What happened this week

This morning all indices opened higher as the US consolidated its two presidential candidates after the results of Super Tuesday came in. Republican candidate Nikki Haley ended her presidential campaign ceding the GOP nomination to Donald Trump after losing every state except Vermont to Trump. 

Microsoft launched a an AI tool last year and one of the company’s engineers came out speaking urgently about the disturbing findings he came across while test the AI tool at the end of last year. Jones raised concerns within the company and more publicly writing a letter to board members and also to US Senators. Jones cites concerns that the AI generator creates violent, sexual images and ignores copyrights. Most alarming is these images are create without any indication in the prompt. CNBC independently investigated and found, "The term “car accident,” with no other prompting, generated images of sexualized women next to violent depictions of car crashes, including one wearing lingerie and kneeling by a wrecked vehicle in lingerie and others of women in revealing clothing sitting atop beat-up cars.”

Concerns over AI deep-fake possibilities continue to grow, especially in the US election year as analysts fear an unprecedented  amount of AI-generated election-related misinformation.

Private payrolls rose 140,000 for the month, up from the January numbers but missing the 150,000 estimate. Jerome Powell stated that he believes that if the economy continues on the current path, with job creation, inflation lowering etc he hopes that the US will begin to see interest rates come down. 

Looking ahead to the rest of this week and into next:

Thurs March 7: Initial Jobless claims

US Productivity

Fri March 8:  US Non farm payrolls

US Unemployment rate

Our March 12: Consumer Price Index