Source: Wall Street News Author: Zhao Ying

Looking back on the year that is about to pass, every impactful business event left a special mark on 2023.

This year, “artificial intelligence” and “weight loss drugs” became popular all over the world, and some companies seized the opportunity to become big winners.$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$Reach the top of the “King of Chips”,$Novo-Nordisk A/S (NVO.US)$Become the “big brother of European stocks”.

At the same time, a new industrial era also began this year. Apple AR opened the door to the “space computing era”, SpaceX Starship test flights illuminated the future of commercial space, and a wave of industrialization of humanoid robots arrived.

Of course, there will also be some bloody and oolong incidents. OpenAI's “Gong Dou Dai” has been reversed many times, and room temperature superconductivity is deeply questionable.

Towards the end of the year, Wall Street News takes stock of the top ten most representative global business events in 2023:

1. The big AI model fights fiercely in various fields

In 2023, the world set off a boom in artificial intelligence, and tech giants launched a “thousand mode war,” a “big and small” model dispute, a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of open source and closed source, and a dispute over generic and industry routes... unfolded in this year.

The big overseas model can be described as a “fairy fight”. With the first-mover advantage, the performance of the GPT-4 OpenAI model was far ahead in the first half of the year; in the second half, the Google Gemini model, which claims to be the “strongest in history”, debuted, beating GPT-4 in some benchmarks; Meta chose to follow the “open source” route and release the open source model Llama 2.

Major domestic models are also engaged in intense scuffles.$Baidu (BIDU.US)$Wen Xin fired the first shot with one word, followed by Huawei Pangu, 360 Smart Brain, Ali Tongyi's Thousand Questions,$Iflytek Co.,ltd. (002230.SZ)$Starfire, Tencent mixed elements... big AI models have appeared one after another. A few days ago, the results of the country's first official “Big Model Standard Conformity Test” were announced. The first batch of four domestic big models, Baidu Wenxin, Tencent Hybrid Big Model, 360 Smart Brain, and Alibaba Cloud Tongyi Qianwen (open source), passed the tests.

While the “Big Model” is in full swing, the “Little Model” is opening up a new battleground. French startup Mistralai's Mixtral 8x7B model has performance comparable to GPT-3.5 and is small enough to run on a single computer.$Microsoft (MSFT.US)$It also showed the big trick of the small model, releasing Phi-2, a small language model with 2.7 billion parameters, which surpassed Google's Gemini Nano 2 in some benchmarks.

Open source and closed source routes are also in a game. In July, Meta released Llama 2, an open source AI model for free commercial applications, and the open source community platform Hugging Face provides a large number of high-quality open source models and tools to maximize the benefits of R&D results to the open source community

Looking forward to the future, from Sam Ultrman's Christmas wish list, the 2024 big model developments are notable: GPT-5, video, open source, and better GPTs/personalized deployment. These contents may bring about a qualitative shift in the AI development ecosystem, user experience, and product capabilities.

2. The century-old Credit Suisse takeover by “World Enemies” comes to an end

Beginning of year$SVB Financial (SIVBQ.US)$The collapse triggered a global panic. Credit Suisse, a financial giant with 167 years of history, was riddled with negative news for several years, and was annexed by rivals after a thunderstorm.

In mid-March, as the turbulence in the financial environment intensified, market unease worsened like a snowball. At this time of crisis, Credit Suisse blew up its financial flaws, and the majority shareholders “gave up”, triggering Credit Suisse's sharp decline.

At the critical moment, the Swiss government acted quickly and “pressed UBS” to acquire Credit Suisse. In this takeover where the bandit logic was brought to the extreme, shareholders were denied the right to decide. In order to calm shareholders' anger, the Swiss authorities also ignored the settlement order, and AT1 bonds were “cleared overnight.”

In fact, in recent years, Credit Suisse has been mired in a series of scandals and turmoil, including the collapse of funds, a sharp decline in performance, drug trafficking, money laundering, etc., and faltered in the midst of one crisis after another.

The “drama of executive infighting caused by a row of tree walls” is vividly clear. Credit Suisse's poor internal culture eventually turned the rift between executives into a seed of extinction.

At the UBS three-quarter report press conference, UBS CEO An Sijie also said that the crisis was not caused by insufficient capital and liquidity requirements; a sound risk management culture and effective corporate governance are even more important.

3. Two explosions of the SpaceX Starship illuminate the future of commercial space

Humans have never stopped chasing the sea of stars. In 2023, Musk's “Dream of Mars” took a new step. Although both “Starship” test flights ended in explosions, the “fireworks” that were blown up were exchanged for valuable measured data, and also illuminated commerce$Addsino Co.,Ltd. (000547.SZ)$prospects.

On April 20, local time, the Starship ignited and took off. Afterwards, the heavy booster and the Starship failed to separate and explode uncontrollably in the air. It continued for about 4 minutes from takeoff until the explosion.

On November 17, local time, the Starship ushered in a second launch. It successfully passed the Max Q moment in 52 seconds, completed thermal separation in 2 minutes and 41 seconds, and flew to the “Carmen Line” (into space). After a few key steps were passed, the accident still happened. After 10 minutes of lift-off, it lost connection, and eventually triggered the self-destruct system.

In contrast, during the second test flight, the first three minutes of flight were successfully completed. A few minutes before launch, all 33 raptor engines operated normally, and the entire system appeared to be very stable.

Carrying Musk's dream of immigrating to Mars, Starship research and development has progressed from explosions one after another in 2005 to the present. One major advantage of Starship is that the thrust reaches 5,400 tons to 7,500 tons, making it “the strongest thrust rocket in history”; another major advantage is that it is low cost. It uses stainless steel, which is cheaper and easier to obtain than traditional materials.

The Starship explosion was both a failure and a success. In the commercial rocket development process, there was no such thing as a “return to zero.” Test flight failure is not a “return to zero”; the iterative optimization of technology brought about by continuous explosions is essentially a huge breakthrough and progress.

Rockets continue to “explode” and learn from explosions time and time again. “Studying success by failure” is the true meaning of Musk's rocket construction. The venture capital mentality has been fully applied to the space sector. “If you can save, you can save”. The “roll over” competitor is probably Musk's understanding of aerospace.

The Starship test flight has also turned a new page in commercial space. In the midst of continuous failure, Musk is still continuing to move forward. Currently, the Starship's “Three Flies” static tests have been completed, so let's look forward to the results of the next test flight.

4. The launch of Apple's first AR opens the door to the “spatial computing era”

After seven years of sharpening the sword, Apple AR glasses were released, opening the door to the “spatial computing era” and reviving the popularity of the AR/VR market, which had been dormant for a long time.

On June 5, local time, Apple launched the AR glasses Apple Vision Pro at the WWDC conference with One More Thing after a long absence, marking Apple's official entry into the MR market.

Vision Pro brings a new way to interact, and users can operate it entirely with their eyes, voice, and hands.

What's even more amazing is that Vision Pro conceals a non-intrusive “brain-computer interface” to sense user emotions and predict user behavior by obtaining data from sensors.

Moreover, unlike Meta's idea of betting on virtual reality, Apple pursues the fusion of reality and virtual reality to explore the many possibilities of scene interaction.

It is worth mentioning that Vision Pro places special emphasis on real-life use scenarios such as gaming, communication, work, study, etc.

Overall, Apple defines Vision Pro as a spatial computing device that seamlessly integrates digital content into the real world. As Cook said, the iPhone brought us into the mobile computing era, and now this device will take us into the era of spatial computing.

However, at the same time, Apple AR has also been questioned, and analysts complained of being too expensive, poor in practicality, and limited in shipping. But that didn't prevent the experience from being amazing. Many people called “My opinion has completely changed”, “brought me to another world” and “experienced the future” after experiencing the real machine...

In fact, Apple has always been best at not pioneering the application of a new technology, but rather taking products to the extreme, leading changes in the industry and defining people's lifestyles.

Standing at the fusion point of virtual and reality, Vision Pro is probably just the beginning, and the future will usher in its “iPhone 4 moment.”

5. The AI boom swept the world, and Nvidia reached the top of the “King of Chips”

Nvidia, the “shovel seller” at the top of the AI wave, became the absolute winner this year: the market capitalization surpassed trillion US dollars, climbed to the top of the chip, the stock price soared by more than 240%, and the chip was robbed by domestic and foreign companies...

May 31 is a day worth remembering for Nvidia. With GPU computing power and the power of AI, Nvidia's market capitalization broke through trillion dollars and became the fifth US stock to enter the “trillion dollar club.”

Artificial intelligence has boosted Nvidia's stock price beyond imagination. Nvidia has become one of the hottest stocks today, and its stock price has soared 245% so far this year. The bears, on the other hand, lost a lot of money, and shorted Nvidia.

Nvidia GPU chips, on the other hand, have become “hard currency”. Thanks to their excellent performance, they have been robbed by major technology companies. Bulk purchases have to go through the back door, and orders are already scheduled for next year. Nvidia sold 816 tons of H100 chips in the second quarter of this year alone.

As the most popular AI hardware in 2023, it has been split up by major tech giants, and there are few opportunities for small companies. Currently, the number of A100 and H100 owned by an enterprise has become one of the important indicators of the industry's ability to judge the enterprise's big model.

Corresponsibly, the price of Nvidia chips has also soared. According to reports, a 200% increase in A100 and H100 is already the norm, and the A800, which is specially supplied to mainland China, also soared from 70,000 to 100,000 at one point.

The AI landscape is undecided, and Nvidia is one step ahead to reach the top of the “King of Chips”. Defeated in the third quarter of this year$Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM.US)$With Intel, it won the top of the chip industry's revenue for the first time.

However, in this AI war, Intel, AMD, etc. are also launching AI chips one after another, hoping to get a share of the computing power market.

However, Nvidia has not stopped. Taking advantage of its leading time window, while launching the H200, an AI chip with more powerful performance, while “wild investing” in AI unicorns, it participated in 35 transactions in 2023, hoping to use “money+GPU” to form the strongest AI ecosystem alliance.

Looking ahead, Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh says Nvidia's advantage is “dominant”, and AI revenue will reach 300 billion US dollars in the next five years.

6. Room temperature superconductivity is deeply questionable, false and real after a few reversals

“Room temperature superconductivity” is deeply questionable. With the publication of a paper on “room temperature superconductivity,” it quickly attracted widespread global attention. Not only did it cause an uproar in the scientific community, but it also sparked heated discussions on the internet, and even caused agitation in the capital market. However, in the end, it seemed that “the wolf is here.”

On July 22, a research team from South Korea published a research article entitled “The First Room-Temperature Ambient Pressure Superconductor”, stating that the material named “LK-99” can achieve room temperature superconductivity. As soon as the news came out, the room temperature superconductivity blew up the network, and the technology team began scrambling for many seconds to replicate the test.

Although there is still no conclusion, the capital market is beginning to surge, and US stocks and A-share concept stocks first skyrocketed. US stocks$American Superconductor (AMSC.US)$The day closed up 60% on August 1, and the A-share superconducting sector collectively surged the next day.

Over the next few days, the results of the replication experiments were mixed. Coupled with flaws in the paper revealed, they overshadowed LK-99. US superconductivity plummeted 30% on August 2, and A-share superconducting concept stocks, which had previously risen and stopped, were also “refuting rumors” that had nothing to do with superconductivity.

Then, on August 3, LK-99 was counterfeited by the South Korean government. It is not a room temperature superconductor. The so-called “fourth industrial revolution” came to an end within just a few days.

The incident did not come to an end. On August 4, the Korean team released the second LK-99 levitation video. Meanwhile, new papers from Huatech University and Indian physicists are all optimistic about the future potential of LK-99.

The disputed LK-99 was reversed again, and room temperature superconductivity is suspected to be punishable by death. On August 8, researchers from Peking University and the National University of Science and Technology published a paper stating that LK-99 showed a ferromagnetic semi-suspension phenomenon and was not superconductive.

Now it seems like the room temperature superconductivity revolution will have to wait any longer.

7. “Weight loss elixir” is popular all over the world, Novo Nordisk becomes the biggest European stock company

Today, the “magic drug for weight loss” simeglutide has become a boon for weight loss seekers. Not only can it lose fat, but it can also “get rid of the disease in one shot”. Demand is extremely hot and has been robbed by countless people. As a result, Novo Nordisk's market value surpassed LVMH and became the “big brother” of European stocks, and its huge market potential has detonated the GLP-1 diet drug race.

Simeglutide, a “hypoglycemic drug” originally used in adults with type 2 diabetes, became a “weight loss elixir” this year. Among them, GLP-1 receptor agonists can promote insulin secretion, reduce appetite, and achieve the effects of blood sugar control and weight loss.

Over the past year, Novo Nordisk Ozempic and sister drug Wegovy have been making a big splash in Hollywood. Musk claims Wegovy helped him lose 20 pounds, and even has a song on TikTok dedicated to the drug.

Due to strong demand for GLP-1 drugs, pharmaceutical companies experienced supply pressure, and Novo Nordisk spent 6 billion US dollars to expand production capacity.

At the same time, a number of experimental studies have proven that GLP-1 can handle more than ten conditions such as diabetes, obesity, kidney disease, dementia, Parkinson's, sleep apnea, NASH (non-alcoholic steatohepatitis), psoriasis, and alcohol addiction, and the outside world has promoted it as a “panacea.”

The world-famous “weight loss elixir” also shook the capital market. Danish pharmaceutical company Novo & Nord, which was in the limelight in early September, surpassed French luxury goods giant LVMH in market capitalization, and became the listed company with the highest market capitalization in Europe, even surpassing Denmark's one-year GDP.

The US consumer sector shivered. Essential consumer goods experienced “record shorting,” and snack and beer stocks plummeted for a while.

Furthermore, the “magic drug for weight loss” detonated the GLP-1 diet drug circuit, and domestic pharmaceutical companies scrambled to take the lead.$Eli Lilly and Co (LLY.US)$The tiverpotide was approved by the US FDA in November, in several countries$UNITED LAB (03933.HK)$, Minwei Biotech's three-target drug has entered the clinical stage.

As diet pills continue to be popular, Goldman Sachs predicted that the global anti-obesity drug market will reach 100 billion US dollars by 2030. Earlier, the market size was estimated to be about 6 billion US dollars this year, which means it will grow 16 times within six years.

8. ARM became the world's largest IPO this year, holding tech giants' necks “happy and worried”

The US stock IPO market has experienced a long cold winter. It ushered in the world's largest IPO in September of this year. Chip giant ARM took the AI Dongfeng to land on the NASDAQ. Although it stuck in the neck of a global tech giant, there were both joys and worries behind it. Can the hegemon of the mobile era continue the myth in the AI era?

On the first day of the Arm IPO on September 15, it opened up 10%. At one point, it rose more than 30% during the intraday period, and the market capitalization exceeded 65 billion US dollars. Arm's major customers — including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Google — are all cornerstone investors in this IPO. Arm's successful listing and first-day surge is expected to inspire dozens of tech startups and other companies' IPOs, as well as to recover Sun Zhengyi's recent loss of face due to investment failures.

As a leader in chip design, Arm is almost stuck in the “neck” of global technology giants. The Arm architecture is the most widely used CPU architecture in the world. So far, it has nurtured hundreds of billion chips, covering more than 99% of the global smartphone market.

But there are joys and worries behind this. Arm has architectural hegemony but can't make much money. Most of Arm's revenue comes from royalties and does not provide hardware, which also brings Arm a gross profit margin of up to 96%. In comparison, Nvidia's gross margin in the most recent quarter was 70%, while Intel's and AMD's gross margins were 36% and 46%, respectively.

However, although royalties can bring a continuous revenue stream to Arm, most ARM architecture products are MCUs (microcontrollers), which are very cheap; on the other hand, Arm draws from chip prices rather than charging for terminal products, so the revenue generated is not high. Arm cannot make much money, and AI is insufficient.

The first quarterly report since listing showed a red light. Arm's fourth quarter guidance fell short of expectations. At one point, it fell more than 8% after the market. Some analysts have doubts about the sustainability of Arm's growth, but at present, Arm's stock price is growing steadily.

9. OpenAI's “Gong Dou Dai” continues to reverse Altman from “exile” to “return of the king”

On the first anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI staged a “palace fight drama,” and CEO Altman walked from exile to the return of the king.

A series of exciting stories happened in just five days: Altman's sudden ouster, three CEOs changed in three days, a collective mutiny of all employees, behind-the-scenes deals and threats of lawsuits, “forced palace” failure, and the coup's “anti-water”... The multiple power struggles and power struggles were dazzling. The situation was reversed, reversed and then reversed, and was no less exciting than “Game of Thrones.”

On November 17, Altman was suddenly ousted, and OpenAI director Ilya Sutskever joined with three other directors to throw Altman out of the game. The management was shocked, and many executives followed Altman and left office.

In just 24 hours, the “palace fight drama” situation was reversed. Microsoft, the majority shareholder, was “angry”. Investors pressured them to welcome back Altman, and Altman returned to negotiations as a guest.

After the initial negotiations failed, OpenAI insiders were at ease, and almost all employees signed a joint letter threatening to leave their jobs unless the board of directors resigned and Altman and others returned.

Altman, on his side, had high morale and ushered in a second round of negotiations with the board of directors. In the end, “Gong Dou Dae” had its grand finale, the board of directors was “reshuffled,” and Sam Altman returned as CEO.

However, the deep-seated conflict in this “palace fight drama” is not only a dispute between “conscientious scientists” and “radical entrepreneurs,” but also an insistence on and questioning effective altruism. When idealism is hit hard by reality, profit expansion and not-for-profit visions end up in a dilemma.

10.$Tesla (TSLA.US)$Optimus continues to evolve, and the wave of industrialization of humanoid robots has arrived

Since this year, Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus has evolved rapidly, and the Optimus Gen2 has made significant progress in terms of weight and flexibility. At the same time, the wave of industrialization of humanoid robots is rolling in, and Xiaopeng and Xiaomi have gone to R&D one after another, Open AI,$Amazon (AMZN.US)$, and Tencent have all approved investment plans.

On September 24, the official account of Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus released a video. Optimus Prime has once again evolved to be able to classify objects and complete simple yoga movements using only vision. Its neural network has completed end-to-end training — video input and output control.

On December 13, Tesla Optimus Gen 2 was unveiled. Compared to the first generation, the upgraded second generation seems to have improved significantly in weight, flexibility, body balance and handling. It runs faster, weighs less, and can easily hold eggs. Analysts say that with the current pace of iteration, Optimus may soon be able to replace labor in many fields.

As industrialization and commercial applications accelerated, tech giant startups jumped into the market. Xiaopeng's self-developed humanoid robot “PX5” achieved high stable walking ability, and OpenAI led the investment in Norwegian humanoid robot company 1x.

The analysis points out that as the aging of the population deepens and the labor population declines, machines will replace human labor will become a long-term development trend in the future. According to Great Wall Securities, humanoid robots are expected to become a 100 billion dollar blue ocean market. It is estimated that under a neutral assumption, the global humanoid robot manufacturing and home service market will be 110.3 billion US dollars in 2035.

edit/lambor