#46 - The IMF Fears AI Money, While Walmart's Robots Fight Cardboard Boxes

In Bangkok, the head of the IMF puts AI on her list of big dangers, right next to war, expensive oil and record debt. In America, the world's biggest shop has a much smaller AI problem: its new robots can't handle its old cardboard boxes.

Today is one question: which one is the real AI story – the big-money fear, or the box that doesn't fit? Recorded in Salzburg.

In this episode:

🌑 The IMF puts AI next to war, oil and debt (01:50) — the IMF and the World Bank hold their annual meetings in Bangkok from 12 to 18 October. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva named three forces shaping the world economy: AI, energy prices that stay high (oil is around $100 a barrel) and record public debt. AI hardware and related tech are now "more than a tenth of global goods trade", and her warning is about the hyperscalers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta – borrowing heavily to build AI data centres: if the money doesn't come back, it becomes a problem for the whole world economy.

🌑 Walmart's robots meet the real warehouse (05:56) — Walmart, the world's largest retailer with more than 140,000 warehouse workers, is automating its warehouses with a robotics company it partly owns. The problem is very physical: the robots can't handle old, soft, misshapen cardboard boxes, so the boxes need extra tape and new packaging. And at peak, the monthly power bill of an automated grocery warehouse can go above $800,000, against about $250,000 with mostly manual work. Most of these warehouses were built in the 1980s and '90s. AI meets the real world one box at a time.

🌑 Nicolas Cage says no to Amazon's AI waiver (11:25) — at New York Comic Con, Nicolas Cage said he refused to sign an AI waiver for the series "Spider-Noir", made by Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios – a clause that lets a studio use AI to recreate or change a performer. As reported by the LA Times: "I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it's like, connect those dots!" (His "$50 billion invested in OpenAI" is his number from the stage and can't be confirmed.) Amazon did not comment.

🌑 Switzerland: AI job ads up 32 percent, but few for beginners (15:26) — the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences (HSLU) counted nearly 5,000 AI job ads in Switzerland in one year, up 32 percent, with most of the growth from small and mid-sized companies. Zurich alone has 45 percent of them. The catch: only 5 percent are real junior roles. Where will the next generation learn the job?

🌑 Halo and GTA in a browser tab: AI rebuilds old games (17:55) — Kotaku reports that in the past two weeks, hundreds of AI-made browser versions of classic games appeared online – Halo, GTA: Vice City, The Simpsons: Hit and Run – rebuilt by decompiling the old code with AI's help. Take-Two and Microsoft could send legal letters, but it becomes whack-a-mole. If your company's value sits in old software, copying it just got a lot easier.

🧵 The thread (21:10) — billions in Bangkok, cardboard boxes on the warehouse floor, an actor who won't sign, and games rebuilt in a weekend. AI is everywhere – and it gets stuck on very ordinary things.

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AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.