House to vote on debt ceiling bill / Amazon walk-out / AI risk letter

Plus: British conservationists bring extinct flower back to life.

Inside Daily Brief For May 31, 2023

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1 The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on the bipartisan debt ceiling bill on Wednesday night. Right-wing representatives have criticized the bill because it lacks the dramatic cuts to social spending that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had pushed for. More: Republicans have a slight majority in the House but several GOP lawmakers said they will vote against the bill. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said the GOP had pledged to secure at least 150 votes but 218 votes are needed to pass the bill. Progressive Democrats have also spoken out against the bill, which includes stricter work requirements for food stamps recipients ― a policy that has been long-opposed by the left wing of the Democratic Party. Zoom Out: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the changes in work requirements would actually increase federal spending on the SNAP program by an estimated $2B. The changes would tighten work requirements for some adult food stamp recipients while loosening them for veterans and some other groups, making an estimated ~78,000 additional Americans eligible for the program.

2 What the numbers say: Shares of U.S. Intel gained nearly 5% on Wednesday morning after CFO David Zinsner said the semiconductor manufacturer would hit the upper end of its $11.5B-$12.5B Q2 revenue outlook. Relevance: Intel posted its biggest-ever quarterly loss in Q1 after investing heavily to boost its manufacturing capacity to better cater to the needs of the nascent AI sector. Despite that shortfall, Intel stock is up 18.28% YTD. The future: Zinsner said that Intel's semiconductor foundry services are well-suited to provide the wafers needed for AI products.

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3 Hundreds of leading AI experts published an open letter calling for regulations to minimize the existential risks that AI may pose to humanity. The letter, which was published on the Center for AI Safety's website, says that regulating AI should be seen as a "global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." More: The letter was signed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently testified before Congress about the risks posed by AI. OpenAI created ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM)-based AI system that reached over 100 million users within six months of its public release. The letter was also signed by Geoffrey Hinton, a senior AI researcher who recently left Google so that he could speak out more openly about the risks posed by AI. Hinton recently told NPR that AI programs are only a few years away from achieving levels of sophistication that he thought would take several decades. Zoom Out: In March, AI experts published a similar letter calling for a six-month moratorium on training AI systems that are more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4 LLM. That letter said AI "could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources."

4 GOOD NEWS: The York groundsel flower, which went extinct in 1991, bloomed once again in what was Britain's first known de-extinction event. The yellow flower, which only grows in the city of York, in northeast England, was brought back to life by conservationists. More: The flower had evolved into a unique species after non-native Oxford ragworts hybridized with native groundsel flowers. It was the first new species to have evolved in Britain in 50 years, growing primarily on railway sidings and abandoned lots. Excessive use of weedkiller led to the destruction of the York groundsel in the wild, but conservationists kept three plants in pots at the University of York. The plants died but they left seeds that were preserved at the Millenium Seed Bank. Conservationists were able to grow 98 of the 100 seeds they planted. The plants were sown into plots across York in February, and the first wild York groundsels began to flower in the wild last week for the first time in 32 years.

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5 Amazon employees are set to stage a workplace walk-out to protest against the company's return-to-office mandate. An estimated 1,900 workers are expected to walk off the job at 3 p.m. EST on Wednesday, including ~900 who plan to gather outside of Amazon's Seattle headquarters. More: On May 1, Amazon ordered corporate employees to return to the office for at least three days per week. The company had previously told employees that it would leave decisions about remote working arrangements to individual managers. Many employees criticized the return-to-office mandate in a petition sent to CEO Andy Jassy and other senior executives. Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a prominent worker's group that has called out the tech giant for its stance on climate change, is partially organizing the walk-out. Zoom Out: Amazon has ~65,000 corporate and technology employees in and around Seattle, and ~350,000 globally.

6 The Indian science curriculum will no longer include lessons on evolution, the periodic table of elements, or sources of energy production. The widely-criticized changes will affect ~134 million Indian students aged between 11 and 18 starting next year. More: Chapters on evolution, different sources of energy, and the sustainable management of natural resources were removed from textbooks. Texts on democracy, diversity, political parties, and challenges to democracy were also scrapped. Amitabh Joshi, an Indian evolutionary biologist, noted that the curriculum reform comes after some religious groups took "anti-evolution stances."  More than 4,500 scientists and teachers signed an appeal calling for the reinstatement of content on evolution.

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💡 ART OF THE DAY "The cows begin to dance" by Wolfgang Moses Miles. Date unknown.

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Daniel Smith Writer Dr. Daniel Smith is an Inside writer with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. Follow him on Twitter @DJS12321 or email him at Daniel@inside.com. This newsletter was edited by Eduardo Garcia

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