Inside Google’s scramble to reinvent its $160 billion search business—and survive the A.I. revolution | This Surprising Obsession Drives Vivek Ramaswamy And His Presidential Campaign | Why are so many Britons not working? | Why fear is spreading in financial markets

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� � � � � � Inside Google's scramble to reinvent its $160 billion search business—and survive the A.I. revolution - Fortune    Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, parent company of Google, stands onstage in front of a packed house at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, Calif. He’s doing his best interpretation of a role pioneered by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: the tech CEO as part pop idol, part tent-revival preacher, deliverer of divine revelation, not in song or sermon but in software and silicon. Except the soft-spoken, introverted Pichai is not a natural for the role: Somehow his vibe is more high school musical than Hollywood Bowl.  Pichai declared Google to be an “A.I.-first” company way back in 2016. Now A.I. is having a major moment—but a Google rival is grabbing all the attention. The November debut of ChatGPT caught Google off guard, setting off a frantic six months in which it scrambled to match the generative A.I. offerings being rolled out by ChatGPT creator OpenAI and its partner and backer, Microsoft. Here, at the company’s huge annual I/O developer conference in May, Pichai wants to show off what Google built in those six months. He reveals a new Gmail feature called Help Me Write, which automatically drafts whole emails based on a text prompt; an A.I.-powered immersive view in Google Maps that builds a realistic 3D preview of a user’s route; generative A.I. photo editing tools; and much more. He talks about the powerful PaLM 2 large language model (LLM) that underpins much of this technology—including Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor. And he mentions a powerful family of A.I. models under development, called Gemini, that could immensely expand A.I.’s impact—and its risks. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium This Surprising Obsession Drives Vivek Ramaswamy And His Presidential Campaign - Forbes    Onwhat feels like the hottest morning amid the hottest August in recorded history, Vivek Ramaswamy sits coolly on a plush leather couch in his campaign bus, chomping on an apple and brimming with self-belief. Thirty-six hours earlier, the 38-year-old political neophyte was the breakout star in the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 primary season. “My gut instinct is that I’m going to be the nominee, that I’m going to win the general election in a landslide,” he says, before positing why that could be: “I think I am closer to Trump in 2015 than Trump today is to Trump in 2015. You only get to be the outsider once.” That’s among the more truthful things he’s in the habit of saying. Eight years ago, Donald Trump turned every American political assumption upside down. He ran for president as a businessman without any political experience, any realistic platform or any repercussions from scandals that would have blown out pretty much every politician, ever. Instead, he was grievance personified, which, combined with uncanny messaging instincts, enabled him to pull an inside straight and punch his ticket to the White House. That’s what makes Ramaswamy’s campaign important. It turns out that Trump wasn’t an aberration—as his juggernaut non-campaign currently underscores—but rather a template. The hottest candidate in the GOP field isn’t the Florida governor, the South Carolina senator or even the former vice president. It’s yet another tycoon (Ramaswamy edged into billionaire status earlier this year) with a penchant for TV hits and the often inaccurate, sometimes outrageous and highly calibrated statements that feed them. Continued here � � � � � � Why are so many Britons not working? - The Economist    SLUGABED. Slowpoke. Idler. Loafer. The English language has many evocative terms for those seen as workshy. British politicians have made hearty use of them when debating economic inactivity. Economists, however, used to point out that Britain had a good record on this score. For two decades until 2019 its inactivity rate (the share of people of working age who are neither working nor looking for a job) was among the lowest of any rich country. Then something went awry. Pandemic lockdowns smothered economic activity everywhere. But whereas other economies bounced back—since 2020 the inactivity rate has fallen, on average, by 0.4 percentage points across the OECD, a club of rich countries—in Britain, uniquely, it continues to climb, and is up by 0.5 points. What’s going on? The immediate cause is not disputed: more Britons than ever are classified as unwell. Data released this week showed a remarkable 2.6m people, a record, are economically inactive because of long-term sickness—an increase of 476,000 since early 2020. Inactivity helps explain why firms are struggling with labour shortages and, in part, stubbornly high inflation. And there is a hefty bill. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, says more long-term sickness has added £15.7bn ($19.6bn), or 0.6% of GDP, to annual government borrowing because of lost tax receipts and higher welfare spending. Diagnosing the cause of the swelling sick rolls is trickier. Could covid, its mystery cousin long covid, or shakier mental health post-pandemic be to blame? Hardly. These are not unique to Britain. Are the woes of the National Health Service the cause? Waiting lists for elective treatment have grown immensely: from 4.6m in February 2020 to 7.6m this summer. Yet look closely, and this is not the answer either. More than half of those waiting for care are not of working age. Nor do the biggest drivers of higher waiting lists by treatment type (for example, musculoskeletal issues) match the reported conditions of the long-term sick (which often relate to mental health). Continued here � � � � � � Why fear is spreading in financial markets - The Economist    According to t. s. Eliot, April is the cruellest month. Shareholders would disagree. For them, it is September. The rest of the year stocks tend to rise more often than not. Since 1928, the ratio of monthly gains to losses in America’s s&p 500 index, excluding September, has been about 60/40. But the autumn chill seems to do something to the market’s psyche. In September the index has fallen 55% of the time. True to form, after a jittery August it has spent recent weeks falling. Such a calendar effect flies in the face of the idea that financial markets are efficient. After all, asset prices ought only to move in response to new information (future cash flows, for instance). Other fluctuations, especially predictable ones, should be identified, exploited and arbitraged away by traders. Yet this September there is no mystery about what is going on: investors have learned, or rather accepted, something new. High interest rates—most importantly in America but also elsewhere—are here for the long haul. The downturn was prompted by a marathon session of monetary-policy announcements, which began with America’s Federal Reserve on September 20th and concluded two days and 11 central banks later. Except for the Bank of Japan, which kept its short-term interest rate negative, all the big hitters repeated the “higher for longer” message. Beforehand Huw Pill of the Bank of England likened rates to Table Mountain, the flat-topped peak overlooking Cape Town, as opposed to the Matterhorn, which has a triangular summit. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, raised rates and spoke of the “long race that we are in”. The Fed’s governors, on average, guessed that their benchmark rate (currently 5.25-5.50%) would still be above 5% by the end of 2024. Continued here

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