Ford slashes Mach-E prices

Plus: OpenAI on hiring spree

January 31, 2023

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Good Morning. Earning season is upon us and it hasn’t been good so far. All eyes are on performance of Ad-industry with Meta, Apple and Alphabet (Google) earnings reports this week.

In today's edition:

  1. Ford slashes EV prices by 8%

  2. OpenAI’s hiring spree

Today's reading time is 3 minutes.

Main Thing

Ford slashes EV prices by 8%

Tesla’s price cut is made it tough for other EVs to compete

What: Ford is slashing prices of its electric Mustang Mach-e by up to 8% or about $4.5K on average.

Tesla recently reduced its prices by almost 20%, resulting in Ford’s Mach-e being more significantly more expensive than Model Y.

Key points:

  1. Ford is selling the lower end models at a loss to remain competitive with Tesla.

  2. The price cut makes more models eligible for federal tax credits worth $7,500 (available for EVs below $55,000)

Take away: Tesla's real strength is its higher operating margin - meaning it can earn a profit per unit even after price cuts. But for other auto-makes, EVs are mostly a net loss as they try to ramp up production and source batteries.

Big Picture

Slowdown in chip industry - Samsung's profit fell by 69% in Q4 after a major slowdown in semiconductor industry. Last week Intel reported 32% decline in revenue as well.

OpenAI on hiring spree: The company hired more than 1,000 contractors, with 40% of them working to build training data for OpenAI's models to learn software engineering tasks. The ChatGPT already made significant progress with coding problems but a dedicated product could be a game changer for software development

Just Launched

  • AutoMerge 2.0: Newer version of AutoMerge to develop local-first applications using CRDT (conflict-free replicated data type) with better performance and reliability.

  • Dyte: SDK to build fully custom live video collaboration within minutes.

  • GetGud: AI tool to detect toxic players like cheaters and griefers in online FPS games.

  • LittleCook: App tell you what dishes to cook with leftover ingredients.

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