BYD vs. Tesla: China's EV giant is charging ahead

8/3/23 8:00PM

BYD time

‍For Chinese manufacturing giant BYD, it seems like the only way is up at the moment — the automaker has just posted its third consecutive month of record-breaking EV sales and climbed 224 positions on this year’s Fortune Global 500.

While its 212th placement on Fortune’s list will undoubtedly be the first time that some in the West will have come across BYD, the company has quietly become one of the two major players in the electric vehicle game and is pulling away from its more brazen US counterpart, Tesla.

‍Supercharged growth

‍BYD’s growth in recent years has seen the company overtake huge brands at both national and international levels — in May, we charted the company’s 2-year journey from being China’s 5th biggest automaker to the top spot with a 10.4% market share. Although comparisons with Tesla aren’t exact — Musk’s company deals exclusively in battery electric vehicles (BEVs), while BYD makes plug-in hybrids too — a similarly speedy ascent has played out in the global EV market.

In 2020, Tesla finished the year with just under 500,000 deliveries, more than double BYD’s figure of ~188,000, but, just 2 years later, the tables had firmly turned. By the end of 2022, the Chinese automaker saw its net income soar 446% as it cemented its position at the top of the EV market, selling nearly 1.9 million models compared to Tesla’s 1.3 million tally.

Tom Jones & Millie Giles3h

ChatGPT hit 1 billion users nearly twice as fast as TikTok did

It took Facebook and Instagram around eight years; it took YouTube just over six; even TikTok, which at the time felt like it was a global sensation almost as soon as it arrived, took more than half a decade.

Now, though, the mobile version of ChatGPT has positively left the biggest platforms (and all of your other favorite apps) in the dust, hitting 1 billion monthly active users in just three years, per new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, as more users turn to OpenAI’s chatbot each month.

ChatGPT 1 billion users chart — Sherwood News

While rival Anthropic might be pulling ahead in terms of annualized recurring revenue, enterprise customer adoption, and valuation, the app version of Claude, a market-leading chatbot on several counts, has clocked only 56 million monthly active users in the quarter to date.

In fact, according to Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, ChatGPT’s monthly active user count for the quarter to date outweighs the figures for Claude, Gemini (472 million), Doubao (106 million), Dola (78 million), DeepSeek (68 million), Meta AI (61 million), Grok (50 million), Perplexity (44 million), and Copilot (31 million)... combined.

ChatGPT made a pretty big splash in the tech world when it landed toward the end of 2022, but there’s no question that the mobile versions — which launched on iOS in May 2023, then on Android a couple months later — helped to catapult the chatbot into the mainstream proper.

Jon Keegan

Final Boss

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AI-xecutive

Rani Molla5h

Amazon unveils a new warehouse robot that takes verbal commands

There are fewer humans working in Amazon warehouses these days, but those that are still there can at least talk to robots.

At its Delivering the Future event in London, the e-commerce giant unveiled the next generation of Proteus, its autonomous warehouse robot. Instead of requiring complex coding, workers can now give the machine verbal instructions in plain language, like telling it to haul a heavy cart across the floor.

While Amazon’s older generations of warehouse robots were restricted to fenced-off loading docks, Proteus is a fully untethered model that uses AI to safely navigate the entire fulfillment floor alongside human staff. The new robot is the centerpiece of a massive €10 billion ($11.6 billion) investment to modernize Amazon’s European logistics network and is currently being piloted in company labs before a planned rollout in early 2027.

Amazon unveils next-gen Proteus robot as part of €10 billion European investment in its fulfillment network

Rani Molla6h

Meta has repeatedly delayed developer access to its new AI model, Muse Spark

Meta has repeatedly delayed the release of developer access to Muse Spark, its newest AI model, according to The Wall Street Journal. While the model launched in April and powers Meta’s AI products, developers outside the company have been kept waiting for access to the API.

That’s a glaring bottleneck for a company spending up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year: without an API, Meta can’t easily sell access to the model, ceding a lucrative monetization engine to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Meta told The Wall Street Journal that API access would be available this month.