(NEW YORK) — Alarm over a possible recession has blared for well over a year, but in recent months a cooldown of inflation alongside resilient job gains has quieted the din.
Growing optimism among some forecasters that the economy could avoid a recession altogether, however, faces a pair of tests this week.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday will announce a decision on whether to impose its 11th interest rate hike since March 2022, potentially escalating an aggressive fight against inflation that risks plunging the nation into a downturn.
The following day, a government agency will release its first estimate of gross domestic product for the three months ending in June — a determination of whether the economy grew or shrank during that period.
“The economy has proven to be more robust and resilient than we thought,” Mark Hamrick, Washington bureau chief at personal finance company Bankrate, told ABC News, noting the possibility that the economy could avoid a severe recession.
“The chances have been rising recently,” he said. “That’s not guaranteed but it’s a rising hope. It’s like being on a dangerous journey and realizing you can see a finish line.”
Nearly three-quarters of forecasters surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics said that the probability of the U.S. entering a recession in the next 12 months is 50% or less, the organization announced on Monday.
Echoing that burst of optimism, the median of economists surveyed by Bloomberg this month put the odds of a recession within the next 12 months at 58%, down from 70% in December.
The fate of the economy will be determined in large part by the extent of rate hikes undertaken by the Fed and their ultimate effect, economists told ABC News.
For more than a year, the Fed has aimed to roll back price increases by slowing down the economy and slashing consumer demand. The approach, however, risks tipping the economy into a recession.
The policy appears to have succeeded in cooling prices. Inflation has fallen significantly from a peak last summer but remains one percentage point above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.
Last month, the Fed opted to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged, ending a string of 10 consecutive rate increases that stretches back 15 months. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg this month expect a modest quarter-point rate hike.
The apparent downshift in the Fed’s inflation fight “means that it’s buying into the possibility of a soft landing or at least is willing to give it a try,” Stephan Weiler, a professor of economics at Colorado State University and a former Fed research officer, told ABC News.
Still, the full effect of rate hikes at the Fed typically takes hold after a time lag that is difficult to predict, leaving uncertain whether the economy will face a significant slowdown in the months ahead, Liz Ann Sonders, managing director and chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, told ABC News.
“We know we had the most aggressive [Fed] tightening in more than 40 years, and it hasn’t so far led to this huge hit to the economy,” Sonders said. “What we don’t know is whether this time is different or whether it’s one of the lags.”
A clearer sense of the nation’s economic health will be made available on Thursday, when the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its initial estimate of GDP growth over the three-month period ending in June.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found forecasters expect gross domestic product to have grown at an annualized rate of 1% over that period, which would mark continued growth but a slowdown from previous quarters.
Such results would indicate a slowdown from the 2% annualized GDP growth recorded over the previous quarter, which itself showed a cooling from the 2.6% growth displayed in the quarter before that.
However, the anticipated finding of 1% annualized growth would demonstrate that the economy expanded rather than shrank. Many observers define a recession through the shorthand metric of two consecutive quarters of shrinking in a nation’s GDP.
“The economy is slowing down,” said Weiler, of Colorado State University. “But it’s slowing down slowly.”
After the economic releases this week, a recession will remain possible but distant, said Hamrick, of Bankrate.
“We’ve had a bumpy ride at times but it really has yet to be one where a more dire outcome has seemed imminent,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — If you travel often, you’ve probably heard the rule of thumb, to book during the opposite season — sort of like Christmas in July or buying a winter coat at a deep discount during summer.
Experts say the logic is the same for booking holiday flights or a winter getaway for less.
“Airfare for Christmas travel this year is already tracking as high as fares last year, more than 20% above pre-pandemic prices,” Hayley Berg, the lead economist for travel booking platform Hopper, told ABC News’ Good Morning America.
Berg suggested that holiday travelers begin “planning ahead and tracking prices so you book at the right time” in order to get “the best deals this upcoming holiday season.”
Save money by booking holiday flights in July, August
“The best time to book your winter holiday flights is not waiting until October, November when most people book those holiday flights, it’s booking it in the summer,” travel expert Scott Keyes told GMA. “When you are on summer vacation and everybody else is thinking about summer travel, that’s the best time to be trying to book your winter holiday flights.”
The going.com founder, formerly of Scott’s Cheap Flights, added that “it’s not that every single flight for Christmas and New Year’s is going to be cheap right now, but the odds are at their best — you’re most likely to see a good deal pop up in July or August.”
Experts share best times to book, airport hacks and more holiday travel insights
Berg agreed, adding that travelers should “use this time to solidify your holiday plans and start tracking prices for holiday trips” as those “will be volatile for the next two to three months.”
Keyes also said that post-pandemic, many “airlines have largely gotten rid of change fees and cancellation fees, so that you can make your plans in pencil.”
“It’s easier to kind of book that $350 flight to Los Angeles today over Christmas to visit your family, knowing that if your plans change, you can now cancel that ticket and have $350 in travel credit with the airline,” he said. “Or, you can change your dates, push it back and not lose the value of the tickets.”
Overall, Keyes said, “I encourage folks to start looking now, well before they’re thinking about the flight.”
More expert travel tips to find holiday and winter travel deals
Keyes, who has spent the better part of a decade doling out travel and airfare savings professionally with the world, shared a few additional recommendations for folks looking to save money on travel later this year and early next year:
The cheapest time of year to fly
“January and February are the two cheapest months for flights of the entire year,” he said. “You see this massive, massive price drop happening around the first week of January, where flights go from one of the most expensive times of the year — Christmas and New Year — to one of the cheapest times around Jan. 7.”
Be flexible for the best value
“If you have the flexibility to be able to travel in January or February, I would highly recommend that as a good value time to go,” he said.
Pick cheaper travel days
Berg said that “sitting down with the calendar in July and planning ahead to travel on the cheapest days can be the difference between breaking your budget and saving hundreds.”
“Historically, travelers have saved as much as $300 per ticket by flying on the cheapest days surrounding Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you’re traveling for Thanksgiving, try flying Monday of Thanksgiving week and returning any week day of the following week to save the most,” she added. “With Christmas Day on a Monday this year, Thursday and Friday will be the most expensive travel days. Travelers who are flexible should plan to depart mid-week before the holiday or on Christmas Eve to get the lowest airfare.”
Plan ahead for disruption
Last year, Hopper data saw flight cancellations and delays during the holiday season, so Berg suggested people “plan ahead by adding in a buffer day, selecting nonstop flights and booking the first flight of the delay to avoid disruptions.”
Best affordable winter travel destinations
“One is Hawaii in January, February, even March because the weather is consistent — when the weather’s pretty miserable in much of the northern half of the U.S., it’s beautiful, sunny and wonderful and warm out in Hawaii — and it’s cheap,” Keyes said. “Flights out to Hawaii in January and February can be found for as little as $200 bucks round trip from the West Coast and sometimes as little as $400 or $450 for the rest of the U.S.”
Similarly, he said the Caribbean is a great budget-friendly winter getaway.
“If you can go just after the Christmas/New Year break, you’re gonna see really cheap flights down to Puerto Rico, around $200 bucks round trip,” he said. “To other islands, sometimes it’s $300 round trip on full service airlines. These are great places to be able to enjoy the sunshine at a time when there’s very little of that [elsewhere] in the U.S.”
Finally, Keyes expects to see a trend of “significantly cheaper prices” for flights to Europe in winter 2024.
“Especially southern Europe — Spain, Portugal, places like that where it’s still quite warm — the sort of really inflated summer prices that we’re seeing to Europe over summer I think are set to end,” he said. “I think we’re likely to see significantly cheaper prices to Europe into the fall and winter for a number of reasons.”
The reason for this? Among other things, Keyes said “the U.S. economy is in much better shape than Europe,” airlines have been “adding more capacity,” and there are “fewer travelers in the winter compared to the summer.”
“I think there’s a very strong likelihood we’re going to see more of those $350-$400 round-trip flights to Europe for January, February and March,” he said.
Travel rules to keep in mind when booking early
“Part of the difficulty of airfare is that it’s the most volatile thing we purchase,” Keyes said. “At end of the day, getting a deal you are happy with yourself is the most important thing — that counts as a win.”
One of his top suggestions is to set a calendar reminder once a week at the same time to look at your flight and search for a cheaper fare. In addition to his own deals and newsletters, Keyes suggests checking other price trackers and Google Flights to set specific alerts for any changes.
“What’s especially nice nowadays is that as long as it’s not basic economy, you can monitor that same flight from the day you booked until the day you actually take the trip — and if the price drops, you can always rebook it at that cheaper price and pocket any difference. That kind of gives you an ability to be able to book today and lock it in,” he said.
Another suggestion from Keyes is to understand and use points while you have them.
“Generally speaking, the best approach to points is to not necessarily amass a huge amount and then just wait for that dream trip, but rather do what’s called ‘earn and burn,'” he explained.
He said the benefit of this approach “is that points are a currency of the airlines, and airlines are well within their right to just change how much your points are worth anytime.”
“That can happen without notice,” Keyes said. “It’s what’s called an overnight devaluation, and you’re always kind of at risk of that with points.”
“The rule of thumb to know if you’re getting a good value to use your points is if you’re getting at least two cents per point,” he added.
(NEW YORK) — UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union representing about 330,000 UPS employees in the U.S., have reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement.
Contract negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters restarted on Tuesday after breaking down earlier this month. The two sides faced a July 31 deadline, at which point the Teamsters had vowed to strike before employees’ contract was set to expire on Aug. 1.
Instead, UPS and the Teamsters struck a five-year tentative agreement that raises wages for all workers, creates additional full-time jobs and imposes dozens of workplace protections and improvements, the Teamsters said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Rank-and-file UPS Teamsters sacrificed everything to get this country through a pandemic and enabled UPS to reap record-setting profits,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement on Tuesday.
“We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” he added.
Similarly, UPS celebrated the agreement as an achievement for the workers as well as for the company and its customers.
“Together we reached a win-win-win agreement on the issues that are important to Teamsters leadership, our employees and to UPS and our customers,” Carol Tomé, UPS CEO, said in a statement.
“This agreement continues to reward UPS’s full- and part-time employees with industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive, serve our customers and keep our business strong,” she added.
Among other issues, the deal addresses two key points of concern among workers: pay raises and safety protections, the union said.
Under the terms of the deal, existing full- and part-time UPS Teamsters will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more per hour over the length of the contract, the union said. Meanwhile, existing part-timers will see their pay raised immediately up to no less than $21 per hour.
Wage increases for full-time workers will keep UPS Teamsters as the highest-paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour, the union added.
In addition, the deal codifies a previous commitment made by UPS to equip in-cab A/C in all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after the outset of 2024, the union said.
The tentative agreement would also grant all Teamsters-represented UPS workers with a day off on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — a key demand that the union had raised in contract negotiations.
The agreement is subject to voting and ratification by Teamsters members.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — Books, binders, pens and pencils are just a few of the necessities students across the country will need as the upcoming school year awaits. But a lengthy list of school supplies may have families sweating the price tags associated with these essential items.
Luckily, starting this week, several states that charge a state tax are taking part in sales tax holidays for school supplies with the new school year around the corner. A sales tax holiday, which often lasts for a weekend or longer, is a timeframe when states remove a sales tax on purchases for specific items up to a certain amount of money.
States offering the school supply sales tax holiday have different limits on tax-free spending. Florida and Tennessee are removing the sales tax on computer purchases up to $1,500, while Arkansas has no limit on tax-free spending for school supplies. New Jersey has no sales tax on school and art supplies, and sets a $3,000 maximum limit on tax-free computer purchases.
The tax holidays start in the South with Alabama’s holiday, which took place between July 21 and July 23. Florida’s break started Tuesday, July 24, while Mississippi and Tennessee follow suit, starting Friday, July 28.
Here is a complete list of states offering sales tax holidays this year:
Alabama (July 21-23)
Florida (July 24-August 6)
Mississippi (July 28-29)
Tennessee (July 28-30)
Iowa (August 4-5)
Ohio (August 4-6)
Oklahoma (August 4-6)
Missouri (August 4-6)
Arkansas (August 5-6)
West Virginia (August 4-7)
South Carolina (August 4-6)
New Mexico (August 4-6)
Texas (August 11-13)
Massachusetts (August 12-13)
Maryland (August 13-19)
Connecticut (August 20-26)
New Jersey (August 26-September 4)
Sales tax holidays vary by location and not every state has one enacted. It’s also important to remember that a sales tax holiday doesn’t necessarily mean there will be no tax added on a purchase, as cities and counties can still levy taxes in their jurisdictions.
(NEW YORK) — TikTok has added a new feature that allows users to create text-only posts with the change coming just a day after Twitter rebranded itself and less than three weeks after Facebook released Threads as competition between the social media giants continues to escalate.
“At TikTok, we’re always looking to empower our creators and community with innovative tools that inspire self expression. Today we’re thrilled to announce the expansion of text posts on TikTok, a new format for creating text-based content that broadens options for creators to share their ideas and express their creativity,” the Chinese-owned video streaming app said in a statement released late Monday. “With text posts, we’re expanding the boundaries of content creation for everyone on TikTok, giving the written creativity we’ve seen in comments, captions, and videos a dedicated space to shine.”
The new feature comes as TikTok announced just last week the launch of a new streaming music service that could rival titans like Apple Music and Spotify and that the partnership with Warner Music Group would create “new revenue, marketing and insights opportunities for artists and songwriters,” according to a statement made by TikTok at the time of the announcement.
TikTok users will now see three different options for content creation: photo, video and text, the company said.
“By selecting text, you’ll be directed to the text creation page, where you can type out the content of your post,” TikTok said. “You’ll find familiar options to customize your content. These include adding Sound, tagging a location, enabling comments, and allowing Duets, among others. These features make it so your text posts are just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post.”
TikTok is one of the world’s fastest growing platforms. It surpassed two billion downloads worldwide in October 2020 and was ranked the world’s most popular website — surpassing Google — in 2021.
Competition between some of the biggest social media networks has been escalating in recent weeks.
Meta Platforms launched Threads — a new social media platform and networking service — less than three weeks ago in an effort to take on Twitter just months after Elon Musk acquired the company in Oct. 2022.
On Monday, Twitter rebranded its logo by removing the famous Twitter bird and replacing it with a black and white letter X.
Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a thread on the platform saying that X will be the platform that can deliver “everything.”
“It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square,” Yaccarino said on Sunday. “For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential. X will do that and more. We’ve already started to see X take shape over the past 8 months through our rapid feature launches, but we’re just getting started.”
(NEW YORK) — Greta Gerwig’s Barbie defied a sluggish pandemic recovery at movie theaters to rake in $155 million domestically over its opening weekend.
The haul made it the highest-grossing debut of 2023 and the top contributor to the fourth-largest weekend at the box office in the U.S. of all time.
At first glance, a comedy based on a children’s toy and bathed in pink may not fit the mold for a blockbuster at a time when superhero movies reign.
However, the longstanding and widely appealing resonance of the toy offers a unique advantage for a film that capitalizes with a fresh perspective from Gerwig and an immense marketing campaign promising summertime escape, analysts told ABC News.
“It’s the right movie at the right time,” Daniel Loria, editorial director and senior vice president of content strategy at BoxOffice.com, told ABC News.
A top reason, analysts said, is the cultural prominence of the 64-year-old “Barbie” brand, which transcends generations and geographies. According to Mattel, “Barbie” has 99% brand awareness worldwide.
“This is one of those movies that a grandma, mother and daughter can all go to together and enjoy,” Ayalla Ruvio, a professor of marketing at Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business who studies consumer behavior, told ABC News.
“The brand has strong nostalgic value,” she added. “It doesn’t matter how old people are — 30, 40, 60 — they all think the movie is targeted toward them.”
The mass appeal of the intellectual property, or IP, risked giving rise to a “generic film” but movie studio Warner Bros. realized the work needed to “have something to say to bring in an audience,” Loria said.
By choosing Gerwig, Loria added, the studio drew upon the creative artistic vision she displayed in previous independent films, such as Lady Bird.
“Audiences are willing and happy to go see IP films as long as they have some creative touch from a filmmaker behind them,” Loria said. “That’s precisely what Barbie and Greta Gerwig were able to do.”
On top of that, the movie benefited considerably from a relentless marketing campaign that began months before the film’s release, analysts said.
Barbie took part in more than 100 crossover product advertisements, allowing the brand to reach consumers of everything from Xbox to yogurt, Sheri Lambert, a marketing professor at Temple University, told ABC News.
While some of that blitz was likely lost in “clutter,” it contributed to an engaging, multi-pronged outreach campaign that made the brand nearly inescapable in the lead-up to the release, she added. Many consumers welcomed the pull toward Barbie, she added.
“We know from all of our marketing textbooks that emotion sells,” Lambert said. “It’s goofiness, it’s fun. It takes you back to your childhood and playing with things.”
To Lambert, the standout marketing tactics included selfie filters, pop-up activities featuring human-size Barbie boxes and pink double-decker buses in London.
Barbie was not the only high-profile debut over the weekend. Christopher Nolan’s R-rated Oppenheimer pulled in $80.5 million at the domestic box office, making it the first weekend in U.S. movie history with one film at more than $100 million and another over $80 million, Loria said.
The twin releases helped create a sense of destination viewing at theaters over the weekend, softening consumer habits hardened during the pandemic that treat the trip to the theater as a rare outing for individual, sought-after films.
“What we saw with Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend was people talking about going to the movies rather than a movie,” Loria said.
Still, the top performer made itself known, Lambert said, referencing a plot point in Barbie in which she travels away from home and into human society.
“She’s coming out into the human world while we are definitely going into Barbie Land now,” Lambert said.
Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The signature blue bird perched atop social media platform Twitter vanished on Sunday as part of a company rebrand under a new name: X.
The revamp marks the latest change enacted by billionaire owner Elon Musk, who stepped down as CEO last month but retained a prominent role in the company.
Promising an AI-fueled expansion of the site’s capabilities, X aims to follow the logo change with an ambitious foray into online banking and video messaging, among other areas, CEO Linda Yaccarino said on Sunday.
“It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life or in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” tweeted Yaccarino, who previously worked as an advertising executive at NBCUniversal.
“Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate,” she added. “Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
Here’s what to know about X, what makes it different from Twitter and the role of Musk in the rebrand.
What is new about X?
For now, X is a rebranded Twitter — but the company on Sunday revealed plans to offer users a one-stop shop for many of their online needs.
The aspiration was made public as long ago as last year. Days after acquiring Twitter, in October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Taking a step closer earlier this month, Musk launched an artificial intelligence company called xAI, vowing to develop a generative AI program that competes with established offerings like ChatGPT.
Describing X’s goal as “unlimited interactivity,” Yaccarino said on Sunday that the company plans to become a hub of online messaging and commerce.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino said.
The best example of what Musk means by an “everything app” is WeChat, a highly popular app in China that serves not only as a messaging and media-sharing platform but also a versatile tool in which users pay friends, purchase products and book reservations, among other uses, analysts previously told ABC News.
Why did Twitter rebrand as X?
The rebrand arrives at a transition period and self-admitted financial difficulty for the company.
Last month, Yaccarino took over as CEO, elevating her as a visible leader alongside Musk, who remains executive chairman and chief technology officer. Musk also serves as CEO of Space X.
Meanwhile, the company has lost 50% of its advertising revenue and faces a negative cash flow, meaning there is more money being spent on expenses than brought in through revenue, Musk tweeted earlier this month.
Prior to its acquisition by Musk, Twitter made the vast majority of its revenue through advertising but many large companies have pulled ads from the platform amid what some have described as a rise of explicit and hateful content.
In addition, X faces a new threat from ascendant social media platform Threads, owned by Facebook parent-company Meta. Threads reached 100 million users within five days, achieving a record as the fastest app ever to do so.
By comparison, Twitter boasted 238 million users before Musk took the company private in October, the company said in an earnings report last year.
What role did Musk play in the rebrand?
Musk’s interest in the letter “X” traces back more than two decades.
In 1999, Musk launched an online payments and banking company called X.com, which later merged with PayPal.
Musk repurchased the URL “X.com” in 2017. Now, the domain directs visitors to Twitter.
“Not sure what subtle clues gave it away, but I like the letter X,” Musk said in a Tweet on Sunday alongside a photo of him crossing his arms to form the letter.
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he added.
(NEW YORK) — Netflix revealed blockbuster subscriber growth in a quarterly earnings report this week, but since then the company’s shares have plummeted more than 20%.
The reaction on Wall Street marks the latest indication of a profound shift in investor priorities away from subscriber growth and toward the bottom line, which holds implications for striking writers and actors as well as the shows and movies that end up on screen, experts told ABC News.
“The tide has turned,” Jessica Reif Ehrlich, an entertainment industry analyst with Bank of America, told ABC News.
Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Here’s what to know about what the earnings report said, why the stock price fell and what it means for Hollywood.
What did Netflix earnings reveal about the company?
Netflix shared a lot of good news in its earnings report on Wednesday, Reif Ehrlich said.
A password-sharing crackdown helped the streaming platform add 5.9 million subscribers over the three months ending June, which marked a staggering improvement from the same period a year ago when the company lost nearly 1 million subscribers, Netflix said.
In all, Netflix said it boasts about 232 million subscribers, far outpacing its nearest rival Disney+, which reported just shy of 158 million subscribers in May. (The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC News).
Meanwhile, Netflix’s free cash flow — a measure of how much money is available to a company after it pays for operating expenses — grew by $1.5 billion to a total of about $5 billion, the company said.
The company, however, failed to meet expectations for revenue, which rose 2.7% from a year earlier to $8.2 billion. Analysts expected $8.3 billion.
Why did Netflix’s stock drop?
The miss on revenue — which Reif Ehrlich called a “modest disappointment” — was enough to send the company’s stock tanking.
The subscriber growth, while strong, is poised deliver less than it appears because many of the consumers live in international markets where the company reaps less revenue per customer, she added.
On Thursday, a day after the report, Netflix shares fell more than 8%. In afternoon trading on Friday, the stock had dropped roughly another 11%.
Despite the recent losses, Netflix stock has climbed roughly 44% this year — a sign that the investor reaction this week suggests a judgment about an overvalued stock rather than an unhealthy company, Luis Cabral, a professor of economics and international business at New York University who focuses on the entertainment sector, told ABC News.
“From the beginning of the year, it’s actually doing quite well,” Cabral said.
Still, the stock falloff is the latest sign of an industry-wide shift away from the breakneck subscriber growth that marked an early phase in the sector as companies jockeyed to accrue a large customer base that could shoulder out competitors, he said. Now, he added, companies like Netflix need to show that they’re actually making money and delivering profits.
What does Netflix’s stock decline say about the streaming industry?
The focus on bottom-line performance means streaming companies like Netflix are increasingly attentive to minimizing costs and enhancing the revenue derived from viewers, Reif Ehrlich said.
That means the companies are less likely to bankroll expensive shows or movies, she added. Some firms, including Netflix, have even imposed layoffs going back to last year as a means of cutting costs.
The ongoing strike among writers and actors adds an additional layer of financial uncertainty, she added.
“Given the strikes and the focus of the market on profitability, they’re really going to have to think about content costs, marketing costs, overhead,” Reif Ehrlich said.
Viewers should expect a smaller selection of shows even after the calendar returns to normal following the strikes, she added. “There was this rush to drive content over the last three to five years,” she said. “Everybody is going to pull back.”
(NEW YORK) — Just two days after a winning ticket was sold for the $1 billion Powerball, another lucky person has a chance at a mega-lottery drawing Friday.
The Mega Millions jackpot has grown to an estimated $720 million — marking the lotto game’s fifth-largest top prize in its history.
There have been no jackpot winners in 26 consecutive drawings, since the grand prize was last won on April 18. Players must match all six numbers to claim the jackpot.
The cash option of the jackpot is an estimated $369.6 million — offered as a one-time, lump-sum payment. Otherwise the winnings can be paid out as one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments, with the annuity option.
The odds of winning the top prize are 1 in 302.6 million.
The estimated $720 million prize marks the fifth time the Mega Millions jackpot has surpassed $700 million. The previous four times that occurred the top winnings continued to grow past $1 billion, with billion-dollar winners in 2018, 2021, 2022 and January 2023.
Mega Millions is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Tickets are $2 for one play. Friday’s drawing is at 11 p.m. ET.
On Wednesday, a winning ticket for the $1 billion Powerball jackpot was sold in Los Angeles. The jackpot — the third-largest in Powerball history — has a cash value of $516.8 million, before taxes.
The prize had yet to be claimed, a California Lottery spokesperson said Thursday, adding that it entails a thorough vetting process to verify it’s their ticket.
Winners are also advised to hire a team of advisers when claiming such a large sum.
The winning ticket marked the second billion-dollar-plus Powerball jackpot claimed in Southern California in eight months.
(NEW YORK) — When Justin Harrison suffered a nasty bout of strep throat two weeks ago, he said he received a barrage of text messages from his mom urging him to take better care of himself — even though his mom is dead.
Harrison, who founded an AI company called You, Only Virtual in 2020 that creates chatbots modeled after deceased loved ones, was getting reprimanded by a digital version of his mom in the same way its real-life counterpart would have done so.
“I’ve got a virtual mom talking to me ad nauseam about more rest, asking why I’m not hydrating,” Harrison, 40, told ABC News. “I was getting yelled at.”
Harrison, who has communicated with the digital reproduction of his mom on a daily basis since she died in October at age 61, believes AI-driven chatbots will redefine how some deal with grief.
The industry faces formidable obstacles to building chatbots that accurately mimic a dead person and questions remain over issues like privacy and consent, experts said.
Moreover, generative AI tools like ChatGPT — which scan text from across the internet and string words together based on statistical probability — have displayed a propensity to share arbitrary, false or hateful speech, raising alarm about the personal and societal effects of noxious words delivered with the intimacy and authority of a deceased loved one, some experts added.
“You will not be reincarnating a relative with GPT-4,” Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at New York University and author of the book ”Rebooting AI,” said in reference to the latest version of Chat-GPT. “These systems make stuff up all the time.”
Still, the emergence of sophisticated AI-driven conversation programs brings a life-like product within closer reach, experts said.
For years, advances in the reproduction of audio and video have made digital copies of deceased people possible, said Mark Dredze, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who helped create a finance-oriented AI language model called BloombergGPT. He pointed to big-budget movies and TV shows that feature impeccable computer-generated images.
In recent seasons of the TV series, The Mandalorian, for example, the creators depicted a youthful Luke Skywalker by digitally de-aging Mark Hamill, the actor who played the character in the 1970s Star Wars films, Dredze added. (The Walt Disney Company, the parent company of the studio that made The Mandalorian, is also the parent company of ABC News.)
“That technology will eventually become cheaper and easier,” Dredze said.
The remaining technical challenge, however, is the authenticity of the words coming out of a digital person’s mouth — something that newly improved conversation bots like ChatGPT can help create, Dredze said. “Is it the person?” he added. “Is this something that they would say?”
AI experts who spoke with ABC News said that success or failure on that score hinges upon the volume of data about the deceased loved one that the user enters into a given chatbot, keeping in mind the possibility that a chatbot could still offer up arbitrary or inaccurate information, regardless of the scale of training data.
“If you have massive amounts of text that somebody has produced, you can train a system on that and you’ll capture in some sense someone’s voice,” Kristian Hammond, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University who studies AI, told ABC News.
The chatbot would still struggle to respond to novel or complicated topics, however, Hammond said. “It’s a thing that looks like, sounds like and speaks like a loved one, but it doesn’t have enough in the way of data to capture the point of view and the values of that loved one,” he added.
You, Only Virtual addresses this challenge by focusing on communication between an individual living person and the deceased, thereby attempting to recreate their specific one-on-one dynamic, Harrison said.
“When you start thinking about the nuances of a holistic human being, it gets out of control,” Harrison said. “I stared at five years of messages and recorded phone calls with my mom — 3,800 pages. The amount of consistency through the entirety of it was staggering.”
After scanning communication records such as text messages, emails and phone calls, You, Only Virtual says it creates a chatbot that can utter original responses in conversation with a user either through written chats or audio responses that mimic a deceased relative’s voice, Harrison said.
The company, he added, aims to offer video-chat capability later this year and ultimately provide augmented-reality that allows for interaction with a three-dimensional projection.
Harrison rejected possible privacy concerns raised by the use of personal correspondence to build a chatbot without the consent of the deceased, noting that the user of the chatbot is the same person to whom the communications were initially sent.
“You absolutely don’t need consent from someone who’s dead,” Harrison said. “My mom could’ve hated the idea but this is what I wanted and I’m alive.”
The early-stage startup, which has eight employees, is poised to grow in part through improvements in generative AI, Harrison said.
“Everything that happens with helping the program get better at learning and quantifying information is good for us,” Harrison said.
StoryFile, a company that says it has 40 employees and $10 million in annual revenue, offers an interactive version of deceased relatives by recording an hourslong question-and-answer session with the individual before his or her death, and in turn, attempting to create a reproduction that responds to prompts.
In this case, the virtual reproduction utters pre-recorded content in a real-life manner, said Stephen Smith, the CEO of StoryFile. If a topic falls outside a set of established discussion areas, however, the reproduction cannot respond. Currently, users speak with the digital loved one through interactive video but the company is developing the capacity for conversation with a 3D likeness, Smith said.
The company holds a “hard line” against the use of AI for generating original spoken content, which Smith said he finds “creepy and weird.” (In response, Harrison defended such use of the technology. “By using natural language processing and generative AI, you’re able to keep the process moving forward so it’s relevant, it’s topical and it’s fresh,” Harrison said.)
Instead, StoryFile deploys an AI chatbot as the interviewer during the question-and-answer sessions, allowing the conversation to probe a vast range of topic expertise, said Smith, who previously led the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, which established an archive of oral testimony about the Holocaust.
“I’m an oral historian going, ‘Jeez, I’ve wasted the last 30 years of my life,'” Smith said. “ChatGPT can do it as well as me.”
To be sure, some experts doubted the progress for this industry afforded by language models like ChatGPT and warned of potential risks.
“They’re trying to do the impossible,” said Marcus, of New York University.
Generative AI sometimes responds to prompts with arbitrary or inaccurate information, Marcus added, posing a risk to users who may struggle to fully understand the limits of the technology when it performs as a reproduction of a deceased loved one.
“These models are good at tricking people that they’re people but they’re not,” Marcus said. “It’s kind of like a party trick doing some imitations but certainly not the real thing.”
Meanwhile, the mental health effects of such products are being examined. Smith, of StoryFile, acknowledged that the immediate aftermath of a death may be too early for some people to see a virtual reproduction of a loved one, adding that the product preserves the legacy for ensuing generations.
You, Only Virtual says it works with a team of clinical psychologists and offers alternate resources on its website for people in a mental health crisis, Harrison said.
Elena Lister, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, said digital reproductions of the deceased could cause harm if they push a grieving individual to withdraw from his or her life. However, she added, the grieving process varies widely.
“When someone dies in your life, you are just so hungry for more of them,” Lister told ABC News. “This is an attempt to bridge that gap.”
“When it comes to grieving, there is very little that is right or wrong,” she added. “If something provides you with comfort, I would in no way say there’s something bad about it.”
Going further, Harrison said he hopes people no longer have to feel grief at all. He wishes he could’ve avoided the painful emotions that have accompanied the death of his mom, he said, even if the experience has brought about some personal growth.
“Have I learned to be more reliant on myself? That’s good,” Harrison said. “Was it worth losing my mom? No.”
