Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during an event at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Feb. 7, 2023.
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Microsoft said Thursday that it’s dispensing with the waiting list it has had in place for the past three months for its revamped Bing search engine, allowing anyone with a Microsoft account to use it. The new Bing, revealed in February, features a chatbot smartened up with the GPT-4 artificial intelligence model from OpenAI that’s similar to the startup’s viral ChatGPT bot.
Google remains the leader in search advertising. Microsoft wants to become a more formidable challenger after introducing Bing in 2009, with help from OpenAI. Microsoft has said that for every percentage point of share it gains in the highly profitable search category, its revenue will increase by $2 billion.
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With its appearance in late November, ChatGPT has sparked a wave of interest in generative AI technologies that create text, images and other content in response to human input. Microsoft provides cloud services for ChatGPT and offers GPT-4 to businesses looking to draw on generative AI.
In addition to augmenting Bing with the GPT-4, Microsoft has announced plans to incorporate the AI model into its Microsoft 365 productivity software and bring out a chatbot for security practitioners, among other products. Google, for its part, is working to add generative AI to its search engine, and it has a language model rivaling GPT-4 that developers have begun using.
“We have really good, positive signal from the time we launched,” Divya Kumar, global head of marketing for search and AI at Microsoft, told CNBC in an interview. Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Bing had crossed 100 million daily active users.
But while Bing has taken share of consumer web searches, it has not won share of search revenue in the nearly three months since Microsoft introduced the new version during a press event on its Redmond, Washington, campus, Bernstein analysts led by Mark Shmulik wrote in a Wednesday note to clients.
“At its heights Bing hit #4 on the US iOS App download rank in early February,” the Bernstein analysts wrote, citing Apptopia data. “Following the launch of the new Bing, Bing’s total app download volume has increased by 4x. However, Bing download momentum declined throughout March and April.” Bernstein has the equivalent of buy ratings on Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft shares.
Now, Microsoft is bulking up Bing with more capabilities in addition to broadening access.
Microsoft is adding a way to get back to previous chat conversations, which ChatGPT has offered for months. It will provide a way to export chats to Microsoft Word documents. It also will start showing images and other media in chat messages when appropriate.
And over time, Bing will add integrations to third-party services such as OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha, enabling people to view and take action on current information when talking with the chatbot. OpenAI announced a similar concept called plug-ins for ChatGPT in March, but those wishing to try them must first join a waiting list.
Kumar said the company will provide more details on how developers can build for the Bing chatbot at its Microsoft Build developer conference, which starts on May 23.
People still must go through Microsoft’s Edge web browser on PCs or the Bing app on mobile devices in order to use the new Bing, including its chatbot. That means Google has yet to allow people to use the Bing chatbot from Google’s dominant Chrome browser. “We’re still early in the journey and were still learning,” Kumar said.
Edge has increased its share of the web browsing market every quarter for the past two years, Yusuf Mehdi, consumer marketing chief, wrote in a blog post. Microsoft includes Edge in its Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems, and the default search engine in Edge is Bing.
Microsoft is updating Edge so that when people open a result that appears during a Bing chat, the chat will move to a sidebar in Edge in order to keep the conversation going, Mehdi wrote.
Anne Wojcicki attends the WSJ Magazine Style & Tech Dinner in Atherton, California, on March 15, 2023.
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23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki and New Mountain Capital have submitted a proposal to take the embattled genetic testing company private, according to a Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Wojcicki and New Mountain have offered to acquire all of 23andMe’s outstanding shares in cash for $2.53 per share, or an equity value of approximately $74.7 million. The company’s stock closed at $2.42 on Friday with a market cap of about $65 million.
The offer comes after a turbulent year for 23andMe, with the stock losing more than 80% of its value in 2024. In January, the company announced plans to explore strategic alternatives, which could include a sale of the company or its assets, a restructuring or a business combination.
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23andMe has a special committee of independent directors in place to evaluate potential paths forward. The company appointed three new independent directors to its board in October after all seven of its previous directors abruptly resigned the prior month. The special committee has to approve Wojcicki and New Mountain’s proposal.
“We believe that our Proposal provides compelling value and immediate liquidity to the Company’s public stockholders,” Wojcicki and Matthew Holt, managing director and president of private equity at New Mountain, wrote in a letter to the special committee on Thursday.
Wojcicki previously submitted a proposal to take the company private for 40 cents per share in July, but it was rejected by the special committee, in part because the members said it lacked committed financing and did not provide a premium to the closing price at the time.
Wojcicki and New Mountain are willing to provide secured debt financing to fund 23andMe’s operations through the transaction’s closing, the filing said. New Mountain is based in New York and has $55 billion of assets under management, according to its website.
Shares of Hims & Hers Health tumbled more than 23% on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the shortage of semaglutide injection products has been resolved.
Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy and diabetes treatment Ozempic. Those medications are part of a class of drugs called GLP-1s, and demand for the treatments has exploded in recent years. As a result, digital health companies such as Hims & Hers have been prescribing compounded semaglutide as an alternative for patients who are navigating volatile supply hurdles and insurance obstacles.
Compounded drugs are custom-made alternatives to brand-name drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs, and compounders are allowed to produce them when brand-name treatments are in shortage. The FDA doesn’t review the safety and efficacy of compounded products.
Hims & Hers began offering compounded semaglutide to patients in May, and it owns compounding pharmacies that produce the medications.
Compounded medications are typically much cheaper than their branded counterparts. Hims & Hers sells compounded semaglutide for less than $200 per month, while Ozempic and Wegovy both cost around $1,000 per month without insurance.
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The FDA said Friday that it will start taking action against compounders for violations in the next 60 to 90 days, depending on the type of facility, in order to “avoid unnecessary disruption to patient treatment.”
“Now that the FDA has determined the drug shortage for semaglutide has been resolved, we will continue to offer access to personalized treatments as allowed by law to meet patient needs,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum posted Friday on X. “We’re also closely monitoring potential future shortages, as Novo Nordisk stated two weeks ago that it would continue to have ‘capacity limitations’ and ‘expected continued periodic supply constraints and related drug shortage notifications.'”
Him & Hers’ weight loss offerings have been a massive hit with investors. Shares of the company climbed more than 200% last year, and the stock is already up more than 100% this year despite Friday’s move.
Even before it added compounded GLP-1s to its portfolio, the company said in its 2023 fourth-quarter earnings call that it expects its weight loss program to bring in more than $100 million in revenue by the end of 2025.
Despite the turbulent regulatory landscape, Hims & Hers has showed no signs of slowing down.
On Friday, the company announced it has acquired a U.S.-based peptide facility that will “further verticalize the company’s long-term ability to deliver personalized medications.” Hims & Hers will explore advances across metabolic optimization, recovery science, biological resistances, cognitive performance and preventative health through the acquisition, the company said.
That move comes just days after Hims & Hers also bought Trybe Labs, the New Jersey-based at-home lab testing facility. Trybe Labs will allow Hims & Hers to perform at-home blood draws and more comprehensive pretreatment testing.
Hims & Hers did not disclose the terms of either deal.
Tesla models Y and 3 are displayed at a Tesla dealership in Corte Madera, California, on Dec. 20, 2024.
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Tesla is voluntarily recalling 376,241vehicles in the U.S. to correct an issue with failing power-assisted steering systems, according to records posted to the website of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
In a safety recall report posted on the NHTSA website, Tesla said the recall includes Model 3 and Model Y vehicles that were manufactured for sale in the U.S. from Feb. 28, 2023, to October 11, 2023, and that were equipped with a certain older software release.
The records said printed circuit boards in the steering systems in affected vehicles could become overstressed, causing the power-assist steering to fail in some cases when a Tesla vehicle rolled to a stop and then accelerated.
When electronic power-assist steering systems fail in a Tesla, drivers need to exert more force to steer their cars, which can increase the risk of a collision.
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Tesla told the vehicle safety regulator that it was not aware of any crashes, injuries or deaths related to the power steering failures, and that it was offering an over-the-air software update as a remedy.
The recall follows an earlier related probe and voluntary recall in China concerning the same systems.
President Donald Trump has appointed Tesla CEO Elon Musk to lead a team that is slashing the federal government workforce, and in some cases, regulations and entire agencies. Those cuts already affected the NHTSA, an agency Musk has long seen as standing in the way of some of his ambitions at Tesla.
The regulator has been engaged in a yearslong investigation into safety defects in the systems that Tesla markets currently as its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) options. The features do not make Tesla cars into robotaxis. They require a human driver ready to steer or brake at any time.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Musk’s team has led mass firings at the NHTSA, reducing the agency’s workforce and capacity to investigate companies including Tesla by about 10%.