CNBC Daily Open: AI schadenfreude is real

Kirill Kudryavtsev | Afp | Getty Images

This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

What you need to know today

A sea of red
Hong Kong shares led losses in the Asia-Pacific market on Wednesday, with the Hang Seng Index sinking as much 2.7% and on track to clock its lowest close in a month, while China’s CSI300 ended down 0.9%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 ended down 0.3% and Korea’s KOSPI finished 0.1% lower. The downbeat performance in the region follows gains in U.S. stocks on Tuesday after comments from a Federal Reserve official raised hopes the central bank may not raise interest rates further.

RIP Munger
Billionaire Charlie Munger, the investing sage who made a fortune even before he became Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, has died at age 99. Munger’s family said he died peacefully Tuesday morning at a California hospital, according to a press release from Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett credited Munger with broadening his investment strategy from favoring troubled companies at low prices in hopes of getting a profit to focusing on higher-quality but underpriced companies.

Bob the builder
Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger told employees Tuesday during an internal town hall that he was looking forward to “building again” after spending 2023 mending parts of the business that “needed attention.” Iger plans to expand Disney’s theme parks with a $60 billion commitment over the next 10 years, build an ESPN direct-to-consumer platform no later than 2025 and rebuild Disney’s movie studio business, which Iger said has suffered from making too many films.

Apple-Goldman divorce
Apple has proposed that Goldman Sachs end its credit-card and savings account partnership with the tech giant within the next 12 to 15 months, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC’s Leslie Picker. The move, if it were to happen, would effectively end one of the highest profile tie-ups between a bank and a tech company. It would also mean that Apple would need to find a new financial partner for its popular Apple credit card, and its high-yield savings accounts. While Apple offers both its credit card and savings account through the wallet app on iPhones, the banking backend is handled by Goldman Sachs.

[PRO] Defense winners
Many countries have beefed up their defense budgets as geopolitical threats mount in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere in the world. AllianceBernstein has named its overweight-rated stocks to play the theme.

The bottom line

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told reporters Tuesday that AI clients “want outstanding, reliable business solutions, not soap operas.”

Multiple companies told CNBC they’d considered switching from OpenAI to competitors’ services following uncertainty at the company in the aftermath of Sam Altman’s ouster as chief executive and his subsequent quick reinstatement.

Hugging Face is not the only company busy distinguishing itself from OpenAI.

Top executives at Cohere, the Toronto-based large language model (LLM) startup which is valued at more than $2 billion, told investors last week — without naming OpenAI and prior to Altman’s return — that the company’s mission and strategy are “shared fully” by its leadership team, company, enterprise customers and investors.

The core issue is OpenAI’s unique structure where the parent entity is a nonprofit, with a so-called capped-profit company underneath that umbrella. The board represents the nonprofit and oversees the activities of Altman and the rest of the corporate team.

Altman didn’t have a say in the company he helped co-found.

The schadenfreude is real, but so is the intense competition in the burgeoning AI scene. After the chaos earlier this month, changes are surely imminent at OpenAI.

This “soap opera” may well turn out to be the single most important catalyst in bringing about greater reliability at the company that propelled AI into the popular imagination with ChatGPT.

— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this report.