A Few Words from Jim

April 2023

I witnessed my first bank run, ok it was my second, the first one was in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. 

Last month, I watched as twitter frenzied tech millionaires and billionaires transferred with a tap on their phones $50 BILLION dollars overnight from Silicon Valley Bank making it insolvent and forcing the feds to move in and take over. 

As many of you know, I serve on the board of a local community bank, People’s Bank, and we met immediately following the run and closure of the bank to discuss the situation, get a sense of what our communities were feeling and to discuss our position and ability to handle panic like this. 

We met again after the weekend and news of other banks closing. We wanted to make sure the customers of the bank and our communities did not panic. I share the letter they posted on their website  addressed to customers of the bank on page 31.

Thankfully the feds stepped in and took immediate and transparent action which seemed to calm everyone down.  At least for the moment. 

We have a special guest author this month.  You have heard a lot in the news lately about ChatGPT and I wanted to try it out first hand and share with you real results. 

I told my wife, Dena, that I was going to use ChatGPT to write all the articles this month as kind of an Aprils Fools Joke on you. But the more I tried, the worse it got. It’s kind of scary how much it can write based on prompts and asking it to read a press release and write up a summary. But sometimes I found the recap didn’t match the press release at all yet it was written in an authoritative voice. So instead I’m only sharing some stories written by ChatGPT. It’s impressive how far it has come and I get a bit of worried excitement when I think about where it’s all going. 

Start reading what the bot has to say on page 5 and let me know what you think. 

I also asked it to create the cover which I find funny and close to home. I also used BING to get clarification pop ups on stories written by human authors inside and you can find those as sidebars in yellow. 

The bot also created much of the art found on pages in the journal. It’s kind of scary how good it can do certain things. 

I even “interviewed” ChatGPT and ask it if it can write articles for the journal and what it responded with is surprising but true. Read that on page 14.

As always I appreciate you reading the journal and talking about it with friends and colleagues. I still need humans to read and share, for now… 

 Jim
Jim@SouthernOregonBusiness.com