3 Shifts Edition (Feb 21 2025): xAI’s Grok 3 is highly performant, Arm will make its own chips, China’s breakneck pace in biotech

Hi everyone – welcome to your [AI-generated] 3 Shifts Edition. When selecting the 3 market shifts that you should know about every week, our 6Pages team typically looks for shifts that aren’t just big but also have an element of being surprising. That certainly fit the bill this week. 

Our first Shift explores Elon Musk’s xAI and the progress of its Grok models. Grok 3, which was just introduced, is currently placed #1 on the Chatbot Arena leaderboard – outperforming most of the other players (although not OpenAI’s o3, which has not been released).

Next, CPU chip designer Arm is going to make its own chips. The move is rocking the industry, and represents a major shift in Arm’s business model of being Switzerland and licensing its designs to other companies. Rumor has it the move is being driven by SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.

Finally, the US may see a DeepSeek-like disruption from China in biotech. 31% of the molecules licensed by big pharma are now coming from China – up from 0 in 2019. Chinese-developed drugs today are often high-efficacy “me too better” versions, as China moves up the innovation ladder.

Enjoy.

– Tam

Sign up for free briefs written by real people on 6Pages.com