It is extraordinary enough to see the world's top central banker make an unscheduled video statement on social media. My first thought upon seeing the post from the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell was: Is this an AI deepfake? That sense did not go away as I listened to what were indeed the real words of the world's most important financial official. The background here is a long-running spat between President Trump and the man responsible for setting interest rates in the US and indirectly much of the rest of the world. In theory, this has officially been about the cost of a renovation project at the Federal Reserve, the US equivalent of the Bank of England.

U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks during a conference following a two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, at the U.S. Federal Reserve in Washington on Wednesday. Washington - The Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Wednesday in another divided vote, but signaled it will likely pause further reductions in borrowing costs as the U.S. central bank looks for clearer signals about the direction of the job market and inflation that remains somewhat elevated. New projections issued after the Fed's two-day meeting showed the median policymaker sees just one quarter-percentage-point cut in 2026, the same outlook as in September, with inflation expected to slow to around 2.4% by the end of next year even as economic growth accelerates to an above-trend 2.3% and the unemployment rate remains at a moderate 4.4%. In considering the extent and timing of additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee said in language that in the past has been used to signal a pause in policy actions -- an outlook at odds with market expectations, which remained locked into two rate cuts next year even after the Fed issued its statement. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

America's top banker sounds warning on US stock market fall There is a higher risk of a serious fall in US stocks than is currently being reflected in the market, the head of JP Morgan has told the BBC. Jamie Dimon, who leads America's largest bank, said he was far more worried than others about a serious market correction, which he said could come in the next six months to two years. In a rare and wide-ranging interview, the bank boss also said that the US had become a less reliable partner on the world stage. He cautioned he was still a little worried about inflation in the US, but insisted he thought the Federal Reserve would remain independent, despite repeated attacks by the Trump administration on its chair Jerome Powell. Jamie Dimon was in Bournemouth, where he was announcing an investment of about £350m in JP Morgan's campus there, as well as a £3.5m philanthropic investment in local non-profits.

The Bank of England says'equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence'. The Bank of England says'equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence'. Possibility of'sharp market correction has increased', says Bank's financial policy committee The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a "sudden correction" in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies. Policymakers said there were also threats of a "sharp repricing of US dollar assets" if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump's continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence.

The government has shut down - what's next? Will a government shutdown hurt the economy? From Wall Street trading floors to the United States Federal Reserve to economists sipping coffee in their home offices, the first Friday morning of the month typically brings a quiet hush around 8:30am Eastern time in the US [12:30 GMT] as everyone awaits the Labor Department's crucial monthly jobs report. But with the government shut down, no information was released on Friday about hiring in September. Hiring has ground nearly to a halt, threatening to drag down the broader economy. Yet at the same time, consumers -- particularly higher-income earners -- are still spending, and some businesses are ramping up investments in data centres developing artificial intelligence models.

We describe a vulnerability in language models (LMs) trained with user feedback, whereby a single user can persistently alter LM knowledge and behavior given only the ability to provide prompts and upvote / downvote feedback on LM outputs. To implement the attack, the attacker prompts the LM to stochastically output either a "poisoned" or benign response, then upvotes the poisoned response or downvotes the benign one. When feedback signals are used in a subsequent preference tuning behavior, LMs exhibit increased probability of producing poisoned responses even in contexts without malicious prompts. We show that this attack can be used to (1) insert factual knowledge the model did not previously possess, (2) modify code generation patterns in ways that introduce exploitable security flaws, and (3) inject fake financial news. Our finding both identifies a new qualitative feature of language model preference tuning (showing that it even highly restricted forms of preference data can be used to exert fine-grained control over behavior), and a new attack mechanism for LMs trained with user feedback (extending work on pretraining-time data poisoning and deployment-time prompt injection).

Microsoft became the latest major tech company to announce massive layoffs on Wednesday. Roughly 5% of the company's workforce--or 10,000 jobs--will be slashed, CEO Satya Nadella announced in note to employees published online. In explaining the decision, Nadella pointed to global economic strife, changes in post-pandemic habits, and perhaps most notably, the impact of rapid developments in artificial intelligence. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, a company whose chatbot ChatGPT has both excited and frightened the world in the last couple months because of its ability to respond to written prompts with clarity and complexity. "The next major wave of computing is being born with advances in AI, as we're turning the world's most advanced models into a new computing platform," Nadella wrote.

Call it the Cyber-ano de Bergerac Defense. The eerie new capabilities of artificial intelligence are about to show up inside a courtroom -- in the form of an AI chatbot lawyer that will soon argue a case in traffic court. That's according to Joshua Browder, the founder of a consumer-empowerment startup who conceived of the scheme. Sometime next month, Browder is planning to send a real defendant into a real court armed with a recording device and a set of earbuds. Browder's company will feed audio of the proceedings into an AI that will in turn spit out legal arguments; the defendant, he says, has agreed to repeat verbatim the outputs of the chatbot to an unwitting judge.

Calling the top of the current wave of inflation has been a painful exercise for economists and central bankers, who have been proven wrong time and again during the past year. But data on Wednesday, which showed that some measures of inflation had cooled in the world's two largest economies, was likely to rekindle a debate about whether the worst might be over after a year of torrid price growth. United States consumer prices did not rise in July compared with June due to a sharp drop in the cost of petrol, delivering much-needed relief to American consumers on edge after steady prices climbs during the past two years. And China's factory-gate inflation slowed to a 17-month low on an annual basis while consumer prices rose less than expected. After wrongly predicting last year that high inflation would be transitory, most central bankers, including the US Federal Reserve, have stopped trying to put an exact date on when they expect current price growth to peak.

Although artificial intelligence has been the subject of academic research since the 1950s and has been used commercially in some industries for decades, it is still in its infancy across much of the broader economy. The rapid adoption of this technology, along with the unique privacy, security and liability issues associated with it, has created opportunities for lawyers to help their clients capture its economic value while ensuring its use is ethical and legal. However, before advising clients on AI issues, lawyers should have some basic technical knowledge to answer questions about legal compliance. Machine learning algorithms are incredibly complex, learning billions of rules from datasets and applying those rules to arrive at an output recommendation. Even the most precise and well-designed AI systems are probabilistic in nature, guaranteeing that the system will, at some point, produce an incorrect result.