🖌️ Adobe enters the AI ring

Ah, the romance of American pharmaceuticals — drug meets populace, populace meets drug, drug gets scarce and expensive, populace pursues drug across borders, Big Pharma steps in and assures everyone lives happily ever after. So beautiful.

The current public paramours are injectable diabetes treatments like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro — appetite suppressants that have been touted on social media as “miracle” weight loss drugs.

• And we mean touted a lot: #Ozempic-tagged TikTok videos have amassed 600m+ views, per MIT Technology Review.

Are the drugs safe and effective? Not our lane. (Though we’ll note: Wegovy is currently the only one approved by the FDA for weight management.)

Supply is now better aligned with demand

The availability of the drugs from makers Novo Nordisk (Ozempic, Wegovy) and Eli Lilly (Mounjaro) has recently increased after lengthy shortages.

Without hard-to-get insurance approval, a monthly supply of these drugs hovers around ~$1k in the US. High costs and waning supply led to a recent run on cheaper Canadian and Mexican pharmacies, per Business Insider.

• In British Columbia, 9% of Rx fills for Ozempic were for Americans in 2022, 22x higher than the average rate across all other drugs.

This market is about to get flooded

Analysts project the fervor will continue: Per NBC News, annual sales for this class of drugs are expected to set records, far surpassing arthritis treatment Humira’s all-timer $20.7B year in 2021.

To prepare for anticipated demand, Novo Nordisk has invested $2.58B in expanding production capacity for their diabetes drug unit; Eli Lilly’s tab for similar expansion is up to $1.7B.

Eli Lilly’s cheery outlook is best told through this 2022 back pat: its CEO got an eye-popping $48.9m in shares on top of his core $21.4m pay.

If you file your taxes through TurboTax or a similar service, you’ve likely been asked if you performed work in more than one state.

Given that it’s the 21st century, there’s a decent chance you did.

But a state’s department of revenue is unlikely to notice that you spent a couple hours answering emails and taking Zoom meetings while skiing in the Poconos.

Unless you’re a professional athlete

Their burden is known as the “jock tax.” Professional athletes owe a portion of their salary to most states and cities they visit — even for a single day.

Unlike, say, nurse practitioners or graphic designers, jurisdictions know exactly when athletes are in town. They know how much they make. And they know how to go after them.

For years, the jock tax has flown under the radar, known mostly to hardcore sports fans and accountants. Nobody, after all, really cares if millionaires have to file complicated tax returns.

But the jock tax matters.

Hardly anyone truly benefits from the tax, and one day in the future, even if you’re not an athlete, you may have to pay it.

Adobe, much like every tech company, is getting into AI — and it actually looks pretty cool.

Adobe Firefly is a forthcoming suite of generative AI models with an array of potential uses.

For now, users can sign up for stand-alone beta versions of its image and stylized text generators, but all tools will eventually be integrated into Adobe’s apps.

How they work

The text generator lets users manipulate text; a demo features letters that look like they’re made of melting chocolate and toasted bread.

The image generator, like DALL-E or Midjourney, returns images based on text prompts. But:

• Generated images can be manipulated using Adobe’s other editing tools. Check out this demo from UI/UX designer Jesse Showalter.
• Artists will be able to use AI tools to create variations of their work.

Perhaps most importantly…

… Adobe said its tools won’t scrape the web to steal artists’ styles.

Image generators that do threaten artists’ livelihoods and can lead to copyright issues. Getty Images has banned AI-generated art for that reason.

Adobe said its models are trained on images that are public domain, licensed for training, or in the Adobe Stock library.

“We can generate high quality content and not random brands’ and others’ IP because our model has never seen that brand content or trademark,” Alexandru Costin, VP of generative AI and Sensei at Adobe, told The Verge.