Open and shut
New York Times versus the chatbots
Good morning, virtual virtuosos. This is your Stock Market Rundown for January 9th, 2024. Thanks for joining me once again. Let’s get into it:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: GRAND THEFT AUTOCORRECT
Chat GPT is a marvel. Just ask, and the free chatbot will write you a horror story in the style of Stephen King, a joke aping the humour of Jerry Seinfeld, or a rap lyric borrowing Jay-Z’s flow.
But how exactly did Chat GPT learn to be such a capable mimic? Well, its creator—OpenAI—gave it a cram session with millions of books, scientific journals, newspaper articles, and other content. It was like Kumon for GPUs.
And that’s where the lawsuits come in. The New York Times is suing OpenAI, the maker of Chat GPT, for training its chatbots on the newspaper’s archive of articles, without permission.
Demanding billions in damages, the Times accuses ChatGPT of basing their business on “mass copyright infringement”, and of being no better than a lazy fourth grader copying his homework directly from Wikipedia.
They’re not the only ones who are pissed. A host of other writers, among them thriller novelist John Grisham and Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, are suing Open AI, too. The company has defended itself by claiming that scraping copyrighted works to train AI products is “fair use”. Soon, a court will decide.
Passionate AI defenders argue it will unleash unlimited abundance. But so far, OpenAI isn’t using chatbots to feed starving children. Instead, they’re charging corporations big bucks for access to the bot-powered future. Let’s be real… you don’t get to an $80 billion valuation by doing charity work.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
Everybody hurts, sometimes. Industry data shows short sellers—investors who bet on stock prices falling—saw their portfolios get creamed to the tune of $195 billion in 2023. When the overall market is surging, being short makes you a bug in search of a windshield.
A supermarket chain in France got so miffed with PepsiCo’s price increases on everything from Lay’s potato chips to Lipton iced tea, it will no longer carry the mega corp’s products. What a tragedy—the nation that gave us Camembert will no longer have access to Cheetos.
America’s biggest egg producer, Cal-Maine, had a tough quarter due to egg prices being down 49% from this time last year. With prices like these, you can increase the number of eggs in your morning omelet from two to four.
In an effort to reduce the number of cardboard cups clogging landfills, Starbucks is letting customers use refillable cups for drive-through orders. But then how will people know I’m drinking a $5.95 Starbucks latte, and not sludge from the Keurig in the break room?
That's all for today, valued colleagues; let’s reconvene tomorrow morning, at the usual time. Yours in capitalism, The Axe
Got questions? Compliments? Want to advertise in Stock Market Rundown?
Hit me up at theaxe@stockmarketrundown.co