Hi, Quartz members!
This week, we spent possibly an undue amount of time looking at what the very rich are buying and selling. But that was before our attention was sucked up entirely by Nvidia, which looked a little dicey (in more ways than one), until it absolutely didn’t.
Here are our other favorite reads from Quartz from the past week and a sneak peek for next. Happy reading!
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🚘 One word that isn’t often associated with Nvidia: cars. Record stock prices and AI craze aside, the chipmaker had another milestone tucked into its latest financial data. It brought in $1.1 billion just from deals in the auto industry last year, especially for self-driving cars.
🤖 Millions of Reddit posts will be fed to Google’s AI model. The online forum signed an agreement with the tech giant to allow its user-generated content to train robots that will generate more content. Gemini, give me a recipe for cookies but in the tone of subreddit r/Showerthoughts.
🥸 Who is Sam Altman? The most recognizable person in the generative artificial intelligence industry has ambitious plans to change the world. We looked at the turns in the road that led him to the helm of OpenAI.
👁️ China wants even more control of its surveillance network. The country is cracking down on local governments’ use of “unnecessary monitoring equipment” to collect excessive fines, but don’t be fooled. Beijing is not looking to scale back its surveillance capabilities — quite the opposite.
📍 Bucharest, Romania; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Huntsville, Alabama all have something in common. They’re among the not-so-obvious places tech companies are increasingly looking at to supply their next class of talent. Lower labor and property costs are of course fueling the trend.
1 sneak peek
In this climate of constant layoff news coming from the tech and media sectors (😬), Cornell University labor expert Arthur Wheaton told Quartz’s Laura Bratton that it’s good to remember that the economy is never an across-the-board thing.
You’ll have to wait until Monday to read the full story, but we’ll give you one quote from Laura here, because we know the waiting is the hardest part.
In fact, there’s actually a labor shortage, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group. Even if all unemployed Americans found jobs, there would still be 3 million unfilled positions.
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on:
- Monday: Mobile World Congress begins in Barcelona, which is a huge trade show dedicated to all things mobile communications. Zoom and Domino’s are also reporting earnings.
- Wednesday: Salesforce and HP will publish their quarterly earnings, as will Formula One Group, amid a lot of drama about Red Bull’s principal
- Thursday: Anheuser-Busch InBev is expected to post its latest financials.
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, Reddit/Gemini collabs, and more Tom Petty references. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Susan Howson and Morgan Haefner.