Pandora’s box of AI bots

For a hot minute, Microsoft looked like it would eat Google’s lunch. Its languishing search engine, Bing, was being revolutionised with a sophisticated new chatbot system from OpenAI. Those hopes have now diminished because of one unexpected truth: nobody — not even AI scientists — truly understands the breadth of capabilities of artificial intelligence when it is unleashed in the wild. Early users of Bing have reported unhinged, emotional, even threatening responses to some of their queries from the AI system, which called one user a “bad researcher” and told another newspaper writer that he was “not happily married.” Bing — whose bot entity goes by the name Sydney — has effectively put Google’s embarrassing Bard error in the shade. However, these flaws are just the tip of a much larger iceberg.

(Adapted from “Bing Trouble: Google, OpenAI Are Opening Up Pandora’s Bots,” by Parmy Olson, published on February 16, 2023)

Still continuing with crypto

The 2022 crypto crash wiped out roughly $1tr in value and scared off many investors. But not all of them. A number of everyday investors say they are continuing to put their money into crypto because they believe digital currencies are their best chance at building significant wealth. Some 39pc of crypto owners said last October that they would likely buy more, according to survey data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Some individual investors’ enduring enthusiasm for crypto stems in part from a sense that traditional routes to wealth are blocked off, say investors and researchers who study their behaviour. Those everyday investors say that those paths, such as earning income, investing long-term in stocks, and buying real estate, seem less accessible and less lucrative than crypto, even with its significant risks.

(Adapted from “The Investors Who Still Think Crypto Can Make Them Rich,” by Joe Pinsker, published on February 21, 2023, by The Wall Street Journal)

The rise of auto negative equity

The cost of new vehicles has risen 20pc since the start of the pandemic, while used vehicles are still up 37pc even after cooling in the fall. For a brief period, car owners hit a topsy-turvy market where they could sell some used cars for more than they paid for them. That helped negative equity plummet earlier in the pandemic. But as more consumers deplete savings accumulated during the pandemic, they’re falling underwater again. The build-up in negative equity — or the amount that debt exceeds a vehicle’s value — is rattling consumers and raising alarms within the industry. Though it’s not unusual for drivers to carry negative equity, some dealers say more people are arriving at their lots up to $10,000 underwater, or “upside down,” on their trade-ins.

(Adapted from “Car Debt Is Piling Up As More Americans Owe Thousands More Than Vehicles Are Worth,” by Paige Smith and Michael Sasso, published on March 1 2023, by Bloomberg)

TikTok battles

Over the past few months, US lawmakers have accelerated calls to ban TikTok, the most popular app in the world — or to force its China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok’s US operations to an American company. The federal government and more than half of states have banned the use of TikTok on official government devices, and prominent Democrats have joined Republicans in calls for an outright ban of the app. But the prospect of a ban has also gained bipartisan criticism, largely from those who believe banning a platform used by millions of Americans to speak, debate and express themselves would violate the First Amendment. If either Congress or the Biden Administration seek to ban TikTok — or force its sale to a US company — TikTok and ByteDance will likely challenge the action in court, arguing that it violates US law.

(Adapted from “How A TikTok Ban Would Work — And How TikTok Could Fight Back,” by Emily Baker-White, published on February 14, 2023, by Forbes)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, March 6th, 2023