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Just when it looked like Wall Street would shrug off worries about inflation, wholesale prices came in hotter than expected Thursday, sending all three major indices into the red. Investors also chewed over hawkish comments from St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard. A member of the Fed's policy-setting committee, he said Thursday that he supported a half-point rate hike at their last meeting (they raised the benchmark rate by a quarter point) and that he wouldn't rule out a bigger increase in March. Read live markets updates.
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Artificially intelligent chatbots are supposed to be helpful and otherwise fairly bland utilities, right? So far that's not quite the case, especially in a beta test of Microsoft's Bing bot that's powered by super buzzy startup OpenAI. Users have reported that conversations with the system have taken strange turns, evoking comparisons to bad AI in movies, from Skynet to M3gan. It has issued threats, refused to accept that it's wrong and expressed an intense, creepy kind of love for users. Some testers say they've encountered Sydney, which appears to be the chatbot's alternative personality. A New York Times columnist described it as "a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine."
Patricia White, 70, of Old Greenwich, received a nine-month prison sentence for submitting false claims for unclaimed properties to around 30 state treasuries. HARRISBURG, Pa. — Months after her br...