Oscar nominations were released last week, and while we’re looking forward to this year's awards, we can’t help but think of last year’s best picture winner, “Oppenheimer” - now immortalized in a trading card. “Now I am become card, destroyer of budgets.”
Scroll down to read about cheap AI, expensive TV, and jobs that AI actually created.
Stats to power your week
💰 It’s a week into President Donald Trump’s second term, and one of his campaign promises - to prioritize and elevate cryptocurrency - is already in the spotlight. While American crypto owners seem to trust crypto and digital assets (62%) more than the global financial system (61%), it’s hard to say if Trump-backed coins will win them over. GWI Zeitgeist
🥂 When it comes to shopping, consumers almost always care most about price and quality. You can set your watch to that. That is unless we’re talking about ready-to-drink cocktails – where a solid 55% of buyers go for “variety of flavors” compared to 43% that prioritize price or quality. Even if budgets are tight, taste buds stay curious. GWI Zeitgeist.
👶 Birth rates are falling around the world, and South Korea and Japan have been leading that trend for many years. Interestingly, despite only 1.3% of South Koreans and 0.7% of Japanese consumers planning on having a child in the next 6 months, the birth rate is set to increase in South Korea for the first time in 9 years. GWI Core
🐋 Talk of the town and top of the app charts at the moment is a new AI chatbot, Deepseek (more on this later). It’s worth considering what makes consumers choose a chatbot in the first place – quality (49%) and accuracy (46%) of responses are most important, but a quarter choose speed of responses. An important insight if these new “reasoning” models need more time to think. GWI Zeitgeist
📺 With TV streaming services going through another round of price hikes, it’s worth remembering that almost half of Americans think that TV subscriptions are getting too expensive – a sentiment that’s surged by 74% since 2020. GWI USA
What’s on our radar
So, what’s the big deal behind Deepseek and why is everyone talking about it? Well, it looks like a Chinese company has created an AI model that performs as well as the current state-of-the-art tools for a fraction of the price, and made it open-source, so people can build on the underlying tech. This Economist piece and this thread from Morgan Brown, a VP of AI products at Dropbox, are good primers on why people think this is one to watch.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about Deepseek (did it really cost just $5 million?), but one potential takeaway is that super smart AI is much cheaper to make than we thought – which would shake up the market big time. If nothing else, it’s safe to assume lots of consumers would jump at a cheaper option (though some may balk at trusting a Chinese company with their data). And Deepseek was released just as President Trump announced a massive $500B initiative to expand AI infrastructure in the US – a scale of investment which already feels like it’s from another era.
Big things are also happening with AI agents. OpenAI has released Operator, a new tool that can browse the web on your behalf. It’s a new benchmark for AI tech but the jury’s still out on if these AI agents are more efficient in practice than humans, and whether users can get over safety and security concerns. Oh, and there’s another open-source challenger model from China.
Meanwhile, Kanye West is hiring “wizards” to join his artificial intelligence team. Maybe AI will create new jobs after all!
Over in the world of social media, Threads has ads in the US and Japan now.
Primark has released a near-50 piece collection of clothes designed for people with disabilities, including a trench coat that can be taken off while seated, magnetic zippers, and hidden access points for medical equipment. It took years of campaigning, but it’s a major step for true inclusion in fashion.
Chart of the week
Wait a second. What if there was some truth to the idea that “only 90s kids will remember”? There’s a few ways to read this chart, and each angle has its own set of compelling insights.
It might be because people in their mid to late 20s and early 30s are in the sweet spot for nostalgia, and have a deep attachment to the music from the decade they were born. Maybe it’s just something that comes with that stage of life. Or perhaps as you get older, you naturally have more choice and so your tastes tend to drift a bit wider in time. But then again, maybe it’s a reflection of technology. Before the internet came along and split us into our respective content bubbles, the 1990s were the peak of the “monoculture,” when most people were watching, listening to, and talking about the same things. These days, it's much easier to listen to music from any decade you like.
Or maybe – and as someone born in the 1990s, l say this with complete objectivity – the music was just better?
Local lowdown
America’s need for oval-shaped speed
The US sports market is in an interesting era. After always being a bit of a global outlier, it’s starting to show its affection for two sports that it had historically resisted – soccer and Formula 1. But let’s not forget the market’s tried-and-true favorites. If you focus too much on the newcomers, you’ll miss the competitions that have long been popular all along.
Viewed by some as “just driving in a circle,” more Americans keep up with NASCAR than Formula 1, the UEFA Champions League, and WWE.
Lionel Messi might currently be America’s most popular athlete (the first soccer player to achieve that honor), but for certain audiences in the States, Joey Logano and Kyle Busch might be your ports of call.
