How Online Review Devour Our Lives

Earlier this year, Alex Hart, a Seattle mother of two, set out on a seemingly straightforward task: she logged on to Amazon to buy-blue sprinkles, the finishing touch for cupcakes she planned to bake for her son’s elementary class. Soon, however, she found herself “sucked in” — something that happens often when Hart shops online. Before she knew it, she’d spent more than an hour reading reviews about blue sprinkles. 

“You start looking through reviews and it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m learning new things,’” she said. For instance, Hart hadn’t considered many of the potential issues that reviewers brought to her attention: the sprinkles had a slightly chemical aftertaste, melted too quickly, or didn’t taste like sugar. “It got a little frustrating because I was like, ‘Why can’t I find sprinkles that just taste like sprinkles?’” she said.

This Team Decides If Their AI Can Be Used To Kill People

When AI companies like OpenAI, MetaMETA $632.50 (2.16%), or Anthropic finish training a new AI model, one of the last steps in the process is to put the model in front of “red teams” — experts in biology, nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, and misinformation — who try to get the model to do very bad things.Their Job Is to Push Computers Toward AI Doom

The Wall Street Journal profiled Anthropic’s in-house red team, which assigns risk scores based on their testing, which the company uses to decide if a model is safe to be released. 

NASDAQ composite surpasses 20k for the first time as tech stock surge.

The S&P 500 rose 0.8% and the Russell 2000 was up 0.5% while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 soared 1.8% to hit a record high.

Stocks benefited from an in-line November CPI inflation report that calcified traders’ confidence that the Federal Reserve will deliver a rate cut next week.

The top S&P 500 sector ETFs were consumer discretionary, communications services, and tech. However, more sector ETFs fell than rose, with health care a notable laggard.

The S&P 500’s advance-decline was negative for the eighth straight session, the longest such streak since the market bottomed in December 2018.

The Magnificent 7 cohort had their best day in over a month, up 3.1% led by Tesla TSLA $429.30 (5.94%) — which hit its first record high in over three years — and Google GOOGL $196.99 (5.56%).

Semiconductors bounced after an awful start to the week, with the VanEck Semiconductor ETF SMH $245.40 (2.47%) gaining 2.5%.

Quantum computing firm Rigetti Computing RGTI $7.15 (13.56%)’s surge was briefly interrupted by a tweet from Citron Research pouring cold water on the stock, but still ended up 13.7%. Competitors in the space like IonQ IONQ $29.53 (-9.01%) and D-Wave Quantum QBTS $4.17 (-12.82%) tumbled.

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• iOS 18.2 is rolling out now, adding ChatGPT integration and more Apple Intelligence tools

• Albertsons sues Kroger after judge rules against grocery merger.

• Airfares are going up faster than rent now.

The First Recorded Recipe is Over 4,000 Years Old