tunguz has backed, focuses on running A.I. agents for its customers at lower costs, its C.E.O., Neil Movva, told DealBook. Fal focuses exclusively on visual A.I., including images and video.
READER FEEDBACK What you said about regulating A.I.How will the Trump administration regulate artificial intelligence? Last week, President Trump appointed Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, as the head of a new so-called Super Intelligence Force. (The administration may be making other moves. It is reportedly having some top officials of the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence — known as the Center for A.I. Standards and Innovation until the Trump-driven rebranding of “A.I.” — report directly to the White House instead of to the Commerce Department, according to The Information.) Clayton was given 120 days to draft a report recommending the role of government in A.I. Andrew asked readers what they would suggest. Here’s a sampling of your responses (condensed and edited for clarity):
FIFA’s $4 million Trump Tower officeThe president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, has spent much of the second Trump administration trying to get closer to President Trump. That effort apparently included renting expensive office space for FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, in Trump Tower in New York City. That seven-year lease, worth about $4 million, has drawn concern from some officials in the organization over its cost, its location in a Trump-owned property and in high-tax New York — and the lack of a clear need for it. (The office stays largely idle, and there are no plans to fully staff it.) Here’s more from Tariq Panja in The Times: FIFA uses the nearly 5,000-square-foot space for special events and for meetings with dignitaries and soccer leaders, the organization said. It is mostly used during the yearly United Nations General Assembly. The decision to open a representative office in Trump Tower was driven by Mr. Infantino, according to the two officials who were involved in the deal. FIFA hired an international real estate consultancy to assess whether the deal was in line with market rates. But the two officials said that there was no clear business need for the office, especially since FIFA had the offices in Miami. Officials flagged that opening another U.S. office, in New York State, could create an additional tax liability for FIFA, the documents show, and the organization worked with lawyers to establish that no business or commercial activities would take place there to avoid such taxes. Infantino has come under increasing scrutiny for his conduct, including his now-abandoned secret talks to sell a portion of future tournaments to investors led by Josh Kushner, the brother of the Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. He also faced accusations of bias and political interference after FIFA rescinded the suspension of a U.S. player during the recent World Cup — following a phone call from Trump to Infantino. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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