Could a Universal Music takeover be in the cards?

0:00How a campus in the Old West treats very new artificial intelligence. I'm David Brancaccio. First crude oil remains high, 113 a barrel now, with President Trump's deadline for a rondery open, a key route for oil just about 13 hours away. S&P futures are down 2.10 percent, NASDAQ futures down 3.10 of a percent. U.S. government bonds can be seen as a haven during volatile times, not seeing more of that at the moment, though, the 10-year interest rate steady, 4.33 percent. An activist investor is making a play for the big record label that has Taylor Swift among others, and a deal valued at around $64 billion. Here's Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer. Investor Bill Ackman is behind the deal. He wants his investment firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, to take over Universal Music Group or UMG. Ackman says UMG's stock price has, quote, languished. Because of issues unrelated to the performance of its music business, Ackman says those problems

1:04would be solved with the transaction he's proposing. Ackman wants to merge UMG with Pershing Square's spark holdings. The new company would be based in Nevada and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. UMG hasn't commented on the proposal yet. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. If you're a business leader, Intuit QuickBooks Payroll is an essential tool that completely integrates payroll, time tracking, HR, and your financials in a powerful all-in-one command center. No more juggling platforms are switching between vendors. While your data, synced into one platform, offering clarity and confidence to make smarter decisions and focus on what matters. This summer, QuickBooks Payroll evolves to support the entire team lifecycle.

2:05HR, time, benefits, and payroll all working together in one connected system that fully integrates with your books. You'll be able to onboard employees in one seamless flow that feeds directly into payroll, and figure automated HR workflows for things like promotions or off-boarding, and track performance, time off, and benefits alongside payroll. Upgrade your workflow with QuickBooks Payroll today and get ready for the brand new tools coming soon. More at QuickBooks.com slash workforce. That's QuickBooks.com slash workforce. On Thursday, we see what the economy looks like in numerical form with the latest revision to Gross Domestic Product. Growth was meager. Last time we got this government reading, we also get personal consumption inflation that day, but in search of a more immersive view of the U.S. economy, I took a drive along a stretch of historic route 66, which turns 100 this year. Yesterday, we visited some near ghost towns, seemingly untouched by the artificial intelligence

3:06revolution, but today, a stop on 66 at a campus where AI is getting a full embrace. Students at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff setting up a tripod with rotating gizmos that use light to make 3D maps of forests. It's called LIDAR, a tech used also on self-driving cars like the Waymo Robot Taxi, in which we started my Route 66 journey. The main technology I use is aerial LIDAR. We're using it to look at the forest in a 3D sense as opposed to 2D data. Keegan Line is a second year PhD student at NAU's School of Forestry. He does this for several reasons. A big one is habitat identification. It is also good for understanding wildfires, but to tell opinion from a juniper from a quaking asp and takes more than LIDAR, it takes machine learning, artificial intelligence

4:06to help humans like Keegan makes sense of it all. Keegan Line, future PhD, is also a kind of shepherd for his AI flock. And you have to definitely tailor it to the problem itself. You need a lot of refinement, and you have to then look at the outline and say, does this make sense? Is this something that's actually useful? And how can we use this in making decisions? One of Keegan's faculty advisors, Andrew Sanchez-Meter, has been using AI in his research since the early 90s before it was cool. He finds the tech indispensable, but... The big thing to watch out for is a model that seems better, but you don't really know why it's better. And then when you apply that model in new plays, certain new scenario, or give it new data, it may not perform the way you thought it was going to perform. So you got to test it, right? You can't trust it completely. We're not at a place where we can just unleash it. It's not just AI in the Department of Forestry. Northern Arizona University is in the spring of what it's declared as the year of AI empowerment.

5:07When manufacturing went away, and mining went away, everybody was asked to code, just get a coding certificate, and that will resolve your issues. But now we're in the era of AI, where a lot of the things that we thought we needed to do and the ways we needed to prepare to be able to have careers of consequence has totally been challenged, right? In A.U.'s president, Jose Luis Cruz Rivera, also teaches electrical engineering. When his own students came back bewildered when they were steered wrong by a chat GPT hallucination on a problem set, he saw a big teaching opportunity. How you inquire in a more productive way, how do you validate what you're hearing back, and how do you stay in control of the cognitive process related to the work that you're engaging that GPT in? The campus community decided collectively that now is the time to focus on this for themselves, the university bureaucracy, and beyond. Not just for our students, but how we connect with the community and how we provide the

6:10resources to make sure that the kids in the boys and girls club, the teachers and the advisors in the Flagstaff High School, the people working in the city offices, have the training and the resources they need, it's ultimately about how we ensure that the human remains central to the work, and it's a sovereign entity in the connection with the A.I. It's not the other way around, and ultimately the A.I. serves humans, not the other way around. Exactly. This fall, A.U. launches a bachelor's degree in A.I. that goes beyond the technical. There will be a course on questioning the A.I. Let's not just talk about the practical aspects of it or how to design it or how to use it. Let's question the bias that's built in and how we can counter that. Let's question the environmental impacts. Let's question how the flow of capital could actually lead to a very dystopian future. Because if you are going to be an engineer working with A.I. and machine learning, we want

7:12you to have that world view available to you if and when the moment arises. Do you think your presence, the university's presence in this community, could help make the Flagstaff region an innovator, almost a hotbed of artificial intelligence? I hope that it will at a minimum ensure that the Flagstaff community, the Northern Arizona community, is empowered by the technology and not subjugated by it. I also visit another center of A.I. on Route 66, this one in New Mexico, where there's loads of R&D and the government is the big investor. David Brancacher, Marketplace Morning Report from APM, American Public Media.