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Taylor Swift at a premiere of "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour" in Los Angeles, California, in October 2023.
Hard Numbers: Not-so-Swift, Job cuts, Microsoft’s milestone, Meta goes to Indiana, Blocking bots
45 million: AI-generated pornographic images of Taylor Swift circulated around social media sites last week, spurring Swift’s team to contemplate legal action. On X, formerly Twitter, one such post had 45 million views before it was finally removed for violating the site’s rules.
8,000: Tech companies are slashing jobs to invest in AI. The German software firm SAP announced it plans to cut or restructure 8,000 jobs — training some of the employees to work alongside AI.
3 trillion: SAP isn’t alone: Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs from its video game business just as AI has pushed its market capitalization past the $3 trillion mark. Yes, Microsoft, which has spent $13 billion investing in OpenAI in addition to its internal work on AI, is the most valuable company in the world.
800 million: Facebook parent company Meta announced it is building an $800 million data center in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to support its AI efforts. We detailed Meta’s controversial ambitions to build open-source AGI, or artificial general intelligence, in last week’s newsletter.
90: News companies are pushing back against AI companies training their models on their articles — at least not without proper payment. More than 90% of top news organizations, according to one estimate, have protections in place to stop data collection bots.
A man holds wheat grains during harvest in Qaha, El-Kalubia governorate, northeast of Cairo, Egypt.
What We’re Watching: Grain deal deadline, tech layoffs, interest rate ripples
Will the Black Sea grain deal be renewed?
Amid growing concern that Russia may refuse to renew a deal to allow food and fertilizer shipments to travel through a safe passage in the Black Sea, UN Secretary-General António Guterres this week visited Kyiv, where he called for the renewal of the agreement, which is set to lapse on March 18. Quick recap: The grain deal, negotiated by Turkey, the UN, Russia, and Ukraine, was implemented in the summer of 2022 in a bid to free up 20 million tons of grain stuck at Ukrainian ports due to Russia’s blockade. You’ll likely remember that the two states are both huge exporters of wheat, while Russia is also the global fertilizer king. Indeed, the deal has helped alleviate a global food crisis that was hitting import-reliant Africa particularly hard, and driving up global food prices. Kyiv, for its part, says that if the deal is expanded to additional ports it could export at least some of the 30 million tons of grain that remain stuck. The Kremlin hasn’t said what its plans are but this week accused the West of “shamelessly burying" the Black Sea deal in what could be used as a pretext for its refusal to play ball.
For more on what Guterres has to say about the ongoing war in Ukraine and its human toll, check out his interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
What should we make of the great tech implosion?
We’ve heard a lot about a downturn in the tech sector in recent months after giants including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, Alphabet, and Spotify laid off large chunks of their workforces. All in all, an estimated 200,000 US tech workers have been shown the door since the start of 2022 – more than the equivalent of the entire Apple workforce. At the same time, however, unemployment in the US remains at record lows, with the US adding more than 311,000 new jobs in February alone, yet another sign of the labor market's resilience. So what does – and doesn’t – the great tech debacle tell us about the current state of the global economy? First, COVID was a boon for the tech sector. As the world shut down, tech companies made the most of increased demand for work/play/eat-from-home services and embarked on massive hiring sprees. Alphabet, for example, increased its workforce by 16% between 2020-2021. But as soon as things reopened, it became clear that consumers wanted to go back to exercising in sweaty gyms and dining at overpriced ramen bars. Demand plummeted. What’s more, rising interest rates – an effort to tackle runaway inflation – and a dizzying stock market are making it harder for tech companies to raise capital and putting downward pressure on stock prices, leading to massive cost-cutting measures. Crucially, analysts warn that things will get worse before they get better.