TheChek News Flow

The fair generated $50.7 million in Media Impact Value, with China, the U.S. and Switzerland being top-performing regions.

The 2024 edition of Watches and Wonders, held between April 9 and 15 in Geneva, generated $50.7 million in Media Impact Value, according to the latest data analysis from Launchmetrics.

Rolex, Cartier, and IWC Schaffhausen were the biggest winners when measured by the Media Impact Value generated during the timepiece fair, raking in $10.2 million, $5.9 million, and $5.2 million in MIV, respectively. They were followed by Piaget, Tag Heuer, Tudor, Patek Philippe, Charriol, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Hublot.

Regarding MIV generated through the brand’s own media channel, Rolex, Tudor, Hublot, IWC Schaffhausen and Chanel were the top performers.

Veteran model Gisele Bündchen, an IWC Schaffhausen ambassador since 2022; Singaporean actor Desmond Tan; tennis player Garbiñe Muguruza, who attended the fair with Rolex, and “Dubai Bling” star Jwana Karim were among the top celebrity MIV generators. Other major stars who visited the fair included Kylian Mbappé, Apo, Lee Jun-ho, and Jackson Yee.

Under the influencer bracket, Mike Nouveau, Teddy Baldassarre, Roberta Naas, and Derek Mon stood out. A top placement came from an Instagram Reels video posted by Naas about the latest Van Cleef & Arpels Lady Arpels Brise D’Été watch, gaining more than 816,000 likes and generating $335,000 in MIV.

Looking at contribution by region, China contributed 20 percent of the total Media Impact Value, $10 million, during Watches and Wonders. It represented an 18 percent increase in placements since 2023. China was followed by the U.S. and Switzerland.

A key takeaway picked up by Launchmetrics at this year’s Watches and Wonders is that the presence of the media voice is gaining momentum.

“Leveraging the media voice helps amplify brand narratives and positions Watches and Wonders as a focal point in global industry conversations,” said Launchmetrics.

Media Impact Value is a proprietary algorithm created by Launchmetrics to measure and benchmark the impact of all media placements and mentions across owned media, partners, influencers, celebrities, and media in the fashion, luxury, and beauty industries.

Ex-DeepMind and Meta AI Researcher Raises Nearly $50 Million To Help Developers With LLMs’ Secret Sauce

For all that’s leaked about the sizes and architectures of the advanced large language models developed by OpenAI and its ilk, we still don’t know what data they were trained on.

A pessimist might say that’s because of the numerous lawsuits LLM developers would face if the amount of copyrighted content they were using was revealed, but a more generous explanation would be that it’s because the makeup of their training data is these companies’ secret sauce.

The importance of data explains why Ari Morcos, a former DeepMind and Meta Platforms AI researcher, co-founded DatologyAI in 2023 alongside ex-Twitter engineering lead Bogdan Gaza and former MosaicML head of data research Matthew Leavitt. The three aim to help researchers and developers better curate their training datasets to improve the quality of their models. Investors are responding. Just three months after announcing its $11.65 million seed round, the Redwood City-based startup has raised an additional $46 million in Series A funding led by Felicis, with participation from Radical Ventures, Amplify Partners, Elad Gil, M12 and Alexa Fund.

DatologyAI, which currently has 11 employees, aims to reduce the amount of human decision-making—which can often be biased or time-consuming—needed in data curation, Morcos told me. That’s a different strategy from the more hands-on approaches of other data curation startups, where employees manually look at their customers’ private data to see where gaps exist. That’s made them more like consultancies than software companies in many cases, VCs tell me.

Instead, DatologyAI uses algorithms to automatically determine how much data a model needs to understand a certain concept. For example, a model will need more examples of a complex concept (like dogs, which vary in appearance) than a simple one (like elephants, which look relatively similar to each other) to understand them, Morcos said. These algorithms also ensure that models see enough rarer “edge cases” and that the data is divided into more manageable chunks during the training process.

Equally important to the training data itself is the order that it’s presented to the model in. Typically, researchers will show LLMs simpler concepts and lower-quality data first, when the models “know” less and can glean more information from the weaker data, Morcos said. Later on in the training, they will show data that’s more relevant to the models’ specific purpose, like lines of software code for a code-generation model, he said.

Though not uncommon for the hot AI market, I did ask Morcos about the reason behind his startup’s back-to-back rounds. DatologyAI is in an interesting position, he explained: Though it doesn’t have the computing needs of a foundation model developer like OpenAI, it does actually need to train models to confirm that the changes it makes to training data lead to better performance. That means that it needs more computing power than other startups developing tools for developers—and therefore, more capital. (Though I’m sure most AI startups wouldn’t say no to more money regardless.)

Morcos also pointed out that, as we’ve been reporting for months, AI talent can be incredibly expensive, especially when a company is competing with the likes of Google, OpenAI and Meta. So some of that capital will also be put towards attracting AI researchers and engineers, he said.

Former company insiders say the firing of an internal investigator showed that the crypto exchange neglected evidence of market manipulation

When the U.S. accused Binance last year of maximizing profits over protecting users, the company promised “unceasing efforts to deliver a safe and trusted platform.”

This was put to the test soon after when an internal investigation found a top client—a firm run by a Lamborghini-loving crypto trader—was manipulating markets.

The result: Binance kept the client and fired its investigator.

The investigator and his colleagues on the company’s market-surveillance team had been hired from the traditional finance world to clean up Binance’s act. The world’s largest digital-currency exchange, born in an unregulated, freewheeling crypto culture, was under the microscope for allegedly failing to prevent the sort of manipulative trading that would get Wall Street traders thrown in jail.

Among the practices the surveillance team found: “VIP” clients—the largest on the exchange—engaged in pump-and-dump schemes and wash trading that were explicitly prohibited in Binance’s own terms of use, according to former company insiders and company documents. Binance also maintained a fleet of secret internal trading accounts that were used to trade large volumes of certain crypto tokens.

Crypto exchanges such as Binance are at the center of the digital-currency economy. Customers use them to trade one cryptocurrency for another, with Binance listing about 400 varieties, along with derivative products that allow users to bet on prices’ direction. The company says it has almost 190 million users and industry data shows it processed spot and derivatives trades worth over $4 trillion in March.

The ex-company insiders say the investigator’s dismissal in late 2023 showed that Binance—already in the crosshairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission—neglected evidence of market manipulation and prioritized generating trading fees from large clients over fixing its practices. A fresh boom this year in crypto trading has created lucrative new trading opportunities for both Binance and its high-rolling customers.

A Binance spokesperson said the company rejected any assertion that it has permitted market manipulation on the exchange and it was prioritizing the improvement of compliance functions.

“We have a robust surveillance framework that identifies and takes action against market abuse,” the spokesperson said. “We do not favor any individual user, no matter how big, over the safety of the platform.”

Decisions to remove users weren’t taken lightly and required sufficient evidence that they had breached the terms of use, the spokesperson said. A Binance executive said the company dismissed the investigator after a subsequent internal inquiry determined the claims against the client weren’t fully substantiated.

Last November, Binance pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements and agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine. Its founder, Changpeng Zhao, stepped down and was sentenced last week to four months in jail on a related charge.

The exchange also faces civil charges in a SEC lawsuit. In a complaint last June, the SEC alleged Binance spun a “web of deception” in misleading U.S. investors about its risk controls to prevent manipulative trading. The SEC said Binance, along with its U.S. arm, put its own financial interests ahead of users.

The SEC declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with former and current Binance employees, as well as other industry players. The Wall Street Journal also reviewed key documents and emails.

Expanding surveillance

Aware of the SEC investigation back in 2022, Binance began growing the market-surveillance team. It hired a dozen investigators from places such as Bank of America and hedge fund Citadel.

The surveillance team built new software tools to track market manipulation and detect wash trading, which is when traders act as buyer and seller in the same transactions to create the illusion of an active market.

The new tech opened investigators’ eyes to the potential scale of the problem, particularly among the VIP clients that Binance’s business relied on. Top traders—those trading more than $100 million a month—accounted for two-thirds of the platform’s total trading volume last year.

Investigators recommended booting out several hundred users through the first half of 2023 for violating the terms of use.

Their biggest action came last summer when they off-boarded the Tron Foundation, a blockchain company set up by crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, a friend of Binance founder Zhao. The SEC in March 2023 charged the Tron Foundation and Sun with fraudulently manipulating the market for its own token through wash trading. Sun and the Tron Foundation, which have requested the case’s dismissal, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Team members also observed that Binance’s own internal accounts were trading certain cryptocurrencies. They received no answer when they requested information inside Binance about who controlled them, the former company insiders said. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in a March 2023 complaint, had warned that Binance wasn’t disclosing to clients its own proprietary trading, which it said was run by a “quant desk” and kept “top secret.”

The Binance spokesperson said it doesn’t trade for profit or manipulate the market under any circumstances, adding its operations were “under close scrutiny.” Over the past three years, Binance has off-boarded nearly 355,000 users with a transaction volume of more than $2.5 trillion for violations, the spokesperson said.

New VIP trader

A new VIP trader began to turn heads at Binance.

DWF Labs, a trading-and-investment firm, vaulted into Binance’s top “VIP 9” designation, meaning it was making at least $4 billion in trades a month. Larger trading volumes on the exchange elevate clients’ VIP ranking, giving them discounted trading fees and access to private relationship managers.

DWF’s Russian managing partner, Andrei Grachev, bragged about his riches last October on social media. “Get into the DWF Lambo,” he tweeted with a photo of a DWF branded Lamborghini. Grachev, 36 years old, was formerly head of the Russian arm of crypto exchange HTX. He set up DWF in Singapore in 2022, corporate records show, and says he is based in Switzerland.

See more...

DWF’s role was as a so-called market maker, a type of middleman firm that simultaneously buys and sells assets, usually indifferent to whether the price of the asset goes up or down.

Market makers boost liquidity, making it easier for others to trade in and out of assets. They profit by pocketing the difference between the price they buy and sell at. In traditional finance, market makers must maintain this price neutrality under the rules of the exchange on which they operate.

Binance didn’t require market makers to sign any specific agreements that would govern their trading, allowing them largely to trade as they pleased, people familiar with their operations said. The Binance spokesperson said all users of the platform must adhere to its general terms of use that prohibit market manipulation.

Instead of price neutrality, DWF offered to use its active trading position to drive up the prices of tokens and create what it called “artificial volume” on exchanges including Binance that would lure in other traders, according to proposals it sent to potential clients in 2022.

In a report prepared that year for one customer, DWF wrote that it successfully generated artificial trading volume equal to two-thirds of the client’s token and that it was working to produce a “believable trading pattern.” Other client proposals from last year said partnering with DWF would lead to “bullish sentiment” for their tokens.

DWF and Grachev didn’t respond to requests for comment. After this article was published, DWF said on X that “allegations reported in the press are unfounded and distort the facts.” DWF operates with “the highest standards of integrity, transparency, and ethics,” it said.

Grachev told a crypto podcast last year that DWF wasn’t manipulating markets and questioned whether any trader could. “Maybe it could happen once, right? But again and again, continuously, it’s not possible,” he said.

The Binance spokesperson said they were unaware of these DWF documents. “If true, it would be very concerning to us and other participants,” the spokesperson said.

A company that DWF said it invested in was Yield Guild Games. The Swiss-registered crypto startup agreed to sell $10 million worth of its token to DWF, about a quarter of its market capitalization at the time.

The value soared fivefold last August after Binance listed a highly leveraged derivative contract tied to the YGG token. Grachev had touted YGG on X just before, claiming the listing would bring the token “sustainability and power.” Its price plummeted soon after.

The crypto industry took notice of the volatility, with two other market-making firms privately raising concerns about DWF with Binance.

One of these market makers complained about DWF’s trading to Binance’s department that handled VIP clients, which in turn connected the company with the market surveillance team. Based on this referral, the team began an investigation into DWF that September.

An investigation and a firing

Binance’s investigators found that DWF manipulated the price of YGG and at least six other tokens, and made over $300 million in wash trades in 2023, concluding these were violations of the terms of use, according to some of the former company insiders.

Following Grachev’s tweet promoting YGG, DWF sold almost five million of the tokens in two batches near the peak, triggering the collapse, they said. YGG’s co-founder, Gabby Dizon, said he wasn’t aware of the investigation’s findings.

The surveillance team submitted its report recommending DWF’s removal later in September. Over the next few days, the head of Binance’s VIP client department and her staff questioned the findings and complained to the company’s leadership.

Another Binance department, tasked with assessing employees’ compliance, launched its own investigation—this time into the market surveillance team and the evidence they had compiled on DWF.

The new inquiry determined there was insufficient evidence of DWF engaging in market abuse, the Binance executive said. The wash trades identified by the surveillance team could have been accidental so-called self-trades that may not alone amount to manipulative behavior, it found.

Binance, the executive said, also felt that the surveillance team’s head had collaborated too closely on the case with the DWF competitor who made the original complaint.

Company leaders then rejected the surveillance team’s off-boarding request.

A week after the DWF report’s submission, they fired the team’s head. Binance laid off several more investigators over the following months, which the Binance executive attributed to cost-saving measures. Others quit voluntarily. The Binance executive said the team is about the same size today.

Silicon Valley finds its silver bullet in a desperate race for energy

Tech giants bet on a nuclear revival to power the supercomputer revolution

Creating superintelligence requires a few simple ingredients: a near-infinite trove of data, an army of tech experts, billions of dollars worth of advanced microchips – and a gigantic amount of electricity.

As Silicon Valley spends enormous sums in a race to build artificial intelligence, tech giants are hitting a bottleneck. Without an abundant supply of energy, they will be unable to build the colossal supercomputing hubs they believe will host the next generation of AI systems.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has assembled what is believed to be the world’s biggest arsenal of Nvidia’s latest AI chips. He told a podcast last month that ultimately using them all in one place could require a gigawatt of power, potentially requiring a dedicated nuclear supply. “A gigawatt [data centre] would be the size of a meaningful nuclear power plant,” he said.

Zuckerberg’s comparison is not simply flippant. The desperate race for energy is triggering a wave of interest in nuclear power among the world’s tech barons. Venture capitalists are becoming nuclear boosters, betting that it will be the power source to keep the AI boom running.

As so often happens in Silicon Valley, support for nuclear power is not couched in terms of the profits it could shower down on California but cloaked in quasi-philosophical utopian language.

Marc Andreessen, the prominent tech investor, has become a leading figure in what has been dubbed the “effective accelerationist” movement, which advocates for rapid advancements in areas such as nuclear power and AI with the promise that it will lead to a state of abundance. In a “techno-optimist manifesto” published last year he called nuclear power a “silver bullet”.

Elon Musk has said shutting down nuclear plants is “anti-human”. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, two of the world’s richest men, have invested in nuclear start-ups ranging from small modular reactors to fusion.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT-developer OpenAI, has been a nuclear supporter for years. In 2015, Altman invested in and agreed to chair Oklo, a company building futuristic microreactors.

Altman is also the biggest outside investor in Helion, a company seeking to crack nuclear fusion. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and replicating it sustainably on earth is seen as the holy grail of clean nuclear power. Altman has said the breakthrough will be crucial to meeting the demands of superhuman AI.

Last year, Microsoft agreed the world’s first fusion purchase from Helion, saying supplies could arrive as soon as 2028. In March, Amazon acquired a nuclear-powered data centre in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, DeepMind, Google’s London-based AI lab, is working on technology that would use AI to better control fusion reactions.

Last Energy, a Washington DC-based company developing small modular reactors, says half of its orders now come from companies setting up data centres, compared to a quarter a couple of years ago. Last Energy has signed multiple deals to provide new data centres in the UK, although it is still waiting for regulatory approval.

“We’ve seen a flood of interest as those pain points become more clear,” says Michael Crabb, Last Energy’s vice president of commercial.

The biggest “pain point” is that AI will require huge amounts of energy from somewhere. The International Energy Agency estimates that the amount of electricity used by data centres and AI could double by 2026, at which point they could use as much energy as Japan. A single ChatGPT query has been estimated as requiring as much electricity as 15 Google searches.

“This tech is an energy hog,” says Ray Rothrock, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has invested in a string of nuclear start-ups. “The big issue with nuclear today is lack of demand. But now, the demand is increasing because of AI.”

While tech companies have made large investments in wind and solar, their intermittency may not be well suited to data centres that run 24 hours a day. Nuclear has no such problem.

Last Energy’s management team and investor list highlight the increasingly close ties between the nuclear industry and the tech sector. While Crabb is an energy industry veteran, the company’s founder Bret Kugelmass was previously a drone entrepreneur. Investors include PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek.

Crabb says the Silicon Valley types bring “that innovative, problem solving mindset [and] they see nuclear as the obvious answer” to the question of how to power AI.

This boom in nuclear interest is being felt far beyond the Californian borders, with Canadian uranium miner Cameco saying last week that the tech sector’s interest had triggered a surge in demand for its reactor fuel.

“Gone are the days of rolling out new technology without worrying about future potential runaway environmental impacts… nuclear is the clear winner,” Cameco’s chief executive Timothy Gitzel said.

The almost-limitless piles of cash AI companies have to spend helps. OpenAI and its major investor Microsoft are reportedly developing plans for the world’s biggest supercomputer, a $100bn (£79.66bn) project codenamed Stargate. Analysts at Morgan Stanley speculated last week that this would be powered by several nuclear plants.

Altman, meanwhile, has been telling investors that he needs up to $7 trillion to achieve his AI dreams, a budget that would include setting up his own energy supplies.

He has claimed that AI will be the most important invention in human history, but says that without a nuclear revival, we will not be able to power it.

“There’s a lot of parts that are hard,” he said recently, adding: “Energy is the hardest part.”

Chinese carmaker plans multibillion-euro investment into factories, marketing and dealers

BYD aims to topple Volkswagen, Tesla and Stellantis and become the largest battery-electric vehicle seller in Europe this decade, a top executive said.

European president Michael Shu said the Chinese carmaker planned a “huge investment” in factories, dealers and marketing in the region to convince motorists to buy its electric and hybrid vehicles.

“We are confident that we could be in a leading position” before the end of the decade, he told the Financial Times’ Future of the Car Summit. “We are moving to the next stage to decide a huge investment in the EU” that would be worth “billions of euros”.

BYD’s plans include a cut-price model based on the Seagull, which sells in China for less than $10,000. The European version of the model should cost less than €20,000, he said.

His comments are the boldest statement yet of BYD’s ambitions for Europe, which is one of the world’s most competitive car markets.

The business, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, briefly overtook Tesla last year as the world’s biggest electric vehicle brand and is privately regarded by western industry leaders as the greatest threat to Europe’s own carmakers.

Brussels is investigating whether Chinese carmakers use subsidies to cut the prices of their vehicles, in a probe that is widely expected to lead to higher tariffs on imported models.

But Shu said the company planned to make its cars “in Europe for Europe”, in a move that would see it skirt any higher penalties and blunt the EU’s efforts to prevent an influx of Chinese models, as well as limit exposure to logistical bottlenecks faced by carmakers importing to Europe.

“To ship cars from China to Europe is not going to be long term. The long term is to produce locally,” he said.

The company is already building a new factory in Hungary that will produce its first cars next year, and the business plans to start studying sites for a second plant in the coming months.

As well as its battery-electric cars, the brand will also sell and produce plug-in hybrid vehicles in Europe, partly because the region has been slow to install charging infrastructure, Shu said.

“Still, the [battery-electric vehicle] is very important. The penetration is already high, especially in the Nordic area,” he said.

BYD’s battery-electric car market share in western Europe was just 1.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2024, according to Schmidt Automotive Research.

During the FT conference, senior executives from Nissan, Peugeot, Volkswagen and Hyundai have all flagged the higher competition posed by Chinese carmakers with their advanced technology, especially in batteries.

Still, BYD reported a 42 per cent fall in overall electric vehicle deliveries in the first three months of the year compared with the final quarter of 2023, due to flagging demand and increasing competition in its home market.

The company overtook Tesla in electric vehicle sales during the final quarter of 2023, when it shifted 526,409 EVs compared with 484,507 sold by Tesla between October and December. But last month, Tesla posted sales of 386,810 vehicles in the first three months of 2024, below an expected 450,000 but more than that of its Chinese rival.

An approach from a Dubai-based group should be welcome to long-suffering shareholders of the engineering company

Few outside of the energy industry and Scotland would once have heard of Wood Group. But since the beginning of 2023, the Scottish engineering company, which has struggled to recover from an ill-fated takeover deal, has enjoyed several moments of fame.

First buyout group Apollo turned up with five approaches, although it eventually dropped its pursuit. Now a Dubai-based outfit that once pursued Wood’s Australian rival Worley has the FTSE 250 engineer in its sights.

The departure of Wood would no doubt add to hang-wringing over the state of London’s market. Yet this is a prime example of when take-private deals of struggling companies may be no bad thing.

Sidara has proposed paying 205p a share for Wood, valuing the company at over £2bn when also taking into account net debt forecasts for this year. Previously called Dar Group, Sidara already owns a small energy services company Penspen and is particularly keen on Wood’s business in the US, which accounts for about 35 per cent of revenues.

Sidara’s offer, already rejected, was at a 41 per cent premium to Wood’s average share price over three months. Still, it is 15 per cent below Apollo’s final proposal of 240p, withdrawn almost exactly a year ago. An approach by Sidara at a similar level — which looked high at the time — should be attractive to Wood’s long-suffering shareholders.

True, Wood has made progress on its latest turnaround since Apollo walked away. First quarter ebitda improved 4 per cent despite a 6 per cent year-on-year drop in revenue as it takes on higher margin work.

But it is slow and lumpy. The company on Thursday said that net debt, which totalled nearly $1.1bn at the end of last year including leases, would end 2024 at a similar level. Wood has struggled to delever quickly as promised after its 2017 takeover of Amec Foster Wheeler, which saddled it with both debt and legal liabilities.

Wood had already pushed back by a year when it expected to generate significant positive free cash flow, to 2025. Newly-arrived chief financial officer Arvind Balan, previously finance director of Rolls-Royce’s civil aerospace business, has promised a sharper focus on working capital. Yet the sort of cultural change he envisions takes time.

A figure close to Apollo’s last bid would value Wood at over seven times on a forward ebitda multiple, which looks fair against other European oilfield services groups. Investors’ patience has been sorely tested. They’d be forgiven for pushing for Wood to return to relative anonymity — this time as a private company.

Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Analyst comments:

Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Analyst comments: