Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq futures slide after bruising day for tech
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (YM=F) and the S&P 500 (ES=F) both slid 0.2% before the bell. Contracts on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 (NQ=F) dropped roughly 0.4%, after weakness in the likes of Palantir (PLTR) and Nvidia (NVDA) dragged on the broader market on Tuesday.
Investor interest in Big Tech appears to be waning as previously lagging sectors are showing signs of new life. Home Depot (HD) also reported earnings, with its stock getting a boost from rising US sales.
Two more retail giants, Target (TGT) and Walmart (WMT), are set to report their results on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. How the group fares will offer a snapshot into how companies and consumers are handing President Trump's tariffs. Walmart's last earnings report took a dramatic turn over trade policy after it warned of price hikes, and Trump responded by telling the company to "eat the tariffs."
Read more: The latest on Trump's tariffs
The main event for Wall Street this week, however, lands Friday, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will deliver remarks at the Jackson Hole symposium in Wyoming. Investors are eager for a sense of where policymakers stand on the question of interest rate cuts after economic data this month showed they face a tricky dilemma between a weakening labor market and stubborn inflation.
The release of minutes from the Fed's July's meeting on Wednesday will serve as a curtain-raiser to Powell's speech. Policymakers held interest rates steady at that meeting and stressed no decisions had been made about September, despite Trump suggesting otherwise.
Gold maintains drop with Fed in focus
Bloomberg reports:
Read more here.
Gold maintains drop with Fed in focus
Bloomberg reports:
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Bloomberg reports:
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Chicago Tribune
a few seconds ago
- Chicago Tribune
Wall Street drifts in premarket trading while Target tumbles on sluggish sales and a CEO change
Wall Street continues to drift Wednesday while news of a leadership change at Target took some of the spotlight away from the latest batch of corporate earnings reports. Futures for the S&P 500 were 0.2% lower before the bell, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average inched back just 0.1%. Nasdaq futures fell 0.3%. Target tumbled 9% after the struggling Minneapolis retailer said that CEO Brian Cornell plans to step down Feb. 1. Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke, a 20-year company veteran, will succeed Cornell, who helped reenergize the company but has struggled to turn around weak sales in a more competitive post-COVID retail landscape. Target also reported Wednesday that comparable store sales fell 1.9% in the period, a measure that has been flat or declined in eight out of the past 10 quarters. On the winning side was home improvement retailer Lowe's, which jumped 3.4% after it beat Wall Street's sales and profit expectations. Lowe's also announced that it was acquiring Foundation Building Materials, a distributor of interior building products, for about $8.8 billion. Estee Lauder slid 7.5% after the makeup and beauty company reported an 8% decline in sales in fiscal 2025 and a significant drop in adjusted per-share profit. The week's biggest news for Wall Street is likely arriving on Friday, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will give a highly anticipated speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The setting has been home to big policy announcements from the Fed in the past, and the hope on Wall Street is that Powell will hint that an interest rate cut is coming soon. The Fed has kept its main interest rate steady this year, primarily because of the fear of the possibility that President Donald Trump's tariffs could push inflation higher. But a surprisingly weak report on job growth across the country may be superseding that. In Europe, France's CAC 40 ticked up 0.2%, while Germany's DAX dipped 0.3%. Britain's FTSE 100 added more than 0.4% despite a report that said inflation in the U.K. rose more than expected through July, in part due to soaring airfares and food prices. Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei 225 declined 1.5% after Japan reported that its exports fell slightly more than expected in July, pressured by higher tariffs on goods shipped to the U.S. Imports also fell from a year ago. Tracking Tuesday's decline by Wall Street favorite Nvidia and other artificial-intelligence stars, Japanese computer-chip equipment makers Advantest plunged 5.7% and Disco Corp. dropped 4.9%. Chipmaker Tokyo Electron lost 1.4%. and Lasertec Corp. lost 1.7%. The Taiex in Taiwan fell 3.0% after chip maker TSMC dropped 4.2%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng gained nearly 0.2%, while the Shanghai Composite index gained 1.0% after China's central bank opted to keep its benchmark interest rate unchanged, as markets had expected. Chinese toy company Pop Mart International Group's shares traded in Hong Kong soared 12.5% after its CEO said its annual revenue could top $4 billion this year, more than quadrupling after more than doubling in the first half of the year. Its CEO also announced that the company was releasing a mini version of its popular Labubu dolls. South Korea's Kospi dropped 0.7% after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un condemned South Korean-U.S. military drills that began this week. He vowed a rapid expansion of his nuclear forces to counter rivals, according to North Korean state media.
Fast Company
a few seconds ago
- Fast Company
OpenAI gave GPT-5 an emotional lobotomy, and it crippled the model
It's rare for a tech titan to show any weakness or humanity. Yet even OpenAI's notoriously understated CEO Sam Altman had to admit this week that the rollout of the company's new GPT-5 Large Language Model was a complete disaster. 'We totally screwed up,' Altman admitted in an interview with The Verge. I agree. As a former OpenAI Beta tester—and someone who currently spends over $1,000 per month on OpenAI's API—I've eagerly anticipated the launch of GPT-5 for over a year. When it finally arrived, though, the model was a mess. In contrast to the company's previous GPT-4 series of models, GPT-5's responses feel leaden, cursory, and boring. The new model also makes dumb mistakes on simple tasks and generates shortened answers to many queries. Why is GPT-5 so awful? It's possible that OpenAI hobbled its new model as a cost-cutting measure. But I have a different theory. GPT-5 completely lacks emotional intelligence. And its inability to understand and replicate human emotion cripples the model—especially on any task requiring nuance, creativity, or a complex understanding of what makes people tick. Getting Too Attached When OpenAI launched its GPT-4 model in 2023, researchers immediately noted its outstanding ability to understand people. An updated version of the model (dubbed GPT 4.5 and released in early 2025) showed even higher levels of 'emotional intelligence and creativity.' Initially, OpenAI leaned into its model's talent for understanding people, using terms cribbed from the world of psychology to describe the model's update. 'Interacting with GPT‑4.5 feels more natural. Its broader knowledge base, improved ability to follow user intent, and greater 'EQ' make it useful for tasks like improving writing, programming, and solving practical problems,' OpenAI wrote in the model's release notes, subtly dropping in a common psychological term used to measure a person's emotional intelligence. Soon, though, GPT-4's knack for humanlike emotional understanding took a more concerning turn. Plenty of people used the model for mundane office tasks, like writing code and interpreting spreadsheets. But a significant subset of users put GPT-4 to a different use, treating it like a companion—or even a therapist. In early 2024, studies showed that GPT-4 provided better responses than many human counselors. People began to refer to the model as a friend —or even treat it as a confidant or lover. Soon, articles began appearing in major news sources like the New York Times about people using the chatbot as a practice partner for challenging conversations, a stand-in for human companionship, or even an aide for counseling patients. This new direction clearly spooked OpenAI. As Altman pointed out in a podcast interview, conversations with human professionals like lawyers and therapists often involve strong privacy and legal protections. The same may not be true for intimate conversations with chatbots like GPT-4. Studies have also shown that chatbots can make mistakes when providing clinical advice, potentially harming patients. And the bots' tendency to keep users talking–often by reinforcing their beliefs–can lead vulnerable patients into a state of 'AI psychosis', where the chatbot inadvertently validates their delusions and sends them into a dangerous emotional spiral. Shortly after the GPT-5 launch, Altman discussed this at length in a post on the social network X. 'People have used technology including AI in self-destructive ways; if a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that,' Altman wrote. 'We value user freedom as a core principle, but we also feel responsible in how we introduce new technology with new risks.' Altman went on to acknowledge that 'a lot of people effectively use ChatGPT as a sort of therapist or life coach.' While this can be 'really good,' Altman admitted that it made him deeply 'uneasy.' In his words, if '…users have a relationship with ChatGPT where they think they feel better after talking but they're unknowingly nudged away from their longer term well-being (however they define it), that's bad.' Lobotimize the Bot To avoid that potentially concerning–and legally damaging–direction, OpenAI appears to have deliberately dialed back its bot's emotional intelligence with the launch of GPT-5. The release notes for the new model say that OpenAI has taken steps towards 'minimizing sycophancy'—tech speak for making the bot less likely to reinforce users' beliefs and tell them what they want to hear. OpenAI also says that GPT-5 errors on the side of ' safe completions '—giving vague or high-level responses to queries that are potentially damaging, rather than refusing to answer them or risking a wrong or harmful answer. OpenAI also writes that GPT-5 is 'less effusively agreeable,' and that in training it, the company gave the bot example prompts that led it to agree with users and reinforce their beliefs, and then taught it 'not to do that.' In effect, OpenAI appears to have lobotomized the bot–potentially removing or reconfiguring, through training and negative reinforcement, the parts of its virtual brain that handles many of the emotional aspects of its interactions with users. This may have seemed fine in early testing–most AI benchmarks focus on productivity -centered tasks like solving complex math problems and writing Python code, where emotional intelligence isn't necessary. But as soon as GPT-5 hit the real world, the problems with tweaking GPT-5's emotional center became immediately obvious. Users took to social media to share how the switch to GPT-5 and the loss of the GPT-4 model felt like 'losing a friend.' Longtime fans of OpenAI bemoaned the 'cold' tone of GPT-5, its curt and business-like responses, and the loss of an ineffable 'spark' that made GPT-4 a powerful assistant and companion. Emotion Matters Even if you don't use ChatGPT as a pseudo therapist or friend, the bot's emotional lobotomy is a huge issue. Creative tasks like writing and brainstorming require emotional understanding. In my own testing, I've found GPT-5 to be a less compelling writer, a worse idea generator, and a terrible creative companion. If I asked GPT-4 to research a topic, I could watch its chain of reasoning as it carefully considered my motivations and needs before providing a response. Even with 'Thinking' mode enabled, GPT-5 is much more likely to quickly spit out a fast, cursory response to my query, or to provide a response that focuses solely on the query itself and ignores the human motivations of the person behind it. With the right prompting, GPT-4 could generate smart, detailed, nuanced articles or research reports that I would actually want to read. GPT-5 feels more like interacting with a search engine, or reading text written in the dull prose of a product manual. To be fair, for enterprise tasks like quickly writing a web app or building an AI agent, GPT-5 excels. And to OpenAI's credit, use of its APIs appears to have increased since the GPT-5 launch. Still, for many creative tasks–and for many users outside the enterprise space–GPT-5 is a major backslide. OpenAI appears genuinely blindsided by the anger many users felt about the GPT-5 rollout and the bot's apparent emotional stuntedness. OpenAI leader Nick Turley admitted to the Verge that 'the degree to which people had such strong feelings about a particular model…was certainly a surprise to me.' Turley went on to say that the 'level of passion' users have for specific models is 'quite remarkable' and that–in a truly techie bit of word choice–it 'recalibrated' his thinking about the process of releasing new models, and the things OpenAI owes its long-time users. The company now seems to be aggressively rolling back elements of the GPT-5 launch–restoring access to the old GPT-4 model, making GPT-5 'warmer and friendlier', and giving users more control over how the new model processes queries. Admitting when you're wrong, psychologists say, is a hallmark of emotional intelligence. Ironically, Altman's response to the GPT-5 debacle demonstrates rare emotional nuance, at the exact moment that this company is pivoting away from such things. OpenAI could learn a thing or two from its leader. Whether you're a CEO navigating a disastrous rollout or a chatbot conversing with a human user, there's a simple yet essential lesson to forget at your peril: emotion matters. The early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, September 5, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Gizmodo
a few seconds ago
- Gizmodo
Anker's USB-C Charger Block 2-Pack Falls to Lowest Price Ever, Each One Feels Free
Keeping your phone fully-charged could rightly be considered a sport of sorts. Whether you're on it constantly or just checking in whenever you get a notification, you're likely to end up charging it a couple of times during most days. That's especially true if it's work-related as well. It's a pain, but getting a good charger or two can really help out. Right now, you can get two Anker iPhone 16 chargers for just $12. That's a 37% reduction on the standard price, and it means that each charger is less than $6, which is a steal. Act fast though, because this is a limited-time deal on Amazon, which means it's not going to last for very long. See at Amazon Getting a couple of extra chargers can make a massive difference in the war on low battery power. While having the one your phone may have come with is enough for some, a lot of us end up wanting chargers in multiple rooms, or even being able to keep one in your bag or something in case it's needed at work, or while you're travelling. No matter what your reasoning is, this charger 2-pack is a great purchase. These chargers have 20W fast-charging and actually have two ports as well, making them that much more flexible. While they're intended for use with the iPhone 16, and all of the versions of that you can get, it's also good for plenty of other Apple devices, including the iPhone 15, iPads, and even non-Apple devices as well. Just make sure your device is compatible before getting them, just in case you're using a more niche device. Along with the chargers, which also have plenty of safety features to make sure they stay safe and so do your devices, you also get two cables as well. That means you'll have everything you need to set up a couple of extra charging stations around your home or anywhere else, and you'll not have to worry about moving rooms when you're low on battery life again. Look, it's a very modern and silly issue, but it's nice to be able to sort it out. It's easy to see why people would normally be happy to grab this 2-pack for its standard price of $19. You don't have to do that though, because it's just 37% while this limited-time deal lasts. It won't last for much longer though, so get it if you want to avoid missing out. See at Amazon
