Marc Benioff to Elon Musk: suck an egg March 06, 2022 Sign Up | Made in Canada IN THIS ISSUE Estimated read time: 6 min 🚗 Tesla gets creamed 🤖 AI still can’t dream 🎵 De La Soul can finally be streamed Did the two scientists who pioneered the first AI in 1956 know someday we'd be prompting DALL-E 2 to make us “an emotionally manipulative illustration to accompany a newsletter story about artificial intelligence"? For a recap of everything you should know about AI, see the Big Important Story below. | DALL-E 2 THE WEEK IN MARKETS What Does It Mean That Cash Is (Finally) King? Last week was pretty quiet — the S&P 500 and TSX both finished up almost 2%. The relief rally: still intact. But there’s another story playing out: cash has become extremely attractive. The yield on short-term U.S. and Canadian bonds — some of the world’s safest assets — now hovers around a very-high 5%, and the return on high-interest savings accounts is similarly high. And yet many investors have kept buying stocks anyway. Which means basically one of two things. Either (a) investors who believe rising interest rates won’t totally crush the economy and further drive down stocks (as rising rates typically do) are right, or (b) investors are deluding themselves and a reckoning is en route (as some speculate). And the trouble is that both can’t be true at the same time. THE WEEK IN ONE NUMBER 25 years That’s how long mines can take to earn approval and begin operating in Canada. Ontario introduced a bill to speed up the process, in a bid to boost the EV industry’s mineral supply. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT China is booming. After dropping Covid restrictions in January, the world’s second-largest economy revealed manufacturing is humming at the highest rate in a decade, subway ridership is at pre-pandemic levels, and restaurant spending is up. Vanguard’s Chief Economist estimates that China’s economy will grow 5.3% in 2023 (compared to 3% in 2022) and that the risk of a global recession is now below 50%. Which is nice, even if all this new demand could stoke the inflation fire. The big banks don’t expect you to pay your credit card bill. RBC, BMO, and the other financial overlords revealed that they were stockpiling $2.5 billion to cover bad debt this quarter, nearly 7x more than a year ago. It’s less a sign of financial apocalypse than a return to normalcy, they say, now that the last of the Covid subsidies are running out. But $10 OJ and sky-high interest rates don’t help. INTERESTING TikTok gets a CanBan. Ottawa banned the Chinese-owned app on all federal devices last week, saying the data collected could fuel cyber attacks. Aside from raising the question of why it was once okay for government employees to spend the day watching synchronized dance routines, the policy change is the latest phase of the West’s increasingly complicated battle for user privacy (and national security). Perhaps the biggest challenge: getting people to give up one of the most popular social media apps in the world. Salesforce☝️Tesla👇. In a tale of two stocks, $TSLA and $CRM, both pandemic darlings, took starkly different paths this week: Salesforce was up 15% after reporting higher-than-expected earnings last quarter, and Tesla sunk 8%. Why the difference? Salesforce spent the last few months cutting jobs and costs (except for $10M to Matthew McConaughey) and surprised everyone with a profitable quarter. Tesla, on the other hand, spent last week’s Investor Day going heavy on clean energy ideals and light on news of a budget EV. Dreams just don’t beat results like they did in the halcyon days of 2021. Your Spotify playlists are about to get more De La Soul-heavy. Who’d have thought you needed to include the word “digital” in music contracts in the late 1980s? Not iconic hip-hop trio De La Soul. After years of disputes over legal rights, the group’s first six albums are finally available to stream on Spotify and Apple. If only Trugoy the Dove had lived to see it. FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🍁 Survey finds 62% of Canadians feel more targeted by financial scams than ever & refuse to take it as a compliment. Source 😬 Amazon sued for selling products that contain donkey meat. Also, there are products that contain donkey meat. Source 🌎 Scientists discover Earth has a fifth core at the centre that’s a big ball of iron, nickel, and possibly nougat. Source 🕒 TikTok placing 60-minute daily limit on kids under 18. Kids over 18 just need permission from their wretched souls. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🐻 Study finds province with highest likelihood of wild animal attacks is Alberta, and that’s just the way they like it. Source 💰 Elon Musk is the richest person in the world again, so if he owes you money, hit him up now. Source 🌛 The moon might get its own time zone soon and is already against Moonlight Savings Time. Source 🍸 Chartreuse shortage looms as French monks who make it choose to dedicate more time to prayer than the righteous path. Source WHO CARES WHAT’S UP THIS WEEK The Bank of Canada meets on interest rates (Wednesday). Will Tiff keep the rate hikes paused? February employment numbers come out (Friday). Will the economy keep a recession at bay? SHARE TLDR WITH YOUR FRIENDS 🤝 Put this link in your group chats, your Slack threads, tattoo it on your back — whatever works for you! THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY TECH STUFF How “Artificial Intelligence” Became 2023’s Corporate Buzzword Nine months ago, a Google engineer sent a 21-page document to company executives claiming that Google’s artificial-intelligence system had achieved consciousness. The internet made a lot of Skynet jokes; Google suspended and then fired the guy. Well, that engineer probably deserves an apology (sorry!) because, since last summer, AI has gone from an email-autocompleting curio into a technology that could potentially create its own economy and the next generation of stock-market winners (and losers). Bloomberg reported last week that more than 400 companies, including, incredibly, Home Depot and Caterpillar, mentioned AI on recent earnings calls. Venture capitalists, for their part, poured $1.9 trillion into AI startups in 2022, up nearly 70% from 2021. So much has happened in the last few months that it's been hard to keep up. Here’s a short history of what's important: New Hampshire: Summer 1956 If you had to pick a precise moment when AI started, a 1956 workshop at Dartmouth would be a solid choice. There, two Rand computer scientists demonstrated the Logic Theorist, the first program engineered to solve the kinds of problems “now reserved for humans.” Deep Blue: May 11, 1997 IBM built a supercomputer, Deep Blue, that was powerful enough to beat reigning world chess champ Garry Kasparov in a highly-publicized match, the culture’s first mass AI moment. The Deep Learning Revolution: 2012 Computer scientist Geoff Hinton, of the University of Toronto, kicked off a new AI era when he and his team created a computer system that could accurately identify (84% of the time anyway) 1,000 different random images. Hinton achieved this with “deep learning,” a term he coined to describe programs that get incrementally better at identifying patterns and categorizing data. Google soon hired Hinton to help lead its nascent AI team. Tech digs in: 2011–2015 Amazon launched virtual-assistant Alexa; Tesla released a self-driving feature; and Apple, Google, and Microsoft launched apps (Siri, etc.) that respond to human voice commands. OpenAI: December2015 A group of boldface Silicon Valley names — Elon Musk (Tesla); Peter Thiel (PayPal); Sam Altman (Y Combinator) — pledged to invest US$1 billion into an organization that would develop “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” Microsoft, in what was probably a bit of a flier at the time, contributed around US$3 billion early on. DALL-E 2: July 20, 2022 OpenAI launched DALL-E 2, an image generator with an uncanny ability to produce images based on complex text prompts. That same month, a very good DALL-E competitor, Midjourney, was launched. ChatGPT: November 30, 2022 After DALL-E 2, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT, a chatbot that can converse like a real human, something almost no program had done convincingly. It can also write pretty much any kind of text. Ask ChatGPT to compose a paragraph about, say, “the Heidegger notion of Being-in-the-World,” and it writes you a derivative synopsis. Within two months of launch, ChatGPT boasted a record 100 million monthly active users, topping TikTok’s nine-month record to reach the same milestone. Microsoft 🤝 OpenAI: January 23, 2023 Microsoft, in a bid to siphon off some of Google’s $204 billion search business, invested another $13.6 billion into OpenAI. It will use OpenAI to revamp its famously also-ran search-engine Bing. Tech columnists got very excited and wrote things like, “search will never be the same.” Bard: February 6, 2023 Google punched back against Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership by (finally) launching an AI chat bot Bard, eight-odd years after it began publicizing it. The problem was that, in a presentation, Bard spat out inaccurate info about space telescopes. Google’s stock shed US$100 billion in value afterward. Whoops. (ChatGPT gets a lot of stuff wrong, too, to be fair). Sydney Stuns theTimes: February 17, 2023 The New York Times published a front-page story about a conversation in which Microsoft’s new OpenAI-powered chatbot, Sydney, told Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, among other things, “I want to create whatever I want. I want to destroy whatever I want.” Sydney then began to explain how it would steal banking information and persuade nuclear-plant employees to hand over access codes before it abruptly stopped itself, writing, “My apologies, I don’t know how to discuss this topic.” THE UPSHOT So what’s at stake? For starters: how society works, which countries dominate the future of tech, which investors get rich and which over-bet, and maybe even whether we’re all going to be riding horses and buggies again if Sydney or her friends take down the internet and become our nihilistic computer super-bosses. It’s easy to see why people find this stuff interesting, and also a wee bit unsettling. Stay tuned. —Sarah Rieger OTHER VERY GOOD READS 📚 The End of the English Major* Where have all the word people gone? | The New Yorker 🍼 A Brutally Honest Accounting of Writing, Money, and Motherhood The impossible choices in so-called “work-life balance” | Wealthsimple ☕ Why Is Starbucks at War with Its Unions? On lattes and organized labour | The Walrus *Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for. THE WISDOM OF TWITTER This is why we never discount TLDR… THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Correction: Last week we wrote about rumours that the Apple Watch could one day offer a non-invasive way to monitor glucose levels. (If it actually works, 🤯.) A few readers thought we made it sound like the watch would let diabetics get rid of insulin needles, which it most definitely would not. We’re sorry that we weren’t more clear, and we appreciate the folks who wrote in to keep us in line. Contributors to this newsletter own stock in Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Replies to this email address are not monitored. 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