Good morning, dear readers,
the exhausting thing about revolutions is that a lot of things happen so suddenly and unexpectedly. In comparison, the Evolution appears to be a much more relaxed event. Primeval anuras, which took hundreds of millions of years to crawl out of the sea onto land, could sing a song about it. Could, if it hadn’t taken another hundred million years to sing.
Artificially intelligent software (AI), on the other hand, has within a very short time developed the ability not only to sing music independently, but also to compose it, which is why the term “AI revolution” seems justified. Especially since this revolution, which is typical of the genre, does not follow rules either.
The AI experts have always agreed: First, intelligent software systems and robots would take over the monotonous and manual activities from humans – and finally the jobs of the so-called knowledge workers, doctors, lawyers, researchers and journalists.
In fact, it is now the other way around. Progress in autonomous driving is stagnating, Amazon has stopped its experiments with delivery robots and there is still no AI that can clear a restaurant table halfway accident-free. Instead, programs like ChatGPT may not yet be able to completely take over countless tasks from knowledge workers, but they can at least imitate them in a deceptively similar way.
The truck driver, on the other hand, who, according to the forecast, should have been trembling for his job for a long time, can now start at Walmart in the USA on an annual salary of $100,000, so urgently is he wanted. Then, from the driver’s cab of his truck, he looks pityingly down at the knowledge worker in the Toyota Prius and asks: “Who’s the lurch here?”
No doubt, so-called generative AI is the next big thing in Silicon Valley. The new messiah in the valley of technology is Sam Altman and he is the brain behind ChatGPT. We dedicated our Friday title to him this week.
Sam Altman: The inventor of ChatGPT is currently revolutionizing the world of work with artificial intelligence.
The financier behind Altman’s ambitions is again an old acquaintance from the tube screen days: Microsoft. In an interview, the AI boss explains how he intends to roll out generative AI across his company’s product range. Those of you who use PowerPoint or Teams regularly can be prepared for something.
A representative online survey by the Civey Institute for the Handelsblatt Morning Briefing shows that Germans are by no means unanimous in seeing the AI revolution as the great threat it is often portrayed as.
A majority of 57.8 percent believe “definitely not” or “rather not” that their jobs could be threatened by AI. “Yes, definitely” or “rather yes” answer 23.9 percent. The rest is undecided.
Civey boss Janina Mütze: “Many employees simply do not know whether artificial intelligence will do them more harm or benefit. Employers should take up this uncertainty, address existential fears and look together at the importance of AI for their own work.”
In striking contrast to the AI euphoria in Silicon Valley are the mews published last night Results of the tech companies Alphabet, Amazon and Apple.
alphabet, where ChatGPT is seen as a threat to its own core business with the search engine Google, saw profits slump in the fourth quarter. Net income fell to $13.6 billion from $20.6 billion in the same period last year. Group sales rose from $75 to $76.3 billion. Alphabet shares fell nearly 4 percent in U.S. after-hours trading.
Discount campaigns in the important Christmas business brought Amazon a surprisingly high turnover in the last quarter. Revenues were $149.2 billion. Net profit, on the other hand, was only a fraction of market expectations at $300 million. The stock fell more than 4 percent in after-hours trading.
Apple closed the quarter with an unusually significant drop in sales and profits. iPhone revenues in particular fell by a good eight percent year-on-year to $65.8 billion. Before Christmas, the US group was struggling with bottlenecks in the new iPhone 14 Pro because factories in China had to close due to corona measures.
Overall, Apple sales fell by around five percent to $ 117.2 billion. The bottom line was a profit of almost $30 billion – $4.6 billion less than a year earlier. The share was temporarily at minus three percent.
When debating the state of the German armaments industry, the term “industry” is already a subject of great debate. The European armaments companies were more like “medieval manufactories” in their way of working, as a diplomat put it: When an order was placed, they rarely produced for stock.
That is no longer enough in times of the Ukraine war and rearmament. Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) is hoping in the direction of the armaments industry “that we can now get more speed in there”.
What the manufacturers want in return is planning security. Rheinmetall boss Armin Papperger told the Handelsblatt: “A pact with the industry would have to include framework conditions for the next seven to ten years.”
Politicians and companies would have to agree on minimum purchase quantities as well as upper limits for desired products.
But it is a long way from manufacture back to industry. According to the German Economic Institute, around 55,500 employees in the defense industry in Germany produced weapons, combat aircraft, warships and military vehicles for around 11.3 billion euros in 2020.
Both the number of employees and the turnover were thus lower than in 2015 shortly after the annexation of Crimea. No wonder that among the top 5 gunsmiths worldwide there are only American companies.
Somewhere in the manufacturing era I would have guessed the heyday of spy balloons, nowadays you have satellites for that sort of thing. But a report from the US Department of Defense teaches me otherwise: The US military has sighted a Chinese spy balloon over the northern United States.
The trajectory is followed closely. They considered launching the balloon, but decided against it because of the danger of falling debris. The balloon is said to be harmless to aircraft due to its high flight altitude, and something like this has happened more often.
I wish you a relaxed end to the week on cloud nine.
Best regards
Your Christian Rickens
Editor-in-Chief Handelsblatt
