TikTok's Response to Increased Regulatory Pressure 👨‍⚖️

Update 2023-03-06

In today's update:

• TikTok Introduces New Features Amid Growing Pressure from Regulators

• Microsoft Researchers Develop Multimodal AI Model to Enhance World Understanding

• Meta Launches New Features for Facebook Reels

• Meta Announces Price Drop of Quest 2 and PRO Following Poor Sales

• Zoom Fires its President, Greg Tomb

• Snowflake and AWS Expand Partnership, Helping 6,000+ Customers Access Transformational Insights

• Apple Approves BlueMail's ChatGPT Feature Update After Assurances of Content Moderation

• Credit Suisse Offers High-Interest Rates to Combat Capital Outflows, Impacting Alternative Investment Returns

• CapitalG Appoints Laela Sturdy as New Leader

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Big Tech and Startups

TikTok Introduces New Features Amid Growing Pressure from Regulators

TikTok is introducing new features to help teens, families, and its broader community express themselves safely.

• Teen accounts will be defaulted to a 60-minute daily screen time limit, with a passcode required to extend this time.

• Families can set custom daily screen time limits in Family Pairing and view a weekly recap in their inbox notifications.

• Direct messaging and hosting LIVEs on the app are restricted to certain age groups.

• The Sleep Reminder feature enables people to set an alert when it's time to log off.

📝 Cloudly quick take: TikTok is facing increasing pressure with bans, blocks, and probes across Europe and a potential ban in the US. There is also an ongoing debate on the negative aspects of social entertainment apps like TikTok (and all social media), especially for young people. So the new features are a move in the right direction. However, we see the feature introduction more or less a was to try and please regulatory bodies and show that Bytedance (TikTok's parent company) has a good user intention. But it will not change the underlying issue with the China ownership and data leak concerns which, at least what it looks like, will lead to the coming ban of the hugely popular app.

Microsoft Researchers Develop Multimodal AI Model to Enhance World Understanding

Microsoft researchers have developed Kosmos-1, a multimodal large language model (MLLM), to understand the world better. Kosmos-1 can be trained with word-image pairs and large amounts of internet text.

• The model is capable of understanding both images and text, as well as tasks such as writing captions for images and answering questions about images.

• Researchers believe that multimodal AI models could develop a better understanding of the world by learning from different data sources.

• Kosmos-1 outperforms large language models in tasks such as visual reasoning due to modality transferability being used to transfer visual knowledge to language tasks.

• The researchers hope to scale up Kosmos-1 to include more modalities, such as speech in model training.

Meta Launches New Features for Facebook Reels

Meta announced support for longer Facebook Reels, up to 90 seconds, and new creative tools.

• The templates feature allows users to create new Reels with the same structure as the one they watched.

• New Grooves feature syncs motion in the video to the beat of a song.

• Creative features were first released on Instagram before being brought over to Facebook Reels.

• Reel plays across Facebook and Instagram have doubled over last year, and reshares have doubled in the last six months.

• Meta plans to continue rolling out new features for Reels to make it easier for creators to get discovered.

Meta Announces Price Drop of Quest 2 and PRO Following Poor Sales

Meta has announced a significant price drop for the Quest 2 ($429.99) and Quest Pro ($999.99) headsets, beginning March 5 (US/Canada) and March 15 (rest of world).

• The company won't pursue a second Quest Pro headset due to poor reviews and sales, but three more Quest headsets are planned over the next four years, with a Quest 3 set for later this year.

• In addition to headsets, Meta plans to develop AR glasses and a smartwatch in 2025.

• Meta CFO Susan Li said the company remains committed to its investment in Reality Labs but will be subject to efficiency plans from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

• The ultimate goal for Meta is making the metaverse the "future of the internet."

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SaaS and Cloud

Zoom Fires it's President, Greg Tomb

Zoom has fired its president Greg Tomb 'without any cause', shortly after announcing 1,300 layoffs from the company. Tomb had joined Zoom in August 2019 as the Chief Revenue Officer and was promoted to President just eight months later.

Earlier last month, the company's CEO Eric Yuan announced 15% layoffs and 98% salary cut for himself for the coming year. Employees given pink slips were given up to 16 weeks' salary, healthcare coverage, and outplacement services.

Snowflake and AWS Expand Partnership, Helping 6,000+ Customers Access Transformational Insights

Snowflake and AWS have announced an expansion of their partnership with increased investments in sales and marketing, industry solutions, and product integrations. The partnership has enabled Fortune 500 organizations like Goldman Sachs to leverage the two companies' offerings for their cloud infrastructure, data platform, and built-in governance.

Snowflake and AWS are now helping over 6,000 joint customers take advantage of Their combined capabilities to generate transformational insights quickly and easily.

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AI

Apple Approves BlueMail's ChatGPT Feature Update After Assurances of Content Moderation

Apple Inc. has now approved the earlier rejected BlueMail's app CharGPT feature update, following assurances from its developer that it features content moderation.

• The app is still available for users aged 4 and older.

• The news of Apple’s initial rejection of BlueMail’s ChatGPT feature highlighted the growing concerns around new uses of language-generating AI tools.

• ChatGPT allows users to converse with an AI that appears humanlike, but early testing has shown the AI producing incorrect information as well as strange and sometimes hostile responses.

• Apple has long maintained that it has to curate and review each app that goes through its App Store in order to keep its products safe for users.

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Funding, M&A & Venture Capital

Credit Suisse Offers High-Interest Rates to Combat Capital Outflows, Impacting Alternative Investment Returns

According to the financial times, annual deposit rates from leading financial institutions have reached 5-6.5%. Credit Suisse is offering the highest rates to battle capital outflows.

📝 Cloudly quick take: Why does this matter? When larger institutions make investments or capital allocation decisions, they look at alternative annual returns that are less risky. For example, having deposits at Credit Suisse is not assumed to be risk-free (like US government papers); however, it is deemed at very low risk. That they now offer high rates as 6.5% leads to higher return hurdles for risker assets like startups, growth companies, etc. As then investors assume a higher Cost of Capital, the valuations of growth assets decline (as higher rates discount future cashflows more).

CapitalG Appoints Laela Sturdy as New Leader

CapitalG, Alphabet's growth stage venture arm, has named Laela Sturdy its new leader, replacing David Lawee, who had been with the firm for ten years.

• Sturdy will be one of the few female partners in leadership positions in the industry.

• While similar to other growth-stage firms, CapitalG only has one limited partner as an investor - Alphabet.

• Sturdy has invested in +10 companies that have held a valued at more than $1 billion at some point in the last two years, including UiPath.

• Sturdy joined Google in 2007 where she led Google's emerging businesses and was highly recognized by colleagues for her work