Shares of Intuitive Machines jumped 16% in trading Friday after the company’s successful first moon landing.

Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C cargo moon lander known as “Odysseus” on Thursday became the first privately developed spacecraft to land on the lunar surface — as well as the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on the moon in more than 50 years.

The company, based in Houston, Texas, confirmed that the IM-1 mission lander was standing upright and sending data back to Earth.

“Odysseus has found his new home,” Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ CTO and IM-1 mission director, said Thursday evening from the company’s mission control.

Intuitive Machines stock initially ripped 40% higher before paring gains with heavy trading volume to close at $9.59 a share. The company has a market valuation of about $1 billion.

The company’s stock has been rallying over the past month as excitement built in the lead-up to and progress of the IM-1 mission. Intuitive Machines went public via a SPAC a year ago and shares had steadily slid to all-time lows near $2 in January.

Wall Street analysts emphasized to CNBC ahead of the landing that the unprecedented nature of the event could lead to volatile momentum trading.

“We’ve never witnessed a publicly traded company go through [a moon landing attempt]. So this is new, not just for investors, but for us analysts as well,” Cantor Fitzgerald’s Andres Sheppard said before the landing.

In a note to investors after the landing, Cantor Fitzgerald increased its price target on Intuitive Machines’ stock to $13 a share from $4 a share.

“In our view, this validates the company’s technology and adds significant credibility to the business. As such, we believe Intuitive Machines is now very well positioned to continue to capitalize on the growing commercial space economy, and on subsequent launches,” Sheppard wrote in the note.

Intuitive Machines, in a statement Friday morning, said that “Odysseus is alive and well,” noting that the lander is charging its solar panels.

“Flight controllers are communicating and commanding the vehicle to download science data,” the company said.

The company and NASA plan to hold a press conference at 5 p.m. ET on Friday.

The Odysseus lander carried 12 government and commercial payloads — six of which are for NASA under a $118 million contract through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative.

Intuitive Machines has already won two more CLPS contracts for future lander missions, with IM-2 expected to launch as early as the second half of this year.

Additionally, the company has part of a five-year $719 million contract to provide engineering services to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Analysts expect the Goddard contract is worth about $11 million per month in revenue for Intuitive Machines, with Cantor Fitzgerald estimating the company will bring in about $338 million in fiscal year 2024 revenue.

Training of elite athletes dates as far back as the Ancient Olympic Games, when so-called gymnastes advised runners, chariot racers, wrestlers and boxers on technique, nutrition and strength conditioning.

Fast forward to today’s Olympians prepping for next summer’s Paris Games. Their trainers and coaches adhere to the same Olympic motto — faster, higher, stronger — yet have the added benefit of millennia of ever-advancing technology, which now has been super-charged with artificial intelligence.

Trainers and coaches at U.S. Soccer, one of the 47 National Governing Bodies overseen by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, are using AI technology to instantaneously identify and track player movements and ball positions. A suite of software tools allows them to study a variety of human performance metrics, such as body position, velocity, speed and timing in real time on the field of play.

“Utilizing advances in AI and computer vision, we’ve been able to track and study personalized analytics from a variety of sports to determine the strengths and deficiencies in an athlete’s movement and help them make data-informed training and competition plans that can help them improve their performance, as well as their own health,” said Mike Levine, director of performance innovation business operations at the USOPC, based in Colorado Springs, also the home of a high-tech Olympic training center.

While the USOPC and NGBs employ in-house experts in bleeding-edge technology development, data analytics and sports sciences and medicine, big tech companies lend their AI know-how as well. USA Surfing staff, for instance, has teamed up with Microsoft engineers to figure out how best to ride waves. They take digital videos of surfers in action and use AI to analyze data on body movement, surfboards and waves to determine what they did well and what could be improved.

“This work saves coaches and staff hundreds of hours of video tagging, facilitates the accumulation of more and higher-quality data and affords analysts and coaches significantly more time to analyze the data and implement learnings into real-life training and performance,” Levine said.

Creating 3-D models of athletes’ bodies with Intel technology

These are manifestations of computer vision systems, which use AI technology to replicate the capabilities of the human brain responsible for object recognition and classification. A commercial application, called 3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT), was developed by Intel‘s Olympic Technology Group a few years ago and is now being utilized by trainers in numerous sports. 3DAT incorporates sensor-less motion capture and digital video to create three-dimensional models of an athlete’s entire body, from head to toes, which trainers use to tweak and improve performance.

“We’re able to see ways athletes move and detect things not possible with just the human eye,” said Jonathan Lee, who as senior director of sports technology at Intel helped develop 3DAT and is now chief product officer at London-based sports tech company ai.io, which recently acquired the system from Intel.

3DAT has been adopted by Exos, a coaching company in Scottsdale, Arizona, that trains college football players for the National Football League’s annual scouting combine, an evaluation ahead of the league’s yearly draft. “Exos uses 3DAT to analyze the 40-yard dash and help players get faster,” Lee said. Digital video cameras, mounted on timing gates incrementally positioned along the course, capture data on how a runner comes off the line, his acceleration and velocity, and his body’s angle of attack.

The data instantaneously constructs a personalized skeletal model of each player for immediate review. Before a player’s next sprint, a trainer might say, “You need to be more upright or lean forward, and give him tips on how to achieve that,” Lee said.

The NFL-Amazon digital player and concussion-risk tracking

The NFL itself is harnessing AI and computer vision to enhance its Digital Athlete program, developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services beginning in 2019. The Digital Athlete provides a complete view of each NFL players’ experience by analyzing data from his training and game activity, which is captured by sensors and tags in equipment and hours of video from cameras in stadiums. Computer vision and machine learning systems track speed, collisions, blocks and tackles. This data is shared with clubs and allows teams to precisely understand what players need to stay healthy, recover quickly and perform at their best.

“AI and machine learning are the backbone of the program,” said Jennifer Langton, NFL senior vice president of health and safety innovation. “We’re able to analyze a substantial amount of data and automatically generate insights into which players might benefit from altering either training or recovery routines, a process that used to be so manual and cumbersome.”

The AI was taught to identify trauma by repeated exposure to and digestion of digital video images of helmets from all angles, Langton said, and then to cross-reference visual information from statistical data to determine what player was wearing what helmet. “With enough practice, the AI becomes exponentially faster and more reliable than humans at accurately identifying and classifying head collisions throughout a game and the season,” she said, allowing trainers and coaches to see which players are due to reduce their workloads and which have room for a more intensive workout.

The Digital Athlete program was rolled out as a pilot with four NFL teams last year and this season is available to all 32 franchises via a dedicated online portal. “The portal provides teams with a daily training load and risk-mitigation information, as well as league-wide injury trends and benchmarks they hadn’t had before,” Langton said, adding that the NFL will assess the data at the end of the season to evaluate tangible results of the program.

‘The next big thing’: Twin hearts of elite athletes

Another AI-enabled technology that’s making its way into elite athlete training is the digital twin, a virtual replica of a physical object, process or system that can be used to simulate, predict and improve real-world scenarios. Tata Consultancy Services, headquartered in Mumbai, recently announced a partnership with French tech developer Dassault Systèmes to produce a digital twin heart, mimicking the flesh-and-blood one of Des Linden, a two-time Olympic marathoner and winner of the 2018 Boston Marathon (sponsored by TCS, along with the races in New York, Chicago and London).

Linden’s avatar organ — created using AI-analyzed data from CT scans and MRIs — can simulate her heart rate, blood flow and oxygen levels, providing instant feedback that can be interpreted to adjust her training and competition. “We want to understand what is a safe zone for Des’ trainer to put her through,” said Dr. Srinivasan Jayaraman, a principal scientist at TCS. Instead of having her run on a treadmill or outdoors, “We can run simulations using her digital twin heart to vary different cardiovascular parameters and fine-tune her training.”

Linden is no stranger to sports tech, from online message boards back in her high school days for remotely comparing times with other runners to today’s state-of-the-art running shoes that world-class marathoners have broken records wearing. “The digital twin heart is going to be the next big thing,” she said. “Being able to map out [my training] and see the gains and drawbacks ahead of time will allow me to work smarter, not harder.”

That’s what Linden, aided by her digital twin heart, will be doing to train for the 2024 Olympic marathon trials in February. Qualifying for her third Team USA slot “will be a tough task,” said the 40-year-old runner, “but I’ll take a crack at it.”

AI and sports training diets

Although there’s no news yet of a digital twin of the human digestive system, AI is involved in planning Olympic athletes’ diet and nutrition. Alicia Glass, a senior sports dietician for the USOPC, designs meal plans for about 300 athletes with USA Track and Field and USA Swimming, a labor-intensive, hand-written task that’s been simplified with an AI-powered app called Notemeal. “They collected data from 37 dieticians from professional sports teams and organizations and used those data sets to generate individualized meal plans,” she said. “The value-add is that it’s a network of sports dieticians working with the best of the best athletes in the world.”

Glass still relies on her professional skills to understand the events each athlete competes in, their training regimens and goals, as well as their genetics, lean body mass and metabolic rate. Even athletes who train and compete in the same events require totally individualized meal plans, she said. “Notemeal makes that process a lot easier,” she said.

The athletes access Notemeal with a smartphone app. “I hit a toggle on my phone, and they get a text saying a meal has been created for you,” Glass said, adding that the app also applies AI to design personalized shopping lists and recipes.

Glass won’t claim that high-tech dietary planning will win medals next summer in Paris, but “many athletes would admit it helps improve their lifestyle because they’re more aware” of their personal fueling needs.

Linden says there is no turning back from the increasing role of technology in the lives of elite athletes. “Let’s just personalize the heck out of training and make sure we’re getting the maximum gains without setbacks from overworking,” she said.

Europe was gripped by punishing heat waves in the summer of 2022, with wildfires, droughts and deaths highlighting what many around the world already know: Weather extremes can have devastating, real-world consequences.  

When it comes to temperatures in warmer months, the direction of travel seems to be going one way.

The U.K.’s Met Office is projecting that summers in the country will be between 1 and 6 degrees Celsius warmer by 2070, and as much as 60% drier. It adds that global heat waves linked to climate change are likely to increase. Just this week it said last month was the U.K.’s hottest June on record.

The overall picture is challenging. In May 2023, the World Meteorological Organization said there’s “a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.”

The consequences of a warmer planet are going to be multifaceted, affecting billions of people — and the world of work is no exception.

A recent report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) sketched out how employees could be affected as temperatures rise.

“Thermal comfort is very important in a workplace and if it is not achieved, morale, productivity, health and safety will all likely deteriorate,” the analysis said.

According to those involved in the report’s production, warmer working environments can create some very challenging scenarios indeed.

“There’s a whole range of things in addition to just people becoming fatigued and exhausted and not being able to focus on the industrial tasks they’re trying to undertake,” Tim Fox, its lead author, told CNBC.

That includes “increased potential for accidents, because people’s cognitive thinking isn’t as sharp as it would normally be.”

Issues relating to productivity also apply to equipment, facilities and buildings, Fox said. “Overheating ultimately results in economic productivity loss, [it] impacts on national and international economics.”   

Fox and his co-authors are not alone in highlighting the difficulties of a hotter world.

In 2019, the International Labour Organization published a report which contained some sobering details. 

“The economic losses due to heat stress at work were estimated at US$280 billion in 1995,” the U.N. agency said.

This, it added, “is projected to increase to US$2,400 billion in 2030, with the impact of heat stress being most pronounced in lower-middle- and low-income countries.”

The ILO’s report also highlighted which sectors would likely bear the brunt of rising average temperatures.

Those working in construction and agriculture, it said, were “expected to be the worst affected, accounting for 60 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, of working hours lost to heat stress in 2030.”

Heat stress is a serious matter. The ILO describes it as referring to “heat received in excess of that which the body can tolerate without physiological impairment.”

Other outdoor jobs may be affected, too. In his interview with CNBC, Fox highlighted the potential challenges faced by workers in oil refineries, gas plants and chemical works.

All the above roles, he said, involve “quite a lot of external activity,” with workers also needing to wear personal protective equipment, or PPE, thanks to the nature of their job.

“This clothing can be quite cumbersome … and quite hot to wear, even under cold conditions,” Fox said.

That in turn makes employees “particularly at risk or vulnerable to … these sort of conditions.”

Factories are another area of concern. Fox noted that buildings of this type haven’t particularly been designed with heat ingress — especially extreme heat ingress — in mind.

“They’re full of equipment that’s generating a lot of heat, and it’s very difficult for factories, buildings, big warehouse buildings, to passively cool themselves,” he said.

Air conditioning is common in offices, but that’s not the case everywhere, he added.

Fox noted that office buildings in countries with temperate climates, like the U.K., “can get quite hot” because not a lot of air-conditioning had been installed.

The overall situation appears grave. For many, preparation and adaptation will be crucial.

The IMechE says this will involve “changes to the design of buildings, infrastructure and other physical assets and systems, both with regard to those that already exist and those that are yet to be built or manufactured, as well as the work, educational, leisure and other activities that humans undertake.”

In a statement issued alongside its report in April, the organization said it also wanted an urgent update to “guidance related to heat impacts on the workforce” so firms can come up with plans and enact changes in their working environments.

At the time, Laura Kent, the IMechE’s public affairs and policy advisor, referenced the challenges authorities face.

“We acknowledge that it would be difficult for the Health and Safety Executive to set a meaningful upper temperature limit due to variations between industries in both working conditions, required PPE and workload,” she said.

“However, HSE guidance needs to be updated to support sectors and industry in the development of appropriate strategies.”

The HSE did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment ahead of this story’s publication.

In other parts of the world, plans are being made to ban work when it’s too hot.

In May, for instance, Spain’s Minister of Labour and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz, tweeted that carrying out “certain jobs during daylight hours” in extreme temperatures would be prohibited.

Speaking to reporters, Díaz said such prohibitions would take effect when AEMET, the State Meteorological Agency, issues red or orange weather alerts.

Citing Spain’s Labour Ministry, Reuters said the move would affect roles in sectors like agriculture and street cleaning. According to Reuters, in the summer of 2022 a street-sweeper in Madrid died from heatstroke.

Trade unions are also making their voice heard when it comes to working in extreme conditions.

Take Unite the Union, which has a presence in Britain and Ireland. It’s listed a range of advice provided by its health and safety representatives to both workers and employers.

Among other things, it stresses the importance of adequate ventilation for internal workspaces, the provision of cover for workers who are in direct sunlight, and stopping all work in extreme conditions.

Among a wide range of actions, Fox stressed the importance of design in creating safe and comfortable working environments in the face of hotter weather.

He said there needs to be a completely new approach to cooling that does not rely on the use of air conditioning, which has a significant environmental footprint.

“We need to explore … more traditional solutions of natural ventilation, use of shade, internal courtyards,” Fox said.

He noted that there’s “an awful lot” that can be done to prepare for the future. Raising awareness would be key. “In many cases, industries and workforces are just not aware that this challenge is coming, and are not preparing for it,” he said.

On top of that, identifying priorities in research and development and updating engineering methodologies and approaches would be needed.

Unless something is done, there will be, “in the coming years and decades, an increase in the economic impact of more extreme heat waves and just the general raising of the ambient seasonal temperature,” Fox warned.

Amazon doesn’t plan to host its re:MARS conference on cutting-edge technologies like robotics and space this year, the company confirmed on Friday. It will incorporate the subjects into its existing lineup of Amazon Web Services events.

The tech giant launched re:MARS, which stands for “Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space,” in 2019 as a way for startups, academics, researchers and executives to discuss the latest developments in these technologies. It morphed out of a private, invite-only version of the event, called Mars, that attracted tech elite and was hosted by Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos.

The decision to cancel re:MARS was not made for budgetary reasons, Amazon said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been taking a hard look at costs across the company as it confronts slowing sales growth and a gloomy economic outlook. The company has undergone the largest layoffs in its history and Jassy has cut a number of initiatives, including the Amazon Care telehealth program, touring “treasure truck,” Glow children’s videoconferencing device and Explore virtual tours service.

Amazon used re:MARS to spotlight some of its futuristic innovations, such as delivery drones, warehouse robots, and its first home robot. Bezos also held talks on space colonization, and tested out a pair of giant remote-controlled robotic hands. At last year’s conference, Amazon demonstrated a feature where its Alexa digital assistant impersonated a deceased relative.

An Amazon Web Services spokesperson told CNBC in a statement: “AWS hosts hundreds of thousands of customers and partners every year at hundreds of events around the world. These events provide an invaluable opportunity to connect with our customers. Their time is precious and we take seriously the responsibility to make each event valuable for every attendee, whether that’s through developing new skills, identifying new solutions that will transform an organization, or building new connections that can advance a career. We consulted with customers and the community as always, and for 2023, decided to incorporate re:MARS topics — machine learning, automation, robotics, and space — into a well-funded lineup of existing AWS events.”

As if there weren’t already enough layoff fears in the tech industry, add ChatGPT to the list of things workers are worrying about, reflecting the advancement of this artificial intelligence-based chatbot trickling its way into the workplace.

So far this year, the tech industry already has cut 5% more jobs than it did in all of 2022, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The rate of layoffs is on track to pass the job loss numbers of 2001, the worst year for tech layoffs due to the dot-com bust.

As layoffs continue to mount, workers are not only scared of being laid off, they’re scared of being replaced all together. A recent Goldman Sachs report found 300 million jobs around the world stand to be impacted by AI and automation.

But ChatGPT and AI shouldn’t ignite fear among employees because these tools will help people and companies work more efficiently, according to Sultan Saidov, co-founder and president of Beamery, a global human capital management software-as-a-service company, which has its own GPT, or generative pretrained transformer, called TalentGPT.

“It’s already being estimated that 300 million jobs are going to be impacted by AI and automation,” Saidov said. “The question is: Does that mean that those people will change jobs or lose their jobs? I think, in many cases, it’s going to be changed rather than lose.”

ChatGPT is one type of GPT tool that uses learning models to generate human-like responses, and Saidov says GPT technology can help workers do more than just have conversations. Especially in the tech industry, specific jobs stand to be impacted more than others.

Saidov points to creatives in the tech industry, like designers, video game creators, photographers, and those who create digital images, as those whose jobs will likely not be completely eradicated. It will help these roles create more and do their jobs quicker, he said.

“If you look back to the industrial revolution, when you suddenly had automation in farming, did it mean fewer people were going to be doing certain jobs in farming?” Saidov said. “Definitely, because you’re not going to need as many people in that area, but it just means the same number of people are going to different jobs.”

Just like similar trends in history, creative jobs will be in demand after the widespread inclusion of generative AI and other AI tech in the workplace.

“With video game creators, if the number of games made globally doesn’t change year over year, you’ll probably need fewer game designers,” Saidov said. “But if you can create more as a company, then this technology will just increase the number of games you’ll be able to get made.”

Due to ChatGPT buzz, many software developers and engineers are apprehensive about their job security, causing some to seek new skills and learn how to engineer generative AI and add these skills to their resume.

“It’s unfair to say that GPT will completely eliminate jobs, like developers and engineers,” says Sameer Penakalapati, chief executive officer at Ceipal, an AI-driven talent acquisition platform.

But even though these jobs will still exist, their tasks and responsibilities could likely be diminished by GPT and generative AI.

There’s an important distinction to be made between GPT specifically and generative AI more broadly when it comes to the job market, according to Penakalapati. GPT is a mathematical or statistical model designed to learn patterns and provide outcomes. But other forms of generative AI can go further, reconstructing different outcomes based on patterns and learnings, and almost mirroring a human brain, he said.

As an example, Penakalapati says if you look at software developers, engineers, and testers, GPT can generate code in a matter of seconds, giving software users and customers exactly what they need without the back and forth of relaying needs, adaptations, and fixes to the development team. GPT can do the job of a coder or tester instantly, rather than the days or weeks it may take a human to generate the same thing, he said.

Generative AI can more broadly impact software engineers, and specifically devops (development and operations) engineers, Penakalapati said, from the development of code to deployment, conducting maintenance, and making updates in software development. In this broader set of tasks, generative AI can mimic what an engineer would do through the development cycle.

While development and engineering roles are quickly adapting to these tools in the workplace, Penakalapati said it’ll be impossible for the tools to totally replace humans. More likely we’ll see a decrease in the number of developers and engineers needed to create a piece of software.

“Whether it’s a piece of code you’re writing, whether you’re testing how users interact with your software, or whether you’re designing software and choosing certain colors from a color palette, you’ll always need somebody, a human, to help in the process,” Penakalapati said.

While GPT and AI will heavily impact more roles than others, the incorporation of these tools will impact every knowledge worker, commonly referred to as anyone who uses or handles information in their job, according to Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute.

“These technologies enable the ability to create first drafts very quickly, of all kinds of different things, whether it’s writing, generating computer code, creating images, video, and music,” Chui said. “You can imagine almost any knowledge worker being able to benefit from this technology and certainly the technology provides speed with these types of capabilities.”

A recent study by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, found that roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of learning models in GPT tech, while roughly 19% of workers might see 50% of their tasks impacted.

Chui said workers today can’t remember a time when they didn’t have tools like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word, so, in some ways, we can predict that workers in the future won’t be able to imagine a world of work without AI and GPT tools.

“Even technologies that greatly increased productivity, in the past, didn’t necessarily lead to having fewer people doing work,” Chui said. “Bottom line is the world will always need more software.”