• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company’s second-quarter earnings call that people who don’t wear smart glasses in the future may be at a “pretty significant cognitive disadvantage” compared to those who do. Zuckerberg’s comments come as Meta has established a “superintelligence” lab fueled with highly paid researchers to progress on AI. The company’s second-quarter earnings reported Wednesday surpassed analyst expectations. 

Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has always been an early adopter of new tech, but now he says those who don’t adopt smart glasses, which sit at the bleeding edge of wearable technology, may be at risk of falling behind.

Zuckerberg said in the company’s second-quarter earnings call that future humans will want to wear smart glasses, like his company’s $299 Meta Ray-Bans, out of necessity.

“I think in the future, if you don’t have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you’re kind of similarly, probably [going to] be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people and who you’re working with, or competing against,” he said during the call. 

Just like regular eye glasses that help correct bad vision, smart glasses will be the main way people access and use AI, as well as “superintelligence,” to which Zuckerberg’s company has dedicated a highly paid team of researchers led by AI wunderkind Alexandr Wang.

Zuckerberg said he is encouraged by the sales growth for the smart glasses and added that people are using Meta’s smart glasses more often because they are actually “stylish eyewear.” Revenue from the Meta Ray-Bans more than tripled year-over-year, according to Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica’s most recent earnings report.

The Meta AI that runs the glasses is continually improving, Zuckerberg added, and the future could hold more notable hardware upgrades as well, including a visual display.

“That’s also going to unlock a lot of value where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day in this multimodal way. It can see the content around you, it can generate a UI for you, show you information and be helpful,” he said. 

This type of full immersion in tech, with the help of smart glasses, could also help Meta realize Zuckerberg’s former favorite buzzword: the metaverse.

“The other thing that’s awesome about glasses is, they are going to be the ideal way to blend the physical and digital worlds together. So the whole metaverse vision, I think, is going to end up being extremely important, too, and AI is going to accelerate that, too,” Zuckerberg said.

After debuting its Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses in 2021, the company has since expanded the collection to include the Oakley brand for a line of “performance AI glasses” for athletes. The company plans to release full-fledged AR glasses by 2027, The Verge reported. 

Meta on Wednesday beat analyst expectations and its performance in the same quarter last year with revenue of $47.5 billion for the second quarter. The company also reported a 36% year-over-year jump in profit at $18.3 billion for the quarter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• The Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged at between 4.25% and 4.5% following the most recent Federal Open Market Committee meeting Wednesday. The Fed’s decision could be felt by President Trump as a rebuke after Trump continuously called for the Fed and Chairman Jerome Powell to cut rates.

The Federal Reserve maintained rates on Wednesday, holding up against the pressure of President Donald Trump and his recently escalated rhetoric.

The Fed, while it brought down rates several times last fall, has stayed the course following the past four Federal Open Market Committee meetings. On Wednesday, the Fed did the same, holding interest rates between 4.25% and 4.5%, down from their peak over the past two years but still higher than pre-COVID levels of between 1.5% and 1.75%. In its decision, the Fed cited low unemployment and a solid labor market in its decision to hold rates steady.

Wednesday’s decision included two dissenting votes from the majority, Fed governors Michelle
Bowman and Christopher Waller. It is the first time in more than 30 years that two governors have dissented in a single meeting.

The U.S. economy has maintained some resilience despite analyst warnings about impending financial turmoil partly caused by Trump’s tariffs. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.1% in June and has remained basically stable over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, annualized second quarter GDP growth increased 3%, bouncing back from the 0.5% contraction in the first quarter. 

This combination of stable unemployment and a return to GDP growth likely played into the Fed’s preference for keeping rates unchanged, despite recent skepticism over data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said Luke Tilley, a former Philadelphia fed adviser and chief economist at Wilmington Trust.

“When they see the unemployment rate remaining low, when GDP has bounced back to a positive, when they don’t see any imminent problems, then they’re really reluctant to start cutting, or even say that they’re going to be cutting, because it’s much harder to unring that bell once they say markets are sort of off to the races,” Tilley told Fortune.

At the same time, the most recent GDP number shows weakness when stripped down to the core components of  consumer spending and business investment, Van Hesser, chief strategist at the Kroll Bond Rating Agency, told Fortune. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, also increased to 2.9% in June, up from 2.8% the prior month.

While concerns about unemployment have been at the forefront for the Fed in recent months, potential signs of lagging growth are bringing more equilibrium than before to the Fed’s dual mandate, said Hesser.

Trump’s tariff policies are likely to weigh on consumers and businesses in the second half of the year, and the Fed is likely waiting for more data to assess these effects. Still, Hesser said despite Wednesday’s rate cuts, he believes the Fed will cut rates later in the year, possibly at its last meeting of the year in December. 

“I would expect to hear some commentary today acknowledging that the risks of inflation and the risks of to the labor market, which is really growth, are coming into better balance, and so it kind of sets up for what we’ve expected, which is, fourth quarter rate cuts—two cuts of 50 basis points,” he said.

As the Trump administration continues to negotiate trade deals with its allies, including, most recently, with the EU, the threat of tariffs and their effects on inflation has worried market onlookers. On Wednesday, Trump said he would impose a 25% tariff on imports from India because of the country’s high tariffs on U.S. goods. Trump also claimed India buys much of its military equipment and energy from Russia, which warranted an unspecified “penalty.” 

Since before he was elected President in November, Trump has continuously criticized Powell and the Fed for not dropping interest rates as fast as he would like. Trump has ramped up his rhetoric recently by repeatedly wishing for Powell to resign and insulting him as “Mr. Late” and “one of my worst appointees,” among others. The president has also seized upon a previously scheduled remodel of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters in Washington D.C. to publicly shame Powell and hint at his possible dismissal.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI will change education, and he doubled down on his previous sentiment that college isn’t the best path for everyone. Altman noted education is “going to feel very different” possibly in 18 years when a new generation will have never known a world without AI. However, the CEO claimed education and human jobs won’t go away, but will merely evolve.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is so skeptical of college he doesn’t think his own kid will attend.

Having dropped out himself—from Stanford University in 2005—the now-billionaire has often advised young people to look beyond a college education and not automatically follow the traditional path. In previous comments, Altman has downplayed his own decision to drop out, saying he always had the option to return if things didn’t work out.

Dating back more than a decade, Altman has long cautioned that young people shouldn’t go to college without dedicating themselves to worthwhile projects and connecting with ambitious people. 

“Most people think about risk the wrong way—for example, staying in college seems like a non-risky path. However, getting nothing done for four of your most productive years is actually pretty risky,” he wrote in a blog post in 2013.

In an interview on the This Past Weekend podcast with comedian Theo Von published Thursday, Altman expanded on his thoughts, claiming his kid would “probably not” go to college.

In a world where young people grow up with new advanced technology such as AI, Altman notes that future kids, including his own, will never be smarter than AI, and will never know a world where products and services aren’t smarter than them. This changes the game for education, he said.

“In that world, education is going to feel very different. I already think college is, like, maybe not working great for most people, but I think if you fast-forward 18 years it’s going to look like a very very different thing,” he said.

While Altman told Von he had “deep worries” about technology and how it is affecting kids and their development, especially the “dopamine hit” of short-form video, he noted the real challenge with advancing AI is whether adults will be able to catch up. 

“I actually think the kids will be fine; I’m worried about the parents. If you look at the history of the world when there’s a new technology—people that grow up with it, they’re always fluent. They always figure out what to do. They always learn the new kinds of jobs. But if you’re like a 50-year-old and you have to kind of learn how to do things in a very different way, that doesn’t always work,” he said.

Altman clarified the advent of new technology will likely eliminate some jobs, but many more jobs will evolve rather than disappear. Just like when Google first came online when he was in junior high, some are also now claiming education may become useless thanks to AI. 

Altman doesn’t buy into this idea. Rather, he points to new tech as yet another tool that helps people think better, come up with better ideas, and do new things.

“I’m sure the same thing happened with the calculator before, and now this is just a new tool that exists in the tool chain,” he said.

However, Altman cautioned, it’s impossible to know how education and jobs will evolve and which roles will exist in the future, and how. He noted his own job as CEO of an AI company would likely have been unimaginable in the past. An AI CEO may even be on the horizon for OpenAI, he said, and therefore his own job would have to change.

Altman isn’t a doomer about the future of work, though, because of the innate social nature of humans and their seemingly limitless capacity for creativity, purpose-seeking, and improving their social status.

In the same way people from the time of the Industrial Revolution might have viewed modern humans as leading a relatively easy existence, looking forward 100 years from now, we may well think the same thing. Either way, he said, he sees a bright future ahead.

“I think that’s beautiful. I think it’s great that those people in the past think we have it so easy. I think it’s great that we think those people in the future have it so easy,” Altman said. “That is the beautiful story of us all contributing to human progress and everybody’s lives getting better and better.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Olive Garden, the Italian restaurant owned by Darden Restaurants, was founded in Orlando in the ‘80s and quickly found a loyal fanbase in part because of its “never-ending” first course, which includes unlimited breadsticks. While unlimited breadsticks have now become a staple of the company’s brand, the dish was actually first offered as a way to occupy customers after long wait times to receive their meal.

Olive Garden’s unlimited breadsticks are beloved by its loyal customers more than any other menu item, but few know the treasured appetizer was originally adopted to keep them busy.

The breadsticks have been a staple of Olive Garden’s Italian-style fare since 1982, when the first restaurant was opened on International Drive in Orlando. An immediate success, the restaurant enjoyed a far better crowd than expected on that first day, but food took longer than expected to leave the kitchen, an Olive Garden spokesperson told Fortune.

On the restaurant’s second day, it was just as busy, and the restaurant team made a decision that would later become a staple of the brand: to give the customers refills on breadsticks, for no extra cost, while they waited for their meals to arrive. While alarm bells rang and kitchen staff struggled to make enough sauce, customers munching on free breadsticks were satisfied.

“It made guests really happy, but it also helped the kitchen catch up since servers could get them themselves,” Jaime Bunker, Olive Garden’s senior vice president of marketing, told CNN.

Soon after, the company added soup and salad for customers purchasing an adult entrée to enjoy in the restaurant.

“Olive Garden’s Never-Ending First Course was born,” the spokesperson said.

Courtesy of Olive Garden

While the breadsticks have always been popular with customers, the way Olive Garden managed them wasn’t always a hit with investors. In 2014, hedge fund Starboard Value released a 300-page presentation criticizing Darden and Olive Garden. In the document, the investor said servers were bringing out too many breadsticks at once and claimed the breadsticks had declined in quality so much as to be compared to hot dog buns. After a proxy battle, Starboard replaced Darden’s board of directors and made significant changes to the company’s restaurants including Olive Garden, but kept the unlimited breadsticks as a staple.

More than 40 years later, the company’s bottomless breadsticks go hand-in-hand with the brand’s identity and are a big part of why customers have made Olive Garden one of Darden Restaurants’ most profitable brands, said Fordham University adjunct professor of Hospitality Marketing Stacy Ross Cohen. 

Olive Garden accounted for $5.21 billion in sales in fiscal 2025, making up about 43% of Darden Restaurants’ revenue for the year, and 47% of its total segment profit over the same period. Of all the company’s brands, which also include Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and LongHorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden has the most non-franchise locations at 935. 

Customers have come to expect the breadsticks and keep coming back in part just for the experience, Ross Cohen told Fortune. 

“The breadsticks are something that make people feel recognized. They make them feel important. They feel cared for,” said Ross Cohen, who is also CEO of marketing agency Co-Communications.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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