Meta Keystroke Logging Evokes 1984

Meta announced a new tool in April to log employee keystrokes and mouseclicks to train its AI models. The tool is known as the MCI or Model Capability Initiative and Meta added that the data "was not used for any other purpose" and there are "safeguards in place to protect sensitive content". The initiative is being led by Stephane Kasriel in Meta's Superintelligence unit. The MCI is reportedly rolled out to US employees currently, with limitations around GDPR impacting potential global rollout.

Anthropic Announcement Wipes Value Off Data Stocks

Data stocks took a beating with news of new functionality released in Claude Cowork for legal research. 

Claude is the invention of Anthropic, the AI company founded in 2021 by ex Open AI employees, including San Francisco-born Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei.

Big investors in Anthropic include Amazon, who invested $4bn in 2023, later doubling this in 2024. Anthropic uses AWS for cloud provision.

On Wednesday 4 February, Gartner stock dropped over 20%, as did IP-management software firm Clarivate. NIQ Global Intelligence, formerly Nielsen IQ, that provides consumer insights, also dropped almost 20%.

Gartner's cousin, Forrester, dropped 12%, potentially as its business decline was already priced in. FactSet dropped 10%.

S&P Global dropped 11.2%. That is despite historical investments in AI, including Kensho in 2018. Kensho specialized in NLP and machine learning for financial data.  Some of S&P's current work involves interfacing with LLMs - a product win for S&P but a not a financial one - that cash goes to AI companies.

LSEG dropped 9.72%. Around 60% of their revenue can be said to be data-driven revenue, coming from the Data and Analytics segment. The rest comes largely from trading services.

CRISIL acquires McKinsey's PriceMetrix

PriceMetrix, which does benchmarking for wealth managers, has been acquired by S&P majority owned CRISIL for $38m.

Facebook WhatsApp Data Sharing Plan Blocked

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is coming into force in May. 

Facebook is currently not compliant and the UK Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has prohibited data sharing, forcing Facebook to put a priority on achieving GPDR compliance.

The ICO's French equivalent is in the process of conducting similar action.

So far the ICO's largest fine was the penalty of £400,000 on TalkTalk for failing to protect customer data from cyber attack.

Markit goes Public with $24 a share IPO

Markit (NASDAQ:MRKT) has gone public at $24 a share.  No money will be raised, however, for the company, and the shares were sold only for the selling shareholders. Over 53 million shares were on offer.