LA Schools Shut, Google Debuts Bard, and All About Ramadan

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LA School Strikes

More than 30,000 Los Angeles school employees and teachers began a three-day strike yesterday, forcing nearly half a million students to stay home in the nation’s second-largest school district.

At the center of the negotiations between Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union and the Los Angeles Unified School District is pay. Union officials seek a 30% raise and a $2 per hour wage increase. Other union demands include more full-time work, equal access to healthcare, and increased staffing levels. The district has offered a 23% pay increase over a five-year period with a 3% cash bonus, a $20 per hour minimum wage, and full healthcare benefits for those working at least four hours per day. The average salary of support staff workers is $25K a year, and most work part-time.

Roughly 60% of the students in the school district are considered economically disadvantaged. During the strike, the district opened 24 grab-and-go food sites and student supervision at many schools. The district was last affected by a six-day strike in 2019.

Yellen Reassures Banks

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed confidence in the US financial system in a speech yesterday, saying regulators are ready to further support troubled banks if the need arises. The speech came amid the worst banking crisis since 2008, with failures at several midsized banks and stock volatility across the industry.

Elevated interest rates have placed pressure on some banks with investments in devalued long-term bonds, forcing them to sell those bonds at a loss to shore up cash for customer withdrawals. After Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed earlier this month, regulators set up an emergency program where banks facing similar cash crunches could borrow to keep money available for customers without needing to sell holdings at a loss (see 101). 

The Federal Open Markets Committee is expected to raise the federal funds rate another quarter percentage point as its two-day meeting concludes today, though analysts observed it will need to reassure investors concerned over banking strains. 

Google Rolls Out Bard

Google yesterday opened limited public access in the US and the UK to its artificial intelligence chatbot Bard, a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT, whose underlying technology also powers a new version of Microsoft's search engine Bing. The rollout is Google's first public foray into a recent rush by tech companies to leverage generative AI—software that creates new content from input prompts (see 101).  

Unlike Microsoft, Google has started Bard as a standalone application rather than integrating it into its search engine. The company says it wants users to think of Bard as complementary to Google Search. Google, in a blog post, said it will expand access to Bard to more countries and languages over time as its underlying technology improves. Like ChatGPT and its newer model GPT-4, Bard uses reinforcement learning from human feedback. 

Separately, Microsoft yesterday added AI-generated visuals, powered by OpenAI image generator DALL-E, to its search engine. 

Join the waitlist to test out Bard here.

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