Thursday's economy & business stories
Trump vs NYTimes: This time over the Patriots
President Trump is calling out the NYT again, this time for a misleading tweet about the New England Patriots White House visit.
In one sentence: The NYT sports account tweeted pics of the Patriots visits from 2015 and 2017, only to have the Patriots themselves point out the Times was making an unfair comparison, as staff were positioned differently in the two different shots.

Bill O'Reilly to receive up to $25m exit payout from Fox News
After Bill O'Reilly's firing from Fox News yesterday, the former host stands to receive an exit payout of up to $25 million — the equivalent of one year of his salary — from the network, per the NYT.
O'Reilly signed a new deal with Fox News through the 2020 election earlier this year, but the network was already aware of his percolating sexual harassment scandal. The new contract allowed Fox News to cut ties with O'Reilly if new harassment allegations came to light and limited a potential exit payout to a year's worth of his salary.
CNN's Jake Tapper — A rising star
The May issue of GQ has a four-page spread on CNN's Jake Tapper as "The Hardest-Working Brow in the Business," by Taffy Brodesser-Akner:
[T]he Jake Tapper WTF Face [is] that unique look through which he transmits his seeming disbelief and outrage... There is the JTWTFF that is a mere frown ... a hood over his downward-turning, disappointed eyes... My favorite Jake Tapper WTF Face is the one where his eyebrows arch but also corrugate into small bowl-shaped caterpillars...
Tapper allows an incredulousness, and maybe even a smidge of disgust, to sneak on through. In those moments, when he augments the standard newsman persona to include his own come-off-it realness, he has a way of embodying all of us.

Timeline: How Fox responded to Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly
Fox News announced today that ratings giant Bill O'Reilly will no longer appear on its network, another major move for the top cable channel, which split ways with Roger Ailes in July.
Update: Bill Shine, who served as co-president since the Murdoch family ousted Ailes, resigned on May 1.
Below, a full timeline of how we got here.

Report: Fox holds emergency meetings on ousting O'Reilly
The Murdoch family has decided Bill O'Reilly has got to go, according to NYMag's Gabriel Sherman, who is probably the best-sourced reporter on Fox News.
- Next steps: Fox execs are meeting this morning to figure out an exit plan, and the parent company's board meets on Thursday.
- Sticking points: Cash — Roger Ailes got $40 million, and O'Reilly has a contract that pays $20 million a year — and whether O'Reilly gets to go back on air to say goodbye to his viewers.
- Potential successors: Eric Bolling, Dana Perino and Tucker Carlson, per Sherman.

How one startup is using artificial intelligence to search for new drugs
Atomwise, a San Francisco-based biotech startup, is trying to use artificial intelligence to cut the development time for new drugs — and it's launching a new project today to help researchers do that. It's inviting scientists to apply for quick screenings using its AI technology. The company will test millions of molecules for up to 100 labs, find out which ones are most likely to work on a disease or protein, and then ship 72 customized compounds to each lab for testing.
What they're trying to solve: Drug companies often talk about the time and expense it takes to develop and win approval for a new drug — the commonly cited statistics are $2.6 billion and 15 years. Atomwise says it's trying to cut that time by using AI to speed up the beginning of the process. If it works, the time from the idea stage to clinical trials will be "significantly shorter" and "the success of the clinical trials will be greater," said Dr. Han Lim, who's in charge of academic partnerships for the startup.

Fox considers future without O'Reilly as advertisers flee
A firestorm of reports from credible journalists surfaced Tuesday, all pointing to the same conclusion: The Murdoch support that has been keeping primetime anchor Bill O'Reilly at the network is waning, and reports could surface by the end of the week that the O'Reilly Factor star will likely not return to his primetime seat after his Italian vacation.
Why it matters: News reports and advertisers moved Fox before Fox moved O'Reilly.
The tea leaves: Axios' Mike Allen reports that corporate execs would love to bring in an outside, non-political big name from another network.

Spending on AI to reach $46 billion in 2020
Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence and cognitive systems will rise to $46 billion in 2020, up 768% from 2016, according to a new analysis by International Data Corporation.
Data: IDS Research; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios
Why it matters: These data show that artificial intelligence is not just a curiosity or a thought experiment, but technology that is spreading fast to businesses that average Americans interact with every day. IDC says business spending in this category in 2017 will be primarily on diagnosis and treatment systems; automated customer service; and fraud analysis and investigation. The financial services, manufacturing, retail, and healthcare industries are expected to most aggressively deploy AI over the next few years.

Tech is ready — but waiting — for net neutrality fight
The never-ending debate over net neutrality has long had pretty predictable fault lines. Internet providers like AT&T and Comcast say overly strict rules are bad for business, while tech companies like Google and Netflix argue rules are needed to keep an even playing field for web content.
As the internet industry has matured, the companies that used to be tiny start-ups at the mercy of the networks are now heavyweights. While that doesn't mean tech giants will stay on the sidelines — an influential trade group has already strongly defended the rules — startups are expected to help lead the charge against efforts to roll back existing rules.
Why it matters: Pushback from both big and small Silicon Valley players would complicate FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's expected efforts to dismantle the agency's 2015 net neutrality rules. Tech employee outrage could also add juice to activist opposition.

Retail workers are being displaced in droves
After a steep rise following the financial crisis, U.S. retail jobs have been plummeting since the start of the year.
Why this matters: The likely irreversible plunge in these relatively low-wage jobs — $18-an-hour employment for teens, adults, immigrants and senior citizens for generations — primarily affects the working class people whose shrinking opportunities have underpinned populist politics in the U.S. and abroad. And the jobs being created in their stead, in online warehouses for companies like Amazon, are too few to soak up those displaced.
Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios

Computers to be smarter than man by 2050, says AI expert
German computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber—who has contributed to various AI innovations like speech-recognition technology—predicts artificial intelligence will surpass that of humans by the year 2050. "[AI] will see little point in getting stuck to our bit of the biosphere," he tells the Guardian in an interview Tuesday. "They will want to move history to the next level and march out to where the resources are. In a couple of million years, they will have colonised the Milky Way."
What happens before that? Schmidhuber is building an electronic brain consisting of one billion neurons—or one one thousandth the number contained in the human cortex. He calls his project "true AI," one that can function much like a baby by "setting themselves little experiments in order to understand how the world works," according to the Guardian. "We aren't that many years away from an animal-like intelligence, like that of a crow or a capuchin monkey," he says.
Not everyone is convinced: One scientist told the Guardian that Schmidhuber is setting up AI to disappoint, much like the vaunted Segway, which was promoted as an invention as important as the PC, but ended up at best a niche product, and at worst a laughingstock.







