Self Created Valuation Boosts

Apple Announces new Podcast push

AI – A breakdown

Playing them like a fiddle – Warner Brothers

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Warm-Up
- A NEW CTP just announced
- China releasing new AI models
- AI - A breakdown - we are on overload
- Big Employment news....

Markets
- Self Created Valuation Boosts
- Apple Announces new Podcast push
- Playing them like a fiddle - Warner Brothers

Quick Note - Going to rip up the playbook on something this week on TDI Podcast. Anyone who owns an annuity should listen to what is about to come on next Sundays show.....

No Agenda...

Olympics - Anything to discuss?

MONEY FOR ALL
- The average tax refund is 10.9% higher so far this season, compared to about the same point in 2025, according to early filing data from the IRS.
- The 2026 tax season opened Jan. 26, and the average refund amount was $2,290 as of Feb. 6, up from $2,065 about one year prior, the IRS reported Friday night.
- As of Feb. 6, the total amount refunded was more than $16.9 billion, up 1.9% compared to last year, according to the IRS release. That figure reflects current-year returns only.
- This is partly because there were excess-witholdings from last year on the rules changed and paycheck withholdings were not adjusted. This is a one time situation..

Emplyment
- 4.3%
- "Better" than expected payrolls number
- A major revision was released last Wednesday. Overall 2025 job growth was much weaker than initially reported. The total net change for the full year 2025 was revised down from +584,000 jobs to just +181,000 jobs (seasonally adjusted) — an average of only about 15,000 jobs added per month instead of ~49,000. This made 2025 one of the weakest years for job creation in recent non-recession periods.
- Employment levels were consistently overstated throughout 2025 by roughly 800,000 to over 1 million jobs, peaking around mid-year. For example:

By March 2025, the level was revised down by 898,000.
By December 2025 (preliminary), down by 1,029,000.

- Monthly changes were also adjusted downward in most cases (e.g., August's originally reported -26,000 became a larger loss of -70,000; September's +108,000 became +76,000).
- The revisions reflect normal annual benchmarking, but this one was unusually large (larger than the typical 0.2% average over the prior decade), likely due to factors like overestimation of business births or other data mismatches.
- In short, the data reveals that the U.S. labor market in 2025 was significantly softer than the monthly headlines suggested at the time — job growth was overstated by a substantial margin, painting a picture of a much weaker employment picture for the year.

AI Updates
- While U.S. markets have been focused on the impact of Anthropic and Altruist’s tools on software and financial services, China’s tech giants have released AI models this week that have shown advancements in robotics and video generation.
- Google is reporting that China's AI models are just MONTHS behind western models
- However - is this progress? In a video demo, Alibaba showed a robot with pincers for hands that appeared to be able to count oranges, pick them up and place them in a basket. It was also shown taking milk out of a fridge.
- Alibaba on Monday unveiled a new artificial intelligence model Qwen 3.5 designed to execute complex tasks independently, with big improvements in performance and cost that the Chinese tech giant claims beat major U.S. rival models on several benchmarks.
- Zhipu AI — which trades as Knowledge Atlas Technology in Hong Kong said the model approaches Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in coding benchmarks while surpassing Google’s Gemini 3 Pro on some tests.
- Shares of MiniMax also jumped Thursday after it launched its updated M2.5 open-source model with enhanced AI agent tools.

Grok Update
- Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, has been gaining ground in the U.S. over the past months, data showed, even as it draws global censure and regulatory scrutiny after being used to generate a wave of non-consensual sexualized images of women and minors.
- U.S. market share of the tool rose to 17.8% last month from 14% in December, and 1.9% in January 2025, according to data from research firm Apptopia.
- Men are still the largest % users of Grok ~ 78% (down from 89% in April 2025)

AI Market Share

- ChatGPT's share slumped to 52.9% last month from 80.9% in January last year, while Gemini's grew to 29.4% from 17.3% over the same period.

AI Market Share

InfoGrapic and AI Understanding
- Have we gone through this?
- At its core, AI is technology that lets machines perform tasks that normally require human intelligence — things like understanding language, recognizing images, making decisions, or solving problems.
- Modern AI (especially since ~2022) is dominated by machine learning — systems that learn patterns from huge amounts of data instead of being explicitly programmed rule-by-rule.
- Inference is the "using" or "applying" phase of AI — when a trained model takes new input and produces an output / prediction / answer.
Contrast with training (the "learning" phase):
------ Training ? Like a student studying for years: very compute-heavy, expensive, done once (or rarely) on massive servers/GPUs, adjusts billions of parameters based on examples.
------ Inference ? Like the student taking a test or doing their job: much faster, cheaper, runs on your phone/laptop/cloud, uses the fixed knowledge from training to respond instantly.
- gentic AI takes regular AI (like chat models) to the next level: instead of just answering questions or generating text, these systems act autonomously to achieve goals with minimal human help.
"Agentic" comes from "agency" — the ability to make decisions, plan, use tools, take actions, adapt, and even learn from results — like a smart digital employee rather than just a smart answer machine.

AI Infographic

Last AI Item
- A shortage of memory chips is hammering profits, derailing corporate plans, and inflating price tags on various products, with the crunch expected to get worse.
- The fundamental reason for the squeeze is the buildout of AI data centers, with companies like Alphabet and OpenAI buying up large shares of memory chip production, leaving consumer electronics producers fighting over a dwindling supply.
- The resulting price spikes are causing concern, with some warning of "RAMmageddon" and others predicting that memory chip prices will go "parabolic", bringing lavish profits to some companies but painful prices to the rest of the electronics sector.

Here is something:
- Gallup will...