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👋 Hi friends,
Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a newsletter containing my recent Bloomberg stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
Image of the week, above: Hong Kong Harbor (1843), by Lt. Humphrey John Julian
✍️ I’m behind in sharing some of my recent work!
First, I’m proud of this investigation with my excellent colleagues Yazhou Sun and Mark Bergen, out a few weeks back: How an ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ Brought the First Big Bust to AI Boom 🎁 <– Gift link
It begins:
When the world’s elite gathered in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2024, Sachin Dev Duggal reveled in his role as the founder of a bona fide artificial intelligence unicorn. His startup, Builder.ai, sponsored glitzy events with celebrities and magazine editors. The BBC featured him on air as an expert in the buzzy technology. Builder.ai’s “Chief Wizard,” as Duggal called himself, told another interviewer at Davos that generative AI is “the cape that you make people superheroes with.”
Whatever magic Duggal once conjured is now gone. A year after his Davos appearance, he was pushed out as chief executive as investors began to suspect him of inflating revenue and mismanaging funds. The startup’s board later restated sales and a major lender seized virtually all of its cash, forcing the company into bankruptcy in June.
Click the link for more.
(Related: Long-time NN readers may recall that I wrote about the company, then called Engineer.ai, for the WSJ back in 2019. And I’ve mentioned our earlier Bloomberg stories from the past few months in previous dispatches.)
🍎 Meanwhile, on a far different topic, my latest, out Friday: Apple Claims Ex-Employee, China’s Oppo Stole Trade Secrets <– 🎁 Gift link
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 👉 A powerful Reuters story from my former WSJ colleague Jeff Horwitz: “Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home.”
2) 📚 Here’s a profile of novelist R. F. Kuang by Hua Hsu in the New Yorker.
3) 🧠 TIL: Rick Perry is an ibogaine advocate.
4) 🇧🇴 Socialist rule is coming to an end in Bolivia. 🎁 <– Gift link
5) 📰 The Onion has more than 53,000 print subscribers and is aiming for profitability next year.
6) 🎥 Netflix trailer of the week: “Ballad of a Small Player,” in which Colin Farrell plays a struggling gambler in Macau. Based on the Lawrence Osborne novel.
7) 🎂 Discover newspaper headlines from the day you were born.
8) 📖 What I’m reading: I loved Valerie Bauerlein’s phenomenal true crime work, “The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty.” (I wrote more about the book on LinkedIn here.)
9) 📕 What I’m reading, continued: I’m nearly finished with my Bloomberg colleague Parmy Olson’s “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World.” If you want to learn more about the minds and companies behind this emerging, much-touted tech, start here.
10) 🐶 Dog video of the week: “He really knows how to help.”
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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of pups who just wanna pitch in to help sound the alarm.
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley