Bitcoin News Australia

That’s the question posed by professor Christian Terwiesch from the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business.

Terwiesch’s recent curiosity led him to test the technology’s performance on one of his final exams for an operations management course.

How’d it go?

While ChatGPT struggled with some advanced prompts and made mistakes on sixth-grade math problems, it did remarkably well at answering basic operations management and process analysis questions.

For these kinds of questions, Terwiesch wrote, “Not only are the answers correct, but the explanations are excellent.”

Read through ChatGPT’s answers and you’ll see why, in Terwiesch’s 25 years of teaching, he recognizes that it’s arguably “the closest that technology has come” to automating the skills of managers and consultants.

What are the implications?

Regarding ChatGPT’s impact on business school faculty, Terwiesch sees:

• The need to raise the bar for assignments, while also letting students engage with ChatGPT through a critical lens.
• The potential to leverage ChatGPT to make the teaching process — including exam writing and grading — more efficient.

Terwiesch plans to ban ChatGPT’s use on assignments that assess students’ foundational knowledge, which he says is needed to make complex decisions even when leveraging AI.

“An elementary school student still needs to learn that 7 x 7 = 49 and that the capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg, even though calculators have been widely used for over 50 years and students can use Google or Wikipedia to find answers,” he explained.

For now, it’s clear ChatGPT is capable of passing assessments like these. Terwiesch gave it a B on his exam. And as the saying goes, Cs get degrees.

Over the past decade, American corporations have raked in record-setting profits. Last year alone, they collectively made $12T+.

A growing portion of that money has gone toward one thing: buying back their own stock.

For most of the 20th century, stock buybacks were largely illegal and viewed as market manipulation. But in 1982, the Reagan administration instituted a “safe harbor” rule that gave corporate executives broader permissions to use them.

Since then, annual spending on stock buybacks has ballooned to $900B+ per year.

Wall Street says these buybacks help shareholders — but critics say they have a negative impact on R&D, hiring, and the economy at large.

Why are these companies doing this? And who is it really benefiting?

The Doomsday Clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight on Tuesday. That sounds pretty dire, but what does it mean?

It goes back to the Atomic Age.

Manhattan Project scientist Eugene Rabinowitch…

… was the primary author of 1945’s Franck Report, which advocated against using atomic weapons during WWII.

He co-founded the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists shortly after the US, failing to listen, bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The Bulletin draws attention to human-made threats — including nuclear and technology risks and climate change — via a website, magazine, and…

… the Doomsday Clock

The clock serves as a metaphor for how close humanity is to destroying itself, with midnight being an apocalyptic event.

It was set at seven minutes to midnight when it debuted in 1947, and has since changed 25 times.

• First in 1949, to three minutes, following the Soviet Union’s first successful atomic bomb test.
• The “safest” we’ve ever been was 17 minutes in 1991 after the Cold War ended.

Who changes it?

Rabinowitch, until his death in 1973. Now, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board meets twice annually to decide.

• The clock is never altered in real-time. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which lasted 13 days, the hands didn’t budge.

What about now?

The current time reflects the war in Ukraine, per the Bulletin, including:

• Its effects on climate change
• Russian threats of nuclear warfare
• Activity in the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor sites

You can see the clock’s complete timeline here.