Wall Street futures edge up as optimism over economy offsets Netflix's fall
NEW YORK : US stock index futures inched higher today, buoyed by signs of a resilient US economy, even as Netflix's market-beating quarterly profit failed to dazzle investors.
At 5.30am, S&P 500 E-minis were up 8.75 points, or 0.14%, Nasdaq 100 E-minis were up 33 points, or 0.14%, and Dow E-minis were up 66 points, or 0.15%.
Wall Street's winning streak continued overnight, with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq notching fresh record closes after upbeat data on retail sales and jobless claims signaled a healthy US economy.
The data gives the Federal Reserve (Fed) some breathing room to assess the inflationary effects of US tariffs.
Netflix rode the success of 'Squid Game' to top earnings estimates and boost its revenue outlook for the year.
Yet, the streaming giant's shares slipped 1.5% in premarket trading. It has risen 43% this year.
All eyes remain on whether President Donald Trump's tariff measures are starting to ripple through the economy.
The Fed has signaled it will stay the course on interest rates until it sees clearer signs of how higher import taxes are shaping inflation.
Traders now put the odds of a rate cut in September at about 56.3%, with a July move nearly off the table, according to CME's FedWatch tool.
'This week's data supports the wait-and-see camp on the Fed.
'Tariffs are percolating to consumer prices but is not withholding households from opening their wallets,' said Kenneth Broux, head of corporate research and rates, at Societe Generale.
Fed governor Christopher Waller signaled yesterday that mounting economic risks and tame inflation have him backing an interest rate cut by this month's end, downplaying concerns that tariffs will fuel lasting price hikes.
As the second-quarter earnings season gets underway, early results from 36 S&P 500 companies that reported, more than 80% have topped Wall Street's earnings expectations, according to LSEG I/B/E/S data.
The S&P 500 and the Dow are on track for only modest advances this week, as investors navigate a swirl of mixed signals – robust retail sales, a spike in consumer inflation, and a stall in producer prices for June.
Cryptocurrency stocks rose after the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would develop a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies.
Robinhood Markets and Coinbase Global gained 1.9% each, while Bitfarms rose 2.8% and Hut 8 advanced 1.3%.
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The Star
8 minutes ago
- The Star
ChatGPT helps prepare this mayor's talking points. Now he wants a thousand city workers using AI
Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new business, his aides ask ChatGPT to help draft some talking points. "Elected officials do a tremendous amount of public speaking,' said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent itinerary has taken him from new restaurant and semiconductor startup openings to a festival of lowriding car culture. Other politicians might be skittish admitting a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that it helped draft a US$5.6bil (RM23.7bil) budget for the new fiscal year, but Mahan is trying to lead by example, pushing a growing number of the nearly 7,000 government workers running Silicon Valley's biggest city to embrace artificial intelligence technology. Mahan said adopting AI tools will eliminate drudge work and help the city better serve its roughly 1 million residents. He's hardly the only public or private sector executive directing an AI-or-bust strategy, though in some cases, workers have found that the costly technology can add hassles or mistakes. "The idea is to try things, be really transparent, look for problems, flag them, share them across different government agencies, and then work with vendors and internal teams to problem solve,' Mahan said in an interview. "It's always bumpy with new technologies.' By next year, the city intends to have 1,000, or about 15%, of its workers trained to use AI tools for a variety of tasks, including pothole complaint response, bus routing and using vehicle-tracking surveillance cameras to solve crimes. One of San Jose's early adopters was Andrea Arjona Amador, who leads electric mobility programs at the city's transportation department. She has already used ChatGPT to secure a US$12mil (RM50.9mil) grant for electric vehicle chargers. Arjona Amador set up a customised "AI agent' to review the correspondence she was receiving about various grant proposals and asked it to help organise the incoming information, including due dates. Then, she had it help draft the 20-page document. So far, San Jose has spent more than US$35,000 (RM148,592) to purchase 89 ChatGPT licenses – at US$400 (RM1,698) per account – for city workers to use. "The way it used to work, before I started using this, we spent a lot of evenings and weekends trying to get grants to the finish line,' she said. The Trump administration later rescinded the funding, so she pitched a similar proposal to a regional funder not tied to the federal government. Arjona Amador, who learned Spanish and French before she learned English, also created another customized chatbot to edit the tone and language of her professional writings. With close relationships to some of the tech industry's biggest players, including San Francisco-based OpenAI and Mountain View-based Google, the mayors of the Bay Area's biggest cities are helping to promote the type of AI adoption that the tech industry is striving for, while also promising guidelines and standards to avoid the technology's harms. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced a plan Monday to give nearly 30,000 city workers, including nurses and social workers, access to Microsoft's Copilot chatbot, which is based on the same technology that powers ChatGPT. San Francisco's plan says it comes with "robust privacy and bias safeguards, and clear guidelines to ensure technology enhances - not replaces - human judgment.' San Jose has similar guidelines and hasn't yet reported any major mishaps with its pilot projects. Such problems have attracted attention elsewhere because of the technology's propensity to spew false information, known as hallucinations. ChatGPT's digital fingerprints were found on an error-filled document published in May by US Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" commission. In Fresno, California, a school official was forced to resign after saying she was too trusting of an AI chatbot that fabricated information in a document. While some government agencies have been secretive about when they turn to chatbots for help, Mahan is open about his ChatGPT-written background memos that he turns to when making speeches. "Historically, that would have taken hours of phone calls and reading, and you just never would have been able to get those insights," he said. "You can knock out these tasks at a similar or better level of quality in a lot less time.' He added, however, that "you still need a human being in the loop. You can't just kind of press a couple of buttons and trust the output. You still have to do some independent verification. You have to have logic and common sense and ask questions.' Earlier this year, when OpenAI introduced a new pilot product called Operator, it promised a new kind of tool that went beyond a chatbot's capabilities. Instead of just analyzing documents and producing passages of text, it could also access a computer system and schedule calendars or perform tasks on a person's behalf. Developing and selling such "AI agents" is now a key focus for the tech industry. More than an hour's drive east of Silicon Valley, where the Bay Area merges into Central Valley farm country, Jamil Niazi, director of information technology at the city of Stockton, had big visions for what he could do with such an agent. Perhaps the parks and recreation department could let an AI agent help residents book a public park or swimming pool for a birthday party. Or residents could find out how crowded the pool was before packing their swim clothes. Six months later, however, after completing a proof-of-concept phase, the city didn't buy a full license for the technology due to the cost. The market research group Gartner recently predicted that over 40% of "agentic AI' projects will be cancelled before the end of 2027, "due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.' San Jose's mayor remains bullish about the potential for these AI tools to help workers "in the bowels of bureaucracy' to rapidly speed up their digital paperwork. "There's just an amazing amount of bureaucracy that large organisations have to have,' Mahan said. "Whether it's finance, accounting, HR or grant writing, those are the kinds of roles where we think our employees can be 20 (to) 50% more productive – quickly.' – AP ——— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives.
Malay Mail
an hour ago
- Malay Mail
The AI gold rush has a new king in Nvidia's Jensen Huang — leather jacket and all
NEW YORK, July 20 — Unknown to the general public just three years ago, Jensen Huang is now one of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the world as head of chip giant Nvidia. The unassuming 62-year-old draws stadium crowds of more than 10,000 people as his company's products push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Chips designed by Nvidia, known as graphics cards or GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), are essential in developing the generative artificial intelligence powering technology like ChatGPT. Big tech's insatiable appetite for Nvidia's GPUs, which sell for tens of thousands of dollars each, has catapulted the California chipmaker beyond US$4 trillion (RM17 trillion) in market valuation, the first company ever to surpass that mark. Nvidia's meteoric rise has boosted Huang's personal fortune to US$150 billion — making him one of the world's richest people — thanks to the roughly 3.5 per cent stake he holds in the company he founded three decades ago with two friends in a Silicon Valley diner. In a clear demonstration of his clout, he recently convinced President Donald Trump to lift restrictions on certain GPU exports to China, despite the fact that China is locked in a battle with the United States for AI supremacy. 'That was brilliantly done,' said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a governance professor at Yale University. Huang was able to explain to Trump that 'having the world using a US tech platform as the core protocol is definitely in the interest of this country' and won't help the Chinese military, Sonnenfeld said. Early life Born in Taipei in 1963, Jensen Huang (originally named Jen-Hsun) embodies the American success story. At nine years old, he was sent away with his brother to boarding school in small-town Kentucky. His uncle recommended the school to his Taiwanese parents believing it to be a prestigious institution, when it was actually a school for troubled youth. Too young to be a student, Huang boarded there but attended a nearby public school alongside the children of tobacco farmers. With his poor English, he was bullied and forced to clean toilets — a two-year ordeal that transformed him. 'We worked really hard, we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough,' he recounted in an interview with US broadcaster NPR. But 'the ending of the story is I loved the time I was there,' Huang said. Leather jacket and tattoo Brought home by his parents, who had by then settled in the northwestern US state of Oregon, he graduated from university at just 20 and joined AMD, then LSI Logic, to design chips — his passion. But he wanted to go further and founded Nvidia in 1993 to 'solve problems that normal computers can't,' using semiconductors powerful enough to handle 3D graphics, as he explained on the No Priors podcast. Nvidia created the first GPU in 1999, riding the intersection of video games, data centres, cloud computing, and now, generative AI. Always dressed in a black T-shirt and leather jacket, Huang sports a Nvidia logo tattoo and has a taste for sports cars. But it's his relentless optimism, low-key personality and lack of political alignment that sets him apart from the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike them, Huang was notably absent from Trump's inauguration ceremony. 'He backpedals his own aura and has the star be the technology rather than himself,' observed Sonnenfeld, who believes Huang may be 'the most respected of all today's tech titans.' One former high-ranking Nvidia employee described him to AFP as 'the most driven person' he'd ever met. Street food On visits to his native Taiwan, Huang is treated like a megastar, with fans crowding him for autographs and selfies as journalists follow him to the barber shop and his favourite night market. 'He has created the phenomena because of his personal charm,' noted Wayne Lin of Witology Market Trend Research Institute. 'A person like him must be very busy and his schedule should be full everyday meeting big bosses. But he remembers to eat street food when he comes to Taiwan,' he said, calling Huang 'unusually friendly.' Nvidia is a tight ship and takes great care to project a drama-free image of Huang. But the former high-ranking employee painted a more nuanced picture, describing a 'very paradoxical' individual who is fiercely protective of his employees but also capable, within Nvidia's executive circle, of 'ripping people to shreds' over major mistakes or poor choices. — AFP
Malay Mail
an hour ago
- Malay Mail
The AI gold rush has a new king in Jensen Huang — leather jacket and all
NEW YORK, July 20 — Unknown to the general public just three years ago, Jensen Huang is now one of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the world as head of chip giant Nvidia. The unassuming 62-year-old draws stadium crowds of more than 10,000 people as his company's products push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Chips designed by Nvidia, known as graphics cards or GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), are essential in developing the generative artificial intelligence powering technology like ChatGPT. Big tech's insatiable appetite for Nvidia's GPUs, which sell for tens of thousands of dollars each, has catapulted the California chipmaker beyond US$4 trillion (RM17 trillion) in market valuation, the first company ever to surpass that mark. Nvidia's meteoric rise has boosted Huang's personal fortune to US$150 billion — making him one of the world's richest people — thanks to the roughly 3.5 per cent stake he holds in the company he founded three decades ago with two friends in a Silicon Valley diner. In a clear demonstration of his clout, he recently convinced President Donald Trump to lift restrictions on certain GPU exports to China, despite the fact that China is locked in a battle with the United States for AI supremacy. 'That was brilliantly done,' said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a governance professor at Yale University. Huang was able to explain to Trump that 'having the world using a US tech platform as the core protocol is definitely in the interest of this country' and won't help the Chinese military, Sonnenfeld said. Early life Born in Taipei in 1963, Jensen Huang (originally named Jen-Hsun) embodies the American success story. At nine years old, he was sent away with his brother to boarding school in small-town Kentucky. His uncle recommended the school to his Taiwanese parents believing it to be a prestigious institution, when it was actually a school for troubled youth. Too young to be a student, Huang boarded there but attended a nearby public school alongside the children of tobacco farmers. With his poor English, he was bullied and forced to clean toilets — a two-year ordeal that transformed him. 'We worked really hard, we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough,' he recounted in an interview with US broadcaster NPR. But 'the ending of the story is I loved the time I was there,' Huang said. Leather jacket and tattoo Brought home by his parents, who had by then settled in the northwestern US state of Oregon, he graduated from university at just 20 and joined AMD, then LSI Logic, to design chips — his passion. But he wanted to go further and founded Nvidia in 1993 to 'solve problems that normal computers can't,' using semiconductors powerful enough to handle 3D graphics, as he explained on the No Priors podcast. Nvidia created the first GPU in 1999, riding the intersection of video games, data centres, cloud computing, and now, generative AI. Always dressed in a black T-shirt and leather jacket, Huang sports a Nvidia logo tattoo and has a taste for sports cars. But it's his relentless optimism, low-key personality and lack of political alignment that sets him apart from the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike them, Huang was notably absent from Trump's inauguration ceremony. 'He backpedals his own aura and has the star be the technology rather than himself,' observed Sonnenfeld, who believes Huang may be 'the most respected of all today's tech titans.' One former high-ranking Nvidia employee described him to AFP as 'the most driven person' he'd ever met. Street food On visits to his native Taiwan, Huang is treated like a megastar, with fans crowding him for autographs and selfies as journalists follow him to the barber shop and his favourite night market. 'He has created the phenomena because of his personal charm,' noted Wayne Lin of Witology Market Trend Research Institute. 'A person like him must be very busy and his schedule should be full everyday meeting big bosses. But he remembers to eat street food when he comes to Taiwan,' he said, calling Huang 'unusually friendly.' Nvidia is a tight ship and takes great care to project a drama-free image of Huang. But the former high-ranking employee painted a more nuanced picture, describing a 'very paradoxical' individual who is fiercely protective of his employees but also capable, within Nvidia's executive circle, of 'ripping people to shreds' over major mistakes or poor choices. — AFP
