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Sam Altman and OpenAI are making their intentions explicit. The company has published what amounts to a manifesto, comparing the rise of artificial intelligence to the arrival of electricity in the nineteen twenties. Altman is calling this a third phase for OpenAI, and notably struck a cautious note, saying that entirely automating everything is not the future the company wants. Whether that restraint holds as the technology matures is a question worth watching.
Closer to home, a new cube-shaped games console is aiming to pull children off the sofa and get them moving. Priced at two hundred sixty nine pounds in the UK and Ireland, it launches on the twenty second of June. The pitch is familiar — active play through gaming — but the price point will determine whether parents see it as a worthwhile investment or just another box under the television.
And a sobering data point from the housing market that has real implications for where people can afford to live and work. A record two hundred forty two American cities now have starter home prices averaging one million dollars. That is not a luxury market figure anymore — that is the entry point, and it raises serious questions about economic mobility in an increasingly unaffordable landscape.
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