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Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said Friday that unpredictable change is inevitable and central banks need to be aware of that and have strategies to operate in those environments. Williams’ comments, which came in prepared remarks for an event in Amsterdam, did not address the outlook for U.S. monetary policy. Williams serves as vice chair of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, which cut interest rates last month as officials sought to offset rising risks to the job market. Unpredictable change and uncertainty will certainly continue to be with us for the foreseeable future, Williams said, flagging issues like the effects of ongoing global demographic shifts, artificial intelligence, and potentially transformative innovations in our financial systems. Williams said dealing with uncertainty means that central banks need robust principles and strategies in place that can deal with a range of contingencies, while noting there will still be novel situations to deal with. Williams also said that formerly unconventional strategies like bond buying are no longer novel and are a normal part of the toolkit. Williams said anchoring inflation expectations is critical and cannot be taken for granted. Michael S. Derby, Reuters
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Investors in quantum computing stocks are having another great week, with shares in the major publicly traded firms up by double digits over the last 24 hours in most cases. Here’s a snapshot of their single-day growth as of the closing bell on Thursday: Rigetti Computing (Nasdaq: RGTI): Up 18.25% D-Wave Quantum Inc (NYSE: QBTS): Up 13.97% IONQ Inc (NYSE: IONQ): Up 10.32% Quantum Computing Inc (Nasdaq: QUBT): 5;32% All four companies were also up in premarket trading on Friday as of this writing. Why are quantum computing stocks rising this week? The rally is apparently being led in part by Berkeley, California-based Rigetti, which announced a major purchase order on Tuesday for two of its 9-qubit Novera quantum computing systems, which are used in research and development. Rigetti introduced the systems in 2023 and says they’re upgradable, meaning the qubit count can be increased. Qubits, or quantum bits, are the basic units on which quantum computers operate. Delivery of Rigetti’s two systems are expected by early next year. The purchase order totaled $5.7 million, the company said. While that might not seem like a giant sum, it’s another sign that somebody, somewhere sees practical uses for quantum computing technology, which has remained largely theoretical until relatively recently. Rigetti did not say who purchased the systems, only that one customer was an Asian company that builds manufacturing tech and the other was an AI startup based in California. Craig Ellis, an analyst at B. Riley Financial, also recently reiterated his Buy rating for Rigetti, as Motley Fool reported. In addition to Rigetti’s announcement, D-Wave announced the results of a “proof-of-technology” joint project with the North Wales Police in the U.K. The project leveraged hybrid quantum technology to help optimize the placement of police vehicles. “The hybrid-quantum technology delivered a faster, more accurate, and more efficient solution than classical methods alone, providing NWP with the ability to reduce the average incident response time by nearly 50%,” D-Wave said in its press release. Quantum computing shares have had a wild ride this year Publicly traded quantum computing firms began to captivate investors late last year as reports of the technology’s potential capabilities started to make headlines. Rigetti, which was essentially a penny stock one year ago, has seen its shares increase by a staggering 4,620% over the last 12 months. The stock was trading at $35.40 a share as of Thursday’s close. D-Wave, whose CEO has vocally pushed back against claims that commercial quantum computers are still decades away, has likewise seen its shares rise by 3,075% over that same period. Should such wild growth give investors pause? Well, probably. Although many experts believe that quantum computing is a bonafide technical revolution that could transform the industry and the world, the sector remains highly speculative at present. It’s not hard to find critics who contend that these stocks are overvalued. Time will tell.
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Whether its Sam Altman surreptitiously stealing GPUs from a Target, trying to make a break for the door under the gaze of security cameras as he tucks a box containing a valuable computer chip under his arm, or Super Mario appearing in Star Wars, the rupture in reality brought about by OpenAIs AI-generated video social network, Sora, is significant. What previously would have been decried as deepfaked videos have gone viral on social media in the last two days, while also outstripping the release of Meta’s competing product, Vibes. Users, including some OpenAI employees on social media, have been revelling in their ability to create outlandish content involving real life characters a consequence of unusually lax rules set out by OpenAI, the company behind Sora. That’s despite the AI giant purporting to have some rules designed to prevent IP infringement. Social networks, which were once designed to connect us with one another and have since been subsumed by AI slop, are now looking like theyre going the way of the dodo. In their place is a boomer Facebook users paradise: A steady scroll of the unreal and outlandish, and not a single human involved. That has experts worried about our ability to distinguish fact from fiction, and how it can tamper with our temperaments. It isnt entirely surprising that businesses are effectively following the money as to what weve seen over the last 12 to 18 months, particularly in terms of AI generated video content, says deepfake expert Henry Ajder. Some of the most viewed videos on platforms like YouTube Shorts, traditionally home to human-only content, are now AI-generated. The fact that these companies are recognizing those opportunities isn’t surprising to me, he says. Those who are slightly online, not to mention the extremely online, are similarly unsurprised. We’re not ready Nevertheless, the impact of AI-filled feeds on our perception of content is significant, says Jessica Maddox, associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia. The danger in sharing and enjoying AI images, even when people know theyre not real, is that people will now have to chase more fictional, manipulated media to get that feeling, she says. And with the apps in question explicitly saying there are few, if any, guardrails around copyrighted content, and limited ones around the type of content that can be created, there are real risks of polluting our pools of content for years to come. Some suggest that were ill-equipped to deal with the problemin part because what we consider real images havent been real for a while, thanks to the volume of pre-processing that takes place in the millisecond between clicking the shutter on your smartphone and the image being saved in your camera roll. A recent preprint study by Janis Keuper, a researcher at Offenburg University and his wife, Margret Keuper, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the University of Mannheim, suggests that the gap between the quality of images used to train deepfake detectors and the average smartphone snap is now so significant as to make any detection tools useless. Detection tools are trained on ground truth images that are as similar to today’s photographs as early 20th century cameras were. Its going to be really hard to filter out AI content, says Janis Keuper. It’s really hard in in text. It’s really hard in images as the generators become better and better. And well, weve been looking at AI generated images for a while now, he says. The secret of slop However, what is different with the advent of Vibes and Sora is that they explicitly say they want AI content firstand usually foremost. Meta Vibes is perfectly named for the problem of AI slop, says Maddox. In a world where the world itself is our imagination, it doesn’t matter if the actual image represents anything close to reality. Its akin to alternative facts. No matter how outlandish the video, its legitimate. All it has to do is reinforce our viewpointthe visual equivalent of the post-truth era brought about by Donald Trump. That bleeds through to the common perception of how people often react to AI-generated content, says Maddox. People will say, But I agree with what its trying to say, whether its real or not, she says. And thats proof positive of whats going on. AI is vibes only, she says. Unfortunately, that means something like Meta Vibes is likely to be incredibly successful with Metas audience that seems to love AI imagery. It wont matter, because with AI, feelings reign supreme. Where the authentic and the synthetic collapse And thats what worries the experts the most. The apps are being foisted on users, but may well succeedin part because were already inured to the persuasive power of content to move us. Reality is one now where authentic and synthetic collapses, right? says Ajder. People have authentic experiencesthat is, experiences that move them, change their beliefs, change their relationships, change their opinionswith AI. Theyre influenced with virtual companions, via chatbots, and with AI-generated disinformation content around war zones and conflicts. Ajder doesnt believe Meta and OpenAI are thinking about the emotional response to AI. The idea is less passionate, he says. It’s more market driven. These kinds of videos are cheap to make. Theyre quick to make. We can scale them easily, and they get engagement, they get views, they get clicks. (Never mind the cost for the environment.) But as well as getting rid of the “social” from social media, the second- and third-order ramifications of driving an AI-powered attention economy could have more significant consequences than keeping us scrolling.
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