Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, an artificial-intelligence gold rush has started over the last several months to mine the anticipated business opportunities from generative AI models like ChatGPT. App developers, venture-backed startups, and some of the world’s largest corporations are all scrambling to make sense of the sensational text-generating bot released by OpenAI in November 2022. But while companies and executives see a clear chance to cash in, the likely impact of the technology on workers and the economy, on the whole, is far less obvious. Despite their limitations—chief among them their propensity for making stuff up—ChatGPT and other recently released generative AI models hold the promise of automating all sorts of tasks that were previously thought to be solely in the realm of human creativity and reasoning, from writing to creating graphics to summarizing and analyzing data. That has left economists unsure how jobs and overall productivity might be affected. For all the amazing advances in AI and other digital tools over the last decade, their record in improving prosperity and spurring widespread economic growth is discouraging. Although a few investors and entrepreneurs have become very rich, most people haven’t benefited. Some have even been automated out of their jobs. The good news is that, in fact, we can decide how we choose to use ChatGPT and other large language models. As countless apps based on the technology are rushed to market, businesses and individual users will have a chance to choose how they want to exploit it; companies can decide to use ChatGPT to give workers more abilities—or simply cut jobs and trim costs.

Private equity firms have been investing heavily in broadband providers in recent years, typically infusing cash into their acquisitions to expand operations, increase a company’s value and then do an initial public offering or sell the company at a profit several years later. What do private equity firms look for in a broadband acquisition? How involved are they in a provider’s operations? For EQT Group, fiber is a top selection criterion in making acquisitions. “EQT has developed a global playbook around fiber-to-the-home,” said Jan Vesely, a partner with global investment organization EQT Group. “The lack of fiber presence in the US, coupled with the increasing demand for symmetrical, high-bandwidth broadband is driving the large market opportunity for [fiber-to-the-home] (FTTH) deployment in the US,” he added. The company also looks for consistent track records of execution, experienced management teams, and competitive “moats,” Vesely said. An example of a competitive moat might be a market where a fiber company is the only high-speed broadband provider or where the company is one of two high-speed providers but the other isn’t fiber-based and where overbuild is economically or otherwise unfeasible.