Tesla pulls out a humanoid 🤖

IPO updates, China's laws, and FB's mess.

Aug 23, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

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What’s brewing hot ☕

✅ No lessons learnt — Facebook won’t stop screwing up. Last week, the company released a report on viral content shared on its Blue platform, countering allegations that FB is a cesspool of political-misinformation. Well, The New York Times found some emails that suggest FB executives apparently shared only April to June data, while withholding data from Jan to March, because vaccine inefficacy and misinformation was actually the most widely shared and debated topic then. Changes nothing, but fortifies the belief that nothing from the company can be “trusted” even as Zuck desperately tries to turn a corner into a “Metaverse” future.

✅ You had one job — the finance ministry is demanding that the CEO of Infosys show up personally and explain why INFY designed Income-Tax Portal continues to perform poorly. The portal, meant to symbolize the broad digitization of government services, has been unavailable for 2 days now, has been repeatedly crashing and underperforming since its launch 2 months ago. Meanwhile, INFY has so far taken ₹165 crores+ in payments for the contract.

Explain Yourself Giancarlo Esposito GIF by Breaking Bad

“Tesla bot, bring me some coffee…” 🤖

Musk threw off even the wildest of fans at Tesla’s annual AI day — announcing that Tesla is working on an humanoid bot, meant to help human beings at boring and repetitive tasks, to be built on Tesla’s smart car foundation.

The Wall Street Journal @WSJ

“It’s intended to be friendly.” Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot he said the company plans to build, drawing on some of the technology used for its vehicles #AIDay #WSJWhatsNews

Now Musk is a genius marketer, and the timing of a “bolder future” just as other promises from the past like the Cybertruck, or the Tesla Semi get delayed, while regulators open an investigation into Tesla’s auto-pilot crashes, isn’t really a coincidence…

Anyway, what do we know right now?

Designed to be overpowered and subservient to humans
5 feet 8 inches, 125 pounds heavy, and will be called Optimus
Trained for tasks that are repetitive, boring, and unsafe, but unclear if domestic or industrial

What next — Prototype is promised to come out “sometime next year”, but much like Google, Tesla is a graveyard for bold ideas that are pitched to pump fan-enthusiasm but never see fruition, like Solar SuperChargers, Charging robots, etc. So...

Big picture — the company that makes robotic vehicles is now making bots for other tasks should hardly surprise you. Explains why the markets are valuing $TSLA like a software company at nearly 20 times revenue.

Footwear retailer Metro Brands, which owns 200+ locations mostly across Indian Tier II cities, will try to raise ₹250 crores from the markets. The 50+ year old business made about ₹800 crores in sales last year (down 38% because of COVID), and is backed by Rakesh JhunJhunwala. Metro plans on using fresh capital to double its store footprint.

Meanwhile, the Adani camp will have to wait before floating any more companies. IPO of their FMCG business Adani Wilmar, is apparently being put on hold by SEBI until all previous allegations of manipulation are resolved. Ouch 🤷‍♀️

Onwards...

Quick look at China’s privacy law 👀

What happened — China introduced a comprehensive new privacy law, laying the groundwork to nail its tech companies on mishandling of users’ personal data, as part of its ongoing crusade to tame its tech giants.

What does it mean — in standard legalese, the law demands app creators provide users a range of options to offer data sharing consents, and be clearly upfront about how the data will be used, including targeting for advertising. Ruling goes into effect from Nov 1.

Casual apps at the bottom of the pile (gaming, productivity, and other basic tools) which monetize essentially via clickbait ads will likely be hit the worst.

Bottomline — the Chinese surveillance engine basically wants to ensure 1. its aware of what data is being mined 2. what’s the risk of that data falling in the hands of western governments. Beyond that, we doubt there’s much love for “consumer protection”!

Otherwise a super sleepy news day folks! We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

🔌 EVs aren’t easy - General Motors is recalling its Bolt electric vehicles for the third time due to possible battery cell defects that could lead to fires.

📈 Consulting IPO - global consulting giant ThoughtWorks, which has a massive presence in India, filed for a $4.5 billion IPO on the Nasdaq, trying to ride the post-COVID cloud digitization boom