Good Monday and happy morning. Welcome to TheStreet’s daily tech roundup.
In case you haven’t seen clips of folks wearing headsets in odd situations, the Apple Vision Pro has officially been released, and Wedbush’s Dan Ives thinks this is “just the start” for Apple’s big push into virtual reality and spatial computing.
Deepfakes, meanwhile, are becoming more prolific — signifying, in the words of artificial intelligence expert Gary Marcus, the arrival of “‘Black Mirror,’ ahead of schedule” — and OpenAI’s latest research paper regarding the biological threat of AI is, in Marcus’ words, “deeply worrisome.”
And the billionaire tech magnate Elon Musk has been accused — again — of using illegal drugs.
Related: Deepfake porn: It’s not just about Taylor Swift
Tech earnings season continues this week, with Palantir (PLTR) – Get Free Report reporting Monday, Spotify (SPOT) – Get Free Report and Snap (SNAP) – Get Free Report reporting Tuesday, Disney (DIS) – Get Free Report, Uber (UBER) – Get Free Report and Roblox (RBLX) – Get Free Report reporting Wednesday and Cloudflare (NET) – Get Free Report up on Thursday.
Tickers we’re watching today: Apple (AAPL) – Get Free Report, Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report and Microsoft (MSFT) – Get Free Report.
Let’s get into it.
Related: Stock Market Today: Stocks slide, bond yields leap as Fed rate-cut bets fade
Ives: The Apple Vision Pro is a ‘game changer’
Apple’s (AAPL) – Get Free Report long-awaited Vision Pro headset officially went on sale Friday, spawning such videos as this one, where a man is driving his Tesla Cybertruck while clad in the techno goggles.
Ives called the headset a “potential game changer” over the coming years, especially considering Apple’s ecosystem of 2.2 billion active iOS devices around the world.
Though he acknowledged that at its current price — $3,500 — the Vision Pro is inaccessible to most, he added that he was “surprised at the early mass market appeal” of the device.
Wedbush believes Apple will sell 600,000 Vision Pro units in 2024 (earning revenue of about $2.1 billion).
Reiterating that his expectation for the future of the device involves consecutively lower price ranges (and smaller designs that better resemble sunglasses than they do space goggles), Ives said that Apple will exceed one million Vision Pro sales in 2025.
“While many on the Street are dismissing Vision Pro as noise, we strongly disagree and believe its the first step towards a much broader technology vision that (CEO Tim Cook) & Co. plan to push to its installed base over the coming years,” Ives wrote, reiterating his outperform rating and $250 price target on the stock.
The average price target for Apple is $205, according to TipRanks. Ives is the most bullish Apple investor on the Street at $250.
Related: Analyst who correctly warned Tesla stock could fall unveils new target
Marcus: ‘Black Mirror is here, ahead of schedule’
Concerns about AI-generated deepfakes have been mounting recently; deepfake robocalls of President Joe Biden were reported ahead of the New Hampshire primary, and Taylor Swift was a recent victim of AI-generated deepfake porn.
On Sunday, a finance worker at a firm in Hong Kong became the latest to fall victim to AI-generated deepfakes, paying $25 million to fraudsters who, according to CNN, used deepfake technology to resemble the company’s chief financial officer in a video call.
Despite the worker’s initial suspicion regarding the request, he proceeded with the transaction because the people in the video call looked and sounded like known company colleagues.
“‘Black Mirror’ has arrived, ahead of schedule,” Marcus wrote in response to the report.
“In the end, I am reminded of the economist’s term negative externalities,” he added. “In the old days, factories generated pollution and expected everyone else to deal with the consequences. Now it’s AI developers who are expecting to do what they do scot-free, while society picks up the tab.”
Related: How one tech company is tackling the recent proliferation of deepfake fraud
The Tesla roundup
Turning to Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report, the Wall Street Journal published another piece detailing Musk’s alleged drug use, a follow-up to the Journal’s similarly-themed January article that both Musk and his attorney refuted.
According to the report, Musk’s drug use resulted in former Tesla board member and Oracle founder Larry Ellison urging Musk to come to his Hawaiian island to “dry out.” Friends and people close to Musk allegedly asked him to go to rehab.
Musk responded to these allegations in a post on X, saying that “no one has ever mentioned rehab” to him.
“Second, if they are saying that I was able to lead Tesla to be by far the most valuable carmaker and SpaceX to be by far the most valuable space company *simultaneously*, that is the greatest compliment I have ever received!” he added.
This comes in the wake of a Delaware judge’s decision to strike down Musk’s nearly $56 billion compensation package; the judge called the process for approving the package “deeply flawed,” citing Musk’s “extensive ties” with some of the directors who approved it.
The Journal’s report alleges that several Tesla directors have consumed drugs with Musk.
Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest, meanwhile released a lengthy thread on X defending Tesla’s compensation package for Musk and calling the Delaware court’s decision “un-American, an assault on investor rights and an insult to the board of Directors of one of the most stunningly successful companies in U.S. history.”
Related: Analyst reveals new Tesla price target with focus on undervalued business unit
OpenAI’s latest report ‘deeply worrisome’
Last week, OpenAI released the results of a study with the goal of determining whether AI could aid bad actors in developing bioweapons, a concern shared by the U.K.’s House of Lords and the White House.
Though the results found that access to GPT-4 “may increase experts’ ability to access information about biological threats,” OpenAI said that the results are unclear and more research must be done in this area.
In analyzing the paper, however, Marcus found much more decisive areas of concern.
The study involved 100 participants, half of which were experts in biology and half of which were students who had taken college-level biology. The group was then split randomly into two sections, one with access to unrestricted GPT-4 and the internet and one with access only to the internet.
The results found that in nearly every test, both students and experts were more accurate with AI than without. OpenAI dismissed this in a footnote as statistically insignificant, a move that Marcus called the result of misanalyzing the data.
“Crucially, if even one malicious expert gets over the hump and creates a deadly pathogen; that’s huge,” Marcus said. “The results make it look like that sort of thing might be possible.”
He added that even if GPT-4 isn’t quite good enough to assist any expert in the creation of a bioweapon, that is no confirmation that the next iteration of the model — GPT-5 — won’t be good enough to accomplish that exact scenario.
The paper was not peer-reviewed.
“If an LLM (Large Language Model) equips even one team of lunatics with the ability to build, weaponize and distribute even one pathogen as deadly as Covid-19, it will be a really, really big deal,” Marcus said.
Contact Ian with AI stories via email, [email protected], or Signal 732-804-1223.
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Maria Malik is your guide to the immersive world of Virtual Reality (VR). With a passion for VR technology, she explores the latest VR headsets, applications, and experiences, providing readers with in-depth reviews, industry insights, and a glimpse into the future of virtual experiences.
