Elon Musk is fighting many battles right now: Against a Brazilian Supreme Court judge, the Australian Prime Minister, Don Lemon, OpenAI, and a nonprofit watchdog, to name a few. But Musk says that he's now spending the majority of his work time on one of his oldest ventures: Tesla. And Tesla badly needs help. The carmaker released its quarterly earnings report yesterday and revealed that its profits fell 55% and revenue fell 9%--figures even worse than many analysts had anticipated. The company announced its intentions to lay off more than 10% of its staff, or about 14,000 people, including major cuts in California and Texas.

M&A activities are pivotal for market consolidation, enabling firms to augment market power through strategic complementarities. Existing research often overlooks the peer effect, the mutual influence of M&A behaviors among firms, and fails to capture complex interdependencies within industry networks. Common approaches suffer from reliance on ad-hoc feature engineering, data truncation leading to significant information loss, reduced predictive accuracy, and challenges in real-world application. Additionally, the rarity of M&A events necessitates data rebalancing in conventional models, introducing bias and undermining prediction reliability. We propose an innovative M&A predictive model utilizing the Temporal Dynamic Industry Network (TDIN), leveraging temporal point processes and deep learning to adeptly capture industry-wide M&A dynamics. This model facilitates accurate, detailed deal-level predictions without arbitrary data manipulation or rebalancing, demonstrated through superior evaluation results from M&A cases between January 1997 and December 2020. Our approach marks a significant improvement over traditional models by providing detailed insights into M&A activities and strategic recommendations for specific firms.

Elon Musk, who sued OpenAI for violating its non-profit mission and chasing profits, allegedly wanted the organization to merge with Tesla when it was starting to plan its transition into a for-profit entity in order to accomplish its goals. Well, either that or get full control of the company, OpenAI said in a blog post. The organization responded to Musk's lawsuit by publishing old emails from 2015 to 2018 when he was still involved in its operations. When OpenAI introduced itself to the world back in 2015, it announced that it had 1 billion in funding. Apparently, Musk was the one who suggested that figure, even though OpenAI had raised less than 45 million from him and around 90 million from other donors.

In this study, ChatGPT is utilized to create streamlined models that generate easily interpretable features. These features are then used to evaluate financial outcomes from earnings calls. We detail a training approach that merges knowledge distillation and transfer learning, resulting in lightweight topic and sentiment classification models without significant loss in accuracy. These models are assessed through a dataset annotated by experts. The paper also delves into two practical case studies, highlighting how the generated features can be effectively utilized in quantitative investing scenarios.

Ten years, billions of dollars, multiple leadership changes, and dozens of rumors later, the Apple Car project is dead. A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to nearly 2,000 employees who had been working on it on Tuesday. As part of the change, Apple will move "many employees working on the car" to the company's artificial intelligence division where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year, according to a statement by CEO Tim Cook on the company's earnings call earlier this month. But the car team also included hundreds of hardware engineers and car designers, some of who, Bloomberg reports, will be able to apply for jobs in other divisions of the company. The rest are likely to be laid off.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have demonstrated impressive proficiency in comprehending and generating natural language. However, they encounter difficulties when tasked with adapting to specialized domains such as accounting. To address this challenge, we introduce Kuaiji, a tailored Accounting Large Language Model. Kuaiji is meticulously fine-tuned using the Baichuan framework, which encompasses continuous pre-training and supervised fine-tuning processes. Supported by CAtAcctQA, a dataset containing large genuine accountant-client dialogues, Kuaiji exhibits exceptional accuracy and response speed. Our contributions encompass the creation of the first Chinese accounting dataset, the establishment of Kuaiji as a leading open-source Chinese accounting LLM, and the validation of its efficacy through real-world accounting scenarios.

The artificial intelligence boom is pushing demand for Nvidia's products past Wall Street's already lofty expectations. The chipmaker beat analyst expectations on Wednesday by leaps and bounds when it reported fourth-quarter earnings, posting 22.1bn in revenue on an expected 20.55bn and 4.93 in earnings per share against an expected 4.64. Revenue was 22% higher than the previous quarter, up 265% from a year ago. Nvidia's most closely watched earnings figure – revenue from data centers – was up more than 400% from the same period last year, reaching 18.4bn. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a press release, "Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations."

Lyft beat estimates for fourth-quarter profit on Tuesday and said it would generate positive free cash flow for the first time in 2024, as the ride-share platform reaps the benefits of heavy cost cuts. Company shares surged nearly 60% in extended trading but erased a third of those gains after the CFO corrected a major mistake in the earnings report. Erin Brewer had said that the company would grow by 500 basis points (5%) in 2024, but later said that the real increase would be a factor of 10 lower – 50 basis points (0.5%). In 2023, the stock gained about 36%. Rides to stadiums grew more than 35% last year from 2022, mainly driven by Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour and sporting events, Lyft said.

SoftBank Group shares surged for a third day on Tuesday, following the explosive rally of its Arm Holdings, the chip designer that has almost doubled in value since making the case last week for how it will benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. SoftBank's stock climbed as much as 11% to the highest level since May 2021. SoftBank held onto a stake of about 90% in Arm as it took the company public last year. Arm's shares rose 29% on Monday, pushing its gains to more than 90% since it reported financial results on Feb. 7. The company is expanding beyond its traditional base in smartphone technology into new markets like artificial intelligence applications, lifting its outlook.

UPS's largest layoffs in its 116-year history were made possible, in part, by new technologies including artificial intelligence, CEO Carol Tome said last week. Citing one example, she said that machine learning allows salespeople to put together proposals without having to ask pricing experts for guidance. UPS is among a growing number of companies facing an AI two-step of sorts: showing investors how AI helps do more with less while simultaneously avoiding the reputational impact of directly linking technology with job cuts. A UPS spokesperson later said AI is not replacing workers, and that executives did not make an explicit connection between AI and the permanent layoffs on the company's earnings call.