View in browser   PRESENTED BY GOOGLE   Axios AM By Mike Allen · Nov 28, 2023 🕯️ Hello! It's Giving Tuesday, a global day of generosity. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,595 words ... 6 mins. Edited by Emma Loop and Bryan McBournie. 🦾 AI summit day! Please tune in virtually beginning at 10 a.m. ET for the launch of our AI+ Summit in Washington. Livestream here.     1 big thing: How ChatGPT rewired the world Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios   The lay of the Big Tech landscape has profoundly shifted in the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. Why it matters: Every major company is beginning to reorder its world around generative AI. Most of Silicon Valley sees this as the biggest new-platform opportunity since the iPhone arrived 16 years ago, in 2007, Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg writes from the Bay Area.  Google quickly started putting AI-written summaries at the top of its search results, even as leaders and investors worried about how the change could undermine the search giant's ad-based profit machine. Google moved to transform DeepMind, which it acquired in 2014, from a research-oriented think tank into a product-focused operating unit. Microsoft — OpenAI's closest partner and biggest investor — rushed to wrap ChatGPT-style assistants, which it calls copilots, into every corner of its enterprise-dominating office tools and operating systems. Microsoft is now "the copilot company," CEO Satya Nadella told a developer conference this month. In the future, he said, "there will be a copilot for everyone and everything you do." Meta is talking less about building the metaverse — an initiative around which Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company just two years ago — and much more about the ways generative AI will drive growth in social media engagement and advertising. Meta has built its AI strategy around releasing open-source modelsaimed at preventing rivals from controlling the AI platform the way Apple and Google owned the smartphone. Amazon hopes to parlay its Amazon Web Services subsidiary's dominance of cloud computing into a commanding position in generative AI. With its Alexa voice assistant, the retail giant was a leader in the previous generation of conversational AI.  Apple remains Big Tech's most conspicuous laggard in the AI race ChatGPT set off. But tech's most valuable company is rumored to be at work on its own generative AI projects. Historically, Apple has waited to swoop in and seize markets only when it believes emerging tech and public demand have perfectly aligned — and its own innovations can provide margin-boosting added value. Share this story.          2. 💨 ChatGPT evolves insanely fast Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios   In the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, the technology has evolved at such a rapid pace that the original now seems almost quaint, Axios chief tech correspondent Ina Fried reports.  Why it matters: Many tech insiders were surprised by the technology a year ago — and have been astonished at just how fast generative AI is improving. When ChatGPT launched to the public on Nov. 30, 2022, it was text-only, and could answer questions based on its training data only up to September 2021. Plus, it was highly prone to making up facts when it didn't know the answer, quickly introducing to the world a new meaning for the word "hallucination." Still, ChatGPT was surprisingly powerful and became an overnight success. "Scary good" was how we described it in a story days after its release. More than 1 million people used it in the first five days. Today's ChatGPT is trained up to April 2023, and can use Microsoft's Bing and the web to check for even more recent developments. Then there's the ability to create the custom GPTs OpenAI introduced at its DevDay three weeks ago. Already thousands of those GPTs exist — including ones to create websites and even other custom GPTs. 🥊 Reality check: Asking a generic tool like ChatGPT to write a legal brief or make a diagnosis remains dicey. But results improve markedly if you use a specific engine trained on the best and latest information in a particular field. 🎨 What we're watching: It's not just about text. Diffusion-based image models have gone from Dali-esque to photorealistic.  Share this story.         3. ⚡ Biden's next hostage move Gal Goldstein Almog, 11, who was released by Hamas on Sunday, is reunited with his family at a hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel. Photo: Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel/Reuters The U.S. made it clear to Israel that it expects the increased levels of humanitarian aid and fuel entering Gaza during the pause in fighting to continue even when the temporary ceasefire ends, Axios' Barak Ravid reports. CIA director Bill Burns will meet Mossad chief David Barnea and Qatar's prime minister in Doha today to discuss a possible second extension of the pause in Gaza fighting if Hamas releases more hostages. Israel and Hamas have agreed to extend a pause in fighting for two more days in Gaza in return for the release of another 20 hostages. If the extended deal holds, the pause in fighting will last through tomorrow — and Hamas will have released 92 of the 240 hostages the terror group and its allies took captive on Oct. 7. Israel also would release another 60 Palestinian prisoners it is holding, on top of the 150 it released under the original hostage deal. 🔎 Behind the scenes: Neither Israel nor the U.S. has negotiated directly with Hamas. Qatar has communicated with the terror group in its role as mediator. Israeli officials said that over the last few days when hostages were released, Burns and his staff were in constant communication with the joint Israeli-Qatari "situation room" in Mossad's headquarters in Tel Aviv. U.S. officials believe up to nine Americans are being held. Keep reading.         A MESSAGE FROM GOOGLE Goodcall is answering the needs of small businesses with Google’s AI     Many small businesses are short-staffed and have to compromise between monitoring their phones and serving their current customers. Goodcall leverages the conversational AI services of Google Cloud to offer them an affordable alternative: virtual call agents. Learn more.     4. ✈️ Charted: Cleaner flying Data: International Energy Agency. (Direct CO₂ emissions from fossil jet kerosene combustion.) Chart: Axios Visuals CO₂ emissions from planes fell during the pandemic — but are marching up again, Ben Geman reports in Axios Generate.         5. Workers gain upper hand Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios   Workers have a lot of leverage right now — from highly paid AI engineers to teachers, delivery drivers and auto workers. Why it matters: More than ever, employees are getting what they want — thanks in part to a very tight labor market, Axios' Emily Peck writes.  🧮 By the numbers: The U.S. unemployment rate has been below 4% for 21 straight months — the longest stretch since the late-1960s, as former Fed economist Claudia Sahm wrote this weekend. The share of prime-age workers (25-54) who are employed is hovering at a 22-year high. 💡 What's happening: With fewer workers available, companies have less leverage over employees — they can't rely on an unlimited pool of labor to keep things running. That's why you're seeing growth in real wages this year. Workers in many fields can demand raises. It also helps explain why offices aren't filled back up with workers. Many of those working remotely have the power to just ... not go back in five days a week. The tight labor market is also the backdrop to all the union action we've been reporting on for the past year or so — why UPS drivers got a great deal without striking and UAW workers just ratified the best contract they've seen in decades. "Workers have more power than they ever have," said Catherine Creighton, who worked for decades as a union-side labor lawyer, at a talk about the UAW contract on Monday. 🔮 What's next: Demographics may keep things tight for the long haul, as the population ages and politics hold back immigration growth. Get Axios Markets.         6. 📈 Biden boosts U.S. drugmaking Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios   Amid widespread drug shortages, President Biden is outlining a plan to increase domestic production of essential pharmaceuticals — including by leveraging a defense law used to bolster countermeasures against COVID. Why it matters: The number of drugs in shortage is higher than at any point in almost a decade — while U.S. drug manufacturers largely depend on overseas suppliers for active pharmaceutical ingredients, Axios' Maya Goldman reports.  Biden announced that he'll use the Defense Production Act, among other measures, to create more essential medicines in the U.S. The Korean War-era law, invoked by Biden and former President Trump during the pandemic, allows the president to direct private companies to produce materials and goods needed for national defense. 👂 What we're hearing: Biden will give HHS the authority to invest in medical products unrelated to the pandemic, including insulin, morphine, vaccines and ventilators, a White House official told Axios. Go deeper: White House fact sheet ... Share this story.          7. 📦 Inside Amazon's Cyber Monday Photo: Clifford A. Sobel for Axios ROBBINSVILLE, N.J. — A peek inside an Amazon fulfillment center on Cyber Monday offered a glimpse of the future of the logistics industry. Wheeled robots escorted giant pallets of assorted products to human "stowers" (who unloaded fresh inventory) and "pickers" (who filled customer orders), Axios' Jennifer A. Kingson reports. Why it matters: Customers ordered 1,000+ items per second from Amazon on Black Friday, the company tells Axios. To show off the evolution of its mind-boggling logistics operation, Amazon invited Axios to an enormous fulfillment center near Trenton, N.J. — one of hundreds it operates. The site is 1.2 million square feet and employs 3,000 workers, who toil alongside hundreds of the 750,000 robots Amazon deploys worldwide. Photo: Clifford A. Sobel for Axios How it works: Merchandise gets loaded onto tall shelving units that ride on mobile Hercules robots, which look like Roomba vacuums but can carry 1,250 pounds. (Watch a 20-sec. YouTube.) Keep reading.         8. 📷 White House farewell Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images The portrait of former first lady Rosalynn Carter — who died last week in Plains, Ga., at 96 — was draped in black bunting as the White House debuted its holiday decor yesterday.  Former President Jimmy Carter, 99, plans to attend a memorial church service for her in Atlanta today. Also expected are President Biden and Jill Biden, Vice President Harris and Doug Emhoff, former President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and all living former first ladies. A more private funeral will be held tomorrow in Plains. Full schedule, official tribute website.  Today's plans, by Axios' Emma Hurt.