TheChek News Flow

Last week, the Biden administration released its final rules attempting to cut China out of the U.S. battery supply chain and encourage American companies to build battery and electric vehicle manufacturing capacity in the U.S. It left one conspicuous opening for Chinese companies: For two years, they could continue to supply graphite to U.S. battery manufacturers and automakers, who claimed that without the exemption, none of their EVs would qualify for Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. China makes virtually all the world’s battery-grade graphite, and the automakers said the reprieve would give them time to find other sources of the material.

The leniency arguably should have included another component—lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP, an iron-based cathode used in most Teslas and Chinese EVs. Today, Chinese companies such as Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. make almost all of the world’s LFP batteries. In contrast, the major non-Chinese automakers, apart from Tesla, have favored nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries, which deliver higher energy density and greater driving range than LFP, but also typically cost more and face more supply constraints because their metals are scarcer. Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen and other automakers plan to incorporate LFP into at least some of their models, and that number is likely to grow because of the pressure to cut costs.

But the U.S. industry has been slow to create a local supply of LFP: Last year, Ford announced that it would license LFP technology from CATL, installing it in a new plant in Marshall, Mich. GM and Tesla are also reportedly negotiating LFP licensing deals with CATL. U.S., Japanese and South Korean companies are building 34 battery gigafactories in the U.S., according to The Information’s Gigafactory Database, but the Ford plant and an Illinois factory planned by China’s Gotion are the only two that will make LFP. The rest will produce NMC cells and packs.

For the past four years, when I have asked auto executives why they are building almost exclusively NMC plants, they have uniformly said NMC batteries are the best available, but that they are prepared to switch if something better comes along. Analysts say NMC in fact did seem like the best battery until the late 2010s, when sudden improvements in LFP by Chinese companies made those batteries competitive. But by then, the automakers and their South Korean suppliers had already committed to NMC.

The Invention of LFP

LFP was invented in the early 1990s in the lab of John Goodenough, the late University of Texas physicist who shared a 2019 Nobel Prize for creating the lithium-ion battery. The breakthrough offered many potential uses, but suffered from a considerable shortcoming—it barely conducted electricity. Soon after, Michel Armand and Karim Zaghib, researchers for utility Hydro-Québec, resolved the flaw with a carbon coating that vastly increased LFP’s conductivity. In the early 2010s, U.S. battery startup A123 Systems briefly commercialized LFP in power tools. But in 2012, the company went bankrupt after an expensive recall of batteries it had made for Fisker Automotive; A123 was sold off in pieces. And with that, LFP was presumed dead—with its relatively low energy density and the stigma of the A123 bankruptcy, everyone assumed it simply wasn’t good enough.

Everyone, that is, except for the Chinese. Starting in the early 2010s, Chinese battery makers Byd and CATL assigned teams of researchers to improve LFP; the Chinese government subsidized the manufacture of the chemistry, especially for electric buses. By 2018, more than 90% of China’s new public buses had LFP batteries, and soon after that both Byd and CATL said they had achieved breakthroughs in boosting LFP’s performance for electric cars. CATL said some of its LFP batteries delivered 300 miles of driving range, and most of China’s EV companies now use the chemistry.

Last year, China became the world’s largest car exporter, and most industry analysts think Chinese EV makers such as Byd and Li Auto are likely to flood the world with their LFP-powered vehicles. To compete, Western automakers will also have to produce EVs and plug-in hybrids powered by LFP.

The infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden in 2021 includes grant money to encourage LFP production. ICL Group, a specialty minerals company, last year broke ground on a $400 million LFP battery plant in St. Louis, half of which was funded under the infrastructure law. Over the last week, I asked industry hands and watchers whether the government should do more. I wondered whether, in the same way many countries view steel and cars as strategic industries, the U.S. should effectively designate LFP a strategic product and offer bigger incentives to produce it. Perhaps not surprisingly, Vivas Kumar, CEO of Mitra Chem, one of a handful of U.S. startups attempting to develop LFP, gave me a resounding yes. “LFP is the chemistry that is most relevant to the fastest-growing segments” of the industry, he told me.

Mitra recently opened an office in South Korea, whose battery and EV production qualifies for IRA tax credits because the country has a free trade agreement with the U.S. Kumar said he is researching South Korean manufacturing costs, and that Mitra may make its batteries there. “We’ll do whatever is going to give us the best probability of getting our product placed in the hands of a customer so that we can generate revenue at the cheapest cost possible,” he said. “We are focused on being an Inflation Reduction Act-compliant company, not necessarily exclusively a U.S. manufacturing company.”

Some independent analysts agree that the U.S. seems to lack a plan for establishing an LFP industry—and should have one. Corey Cantor, an EV analyst for BloombergNEF, a renewable energy research firm, noted that the three big South Korean battery makers—LG Energy Solution, Samsung and SK On—have said they’re working on LFP batteries but have shown no sign they’ll be producing any before the end of the decade. Likewise, Panasonic, Tesla’s main battery supplier, has announced no LFP plans. The ICL plant is the only U.S. LFP facility that’s received a grant or loan from the IRA or infrastructure law.

Cantor said the U.S. will only develop an LFP industry if the South Koreans move faster or U.S. startups get more government backing. “What is the U.S. strategy on LFP?” he asked. “Are they just going to continue to let CATL dominate it?”

About two years ago, CATL and other Chinese companies began to speak publicly about a tweak to LFP that juiced its energy density and driving range by adding manganese, another plentiful material. Such a battery, called LMFP, would boost LFP’s energy density by around 20% without creating supply chain issues, according to Steven Kaye, former chief technology officer at LFP cell developer Our Next Energy. An EV with such a battery could go 360 or so miles on a charge, thus matching many formulations of NMC, the higher-density battery chemistry favored by Western automakers. Last month, CATL announced a new LFP battery, the Shenxing Plus, which it said would deliver 375 miles on a charge; the company didn’t release details, but analysts said the Shenxing Plus was likely LMFP.

Battery makers have struggled to commercialize LMFP because the manganese gradually dissolves into the battery’s liquid electrolyte, and doesn’t conduct electricity as well as LFP, Kaye said. But Chinese battery makers began blending highly conductive NMC into the LMFP. The addition of a bit of nickel and cobalt resolved many of the battery’s shortcomings, he said.

Chinese automaker Chery reportedly plans to soon release an EV called the Luxeed S7 with an LMFP battery made by CATL. I asked Kaye why CATL appears to have figured out LMFP for EVs before Western companies. He noted the relative novelty of the chemistry that includes NMC, and said CATL’s scale gave it a manufacturing advantage, allowing it to commercialize faster than anyone else.

Mitra’s Kumar is skeptical. Just because CATL says it’s producing the chemistry, he said, doesn’t mean it’s ready for the global market. “LMFP is going through the same learning curve that LFP did,” Kumar said. He expects battery makers to gradually reduce the NMC content of LMFP until there is no nickel or cobalt in the chemistry, but says the process will take time.

But LFP and LMFP could relegate NMC to large SUVs and pickup trucks and high-end luxury EVs. Some industry watchers worry that the West is again letting opportunity pass it by, allowing China to get the spoils. “LMFP is in the beginning stages [in] China, but we shouldn’t wait until it’s good enough in China to start doing it in the West,” Kumar said. “We’ve already learned that lesson from seeing how LFP developed.”

LONDON, May 6 (Reuters) - Investors withdrew an estimated net $9.9 billion from hedge funds in March, up from $780 million in February and the 22nd consecutive month where industry outflows totalled more than inflows, a report from Nasdaq eVestment said on Monday.

While the scale of the March outflows was not historically high, money coming in from investors remained "consistently low" because of a "reluctance" to make meaningful new allocations, the report said.

The outflows came even as hedge funds posted positive performances across every strategy tracked by the data firm.

Alternative risk premia, a hedge fund strategy that trades stocks and derivatives in order to remain neutral to markets, had an almost 12% return for the quarter, said Nasdaq eVestment.

Managed futures, the next most successful trading strategy returned about 4% in March and were up about 9% for the year to March 31.

However, only four out of the 10 different kinds of trading strategies saw inflows including two kinds of bond trading hedge funds, making directional bets and trading between the relative prices of different bonds.

Multi-strategy hedge funds, which include some of the largest hedge funds in the world, saw the largest outflows in March of $2.7 billion, said Nasdaq eVestment.

However, estimated assets overseen by multi-strategy funds surpassed $700 billion in March to reach an all-time high.

This number includes leverage and performance as well as client inflows.

Lawmaker’s letter calls Moscow’s access to the satellite internet service in Ukraine a ‘serious national security threat’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) pressed the Pentagon to address Russian troops’ illicit use of Starlink internet terminals in Ukraine, calling the issue a “serious national security threat” to the U.S. and its allies.

In a letter addressed to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Warren cited a Wall Street Journal investigation that illustrated how a black market of middlemen from the Middle East and elsewhere have funneled the compact satellite dishes into the hands of American adversaries and accused war criminals on the battlefields of Ukraine and Sudan.

Starlink, a part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has proved crucial for Ukrainian soldiers and civilians since Musk activated terminals there in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion. But officials in Kyiv complain that Russian forces’ recent use of the satellite links is erasing one of the defenders’ few strategic advantages.

The company supplies some devices to Ukraine through a $23 million contract with the Department of Defense. Other terminals in Ukraine come from donations by European governments and private-sector groups.

“As a DoD contractor, SpaceX cannot allow its products or services to be used to undermine national security,” Warren wrote. The letter asked the Pentagon to detail what it knows about Russian Starlink usage and the tools available to stop it.

A Pentagon spokesman said the department responds directly to members of Congress on such matters. “However, we can reinforce that we are aware of the reports that some Russian forces in occupied Ukraine have used Starlink terminals,” he said. “DoD has been working closely with SpaceX and the Government of Ukraine to investigate and address this threat.”

SpaceX has told regulators that its user agreements bar customers from using the service in unauthorized countries. Starlink lacks licenses to operate in China, Russia and many other countries, and U.S. export controls prohibit its sale in Russia.

Musk has said on the social-media platform X, which he also controls, that to the best of his knowledge, no terminals had been sold directly or indirectly to Russia and that the terminals wouldn’t work inside the country.

A thriving trade nevertheless continues to supply fresh Starlink terminals to Russian buyers, often by exploiting the service’s roaming feature.

The latest letter illustrates some U.S. officials’ growing discomfort with the commanding lead Musk’s space company has taken over its rivals. Once a scrappy startup, SpaceX now dominates the market for many commercial satellite launches. Its network of more than 5,000 Starlink satellites has also upended the market for broadband service from space by offering a relatively affordable, easy-to-install internet link.

Warren has pressed Musk’s companies on other fronts. In March, she renewed calls on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Tesla violated rules governing board independence at public companies.

The Massachusetts senator and several colleagues in September asked the defense secretary to explain reports that Musk had shut off Ukrainian Starlink access in Crimea to prevent the country from attacking Russian ships. Musk told biographer Walter Isaacson he decided to limit the service to avoid what he considered an escalation in the conflict.

The WSJ’s investigation in early April also detailed the use of Starlink by rebel forces in Sudan, where the technology hasn’t been approved by the government. Nearly a week after the investigation, SpaceX began a crackdown on users who are connecting to its Starlink high-speed internet service from countries where it hasn’t been authorized.

Starlink customers there, as well as in Zimbabwe and South Africa, have received email notifications from the company, warning that their access to the service would be terminated. Those emails, viewed by the Journal, noted that using Starlink in areas where it hasn’t been approved by local regulators was against the company’s terms of service.

The ANC treats Anglo American as both national champion and national piñata

South Africa’s ruling party berates big business one minute and urges it to invest the next

Imagine making an offer on a house but only on condition that the owners demolish part of it first. That is a rough analogy for BHP’s £31bn offer for rival miner Anglo American, which includes the stipulation that first it jettisons its South African businesses.

South Africa’s presidency denies this is a vote of no confidence in the country. It is true that the motive for BHP’s offer is to get hold of Anglo’s sought-after copper mines in Peru and Chile. Yet it is hard not to see the proviso that Anglo ditches its South African platinum and iron ore assets as anything other than a comment on the country’s investment landscape.

As supposed evidence that the African National Congress enjoys close relations with business, the presidency this week cited co-operation between the administration and companies in tackling the country’s problems. The private sector has indeed provided expertise and finance to help solve three of the biggest: rolling power cuts, a collapse of rail and ports, and crime.

Yet these “collaborative efforts”, supposed evidence of them working hand in glove, are the result of failed ANC policies that have wrecked much of the country’s infrastructure. Business is helping out as a matter of survival.

Even when it turns to the private sector for help, the ANC has not managed to throttle the party’s old instincts of blaming it for all the country’s ills. When last year, Standard Chartered Bank paid a $2.35mn fine to settle an eight-year-old case of rand manipulation, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, minister in the presidency, launched a withering attack on the entire private sector. It had “no interest in the development of this country”, she chastised, and was seeking to “engineer” government collapse.

Her remarks revealed the deep suspicion much of the ANC still has of the private sector. The prevailing attitude is that business, even foreign investors with no history or skin in the game, owes South Africa a living for the sins of the past.

Hardly surprisingly, the ANC’s relations with the mining sector have had their ups and downs. When it came to power after the country’s first free elections in 1994, the ANC rightly saw white-dominated businesses as having profited from exploiting cheap black labour. But much as it wanted to blame big business, it also needed its help. Only a profitable and confident private sector could pay enough taxes and provide enough employment to keep the ANC’s dreams of social transformation alive.

In 30 years, the ANC has never resolved those twin impulses. It oscillates between beating up big business and imploring it to invest.

The relationship with Anglo American follows a similar topsy-turvy trajectory. When in 2004, Tony Trahar, then Anglo’s chief executive, said political risk was declining, he was excoriated by Thabo Mbeki, then president, for saying that it existed at all. Trahar was wrong. Political risk was on the rise as the subsequent presidency of Jacob Zuma revealed.

The spectre of nationalisation has long hung, if mostly rhetorically, over the mining sector. The ANC made the state, not individual landowners, the custodians of the nation’s minerals. There was nothing wrong with that. But it did ensnare mining companies in the endless red tape of licence applications.

The mining industry no longer lays golden eggs — nor platinum or iron ones either if BHP’s snub is anything to go by. In 2003, South Africa accounted for 5 per cent of global exploration, a figure that dropped to below 1 per cent by 2023. The industry’s contribution to GDP and employment has dwindled inexorably.

These days, mines struggle to get minerals on freight trains and through backed-up ports. Miners generate their own power because they cannot rely on the state grid. Recently, in co-operation with government, they have provided private security to guard railway lines targeted by criminal gangs. It is co-operation of a sort, but born of desperation.

Anglo has made its own mistakes. It listed in London in search of cheap capital, but was never able to persuade foreign investors that its unwieldy structure made any sense. It splashed out on Brazilian iron ore, but was too timid in bidding for Australian iron ore assets that made its competitors rich.

Whatever errors Anglo made abroad, its battles at home with an ANC that saw it both as national champion and national piñata cannot have helped. Gwede Mantashe, mining minister, last week poured cold water on BHP’s offer, saying the Australian miner had never done much for South Africa. Though he didn’t say it, perhaps the begrudging inference was that Anglo American had.

Weight-loss treatments are not the only source of excitement in the pharmaceutical research world

Investors’ interest in anti-obesity drugs sometimes seems all-consuming. Yet weight-loss treatments are not the only source of excitement in the world of pharmaceutical research.

A class of molecules known as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) is generating buzz. These use antibodies to deliver chemicals directly to tumours, making them the guided missiles of the cancer world. Invented decades ago, they have recently improved so much that developers such AstraZeneca talk about them replacing conventional chemotherapy. When the UK company and its Japanese partner Daiichi Sankyo revealed impressive breast cancer trial results for their ADC Enhertu in 2022, oncologists broke into a standing ovation.

Daiichi Sankyo is expected to be the ADC leader in 2028 with nearly $10bn of sales, according to Evaluate. It trades on a price/earnings multiple of 50 times, the kind of hefty multiple normally associated with obesity stocks. Novo Nordisk is on a 37 times multiple and Eli Lilly on 59 times. Some estimates of the long-term market potential invite parallels with obesity drugs. Morgan Stanley reckons the ADC market could eventually be worth more than $140bn.

That bullish estimate is based on a one-for-one switch from conventional chemotherapy, which accounts for more than 37 per cent of US cancer prescriptions. Healthcare funders might resist this on cost grounds; most chemotherapies have lost their patent protection and are relatively inexpensive. In April, access to Enhertu in England was blocked on value-for-money grounds although it got a green light in Scotland.

Investors should also worry that the market is getting overcrowded. Roche, Johnson & Johnson and Denmark’s Genmab have all inked deals this year, following nearly $100bn of ADC-focused M&A and partnership transactions last year. This included a Merck agreement with Daiichi Sankyo worth up to $22bn, Pfizer’s $43bn acquisition of lossmaking Seagen and AbbVie’s $10.1bn acquisition of ImmunoGen. The latter represented a 95 per cent premium to the undisturbed price.

The ImmunoGen deal came four decades after the company started working on the first generation of ADCs. Some of the current hopes for ADCs — which includes using them to treat bacterial infections and autoimmune diseases — could fail or take a long time to come to fruition.

The money pouring into ADCs is a reminder of just how important oncology is to the pharmaceutical sector, even as obesity steals the limelight. It is the industry’s biggest source of sales, with projected 2028 revenues of $440bn, says data provider IQVIA. Drugs that precisely target cancerous cells look set to play a crucial role in treating the disease, unleashing another wave of oncology growth.

Retail brokerage says ‘Wells notice’ comes after years of attempts to seek regulatory clarity

Robinhood has warned of an impending lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission over its cryptocurrency business, in a sign that a US regulatory crackdown on digital assets continues.

The retail brokerage said in a filing on Monday that the SEC had over the weekend sent its crypto unit a so-called Wells notice, which warns a company that it faces legal action. SEC staff have made a “preliminary determination” to recommend enforcement action against the company, which could lead to civil litigation, monetary penalties and limits on business activities.

The SEC has taken a hard line on crypto enforcement, arguing that many tokens constitute securities and should be regulated as such.

Robinhood, founded in 2013, says it has a customer base of more than 23mn investors and $119bn in assets under custody. While also brokering equities and options, it offers commission-free trading of 15 cryptocurrencies in most US states, according to its most recent annual report. Cryptocurrencies accounted for $135mn of its $785mn in transaction-based revenues last year.

The company said Monday it had “made difficult choices not to list certain tokens or provide products, such as lending or staking,” to avoid fall foul of the SEC’s policy stance on cryptocurrencies.

“After years of good faith attempts to work with the SEC for regulatory clarity including our well-known attempt to ‘come in and register,’ we are disappointed that the agency has decided to issue a Wells notice related to our US crypto business,” said Dan Gallagher, Robinhood’s chief legal, compliance and corporate affairs officer.

“We firmly believe that the assets listed on our platform are not securities and we look forward to engaging with the SEC to make clear just how weak any case against Robinhood Crypto would be on both the facts and the law.”

The SEC said it “does not comment on the existence or non-existence of a possible investigation.”

The SEC’s efforts to exert control over the growing digital assets industry have intensified after the failure of FTX in 2022, which culminated this year with founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year prison sentence on fraud charges. The agency has also sued leading crypto platforms such as Coinbase, Binance and Kraken.

TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg said in a policy note that the SEC’s warning to Robinhood should not come as a surprise and noted that the broker had little incentive to settle such a lawsuit given that the term of SEC chair Gary Gensler was due to expire within two years. His departure could lead to a change in the regulator’s position on cryptocurrency enforcement.

“We see this as consistent with the SEC’s approach of forcing crypto fights to the courts,” Seiberg said in the note. “We also see little reason for Robinhood to settle given the political and legal changes that are possible in the coming years.”

Robinhood’s stock price was unchanged on Monday and is up about 47 per cent since the start of 2024. The company is set to report its first quarter financial results on Wednesday.

The company has previously paid out large sums to resolve regulatory cases, including a $65mn settlement with the SEC in 2020 over charges that it had failed to provide its customers with the best prices for trades, and more than $70mn in penalties in 2021 from industry regulator Finra over alleged harm to customers.

Last November, Adam D’Angelo found himself at the epicenter of one of the biggest controversies in the tech industry. The board of OpenAI — the $80 billion startup leading the AI bandwagon — had abruptly booted its CEO, Sam Altman, only to reinstate him just days later. D’Angelo was on the board that dismissed Altman… and he was (and remains) on the board that brought him back in. In fact, he was the only person who kept his seat amidst the ensuing restructuring that saw a lot of the original board leave.

It was certainly a rocky time for OpenAI, but it was perhaps doubly so for D’Angelo, since the drama was playing out while his own company, Quora, was taking big steps towards AI.

Quora, the crowdsourced Q&A site D’Angelo co-founded and leads as CEO, had been building an AI platform of its own while also fundraising (a $75 million round that valued it at $425 million, per PitchBook). The company in February 2023 had launched Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration), which lets users ask questions of and talk to a variety of chatbots, lets developers build their own bots, and offers a bot monetization program and marketplace similar to OpenAI’s GPT Store.

Quora’s core Q&A service was facing some big questions, too. Incumbent search engines like Google and Bing were beginning to use AI to produce more fluid results and answer questions, and with tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity being widely available, what could Quora do to secure a position as one of the top websites where people could get their questions answered? More crucially, does anyone actually want or need crowdsourced Q&A anymore?

For D’Angelo, those questions are intrinsic to his pursuit of AI, which he sees as an important tool that people can use to tap the Internet’s collective knowledge. An important, if understated, figure in tech for years, he’s been involved in efforts to tap the Internet’s store of knowledge for a long time — he was friends with Mark Zuckerberg in high school, where in 2002 the pair built a digital music suggestion service called Synapse that, according to this vintage piece from the Harvard Crimson, beat off acquisition offers from Microsoft and more. Later, he became CTO at Facebook when it was just starting out, and then eventually co-founded Quora.

All of that was seemingly a long road toward building AI tools for him, it appears. I recently caught up with D’Angelo about the challenges and opportunities in AI today, how to build and support a developer community, and what role humans can play when it comes to sharing and accessing knowledge. Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

Humans are better at answers than AI — for now

The hype around AI seems to be having less of an impact on the search for information than you might think. D’Angelo said that Quora is seeing record numbers of users despite the proliferation of AI tools — although he declined to update the 400 million monthly active users figure it disclosed last July.

Still, there is a bridge between what Quora set out to do and D’Angelo’s interest in AI. Recently, in a conversation with David George, a general partner at a16z, D’Angelo said he was drawn to social networking because he was actually interested in AI. The latter was hard to develop at that time, but he saw social networks as an alternative architecture for achieving the same idea: People, assembled in a social network, in his view, almost played the role of living, large information models, as they could provide news, entertainment and more to each other.

He worked on that concept when he was with Facebook, and later, founded Quora to distill the role social networks could play in answering questions. Now, AI is taking over that role.

“In the past, humans were substituted for AI to provide answers. You could ask a question like, ‘What is the capital of California?’ and humans would answer that on Quora. Now, you can use AI tools to get that answer,” he said.

But AI, at least in its current shape today, cannot provide answers to all the questions people can have. That, D’Angelo believes, helps people retain a lot of value.

“Quora has always been founded on the idea that humans have a lot of knowledge they have access to in their heads that’s not on the internet anywhere. And AI will not have access to any of that knowledge,” D’Angelo said.

He acknowledged that AI still has a hallucination problem, which makes it hard to rely on such answers, even if newer, more advanced models are slowly making progress in tackling that issue.

Supporting developers on Poe

Quora opened up Poe to all users last year after a few months of closed beta testing. Since then, the company has introduced tools to create and browse the bots on its marketplace.

The company’s pitch is that consumers get to use all the different kinds of models or bots on the platform. For developers, the allure lies in the possibility of reaching millions of users without having to worry about distribution across platforms. And developers can earn money on Poe in two ways: The first is through a referral when a user becomes a Poe premium subscriber via their bot; the second is by setting a per-message rate, so they get paid based on how often people use their bot.

In essence, Poe offers developers and users access to different large language models, but its functionality is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT Store.

But that means both platforms face some of the same challenges. They make it easy for anyone to create bots with prompts, which makes it hard for developers to stand out. D’Angelo told me that there are already a million bots on the platform, compared to 3 million custom GPTs on ChatGPT. For reference, it took Apple’s App Store more than five years to cross the million-app mark.

Both Poe and GPT Store also suffer from a ton of spam, similarly named bots, bots claiming to escape plagiarism, and even ones that flirt with copyright law. Poe has also released a feature that lets users chat with multiple bots in one conversation. All that noise makes it hard to choose a bot that will do the job well.

Despite these challenges, D’Angelo says that Quora wants to help developers earn sustainable money by improving bot discovery.

“One of our goals with developers is to be able to make a living [out of making AI bots] and cover their operational costs,” he said. “We have taken a big step forward with the pay-per-message feature, but we also want to help developers get distribution inside the platform as much as possible. So, we are working on improving our recommendation system so more people can find out about the bots.”

No ads on Poe just yet

Poe is growing steadily, but it is still a lot smaller than ChatGPT. Market intelligence firm SimilarWeb suggests Poe has 4 million monthly active users in the U.S. (iOS and Android) and 3.1 million monthly active users worldwide (Android only). Compare this to ChatGPT users, which now averages 100 million users a week.

D’Angelo said that the company will stay away from ads, instead relying on Poe’s $19.99 per month subscription product to generate revenue. That is in contrast to some of the other AI-powered tools on the market: Perplexity, Bing Search, and Search Generative Experience (SGE) by Google all feature ads.

Quora and D’Angelo declined to disclose revenue figures, but data from analytics firm Sensor Tower indicates that Poe users have spent $7.3 million on subscriptions since its launch, amounting to close to 40,000 paid users. In comparison, ChatGPT has more than 1 million paid subscribers, according to Sensor Tower.

More AI tools for Quora and Poe

Despite stating the importance of human answers, Quora is already experimenting with answers written by Poe. The site surfaces the AI-written answer to some questions with a link that lets you chat with Poe if you have further questions.

D’Angelo said that Quora had already deployed systems to rate different human answers. Now, it is applying techniques like asking users through a survey if an AI-generated answer is useful.

“My goal is for the AI-written answers to be fairly ranked and only to be above a human answer if they are more useful than the human answer,” he said.

D’Angelo also wants to avoid having Quora tagged as an “answer engine.”

“I think we never really saw Quora as an answer engine. That term kind of implies that there are AI-only answers. Quora is really about human knowledge, and we’ll have AI enhance it,” he said

Quora is also working on AI tools that users can use to write answers and hopes to release them soon. D’Angelo noted that one of the tools it is testing allows users to generate an image based on their answers.

The company is using AI in a few other ways, too. One involves trying to catch bots or users using automation to answer questions on Quora. D’Angelo didn’t share details about the project, saying that the company would give a heads-up to perpetrators who are trying to game the system.

A few outlets and users have recently pointed out that the answer quality on Quora has plummeted. To that, D’Angelo said people feel that the overall standard of answers has decreased because low-quality answers have more visibility. He said AI is helping the company determine the difference between different quality of answers, and the early results look promising.

On Quora’s relationship with OpenAI

D’Angelo declined to discuss any of the OpenAI drama — “I just can’t talk about any of this stuff,” he said. “I’m not here to represent OpenAI. I can just represent Quora.” But he did say that he doesn’t see OpenAI as a competitor, because the bigger startup has, well, bigger ambitions.

“There is some sense of overlap in terms of what users can do on the GPT Store and what they can do on Poe. But that’s minor in the grand scheme of things. OpenAI is working towards this big mission to build AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]. And at Quora, we are looking to make AI products available to the world — including OpenAI’s products.”

Quora also continues to be a “big customer” of OpenAI and D’Angelo expects more collaboration with the company than competition.

“We spend a lot of money as a customer with OpenAI, because OpenAI is the biggest source of models for Poe,” he added.

While D’Angelo did mention that Quora pays “tens of millions” to developers on Poe and companies whose models the platform uses, he didn’t explicitly detail how these payments compared to the payout to OpenAI.

Quora currently doesn’t have any data licensing deals with any of the major companies, and it is not thinking about building its own model either, D’Angelo told TechCrunch.

“We are not in a rush to license our data. We want to make sure our rights and users’ rights are respected. Right now, there is not a lot of clarity around how all of this (AI landscape) will play out. So right now, we are just waiting before taking any steps in this direction,” D’Angelo said.

The company’s also relatively fresh out of its last fundraise, so it is focused on building AI across the business and improving revenue growth on its existing products. He said that Quora will go public “at some point,” but that is not the focus right now.

Idées. Education positive, GPA, RN… La philosophe, qui publie "Messieurs, encore un effort…", s’inquiète de la chute de la natalité qui pourrait entraîner un retour de bâton conservateur et religieux contre les femmes.

"Certains courants féministes me verront comme une nataliste enragée…" soupire-t-elle. Mais à 80 ans et après bien des combats, Elisabeth Badinter ne se soucie depuis longtemps plus du qu’en-dira-t-on. Messieurs, encore un effort… est une mise en garde dont la publication a été repoussée par la disparition de son mari Robert. La philosophe y alerte sur la chute de la natalité qui, craint-elle, pourrait se retourner contre les femmes à travers des politiques natalistes menées par des partis conservateurs et religieux, comme on le voit déjà en Hongrie, en Italie ou aux Etats-Unis. Pour l’icône du féminisme universaliste, c’est au contraire aux hommes d’alléger la charge qui pèse sur les mères actuelles, prises entre leur carrière, les tâches familiales et le culte de l’enfant roi.

Dans un long entretien accordé à L’Express, Elisabeth Badinter explique comment il est facile de culpabiliser les femmes, mais aussi pourquoi la question de l’IVG "pourrait coûter cher à Donald Trump". Elle réitère son engagement en faveur de la GPA, qui fait aujourd’hui l’objet d’une attaque des médias conservateurs. Aux électeurs tentés par le vote RN, elle rappelle "les origines détestables" du parti, mais estime que Gabriel Attal répond mieux qu’Emmanuel Macron au "désir d’ordre" exprimé par une partie du pays.

L’Express : Votre livre évoque le déclin démographique auquel font face de nombreux pays. Mais la baisse de la natalité n’est-elle pas une bonne nouvelle pour les femmes, en sachant que leur accès à l’éducation en est l’un des facteurs importants ?

Elisabeth Badinter : Je ne dirais pas que la dénatalité est une "bonne nouvelle", mais la conséquence de bien d’autres facteurs. Il est vrai que quand on fait des études prolongées, on engendre plus tard. L’âge moyen du premier enfant est passé de 27,8 ans en 2000 à 31 ans aujourd’hui. D’autant plus que les filles sont plus nombreuses à sortir de l’université avec un diplôme de l’enseignement supérieur, 55 % contre 45 % de garçons. Mais j’en suis convaincue, ce déclin démographique représente un vrai problème politique s’il continue à ce rythme encore plusieurs années.

Vous craignez les conséquences possibles sur les femmes de politiques natalistes menées par des partis conservateurs ou religieux…

Absolument. Regardez ce qui se passe en ce moment. La cheffe du gouvernement italien, Giorgia Meloni vient de rajouter un obstacle psychologique à l’avortement, en autorisant des groupes anti-IVG à s’introduire dans les cliniques pour tenter de dissuader les femmes d’avorter. Or il est très facile de culpabiliser les femmes là-dessus. Meloni n’a certes pas supprimé le droit à l’avortement voté en Italie en 1978, mais dans les faits, il est devenu difficile de trouver un médecin prêt à faire cette procédure, en particulier dans le sud de l’Italie.

La Floride vient d’interdire toute IVG après six semaines, contre quinze semaines auparavant…

Seulement six semaines pour avorter (elle soupire)… Déjà, il faut souvent trois semaines à une femme pour qu’elle se rende compte qu’elle est enceinte. Qui pouvait imaginer qu’une grande démocratie comme les Etats-Unis mettrait fin, il y a à peine deux ans, au droit d’avorter dans quatorze Etats ? En même temps, le sujet de l’IVG peut coûter cher à Donald Trump. L’Ohio, Etat remporté par les Républicains en 2016 comme en 2020, a par exemple adopté par référendum la protection du droit à l’avortement dans sa Constitution.

La France a longtemps bien résisté en matière de natalité, mais celle-ci dégringole aujourd’hui…

Nous sommes quand même encore les meilleurs d’Europe en la matière. La France a une longue tradition qu’elle n’a partagée qu’en partie avec l’Angleterre, à savoir la séparation du rôle de la femme et de la mère. Il était entendu que le soin des enfants n’était pas digne d’une femme de l’aristocratie ou de la bonne bourgeoisie, qu’elles avaient mieux à faire que de s’occuper de la "marmaille" et que personne n’y trouvait à redire. Au contraire. Cette idée de la maternité en France était très originale. A l’inverse, les pays qui ont longtemps confondu femme et mère, comme les pays du sud de l’Europe ont vu une baisse plus précoce de leur natalité. La mamma italienne, et même la Mutter allemande sont des modèles caricaturaux de la mère. Toute l’essence d’une femme serait dans la maternité. Heureusement, les choses ont bien changé, car il y a eu un mouvement féministe efficace.

Mais comment expliquez-vous cette baisse de la natalité ? Même les pays scandinaves, les plus égalitaires, ont des taux historiquement bas…

Deux changements objectifs qui se rencontrent et s’opposent bouleversent notre société occidentale. Le premier est le "moi d’abord" qui va de pair avec la recherche de son épanouissement personnel. Le second est "l’enfant d’abord" ! Si on décide d’avoir un enfant, on lui doit tout, son énergie, son temps et son infinie patience. Le stress, la fatigue quotidienne des mères qui travaillent à temps complet doivent totalement s’oublier devant l’enfant roi. Dès la conception, l’embryon, est déjà le patron.

LIRE AUSSI : Robert Plomin : "Même échangé par erreur à la maternité, vous seriez à peu près la même personne"

Vous avez confessé avoir fumé durant vos grossesses. Aujourd’hui, c’est presque criminel…

Tout ce que les neurologues et les pédiatres énoncent comme loi, il faut s’y soumettre. Ils ont sûrement raison sur un tas de points, mais il n’y a plus aucun choix laissé à la mère. Quand on ne peut plus boire un seul verre de vin le soir, ou fumer une cigarette le matin… Et je ne vous parle pas de la culpabilité… Comme elles sont loin les années 1970 où l’on pouvait vivre sa grossesse avec insouciance.

Et qu’en est-il des pères ?

Les statistiques témoignent qu’il n’y a toujours pas un véritable partage des tâches familiales entre hommes et femmes, et c’est l’une des causes premières du désengagement des femmes en matière de maternité. Ce n’est pas au politique d’imposer des lois pour le partage de la vaisselle. Ce serait grotesque. On est dans la sphère du privé, sur laquelle les pressions sont difficiles. Pourquoi continue-t-on à parler de double journée de travail pour les femmes, et pas pour les hommes ?

Si vous regardez la vie quotidienne d’une mère d’enfants encore petits, et qui a un emploi à temps plein, très franchement, c’est dur. Pourquoi ? Parce qu’il faut penser à une infinité de détails de la vie quotidienne concernant bien sûr les enfants, mais aussi tout le reste, la gestion de la maison au quotidien. Le vaccin pour l’un, un médicament pour l’autre, les vêtements qui sont trop petits… Tous les jours, il faut commencer par s’occuper de ces détails qui rendent la vie très stressante pour les mères.

Mais avec l’attention portée sur la charge mentale, n’y a-t-il aujourd’hui pas une évolution du côté des hommes ?

Au moment où le féminisme des années 1970, universaliste, était dominant, il y a eu des vrais changements dans les comportements des hommes et des femmes. Dans le domaine public et dans l’accès à l’emploi, des progrès spectaculaires ont été réalisés. Entre 1975 et 2021, le taux d’activité des femmes est passé de 54,5 % à 70 %, proche de celui des hommes qui est de 76 %. Mais cela ne s’est répercuté dans la vie privée. On travaille comme vous, mais vous ne vous impliquez pas comme nous à la maison. Même si les hommes s’investissent aujourd’hui davantage dans l’éducation des enfants (vingt minutes de plus par jour en moyenne nationale que dans les années 1980), l’écart reste trop important. Quand les hommes répliquent à leur femme "mais tu ne m’as pas demandé !"…

Ce manque de partage, qui soulagerait les femmes, est une raison secrète de la chute de la natalité. D’autant plus que l’épanouissement personnel est devenu une revendication forte des hommes et des femmes. Aujourd’hui, on évalue ce qu’un enfant offre en plaisirs et en peines. C’est une vraie révolution anthropologique. Jamais on n’aurait pensé ainsi avant les années 1970. D’autant plus que pendant des décennies régnait la grande illusion consistant à penser que la maternité était le couronnement de la féminité, et une assurance de bonheur affectif. On ne parlait alors jamais des charges.

Vous critiquez aussi l’éducation positive. Pourquoi ?

Car cette école de pensée suppose une grande patience, un oubli de soi et du temps pour expliquer à l’enfant la raison de ses émotions. Vous sortez d’une journée de travail, et si votre enfant fait un caprice ou une crise de colère, il ne faudrait surtout pas le gronder, car cela pourrait avoir des effets nocifs sur son cerveau. Qui peut sérieusement penser que les mères du XXIe siècle, déjà accablées de mille soucis, peuvent se payer le luxe d’expérimenter une nouvelle éducation qui n’a pas fait ses preuves ? Aujourd’hui, si on veut des enfants, il faudrait être une mère exemplaire. Or, franchement, les mères parfaites sont aussi rares que des Mozart.

Pour vous, les politiques natalistes doivent avant tout s’adresser aux hommes…

Jusqu’à présent, on s’est toujours adressé aux femmes. Mais elles font ce qu’elles peuvent compte tenu de notre nouvel environnement hédoniste. Les hommes ont encore de la marge. Les pères font certes des choses, mais pas forcément les plus ennuyeuses ou répétitives. Ils manquent trop souvent d’initiative. Un enfant a besoin d’un médicament ? C’est la mère qui va à la pharmacie.

Alors que près de 60 % des Français y sont favorables, les médias conservateurs ont lancé une offensive contre la GPA, en mettant notamment en avant la figure d’Olivia Maurel. Qu’en pensez-vous ?

Je me suis engagée il y a dix ans pour la GPA éthique. On me répond toujours qu’il y a un échange d’argent. Mais il est normal de rembourser tous les frais d’une femme qui va assumer une grossesse. Cela me semble évident. Là, le débat déborde à nouveau. Je pense que le concept de "marchandisation" du corps a été un slogan efficace pour maintenir l’interdiction de la GPA en France.

Les outrances de l’extrême gauche nous font-elles perdre de vue l’offensive de l’extrême droite ?

L’un ne va pas sans l’autre. A chaque fois que Mélenchon met une couche de plus dans la provocation, des électeurs qui ne situent pas au départ à l’extrême droite se disent "pourquoi ne pas essayer". Je suis frappée de voir le nombre de personnes expliquer que le RN a évolué, et qu’il ne représente plus un danger.

Même les retraités sont de plus en plus tentés par le vote RN. Comment l’interprétez-vous ?

C’est un désir d’ordre, une peur de la dissolution de nos valeurs que nos gouvernements ne parviennent pas à renforcer. Mais je remarque que Gabriel Attal parle plus d’ordre que Macron, ce qui lui vaut un degré d’appréciation plutôt bon pour un Premier ministre. Il est clair sur ces questions. Le problème, c’est que sa ministre de l’Université fait le contraire de ce qu’il annonce…

Que diriez-vous aux gens tentés par le vote RN ?

Le RN a des origines détestables. Méfiez-vous du chat qui dort et nous endort avec lui. Vous pouvez le regretter amèrement, et la France avec vous.