infrastructure spending

The EU and US found some stop-gap funding for weapons for Ukraine, China is scrapping a number of infrastructure projects in indebted regions, and US inflation ticked up unexpectedly. Plus, tension between Beijing and Washington over access to technology has prompted many companies to open factories in south-east Asia. 

Mentioned in this podcast:

EU and US find stop-gap funding for Ukraine weapons

China’s treatment of local debt ‘ulcer’ threatens growth target

US inflation rises to 3.2% in February

Malaysia: the surprise winner from US-China chip wars

The FT News Briefing is produced by Fiona Symon, Sonja Hutson, Kasia Broussalian and Marc Filippino. Additional help by Sam Giovinco, Breen Turner, Peter Barber, Michael Lello, David da Silva and Gavin Kallmann. Our engineer is Monica Lopez. Topher Forhecz is the FT’s executive producer. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. The show’s theme song is by Metaphor Music.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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On today's podcast:

1) Biden, McCarthy Vow More Debt-Limit Talks

2) George Santos Faces Criminal Charges

3) Trump Liable for Sex Abuse 

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Our 113th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

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Stories this week:

• Applications & Business
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  • Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers 
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  • Alphabet Layoffs Hit Trash-Sorting Robots 
  • Spectrum uses generative AI to create TV commercials
  • Spotify’s new AI-powered DJ will build you a custom playlist and talk over the top of it
  • Amazon’s Cloud Partners With Startup Hugging Face as AI Deals Heat Up
• Research & Advancements
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  • Human-Timescale Adaptation in an Open-Ended Task Space
  • RT-1: Robotics Transformer
  • Meta heats up Big Tech's AI arms race with new language model
  • MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can enable a machine learning model to quantify how confident it is in its predictions
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• Policy & Societal Impacts
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