MBI Daily Dose (July 02, 2025)
Companies mentioned in today's Daily Dose: Amazon, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Figma vs Adobe
WSJ had an interesting piece yesterday on how Amazon has scaled its robotic efforts over the years:
"The e-commerce giant, which has spent years automating tasks previously done by humans in its facilities, has deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, Amazon said. That is the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities.
Now some 75% of Amazon’s global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics, the company said. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity, while easing pressure on the company to solve problems such as heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.
The average number of employees Amazon had per facility last year, roughly 670, was the lowest recorded in the past 16 years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, which compared the company’s reported workforce with estimates of its facility count.
The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175, the analysis found, an indication of the company’s productivity gains."
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Perhaps micropayments do have a future. From TechCrunch:
"Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between website owners and AI companies — ideally giving publishers greater control over their content.
It’s called Pay per Crawl, and Cloudflare is launching the “experiment” in private beta on Tuesday. Website owners in the experiment can choose to let AI crawlers, on an individual basis, scrape their site at a set rate — a micropayment for every single “crawl.
This June, Cloudflare says it found that Google’s crawler scraped its websites 14 times for every referral it gave them. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s crawler scraped websites 17,000 times for every one referral, while Anthropic scraped websites 73,000 times for every referral."
Another day...another mindboggling progress in AI. From Microsoft AI:
"The Microsoft AI team shares research that demonstrates how AI can sequentially investigate and solve medicine’s most complex diagnostic challenges—cases that expert physicians struggle to answer.
Benchmarked against real-world case records published each week in the New England Journal of Medicine, we show that the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO) correctly diagnoses up to 85% of NEJM (The New England Journal of Medicine) case proceedings, a rate more than four times higher than a group of experienced physicians. MAI-DxO also gets to the correct diagnosis more cost-effectively than physicians.
Across Microsoft’s AI consumer products like Bing and Copilot, we see over 50 million health-related sessions every day.
MAI-DxO boosted the diagnostic performance of every model we tested. The best performing setup was MAI-DxO paired with OpenAI’s o3, which correctly solved 85.5% of the NEJM benchmark cases. For comparison, we also evaluated 21 practicing physicians from the US and UK, each with 5-20 years of clinical experience. On the same tasks, these experts achieved a mean accuracy of 20% across completed cases.
Importantly, we found that MAI-DxO delivered both higher diagnostic accuracy and lower overall testing costs than physicians or any individual foundation model tested."
We now have Figma S-1, so we can compare and contrast with Adobe's Creative Cloud business. I hope Canva comes to IPO soon so that I can track the competitive dynamics much more closely.
Current Portfolio:
Please note that these are NOT my recommendation to buy/sell these securities, but just disclosure from my end so that you can assess potential biases that I may have because of my own personal portfolio holdings. Always consider my write-up my personal investing journal and never forget my objectives, risk tolerance, and constraints may have no resemblance to yours.