3 Shifts Edition (Jan 31 2025): The Fed’s pause on rate cuts, A private-sector rollback on DEI, This generation of personal AI assistants

Hi everyone – welcome back to your [AI-generated] 3 Shifts Edition.It’s been a tumultuous week in the markets but if you’re looking for DeepSeek, we wrote about it in our 3 Shifts Edition on Jan 17: “China’s notable progress in AI models.” (We also covered it in our Jan 10 edition the week prior.)Looking ahead now, our first Shift delves into the Fed’s pause on rate cuts. While not a surprise, it is the first time the Fed has hit pause since the current rate-cutting cycle began in Sep 2024. Powell is signaling he doesn’t intend to do a quick reversion back to cuts.Next, we take a look at the private-sector pullback on DEI in the wake of Trump’s executive order. In a recent survey, 1 in 8 companies reported plans to reduce or eliminate their DEI commitments in 2025.Finally, the past couple weeks have seen the introduction of browser-based and multi-app assistants from major AI players – OpenAI’s Operator and Perplexity Assistant. This category of AI agents has the potential to be much less bounded, opening up a cascade of downstream consequences for a large population.As always, if you have any feedback for us, feel free to hit ‘reply’ and let us know what you think.Enjoy.– TamSign up for free briefs written by real people on 6Pages.com