Elon Musk believed in the coming of AGI, and Bitcoin soared by 44%
Development of the situation with Kiwi
The news from the fields of disintegration of Qiwi Bank continues. DIA published statistics on money stuck in electronic wallets: there are currently a little more than 9 million of these wallets, and the volume of funds blocked there is 4.4 billion rubles. It turns out that the average wallet contained approximately 500 rubles.
However, it will not come to payments on wallets soon (if at all) – first you have to wait until they settle accounts with bank account holders. Between February 29 and March 1, DIA has already managed pay almost 900 million rubles. to depositors within the insurance limit of 1.4 million rubles. per person.
Well, “per person” is a bit arbitrary, because… ordinary individuals were practically not served at Qiwi Bank: small businesses (individual entrepreneurs/LLCs) mainly held current accounts there. In particular, the bank for entrepreneurs Tochka offered its clients to open accounts in Qiwi in cases where they needed to make payments in foreign currency to other countries.
The guys from Tochka eventually took a powerful step: they voluntarily have taken undertakes to fully reimburse money “from its own” to all its clients who have something frozen in their Qiwi accounts in excess of the insurance limit of 1.4 million rubles. – and this is a total of approximately 8 billion rubles.
It is clear that Tochka hopes to reimburse this money later during the liquidation of Qiwi – but this is not guaranteed, and it is not a fact that it will definitely happen. And if it does happen, it will probably not happen soon (and entrepreneurs need frozen money now). In short, I’ve been a client of Tochka for over a year now, and even though the situation with Qiwi didn’t affect me, I still respect them for their approach.
Meanwhile, the “Qiwi Bank case” started checking FSB, and the holding itself started softly hint that as part of the previously announced deal to buy out the business by its CEO through a Hong Kong company, it is quite likely that no payment can be expected.
And the Central Bank is happy not to remove the banhammer, following the revocation of the Qiwi license decided at the same time, remove the completely unknown bank “Hephaestus” from the city of Kimry.
Skillbox uncontrollably vomited to the stock exchange
They writethat the EdTech company Skillbox is going to conduct an IPO this year and go public. I sympathize with all of us: not only have we been listening to advertisements for this company from all YouTube bloggers for the last couple of years, but now we will also have to read it simultaneously in all investment channels in the country…
By the way, last week I posted the results of a large survey of IT specialists, which included a block with reviews of courses on “getting into IT.” So, Skillbox is mentioned there more than anyone else. But, as they say, there is a nuance!
Self-prohibition on obtaining loans
Accepted a law that allows Russians, through State Services, to establish a ban on issuing consumer loans to themselves – it will take effect in March 2025 (although the State Services/MFCs themselves may not have time to finalize it by this time). All this is done to prevent scammers from insidiously gaining loans on you without your knowledge.
Film “Pay in 10 seconds”
In Russia, SBP (Fast Payment System) has been in effect since 2021. The European Union has been envious all this time, and now they implement its system of instant payments via IBAN within 10 seconds between any eurozone countries.
Diabetes drug maker just got too fat
If you think that the Russian stock market is too dependent on a handful of oil companies, and the American market on the five tech giants, then here's a Fun Fact: 70% of the capitalization of the Danish stock market is accounted for by exactly one company – the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk. In general, this is the most expensive pharmaceutical company in Europe, and their market cap even exceeds the country’s annual GDP!
Yablokar didn't go
For 10 years, Apple tried to fix an electric car, but they couldn’t. Project closed, 2,000 employees from the relevant department were transferred to the artificial intelligence manufacturing front. We'll find out what they come up with in 10 years!
Elon Musk discovered AGI (and immediately sued him)
Elon Musk is suing with OpenAI (along with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman) for betraying the bright ideals of a non-profit organization. At the dawn of the creation of OpenAI, they all entered into an unbreakable agreement that the company would always cut open-source code and would never do anything commercial – and Altman eventually cynically and capitalistly “lay down” under Microsoft. Well, after taking the initial millions of dollars from Musk and then kicking him out of OpenAI.
There is indeed a small snag in this logic: the very agreement that Musk is talking about does not exist in nature. Elon simply screenshotted parts of his email correspondence with Altman and stitched together a mythical “agreement” from it. U – convenience!
A separate cake is what Elon says in his lawsuit calls GPT-4 is the elusive artificial general intelligence (AGI). They say there is no point in arguing about the extent to which people can create such a thing – Skynet is practically among us already! In short, let’s just say that there are certain doubts about the prospects of Musk’s lawsuit…
And in other OpenAI news, remember when the NY Times filed a lawsuit against them alleging that ChatGPT was maliciously passing on their paid articles to users for free? So, guys from OpenAI prepared official response: they claim that journalists specifically tried to hack the chatbot with a DDoS attack from 10 thousand requests – in order to cherry-pick the most “successful” screenshots for the lawsuit from randomly dropped pieces of articles. But in fact, it is very, very difficult for an individual ordinary user to achieve reliable reproduction of an article.
In short, it’s hard to be a startup with a valuation of $80 billion – literally everyone you meet is trying to get to the bottom of you in court for any reason!
You love longreads, right? In short, I embedded another longread into this longread
Igor Kotenkov released a hefty (and wildly interesting) article about the neural network for generating OpenAI SORA videos as a world simulator. That's it, the news ends here – just go and read it (it's worth it!).
BITCOIN BITCOIN BITCOIN
In February, Bitcoin shot up by 44% and is now hovering at $61-62k per share. By the way, almost exactly a year ago (when I wrote an article about stablecoins in March 2023 wrotethat buying BTC is probably not such a bad idea) it cost $25k.
Perhaps the crypto-native madness of last week would have continued further, but at some point on the large American exchange Coinbase something it broke, and users began to see zero balances on their wallets instead of their growing crypto. Well, here, on the spectacled bench press of the cryptans, Bitcoin began to correct itself back.
Meanwhile, recently launched Bitcoin ETFs have already accumulated there are over 300 thousand coins on the balance sheet (more than $18 billion). The record price of BTC ($67.5k – November 8, 2021) remains to grow by about 9%.
Good news of the week
Drea de Mattea – star of the series The Sopranos (passion of Chris Moltisante, well!) – started OnlyFans account and in the first five minutes I solved all my financial problems. And this is good!
More financial news and original analytics in my Telegram channel RationalAnswer.
