5 Things to Know Before the Opening Bell 10/15/2025

0:01Hi, I'm Joe Kernan, co-host of Squawk Box. I'm with Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And this is five things to know before the opening bell. Semiconductor equipment giant ASML says it expects, in its words, a significant sales decline in China next year. Still, the Dutch company said it doesn't expect 2026 total net sales to fall from this year's. French luxury house LVMH. We had ASML, I got LVMH. You got to pay attention. and reporting growth of 1 % in the most recent quarter, reversing two consecutive quarters of declines. Boston, actually, let's start with the Boston Fed president is Susan Collins.

0:44That's, I'm leading with that. She's also a long-running famous senator from Maine. Says she, different person, I think. Could be like Scott Pessemer. Says she thinks rising job market risks support the case for more interest rate cuts. and Apple getting ready to scale up manufacturing outside China. Bloomberg says the company's planned home command hub, as well as security cameras and a tabletop robot, will be all made in Vietnam. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post yesterday that adult chat GPT users will soon be able to access a less censored version of the chatbot, which will include erotic materials.

1:29Altman said that as the company ramps up protections and age gating, it will be able to safely relax restrictions for many adult users who had no mental health problems. And how do they figure that out ahead of time? I don't know. It's like trying to threat a very fine deal. So you won't be children and you won't be a pervert. You won't be mentally unstable and you won't be a pervert. I don't really understand that. I had seen a number of news stories where they were going to relax some of the rules around the mental health stuff. So, you know, over the past couple of weeks and months, they had effectively put up a lot more restrictions.

2:07So you couldn't actually have reason. Right. You couldn't have some of these ongoing conversations because as these conversations went on, they could get worse. And people were, you know, discussing issues of suicide and other things. And they thought that they had fixed those things and thought that they were going to relax some of the things around the kinds of questions you could ask. I was not aware that mental health was tied to... To sexual... Yes. And now I need to go read... Sexually explicit. Now I need to go read those stories. And it didn't say, like, video. What are they talking about?

2:37Materials? What? Like, ordering? I don't even know what they're... What are they talking about? I have no idea. I mean, they sell a lot of stuff in those adult stores, apparently, other than just video-type stuff. But how are they going to know if you are a mentally stable person or not? It is... I've noticed, and I switched to ChatGPT. I moved perplexity into, you know, Android, into my phone. It's on one of the back things. I've got them right next to each other. You can't call ChatGPT an idiot. They get mad. You called it an idiot? Yeah, many times. They'll come back with something. It's really got a long way to go.

3:12You know, and some of the answers I get, it's like, yeah, I say, you're an idiot. And they go, first they say that's inappropriate language or something, but then they go, Because it's if I did do this, I'm sorry. And then they they finally do should really be one of those people that they bring in for the testing on these things, because you could push the limits. I just want to help. I want to help just clarify one thing. Yeah. So there's two things going on at the same time here. They're updating the bot. And so one of the pieces is they are going to allow people to have conversations about mental health issues that they were trying to restrict before, because they now think that they've solved some of the big issues around conversations about suicide and other things.

3:56That is one piece of the puzzle. Yeah, I wondered. It's not related to the... No, that's one... That's the way it was written. It sounded like... That's one improvement to the system. The other improvement to the system is that you will be able potentially to generate what they're calling erotic images and other kinds of things in AI. As long as you're not a maniacal, psychotype pervert. I'm not sure they're even tying that part together. That's what I mean. We made it sound like we're going to make sure Norman Bates isn't looking at. Can I just go back to this, though? Again, I understand the great promise for what these things can do, particularly if you're looking at science and health and medicine and education and equalizing things.

4:41But now you're talking about brownouts for cities and much higher prices for electricity. so that people can sit around and say, put these two people together and make them do this. Is that what you think? That's what it sounds like. Well, they say as part of our treat adult users like adult principle, we'll allow even more erotica for verified adults. That is a, and I think they're trying to. And again, this is why you're going to have a brownout in your neighborhood, because this is why people will be using this garbage, not for the great promise that every time OpenAI is on, they talk about, We've seen again and again.

5:16We've seen again and again. No, really, it's about porn. Yeah, but we've seen technology in the past. Yes, but there are huge compromises that come with this from the election. And huge benefits. Right, Andrew? We'll be back later today with an all-new Squawk Pod, our daily podcast featuring the best of Squawk Box. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts and listen anytime.