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  • The Billion Dollar Breakup 💰💔

The Billion Dollar Breakup 💰💔

PLUS: Tweetin No More 🐦

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Here's what we're serving up today:

  • The Billion Dollar Breakup 💰💔

  • Tweetin No More 🐦

  • Databrick’s Dolly 🐑

The Billion Dollar Breakup 💰💔

Looks like SoftBank and Alibaba's love story is coming to an end! The Japanese group, led by billionaire Masayoshi Son, is selling off majority of its remaining stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant and will be left with around 3.8% of the company, down from their once glorious one-third stake. They've already sold about $7.2 billion worth of shares this year, after a whopping $29 billion last year. Talk about putting a relationship on ice!

But why Jack (Ma), why? Well, Alibaba has been getting the stink-eye from the Chinese government lately, and their stock price has taken a nosedive. SoftBank itself is trying to recover from a series of failed investments, even cutting staff in their Vision Fund unit. Plus, they were an investor in the failed crypto startup FTX. Ouch.

Selling an average of $92 a share for Alibaba might not sound too bad, but it's a far cry from the company's all-time high of $317 a share. Looks like SoftBank's going for the "better safe than sorry" approach with this breakup!

But let's not forget the good ol' days when Son invested $20 million in Alibaba after meeting Jack Ma, who in Masa’s own words had "strong, shining eyes" (that’s true love folks). Unfortunately, strong eyes don't protect you from a government crackdown. Guess it's time for both parties to see other people, huh?

Tweetin No More 🐦

There is honestly more drama happening daily at Twitter than a Netflix thriller honestly. As of late, it seems that US news outlets PBS and NPR have had enough of Twitter's shenanigans! They've decided to quit the platform after being labeled as "state-affiliated" and "government-funded" media. It's like Twitter's throwing shade on their journalistic integrity, and they're not having it!

PBS and NPR are basically saying, "Thanks, but no thanks" to Twitter. And as if things weren't messy enough, Twitter's been playing around with that iconic blue checkmark, threatening to take it away from the legacy verified accounts (New York Times - Elon is talking about you) from April 20 unless they cough up some cash for Twitter Blue.

So, if you're into PBS or NPR, you'll have to look elsewhere for your news fix (Check out NPR’s list below), 'cause they're not going to be chirping on Twitter anytime soon.

Databrick’s Dolly 🐑

Databricks is saying "Hello Dolly!" to the world of AI, with their new open-source large language model Dolly 2.0! Inspired by OpenAI's ChatGPT, Databricks is bringing their own sassy AI to the stage. But this diva has a twist: she's a smaller, more computationally affordable model perfect for companies who want to keep their secrets and data safe from prying eyes.

“We’re calling the model Dolly — after Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal — because it’s an open-source clone of an Alpaca, inspired by a LLaMA.” (Ok honestly, kudos to the naming)

She may not be as big and fancy as the models from OpenAI or Google, but With just six billion parameters, Dolly's bringing AI democracy to the masses. Dolly 2.0 is built on GPT-J-6B from EleutherAI and has some, uh, "quirks." It only speaks English. Also, it's not always the most reliable source of info.

Despite its flaws, Ghodsi says Dolly 2.0 is meant for simple tasks, like responding to customer support tickets or extracting info from legal documents. He believes open-sourcing models like Dolly will help improve them, but there's always the risk of misuse (looking at you, deepfakes!).

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