Lessons from the month of November

As storms raged and The Crown dropped the first draft of its final season, a number of appropriately juicy news stories filled the news. Join us in reflecting on the month that was and sharing what we’ve learned.

1. The ousting and reinstating of Sam Altman.

OpenAI’s messy firing and rehiring of its powerful chief executive this month shocked the tech world. But the power struggle has implications beyond the company’s boardroom, AI experts say.

The tussle between Sam Altman and OpenAI’s board of directors began early in the month with the unexpected announcement that the board had ousted Altman as CEO for being “not consistently candid in his communications with the board”, hiring interim CEO, Mira Murati, then the chief technology officer of OpenAI, and then former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. Amazingly, Altman returned to the startup’s headquarters on the same day that Shear was hired, only for it to be announced that he had been rehired as head of the new artificial intelligence unit. Three days later, following an open letter by staff demanding he be reinstated, Altman was CEO again.

The split between Altman and the board at least partly seemed to fall along ideological lines, with Altman and Brockman in a camp known as “accelerationists” – people who believe AI should be deployed as quickly as possible – and “decelerationists” – people who believe it should be developed more slowly and with stronger guardrails.

In the absence of substantive regulation of the companies making AI, creators like Altman take on an outsized importance. This lack of transparency appears to be at the heart of the issue, meaning that the development of cutting-edge AI rests in the hands of a small, secretive cadre that operates behind closed doors. Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the centre for business and human rights at New York University’s Business School, echoes this: “The fight for control of OpenAI provides a valuable reminder of the volatility within this relatively immature branch of the digital industry and the danger that crucial decisions about how to safeguard artificial intelligence systems may be influenced by corporate power struggles. Huge amounts of money – and huge egos – are in play. Judgments about when unpredictable AI systems are safe to be released to the public should not be governed by these factors,” he said.

2. TikTok v Simon Coveney.

Video-sharing app TikTok was reprimanded this month after the team behind it called off two meetings with Minister for Enterprise Simon Coveney, who eventually told them politely where to go. The saga, revealed in a series of emails released under the Freedom of Information Act, began at the end of June when an official from the IDA contacted Coveney’s office to organise two meetings, both of which were eventually sacked off.

The meetings were in relation to TikTok’s recent High Court case to challenge the Data Protection office on the €345M fine they received for not protecting children’s data on their site. The fine was imposed on TikTok Technology Limited (TTL) by the Data Protection Commission (DPC) after the probe into how certain privacy settings and features complied with obligations under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. As per its research, the DPC proved that it’s normal for children as young as 11 and 12 to be highly invested in TikTok, and many government bodies believe that these children are not protected from the content they might be seeing or sharing. For more information on the case, you can check it out via dataprotection.ie here.

3. More bad news for the Irish commercial property sector.

AIB has, this month, decided to sell a loan they have tied to Blanchardstown Shopping Centre to London-based Hayfin Capital Management, according to a source familiar with the matter. The bank will sell the loan, which had a so-called par value of €175 million, for about 83 cents in the euro, implying that the loan will be sold at a discount of about €29.75 million.

The deal – which is being hailed as one of the most significant losses to be crystallised by a lender in Ireland in recent times – is the latest sign of bad news in the Irish commercial property sector. While the retail sector has been dealing with the shift to online shopping in recent years, the current problems have been largely in the office market, which has been hit by the growth in working from home since the pandemic, job cuts and interest rates.

It follows the news that a portfolio of assets tied to infamous developer Johnny Ronan, which includes Bewleys Cafe on Dublin’s Grafton Street, went into receivership this week. Loans from AIB and Bank of Ireland worth about €130 million were at the centre of the decision to call in the receivers.

4. Mergers + Acquisitions out the wazoo.

It’s all go this month as a myriad of M+As have taken place while we weren’t looking. First up is:

Select Technology Group has agreed to acquire DID Electrical, which has 23 stores.

Select, formerly known as Compu b, is Ireland’s leading Apple premium reseller with shops in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. DID Electrical, which has been trading for 60 years, sells a wide range of electrical appliances for the domestic and business markets.

Controlled by the Houlihan family, ownership of the DID Electrical chain is vested in Peach Limited, a company registered offshore in the Isle of Man.

DID operating company Home Appliance Unlimited had revenue of €109m in the year to March 2021, according to filed accounts, up from €83m the previous year. Select’s managing director Ciaran McCormack claims this is “a transformative deal for Select in Ireland.” “It allows us to combine the skills and expertise which have driven our growth in consumer electronics and technology retail, B2B and Apple education sales with the passion and talent across the DID Electrical business which we feel will mean that both businesses thrive for years to come.”

Next, Irish-based start-up Zerve has secured €3.8m in pre-seed funding to build new data science and AI architecture.

The Tipperary-registered company – which was founded in 2021 by Philly Hayes (LearnUpon, Deloitte) and engineering PhD Jason Hillary, and later joined by Greg Michaelson, former chief customer officer of DataRobot––has created a coding platform for data science and AI development that allows teams to collaborate and share their work more easily. Zerve’s technology utilises a novel, stateful architecture to create a scalable collaborative development environment to break down silos that can exist between data scientists and developers.

The venture has been included in Intel’s Ignite accelerator programme for deep-tech companies, and the funding round was led by Manna, Flipdish and LetsGetChecked backer Elkstone Ventures with contributions from Algolio CTO Sean Mullaney, and former DataRobot EVP of engineering Rob Hickey.

And finally, PHX Ireland, via its subsidiary LloydsPharmacy, has agreed to acquire McCabes Pharmacy.

The proposed deal will see the combined retail pharmacy outlets merge their operations, trade under the McCabes brand and be led by Sharon McCabe. Lloyds Pharmacy operates 82 stores across the Republic of Ireland, while McCabes Pharmacy has 32 stores across the greater Dublin Area.

The transaction is conditional on approval by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), and the combined retail entity will form part of the family-owned Phoenix group, an integrated healthcare provider in Europe providing pharmaceutical wholesale, pharmacy retail, and services for the pharmaceutical industry.

In summary: As Christmas beckons and nights get shorter, one can’t help but feel a bit eerie as Ireland hits a difficult crossroads and Nigel Farage eats mealworms on national television.

That said, when times are low, the only way to go is up. It may be coming from unlikely sources – indulgent meals, the Late Late Toy Show, Nigel Farage eating mealworms on national telly – but at least these small moments of joy are enough for us to cling onto during the very literal darkness.

For now, it might be best to draw from the considerable bravery shown by Dublin-based, Brazilian-born Deliveroo driver Caio Benicio, who recently took to task a shade of evil in Dublin city centre. And, as it happens, a GoFundMe in his name is currently at the €356,000 mark (on the date we wrote this article), to show him and everyone else, how proud we are of the people who live here.

Long live those who help in times of woe, may we know them, may we be them, may we raise them.

See you next month!

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