Digital Rockers, China's Economy, New AI Chip, and More!

Vonetta Logan's weekly recap of the big business, news, markets, political, cultural and viral trending stories featured this week on Daily Dose.

What’s up tastynation! Welcome to this week’s edition of Weekly Dose! Each week, I recap the top stories that I covered on Daily Dose. If you missed any eps of Daily Dose you can catch up on them here.

First, I offer my sincerest congratulations to Time Magazine’s Person of the Year ... Taylor Swift. At Luckbox magazine, our Person of the Year is the raccoon in our alley who is constantly trying to steal our trash. Both are true icons.

Let’s get to this week’s recap. 

All I want for Christmas is crypto 

Bitcoin, after having a nice luxurious weekend, looked around on Monday and after confirming that both Sam Bankman-Fried and Chanpeng "CZ" Zhao were still in federal custody, said “Alexa, play ‘I’m Coming Out’ by Diana Ross.”

Bitcoin rose on Monday, briefly surpassing $42,000 to reach a 20-month high. That pop was enough to send Bitcoin bulls into paroxysms of digital asset joy, and they’re now calling for Bitcoin to hit 100k next year. Dear reader, this is the crypto bro equivalent of doing an AI rendering of what your children will look like after just one date.

Even El Salvador, which is the first nation to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, said the nation has no intention of selling. El Salvador’s millennial president Nayib Bukele posted on X, formerly Twitter, “El Salvador’s #Bitcoin investments are in the black!” Then, like a good crypto bro he posted a screen grab of his #gainz.

Rockin' the blockchain

Even the classic rock group Kiss is getting in on the digital asset gold rush this week. After the completion of its final show, the band announced that digital avatars of Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Tommy Thayer, and Eric Singer will live on in Kiss Army perpetuity. The avatars were created by George Lucas’ special-effects company, in partnership with Pophouse Entertainment Group.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and digital rockers this week. In his testimony before Congress, JP Morgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon went on an epic rant against cryptocurrency. When I say epic, I mean epically stupid. Dimon said he’d always been deeply against crypto.

“The only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers … money laundering, tax avoidance. If I was the government, I’d close it down,” Dimon said, He then added “get off my lawn” before tucking his hands neatly into his lap as a congressional aid poked a straw into a freshly chilled box of Ensure. Bitcoin looks like it will end the week above $43,000. 

China’s chaotic economy comes into the spotlight 

The economic news out of China did not start off on a good foot this week. First, Alibaba (BABA) the once pre-eminent e-commerce retailer in China got downgraded by Morgan Stanley (MS). Since Alibaba was unable to fulfill its duties as China’s Next Top Retailer for cheap goods that you don’t need, Pinduoduo (PDD) was awarded the crown. (She didn’t have any incriminating photos, but she did sleep with a judge.)

Then, ratings agency Moody's slapped a downgrade warning on China's credit rating, saying costs to bail out local governments and state firms and control its property crisis would weigh on the world's No. 2 economy. Moody's lowered the outlook on China's A1 debt rating to "negative" from "stable".

But in some good news, the Chin-linked e-commerce platform Temu, part of PDD Holdings (PDD), is successfully taking on U.S. dollar stores including industry leader Dollar General (DG), according to the latest market share data. As of last month, Temu accounted for nearly 17% of market share in the United States within the discount store category.

The threat of cheap Chinese fast fashion is putting pressure on America’s largest e-commerce site, Amazon (AMZN). This week, Amazon announced it was taking clear steps to compete with fast fashion site Shein. Amazon announced it would reduce its seller fees from 17% to 5% for apparel under $15. Clothing priced between $15 to $20 will incur a 10% fee. The new rates will start in January.

I have never purchased anything on Shein, but I do regularly purchase clothing made in China from Amazon. I am a plus-size Asian woman. Shein’s low prices and its network of 6,000 manufacturers is intimidating even for Amazon. Shein is preparing for a US IPO. You can read more about Shein’s bumpy road to IPO here. 

AI everywhere all at once

After the rollercoaster of emotion that was the firing, then re-hiring, of Open AI CEO Sam Altman for super double secret reasons we still don’t know, this week’s AI news is pretty tame.

First, X.AI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. The AI startup, which Musk announced in July, seeks to “understand the true nature of the universe.” X’s chatbot “Grok” got rolled out to premium users this week, but the consensus on the bot seems to be: cringe.

Then, Apple (AAPL) after casually clearing the $3 trillion in market cap threshold strolled into brunch with the chip girlies and announced a new machine-learning (ML) framework that she’s been working on in her spare time. Apple’s ML teams have released a new framework for Apple Silicon: MLX, or ML Explore arrives after being tested over the summer and is now available through GitHub.

Not to be left out, the Google unit of Alphabet (GOOGL) reaches for her second mimosa and casually mentions that she, too, has created the company’s largest and most capable artificial intelligence model, Gemini.

The girls have thoughts on Geminis, but undeterred, Google presses on. She says the large language model Gemini will include a suite of three different sizes: Gemini Ultra, its largest, most capable category; Gemini Pro, which scales across a wide range of tasks; and Gemini Nano, which it will use for specific tasks and mobile devices. But Google is a bit of a truth stretcher because it turns out Google’s claims may not be all that great.

New chip on the AI block

Waiting for drama to die down, Miss Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) quietly slides her hand across the table letting the light catch the stunning new chip on her finger. This week, AMD announced the availability of new accelerators and processors geared toward running large language models, or LLMs. The chipmaker unveiled the Instinct MI300X accelerator and the Instinct M1300A accelerated processing unit (APU), which the company said works to train and run LLMs.

AMD claims its new chips are 1.6x faster than Nvidia’s (NVDA) chips. At this, Nvidia scoots her chair back and runs to the ladies' room, her tears leaving dark streaks of mascara down her face.

Meta (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) pull up to the table and ask AMD if they can buy her another round of mimosas. This week, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said they will use AMD’s newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X—a sign that tech companies want alternatives to the expensive Nvidia graphics processors that have been essential for artificial intelligence. Okay, I guess there was drama in AI this week. 

That’s all for this week! See ya next week! 

Vonetta Logan has more than a decade of markets experience and has been a trader for five years. She is an on-air personality, creative writer and news correspondent at tastylive. Vonetta  appears Monday-Friday on Daily Dose and contributes to Luckbox Magazine. @vonettalogan

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