This report is from today's CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.
What you need to know today
November rally resumes
Stocks rose Tuesday as comments from a Federal Reserve official raised hopes the central bank may not need to raise interest rates further. U.S. Treasury yields dipped on Tuesday, with the yield on the 10-year note last down nearly 6 basis points at 4.33%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 83.51 points, or 0.24%, to close at 35,416.98. The S&P 500 inched higher by 0.10% to 4,554.89, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gained 0.29% to end the session at 14,281.76.
RIP Munger
Billionaire Charlie Munger, the investing sage who made a fortune even before he became Warren Buffett's right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, has died at age 99. Munger's family said he died peacefully Tuesday morning at a California hospital, according to a press release from Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett credited Munger with broadening his investment strategy from favoring troubled companies at low prices in hopes of getting a profit to focusing on higher-quality but underpriced companies.
Making Disney great again
Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger told employees Tuesday during an internal town hall that he was looking forward to "building again" after spending 2023 mending parts of the business that "needed attention." Iger plans to expand Disney's theme parks with a $60 billion commitment over the next 10 years, build an ESPN direct-to-consumer platform no later than 2025 and rebuild Disney's movie studio business, which Iger said has suffered from making too many films.
Amazon's AI push
Amazon's AWS cloud unit has announced new chips for customers to build and run artificial intelligence applications on, as well as plans to offer access to Nvidia's latest chips. Amazon's two-pronged approach of both building its own chips and letting customers access Nvidia's latest chips might will help it against its top cloud computing competitor, Microsoft.
[PRO] Pullback candidates
The rise in stocks throughout November has been underpinned by softer-than-expected inflation data that has fueled investor hopes for an end to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy tightening campaign. However, the favorable backdrop for Wall Street may have fueled unsustainable gains for a slate of stocks. CNBC Pro screened some of these names.
The bottom line
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told reporters Tuesday that AI clients "want outstanding, reliable business solutions, not soap operas."
Multiple companies told CNBC they'd considered switching from OpenAI to competitors' services following uncertainty at the company in the aftermath of Sam Altman's ouster as chief executive and his subsequent quick reinstatement.
Hugging Face is not the only company busy distinguishing itself from OpenAI.
Top executives at Cohere, the Toronto-based large language model (LLM) startup which is valued at more than $2 billion, told investors last week — without naming OpenAI and prior to Altman's return — that the company's mission and strategy are "shared fully" by its leadership team, company, enterprise customers and investors.
The core issue is OpenAI's unique structure where the parent entity is a nonprofit, with a so-called capped-profit company underneath that umbrella. The board represents the nonprofit and oversees the activities of Altman and the rest of the corporate team.
Altman didn't have a say in the company he helped co-found.
The schadenfreude is real, but so is the intense competition in the burgeoning AI scene. After the chaos earlier this month, changes are surely imminent at OpenAI.
This "soap opera" may well turn out to be the single most important catalyst in bringing about greater reliability at the company that propelled AI into the popular imagination with ChatGPT.
— CNBC's Hayden Field contributed to this report.
