logo
Sperling Sees Enduring US-China Trade Tensions, Volatility Ahead

Sperling Sees Enduring US-China Trade Tensions, Volatility Ahead

Bloomberga day ago

Trade tensions between the U.S. and China are unlikely to ease soon despite a recent thaw on tariffs, according to Gene Sperling of Pacific Investment Management Co., who warns market volatility is likely to persist.
Sperling, a former director of the National Economic Council, a White House unit that coordinates administration policy, cautioned the recent truce between the world's biggest economies failed to address underlying structural issues. These include intellectual property rights, technology transfers and market access.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Pop Mart's 200% Stock Rally Spurs Rush to Hike Price Targets
Pop Mart's 200% Stock Rally Spurs Rush to Hike Price Targets

Bloomberg

time12 minutes ago

  • Bloomberg

Pop Mart's 200% Stock Rally Spurs Rush to Hike Price Targets

Wall Street analysts are rushing to raise price targets on Pop Mart International Group Ltd. following the success of its Labubu dolls. At least five brokerages, including Deutsche Bank AG and Morgan Stanley, have lifted projections on the Hong Kong-listed stock this week. Citigroup Inc. hiked its price target by 90% to a street high of HK$308 apiece, citing the growing influence of the company's intellectual properties globally.

Meta invests $14.3B in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team
Meta invests $14.3B in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team

Washington Post

time20 minutes ago

  • Washington Post

Meta invests $14.3B in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team

Meta is making a $14.3 billion investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing 'superintelligence' at the tech giant. The deal announced Thursday reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI. Meta announced what it called a 'strategic partnership and investment' with Scale late Thursday. Scale said the $14.3 billion investment puts its market value at over $29 billion. Scale said it will remain an independent company but the agreement will 'substantially expand Scale and Meta's commercial relationship.' Meta will hold a 49% stake in the startup. Wang, though leaving for Meta with a small group of other Scale employees, will remain on Scale's board of directors. Replacing him is a new interim Scale CEO Jason Droege, who was previously the company's chief strategy officer and had past executive roles at Uber Eats and Axon. Zuckerberg's increasing focus on the abstract idea of 'superintelligence' — which rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI — is the latest pivot for a tech leader who in 2021 went all-in on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company's name and investing billions into advancing virtual reality and related technology. It won't be the first time since ChatGPT's 2022 debut sparked an AI arms race that a big tech company has gobbled up talent and products at innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them. Microsoft hired key staff from startup Inflection AI, including co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who now runs Microsoft's AI division . Google pulled in the leaders of AI chatbot company while Amazon made a deal with San Francisco-based Adept that sent its CEO and key employees to the e-commerce giant. Amazon also got a license to Adept's AI systems and datasets. Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016. They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier. Scale's pitch was to supply the human labor needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them. General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers. What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs. More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models — the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama — brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to service 'every leading large language model,' including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers. Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration. The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government. Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs. It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as 'one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet.' Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed skepticism about the tech industry's current focus on large language models. 'How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?' LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year. These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models 'basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way,' LeCun said. Instead, he emphasized Meta's interest in 'tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman.' When he returned to France's annual VivaTech conference again on Wednesday, LeCun dodged a question about the pending Scale deal but said his AI research team's plan has 'always been to reach human intelligence and go beyond it.' 'It's just that now we have a clearer vision for how to accomplish this,' he said. LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau . Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research 'remains unwavering' and described the work as 'building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology.'

Chicago area marshmallow maker exchanges kitchen space for opportunities for people with disabilities
Chicago area marshmallow maker exchanges kitchen space for opportunities for people with disabilities

CBS News

time27 minutes ago

  • CBS News

Chicago area marshmallow maker exchanges kitchen space for opportunities for people with disabilities

This is a story about marshmallows, but a fluff piece it is not. It is the story about a simple idea cooked up in a Chicago area kitchen, which became a recipe not only for business success, but for inclusion for people with disabilities. Lissa Levy of Skokie is a food stylist, presenting food for video, photography, and marketing. She was also recently elected as a Skokie village trustee. And some years back, Levy started up a side hustle in the form of Elle's Marshmallows — which makes gourmet artisan marshmallows inspired by a variety of culinary traditions. The array of tantalizing flavors include honey rosemary, Irish cream, coconut, spiked hazelnut, and Hawaiian coffee — among many others. Her spiked infusions steadily grew until business reached a boiling point. "I had a whole section of my basement that was all dedicated to marshmallow equipment storage," said Levy. "So every time I cooked, I'd be running equipment up and down the stairs." Meanwhile, a local organization had some needs of its own. The Skokie nonprofit Shore Community Services is committed to inclusive living for people with intellectual and other developmental disabilities — and serves 20 communities, including Skokie, Evanston, Morton Grove, and Chicago's North Side. Shore sometimes has a tough time finding employment for its clients. "It's gotten easier in that I think more people are aware of people with disabilities," said Shore vocational services chief Anni Braverman. "Sometimes it's harder, because more and more jobs want people to be able to do everything." Someone at Shore whipped up a solution about six months ago — the organization would offer a food entrepreneur free use of its kitchen. In exchange, the small business owner would hire Shore clients. Levy was that entrepreneur, and Elle's Marshmallows was that small business. Janie Walcoff, a Shore client, gets $15 an hour to package up Elle's Marshmallows. When asked what her favorite part about the job was, Walcoff said, "Money." Walcoff's beauty work is seen by more customers than ever before. "This is actually my first year selling at Skokie Farmers' Market," Levy said. Levy said expanding had been difficult, if not impossible, for Elle's Marshmallows — because food safety rules limited what she could make and sell from her home. The much bigger space at Shore where Levy and Walcoff now work together is a commercial-grade kitchen. That designation matters. "It allows me to sell to other businesses," Levy said. "It allows me to sell across state lines." Sales have easily quadrupled, Levy said. "I really couldn't have asked for a better situation," she said. Neither could Walcoff. She says the difference between her last job bagging groceries and her current one with Elle's Marshmallows is night and day. They both get a lot out of the moments they share together, in what amounts to a sweet win-win scenario. "It's just joyful!" Levy said. Shore is looking for more small business owners to trade jobs for kitchen space. The nonprofit is also busy renovating a job training center in Morton Grove that helps people with disabilities prepare for employment.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store