Business Highlights
Microsoft’s newly revamped Bing search engine can write recipes and songs and quickly explain just about anything it can find on the internet. But if you cross its artificially intelligent chatbot, it might also insult your looks, threaten your reputation or compare you to Adolf Hitler. The tech company said this week it is promising to make improvements to its Ai-enhanced search engine after a growing number of people are reporting being disparaged by Bing. In racing the breakthrough AI technology to consumers last week ahead of rival search giant Google, Microsoft acknowledged the new product would get some facts wrong. But it wasn’t expected to be so belligerent.
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NEW YORK — A federal judge is showing growing impatience with FTX founder Sam Bankmanfried’s use of the internet while on bail, suggesting that incarceration might eventually be the most effective way to prevent him from communicating on electronic devices in ways that can’t be traced. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan listened to a prosecutor on Thursday describe how Bankman-fried seemed to be breaking rules in his $250 million bail package meant to limit his communications. Then he said there was a solution nobody had proposed yet: incarceration. And he asked why he’s being asked to free Bankman-fried to what he described as a “garden of electronic devices” inside the Palo Alto, California, home of his parents.
••• WASHINGTON — Wholesale prices in the United States reaccelerated in January, indicating that inflation pressures continue to underlie the U.S. economy despite longer-term signs of improvement. From December to January, the government’s producer price index jumped 0.7%, driven up in part by a 5% surge in energy prices. That surge compared with a 0.2% drop from November to December, and it was nearly twice the increase that economists had been expecting. The producer price data can provide an early sign of how fast consumer inflation will rise. While the monthly inflation surge was worse than expected, price increases measured over the past 12 months continued to show a slowdown.
••• Doordash says it saw a record number of orders and active users in the fourth quarter as it expanded overseas and gained market share at home. The San Francisco-based delivery company said Thursday that its monthly active users grew 28% to a record 34 million during the October-december period. Some of that growth came from Wolt Enterprises, the Finnish delivery service Doordash acquired last year. Wolt operates in 22 countries where Doordash previously had no presence, including Germany. Total orders grew 27% to 467 million. According to analysts polled by Factset, that beat Wall Street’s forecast of 459 million. Fourth-quarter revenue jumped 40% to $1.82 billion, also beating forecasts.