Over the past week, the tech world has been closely watching the quarterly results of industry giants such as Tesla, Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft. On April 23, Tesla revealed lower than expected Wall Street results in terms of EPS, with a decline of 11.11%, despite an almost 20% rise in shares at the end of the week, thanks to the announcement of the production of a new affordable electric vehicle model. The following day, Meta announced a 27% annual increase in revenues for the first quarter, forecasting capital expenditures of between 35 and 40 billion dollars in 2024, to support investments in infrastructure for the company’s artificial intelligence strategy. However, increased expenses and slower than expected sales growth led to a 14.74% decline in shares on the morning of April 26. Alphabet exceeded analysts’ expectations on April 25, with sales of 67.6 billion dollars and net income of 1.89 dollars per share, also announcing its first dividend and a 70 billion dollar share repurchase. Microsoft reported a 17% increase in annual revenue and a 20% growth in both operating income and diluted earnings per share, with Azure cloud revenues increasing by 31%, with 7% attributed to AI contributions
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Bitcoin price stability after the ‘halving’
The price of Bitcoin remained stable in the first week after the ‘halving’ that took place on April 19, which reduced the reward rate from 6.25 to 3.125 Bitcoin. Despite a promising start to the week, the price showed a slight decline, influenced by a number of factors including weak business performance, geopolitical tensions and global macroeconomic conditions. Bitcoin ETFs recorded record outflows, with the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund and BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust
showing significant contractions.
New generative AI tools from Amazon
Amazon has launched new tools and updates for Amazon Bedrock, part of Amazon Web Services, aimed at building more robust and secure artificial intelligence applications. Among the new features, the ability to import customized AI models and the launch of Amazon Titan models, designed for diversified AI tasks, which improve performance and versatility. In addition, Amazon introduced the Titan image generator and announced new tools for creating text embeddings, in addition to implementing Guardrails, security measures against malicious content
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New Tesla investigation
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched a new investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system, following concerns about its effectiveness after the last software update. This intervention comes shortly after the release of Tesla’s first-quarter financial results and raises questions about the security of software changes, which can be easily deactivated by users.
Stablecoin Legislation
A stablecoin bill could soon move to the United States House of Representatives, with the hope that it could be approved before the elections. This legislation, which requires stablecoins to be fully backed by reserves and prohibits algorithmic ones, could be combined with the SAFER Banking Act to increase
their chances of passage.