Bitcoin News Australia

Reddit is praying investors will click the “upvote” button.

The social media website — and home of the best relationship dilemmas since Jerry Springer — filed paperwork on Monday announcing its intention to raise up to $748 million in its upcoming initial public offering, pegging its valuation around $6.4 billion. The Reddit IPO has been a long time coming, but now the company is raring to go, despite the fact it has never once turned an annual profit. Hey, it worked for Uber, didn’t it?

You Live by the LLM, You Die by the LLM

Reddit isn’t the most high-maintenance of social media platforms. The vast majority of curating and managing its esoteric subreddits (the myriad forums that make up the site) is done by the users themselves. In its IPO filing, Reddit compared its moderation approach to a “democratic city, wherein everyone has the ability to vote and self-organize, follow a set of common rules, and establish community-specific norms.” 

However, turning user information into advertising dollars, the typical social media playbook, has yet to yield an annual profit for Reddit since it was founded in 2005. In the past year, Reddit has been on the warpath trying to eke out more value from its platform and ended up majorly upsetting its power users in the process. But Monday’s IPO filing mentions a whole new revenue stream: being a training ground for other companies’ Large Language Models (LLMs). Reddit is selling itself as an invaluable source of “authentic and constantly updated human-generated experience,” i.e. if you train an LLM on it, it will learn to sound like real people, or at least, like people who post on Reddit. The only problem is that by licensing the Redditverse out to AI companies, Reddit may be signing its own death warrant:

• Reddit entered a new partnership with Google in February that gave the tech giant access to Reddit’s data for AI training purposes, one week after Bloomberg reported Reddit had signed a $60 million-per-year AI training deal with an unnamed company.
• That amount is nothing to sniff at, but Reddit warns in its filing that LLM-powered internet services could eat into its business. “Redditors may choose to find information using LLMs, which in some cases may have been trained using Reddit data, instead of visiting Reddit directly,” the company said.

The S&P 500 has 493 other stocks, too. Investors have started to notice. 

After a relatively dismal 2023 and start of 2024, many stocks in the broader market are finally beginning to catch up — and in some cases surpass — the Magnificent Seven tech players that almost single-handedly lifted the entire market to its recent all-time highs, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis published Monday.

The Dog Days Are Over

Cracks already started to show earlier this year in the foundation of the seven-company bloc — Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Tesla — that once fueled the market rally, with Apple and Tesla in particular beginning to slip. But persistent optimism over a so-called soft-landing (despite the frequent optimism-tempering language of Fed Chair Jerome Powell) has lifted smaller players to fill the vacuum and continue a broader runup in equities.

The S&P 500 is up around 33% in the past year and closed last Thursday just a half-point shy of a record. Hope for taming inflation and looming rate cuts has helped lift companies of all stripes, especially what could be called Small or Mid Tech players:

• Tech stocks overall are up over 10% this year, according to WSJ analysis. The AI-hype train has trickled down to Super Micro Computers, up 300%, while Carvana, up 61%, can finally see an escape path from the stranglehold of high-interest rates.
• Meanwhile, the Russell 2000, which tracks the type of small-cap companies hit particularly hard by inflation and high borrowing costs, is up nearly 30% since an October fallow period.

“With inflation coming down and the Fed no longer fighting you, it’s just a better long-term case for risky assets,” Joseph Amato, chief investment officer at Neuberger Berman, told the WSJ.

In 1984, paranoid pop singer Rockwell sang “I always feel like somebody’s watching me.” Four decades later, short-term rental customers say they know the feeling.

In response to guests’ calls for privacy, vacation rental service Airbnb has banned the use of indoor cameras across its listings globally.

We Won’t Be Watching

Opening your home — or second home — to strangers, even paying ones, can be nerve-wracking for some hosts. But vacation travelers also don’t like the feeling that Big Brother is peeking over their shoulders while they read an Emily Henry novel.

Airbnb previously allowed hosts to install indoor security cameras in common areas like living rooms and hallways, but not in intimate spaces like bathrooms or bedrooms, as one visiting couple found in Brazil in 2022. And any cameras had to be clearly visible and disclosed to guests, so no secret nanny cams hidden inside teddy bears. 

But beginning April 30, there will be no exceptions: 

• In a blog post Monday, Airbnb didn’t specify how many hosts use indoor security but said the majority of listings don’t, so the new rule shouldn’t have a major impact on its host clientele.
• Airbnb also said that hosts now need to provide the general locations of outdoor cameras and decibel readers before guests book a reservation. Airbnb said the changes were made in collaboration with guests, hosts, and privacy experts.