Walmart is all about rom-commerce

The world's largest retailer is banking on a holiday season staple to boost sales: the cheesy holiday rom-com.

Driving the news: Walmart has launched a 23-part shoppable rom-com TV series called Add to Heart (get it, like ‘add to cart’) as part of its push to reach younger consumers. The format allows viewers to buy the clothes, decor, and furniture that is seen on the show.

Low math scores are an unsolved problem

If you’re like us, when you studied math in school, you were constantly thinking ‘wow, this is hard.’ Unfortunately, for kids today, it seems that learning math has gotten even harder.  

Driving the news: Canadian math scores continued a long fall from grace, per the latest results from the OECD’s standardized math test. Between 2003 and 2022, overall scores declined by 35 points, with only 12% of students categorized as “high math achievers.”

Crypto optimism is blooming

As actual winter sets in, “crypto winter” seems like it could be coming to an end.

What happened: A surge has put Bitcoin prices over $56,500, as of the end of the day on Monday. Prices for the cryptocurrency are now up 152% so far this year, returning to price levels seen just before rising inflation led to a sell-off and subsequent crash in April 2022.

Food industry preps for lower appetites

Like a gym bro about to tackle leg day, food companies are all in on protein. 

Driving the news: As weight-loss drugs like Ozempic become more popular, some of the world’s biggest food companies are beginning to steer into the skid with products that can accompany the drugs or, in some cases, replace them, per The Wall Street Journal.

Hitting the gas on methane rules

Yesterday, Canada joined the U.S. in creating strict methane rules to meet climate goals.

What happened: The federal government is planning to roll out new regulations that target methane emissions in the oil and gas industry, with Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault saying the controlled release or burning of methane will be almost entirely barred by 2030. 

KISS avatars herald weird new digital age for music industry

If your favourite artist is getting too old to tour, here’s some good news — soon, they could start sending a digital proxy to perform for them. 

What happened: For the finale of its farewell tour in New York, rock band KISS closed out the show with a performance by 3-D digital avatars of themselves.

Carbon removal now critical to hitting climate goals, scientists tell COP28

Most of the world’s countries agreed on a significant new renewable energy push at the UN’s COP28 climate summit over the weekend, but scientists warned that overshooting the 1.5°C threshold — beyond which climate disasters will become more frequent and intense — is now almost “inevitable.”

Jeremie Harris on what’s next for OpenAI

On this week’s episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, we sat down with Jeremie Harris to talk about what happened amid the OpenAI executive shake-up, and what’s next for the industry.

What to do this weekend

Our picks for what to eat, read, watch, and listen to this weekend.

Foreign actors drive the political divide

Foreign bad actors have been studying our culture and have come to the very correct conclusion that nothing divides people more than a spicy Instagram post. 

What happened: Meta has taken down a network of 4,800 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts that were designed to stoke division in the U.S. by spreading political content. 

ChatGPT made a law in Brazil

What if laws were no longer created by our imperfect human minds… and instead, dictated by, also imperfect, but oh-so-efficient, artificial intelligence? 

What happened: A councilman for the Brazillian city of Porto Alegre revealed that a law passed earlier this year, which he proposed, was secretly written entirely by ChatGPT.

Explain It Like I'm Five: Digital advertising and the Online News Act

What is the Online News Act?

A law coming into effect in a few weeks that would see certain tech companies pay Canadian publishers in exchange for having news on their platforms. It is based on Australia’s News Bargaining Code, which mandates that tech platforms enter a negotiation process with outlets to determine that number.

How do the tech companies feel about it?

Meta pulled news from its services so it didn’t have to be bound by the Act’s terms. Google was prepared to do the same, but reached a deal with the government this week.

Why farmers might make it easier to fix your fridge

A big step forward in a legal battle between farmers and the leading equipment manufacturer in North America could also advance right-to-repair rules for everyone.
 
Driving the news: A U.S. judge rejected John Deere’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit from farmers claiming the company is actively restricting services for maintenance and repair.

ChatGPT is a bit of a blabbermouth

Getting math problems wrong isn’t the only way ChatGPT is becoming less smart — apparently, it is pretty easy to trick into sharing its secrets (including, potentially, yours).

What happened: Researchers from Google’s DeepMind and five universities discovered an “attack” prompt for ChatGPT that got the platform to share parts of its training data, revealing personal information of random people and copyrighted material.

Dissecting the digital dollar debate

As 2024 nears, flying cars and teleporters are no closer to becoming a reality, but countries are hard at work devising digital currencies. That’s just as cool as those other things… right? 

What happened: South Korea is launching a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot next year, selecting 100,000 adventurous citizens to try spending with digital tokens

McDonald’s moneymaker gets a makeover

With consumers starting to lean into burger options that are less… let’s say, mushy, McDonald’s is revamping its classic road trip staple. 

Driving the news: After seven years of testing, McDonald’s is making over 50 changes to its signature hamburgers, including the infamous Big Mac, as the world’s biggest fast-food chain tries to keep pace in the booming burger business, per The Wall Street Journal. 

Dropping your living standards

The Canadian economy has avoided a technical recession after economists updated the numbers that triggered alarm bells earlier this year. That’s #EconomistMath. 

What happened: Gross domestic product (GDP) data shows the economy shrank by 1.1% last quarter from the previous year, falling above the 0.1% rise expected by economists and the Bank of Canada’s forecast of 0.8%, a steep drop from growth seen earlier this year.

Digital tax spat

Move over, dairy tariff quotas… there’s a new Canada-U.S. trade disagreement in town. 

What happened: The feds introduced legislation that would introduce the Digital Services Tax (DST), which would levy a 3% tax on tech companies with annual revenues of over ~$1.1 billion and Canadian digital services revenues of $20 million (i.e. Amazon, Google).

A year of ChatGPT

Today marks the one-year anniversary of an event that changed the world forever: The UN bestowing the baguette with protected heritage status… just kidding. 

Driving the news: It’s (somehow only) been one year since OpenAI unlatched Pandora’s Box of generative AI and publicly released ChatGPT. The chatbot was an overnight sensation, gaining 1 million users in five days, peaking with 1.8 billion monthly users in May. 

A new news deal

Canadians will get to keep (some of) their access to news, now that the government has reached a deal with Google over the controversial Online News Act

What happened: After months of tense negotiations, Google has agreed to pony up $100 million a year for the Canadian news content hosted on its platform, part of an effort to compensate media companies for the advertising revenue that has been lost to Big Tech.