Comment on COVID-19 won’t impact climate much, but economic recovery could

Only a few flagship smartphones can currently be considered GenAI phones, but expect that to change quickly. Generative AI (general artificial intelligence) has been the trendiest term in software for two years. Now it’s about to make its way to the consumer hardware market, too. By the latter half of this year, it’s likely that we’ll begin to encounter phones being marketed as GenAI smartphones or simply GenAI phones.

Architecture, engineering, and construction firms are the new hot ticket for investors. Private equity is often viewed as an industry that favors a particular kind of financial engineering—one that hasn’t always been good for industries where it operates, such as journalism, healthcare, and music. What may not be as well known is that private equity investors have recently become extremely interested, and heavily invested, in the actual engineering industry itself.

Colorado employers added a meager 300 jobs in April, with the private sector losing 600 jobs and governments adding 900 jobs, according to a monthly update from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. March’s strong monthly gain, initially estimated at 5,300 jobs, was revised down to 2,800 jobs. The state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment remained at 3.7%, below the U.

The high office vacancy rate in downtown Denver inched slightly higher in the first three months of 2024, rising to about 32% — the highest point in a couple of decades and more evidence of a drawn-out recovery from a pandemic that upended work routines and sectors of the economy. But real estate experts and business advocates insist there’s more to the story about the state of downtown than the uptick from a total vacancy level of roughly 31% at the end of 2023. “I just think that statistics lag what’s truly happening on the streets,” said Sarajane Goodfellow, a first vice president in the Denver office of real estate firm CBRE. “From a day-to-day perspective and from a boots-on-the-ground perspective, it is feeling a lot better, more lively and active,” she added. Goodfellow, who represents landlords, said the number of tours she and her team are conducting of downtown office buildings has increased.

Gov. Jared Polis on Friday signed into law a measure that aims to provide relief to those living in the shadows of Colorado’s airports, which have been blamed for exposing people beneath flight paths to noise pollution and lead contamination. But as the governor was putting pen to paper, an airplane’s engine buzzed overhead — an irony that prompted laughter in the crowd attending the bill signing at Wildflower Park in Superior.

Nvidia’s Blackwell” chips will bring the company even greater control of the AI ecosystem, D-Wave Quantum finally saw its shares rise on earnings rather than the usual sell-off, cyber-security is going to continue to struggle with buyer fatigue, and Apple is going to continue to struggle with poor iPhone sales. This story originally appeared in The Technology Letter and is republished here with permission.