Comment on U.S. homebuilding retreats, manufacturing still struggling

With summer movie season upon us, theaters are looking to draw crowds with a new interactive lobby attraction. A long line to get into the theater is fairly standard for a hot movie in its opening weekend. A long line just to engage with a film’s lobby display, however, is not standard at all.

The housing market saw a 30% increase in active inventory in April, but that’s still 35% below pre-pandemic levels. Want more stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the free, daily ResiClub newsletter.

In the past few days, you may have noticed something new inside Meta’s apps, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp: an artificially intelligent chatbot. Within those apps, you can chat with Meta AI and type in questions and requests like “What’s the weather this week in New York?” or “Write a poem about two dogs living in San Francisco.” The assistant will come up with responses immediately, such as “The corgi was short, with a butt so wide, the lab was tall, with a tongue that would glide.” You can also instruct Meta AI to produce pictures — like an illustration of a family watching fireworks. This is Meta’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot that upended the tech industry in 2022, and similar bots including Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Bing AI.

Builders are finally making a dent in the state’s housing shortfall, especially for apartments. But home prices and mortgage rates continue to outpace income gains, and affordability is worsening rather than improving. “The story with interest rates is that they are only exacerbating the problem,” said Steven Byers, chief economist with the Common Sense Institute in Denver.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — On a Monday morning last month, tech executives, engineers and sales representatives from Amazon, Google, TikTok and other companies endured a three-hour traffic jam as their cars crawled toward a mammoth conference at an event space in the desert, 50 miles outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The lure: billions of dollars in Saudi money as the kingdom seeks to build a tech industry to complement its oil dominance. To bypass the congestion, frustrated eventgoers drove onto the highway shoulder, kicking up plumes of desert sand as they sped past those following traffic rules.

A high school athletic director in Maryland has been accused of using artificial intelligence to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and antisemitic comments, authorities said last month. Authorities said the case appears to be among the first of its kind in the country and called for new laws to guard against the technology.