The Age of Generalist Robotics.

Happiness is Helsinki.

“I can’t do my job without News Items.” — Jim Cramer.

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1. Nearly two months into his second term, President Donald Trump’s approval rating matches his all-time high. Congressional Republicans also enjoy record ratings, while views of congressional Democrats tumble near an all-time low, according to the latest Fox News Poll. Half of voters, 49%, approve of the job Trump is doing as president, matching his high from April 2020. That’s also better than at the same point in his first term (43% approved in March 2017). He is at high marks among key groups, including women, Black voters and voters under age 30. (For reference, in January, a 52% majority of voters approved of the job Trump was doing handling the presidential transition.) Nine in 10 Republicans approve of Trump, while the same number of Democrats disapprove. Six in 10 Independents disapprove of his job performance. (Sources: foxnews.com, latimes.com)

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2. The Federal Reserve has slashed its US growth forecast and lifted its inflation outlook, underscoring concerns that Donald Trump’s tariffs will knock the world’s biggest economy. The Fed’s latest set of projections showed officials now expect GDP to expand by 1.7 per cent this year, with prices forecast to rise by 2.7 per cent. Policymakers kept the central bank’s main interest rate on hold at the end of a two-day meeting on Wednesday. Fed chair Jay Powell acknowledged to reporters after the meeting that the US president’s plan to hit trading partners with sweeping tariffs had affected the central bank’s outlook for inflation and the economy. “Clearly some of it, a good part of it,” is related to the impact of Trump’s tariffs, Powell said, adding that they “tend to bring growth down and push inflation up”. He also said that the Fed did “not need to be in a hurry” to shift rates given “unusually elevated” uncertainty. (Source: ft.com)

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3. Annie Lowrey:

The American consumer is tapped out. Grocery prices are bananas, housing prices are obscene, out-of-pocket medical expenses are absurd, and child care is impossible to afford, if you can find it. To keep up with the basics, let alone the Joneses, American consumers have been charging more and more to their cards. Credit-card balances stand at an all-time high of $1.2 trillion, up more than 7 percent year-on-year, and the share of borrowers who are late on their payments has reached its highest point since the aftermath of the Great Recession. Serious delinquency rates are climbing, particularly among consumers under the age of 40. High costs are weighing down working-class families, while driving big rewards to rich ones. Over the past few decades, the credit-card market has quietly transformed into two credit-card markets: one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans, the other offering expensive debt to the poor, with the latter subsidizing the former. (B)alances are compounding at the highest average APR in decades, a brutal 21.5 percent. (Source: theatlantic.com)

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4. June Yoon:

The pace of China’s open-source AI push has been relentless. Since the debut in January of DeepSeek R1 — China’s answer to OpenAI’s o1 series — a wave of increasingly capable models has followed. Alibaba claims its latest AI reasoning model QwQ-32B rivals DeepSeek’s R1 and has performed well in official benchmark tests. Every few weeks, another arrives, pushing the boundaries of what open-source AI can do.

Chinese tech groups are taking a very different approach. By open sourcing AI, they not only sidestep US sanctions but also decentralize development and tap into global talent to refine their models. Even restrictions on Nvidia’s high-end chips become less of an obstacle when the rest of the world can train and improve China’s models on alternative hardware.

AI advances through iteration. Every new release builds upon the last, refining weaknesses, expanding capabilities and improving efficiency. By open-sourcing AI models, Chinese tech groups create an ecosystem where global developers continuously improve their models — without shouldering all the development costs.