AI: To Accelerate or Slow Down? Revolut Takes on Extortionists; Luxury Is Becoming More Affordable

The main topic of the past week was, without a doubt, the debate among tech giants over the need to slow down the development of artificial intelligence. This week, the discussion, which was initiated earlier by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and supported by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, literally all the luminaries of the AI industry joined in.

For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described dangerous scenarios for the development of AI and inadvertently caused the Nasdaq Composite to plummet. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s long-time CEO Jensen Huang have thrown themselves into the fray. Both spoke out against slowing down AI development and stated that free competition is the best safety mechanism in this field.

Donald Trump didn't stay on the sidelines either. The U.S. president criticized AI pessimists and called for maintaining the country's leadership in AI in light of the technological race with China. Official Beijing also condemned the fearmongering surrounding AI.

It was a turbulent day on Wall Street: major stock indices and shares of AI-related companies were falling. Analysts urged investors not to panic, but the general sense of unease affected their forecasts and expectations. For example, Wells Fargo lowered its year-end target for the S&P 500. And Citigroup warned of increased risks associated with investing in U.S. stocks.

Here at Oninvest, we didn’t just sit back and watch these debates and the market’s reaction. Albert Fakhrutdinov has compiled all the opinions of leading AI gurus on the AI slowdown, and Venera Sayfutdinova has identified potential beneficiaries of the situation.

Vadim Novikov, an advisor to the president of Almaty Management University (AlmaU) Vadim Novikov wrote a column for Oninvest discussing whether the leaders of the AI race will be able to agree on creating an organization similar to OPEC that would oversee the development of AI and ensure compliance with uniform rules.

Two companies were vying for the title of top newsmaker this week. The first was Revolut. Europe’s largest neobank applied for a banking license in Switzerland and, for the first time, revealed its preferred markets for a future IPO. But most importantly, details emerged this week about a massive leak of its customers’ personal data. The hackers who claimed responsibility for the attack even publicly demanded a ransom from the bank, threatening to sell the data to other cybercriminals.

Mikhail Tegin spoke with Mark Beranzoni, a financial crime prevention expert and founder of the FinCrime Agent platform, about the vulnerabilities in the banking sector’s digital transformation that this data breach exposed, and I asked Revolut what actually happened and what customers should do. Read our joint article for more details.

The second company at the center of all the excitement was LVMH, the epitome of luxury. First, it dropped out of the top 10 most valuable companies in Europe. Second, it reached an agreement with the heirs of Hermès to purchase their shares.

In her column for Oninvest, Alena Nikolaeva, an independent portfolio manager specializing in global markets, used LVMH as an example to discuss the main challenges facing the luxury sector and the companies that will be the first to feel the impact.

If you're tired of all the drama, you might want to check out two other articles that came out this week. Daniil Zhelobanov explains why Bank of America analysts called the CIS “almost a safe haven.”

And reporter Mikhail Tegin uncovered the details behind the creation of the Nordic Stock Exchange, which will bring together the stock exchanges of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor