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The chip of Sam Altman’s eye may be too shiny. The $7 trillion price tag on his project to reshape the global semiconductor industry is a big, big number — in fact, maybe that’s all it is.
Meanwhile, a U.S. chipmaker is getting $1.5 billion from the government. The Biden administration is giving GlobalFoundries money to expand production in New York and Vermont.
U.S. aid to Ukraine is boosting the U.S. economy. European allies and the Pentagon are putting in orders for weapons, increasing defense industry production by 17.5% since 2022.
The company that makes parts for half of the world’s cars is slashing 10,000 jobs. France’s Forvia, a supplier for Tesla, Ford, and many others, is staring down an EV transition and China.
Along came Sora — and the deepfakes
Sora — OpenAI’s new text-to-video generator — is living up to its name. Sora means “sky” in Japanese, and it’s pretty clear that if this is phase one, then sky’s the limit on where this technology can go.
Quite simply: Yes, this will mean more deepfakes, Jun-Yan Zhu, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who researches generative AI, told Quartz. And OpenAI can’t be the only one building out this type of technology (we’re looking at you, Google and Microsoft), meaning there will be more access to make more fake videos that look really real.
So where do we go from here? Here’s how Sora could change videos.
Bad air means big costs for businesses
Companies across the globe already lose more than a billion work days every year due to air pollution. By 2060, that number could more than triple to 3.8 billion days, especially with wildfires becoming much more prevalent as the world warms.
We quantified just how much that loss in productivity will cost U.S. workers in the year 2054 alone, and it’s $334.1 billion.
“We are just starting to see the beginnings of the impact this hazard will have on our daily lives and the larger economy moving forward,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at the environmental research group First Street, told Quartz. Read the full report here.
The American vibes recession is over
Consumer sentiment just hit its highest mark since before the pandemic, and it’s good vibes only.
It’s not just our words. The Fed is talking about vibes, too. Chicago Fed president Austan Goolsbee last week took a moment to get philosophical about the state of America’s vibes, saying, “We do think about vibes, because historically the vibes — consumer sentiment and business sentiment — have been good predictors of consumer spending and business investment.”
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Surprising discoveries
Patagonia has very new, very old cave art. Nobody knows what the “comb-like” pattern means, unless we’re all just over-thinking it and cave-dwellers 8,200 years ago hated tangles.
Teens still know how to get around teen bans. It’s an age-old tradition going strong.
A lot of actors think “tear sticks” are cheating. There are lots of ways you can learn to cry on cue without the use of the menthol lipstick-for-your-eyes, though.
For the first time, a child has been cured of brainstem glioma. That’s a particularly nasty brain cancer, so this is something to really celebrate.
The math of music imparts information to our brains. And that might be why we like what we like — and why J.S. Bach was such a genius.
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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, baroque math, and tear sticks to talk@qz.com. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Susan Howson and Morgan Haefner.