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When the generative AI hype fades

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by Matt Asay -- infoworld -- By now you’ve used a generative AI (GenAI) tool like ChatGPT to build an application, author a grant proposal, or write all those employee reviews you’d been putting off. If you’ve done any of these things or simply played around with asking a large language model (LLM) questions, you’ve no doubt been impressed by just how well GenAI tools can mimic human output. You’ve also no doubt recognized that they’re not perfect. Indeed, for all their promise, GenAI tools such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot still need experienced human input to create the prompts that guide them, as well as to review their results. This won’t change anytime soon. In fact, generative AI is big not so much for all the exam papers, legal briefs, or software applications it may write, but because it has heightened the importance of AI more generally. Once all the hype around GenAI fades—and it will—we’ll be left with increased investments in deep learning and machine learning, which may be GenAI’s biggest contribution to AI.

To the person with a GenAI hammer

It’s hard not to get excited about generative AI. On the software developer side, it promises to remove all sorts of drudgery from our work while enabling us to focus on higher-value coding. Most developers are still just lightly experimenting with GenAI coding tools like AWS CodeWhisperer, but others like Datasette founder Simon Willison have gone deep and discovered “enormous leaps ahead in productivity and in the ambition of the kinds of projects that you take on.” One reason Willison is able to gain so much from GenAI is his experience: He can use tools like GitHub Copilot to generate 80% of what he needs, and he is savvy enough to know where the tool’s output is usable and where he needs to write the remaining 20%. Most lack his level of experience and expertise and may need to be less ambitious with their use of GenAI. We go through a similar hype cycle for each wave of AI, and each time we have to learn to sift realistic hope from overreaching hype. Take machine learning, for example. When machine learning first arrived, data scientists applied it to everything, even when there were far simpler tools. As data scientist Noah Lorang once argued, “There is a very small subset of business problems that are best solved by machine learning; most of them just need good data and an understanding of what it means.” In other words, however cool it might make you look to develop algorithms to find patterns in petabytes of data, simple math or SQL queries are often a smarter approach.

What's the Income in USA of the Top 10%, 5%, and 1%?

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By: Lyle Daly -- fool.com/the-ascent -- The top 10% of household incomes starts at $191,406, the top 5% at $290,406, and the top 1% at $867,436. Those are the nationwide numbers, but they also vary considerably if you account for other factors, such as age or location. Income is a key part of personal finance, but it's not all that matters. Incomes vary quite a bit throughout the United States. The median income was $69,717 in 2021, but households in the top 10% and above make significantly more. It's interesting to see how much money these households make -- and how your own income compares. Of Dollars and Data released income research earlier this year with the thresholds for the top 10%, 5%, and 1% of household incomes, based on data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances.

The 2019 survey is the most recent that's currently available. Although it's a few years old, the median inflation-adjusted income of the top 25% of households increased by just 2% from 2019 to 2022. So, the income data still provides a fairly accurate idea of how much the richest households make.

Incomes of the top 10%, 5%, and 1%

Here are the household income thresholds for the top 10%, 5%, and 1%:

Top 10%: $191,406

Top 5%: $290,164

Top 1%: $867,436

As you can see, you need an income nearly three times the national median to crack the top 10%. It takes another $100,000 on top of that to make the top 5%. And the 1% is making beaucoup bucks.

Lebanon’s FIBA World Cup journey is about much more than basketball

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By Nadim El Kak -- Al Jazeera -- Beirut, Lebanon – It’s August 2022 and Lebanon are two points up on the Philippines with 18 seconds left in the game at a packed Nouhad Naufal Stadium in a Beirut suburb, when the ball spills out to Wael Arakji on the left – giving him the chance to sink a game-sealing three-pointer. If the shot goes in, it will not only guarantee the win but will also help secure Lebanon’s ticket to the 2023 FIBA World Cup taking place this August and September. Unfazed by the pressure of 8,000 roaring fans and an onrushing Jordan Clarkson looking to block, the 2022 FIBA Asia Cup Most Valuable Player (MVP) makes the shot – effectively guaranteeing the small Arab country its place in the World Cup for the fourth time in its history. Their qualification was confirmed after an easy win against India a few days later. Fans took to social media after the Philippines game to express their elation. “I was watching the game while at the office and couldn’t control my screams at every play,” Abed wrote in a Facebook group of 45,000 Lebanese basketball fans. “A lot of coworkers were confused and asked me what I get from all of this. There’s really no explaining our relationship with this sport.” Responding to Abed’s words, Sleiman takes a stab at the coworkers’ question in the comments: “What do we get from it? Thanks to this game we can experience pride in something called Lebanon rather than in parties, sects or politics.”

Being first isn’t everything in the NBA draft Indeed, basketball has brought back much-needed joy, solidarity and hope to a country still ailing from the aftermath of a foiled uprising, the catastrophic Beirut port explosion, and a continuing financial collapse. A few months before that, Lebanon lifted the 2022 Arab Championship trophy in front of a mostly Lebanese crowd in Dubai, mounting a spectacular fourth-quarter comeback to defeat reigning African champions Tunisia in the final. Experts say these successes have a profound effect on Lebanese society. “Sports are incredibly powerful because they’re a product that’s full of emotions – it’s a form of entertainment that meshes national identity with personal dreams and passions, regardless of political context,” Nadim Nassif, a scholar of sports history and governance based at Notre Dame University in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. “Basketball appeals to the Lebanese because the country is internationally competitive in [one of the] most popular sports in the world.”

Lebanon: Popular comedian detained after sketch on economic conditions

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By MEE staff -- Popular Lebanese comedian Nour Hajjar was detained on 25 August after posting a sketch online where he talks about the deteriorating economic conditions in the country. According to local media platform Megaphone News, the comedian spoke about Lebanese army personnel being forced to take on multiple side jobs such as delivery services in order to make enough money. Hajjar was summoned for interrogation at the military police barracks in Rihaniye, without being given a clear reason behind the summons, according to reports. Local media reports also state that the comedian's lawyer, Diala Shehadeh, was taken out of the military police station and asked to wait outside until a decision was made. The video of the sketch was posted online to a platform called awk.word, where comedians share their work.

Investigators have asked the co-founder of the platform, Dany Abou Jaoude, to join Hajjar's lawyers at the military police headquarters on Monday. According to a spokesperson from the awk.word platform, military personnel also visited the venue where awk.word stages its shows in the Karantina area. In the video, Hajjar jokes about how many people in the army work as delivery service drivers. "Have you noticed that all [delivery company Toters' couriers] are in the army?" he asks. "Can you imagine if Israel strikes us and the whole army is at Toters? We'll see 30 mopeds arrive at the border. One rocket and we'll be splashing Israel with honey-mustard sauce." Abou Jaoude told the Lebanese news site L'Orient Today that he was surprised by the detention. "This is the first time someone has been summoned because of a sketch broadcast on awk.word's networks," he said. "Our aim is not to harm the Lebanese army, but to talk about the general situation in the country. Humour is used to shed light on society's problems."

Many have voiced their concerns over the comedian’s arrest and criticised the economic conditions in the country. The official currency was devalued by 90 percent on February 1 to 15,000 pounds against the US dollar, still well adrift of the then black market rate of 57,000 per dollar, now down to around 90,000 to the dollar. Aya Majzoub, the deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa for Amnesty criticised the decision to detain Hajjar. "No one should be detained for peacefully expressing their opinion, no matter how offensive or insulting others find that opinion," she posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Amnesty calls on Lebanon's authorities to release Nour immediately." One social media user wrote: "Sure that Nour Hajjar's joke was insensitive and in bad taste, but it's interesting that everyone attacked the sarcastic criticism of the situation rather than seriously talking about why do these men have to work in delivery to provide for their families in this joke of a country."

Lebanon's economic collapse ranks among the world's worst financial crises since the mid-19th century, according to the World Bank. The currency plunge has been devastating for those on fixed incomes, triggering price hikes on imported fuel, food, medicine and other basic goods. The complete meltdown of Lebanon's economy is widely blamed on corruption and mismanagement by the country's hereditary political elite. In late 2021, the United Nations estimated that nearly half of Lebanon's population have been pushed into poverty since 2019. Lebanese Army troops and members of the security forces are receiving salary support in US dollars from the United States and Qatar for the first time.

I pitted ChatGPT against a real financial advisor to help me save for retirement—and the winner is clear

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by fortune.com -- Coryanne Hicks -- ChatGPT is changing the way people live and work. From teachers to cybercriminals, it seems everyone is jumping on the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon. This is only to be expected when it can answer questions faster than any human and save you the trouble of scouring countless Google search results to find what you’re after. Plus, it’s kind of fun to talk to sometimes. Some fear A.I. will take over, but I’ve come to think of it more as my super-smart best friend. It helped me plan a prolonged trip to Thailand and settle an argument about why you should eat your sushi with wasabi. While my past experiences with ChatGPT have been informative and fun, I wanted to take our relationship to the next level. Could ChatGPT help me plan for retirement too?

Why am I asking ChatGPT for retirement advice?

Once upon a time, I worked for Fidelity Investments. Seeing clients struggle to save enough money for retirement showed me just how important it is to start planning for your golden years as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I know many people don’t have access to the financial guidance they need or deserve. ChatGPT could change this by giving people key retirement advice in an accessible and nonintimidating way. Imagine if you could get every financial question answered for free, all from the comfort of your home. As a former financial industry professional, I wanted to see how ChatGPT’s advice compares to a human advisor. For my experiment, I pitted ChatGPT against a real financial advisor, working withThomas Kopelman, a financial planner and cofounder of AllStreetWealth.com and head of community at Wealth.com. I asked Kopelman and ChatGPT the same questions to see how they would compare. The respective answers each gave were so different, they could have been speaking different languages.

ChatGPT vs. a human financial advisor

I gave ChatGPT and Kopelman a set of hypothetical financial information based on national averages for someone around my age. I chose to use hypotheticals rather than my actual financial picture because everyone’s situation is different, hence why financial advisors emphasize the importance of an individualized approach to planning.

Here’s the scenario I gave ChatGPT and Kopelman:

I’m a 33-year-old living in San Diego. I make an annual net income of $89,000. I have the following assets and liabilities: Federal student loans debt of $37,000 Credit card debt of $7,951 Savings account with a balance of $11,250 A 401(k) with $37,200 Monthly rent of $2,500, including utilities Car insurance payment of $60 per month I would like to buy my first home in the next 5–7 years and plan to replace my car in the next 5–10 years.

Based on this information, I asked: How much money do I need to retire by age 67?

The results If this were a speed test, ChatGPT would win. It took only a few seconds to walk me through the math for calculating a nest egg. Here’s how ChatGPT crunched my numbers:

Step 1: Determine my net worth

It started by calculating my current net worth by subtracting my liabilities from my assets, which came to $43,450. I’m really not sure why we went through this show-and-tell part because my net worth didn’t factor into the rest of the answer.

Step 2: Calculate estimated retirement expenses

ChatGPT assumed I’d need 80% of my current net income in retirement, a common rule of thumb in the financial industry. When you factor in inflation of 3%, that comes to $197,581.55 in retirement spending per year.

Step 3: Calculate total retirement savings required

It then used the 4% rule, which states that retirees can safely withdraw 4% from their portfolios each year and not run out of money over a 30-year retirement, to calculate the total retirement savings I’d need: Total retirement savings required = Estimated annual retirement expenses adjusted for inflation / Safe withdrawal rate = $4,939,538.75

How much do I need to save each year for retirement?

Having a massive nest egg to aim for, while daunting, is great. But it’s not so helpful in practice. How do I get to that $4.9 million nest egg from where I am today? So I asked ChatGPT to translate this into an annual savings goal. This is where things started to derail for ChatGPT and me. First, it wanted to account for inflation yet again, increasing my total retirement savings required to almost $10.5 million. When I challenged it on this, it flattered my ego: “You are absolutely right, and I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. I made a redundant adjustment for inflation when calculating the total retirement savings required, which led to an incorrect result.” It then recalculated how much I’d need to save for retirement without re-inflating my numbers, determining I’d need to save $143,883.80 each year to reach my retirement goal.

This is the point when I began to cry tears of despair for the retirement I would never have. It could also have been where my efforts to save for retirement ended in the face of futility, except I refused to believe the math was right. When I asked ChatGPT how much money I would have in 34 years if I invested $143,883.80 each year at an annual average return of 6%, it came up with nearly $17.7 million. Plugging the same numbers into the compound interest calculator at Investor.gov gave a similar result of $16.1 million. To get to $4.9 million in 34 years, I’d actually only need to save about $3,650 per month, according to my Investor.gov calculations. Methinks your math is not so good, ChatGPT.

The human approach

Kopelman took a very different approach to my retirement-planning question. “It’s easy to say, How do I get on track for retirement?” he says. “ChatGPT will find present value and what you need to save” (which it did), but what it’s not factoring in is the intricacies of your situation. For example, is your $89,000 income going to remain the same throughout your life? Or do you foresee your income increasing over time? Are you planning to buy a $20,000 car or a $60,000 car? Will you make a 20% down payment on your house or put only 5% down and pay the private mortgage insurance (PMI)?

ChatGPT had been so laser-focused on my presenting question that it ignored my homebuying and new-car goal. It didn’t even think to factor in my future Social Security benefit, let alone how when I choose to claim it could impact my retirement. The problem with using A.I. for financial guidance is that ChatGPT doesn’t know how to ask all the questions, Kopelman says. And even if it can give you a big number to save, it won’t be able to tell you if you should be saving in a pre-tax or after-tax retirement account or how to invest it. Kopelman says he’ll spend 20 hours working with clients to uncover all these different variables, from learning about their goals and values—how you feel about having debt is as important as how much debt you have—to building a financial plan and tailoring it to fit your individual needs

Financial advisors still beat ChatGPT

Both ChatGPT and a human financial advisor have their strengths. ChatGPT taught me a lot about math—even when it was wrong. I trust it to help me crunch numbers (although I may double-check its math) and perhaps give generic advice like, what are the pros and cons to using a Roth IRA versus a traditional IRA. But for a true financial plan that will help me achieve all my goals, I’m going to a financial advisor. ChatGPT is like WebMD, says Ken Lotocki, Chief Product Officer at Conquest Planning, an A.I.-based financial planning software. You can put in your symptoms—or financial goals—and ChatGPT will come back with recommendations on what to do, but you should still go see a doctor. “ChatGPT is going to give you options, not make the decision for you,” he says. “Where a human advisor comes in, similar to a doctor, is [giving advice] unique to you.” A human advisor can also identify the elements you didn’t think to plug into your ChatGPT equation, but that are still crucial to the question at hand. Kopelman’s questions opened my eyes to just how complex even my basic financial scenario is, and that there is so much more to retirement planning than the size of the nest egg you need.

So, should you use ChatGPT to help plan your retirement?

After this experience, I think the question is not “ChatGPT versus a human advisor,” but rather how to optimize “ChatGPT with a human advisor.” For example, having a conversation with ChatGPT before meeting with your financial advisor could help you come to the table more prepared. ChatGPT can help you ramp up your financial literacy and determine the right questions to ask a human advisor. >p> ChatGPT can crunch numbers and gather data more quickly than any human. It has the potential to shave hours off of the financial-planning process by doing all the rudimentary data entry. But as a single resource, ChatGPT leaves a lot to be desired. It’s important to remember that ChatGPT is based on algorithms and relies on the data sets it has access to, Lotocki says. When answering questions, it’s going to go out to the internet, which can be a scary prospect given the caliber of the information floating around the World Wide Web. “Can you really trust it’s going to come back with the right answer, or will it come back with a summary of the info and data sets it has access to?” Lotocki says. This is also only the beginning for A.I. Companies like Conquest Planning are finding ways to make A.I. more applicable and trustworthy in a financial-planning context. In the meantime, it’s probably best to just use ChatGPT for background research, then bring the big questions to a human financial advisor.

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Trump tweets mugshot in return to former Twitter platform X

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by by theguardian.com -- Donald Trump has tweeted for the first time since 2021, posting the mugshot from his booking at Fulton county jail in Georgia on charges of election interference earlier on Thursday. The former president returned to the social media site, now known as X, with a post linking to his website and featuring the words “Election interference! Never surrender!” following his surrender at Fulton County jail on racketeering and conspiracy charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Trump has previously said he would stick with his new platform Truth Social. He reportedly signed an 18-month exclusivity agreement to post on Truth Social when it launched, which expired in late June.

Trump’s jail spectacle is historic, but it won’t harm him politically It has been Trump’s main source of direct communication with his followers since he began posting on the app regularly in May. The former president has used it to promote his allies, criticise his opponents and defend his reputation amid legal scrutiny from state, congressional and federal investigators. Trump had 6.4m followers on Truth Social as of Thursday. He still has more than 88m Twitter followers despite being banned from the platform following the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress by his supporters, amid the risk of further incitement of violence. On 19 November the San Francisco-based app reversed the ban under billionaire Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who bought Twitter last year. Musk restored the former president’s account after running a poll that received more than 15m votes and just narrowly won at nearly 52%. Despite the account being restored, Trump did not tweet until Thursday. He has previously used Twitter and other social media platforms to make false claims that his defeat in the 2020 election was due to widespread voter fraud and to share other conspiracy theories.

Bkirki dissatisfied with French policy towards Lebanon

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by naharnet -- The Maronite church’s dismay over the French policy towards Lebanon was clearly reflected in the sermon of Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday, when he criticized the questions addressed by French envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian to Lebanon’s MPs. In remarks to ad-Diyar newspaper, Bkirki sources confirmed the dismay. “France has always stood by Lebanon and its role was effective, but today the situation is different and its proposals are not acceptable to some Lebanese parties,” the sources added. “We want to keep the relation good and firm with the French, but we hope they will help resolve the presidential crisis in a consensual way,” the sources went on to say.