VOLUME 39

Happy Thursday, y’all. Hope everyone is having a wonderful day. In today’s volume of The Pace Report, we have a variety of stories to cover such as the bizarre return of meme stocks this week, OpenAI’s new update (which Elon apparently thinks is cringe), Bumble’s new “AI dating vision” of the future and the notorious “free-speech” social media platform Rumble suing YouTube.

You don’t want to miss this!

— Jacob Pace

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The Return of Meme Stocks

What’s going on? In a bizarre turn of events, legendary meme stocks such as GameStop (GME) and AMC (AMC) had an upswing this week, climbing as much as 70% and 31.98% respectively. However, the gains were short-lived as GameStop's stock reversed some of its gains, ending down about 27%, while AMC also fell by about 1.9% after announcing a debt-for-equity swap. 

This flurry of trading activity was spurred by Keith Gill, also known as Roaring Kitty on X (the originator of the meme stock movement in 2021), who posted a provocative image which you can see here (SFW), reigniting interest in these stocks.

Anyway, if you were in on the joke, I suppose this was a good week for you, but not so good if you were shorting these stocks. According to data from S3 Partners, short sellers of GameStop experienced about $1.24 billion in paper losses. AMC short sellers, meanwhile, incurred approximately $126 million in losses. Now that’s a lot of dough!

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OpenAI Releases New Update… and Elon is Calling it “Cringe-Worthy”

This week, ChatGPT got a fresh coat of paint with the release of GPT-4o, also known as “Omni”. In the latest model, GPT-4o has taken a big step to integrate what they describe as ‘multimodal capabilities’, meaning it can understand and generate responses based on text, images, audio, and video in an almost human-like fashion.

The company released a 26 minute long video which you can watch here, that goes through all the new features. Other than that, OpenAI is alleging that the model is far more responsive than GPT4.

Well, in a typical fashion, Elon Musk had some problems with this that he took to his social media platform, X. Musk responded to a post by author Ashley St. Clair, which sparked a series of comments and memes. He specifically highlighted that the demo's portrayal of AI capabilities seemed “exaggerated” and “overhyped”.

While we all know that Musk has some beef with Sam Altman and OpenAI, this is par for the course given that he has his own GPT competitor, GrokAI.

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Bumble Plans to Introduce ‘AI Dating Concierge’

AI dating concierge? Yes you heard that right. It’s time to give it up, because Bumble CEO Whitney Herd announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit last week that they are preparing to release an "AI dating concierge" feature on their app that will talk to hundreds of other AI dating profiles for you.

I suppose this streamlines a lot of work that would otherwise go into the dating process, but it also takes the spontaneity out. While there is not a release date set for the feature, this seems to be a step further towards a future where humans become obsolete… just kidding.

But seriously, maybe you’re better off just walking up to that guy or girl at the bar at this point.

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Rumble Sues YouTube for Over $1 Billion in Damages

Well, it looks like the mega free speech platform Rumble has just about had enough with YouTube’s antics. In a recent exclusive report from Axios, Rumble is suing video giant YouTube for allegedly manipulating their algorithm to limit the visibility and reach of videos from Rumble on the platform.

Rumble is accusing parent company Google of violating antitrust laws by monopolizing the online video market. Rumble argues that Google's practices have caused significant financial harm and have restricted Rumble's growth and user engagement, to the note of more than $1 billion dollars worth!

Rumble seems to have deep pockets, and so does YouTube, so I’d imagine it’s going to be a while until we see the end of this lawsuit. Plus, this only adds to Rumble’s PR image of being a “anti-censorship” platform, so this could just be a strategic marketing move for all we know…

That’s all we have for you this week, folks! See you next week.

And don’t forget to drink water!