ChatGPT generates US investigation

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘ChatGPT generates US investigation’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, July 14th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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The UK has invited Saudi royalty to visit. And US regulators are going after one of the hottest artificial intelligence companies in the market. Plus, young people in China are having a hard time finding jobs. Our Beijing bureau chief talks about how graduates are dealing with the problem. I’m Marc Filippino and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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The UK wants Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to come to London this autumn. A visit from MBS shows that Britain wants to bring in more investment from the oil rich Gulf. Prince Mohammed’s last visit was in March 2018, six months before Saudi agents killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A visit this fall would be another sign that western countries are moving past something that used to be a huge sticking point. The schedule for MBS’s trip is still being finalised, but sources told the FT that the idea is for him to visit in October or November. One UK government official said that the timing is really up to the Saudis, given that quote, “We need them more than they need us.”

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As China emerges from three years of Covid-19 restrictions, young graduates who don’t have jobs are bearing the brunt of a lukewarm economy. The FT’s Beijing bureau chief, Joe Leahy, is here with me now. He’s been talking to some of the people struggling to find a well-paying job. So, Joe, how bad is China’s youth unemployment rate?

Joseph Leahy
China at present has a record number of unemployed youth, 20.8 per cent, and this is higher than Italy or France. This is unusual for China and would have been unimaginable five, 10 years ago.

Marc Filippino
Now, when we say youth, we mean people between 16- and 24-years old. Why are younger people being affected more by China’s sluggish recovery?

Joseph Leahy
This situation has been coming for some time, but of course during Covid, you know, all of those lockdowns essentially put a lot of small and medium enterprises out of business. A lot of the services sector was closed or slowed down a lot. And in the midst of all of that, you had crackdowns on the internet sector. Companies like Alibaba and WeChat were forced to retrench. And these were all sectors that employed a lot of young people. And now the government’s also trying to reorient the economy towards more engineering-intensive sectors, such as advanced technology or advanced manufacturing. That is leaving a lot of young people who studied in other areas kind of stranded because they didn’t, you know, they didn’t study engineering and they’re not equipped for this structural change that’s going on in the economy.

Marc Filippino
So Joe, where are the graduates you spoke to finding work? Are they unemployed?

Joseph Leahy
It’s not to say that there aren’t jobs. There are a lot of sort of basic jobs around sales or delivering food. These jobs pay very little, and they require people to work six days a week, 12 hours a day. And when you’ve studied for three to four years, your parents have paid a fortune for your education and you are qualified as an accountant or whatever it is, and you have to go into one of these basic jobs, it’s very disappointing for these graduates. There was one young graduate who we met in Chengdu. The best that she could do was to get a job that pays Rmb3,000 a month, which is below the average urban wage in China of just over Rmb5,000. And when she told her father that she got this job, he was appalled. He’s a construction worker and he earns Rmb10,000 a month.

Marc Filippino
I’m curious, Joe, is the government doing anything to help young people?

Joseph Leahy
The government does recognise the problem and it’s trying to get state-owned companies to hire more people and it’s offering other forms of support to graduates. But you do see senior government officials, even President Xi Jinping himself, trying to urge young people to embrace hardship, perhaps take on jobs that they didn’t envisage themselves doing — more manual jobs or harder jobs. If you look at sort of the older generation, the leadership generation, Xi Jinping himself, during the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to go out into the countryside and worked in a poor village. And I think that was actually very formational for him in some ways. And he believes that all young people should be able to overcome hardship.

Marc Filippino
Joe Leahy is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief. Thanks, Joe.

Joseph Leahy
Thanks, Marc.

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Marc Filippino
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company that makes ChatGPT. The FTC sent a letter to OpenAI saying it would look at whether people have been harmed by AI chat bots, specifically if the AI has created false information about them. The FTC is also probing whether OpenAI has any deceptive privacy or data security practices. OpenAI and the FTC both declined to comment.

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The United Arab Emirates is hosting this year’s UN climate change conference, more commonly known as COP28. The conference starts in November, but the Gulf state has already caused a stir, partly because it’s talking about curbing fossil fuel emissions rather than phasing out fossil fuels altogether. But also because they’ve chosen Sultan Al Jaber as president for the talks. He’s the head of the state-owned oil company.

Farhana Yamin
First of all, he hasn’t given up his day-to-day responsibilities.

Marc Filippino
That’s Farhana Yamin. She’s a British lawyer and climate activist who’s been attending UN climate summits for the past 30 years.

Farhana Yamin
And most COP presidents step back because the intensity of the job itself is so demanding with huge numbers of consultations, international travel, bilaterals going on. So there’s that. And then secondly, the job he is continuing to do is the head of a national state-owned oil company. And that really is a complete direct conflict of interest.

Marc Filippino
But Yamin says that Al Jaber has the potential to grow into the role as this year’s COP president.

Farhana Yamin
I think they’ve got a huge team and there’s huge commitment and huge amounts of talent being drafted in to help him deliver this very key summit. And quite often they seem to be saying all the right things. You know, it’s like they’re reading the right notes but don’t seem to have grasped what really is needed. So I hope a lot more work is going on behind the scenes that I haven’t seen. But I think publicly we need a lot more oomph and a lot more upfront leadership from this incoming presidency than has been evident so far.

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Marc Filippino
Farhana Yamin was the FT’s guest on this week’s Rachman Review podcast. We’ll put a link to that episode in our show notes.

You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com for free when you click the links in our shownotes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back next week for the latest business news. The FT News Briefing is produced by Sonja Hutson, Fiona Symon and me, Marc Filippino. We had help this week from Monica Lopez, Katie Mcmurran, David da Silva, Michael Lello, and Gavin Kallmann, our executive producer is Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. And our theme song is by Metaphor Music.