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    Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

    In 1812 Frederick Winsor, a madcap entrepreneur, invented the public utility. The idea behind his Gas Light and Coke company, which would supply residents of London, was that instead of each household buying its own energy—bags of coal, bits of firewood—the stuff would be piped directly to them from a central location. More customers, with differing patterns of demand, would allow power plants to be used more efficiently. It was a natural monopoly: scale would spread the cost of the gasworks, the pipes and so on across large numbers of customers, each spending less than they would individually to consume just as much. The idea of “energy as a service” spread across the world. More

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    Russian inflation is too high. Does that matter?

    While inflation has cooled almost everywhere, in Russia it is hotting up. Consumer prices rose by 9.5% year on year in December, up from 8.9% the previous month and uncomfortably above the central bank’s target of 4% (see chart). The prices of fruit and vegetables have risen by more than 20% on average in the past year. In a normal country, this sort of high inflation would be unsustainable. But Russia is not a normal country. More

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    Why you should repay your mortgage early

    The holiday from reality, for the happy few enjoying it, has been delightful. Three years ago it was still possible to fix a mortgage rate in Britain and much of the euro area at somewhere near 1%. American housing loans were dearer by just a percentage point or two. Even as interest rates have risen and borrowing costs for new mortgages have doubled or tripled, homeowners who locked in the enviable rates of the early 2020s have been living blissfully in the past. Moreover, the inflation that prompted rates to rise has bitten chunks out of the real value of their debt. More

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    How AI will divide the best from the rest

    At a summit in Paris on February 10th and 11th, tech bosses vied to issue the most grandiose claim about artificial intelligence. “AI will be the most profound shift of our lifetimes,” is how Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s boss, put it. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said that it would lead to the “largest change to the global labour market in human history”. In a blog post, Sam Altman of OpenAI wrote that “In a decade perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.” More

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    The danger of relying on OpenAI’s Deep Research

    In early February Openai, the world’s most famous artificial-intelligence firm, released Deep Research, which is “designed to perform in-depth, multi-step research”. With a few strokes of a keyboard, the tool can produce a paper on any topic in minutes. Many academics love it. “Asking OpenAI’s Deep Research about topics I am writing papers on has been incredibly fruitful,” said Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania. Some economists go further. “I am *sure* for B-level journals, you can publish papers you ‘wrote’ in a day”, said Kevin Bryan of the University of Toronto. “I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two,” said Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, an economist with cult-like status in Silicon Valley. More

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    Chinese businesses rush to try DeepSeek AI at ‘unprecedented’ scale

    Eight automakers including BYD, at least nine financial securities companies, three state-owned telecommunications operators and smartphone brand Honor are among the many that have rushed to integrate with DeepSeek in the last week.
    “This is quite unprecedented,” Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said in an email Monday. She pointed to the rate of adoption, scale of business integration and breadth of specific industries covered.
    A big factor in the widespread interest is timing, as well as DeepSeek’s open-source availability in China.

    Dado Ruvic | Reuters

    BEIJING — Chinese businesses are tapping DeepSeek’s newest artificial intelligence model to see how it can improve productivity.
    The Chinese AI model took the world by storm in recent weeks after showcasing its reasoning process and claims to undercut rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT on cost — despite U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to the advanced semiconductors needed to develop the tech.

    Eight automakers including BYD, at least nine financial securities companies, three state-owned telecommunications operators and smartphone brand Honor are among the many that have rushed in the last week to integrate with DeepSeek. Cloud computing operators Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent and Baidu have all offered ways for clients to access DeepSeek’s latest model.
    “This is quite unprecedented,” Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said in an email Monday. She pointed to the rate of adoption, scale of business integration and breadth of specific industries covered.
    “When we have all of these, we know it’s making a big social and economic impact,” she said.

    Optimism over artificial intelligence has spread to Chinese stocks. UBS said Wednesday that AI-related Chinese stocks are up by 15% since the start of the year, outperforming the broader MSCI China Index by 9%.
    A big factor in the widespread interest is timing. DeepSeek released its latest R1 model on Jan. 20, and news of its low-cost reasoning capabilities prompted a global tech stock sell-off on Jan. 27 — just as millions of urban workers in China were returning to their hometowns to celebrate the eight-day Lunar New Year holiday.

    As a result, less developed parts of China gained greater understanding of AI and its impact, a topic previously limited to conversations in China’s largest cities, said Wenhao Zhang, CEO of the Beijing-based consumer marketing consultancy Doodod.
    “It’s a major education of the market. This will push the entire ecosystem’s development,” he said Tuesday in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.
    Zhang, who studied AI at Tsinghua University, founded Doodod in 2012 to build customer engagement through social media analysis. He said the company — which counts China Merchant’s Bank and Toyota as clients — started looking at DeepSeek’s offerings late last year, and began using it more after the R1 release in late January.
    DeepSeek, founded in 2023 out of a quantitative hedge fund, had released a basic version of R1 in November, and a V3 model in December. It launched a smartphone chatbot app in January.

    Open-source local deployment

    Another attractive factor for businesses is that DeepSeek’s models are open-source, allowing individuals and companies to download and customize it.
    DeepSeek also advertised drastically lower prices for applications to use its tech versus that of OpenAI. ChatGPT is not officially available in mainland China and requires users to provide an overseas phone number and payment method from a supported country such as the U.S.
    DeepSeek changed the perception that AI models only belong to big companies and have high implementation costs, said James Tong, CEO of Movitech, an enterprise software company which says its clients include Danone and China’s State Grid.
    He said Movitech started integrating an earlier version of DeepSeek in the fourth quarter of last year, helping boost sales by about 25% from the same period in 2023. The company plans to launch a new DeepSeek-integrated application by the end of March to improve clients’ ability to make decisions, he said.
    Many recent videos on Chinese social media have showed off how to run a local version of DeepSeek on Apple’s Mac mini.
    Apple Mac mini online sales in China climbed significantly from November to January, versus the same period the year prior, according to data from consultancy WPIC. The electronics-focused JD.com site recorded unit sales of around 20,200 in January, up from nearly 19,400 in December and around 12,250 in November, the data showed.
    DeepSeek’s affordability is pressuring more expensive AI models to cut prices, enabling more businesses to adopt the tech, said Chim Lee, senior Asia analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. He added that open-source models allow finance, banking and healthcare businesses — which are subject to stringent data protection rules in China — to develop AI applications locally.
    “It is still very early to point to concrete business applications, but a key takeaway is that DeepSeek will accelerate the commoditization of AI,” Lee said.
    Beijing is also increasing support. China’s national supercomputing network announced Tuesday that eligible companies and individuals can obtain three free months of DeepSeek access, along with subsidized computing power.
    The network is similar to OpenAI’s Trump-backed Stargate project in the U.S. for building AI infrastructure — with the potential for “even faster scaling,” Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law said Wednesday. He is also the author of “The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.” 

    Not centered on DeepSeek

    The rush to try out DeepSeek doesn’t mean it will be the only AI provider for Chinese companies. Developers in the U.S. and China are regularly releasing new models.
    Movitech also uses Alibaba’s Qwen AI model, Tong said, noting that the market wants the tech that can lower costs and produce results the most, whether it’s OpenAI or DeepSeek.
    HangHang AI, which has invested several hundred million yuan to develop AI solutions for companies across 20 industries, uses a range of models, said partner and COO Shu Weibing.
    Many people first used “Baidu, then realized it wasn’t as good as Kimi, then it wasn’t as good as [ByteDance’s] Doubao, which also cut prices,” Shu said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. “Now it’s DeepSeek.”
    It remains to be seen how much generative AI can boost productivity and profits.
    Shu predicts that small businesses and companies that integrate AI with hardware will benefit more than large, consumer-facing internet platforms, whose AI work so far, he said, has focused more on boosting efficiency rather than creating new consumer services.
    Despite AI models’ falling prices, “small and medium-sized businesses may still be in a period of wait-and-see” for adopting the tech due to the relatively high cost for a full deployment, including computing power and customization, Mike Fang, senior director analyst at Gartner, said Wednesday in Mandarin translated by CNBC.
    But the consulting firm predicts that by 2027, the average price to access a generative AI model will be less than 1% of what it costs now — and that by 2029, 60% of Chinese businesses will have incorporated AI into their primary products and services, forming the top drivers of revenue growth. More

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    CFPB’s new leadership begins staff purge with dozens of employees terminated

    The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent termination notices to several dozen employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
    The affected staff were mostly those with probationary status, said the people, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly after orders to stop all agency work, including speaking with reporters.
    Several of those being laid off had already accepted federal buyout offers, said one of the people.

    Acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought speaks with reporters during a press briefing at the White House in Washington on March 11, 2019.
    Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

    The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent termination notices to several dozen employees late Tuesday, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
    The affected staff were mostly those with probationary status, said the people, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly after orders to stop all agency work, including speaking with reporters.

    Being on probation means the employee is in a trial period, often lasting a year or two, after starting a new government position, and does not reflect performance, the people said.
    The move comes amid a broader effort under President Donald Trump to trim federal staff. The Office of Personnel Management asked federal agencies for lists of all recently hired workers because they are the easiest to terminate, NBC News has reported. That has stoked fears of layoffs at places as disparate as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
    CFPB staff have been on edge since late last week, when operatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the agency. The CFPB headquarters have since been shuttered, while employees were told by acting CFPB director Russell Vought not to do any bureau work. Both Musk and Vought have called for the elimination of the CFPB.

    ‘First salvo’

    “This is an unlawfully-executed mass firing,” said Johanna Hickman, senior CFPB litigation counsel who said she received the agency’s dismissal notice. “It’s almost certainly the first salvo in the dismantling of this agency, and a significant percentage of the federal workforce.”
    Hickman, who said she started in her CFPB role in June of 2023, said the agency’s new leadership didn’t follow established federal protocol for dismissing probationary employees. “A lot of us are prepared to fight, and we are examining all our legal avenues,” she said.

    The terminations have sowed more confusion at the bureau, as several of those being laid off had already accepted federal buyout offers, said one of the people.
    Some being dismissed received form letters that did not include their specific names and titles, but left some fields filled with generic placeholders, said this person.
    “Unfortunately, the Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not meet the Agency’s current needs,” the CFPB told some who were dismissed, according to people who received the notices.
    The terminations hit the CFPB’s enforcement division in particular because of a push under former director Rohit Chopra to boost hiring of enforcement lawyers, said another person. The agency had about 1,700 employees before the job cuts.
    The CFPB declined to comment.

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    Comcast and NBCUniversal receive FCC inquiry on DEI initiatives

    The Federal Communications Commission has informed Comcast it is opening an investigation into the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
    The inquiry will look into the businesses of both Comcast and its media arm NBCUniversal.
    The letter comes three weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that calls for ending DEI hiring programs and initiatives.

    U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a viewing of the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. 
    Brandon Bell | Getty Images

    The Federal Communications Commission has alerted Comcast Corp. that it will begin an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the media giant.
    The FCC, the agency that regulates the media and telecommunications industry, said in a letter dated Tuesday that it would open the inquiry into both Comcast — which provides broadband, mobile and cable TV services under the Xfinity brand — and NBCUniversal, the media arm that encompasses the company’s broadcast and cable TV networks, streaming app Peacock, and Universal film studio and amusement parks.

    The letter comes three weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order looking to end DEI practices at U.S. corporations. The order calls for each federal agency to “identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” among publicly traded companies, as well as nonprofits and other institutions.
    FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Republican who was recently appointed by Trump, said he was starting his investigation with Comcast and NBCUniversal because they “cover a range of sectors regulated by the FCC.”
    “We have received an inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission and will be cooperating with the FCC to answer their questions,” a Comcast spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday. “For decades, our company has been built on a foundation of integrity and respect for all of our employees and customers.” 
    Carr said in the letter sent to Comcast that he was “concerned that Comcast and NBCUniversal may be promoting invidious forms of DEI in a manner that does not comply with FCC regulations.”
    The letter goes on to say that “Comcast states on its website that promoting DEI is ‘a core value of our business’ and public reports state that Comcast has an entire ‘DEI infrastructure’ that includes annual ‘DEI day[s],’ ‘DEI training for company leaders,’ and similar initiatives.” The letter says NBCUniversal has similar initiatives, “including executives specifically dedicated to promoting DEI across the TV and programming side of the business.”

    Fellow media giant Disney is changing its DEI programs, which includes updating performance factors and rebranding initiatives and employee resource groups, among other things, the company confirmed Wednesday.
    Public broadcaster PBS is shutting down its DEI office. A PBS representative confirmed that those employees were leaving the company, noting it was to stay in compliance with Trump’s executive order.
    “We will continue to adhere to our mission and values. PBS will continue to reflect all of America and remain a welcoming place for everyone,” the broadcaster said in a statement.
    Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.
    — CNBC’s Sarah Whitten contributed to this article. More