Semafor is a digital media company founded in 2022 by Ben Smith and Justin B. Smith. It focuses on providing global news for college-educated readers and aims to bring transparency and clarity to a polarized news industry. Semafor produces nine newsletters covering various topics and hosts live-journalism events. The company also produces original video content and has plans to expand its coverage to regions beyond the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa.

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🟡 Semafor’s editors will lead a bicoastal exchange of ideas, posing the biggest questions around AI to tech leaders in Silicon Valley and top policymakers in Washington.

RSVP to join us in D.C. on December 7: https://lnkd.in/eSgTG_aF

🟡 Axel Springer Chairman and CEO Mathias Döpfner will join Semafor's Founding Editor-at-Large Steve Clemons on December 5 for a candid conversation about the state of global democracy, the role of trade today in undermining democracies, and how autocratic regimes need to be challenged.

RSVP now to join virtually: https://lnkd.in/gZ-VPPA5

🟡 NEW from Liz Hoffman: The money behind soccer’s mystery buyer
 
A Miami company has been making a splash in the sports business buying up financially troubled teams, like a once-great British football club that hasn’t won a league title in 36 years.

As its lineup grew — a German soccer club, a British basketball team — few in the sports world or on Wall Street could figure out 777 Partners or where its money had come from.

Like a lot of the cash sloshing around private equity these days, much of 777’s money comes from an unlikely and pedestrian source: insurance. The firm owns a Bermuda-based reinsurer whose policy premiums and annuities payments appear to have bankrolled much of its buying spree.

Last week, those cozy ties between 777 Partners and its captive insurer sparked a credit-rating downgrade that may threaten its ability to fund its growing empire.

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Great scoop from Alexis Akwagyiram on Turkey's Karpowership, the 'floating generators' which have become way more influential for the future of power supply in Africa than most people realize and is in talks with new African governments to provide electricity. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gHjUSSRe

🟡 SCOOP: GitHub's AI coding assistant, called Copilot, has gone from an experiment to a moneymaker, the company’s CEO Thomas Dohmke tells Reed Albergotti in an exclusive interview.

“We are happy about the growing positive margins the product has,” he said.

The revelation helps answer an important question about the business of generative AI: Because the powerful models require so much costly compute power to run, can companies make a profit on products that rely heavily on the nascent technology?

Dohmke’s answer was an unequivocal yes. “The cost of goods sold, which is all the costs to run Copilot per user, is lower than the price that we’re charging,” he said.

Copilot was the first consumer product to use AI models from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It helps software developers write code, the same way Gmail suggests the next word in a sentence while typing an email.

GitHub initially launched Copilot as a free, experimental product in 2021. Dohmke didn’t say when Copilot began posting positive margins, but he implied the company has been building infrastructure in anticipation of demand.

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