February 23 2024
The TikTok election
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1 TikTok to play large role in 2024 election
2 American commercial spacecraft lands on moon
3 Chipmaker Nvidia’s blowout earnings report reflects scale of AI boom
4 AI can help the middle class
5 Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic to change food demand patterns
2/23/1954 Children receive first polio vaccine
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1 TikTok to play large role in 2024 election
Donald Trump’s first election campaign played out on Facebook. Protests against the murder of George Floyd and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade took to its sister app, Instagram. Journalists and commentators have begun to see Meta Platform Inc.’s Twitter copycat, Threads, as a space for news away from Elon Musk’s X. But with Meta getting squeamish about politics at the cusp of the US election year, the tech giant stands to lose relevance to rival TikTok. Meta last week formally said it’ll be prioritizing light, advertiser-friendly topics like fashion and sports, while stopping recommendations of political content in people’s feeds across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Users will have to actively search for political news and commentary, or manually opt in to see posts on elections or certain social topics that Meta deems politics-adjacent. Political content creators also won’t be able to reach new followers with those posts.
Meanwhile, that momentum has been shifting TikTok’s direction. President Joe Biden’s election campaign launched its account on the viral video site on Super Bowl Sunday. Despite ongoing concerns about the app’s ownership by Chinese tech giant ByteDance Ltd., Biden’s team seems to recognize that TikTok will be a key political hub during election season. TikTok has both the hard-to-reach youth vote and is increasingly popular with older demographics. The average age of the 170 million Americans logging in every month is now older than 30, the company said last month. One Gen-Z creator, who focuses on news and politics, said they plan to spend less time on Instagram and more on TikTok, where their content has a better chance of getting views. The creator declined to be named for fear of retribution from the platforms.
Some Instagram and Threads users, who are concerned about what exactly Meta will define as political content, have also said they are planning to move to other apps. No longer just an app for silly dance videos, TikTok has been a lively place for political discussion on topics from the wars in Israel and Ukraine to the state of reproductive rights in America. Young people are increasingly turning to the app as a news source, while Facebook and X have seen a decline in users who say they regularly get their news there, according to Pew Research.
Bloomberg
2 American commercial spacecraft lands on moon
An uncrewed spacecraft developed by Houston-based Intuitive Machines landed on the lunar surface Thursday evening, the first time a U.S. vehicle has touched down there in more than 50 years. The company’s Odysseus vehicle, carrying research and commercial devices, descended from lunar orbit to land shortly after 6:20 p.m. ET in the moon’s south pole region, according to a National Aeronautics and Space Administration livestream.
WSJ
3 Chipmaker Nvidia’s blowout earnings report reflects scale of AI boom
Nvidia’s fourth-quarter results showed that massive spending to build artificial intelligence systems remains strong as the chip maker scrambles to meet demand. Chief Executive Jensen Huang described AI as hitting “the tipping point” and indicated demand for the computing power that underlies AI remained astronomical. “Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” he said. That demand showed up in the company’s results Wednesday. Sales more than tripled in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter from a year earlier and are projected to do so again in the current period. Earnings surged more than eightfold. The results exceeded analyst expectations. Shares in the company rose 9% in off-hours trading. Nvidia’s results act as a bellwether for the strength of the AI boom, as big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple place large bets on the technology and need Nvidia’s hardware to drive them.
WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/nvidia-nvda-q4-earnings-report-2024-cc7c257d
4 AI can help the middle class
While the utopian vision of the current Information Age was that computerization would flatten economic hierarchies by democratizing information, the opposite has occurred. Information, it turns out, is merely an input into a more consequential economic function, decision-making, which is the province of elite experts. The unique opportunity that AI offers to the labor market is to extend the relevance, reach, and value of human expertise. Because of AI’s capacity to weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can be applied to enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks that are currently arrogated to elite experts, e.g., medical care to doctors, document production to lawyers, software coding to computer engineers, and undergraduate education to professors. My thesis is not a forecast but an argument about what is possible: AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.
NBER, David Autor
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32140
5 Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic to change food demand patterns
Nestle SA Chief Executive Officer Mark Schneider said GLP-1 obesity drugs like Wegovy will probably increase demand for a range of food products that can help avoid nutrient deficiencies. The company is well-prepared to help users of such treatments with a portfolio that already has annual sales of 1.5 billion Swiss francs ($1.7 billion) including products such as Vital Performance Protein to preserve muscle mass and Garden of Life probiotics to improve gastrointestinal health. The boom in medications such as Novo Nordisk A/S’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound won’t cause a “straight reduction in demand, but a shift in demand,” Schneider told reporters Thursday as the company reported 2023 results. Food stocks have been dropping on concern about GLP-1 drugs. Last week, Morgan Stanley said spending in households that use such medications decreased by 6% to 9% versus non-GLP-1 households, citing a survey from Numerator, a market-research provider.
Bloomberg
2/23/1954 Children receive first polio vaccine
Have a good weekend!
