TheChek News Flow

OpenAI on Tuesday announced a new feature coming to ChatGPT, which will turn the chatbot into a reminder app. Called “Tasks,” the feature will let users ask ChatGPT to remind them about their tasks and even create periodic alerts for specific situations.

ChatGPT now lets users create reminders with ‘Tasks’

OpenAI describes the Tasks feature as an “important step toward making it more of a helpful AI companion that can take on tasks on your behalf.”

With this feature, ChatGPT can send you reminders when you need them, whether they are one-time or recurring. With the feature enabled, all you have to do is tell ChatGPT what you want and when, and it will create the task. There will be a dedicated section for managing tasks in the profile menu within ChatGPT. The chatbot will also suggest tasks based on your chats.

As an example, users can ask ChatGPT to remind them that their passport will expire in 6 months. It also works with more complex requests, such as to get a daily weather report every morning or a list of things to do every Friday. ChatGPT will send push notifications via its website or app. Depending on what you tell the app, it will also create a task automatically (if you allow it to).

The new Tasks feature is now being rolled out as a “beta” to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers. It will be available across all platforms via the new “4o with scheduled tasks” model. During the beta, users can set only 10 active tasks at a time. Push notifications will also work through ChatGPT’s macOS app.

“Right now, we’ll use this beta period to understand how people use tasks and refine the feature before making it available to all ChatGPT users,” OpenAI told 9to5Mac.

In December, OpenAI made ChatGPT Search available to everyone for free. The feature essentially turns ChatGPT into a search engine that can find answers on the web in real time. The macOS app was also recently updated to work with Apple Notes and more third-party apps.

The ChatGPT app is available for free on the iOS App Store. The Mac version must be downloaded from the OpenAI’s website.

Year of the Dragon produces a baby rebound, but demographers say it is temporary

China’s population continued to decline last year—though births edged up for the first time in eight years—falling for a third straight year as deaths outpaced births.

China had seen birth numbers plummet since 2017, the year after it ended the one-child policy, despite Beijing’s encouragement of couples to have three children. At the same time, the number of deaths in China had been creeping up as the population ages.

The data for last year produced a brief reversal of the trend. Births rose to 9.54 million from 9.02 million in 2023, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday. That is still a far cry compared with the more than 16 million in 2015, the final year of the one-child policy.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths dropped to 10.93 million last year from 11.10 million in 2023, Friday’s data showed. That brought China’s total population to 1.408 billion last year from 2023’s 1.410 billion.

Some demographers had expected birth numbers to see a small rebound in 2024, most of which fell in the Year of the Dragon, which is seen as an auspicious one for marriage and births in Chinese culture.

The uptick in births isn’t expected to last. China’s fertility rate—the number of children a woman has in her lifetime—is less than half of the replacement rate of 2.1, meaning that each generation will be less than half the size of the one before it.

Chinese couples who delayed marriages and births during the pandemic rushed to give births in the Year of Dragon, said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in Guangdong. But he said underlying factors, such as a shrinking number of women of childbearing age and young people’s reluctance to start families, remain unchanged. “This year, births will be lower again,” he said.

According to He, the long-term trend is also that deaths will gradually rise each year as the aging of the population speeds up. In 2010, only 13% of the population fell into the 60-and-older age bracket. Now, that age group makes up over one-fifth of the population, or 22% last year, up from 21% in 2023.

In 2022, deaths overtook births for the first time. Before then, the only other year since the founding of the People’s Republic when more people died than were born was 1960, when the country suffered mass starvation as a result of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

“As populations age, their crude death rates tend to increase,” said Joseph Chamie, a former director of the United Nations Population Fund.

China’s aging is happening fast. In the 2020 census, Chinese aged 80 or older were only 2.5% of the population, but based on U.N. estimates, they will be over 5% by the end of this year and 10% in 2050.

In other countries with aging populations, immigration often helps offset low birthrates and keep the population younger. Lower immigration is one reason U.S. deaths are expected to exceed births in 2033, seven years earlier than projected just a year ago.

China, with virtually no immigration, is stuck on a path of population decline, as deaths outpacing births becomes the new reality. The U.N. expects China’s population to drop to 639 million, less than half of what it is now, by the end of the century.

To encourage more births, Beijing has tried measures from cash incentives to longer parental leaves in recent years, part of promoting what it calls “a birth-friendly culture.” But young women are becoming more prone to resist the pressure to marry and have more children. The country’s economic downturn is also making young people hesitant to marry and start a family.

China long prided itself on a rising life expectancy and an active elderly population. Death was something few spoke of, a cultural taboo. But as the population ages, death has become a bigger part of life.

Diseases related to old age, such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease and cancer, have become a major concern in China. About 1.5 million Chinese of 60 or older were diagnosed with dementia in 2022, including 1 million with Alzheimer’s, the latest official data showed.

Elderly care is taking a toll on both families and the economy, eroding household savings and cutting into spending on other items. For many Chinese cities, sluggish economic growth and pension coffers heavily in the red are sapping vitality and making providing for the elderly increasingly daunting.

China’s death rate had hovered just above 7 per 1,000 people since 2008, but has inched toward 8 in recent years. It came in at 7.76 in 2024. The birthrate, meanwhile, edged up to 6.77 in 2024 from 6.39 in 2023.

China’s birth and death data, as published annually by the statistics bureau, aren’t absolute numbers but estimates based on survey results of a small number of households. China’s once-a-decade census is a closer representation of the true state of the population.

A wild card in counting Chinese deaths is the pandemic. In late 2022, Beijing lifted all Covid restrictions practically overnight, thrusting China into a public-health emergency as infections rapidly spread.

Two years later, the exact number of Covid deaths remains a mystery. Epidemiologists have estimated that between 1 million and 1.5 million people died from Covid-19 in China. Chinese health authorities have put the death toll far lower, at roughly 84,000.

A team led by Hong Xiao and Joseph Unger, scientists at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, in a 2023 study estimated excess deaths—a measure of deaths above expected levels—among Chinese 30 or older at 1.87 million between December 2022 and January 2023.

The team, which analyzed data based on three universities’ published obituaries on staff and faculty, as well as search-engine data on searches for keywords such as “funeral parlor” and “crematorium,” found that most of the excess deaths were among older individuals.

Xiao said that death surveillance data released by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which had been regarded among public-health professionals as comprehensive and representative, hasn’t been published for 2022 and 2023.

The activist firm run by Jeff Smith owns a 7.7% stake in the chip maker that competes with the likes of Broadcom and Qualcomm

Activist investor Starboard Value has built a big stake in chip maker Qorvo QRVO -0.77%decrease; red down pointing triangle and is seeking changes to boost the company’s lagging share price, according to people familiar with the matter.

The details

Starboard has amassed a 7.7% position in the company, the people said. The stake, valued at around half a billion dollars, is expected to be revealed in a securities filing Friday morning, they said.

The details around Starboard’s plans for Qorvo couldn’t be learned.

Qorvo, based in Greensboro, N.C., had a market value of nearly $7 billion as of Thursday.

Its share price has stumbled in recent months. The business has struggled to rein in expenses and has faced stiffer competition from other semiconductor companies including Skyworks Solutions and Broadcom.

Qorvo shares plummeted late last year after the company forecast quarterly revenue and profit below Wall Street estimates.

The context

Qorvo makes so-called radio frequency chips used by customers ranging from smartphone makers to infrastructure and defense companies.

Chief Financial Officer Grant Brown said in late October that Qorvo was taking actions, including factory consolidation, to improve profitability. A shift by consumers toward entry-tier smartphones, especially Android models, was weighing on the business, he said.

Starboard, led by Jeff Smith, has a history with chip companies and a predecessor to Qorvo. More than a decade ago, the firm had a position in TriQuint Semiconductor, where it pushed for changes and nominated board directors. TriQuint later merged with RF Micro Devices in 2014 and the combined entity became known as Qorvo.

Starboard has held investments in a number of other chip companies over the years, including Nvidia, Marvell Technology, ON Semiconductor and Mellanox Technologies, before it was sold to Nvidia in 2019.

Silicon Valley defence start-up Shield AI hits $5bn valuation

Maker of software for autonomous aircraft is raising around $200mn from backers

Artificial intelligence start-up Shield AI will nearly double its valuation to $5bn in a new fundraising round, as investors race to fund defence technology groups producing cutting-edge military systems.

The San Diego-based group, which makes AI-powered software for autonomous aircraft and drones, is raising around $200mn from defence and aerospace companies set to include Palantir, Airbus and L3 Harris, according to people close to the deal. Venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 and Riot Ventures are also expected to participate, they added.

The fundraising will boost Shield’s valuation from the $2.8bn it enjoyed a year ago amid a flood of investor appetite for companies likely to benefit from higher federal spending on national security under Donald Trump’s incoming government.

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and geopolitical tensions between the US and China have also heightened Washington’s reliance on tech companies developing advanced AI products that can be used for military purposes.

Shield’s core “Hivemind” software enables drones and aircraft to operate without GPS, communications or a human pilot. Its autonomous technology is being used by a number of rival companies, including legacy defence prime contractors that can incorporate its software into their aircraft.

“Companies invest in competitors when there’s a strong strategic rationale to do so,” said one of the people close to the matter. The investments are a sign of the “serious commitment to use our autonomy backbone in their programmes”, they added.

Shield declined to comment. Palantir, Airbus, L3 Harris, Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 and Riot Ventures did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The fundraising comes as tech groups are seeking to grab a bigger slice of the US government’s $850bn defence budget from traditional prime contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing.

The Financial Times revealed last month that Palantir and Anduril, two of the largest US defence technology companies, are in talks with about a dozen competitors to form a consortium that will jointly pitch for defence contracts. Shield AI is among the companies lined up to be part of the consortium.

Groups including Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril and OpenAI have in some cases integrated systems to leverage their technology in order to more rapidly advance America’s military capabilities.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary pick, on Tuesday emphasised the need to speed up weapons development through competition and innovation.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, he praised Silicon Valley, saying that it “for the first time in generations, has shown a willingness, desire and capability to bring its best technologies to bear at the Pentagon”.

Investors have been quick to back Silicon Valley’s burgeoning defence industry. Palantir’s share price has soared 330 per cent in the past year, valuing it at over $160bn.

The data intelligence group was co-founded by tech investor Peter Thiel, who also provided the initial backing for Anduril, which launched in 2017 and was valued at $14bn last year.

Rio Tinto and Glencore held talks about combining their businesses

Aborted discussions highlight how mining executives are contemplating big deals amid energy transition

Rio Tinto and Glencore held talks last year about combining part or all of their businesses, in an indication of how the push by mining companies to secure metals needed for the energy transition has focused executives on large-scale deals.

The London-listed companies engaged in early-stage talks as recently as October, according to people familiar with the matter, but the discussions did not progress to a deal.

A full-blown merger between Rio and Glencore — which have market capitalisations of $103bn and $55bn, respectively — would rank among the largest-ever transactions in the mining industry.

The talks between the two companies followed BHP’s failed £39bn bid for Anglo American last year, which prompted rivals to review strategic options.

BHP was interested in Anglo’s copper mines, among other assets, because the metal is used in renewable energy projects and electric vehicles.

Glencore and Rio declined to comment. Bloomberg first reported the companies had discussed combining their businesses.

Rio has been looking to boost its exposure to commodities including lithium and copper to offset weakness in the iron ore market as demand from China slows.

Glencore owns stakes in two significant copper mines — Collahuasi in Chile and Antamina in Peru — that would boost its production of the metal by almost 1mn tonnes a year and offer substantial expansion capacity, according to analysts.

A potential deal with Glencore would be complicated by the Swiss-based company’s heavy exposure to thermal coal, a commodity Rio has abandoned in recent years.

Matthew Haupt, a portfolio manager at Wilson Asset Management, which owns shares in Rio, said the deal “didn’t make a lot of sense” given Rio’s efforts to get out of coal and invest in renewable energy to power its operations.

Glencore, which has a large commodity trading business and mining operations, has been debating the future of its coal business.

The company said in 2023 it would spin out its coal mines into a separate listed business but changed its mind last year and decided to retain them. 

Glyn Lawcock, an analyst with investment bank Barrenjoey, said coal assets could be spun out as a separate company as part of any agreement. He added there was little overlap between the two companies, meaning there were few synergy benefits from a merger and a deal would need to be justified by asset diversification and creating more scale.

Ray David, a portfolio manager at Blackwattle Investment Partners, which owns Rio’s UK-listed shares, said Rio could fund an acquisition of Glencore by issuing shares in Australia, which would rebalance Rio’s share structure and close the value gap between its Australian and London listings.

Activist investors, including Blackwattle, have urged Rio to move its primary listing to Sydney — where its stock trades at a premium — to simplify share-based deals.

Rio’s Australia-quoted shares fell 1.8 per cent in early trading in Sydney on Friday, before climbing back to be down 0.5 per cent.

Demand for commodities required to decarbonise the global economy — such as copper, lithium and aluminium — has triggered a flurry of dealmaking activity in the mining industry over the past year.

Rio last year announced a $7bn deal to acquire Arcadium Lithium to increases its presence in metals used in batteries for electric vehicles. People close to the company said it was still digesting that transaction. 

Rio previously rejected a takeover bid by Glencore in 2014.

Lawcock said the reaction from some Rio investors in Australia was one of unease given Glencore’s reputation for smart dealmaking.

“Shareholders have said I don’t want any of my companies sitting across the table from Glencore,” he said.

Blackwattle’s David said the fact talks had ended showed Rio remained cautious in a consolidating market.

“I suspect Glencore wants a high premium,” he said. “It is a positive sign [that talks ceased] as it shows Rio is being disciplined and aware of not destroying shareholder value. It would be easy to panic.”

Firms intended to backstop frontline insurers raised rates and increased recovery thresholds after losses on prior blazes

Gaps in California’s insurance system could lead to serious failures in coverage for the Los Angeles firestorms, while leaving a key segment of the industry — reinsurance companies meant to spread out the most concentrated risk — virtually unscathed.

Reinsurers, which provide insurance to frontline insurance companies, could ultimately absorb less than 3 per cent of insured losses from the blazes, Citi analysts said.

California’s governor Gavin Newsom has said the fires, which have damaged or destroyed 12,000 buildings, could be the costliest disaster in US history, with early estimates suggesting insured losses could exceed $20bn.

The mild hit to reinsurers highlights how they have quietly pared exposure to natural catastrophe risks in recent years, raising prices and increasing the level at which coverage kicks in. That pullback accelerated the retreat of major insurance carriers in California, industry experts said, leaving many homeowners without cover or turning to the state-backed insurer of last resort.

“Reinsurers backed away from taking on a lot of that [catastrophe] risk. So, the insurers naturally said, we want to step away,” said Andrew Engler, co-founder of Kettle, a wildfire-focused insurance technology business in California.

State Farm and Allstate, two of California’s largest providers of homeowners’ insurance, cited the cost of reinsurance, along with factors such as high construction costs, when they announced last year they would stop writing new policies in the state.

Insurers have long complained California law makes it challenging to raise premiums to match the losses they face. In December, insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara issued new rules aimed at making it easier to raise rates, including by allowing reinsurance costs to be passed on to customers.

But that regulation had not taken effect by January, and its future effect could be muted by a broader shift in the industry. As global insured losses have climbed in recent years, reinsurers’ share of those losses has fallen.

Last year, US reinsurance rates hit their highest level since at least 1990, according to a cost index published by Guy Carpenter, a Marsh McLennan-owned reinsurance broker.

Over the past 25 years, reinsurers assumed about 46 per cent of modelled catastrophe risk, but that exposure has been cut to 33 per cent since 2023, according to the reinsurance arm of broker Howden.

Reinsurers remain exposed to so-called peak perils such as earthquakes and hurricanes. But fires, which have become more costly and intense because of urban growth and climate change, are less likely to hit the higher threshold that triggers reinsurance payments.

Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer which provides coverage to major US primary carriers, said in a 2020 investor presentation it had “reduced appetite” in reinsurance for so-called secondary perils such as wildfire.

The reinsurers’ retreat followed years of painful losses. Munich Re booked €500mn of wildfire losses in 2017, the year when the Tubbs fire swept through Northern California, and €430mn of losses in 2018, following two other major fires in the state.

Munich Re told the Financial Times: “We remain committed to providing natural catastrophe capacity across all markets, as long as we can achieve prices that adequately reflect the risk.”

In 2022, rising interest rates and inflation squeezed reinsurance capital supply, triggering a reset for the industry, when reinsurers negotiated tougher terms and higher prices with clients.

“The reset in 2023 was on the back of heavy loss activity in prior years,” one executive at a major reinsurer said.

Reinsurers raised prices in 2023 and 2024. Citi predicted January’s losses could drive a “significant” increase in reinsurance prices when many policies are renewed in early summer, ahead of the US hurricane season.

“If I’m a reinsurance company and I’ve got a very good relationship with State Farm nationally, then I might begrudgingly take on some Californian wildfire risk, as part of a diversified portfolio,” said James Shuck, Citi’s head of European insurance research. “But the fundamental problem is, it’s an uninsurable risk. There comes a point at which you have to raise prices by so much that it becomes uneconomic.”

ETF flows obliterate previous full-year record to hit $1.5tn

Buying frenzy peaked at end of year spurred by Donald Trump’s presidential victory

Global exchange traded fund flows hit a record $1.5tn last year with the buying frenzy accelerating after Donald Trump’s presidential victory in November.

The net inflows obliterated the previous full-year record of $1.2tn set in 2021 according to data from Morningstar, which includes most major investment markets except China and India. Total assets hit $13.8tn, a rise of $2.7tn during the year, and nearly five times the $2.9bn level of a decade ago.

Both equity and fixed income funds saw record inflows, with these two asset classes accounting for 95 per cent of flows between them, despite an industry focus on alternative assets such as bitcoin.

The record year is a reflection of the lure of rising markets, with many major equity benchmarks hitting record highs last year. It also highlights the ongoing switch away from the century-old mutual fund format to the lower cost and greater transparency, liquidity and convenience of ETFs. This is particularly true in the US where ETFs also have significant tax advantages.

“ETFs are going gangbusters,” said Syl Flood, senior product manager at Morningstar. “Inflation-adjusted returns on short-term bond products, especially for US investors, are back to where they were before rates started rising, so it’s back to Tina [there is no alternative] to equities.”

“ETFs seem to have a bit of a halo around them,” Flood added. “People want the ETF version of a strategy, if they can get it. The halo has been earned. ETFs have been great tools for helping investors reach their goals.”

Flows peaked at the end of the year with November and December the two biggest months — totalling $310bn in the US alone — after Trump’s re-election sparked hopes in some quarters of further stock market gains.

“Investors’ ‘risk on’ posture was evident throughout the year and was further amplified by the US presidential election in November,” Flood said.

“While markets closed the year with a whimper, ETF flows did not,” said Scott Chronert, global head of ETF research at Citi. “December marked the second-best flow month ever for US-listed ETFs. This was an impressive follow-up to the record-setting flow data we saw in November.”

The rise of ETFs was not purely a US phenomenon, however, with net inflows in the rest of the world hitting $377bn, according to Morningstar’s figures, comfortably above the previous peak of $292bn in 2021, with every major domicile reporting record numbers.

“South Korea had a blowout year, growing at a torrid 33 per cent rate for the second straight calendar year,” Flood said. Ireland, Europe’s largest ETF hub, grabbed the lion’s share of these non-US flows, however, at some $226bn.

The ETF industry also accelerated its transition away from its traditional focus on passive, index-tracking funds in 2024. Assets held by actively managed ETFs topped $1tn for the first time, rising 61 per cent during the year, even as US-domiciled active mutual funds continued to bleed money. Net flows more than doubled from 2023’s previous record, hitting $339bn. Actively managed ETFs now account for 7.8 per cent of industry assets, up from 6.2 per cent 12 months ago.

For once, JPMorgan’s wildly popular $37.1bn Equity Premium Income Fund (JEPI) was eclipsed in the active space, with iShares’ US Equity Factor Rotation Active ETF (DYNF) heading the leaderboard with $11.7bn of net inflows, taking its total assets to $13.7bn.

Matthew Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas research at SSGA, who only covers US ETF flows, counted record inflows in no less than 19 categories last year, ranging from growth and small cap ETFs to those focused on derivative income and collateralised loan obligations.  

In another sense the industry is becoming more concentrated, however. At a time when the US share of global stock market capitalisation has risen to its highest level since the early 1970s, just three ETFs focused on the same index — BlackRock’s iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV), State Street Global Advisors’ SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) and Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF (VOO) — accounted for $292bn, 19.5 per cent of the global flows, as they took their combined assets to an unprecedented $2.1tn. VOO alone took in an “astounding” $117bn, Flood said, a record single-year tally for any ETF, as investors chased the index’s 25 per cent annual gain.

The other winner from this trend was S&P Global Ratings, which “dominated flows among benchmark index providers”, with the $475bn of net new money subsumed by ETFs that track its indices taking its market share to 28 per cent, up five percentage points in five years.

Despite this, Invesco outshone BlackRock, Vanguard and SSGA in relative terms, with its assets rising 21 per cent during 2024. The Atlanta house largely piggybacked on enthusiasm for the tech-heavy Nasdaq index, with its QQQ Trust (QQQ) and Nasdaq 100 (QQQM) ETFs proving popular, alongside the S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP), its own take on the blue-chip index.

There were some losers amid the oceans of winners, however. Some niches were out of favour on the fixed income side, including inflation-protected bond funds and emerging market bond ETFs. The latter was tipped into the red by outflows in December “as fears of a more protectionist US fiscal framework led to a stronger dollar and weighed returns”, Bartolini said.

In equities, defensive sectors suffered $6.7bn of outflows from US-listed ETFs, the second-worst figure ever, he added, led by healthcare, which shipped $7.4bn.

This pessimism was in complete contrast to the technology sector, where $33bn of inflows accounted for 76 per cent of US sector flows in 2024, well above tech’s 37 per cent share of assets, something Bartolini attributed to “broad-based fervour” for artificial intelligence.