TURKEY AND SYRIA

Two earthquakes, nine hours apart, and a death toll past 33,000 and climbing

Buildings that had passed inspection folded onto the people asleep inside them. The cold did the rest.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey at 4:17 on the morning of February 6, centred near Gaziantep, close to the Syrian border. Nine hours later a second, magnitude 7.5, hit about 100 kilometres to the north. Between them they flattened parts of eleven Turkish provinces and of rebel-held and government-held Syria alike. By Sunday night the confirmed dead numbered more than 29,000 in Turkey and more than 4,500 in Syria, and the numbers were still rising by thousands a day. The United Nations said the final toll could double.

Temperatures fell below freezing every night of the week. Rescue teams from more than 70 countries, India's National Disaster Response Force among the first to arrive, pulled survivors from the rubble on the fifth and sixth days, each one televised, each one rarer. In Antakya, the ancient Antioch, whole districts were gone. In Kahramanmaraş, near the epicentre, residents said no help came for two days. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who faces an election in May, acknowledged "shortcomings" in the first response and then declared that it was "not possible to be prepared for a disaster this big."

Engineers were less sure. Turkey has had a modern seismic building code since 1999, after the İzmit earthquake killed 17,000, and revised it in 2018. It has also, repeatedly, granted "construction amnesties" that legalised buildings put up without meeting it, most recently a 2018 amnesty that covered several million structures and raised billions of lira for the treasury. Photographs of new apartment blocks that collapsed while older ones next door stood are now evidence. Prosecutors issued more than a hundred arrest warrants for builders and contractors by the weekend; one was detained at Istanbul airport trying to leave the country.

In north-west Syria, where four million people displaced by the civil war already lived in tents and unfinished buildings, aid moved through a single crossing from Turkey, and it took until Thursday for the first UN convoy to use it. The government in Damascus asked that all aid be routed through it. Most donors declined.

TECHNOLOGY

Microsoft puts a chatbot in Bing; Google answers with Bard, and a wrong answer costs it $100 billion

The search war that everyone predicted in December arrived in one week, and the incumbent stumbled on the first step.

Satya Nadella stood in front of reporters in Redmond on February 7 and said the race starts today. Microsoft showed a version of Bing and its Edge browser with an OpenAI model built in, one it said was more powerful than ChatGPT and tuned for search, answering questions in paragraphs with footnotes to the web pages it drew on. A million people joined the waiting list in 48 hours. Nadella said every percentage point of search share was worth $2 billion in advertising revenue, which is the arithmetic of a company with 3 percent of the market and nothing to lose.

Google had tried to get ahead of it. On February 6 Sundar Pichai announced Bard, an "experimental conversational AI service" built on the company's LaMDA model, opened to trusted testers with a public release "in the coming weeks." Its promotional material included a sample answer about the James Webb Space Telescope that said the telescope had taken the first pictures of a planet outside the solar system. It had not; that was done in 2004 by a telescope in Chile. Astronomers noticed. On February 8, the day of a Google event in Paris that was itself thin on demonstrations, Alphabet's shares fell 7.7 percent, roughly $100 billion of market value.

The gap between the two events was the story. Microsoft has a product people can join a queue for and a partner whose model is already in millions of hands. Google has the larger model, the larger research group and, as of this week, a public example of the failure mode everyone worried about, in its own advertisement. Reporters who have used the new Bing say it too makes things up. But it was not the one that lost $100 billion for doing so.

INDIA

Adani pulls its share sale; the group has lost more than $100 billion in ten days

Adani Enterprises withdrew its 20,000 crore rupee follow-on offering on the night of February 1, hours after declaring it fully subscribed, saying it would not be "morally correct" to proceed while its shares were falling. They had dropped 28 percent that day. By the end of the following week the group's listed companies had lost more than $110 billion, more than half their value before the Hindenburg report, and Gautam Adani had fallen out of the world's top twenty richest people. The Reserve Bank of India said the banking system remained "resilient and stable"; the Securities and Exchange Board said it was examining the matter; the Supreme Court asked the regulator for a report. Opposition parties disrupted parliament for days demanding a joint committee. The Union Budget, presented on the same day the offering was pulled, raised capital spending by a third to 10 lakh crore rupees; it was the second story in every paper.

CHINA AND THE US

A balloon, then three more objects, shot down over North America

A high-altitude Chinese balloon carrying what the Pentagon called a surveillance payload drifted across Montana on February 1 and the rest of the country over the following days before an F-22 shot it down off South Carolina on February 4. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a visit to Beijing that would have been the first by a US secretary of state in five years. Beijing said it was a weather balloon blown off course and called the shoot-down an overreaction. Fighters then downed three further "objects" on February 10, 11 and 12, over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron; the White House said it did not yet know what they were.

ECONOMY

The Fed slows to a quarter point; the US adds 517,000 jobs

The Federal Reserve raised rates by 25 basis points on February 1, to a range of 4.50 to 4.75 percent, and Jerome Powell said "the disinflationary process has started." Markets took it as the beginning of the end. Two days later the Labor Department said employers had added 517,000 jobs in January, nearly three times the forecast, and that unemployment had fallen to 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1969. Markets took that back. The European Central Bank and the Bank of England each raised by half a point on February 2.

COURTS

Musk not liable over "funding secured" tweets

A San Francisco jury found on February 3 that Elon Musk had not defrauded Tesla shareholders with his August 2018 tweets saying he had "funding secured" to take the company private at $420 a share. Investors had sought billions in damages; the Securities and Exchange Commission had already fined him and the company $20 million each in 2018. Musk said the verdict showed "the wisdom of the people."

IN BRIEF

Layoffs continue; Zelensky in London; Musharraf dies; Beyoncé's record

Disney said it would cut 7,000 jobs; Dell 6,650; Zoom 1,300; PayPal 2,000. Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Parliament in London on February 8, asked for fighter jets, and went on to Paris and Brussels. Pervez Musharraf, who took power in Pakistan in a coup in 1999 and ruled for nine years, died in Dubai on February 5 at 79. Beyoncé won her 32nd Grammy on February 5, more than anyone in the history of the awards, and lost album of the year to Harry Styles. President Biden delivered the State of the Union on February 7 and was heckled. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles 38 to 35 in the Super Bowl on Sunday night.

The Column

The demo that cost a hundred billion dollars

Every consultant knows the rule. Google broke it in a press release.

By Daniel Reeve

I have given more demonstrations than I can count. Products, prototypes, a screen recorded at midnight to prove a workflow could be done. Somewhere in the first few years I learned the only rule that matters, from a client who stopped me mid-sentence: never show me anything you cannot ship on Monday. It sounds obvious. It is broken constantly, because a demo is where the pressure is highest to look further ahead than you are, and the person watching cannot tell the difference between the part that works and the part that is a picture of working.

On Monday Google published a picture of working. An animated example of its new chatbot, Bard, answering a question about the James Webb telescope, and one of the three answers was wrong. Not subtly. It credited the telescope with the first photograph of a planet outside our solar system, which was taken in 2004 by a different telescope on a different continent. An astronomer pointed it out. By Wednesday the company had lost about a hundred billion dollars in market value, and although the loss had other causes, a Paris event with no product to show being one of them, the telescope is what people will remember.

There are two lessons here and only one of them is the obvious one.

The obvious one is about the technology. These systems produce fluent, confident, well-formatted prose whether or not the underlying claim is true. That is not a bug in Bard specifically. The new Bing does it. ChatGPT does it. Anyone who has spent an evening with one of them has caught it. What Google demonstrated, in its own promotional material, is that the people building the thing cannot reliably catch it either, or did not check. That is the finding. If the vendor's own launch copy is not verified, the enterprise buyer should assume nothing downstream is.

The less obvious lesson is about demos, and it applies to everyone in my line of work. Google did not need to put a factual claim in that animation. It could have shown the chatbot planning a trip, or explaining a poem, or any of a thousand things where "wrong" is a matter of taste. It chose a checkable fact because checkable facts look impressive, and it did not check. That is exactly the mistake I watch junior consultants make: reaching for the sharpest example in the room to win the moment, without asking whether the example survives contact with someone who knows more.

The discipline is boring and it is this: before you show anything, ask who in the audience is the expert, and assume they are. Show the thing that expert would nod at. If you cannot, show less. In my world that means the demo runs on the client's own data, not a clean sample, because their operations manager will spot the fake account in the first ten seconds and stop listening. Google's audience was the internet, and the internet contains astronomers.

I want to be fair to them about the underlying position. Google has the research, the model, the distribution and sixty billion dollars of annual profit to spend. Microsoft has a partner, a queue and a search engine that three people in a hundred use. It is entirely possible that in two years Google is ahead. But this week it demonstrated something Microsoft has not yet had to: what it looks like when the confident machine is wrong in public with your name on it. Every executive who has to decide whether to let one of these things talk to customers has now seen that clip.

The demo rule again, for the record: never show what you cannot ship on Monday, and never claim what you have not checked. Google could ship Bard on Monday. It could not have checked. That is the more expensive failure of the two.

The Ledger

Bing with OpenAI (waitlist, a million in 48 hours) and Bard (testers only) launched within a day of each other. Both fabricate; only one has been punished for it. The enterprise question, "who checks the answer," is now the whole game.

Rates

Fed 4.50 to 4.75 percent, quarter-point pace; then a 517,000 jobs print. Markets moved from "cuts by year end" to "higher for longer" in 48 hours. ECB and BoE each up half a point.

Real estate

Turkey's collapse is a building-code story as much as a seismic one: 1999 code, 2018 revision, and repeated amnesties that legalised what did not comply. Watch the prosecutions. US 30-year mortgage 6.12 percent (Freddie Mac, February 9).

India tech

Adani's follow-on offer withdrawn; group down more than $110 billion. Budget: capex up a third, the new income-tax regime made the default. Air India's aircraft order is expected imminently.

What we called wrong

Last issue's Ledger said the debt-ceiling clock "runs to about June." Still true, but the jobs report suggests the economy will not force anyone's hand before then. We were early to talk about recession risk; the data are not.

The Back Page

Aya

She was born under the rubble of a five-storey building in Jindires, in north-west Syria, sometime in the hours after the first earthquake, still attached by the cord to her mother, who did not survive, nor did her father or her four siblings. A relative heard her crying on the afternoon of February 6 and dug her out. Nurses at the hospital in Afrin named her Aya, which means "sign" or "miracle." Her great-uncle has said he will raise her. Thousands of people offered to adopt her within a day of the video appearing. She was, on Sunday, doing well.