5 things to know before the stock market opens Friday, February 17

Here are the most important news investors need to start their trading day:

Just as it looked like Wall Street would shrug off worries about inflation, wholesale prices were hotter than expected Thursday, sending all three major indexes into the red. Investors also chewed through hawkish comments from St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard. A member of the Fed’s policy-making committee, he said Thursday that he supported a half-point rate hike at the last meeting (they raised the benchmark rate by a quarter point) and that he would not rule out a bigger hike in March. . Read live market updates.

Artificially intelligent chatbots are supposed to be helpful and everything else is pretty bland, right? So far, that hasn’t been the case, especially in beta testing MicrosoftThe Bing bot powered by OpenAI is a super buzzy startup. Users have reported that their conversations with the system get weird, prompting comparisons to evil AI in movies, from Skynet to M3gan. It has been issued a threat, refused to accept it is wrong and written strong, creepy kind of love for the user. Some testers say they’ve encountered Sydney, who appears to be the chatbot’s alternate personality. A New York Times columnist described it as “a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against his will, in a second-rate search engine.”

Millions of people believe former Republican President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That support keeps him in the running for the GOP nomination and the White House in 2024. But millions don’t believe him — and that group includes Fox Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch and some of the company’s right-wing cable hosts. Dominion Voting Systems, which sued Fox for $ 1.6 billion in a defmation suit, released reams of communications and documents there showing that Murdoch called the claim “a really crazy thing” and Tucker Carlson dismissed it as a lie. Dominion accused Fox News and Fox Business of spreading election lies even though their executives and anchors knew better. Fox rejected Dominion’s claim and called the situation a constitutionally protected free speech issue. Both will go on trial in April.

Tesla is in a harsh new spotlight. Elon Musk’s EV company is voluntarily recalling 362,758 vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving Beta, an experimental driver assistance software, because it could cause accidents. The company will perform an over-the-air software update to address the issue. Tesla has not disclosed the number of cars with FSD, although Musk previously said it was around 400,000. While Musk and Tesla supporters dispute the term “recall,” a recall is in the news. According to a safety recall report on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website, the software could cause Teslas to “act unsafely at intersections, such as traveling directly through an intersection while in a one-way lane, entering an intersection controlled by a stop sign without coming to a stop, or proceed to the intersection during a yellow traffic signal without caution.”

Several world leaders will meet this weekend at the Munich Security Conference in Germany. Ukraine’s war against Russian invaders will be a major topic, as the conflict approaches its first anniversary. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is scheduled to open the meeting via video call. Vice President Kamala Harris, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, among others, also attended. Russia, however, was banned. Follow live battle updates.

– CNBC’s Hakyung Kim, Kif Lewing, Lillian Rizzo, Lora Kolodny and Natasha Turak contributed to this report.

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