Stripe did $1.4 trillion payments volume in 2024 – it is worth reading their annual letter.
Topics include AI Economy (their data shows top 100 AI firms reach $5m ARR in 24 months vs. 37 months for their top SaaS firms in 2018), vertical SaaS, stablecoins, Europe.
Want a guide to what happened in the world of ecommerce in 2024? Read here.
The most fascinating development continues to be a move from made in China, to sold by China to now, with the rise of Temu and Shein, promoted by China.
Retail media has taken over from traditional TV in terms of advertising dollars.
“OpenAI’s new o3 system – trained on the ARC-AGI-1 Public Training set – has scored a breakthrough 75.7% on the Semi-Private Evaluation set at our stated public leaderboard $10k compute limit. A high-compute (172x) o3 configuration scored 87.5%.“
“This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models. For context, ARC-AGI-1 took 4 years to go from 0% with GPT-3 in 2020 to 5% in 2024 with GPT-4o. All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3.“
The transformation of technology to the -as-a-service model has led to many positives, yet it has led to a situation where users don’t own anything.
This creates vulnerabilities – “years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.”
“If the current trend of technology is sweeping us in a direction of “everything is amazing, but nothing is ours”, Technology that’s Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend.“
The semiconductor manufacturing company’s $65bn foray into the Arizona desert is a meeting of cultures, technologies, education, politics, and geopolitics.
Through interviews with dozens of employees, this article addresses the still open question – will it succeed?
