TSLA "Real-Time" Insurance, SPCE resumes Test Flight, Microsoft's Project Turing
1. Tesla Launches its “Real-Time” Insurance Product
Last week during Tesla’s shareholder’s meeting, CEO of Tesla Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla would expand its insurance product in Texas after launching its original insurance offering in California in 2019. Tesla will be adding real-time driving behavior to lower overall auto insurance costs by 20-40% based on real-time driving behavior.
Based on the “Safety Score” feature and “Full Self-Driving” beta software, this will mean that Tesla will be able to evaluate individual driving behavior metrics and offer a much lower insurance pricing compared to other competitors’ quoted premiums.
Tesla insurance using real-time data will be made available to all Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y owners in Texas.
Tesla owners will be able to sign up for Tesla’s Insurance Coverage using their Tesla app or through touchscreens in their vehicles based on real-time driving behavior data in addition to traditional underwriting such as age, credit and claim history resulting in a lower insurance cost compared to its competitors. Image Source: Electrek
2.)Virgin Galactic to Resume Space Tourism in 2022
Long haul airplane flights that are more than 10 hours would be disrupted by point-to-point flights on rockets. For instance, SpaceX said its Starship would be able to fly from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes instead of the 15 hours it takes by traditional airplane.
Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, said its next test flight- Unity 23 will begin in the fourth quarter of 2022 after postponing its first commercial flight this year.
According to UBS, super fast travel using outer space is predicted to be a $20Bn. market disrupting traditional airlines. UBS expects the broader space industry, worth about $400 billion today could double to $805 billion by 2030.
Long haul airplane flights that are more than 10 hours would be disrupted by point-to-point flights on rockets. For instance, SpaceX said its Starship would be able to fly from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes instead of the 15 hours it takes by traditional airplane.
Virgin Galactic (NYSE: SPCE) dropped 15% last week due to the delay of its test flight.
UBS estimates more than 150 million passengers averaging 309 seats on airplane could be the target market for space travel.
Assuming of 5% of these flights are serviced by space at about $2,000-$2,500 per trip, the Serviceable Addressable Market would be more than $20Bn. per year as of today .
Source: CNBC
Singular believes with Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX’s leading efforts to make space travel commercially viable, this sub-sector will become mainstream by 2030 as the technology becomes more proven and cost per trip starts falling.
3.) Microsoft Announces Project Turing
Last week, Microsoft announced the launch of Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG) a 17 billion parameter language model that outperforms all other downstream NLP tasks created by Nvidia and Facebook.
With massive deep learning language models (LM), it will be able to perform a variety of tasks such as assisting authors composing their content, summarizing a long piece of text, or improving customer experience with digital assistants.
Microsoft also confirmed an investment of $1 billion into OpenAI about 2 years ago , a San-Francisco based research lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman to develop the GPT-3 to advance the state-of-the-art performance.
The Project Turing or T_NLG will be a part of larger initiative by Microsoft to integrate the quality of language models into its existing products such as Bing, Office, and Xbox.