• Google rolled out its latest AI models.
• Walmart is laying off or transferring hundreds of corporate employees.
• The closely watched consumer price index is due out Wednesday morning.

Here are the most important news items that investors need to start their trading day:

1. Futures jump

Stocks rose Wednesday morning as the latest consumer price index reading came in lighter than expected. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 188 points, or 0.5%, while S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq-100 futures respectively added 0.6% and 0.7%. That's coming off a day in which the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.75%, enough to hit a fresh closing record. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 126.60 points, or 0.32%, on Tuesday, and the S&P 500 rose 0.48%. Fed Chair Jerome Powell also spoke Tuesday, reiterating that it was unlikely the central bank would raise rates but that Fed members would need to practice patience. Follow live market updates.

2. Some sign of relief?

April brought some slight inflation relief. The consumer price index, a broad measure of how much goods and services cost at the cash register, increased 0.3% from March, according to data released Wednesday. That was slightly below Dow Jones estimates for an increase of 0.4%. On a 12-month basis, the CPI increased 3.4%, in line with expectations. The previous month had shown a 3.5% reading. The important core measure that excludes food and energy came in at 0.3% monthly and 3.6% on an annual basis, both as forecast.

3. AI competition heats up

The AI race is hotter than ever. Google used its annual developer conference, Google I/O, to tout its most powerful artificial intelligence models so far. The company said its new Gemini 1.5 Flash model can quickly summarize conversations, caption images and videos, and extract data from large documents and tables. Google also recently announced an improved Gemini 1.5 Pro model, which can make sense of up to 1,500 pages total or summarize 100 emails, according to a vice president working on the project. The unveiling comes a day after competitor OpenAI announced its newest AI model, GPT-4o. Meanwhile, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever said Tuesday that he's leaving the Microsoft-backed startup.

4. More Boeing scrutiny

Boeing violated a 2021 settlement that had protected the company from criminal charges over two fatal crashes of the 737 Max, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. Such a violation could potentially open the company to U.S. prosecution. It has 30 days to respond to the Department of Justice, which said Boeing failed to set up and enforce a compliance and ethics program to detect violations of U.S. fraud laws. Boeing denied those claims. It paid $2.5 billion in January 2021 and admitted that two of its 737 Max technical pilots "deceived" the Federal Aviation Administration about the capabilities of a flight-control system on the planes.

5. Return to Arkansas

Walmart is laying off and transferring hundreds of corporate employees to its Arkansas headquarters. The big-box retailer's Chief People Officer Donna Morris said in a memo that the move is meant to bring more employees back to the office after the Covid-19 pandemic. Walmart employees officially returned to the office in February 2022. But now, the majority of employees working remotely and in offices in Dallas, Atlanta and Toronto have been asked to relocate, according to the memo. The company is currently building a new headquarters in its hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart is set to release a much-anticipated earnings report on Thursday.

— CNBC's Lisa Kailai Han, Jeff Cox, Jennifer Elias, Leslie Josephs and Melissa Repko contributed to this report.

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