Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 53 seconds.

Yesterday, Elon and some other tech heavyweights asked to press pause on AI, Turkey pumped up minimum wage, and Sony’s VR headsets had a sputtered launch. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• South Africa’s central bank pushed on and hiked interest rates despite some nation-wide power cuts and an increasingly teetering macro landscape. 

• Turkish stock markets have had an absolute romp. Locals are seeking shelter from 80% inflation, which made the index pop 2x in 2022. Hungry for returns.

• Markets ticked up yet again after a subsiding banking crisis seemed to instill a sense of confidence in the suits.

Story Roundup

1 - Elon and Co want to press the brakes on AI. 🤯

Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari and tons of other other tech experts just signed an open letter asking to pause AI training.

And they’re super serious about it.

“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control”.

But then again, some of the folks signing this are CEOs of multi-million dollar AI companies. And their bread-and-butter is literally AI research.

The best outcome for us as a species (🙈) is a bunch of protocols that outline “safe” AI creation - but there are obviously gonna be bad actors who flout the rules.

Maybe it’s time to re-watch The Matrix…

2 - Turkey slaps a minimum wage onto a struggling economy. 💀

There is no government that cannot be overthrown by an empty dinner table.

And this reality just hit Turkey’s President Erdogan.

So to safeguard his place of power, he’s gonna be hiking the minimum wage in 1 month.

But the problem lies here - he already bumped it up 55% in January. Inflation is running so rampant that he’s being forced to notch minimum wage up again.

There are tons of other “financial giveaways” that have been introduced too - debt relief, pension boosts, energy price cuts, and early retirement for 2 million folks.

Whatever this economic policy is, it seems to be working.

Inflation fell from 81% to 50%.

Wild world we live in. 💀

3 - Sony’s metaverse hits a meta-reverse.

Disappointment with a capital D.

Sony launched their PSVR2 - Play Station Virtual Reality 2.

And if you haven’t heard of it, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

They’re projected to sell less than 300k of these headsets in their first few weeks, making it a MASSIVE flop.

FYI - their goal was to sell around 2 million units. The target was revised to 1.5 million, but Sony fell flat in a shocking way.

There are a few reason why it’s not flying off the shelves.

The biggest and most important one - PSVR2 is priced at $549. The average Joe can’t shell out that much on a video game in this economy.

Plus, you need to own a PS5 to run it, so their customer base is already limited.

And most structural of all - the whole meta-boom isn’t that exciting anymore.

Ready Player One still has a few years to reality. 😅

4 - Blockchain startups get some mojo going. 🤔

AI is riding high on a curve of hype, which means some of the practical questions that might grow louder over time.

But for now, no one is talking about the problems, and everyone is getting their chequebook ready.

Yesterday, a startup called Fetch raised $40 million to build blockchain-based “autonomous agents, network infrastructure, and decentralised machine learning”.

That is a whole lot of jargon, and in short, it means that they build tools which let AI speak to each other.

Here is one use case -
They used AI to determine which parking spots were free, but then they also rewarded users with free parking spots when they decided to not use their car at all.

Sign of the times, I guess. 🤷🏻

5 - AI companies shell out big bucks for robot whisperers. 🙊

If you wanna get paid half a million dollars a year while talking to robots, today is your lucky day.

The AI race is heating up and as hype spirals to the moon, so do salaries for AI whisperers.

A Google-backed company named Anthropic is looking for a so-called “prompt engineer” - dudes who spend their entire day speaking to AI and making it better.

This is the fastest-moving IT market that we’ve seen in years, and there’s gonna be a lot of catching-up to do.

You can literally pay people to create “the perfect prompt” to input into ChatGPT or other AIs.

The most interesting thing?

There’s no requirement for a college degree. All you need to do is know AI like it’s the back of your hand. 💀

Hope you enjoyed this issue of Market Munch. If you’ve got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email and I'll get a ping in my inbox. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

- Aryaansh ⚡