Fortune

Sir Jim Ratcliffe likes to keep busy. As a reward for working a seven-day week at his €40 billion ($52 billion) petrochemical empire Ineos, the British billionaire treats himself to a flurry of side projects, from owning a London pub and a football club to embarking on a real estate splurge in the remotest parts of Iceland. The 71-year-old is among the richest people in the U.K., with a net worth estimated at £23.5 billion, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List. What do you do with all that wealth? For Ratcliffe, the answer appears to be living out each of his childhood fantasies. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eEh-_Sue

With rate cuts from the Federal Reserve looking more imminent, the housing market outlook has taken another sharp twist. According to Freddie Mac’s latest forecast, home prices will rise 2.1% in 2024 and 0.6% in 2025, marking the latest head-spinning turn, especially for this year. In April, the mortgage giant said home prices will increase only 0.5% in 2024 and 2025, down sharply from its forecast in March, when it predicted prices would rise 2.5% in 2024 and 2.1% 2025. Freddie Mac refrained from offering fresh home-price guidance between April and now, opting instead to switch to a quarterly cadence. That proved prescient as the dust has only recently settled from major upheavals in the markets and economic data. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ep5pGUwM

No, Taylor Swift did not endorse Donald Trump. Yes, the large crowds at a Kamala Harris rally were real. Do you agree? Whether you do or not, the fact that it is even a question shows that we are all in the throes of an ongoing AI election nightmare, one in which examples of AI-generated disinformation related to the 2024 election are quickly piling up. The chaos caused by generative AI during this election season, which expands on the spreading of falsehoods that famously accompanied the 2016 election as well as the aftermath of the 2020 election, has long been predicted. Back in December, Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, told Fortune that he thought AI would make the 2024 elections a “hot mess.” Read more:

In countries like Saudi Arabia, which have never won a gold medal, the prize winnings could be enough to set the athletes up for life—or certainly until the next Olympic Games. At the Tokyo Games in 2021, karate master Tareg Hamedi won the second-ever silver medal for Saudi Arabia, which made him a national hero—and millionaire. He neared the end of the match in plum position to win gold, but was disqualified for an illegal and dangerous move in which he kicked his Iranian opponent in the head, knocking the karateka unconscious. Ultimately, the opponent won gold and Hamedi claimed silver, which caused a stir in the karate community, but Hamedi conceded with respect and without objection. Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, told Hamedi that he “was a gold medallist in his country’s eyes,” Reuters reported this week—and gave him the gold medal prize, worth $1.33 million. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eim_8Mxr

Some companies have introduced a new C-suite position: a chief AI officer (CAIO). But is that necessary? “Do You Really Need a Chief AI Officer?” is the title of an interesting new report in MIT Sloan Management Review that delves into this topic. The authors have experience in analyzing the potential value of CAIOs, and four have been chief digital officers across a variety of industries. Some of the pros of having a CAIO are to steer the AI focus and prioritization companywide, which can centralize management of AI risks, and reduce internal deficiencies. But there are cons as well. Read more:

Welcome to the fearful labor market. Despite a low unemployment rate, a record number of people are scared about losing their jobs. The percentage of workers who expect to be cut in the next four months reached 4.4% in July, according to a new survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s up from 3.9% compared to the same month last year, and the highest it’s been since the agency started keeping score in 2014. But increased job loss fears don’t tell the whole story of a labor landscape that has become a strange brew of bad vibes, high wages, and restless employees. Read more:

The U.S. Open is getting underway in New York—and the fourth and final Grand Slam tournament of the year is, in many ways, the biggest. Wimbledon might have more name recognition—and maybe even more prestige among some fans—but when it comes to cash in pocket for the highest profile winners, Queens is the place to be. The U.S. Open has the highest individual prize money of all four of the Grand Slams this year. Players will be competing for a share of a $75 million purse. That’s 15% higher than last year. Who earns what and how does it compare to other Grand Slams? Here’s how it shakes out: https://lnkd.in/eqtAcgRC

NEW for Fortune: Nearly half the OpenAI staff that once focused on the long-term risks of superpowerful AI have left the company in the past several months, according to Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI governance researcher. OpenAI, the maker of AI assistant ChatGPT, is widely regarded as one of a handful of companies in the vanguard of AI development. Its mission, according to the company's founding charter, is to develop a technology known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, in a way that "benefits of all humanity." OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that can perform the most economically-valuable work, like humans currently do. Because such systems might pose significant risks including, according to some AI researchers, the possibility that they would escape human control and pose an existential threat to all of humanity, OpenAI has, since its founding, employed a large number of researchers focused on what is known as "AI Safety"—techniques for ensuring that a future AGI system does not pose catastrophic or even existential danger. It's these group of researchers whose ranks Kokotajlo says have been decimated by recent resignations. The departures include Jan Hendrick Kirchner, Collin Burns, Jeffrey Wu, Jonathan Uesato, Steven Bills, Yuri Burda, Todor Makov, and co-founder John Schulman. Their exits followed the high-profile resignations in May of chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, another researcher, who together co-headed what the company called its "Superalignment" team. In announcing his resignation on the social media platform X, Leike said safety had increasingly “taken a backseat to shiny products" at the San Francisco AI company. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/eFAQvaxp

Jason Warnick is the CFO of Robinhood. He joined Robinhood in 2018 after almost 20 years at Amazon, which heavily influenced Warnick’s approach to his job and whose lessons he still draws upon today. These are the most important leadership lessons he has learned from his time at Amazon.

Gen Z and millenials are leaning on astrology for career advice. Around 80% of all Gen Z and millennials believe in astrology. And a notable portion of that group is using it to make career decisions, according to a new report from EduBirdie, an academic and writing platform, based on survey results from 2,000 young Americans who embrace the concept or relate to it. About 63% of Gen Z and millennials who embrace or relate to horoscopes say that astrology has positively impacted their career, 72% use it to make important life decisions, and 18% lean on the practice to make career moves. “All people need something to believe in, that’s our human thing to do,” Ksenia Hubska, data lead at EduBirdie, tells Fortune. Read more: