Artificial Intelligence

Amazon exceeded high expectations from the tech community with a slew of new hardware announcements: the Echo device lineup extended to earbuds, eyeglasses, and a ring. Here are our takeaways along with some data that sheds light on the voice…

We love companies that leverage disruptive technologies to solve real customer challenges. The Pharma industry faces many challenges, many of which stem from the cost of drugs. They’re an easy target for politicians and an under-insured public. To the extent…

We recently asked the leading digital assistants, Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa, 800 questions each. Google Assistant was able to correctly answer 93% of them vs. Siri at 83% and Alexa at 80%. Each platform saw improvements across the board…

As anyone who holds at least one ear to the neurotechnology world undoubtedly knows, Elon took the stage on Tuesday night at the California Academy of Sciences to deliver an Elonian exposé on Neuralink’s progress over the last two years.…

A year ago, we announced our investment in Bumblebee Spaces, a company that is creating a new way to live by unlocking the third dimension in your living space. Bumblebee hopes to alleviate escalating housing costs and rapid urbanization by…

WWDC and Google I/O set the direction for developers for the upcoming year and give insight to the trends Apple and Google are actively moving forward. The developer conference keynotes are the newsmakers but are only one event in a…

We’re updating our estimates for stand-alone smart speakers and tuning our model based on more historical sales figures. Bottom line: this market remains in high growth mode. We estimate more than one-third of all US households will have a smart…

Apple is in talks to acqui-hire the team of a well-known self-driving vehicle startup, Drive.ai, according to The Information. The company has raised $77M and was last valued around $200M. In our view, Apple is not after brand or even…

Apple begins its annual developer conference on Monday. We think that most of the headlines around the announcements are widely known, so we’re preemptively shifting from “preview” mode to “take away” mode. History suggests investor disappointment will follow the event…

Google shares traded off ~7% in after-hours trading after reporting soft top-line results and expectations for continued FX headwinds. Separately, deceleration of paid clicks growth from 66% to 39% is likely viewed as a directional negative, given the preference toward…

This piece marks the first in a quarterly series to track the progress of frontier tech, as measured by the Loup Frontier Tech Index. The index tracks the performance of publicly-traded companies that influence the future of technology including AI,…

AT&T recently rolled out a limited 5G Evolution (5GE) network in Minneapolis in combination with its sponsorship of the Final Four. We tested the network and found only modest improvements in network speeds. Given AT&T’s 5GE marketing hype, we’re disappointed…