TheChek News Flow

The billionaire co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI, Andy Konwinski, is singularly focused on plugging the years-long drain of talent from academia to Big Tech.

He wants to encourage academics to focus on publishing more openly available research, a reaction to the move by frontier AI companies to reduce the amount of AI research they publish as they race against one another to develop the best models and AI tools.

While Google, in particular, has long been known for its research publishing, a 2026 Stanford report noted that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google no longer disclose details about the software used to train their AI models, how much computing power they used, and the size of their training datasets — crucial points that could help researchers replicate the companies’ successes.

“There are many reasons—like fundamental, societal-level, defend-democracy reasons—that open research needs to survive,” Konwinski told me at the Association for Computing Machinery’s AI conference in San Jose. He pointed to a well-known Google research paper from 2017 that would later become the basis of today’s most popular AI models and chatbots.

Now, he said, there is an “aging generation of luminaries” that aren’t publishing research externally or sticking around in academia to “train up their replacement,” meaning there could be a future scarcity of AI talent, just as artificial intelligence technologies become more complex and crucial to national security.

Konwinski in June 2025 co-founded Laude Institute, a kind of Y Combinator for academic and research types with big ideas for breakthroughs in AI research. Laude Institute, which Konwinski put $100 million into, currently funds about 70 projects through grants of up to $10 million. One such project was Terminal-Bench, a collection of AI benchmarking tools created by researchers from Stanford and Laude Institute that’s become an industry standard for evaluating AI coding tools.

Another is Stanford’s Marin project, which is focused on coming up with more efficient, predictable ways to pre-train open source models that perform on par with frontier ones at a fraction of the cost by requiring fewer AI chips or fewer “runs” or rounds of training.

Konwinski said he chats with about one dozen PhD students every month from the top 20 universities in North America, with a particular focus on Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. His pitch to them: Stay in academia as a PhD student, even if that means making less than $100,000 annually for a few years, rather than accepting a $1 million to $3 million compensation package from a tech firm. If they do that, and publish openly, Laude will fund their research so they can share technology breakthroughs with the world. Eventually, you’ll get offers for tens of millions of dollars from the same companies, he tells them.

“I can get you [researchers] to fifty million. I can get you to a hundred million,” he said. “The value you have is in your ability to make the breakthrough.”

Konwinski said he’s fighting an uphill battle as AI talent wars send compensation packages through the roof: “The trade-off‘s just getting so much harder ’cause people are having to say no to salaries that are unprecedented.”

Academia also has problems getting adequate resources to produce AI models. Universities used to need up to a $10 million budget for large AI research projects but the cost has soared to around $100 million in some cases, given the expenses linked to costly AI chips, Konwinski said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, for instance, thinks universities need $1 billion budgets for AI chips—an issue that Stanford visiting professor Anjney Midha grilled him about during a recorded class lecture last month.

“We are dying out here,” said Midha, referencing the university’s crimped ability to purchase Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units.

“You don’t have the budget for $1 billion compute,” Huang responded. “You have to find a way to change the way you do budgeting, he said.

Meanwhile, Konwinski is doing what he can to encourage open research despite the challenges. Laude Institute is beginning to accept pledges from other technologists and said it has a commitment from Berkeley professor and Google distinguished engineer Dave Patterson.

He said open research “needs a heavyweight champion in the ring.”

“We're fostering this ecosystem of open research so that I can put forward a heavyweight contender in the arena with the closed labs, the closed models, the closed techniques.”

The report cites an unnamed person familiar with the matter as revealing that Point72 rose 2% in May, bringing year-to-date gains to approximately 10.5%. The result follows a 17.5% return in 2025, during which the firm outperformed several of its closest peers in the multi-strategy hedge fund space, including Millennium Management and Citadel.

Broader industry performance was also positive but more uneven. Millennium Management posted a 2.4% gain for May, lifting its 2026 returns to 6.1%, while Balyasny Asset Management moved into positive territory for the year after a 1.4% monthly gain.

Despite solid results among hedge funds, returns lagged behind broader equity markets, which rallied strongly on continued investor enthusiasm for technology and artificial intelligence-linked stocks. The S&P 500 rose 11% in May, following a gain of more than 5% in the month alone.

Not all managers posted gains. Walleye Capital and North Rock Partners recorded modest losses of 0.9% and 0.2% respectively over the month.

The performance snapshot highlights ongoing dispersion across the hedge fund industry, with multi-strategy platforms continuing to compete closely while navigating a market environment heavily influenced by equity momentum and sector concentration.

Projections by Wall Street bank underpin the $1.78tn valuation group is pitching in IPO

SpaceX’s pitch to achieve a $1.78tn valuation in its initial public offering hinges on revenues at its AI unit surging by around 100 times by 2030, according to projections made by its lead investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Goldman expects revenues from SpaceX’s AI division to rise to $322bn by 2030 from $3.2bn in 2025, according to forecasts discussed by the Wall Street bank with a potential investor in the deal. SpaceX’s total revenue is expected to reach $474bn in 2030 from $18.7bn last year.

The bank’s lofty projections underscore the aggressive bets underpinning the AI investment boom by Big Tech firms that has propelled the US stock market to a series of record highs. Goldman’s model was verbally shared with the investor as SpaceX kicks off its IPO roadshow, in which bankers will seek to sell money managers on a deal that could raise up to $86bn.

The valuation of Elon Musk’s rockets-to-chatbot group rests on an assumption that its AI division xAI — which made a loss of $6.4bn in 2025 — has a total addressable market of $26.5tn, SpaceX’s IPO prospectus shows. That dwarfs the roughly $2tn total addressable market outlined for the group’s Starlink internet service and space operations.

Goldman’s projections show that the Wall Street bank expects revenues at SpaceX’s AI segment to rise 388 per cent to $15.6bn in 2026 compared with the year prior and reach $34.5bn in 2027. The estimates were confirmed by a person familiar with the matter.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. Goldman declined to comment.

Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Commodity trader’s net profit more than doubles to $4.1bn for October to March period

Commodities trader Trafigura has warned that global energy markets are at an “inflection point” that could send prices sharply higher as it reported near-record first-half profits boosted by the war in the Middle East.

The group’s net profit for the six months to March 31 climbed to $4.1bn, more than double the same period last year — and the second highest in its history, just below the $5.5bn made in the first half of 2023 in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Trafigura’s results are an early indication of how the trading houses that move raw materials around the world are expecting bonanza profits from the Iran war, which has largely shut the Strait of Hormuz since late February, disrupting the flow of as much as a fifth of the world’s oil.

While the privately held group’s profits announced on Thursday capture only the first month of the war, trading houses typically benefit from periods of disruption and volatility as they profit from dislocations in the prices of commodities between different geographic locations.

Trafigura and rivals such as Vitol, Mercuria and Gunvor all reported record profits during 2022 and 2023 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine roiled energy markets.

Oil prices surged in the early days of the Iran war but since then prices have broadly been lower than many traders first anticipated, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, falling back below $100 a barrel.

Trafigura warned markets against complacency, with chief economist Saad Rahim arguing that the world had largely run through its “buffers” of fuel inventories and now stood “at an inflection point”.

The war in the Middle East has caused a production loss of about 14mn barrels per day, compared with pre-conflict levels, according to Rahim, who added that the price response did not reflect the magnitude of the energy crisis.

“The factors that have contained prices so far — elevated inventories, floating cargoes, co-ordinated SPR [strategic petroleum reserve] releases, a shoulder season, and demand destruction across Asia and Africa — have bought the market time, but are not a solution,” Rahim wrote in the report.

He pointed to low US petrol inventories as a particular concern, noting that these inventories are being drawn down at a record pace.

Even if a peace deal between the Trump administration and Tehran was reached soon, “restoring production and shipping flows to pre-conflict levels will, by most estimates, take months, not weeks”, Rahim added.

Trafigura chief executive Richard Holtum echoed Rahim’s view, saying “the pressures that have built up across commodity markets and global supply chains in recent months will take time to unwind”.

Trafigura, whose financial year runs until the end of September, said that during its first-half period its traders moved record volumes of oil and gas, equivalent to 8.7mn b/d, up 21 per cent from the same period a year prior.

The company’s involvement in Venezuela, where the US removed leader Nicolás Maduro in January, also contributed to its increased oil volumes, accounting for about 300,000 b/d.

Chief financial officer Stephan Jansma said the company had a particularly strong first quarter (ending December 31), its second-most profitable first quarter ever. Trafigura’s metals division benefited from the copper tariffs in place in the US, and its refineries reported unusually strong results in the quarter, the company said.

“A substantial portion of the period’s profits had already been secured before the conflict in the Middle East began at the end of February 2026,” Jansma wrote.