The quarter ended with a bang for both the Fab Five (+$173 billion week/week) and Telco Top Five (+$23 billion). The Fab Five had a stellar first quarter with $1.55 trillion in gains (this offsets about 40% of 2022’s losses). While there’s still a lot of time left in 2023, both groups are off to a good start.

There wasn’t a lot of wireless telecom news this week, but on the fiber-to-the-home front, Google did introduce an 8 Gbps symmetric product in Mesa, Arizona (also served by Cox Communications and Lumen). The Light Reading article on the deployement, which also includes a handy list of each Google Fiber and Webpass market, is here.

One of the other big stories this week was the release of a letter from The Future of Life Institute asking for a six month halt to Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments after the current version (GPT-4). That letter is here. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Twitter CEO Elon Musk are two of the more than 2,500 signatories. What is most interesting to us about this letter is a) the criticality of the next six months (the threat is imminent) and b) the admission that the spread of misinformation could quickly get out of control.

There are many possible responses, and we may have been spending way too much time deploying fiber in the countryside, but, with most Twitter news being reposted from news sources like CNN, ESPN, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others, doesn’t this threat (if imminent) require more social media discretion and editorial management? If Twitter were responsible for the content that was shared, wouldn’t that solve the problem? Could the equivalent of a “six second” rule in social media solve this issue?

Some deep thoughts for the weekend as we enter April. Try not to get fooled today! File is below.

*Note: The opinions and projections in this Brief are solely those of the Patterson Advisory Group and may not reflect those of Fastwyre Broadband