Dear reader,
Welcome to a new edition of the Tech Update - today for the first time with an analysis from our new columnist Katharina Wilhelm, partner at the renowned VC fund Index.
You can also look forward to exciting research again - please subscribe to us here if you haven't already done so!
These are our top topics
this week
:
What Germany's biggest AI hope
Aleph Alpha
is good for
How the business elite
is preparing their children for the
AI age
Why the time of
cockroach start-ups
has arrived
What's behind Habeck and Lindner's
supposedly worth 1.75 billion
start-up package
Exclusive research: What good is the German AI hope Aleph Alpha?
Jonas Andrulis
(41) has become a kind of savior figure for AI in this country. His start-up
Aleph Alpha
, which recently received almost half a billion euros from investors, is intended to defend nothing less than European sovereignty. But the Heidelberg company is in danger of being left behind by global competition. My colleague Mirjam Hecking researched what Germany's biggest AI hope can really do.
Heads: Kenza Ait Si Abbou ++ Magdalena Oehl ++ Elon Musk ++ Sepp Hochreiter ++ Faye Iosotaluno ++ Adam Neumann
How are the business elite preparing their children for the AI age? The AI manager
Kenza Ait Si Abbou
(42, ex-IBM, now CTO at logistics company Fiege) wrote her own children's book about it. Her message to the next generation: AI is “not magic, but craftsmanship”.
Elon Musk
(52), on the other hand, quickly founded his own school for his officially eight children. Managers like SAP board member
Thomas Saueressig
(38) or entrepreneur
Magdalena Oehl
(39) rely on simpler rules.
Many years ago , the renowned researcher
Sepp Hochreiter
(58) designed an algorithm that today serves as the basis for numerous AI applications. Now he wants to know it again and is starting his own company,
NXAI
- as a counterpart to US giants like Google or OpenAI.
Last week we reported here that a US judge declared
Elon Musk's
(52) billion-dollar salary at Tesla null and void. This week we introduce the woman behind this decision:
Kathaleen McCormick
(44) from Delaware - the judge who showed Elon Musk his limits.
Faye Iosotaluno
(44) has made it to the top of the dating app giant
Tinder
. Right at the beginning of her term in office, the CEO is under enormous pressure because the activist investor
Paul Singer
(79) is launching an attack.
And
Adam Neumann
(44) also tries to attack again. He wants to buy back the company he founded,
WeWork
, from which he left without honor and which filed for bankruptcy in November. However, the discussions are still not very concrete.
Column: The time of cockroach start-ups
Waves of layoffs and bankruptcies are creating a gloomy mood in the start-up industry. Our columnist, investor
Katharina Wilhelm,
takes a look back at the last major crisis. And predicts: The best digital companies are currently emerging.
Round-up: Disney ++ Epic Games ++ Temu ++ Bluesky ++ X ++ Snap ++ Audeering ++ Google
Disney
boss
Bob Iger
(72) joins
Epic Games
, the game developer behind “Fortnite,” with $1.5 billion
a. Together they want to create a “Disney universe”. And we thought the Metaverse hype would have been replaced by ChatGPT at the latest?
On the other hand, the Chinese online marketplace
Temu,
which is riding a wave of success with cheap offers in Germany, is certainly trendy. Now trade associations are calling for stricter action against the low-cost provider.
After a year in the restricted beta phase, the Bluesky
social network has been
available to everyone since this week. The number of unique users jumped from almost 400,000 to over two million within three days. The Twitter (X) alternative was started by none other than Twitter founder
Jack Dorsey
(47, now on the Bluesky supervisory board) himself.
The parent company of the photo app Snapchat is recording slight sales growth, but is still making a loss.
Snap
CEO
Evan Spiegel
(33) is countering this with drastic cost-cutting measures and wants to lay off employees again. Shareholders are losing patience.
Start-ups like
Audeering
promise that they can detect diseases through voice analysis with artificial intelligence. Researcher
Holger Fröhlich
(48) from the Fraunhofer Institute explains why it doesn't work that easily - and why the technology could still work more objectively than doctors.
Google
gives its AI chatbot a new name: Gemini replaces Bard.
Number of the week: 1.75 billion euros
Economics Minister Robert Habeck
(54) and Finance Minister
Christian
Lindner
(45)
announced in a popular selfie
additional capital for start-up funding. Important to know: It's not new money. 1.6 billion of these come from the 10 billion growth fund announced in 2021. 150 million euros of this come from another special fund.
Skilling me Softly: Dismissed by the AI
What AI can companies outsource and what not? The two researchers
Gizem Yalcin Williams
and
Stefano Puntoni
have looked into this question and come to some surprising findings. They recommend that it is best to handle layoffs using AI – “even if that may contradict usual management thinking”.
Interview of the week: “Even bloodier”
The computer science professor
Wolfgang Koch
(61) works with the Bundeswehr and the arms industry, among others. Koch said in an interview with my colleague Kirsten Bialdiga that he had long hoped that AI in armaments would help prevent suffering. He now believes: “In the end it will probably be even bloodier. “
Error 404 – that was missing: Tired Musk groupie
There are probably few Elon Musk fans in Germany as big as
Frank Thelen
(48), who once said that “the people” see him as a “German version of Elon Musk.” Oh well. But recently Tesla really crashed on the stock market and Thelen's 10xDNA fund was also sold: Since the end of May 2023, Thelen has sold around 51 percent of Tesla shares. But don't misunderstand: According to the spokeswoman, Thelen remains "convinced" of Tesla's "long-term potential". Sounds, um, convincing?
And that's it for this week's tech update, we'll read it again next Friday.
But I still have one question for you:
How do you handle AI education with your children? Write us
! We also welcome any questions, comments or criticism: tech-update@manager-magazin.de.
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Many greetings
Sarah Heuberger