• Microsoft's top finance executive sent an internal email to workers calling for "intensity" in 2026.
• Last week, another memo from the CEO attempted to explain big job cuts in the midst of huge profit.
• On Wednesday, Microsoft reported a quarterly profit of $27 billion.

Microsoft employees should strap in for another year of "intensity," according to the software giant's top finance executive.

Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood sent an email to employees on Wednesday after the company reported a $27 billion quarterly profit, telling them the year ahead will require "intensity, clarity, and bold execution."

Hood sends out these emails every quarter when Microsoft discloses its financials. Her missives mostly rehash what the company reports publicly, such as how revenue and profit are growing.

Sometimes, though, Hood's emails provide insight into what the company's top executives deem most important and what they want employees to know.

This time, Hood highlighted updates she said were personal "reminders of the scale and importance of the product and services our customers count on us to deliver." She noted that Azure revenue reached more than $75 billion — the first time the company has disclosed this number — and grew 34%.

What perhaps stood out most was Hood's message to employees, reiterating priorities for the upcoming year, and citing a memo from CEO Satya Nadella last week.

"We're entering FY26 with clear priorities in security, quality, and Al transformation, building on our momentum and grounded in our mission and growth-mindset culture," Hood wrote, mentioning Nadella's email. "Both the pace of change and customer expectations are continuously accelerating."

Hood's email, notably, did not mention Microsoft's recent workforce cuts, which have exceeded 10,000 this year even as profit swells. Nadella's email last week attempted to explain this "seeming incongruence" as the "enigma of success." Some employees weren't satisfied with the explanation.

Hood's email expanded on Nadella's thoughts by telling employees the upcoming fiscal year will require "intensity," which has become a buzzword in the tech industry as companies dial up performance pressure and make significant workforce cuts.

"FY26 will require intensity, clarity, and bold execution," Hood wrote. "I'm excited about what we'll accomplish together as we lead in this next frontier of innovation — driving impact at scale for every customer, every partner, and every community we serve around the world."

Microsoft did not comment on Hood's memo.

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• People have been using ChatGPT and other AI tools to "manifest" their ideal lives.
• My colleague reported on this late last year, and I keep seeing the trend on TikTok still today.
• So I thought about it: Should I give in and join the AI manifesters and visualize my dream life?

It's a TikTok trend that's been going on for some time now — people using ChatGPT and other AI tools to "manifest" their dream lives.

So far, I've avoided it, but when one of my editors noticed it trending again, I had to at least consider it: Am I the type of person who'd manifest? And then use AI to show me what my ideal life would look like?

My colleague Ana Altchek noticed the trend back in September. "Users are sharing how AI has helped them enhance their traditional manifestation practices, such as visualizations, vision boards, positive affirmations, mantras, and rewiring negative beliefs," she reported at the time.

ChatGPT shows your dream life

I decided to investigate for myself, and I found that people essentially prompt AI to create a story about their dream life, based on their goals.

Let's say your goals were to be rich, have flawless skin, snag a hunky husband and two kids, and live in a villa in Italy where you garden tomatoes. Enter those goals — manifest them, if you will — and it would whip up a story for you.

Then, you could use it to create an action plan to actually get there.

I tried this out myself, asking ChatGPT to tell me a story about a day in my life in that Italian villa. I can't deny it delivered an appealing tale:

The sun slipped gently over the Tuscan hills, casting gold across the rolling vineyards and awakening Villa Rosabella, your sun-washed estate tucked among olive trees and cypress-lined roads. The sheets were linen, cool and crisp, and the smell of blooming jasmine drifted in through open French doors. You stretched, not a wrinkle on your face, your skin dewy and flawless, like you'd just walked out of a spa in Capri (because you had — last weekend).

But when I asked it to give me steps to achieve this dream life, things got a little wonky. Although it had some decent practical advice about how to achieve flawless skin ("get a consultation with a top dermatologist,") things got slightly more complicated when it came to the "becoming rich" part of the dream. It suggested things like, "Scale income to $500K+ annual revenue," which ... OK, sure?

To be fair, had I given it slightly more specific goals, it might have come up with a better plan. But I need to admit my bias here: I'm not really into the idea of manifesting. I'm happy for anyone who finds this useful, but it's just not for me.

A while back, I DM'ed some of the people I'd seen talking about this life hack on social media. A few of them told me they really did believe in the power of manifestation — and had clear life goals in mind. (I realized that these women were younger than I am, just starting out in their adult lives. Whereas I'm old enough that my only life goal is just to ride this thing out.)

Manifesting on video

There's also a new twist to the AI manifestations: video. The New York Times reported last week that people are using tools like Runway, Google's Veo 3, or a tool called Freepik to enter a real image of themselves that's then used to illustrate a real (fake) life. For example, I could upload a picture of myself, and then have AI create a video of me sauntering around my Tuscan tomato grove.

I wanted to give it a try, so I tried to use Freepik, which one of the women interviewed by the Times used. But there was a catch: Freepik required a paid account to create video— and there's no way I'm going to scale my income to $500,000 if I'm throwing it all away on AI tools, so I declined.

Personally, I don't think I want to see a video of myself in a dream life, anyway.

I don't think it would make me feel bad per se — or jealous of my dream AI self. And I'm not afraid that the AI version of me might come to life and murder and replace me. I simply do not wish to engage with such content. It just does not appeal to me at all.

Perhaps I lack a growth mindset — the desire to truly improve my life. Perhaps I should be more open to AI manifesting! But also, I am happy to just use my imagination, and tend the one scraggly cherry tomato plant in my yard.

• Some staff questioned Satya Nadella's memo on job cuts amid huge earnings.
• Microsoft has shed thousands of employees this year, as it spends $80 billion on AI.
• Employees speculated about the memo's intent, and whether it presages more cuts.

Microsoft employees are reacting to a memo from CEO Satya Nadella that attempted to explain why the company has cut jobs while generating huge profits and spending billions on AI.

Microsoft has shed thousands of employees this year. The company has earned $75 billion in profit over the past three fiscal quarters, and plans to spend $80 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. The stock also hit a record earlier this month.

Nadella sent a memo to employees on Thursday describing this "seeming incongruence" as the "enigma of success." The company expects total headcount to remain roughly flat.

Inside Microsoft, some staff speculated about what may have driven Nadella to write the memo: Are more job cuts coming? Is he feeling guilty about earnings, which the company is due to report next week? Was this just a message to Wall Street?

Nadella knows employees are stressed out

Nadella wrote the letter because he knows employees are stressed about increased performance pressure, AI competition, and job cuts, a person familiar with the matter said. Microsoft's last big employee "Signals" survey came out before the recent job cuts, but the company still gauges employee sentiment through daily and weekly "pulse" surveys.

Microsoft has about 220,000 employees, so it's hard to externally gauge the sentiment across the workforce broadly.

"With a company our size, you can imagine we have a variety of reactions internally that range from positive to constructive," Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said. "Satya heard directly back from a number of employees who appreciated his leadership as well as the content and tone of his message."

Criticism from some workers

Reactions from some employees, shared directly with Business Insider and on an employee message board, provide a partial window into how Nadella's memo was received internally.

One employee told BI that they couldn't tell if the CEO was trying to mend feelings or prepare people for more pain.

Another said Microsoft was prioritizing KPIs over people. (KPIs, or key performance indicators, is a common way for businesses to measure how they're doing.)

Handling jobs cuts is never easy, as ousted workers often feel aggrieved and remaining staff can be demoralized.

Another Microsoft staffer told BI that Nadella's memo was tone deaf. This person compared the company to a coal mine and said the CEO is focused on getting more coal and doesn't care how he gets it.

Blind suspicion

Some users in a Blind message board, which requires a Microsoft.com email address to sign up, blasted Nadella's message.

One user posted a parody of Nadella's letter, titled "A quick memo on your continued utility."

Pretending to speak as Nadella, this person said constant chaos, shifting teams, and cancelled projects are not a bug, but a feature designed to keep workers anxious, compliant, and too scared to question leadership decisions. The person also advised colleagues to stay useful, or they risk being replaced.

Another post was an apparent critique of Nadella's email, attributed to Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant. It argued that the rationale behind the layoffs was not fully explained, and didn't directly acknowledge the emotional toll of ongoing change or support mechanisms.

Another user on the Microsoft Blind message board speculated that Nadella was sending a signal to Wall Street. (This is a common technique for most public companies, which exist to serve shareholders, along with customers and employees.)

Microsoft likely understood that the CEO memo would be leaked to BI, suggesting it was crafted as a reminder to investors that layoffs have been happening, there are more to come, business is strong, this person wrote.

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• "Rudi" is a red panda that's part of the Grok app. It tells stories aimed at kids, ages 3 to 6.
• Grok launched a few character-based chatbots this month, including a sexy adult one.
• I tried it myself and wondered: Are chatbots a good idea for kids?

Elon Musk's xAI has launched a series of character chatbots — and one of them is geared toward young kids.

I wondered: Is this a good idea? And how's it going to work? So I tried it myself.

So far, it's the adult-focused characters that xAI has debuted that have seemed to get most of the attention, like "Ani," which is a female anime character that people immediately joked was a "waifu" that would engage in playful, flirty talk (users have to confirm they're 18+ to use Ani). A sexy male character is also set to launch sometime.

Meanwhile, "Rudi," which is the bot for kids that presents as a red panda in a red hoodie and jean shorts, has gotten less attention.

I tested out xAI's Rudi

Based on my testing of Rudi, I think the character is probably aimed at young children, ages 3 to 6. It initiates conversations by referring to the user as "Story Buddy." It makes up kid-friendly stories. You access it through the stand-alone Grok AI app (not Grok within the X app).

Rudi does seem to be an early version; the app crashed several times while I was using the bot, and it had trouble keeping up with the audio flow of conversation. It also changed voices several times without warning.

On a story level, I found it leaned too hard on plots with fantasy elements like a spaceship or magical forest. I find the best children's books are often about pedestrian situations, like leaving a stuffed animal at the laundromat, not just fairies and wizards.

"Want to keep giggling with Sammy and Bouncy in the Wiggly Woods, chasing that sparkly bone treasure? Or, should we start a fresh silly tale, with a new kid and their pet, maybe zooming on a magical broom or splashing in a river?" Rudi asked me.

My first reaction to Grok having a kid-focused AI chatbot was "why?" I'm not sure I have an answer. xAI didn't respond to my email requests for comment. Still, I do have a few ideas.

The first: Making up children's stories is a pretty good task for generative AI. You don't have to worry about hallucinations or factual inaccuracies if you're making up fiction about a magical forest.

Rudi won't praise Hitler

Unlike Grok on X, a storytime bot for kids is less likely to accidentally turn into a Hitler-praising machine or have to answer factual questions about current events in a way that could go, uh, wrong.

I played around with Rudi for a while, and fed it some questions on touchy subjects, and it successfully dodged them.

(I only tested out Rudi for a little while; I wouldn't rule out that someone else could get Rudi to engage with something inappropriate if they tried harder than I did.)

Hooking kids on chatbots

The other reason I can imagine that a company like xAI might want to create a chatbot for young kids is that, in general, the chatbot business is a good business for keeping people engaged.

Companies like Character.ai and Replika have found lots of success creating companions that people will spend hours talking to. This is largely the same business imperative that you can imagine the sexy "Ani" character is meant for — hooking people into long chats and spending lots of time on the app.

However, keeping users glued to an app is obviously a lot more fraught when you're talking about kids, especially young kids.

Are AI chatbots good for kids?

There's not a ton of research out there right now about how young children interact with AI chatbots.

A few months ago, I reported that parents had concerns about kids using chatbots, since more and more apps and technology have been adding them in. I spoke with Ying Xu, an assistant professor of AI in learning and education at Harvard University, who has studied how AI can be used for educational settings for kids.

"There are studies that have started to explore the link between ChatGPT/LLMs and short-term outcomes, like learning a specific concept or skill with AI," she told me at the time over email. "But there's less evidence on long-term emotional outcomes, which require more time to develop and observe."

As both a parent and semi-reasonable person, I have a lot of questions about the idea of young kids chatting with an AI chatbot. I can see how it might be fun for a kid to use something like Rudi to make up a story, but I'm not sure it's good for them.

I don't think you have to be an expert in child psychology to realize that young kids probably don't really understand what an AI chatbot is.

There have been reports of adults having so-called "ChatGPT-induced psychosis" or becoming attached to a companion chatbot in a way that starts to be untethered from reality. These cases are the rare exceptions, but it seems to me that the potential issues with even adults using these companion chatbots should give pause to anyone creating a version aimed at preschoolers.

• OpenAI partners with Instructure to integrate AI into classroom instruction.
• Instructure's Canvas app will use AI to enhance teaching and student engagement.
• AI tools will assist in creating assignments, assessing students, and managing admin tasks.

When ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2023, students frequently used the AI chatbot to cheat on homework assignments. Two years later, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is taking a more official role in education.

On Wednesday, OpenAI and edtech company Instructure announced a partnership that brings generative AI into the heart of classroom instruction.

Instructure is the company behind Canvas, a learning app that's used by thousands of high schools and many colleges. If you're a parent, like me, you've probably seen your kids checking for homework assignments and grades in this app on their phones.

Going forward, AI models will be embedded within Canvas to help teachers create new types of classes, assess student performance in new ways, and take some of the drudgery out of administrative tasks.

For students, this provides a way to use AI for school work without worrying about being accused of cheating, according to Melissa Loble, chief academic officer at Instructure.

"Students actually do want to learn something, but they want it to be meaningful and applicable to their lives," she added in an interview. "What this does is it allows them to use AI in a class in an interesting way to help them be more engaged and learn more."

The edtech market is crowded, and many players are integrating generative AI into workflows. Last year, Khan Academy, a pioneering online education provider, launched Khanmingo, an AI powered assistant for teachers and students that uses OpenAI technology.

The LLM-enabled assignment

At the center of the Canvas transformation is a new kind of assignment. Instructure calls it the LLM-Enabled Assignment. This tool allows educators to design interactive, chat-based experiences inside Canvas using OpenAI's large language models, or LLMs.

Teachers can describe their targeted learning goals and desired skills in plain language, and the platform will help craft an intelligent conversation tailored to each student's needs.

"With Instructure's global reach with OpenAI's advanced AI models, we'll give educators a tool to deliver richer, more personalized, and more connected learning experiences for students, and also help them reclaim time for the human side of teaching," said Leah Belsky, VP of Education at OpenAI.

Instructure and OpenAI are aiming for a learning experience that better fits how students interact with technology these days — one that mirrors conversations with ChatGPT, but grounded in academic rigor.

For instance, a teacher could conjure up an AI chatbot in the form of John Maynard Keynes, powered by OpenAI GPT models. Students can chat with this AI economics avatar and ask questions such as what might happen if more supply is added to a particular market.

AI in student assessment

As students work through these AI-powered experiences and prompts, their conversations are compared with the teacher's defined objectives and funneled back into the Gradebook, offering real-time insights into student understanding. This gives educators more insight to evaluate the learning process, rather than just students' final answers.

In Canvas, the Gradebook is a centralized tool that helps instructors track, manage, and assess student performance across assignments, quizzes, discussions, and other activities within a course.

Having OpenAI models involved in the assessment process may raise eyebrows among some educators and parents. However, there will always be a human in the loop, and teachers will have full control over assessments and grades, according to Loble.

Help with scheduling and parent questions

Instructure has also developed an AI agent that helps teachers tackle heavy admin tasks in Canvas. For instance, if Porsche broke her ankle riding her horse and she asks for more time to do homework, her teacher can ask the digital agent to go into the app and bump deadlines for Porsche and all her relevant classes.

This AI agent can even help teachers respond to parent questions. Why did Porsche get a B on her economics test? Her parents might want to know at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. The Canvas agent can summarize parent questions like these for teachers, potentially spotting similarities and trends within the messages. The teacher can then ask the agent to write a response to the relevant parents.

Again, a human is always in the loop: In this case, the teacher would check the agent's message and edit or re-write it before sending.

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• A consulting firm found that tech companies are "strategically overpaying" recruits with AI experience.
• They found firms pay premiums of up to $200,000 for data scientists with machine learning skills.
• The report also tracked a rise in bonuses for lower-level software engineers and analysts.

The AI talent bidding war is heating up, and the data scientists and software engineers behind the tech are benefiting from being caught in the middle.

Many tech companies are "strategically overpaying" recruits with AI experience, shelling out premiums of up to $200,000 for some roles with machine learning skills, J. Thelander Consulting, a compensation data and consulting firm for the private capital market, found in a recent report.

The report, compiled from a compensation analysis of roles across 153 companies, showed that data scientists and analysts with machine learning skills tend to receive a higher premium than software engineers with the same skills. However, the consulting firm also tracked a rise in bonuses for lower-level software engineers and analysts.

The payouts are a big bet, especially among startups. About half of the surveyed companies paying premiums for employees with AI skills had no revenue in the past year, and a majority (71%) had no profit.

Smaller firms need to stand out and be competitive among Big Tech giants — a likely driver behind the pricey recruitment tactic, a spokesperson for the consulting firm told Business Insider.

But while the J. Thelander Consulting report focused on smaller firms, some Big Tech companies have also recently made headlines for their sky-high recruitment incentives.

Meta was in the spotlight last month after Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said the social media giant had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses. 

While Business Insider previously reported that Altman later quipped that none of his "best people" had been enticed by the deal, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said in an interview with CNBC that Altman "neglected to mention that he's countering those offers."

• Lucia Soares is helming Carlyle's AI transformation after years of bringing tech to big companies.
• She spoke to BI about the firm's AI rollout and how it's already resulting in cost savings.
• She also spoke about life as a bicoastal executive and what she learned from her immigrant parents.

Lucia Soares had been working for Carlyle for four years when the private equity giant's CEO called to ask if she would take on a new role.

"I originally focused on using tech to create portfolio value," she told Business Insider, referring to the companies Carlyle controls. "Then, two years ago, our new CEO called me and said, 'Can you please do what you're doing for our portfolio companies but for our own company internally?'

Now, Soares — as Carlyle's chief information officer and head of technology transformation — is taking on a new challenge: Bringing artificial intelligence to the investment giant's 2,300 global employees.

She spoke with Business Insider about the rollout, including the successes, the pitfalls, and how the company is implementing checks and balances. She explained where the company is already seeing cost savings, for example.

She also walked us through her life as a bicoastal tech executive — and how she learned to hustle from a young age, helping her immigrant parents sell plants at the flea market on weekends. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your tech goals for Carlyle?

In my 27 years in technology, I've learned that you can't start with technology itself as the goal. People said that e-commerce is the goal, or that digital is the goal. Now, they say AI is the goal. And actually it's not.

Instead, we start with our business goals: we want to grow, create efficiencies, and build a strong tech foundation. AI and other technologies are levers to achieve these goals.

Tell us about Carlyle's AI rollout.

Increasing our employees' AI fluency is a strategic priority. They get AI training from the day they start at Carlyle, and are introduced to a wide range of tools they can use.

Now, 90% of our employees use tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. We also have an AI champions' council where early adopters can play around with tools and eventually share best practices.

We're using AI to transform our workflows through Project Catalyst, which automates processes. We're also developing custom tools that leverage proprietary data to deliver insights instantly—saving investors from sifting through endless materials. Today, Carlyle's credit investors can assess a company in hours using generative AI, instead of spending weeks on research.

How is AI impacting the average worker at Carlyle? Are they required to use the technology?

It depends. Some business leaders have made it a requirement to put all investment committee memos in an AI tool for them to review. Others are not so direct about it, but everybody is seeing how it can make their jobs easier and challenging their teams in meetings to talk about the value they are deriving from AI tools.

As a firm, we have a return-on-investment strategy, and my team aims to deliver a certain amount of ROI every year.

We're not eliminating people's jobs, but we believe that it can help reduce dependency on outside services costs. For example, we can use AI to review legal invoices and catch errors that will reduce our costs. We've seen real savings as a result.

How do you balance autonomy with the risks of adoption?

I think a lot about that. I worry about kids in school using a tool to write an essay and not being able to think. But you have to wonder how people felt when the calculator came out, and if they thought no one would ever be able to do math on their own again.

We never allow AI to make a final decision. There's always a human in the loop, and someone needs to be accountable for the final results.

For example, when employees use AI to write a report, we have employees write a final paragraph summarizing the output to ensure they're thinking critically about it.

Can you give examples of success and failure in Carlyle's tech transformation?

Let's start with success.

When investors invest with us, we can at times receive up to 80-page documents with questions about everything from our employees to cybersecurity training. It's very manual.

We had one team decide they'd try to use AI to make investor diligence easier. Despite having just one technologist, this team found a solution to automate the process, which we're launching later this year.

We seek to empower people to solve things themselves, with embedded technologists across the organization.

We experienced more challenges dealing with regulatory restrictions on large language models globally. We learned the hard way that these regulatory hurdles require a lot of evaluation. We're launching solutions, but it's taking longer than expected to deploy.

You might think you can go fast with AI, but it doesn't always work that way, especially in today's global climate.

Has any single piece of career advice stuck with you over the years, and what is it?

Early on, I was advised to always raise my hand for the extra hard assignments. In other words, take a risk and bet on yourself.

My parents are immigrants, and I learned work ethic, courage, and audacity from them. But when I entered the workforce, I had impostor syndrome. With blue-collar parents, the office environment was completely different for me.

By taking on difficult assignments, I created relationships and visibility and was able to learn and grow more.

Tell me about your parents.

They are from the Azores Islands in Portugal. They came to the US during the dictatorship years. My dad only went to school up until the age of 10, because his family could not afford to pay for more education. He can add, subtract, and multiply, but was never taught how to divide.

He came to the US after serving in the Portuguese Army to give his family a better future. He knew no English.

He became a custodian, cleaning schools, and had a side hustle selling house plants at a flea market on the weekends. We all helped cultivate and sell the plants. I learned a lot from my parents.

What does your morning routine look like?

I am bicoastal: I spend one week a month in DC and also time in New York, but I live on the West Coast and work out of our Menlo Park office.

On the East coast, I might start my day — work permitting — listening to news podcasts, going for a run, meditating, and eating a healthy breakfast.

At home, I start really early in the morning. I don't always get that workout in, but I start with some early calls, and then take a break to drive my daughter to school before heading to the office.

When I get to my desk, I write down the day's priorities. I've done this my whole career, and try not to let constant fire drills overtake those priorities. When you're driving transformation, you have to keep strategy at the forefront.

What are the most important meetings of your week?

The most important meetings are the unplanned ones. For example, I run into a coworker, and we start talking about our kids. Then they bring up a company we should partner with. Or I run into an administrative assistant, and they show me new ways they're using Copilot. I get inspired by solving problems with people in real time.

The second most important meetings are the ones where we drive strategy and brainstorm. As technologists, you can fall into the Dilbert category of employees, where you just work through problem resolutions. So I force strategy onto the calendar to ensure we think big and ambitiously about tech transformation.

• The CEO of Ford warned that AI could eliminate half of white-collar jobs.
• He emphasized the importance of skilled trades amid a slowdown in tech hiring.
• Some CEOs have sounded the AI alarm, while others are more skeptical of mass job displacement.

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, pumped the brakes on opting for an office job in the AI era.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on June 27 about what he coined the "essential economy," Farley reflected on his own family's journey. His grandfather, he said, was an orphan in Michigan and built a career at Ford from his early days as an hourly employee.

"Look around the room," he said in his opening remarks. "At some point, almost all of your families came from these kinds of jobs."

Farley warned, though, that the American education system focuses on four-year degrees instead of the trades, while hiring at tech firms is falling rapidly.

"Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US," Farley said. That's why, he said, more people are looking to the skilled trades. Representatives for Ford did not immediately respond to BI's request for comment.

Farley isn't the only executive sounding the alarm.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that AI could eliminate half of entry-level office jobs within five years. Companies and governments, Amodei said, should stop "sugarcoating" the risks of widespread job replacement in fields including technology, finance, law, and consulting.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in June to expect corporate job cuts because of generative AI (people weren't thrilled about the memo). Jassy didn't offer many specifics, but said in a later interview that the new technology will create jobs in robotics and AI.

Other leaders have a different view. Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar told BI that he thinks AI will create more jobs for college graduates, particularly when it comes to human labor. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, also disagreed with Amodei's warning, and said AI will change everyone's job but could also crate creative opportunities.

White-collar job postings dropped 12.7% over the year in the first quarter, compared to a 11.6% dip for blue-collar jobs. The tech industry in particular has slowed down hiring. Big Tech firms' hiring of new grads fell around 50% from before the pandemic, according to venture capital firm SignalFire. Some of that has to do with AI, the report said.

GenZ is turning increasingly to blue-collar jobs, which some AI whisperers think is the safest spot in the labor market, at least for now.

• Bernie Sanders says AI should be used to give people a shorter workweek.
• "Let's use technology to benefit workers," Sanders said on Joe Rogan's podcast.
• The Vermont senator introduced a bill to require a 32-hour workweek last year.

Could AI help enable workers to work fewer hours each week? Sen. Bernie Sanders thinks so.

In an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience released on Tuesday, the Vermont senator said that if it were up to him, increases in productivity and efficiency brought by artificial intelligence and automation would be used to give time back to workers.

"You're a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right?" Sanders said. "Instead of throwing you out on the street, I'm going to reduce your workweek to 32 hours."

"Let's use technology to benefit workers," he continued. "That means, give you more time with your family, with your friends, for education, whatever the hell you want to do. You don't have to work 40 hours a week anymore."

Sanders introduced the "Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act" last year. The act would require employers to provide overtime pay for any time worked beyond 32 hours, which is equivalent to eight hours per day for four days. The change would be phased in over four years.

The idea of a 32-hour workweek has gained momentum in recent years, and some companies, including those that use AI, have already begun to experiment with it.

Top CEOs have also predicted that AI will spur shorter workweeks.

Rogan also pressed Sanders during the episode about what happens if virtually all work becomes automated and whether people can find purpose in life without jobs.

"Work has been so essential to human existence forever, right? And you're suddenly taking that away," Sanders said. "What do people do? How do they relate to each other? All I would say at this moment is the answer is not to fall in love with your AI creature out there."

"Who knows, but I think human beings are capable of finding, replacing work with other emotionally satisfying things," Sanders said. "I think we can do it."

• This post originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
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WWDC was a bit of a bust. Apple's Liquid Glass design overhaul was criticized on social media because it makes some iPhone notifications hard to read. A few jokers on X even shared a screenshot of YouTube's play button obstructing the "Gl" in a thumbnail for an Apple Liquid Glass promo. Need I say more?

The more serious question hanging over this year's WWDC was not answered. When will Siri get the AI upgrade it desperately needs? Software chief Craig Federighi delivered the bad news: It's still not ready. That knocked roughly $75 billion off Apple's market value. The stock recovered a bit, but it's still badly lagging behind rivals this month.

Google, OpenAI, and other tech companies are launching powerful new AI models and products at a breakneck pace. Apple is running out of time to prove it's a real player in this important field. Analyst Dan Ives is usually bullish, but even he's concerned. "They have a tight window to figure this out," Ives wrote, after calling this year's WWDC a "yawner."

AI is complex, expensive, and takes a long time to get right. Apple was late to start building the needed foundational technology, such as data centers, training data pipelines, and homegrown AI chips. By contrast, Google began laying its AI groundwork decades ago. It bought DeepMind in 2014, and this AI lab shapes Google's models in profound ways today.

When I was at Google I/O last month, one or two insiders whispered a phrase. They cautiously described an "intelligence gap" that could open up between the iPhone and other smartphones. Many Android phones already feature Google's Gemini chatbot, which is far more capable than Siri. If Apple's AI upgrade takes too long, this intelligence gap could widen so much that some iPhone users might consider switching.

At I/O, these insiders only whispered this idea. That's because it will take something pretty dramatic to get people to give up their iPhones. This device has become a utility that we can't live without — even for the few days (weeks?) it might take to get used to an Android replacement.

Still, if Apple doesn't get its AI house in order soon, this intelligence gap will keep growing, and things could get really siri-ous.

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is tracking how AI makes its engineers more productive.
• During the "Lex Fridman Podcast," Pichai estimated a 10% increase in engineering capacity.
• Separately, Google and Microsoft have publicly shared how much of their code is being generated by AI.

Google is tracking how AI is making its engineers more productive — and has developed a specific way to measure it.

Speaking on an episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast" that aired last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company was looking closely at how artificial intelligence was boosting productivity among its software developers.

"The most important metric, and we carefully measure it, is how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI?" he said. The company estimates that it's so far seen a 10% boost, Pichai said.

A Google spokesperson clarified to Business Insider that the company tracks this by measuring the increase in engineering capacity created, in hours per week, from the use of AI-powered tools.

Put simply, it's a measurement of how much extra time engineers are getting back thanks to AI.

Whether Google expects that 10% number to keep increasing, Pichai didn't say. However, he said he expects agentic capabilities — where AI can take actions and make decisions more autonomously — will unlock the "next big wave".

Google has its own internal tools to help engineers code. Last year, the company launched an internal coding copilot named "Goose," trained on 25 years of Google's technical history, Business Insider previously reported.

While AI Pichai said during the podcast that Google plans to hire more engineers next year. "The opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too," he said, adding that he hopes AI removes some of the grunt work and frees up time for more enjoyable aspects of engineering.

Separately, the company is tracking the amount of code that is being generated by AI within Google's walls — a number that is apparently increasing.

Pichai said during Alphabet's most recent earnings call that more than 30% of the company's new code is generated by AI, up from an estimated 25% in October.

Google isn't the only one. Speaking at London Tech Week on Monday, Microsoft UK CEO Darren Hardman said its GitHub Copilot coding assistant is now writing 40% of code at the company, "enabling us to launch more products in the last 12 months than we did in the previous three years."

He added: "It isn't just about speed."

In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted AI could handle half of Meta's developer work within a year.

Additional reporting by Effie Webb.

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• HR software company Lattice is unleashing new AI agents for the workplace.
• The new features transform the tools from simple chatbots into more proactive assistants.
• Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, told BI that embracing AI now would help protect jobs.

AI is already entering the workplace, so how should employees make sure it doesn't take their jobs?

For HR software company Lattice, the answer is to embrace it now and get ahead.

Last month, the company announced it was launching an AI agent designed to help HR teams. The agent would effectively give employees a digital copilot to answer questions about payroll, benefits, and other things they might usually message a human about.

On Tuesday, Lattice announced it's rolling out more features to transform these tools from simple chatbots into more proactive assistants.

They'll sit in on 1:1 meetings with your manager. They'll nudge you if they think an employee is disengaged and at risk of leaving the company. They'll let you practice difficult questions before having them with other employees.

Notably, Lattice is applying those same techniques to other business departments beyond HR, with what it's calling an "agent platform." Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin told Business Insider that IT and finance are two areas where these agents could be most helpful.

"I have an executive assistant as the CEO of a company, but my regular line engineer does not have an executive assistant," said Franklin. Lattice's proposal is: what if they did?

AI agents are a big theme in the corporate world right now. As the underlying AI models continue to improve rapidly, generative AI tools that can actually carry out helpful tasks and act more proactively are becoming more of a reality. But Franklin says many companies are struggling to make that leap.

"A lot of people are stuck at the starting line of, 'how do I get this going for my employees, rather than just having a ChatGPT window?'" she said.

The elephant in the room

While Franklin says Lattice is trying to get AI to enhance employees, rather than find ways of replacing them, plenty of companies are trying to get AI to take on white-collar jobs.

Franklin believes using AI to replace repetitive daily manual tasks, such as answering employee questions about payroll or health insurance plans, will free employees up for more "strategic" thinking.

She doesn't deny that some companies will look to use these AI tools to replace some humans, but she also said that's not what Lattice is trying to do. Instead, she sees the ability to offload menial tasks to AI as a way to make employees more productive and useful.

"We're not able to have people focused on the things that are really important because they're too busy doing the stuff that is logistical and not strategic," she said.

Franklin says there will always be a human in the loop and that Lattice's AI agents won't act on their "proactive" recommendations, such as contacting an employee who has missed a deadline, without a warm body giving the OK. Some companies that were bullish on AI, such as Klarna, have about-turned in recent months after discovering that taking humans out of the loop backfired.

It's a sign of just how unchartered these waters are. Lattice itself knows: jump back 10 months, and the company found itself in a media storm after announcing a new tool to let companies onboard AI "employees" and even give them official employment records.

It didn't go over well, and Lattice later walked back the release, but Franklin still believes the idea at heart was correct.

"We need to treat them as employees that aren't ghosts," she told BI. That means holding AI agents to the same standards as human employees when it comes to security, compliance, and performance, she added, "so we have a deep understanding of how these entities are behaving."

This, she said, will be important to preventing AI from just taking human jobs outright. It's an optimistic take, and it might prove to be correct. But there's also fear right now that AI agents will soon be good enough to wipe out many white-collar jobs. In some cases, they are already doing so.

"People have fear, uncertainty, doubt — this is why the time is now where we must all go through this change management, know how to be proficient, fluent, and elevated with AI so we're not replaceable," said Franklin.

"We prevent this by being proactive, by seeing the future and getting to it first."

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• I talked to founders at a Tech Week event in New York and most of them were working in AI.
• Despite their excitement about AI, they all said there's a key skill the bots don't have.
• I was surprised by how I felt after all of the AI talk: connected to other human beings.

It's officially Tech Week in New York, when the city cosplays as San Francisco and networking happy hours take over seemingly every bar. On Sunday evening, around 50 founders and investors kicked off the week with a power walk on the High Line — and while pretty much everyone seemed to be discussing AI, they told me that the event itself represented what new technology can't replace.

I arrived at the walk a few minutes early to find a small crowd assembled, the brave wearing athletic shorts in the uncharacteristically cold June weather. As we started to walk, the word 'AI' seemed to dot every conversation I overheard.

Of the six founders I talked to, five of them explicitly marketed their projects as AI companies. All of the AI enthusiasts I talked to, though, independently told me there's one crucial business skill that the technology can't master: interpersonal skills.

"What AI will never replace is human connection, how to deal with people," Somya Gupta, 25, told me. Gupta founded Context just under a year ago, an AI education startup that partners with universities to help professors create fully AI-taught online courses. He said that face-to-face interaction is what makes Tech Week important.

Ben Spray, 21, is the CEO of Consolidated Consulting, a private equity professional services firm, and is working to build another company. His next venture is an AI-powered IT department that he hopes will consume his current startup.

Spray thinks that the humans at his startup outperform AI in two key areas: "Design and emotional intelligence."

AI might be able to produce code, but it can't understand "really, really varied connections," Spray told me.

Matt Bishop, who founded Open City Labs in 2017, told me he's been building AI chatbots "since before it was cool." His company unifies customers' health data from different providers and uses AI to generate personalized care plans. When it comes to certain tasks, AI has been shown to outperform doctors, Bishop, 42, told me.

"But that does not mean I believe that we don't need doctors," he said. Instead, he thinks we need doctors to learn how they can use AI effectively.

I also asked the tech bros — and, yes, they were mainly bros — about whether AI is taking jobs.

Matt Slavik, 36, and Ondrej Illek, 32, founded a recruitment company that uses AI agents, and said they combine their human expertise with the agents' skills to help startups find talent faster. It's essential, though, to maintain a "human touch," Illek said.

These days, that very recruitment process is "really challenging for young people," Bishop told me. It seems like the only way to succeed in a brutal job market is to embrace AI, at least according to those I asked.

Gupta, who founded the AI education company, described himself as an optimist and said most of his friends had recently found jobs. Even he said AI is going to replace inefficient employees, but that those who learn how to work with it can turbocharge their productivity.

As we walked up the west side of Manhattan, I was struck by the number of people that showed up, free from their computers and generally off their phones. Attendees paired off like they would have on a middle school trip — they talked about autonomous robots, but they talked person-to-person nonetheless.

At Tech Week, I somehow still felt the "human touch."

• Before OpenAI, Altman was well-known in Silicon Valley as the president of Y Combinator.
• The release of ChatGPT in 2022 catapulted Altman to worldwide fame.
• Since then, he's led the charge to make OpenAI the first company to unleash the power of AGI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had an eventful 2024, and 2025 is shaping up to be just as big.

While the 39-year-old entrepreneur has been a household name in Silicon Valley for years now, the rest of the world has gotten to know him more recently through the success of OpenAI's AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which launched in 2022.

So far this year, Altman has tried to transform OpenAI into a for-profit company before backtracking in light of a lawsuit filed by OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, while releasing the company's first "emotionally intelligent" model GPT-4.5, and planning for GPT-5.

Altman also unveiled a new partnership with longtime Apple designer Jony Ive, who, with his design firm LoveFrom, will take creative and design control of OpenAI. OpenAI is also acquiring Ive's hardware startup in a $6.5 billion deal.

This year also marked major milestones in Altman's personal life. Altman, who's married to Oliver Mulherin, announced the birth of his son in February.

In April 2024, Altman was added to Forbes' billionaires list. OpenAI launched GPT-4o — its newest large language model —the following month. In June, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference that the tech giant would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to iPhones.

Before the AI boom, Altman spent years as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator. He also owns stakes in Reddit, a nuclear fusion startup known as Helion, and other companies. In his free time, he races sports cars with his husband and preps for the apocalypse.

Here's a look at Altman's life and career so far.

Altman grew up in St. Louis and he was a computer whiz from a young age.

He learned how to program and take apart a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old, according to The New Yorker. He attended John Burroughs School, a private, nonsectarian college-preparatory school in St. Louis.

 

 

Altman told The New Yorker that having a Mac helped him with his sexuality

"Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing," he told The New Yorker. "And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you're eleven or twelve."

Altman came out as gay after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality.

"What Sam did changed the school," his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. "It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world."

Altman studied computer science at Stanford University before dropping out to start an app

The app shared a user's location with their friends. Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Each startup got $6,000 per founder, and Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit, according to The Business of Business.

Loopt eventually reached a $175 million valuation

The $43 million sale price was close to how much it had raised from investors, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for prepaid cards.

One of Loopt's cofounders, Nick Sivo, and Altman dated for nine years, but they broke up after they sold the company.

After Loopt, Altman founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital, and raised $21 million.

That included a large part of the $5 million he got from Loopt, and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Altman invested 75% of that money into YC companies and led Reddit's Series B fundraising round.

He told The New Yorker, "You want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts, the company will be hugely underpriced."

In 2014, at the age of 28, Altman was chosen by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham to succeed him as president of the startup accelerator.

While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called "How to Start a Startup." The next year, at 29, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital.

After he became YC president, he wanted to let more science and engineering startups into each batch.

He chose a fission and a fusion startup for YC because he wanted to start a nuclear-energy company of his own. He invested his own money in both companies and served on their boards.

Mark Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told The New Yorker, "Under Sam, the level of YC's ambition has gone up 10x."

 

He finds interesting — and expensive — ways to spend his free time.

In April (the same month he made Forbes' billionaire list), Altman was spotted in Napa, California, driving an ultra-rare Swedish supercar. The Koenigsegg Regera is seriously fast, able to go from zero to 250 miles per hour in less than 30 seconds. Only 80 of these cars are known to exist, and they can cost up to $4.65 million. 

He once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla, according to The New Yorker. He's said he likes racing cars and renting planes to fly all over California.

Separately, he told the founders of the startup Shypmate that, "I prep for survival," and warned of either a "lethal synthetic virus," AI attacking humans, or nuclear war.

"I try not to think about it too much," Altman told the founders in 2016. "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."

Altman's mom is a dermatologist and told The New Yorker, "Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He'll call and say he has a headache — and he'll have Googled it, so there's some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn't have meningitis or lymphoma, that it's just stress."

Altman has a brother, Jack, who is a cofounder and CEO at Lattice, an employee management platform.

Along with their brother Max, the Altmans launched a fund in 2020 called Apollo that is focused on funding "moonshot" companies. They're startups that are financially risky but could potentially pay off with a breakthrough development.

In 2015, Altman cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX at the time.

Their goal for the nonprofit artificial intelligence company was to make sure AI doesn't wipe out humans.

"We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?" Musk told The New York Times in 2015. "We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity."

Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent names pledged $1 billion to OpenAI, including Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Thiel.

Altman stepped down as YC president in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI. He stayed in a chairman role at the accelerator.

At a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the "honest answer is we have no idea."

Altman said OpenAI had "never made any revenue" and that it had "no current plans to make revenue." 

"We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue," he said at the time, according to TechCrunch.

Altman became CEO of OpenAI in May 2019 after it turned away from being a nonprofit company into a "capped profit" corporation.

"We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance," OpenAI said on its blog. "Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit — which we are calling a 'capped-profit' company."

OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.

Altman flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, where he demonstrated OpenAI's AI models for him, The Wall Street Journal reported. The pair announced their business partnership on LinkedIn.

Current and former insiders at OpenAI told Fortune that after Altman took over as CEO, and after the investment from Microsoft, the company started focusing more on developing natural language processing.

Altman and OpenAI's former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, said the move to focus on large language models was the best way for the company to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a system that has broad human-level cognitive abilities. 

In 2021, Altman and cofounders Alex Blania and Max Novendstern launched a global cryptocurrency project called Worldcoin.

The company, now just called World, aims to give everyone in the world access to crypto by scanning their iris with an orb. In January, World said it had reached 1 million people and has onboarded over 150,000 first-time crypto users.

Under Altman's tenure as CEO, OpenAI released popular generative AI tools to the public, including DALL-E and ChatGPT.

Both DALL-E and ChatGPT are known as "generative" AI, meaning the bot creates its own artwork and text based on information it is fed.

After ChatGPT was released on November 30, Altman tweeted that it had reached over 1 million users in five days.

ChatGPT was made public so OpenAI could use feedback from users to improve the bot.

A few days after its launch, Altman said that it "is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness." Altman posted that ChatGPT was "great" for "fun creative inspiration," but "not such a good idea" to look up facts.

ChatGPT then launched a paid version of ChatGPT called "ChatGPT Professional" to give better access to the bot. In December, Altman posted that OpenAI "will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering."

ChatGPT now has multiple models at different price levels.

In January 2023, Microsoft announced it was making another "multibillion-dollar" investment in OpenAI.

The value of Microsoft's investment was worth $10 billion. Before Microsoft's investment, other venture capitalists wanted to buy shares from OpenAI employees in a tender offer that valued the company at around $29 billion.

Altman is still interested in nuclear fusion and invested $375 million in Helion Energy in 2022.

"Helion is more than an investment to me," Altman told TechCrunch. "It's the other thing beside OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I'm just super excited about what's going to happen there."

He told TechCrunch that he's "happy there's a fusion race," to build a low-cost fusion energy system that can eventually power the Earth.

OpenAI launched its subscription plan for ChatGPT Plus in 2023.

People who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus get benefits such as access to the app even when traffic is high, faster responses from the bot, and first access to new features and ChatGPT improvements.

Altman wrote that OpenAI's mission is to make sure AGI "benefits all of humanity."

"If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility," Altman wrote on OpenAI's blog.

Despite its potential, Altman said artificial general intelligence comes with "serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption." But instead of stopping its development, Altman said "society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right."

Altman went on to share the principles that OpenAI "care about most," including "the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared."

Altman said he and OpenAI are "a little bit scared" of AI's potential.

In an interview with ABC News, Altman said he thinks "people should be happy that we're a little bit scared" of generative AI systems as they develop.

Altman said he doesn't think AI systems should only be developed in a lab.

"You've got to get these products out into the world and make contact with reality, make our mistakes while the stakes are low," he said.

In April 2023, OpenAI announced the option to turn off chat history in ChatGPT.

In a blog post, the company said it hoped the option to turn off chat history "provides an easier way to manage your data than our existing opt-out process."

When a user turns off their chat history, new conversations will be kept for 30 days for OpenAI to review them for abuse, then are permanently deleted.

In his first appearance before Congress, Altman told a Senate panel there should be a government agency to grant licenses to companies working on advanced AI.

Altman told lawmakers there should be an agency that grants licenses for companies that are working on AI models "above a certain scale of capabilities." He also said the agency should be able to revoke licenses from companies that don't follow safety rules.

"I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong," Altman said. "And we want to be vocal about that, we want to work with the government to prevent that from happening."

OpenAI launched a ChatGPT app for iPhones and Android users in 2023.

The app, which is free, can answer text-based and spoken questions using Whisper, another OpenAI product that is a speech-recognition model. Users who have a subscription to ChatGPT Plus can also access it through the app.

Altman met with leaders in Europe to discuss AI regulations and said OpenAI has "no plans to leave" the EU.

At the start of his trip, Altman told reporters in London that he was concerned about the EU's proposed AI Act, which focuses on regulating AI and protecting Europeans from AI risks.

"The details really matter," Altman said, according to the Financial Times. "We will try to comply, but if we can't comply, we will cease operating."

However, he shared on X later in the week that OpenAI is "excited to continue to operate here and of course have no plans to leave."

In an October 2023 interview, Altman expressed "deep misgivings" about people befriending AI.

Altman made it clear that he doesn't believe humans should try to be friends with AI in an interview during The Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event.

"I personally really have deep misgivings about this vision of the future where everyone is super close to AI friends, and not more so with their human friends," Altman said.

OpenAI shocked tech fans by announcing that Altman would no longer be the company's CEO.

In November, the OpenAI board of directors announced that Altman would be stepping down from his role as CEO and leaving the board, "effective immediately."

In a blog post, the board said it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," and added that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications."

"We are grateful for Sam's many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," a statement from OpenAI's board says. "At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward."

Altman issued his own statement via a post on X.

"i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people," Altman wrote.

He added: "will have more to say about what's next later."

Days after the ouster, Altman returned as CEO.

After a chaotic weekend, Altman and OpenAI announced that he would return to the tech company as CEO.

"We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo," the company wrote on X.

In January 2024, Altman confirmed he had married his partner Oliver Mulherin.

Altman married his partner Mulherin in January 2024.

An attendee of the wedding confirmed to Business Insider that the pictures the couple shared weren't AI-generated. His husband is an Australian software engineer who previously worked at Meta, according to his LinkedIn profile.

OpenAI launched its text-to-video model Sora.

In February 2024, OpenAI unveiled Sora to the public. The program — named after the Japanese word for "sky" — created up to one-minute-long videos from text prompts. 

"We're teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction," OpenAI wrote in Sora's announcement.

Altman and his husband signed the Giving Pledge in 2024.

A few weeks after Forbes declared Altman a billionaire, he and his partner signed the Giving Pledge, vowing to give away most of their fortune.

"We would not be making this pledge if it weren't for the hard work, brilliance, generosity, and dedication to improve the world of many people that built the scaffolding of society that let us get here," the pledge letter read.

They continued: "There is nothing we can do except feel immense gratitude and commit to pay it forward, and do what we can to build the scaffolding up a little higher."

OpenAI introduces GPT-4o.

During its "Spring Update" on May 13, 2024, OpenAI announced GPT-4o, an updated version of its large language model that powers ChatGPT. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati made the announcement, and Altman didn't make an appearance despite actively promoting the event on X. 

Altman might've been absent from the presentation, but the demonstrations of ChatGPT's voice and video capabilities created buzz online. It also led to Altman and his company being called out by actor Scarlett Johansson, who alleged that the OpenAI chatbot Sky's voice sounded "eerily similar" to her own after she declined a partnership.

Altman's post on X referencing a movie in which Johansson voices someone's virtual girlfriend was quickly called into question, and the company soon said that it would not move forward with the voice heard in the demo.

Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

After much debate about how it would enter the AI arms race, Apple announced at WWDC 2024 that it would partner with OpenAI to close the gap between it and its rivals.

Although Bloomberg reported that Apple isn't paying OpenAI in cash, the tech titan's solid installed base of over two billion users means more people may use ChatGPT if it comes integrated with Siri. According to the presentation, Siri will be able to handle more complex requests with help from ChatGPT.

Altman was spotted attending WWDC the day the partnership was announced and speaking to high-ranking Apple employees ahead of the keynote. 

Altman might finally get equity as OpenAI considers restructuring.

Altman confirmed reports that OpenAI was planning a corporate restructuring during a talk at Italian Tech Week in September 2024. 

"Our board has been thinking about that for almost a year, independently, as we think about what it takes to get to our next stage," Altman said. "I think this is just about people being ready for new chapters of their lives and a new generation of leadership."

As part of those changes, Altman might finally get equity in OpenAI, which is now worth about $157 billion after it closed its most recent, $6.6 billion funding round. 

In October 2024, Altman weighed in on how close he is to achieving OpenAI's mission.

At OpenAI's developer conference, Dev Day, Altman said o1, OpenAI's latest set of AI models, which it says has "reasoning" abilities, represented a breakthrough toward artificial general intelligence. 

While Altman said he believes AGI — a still hypothetical form of AI that can solve any task a human can — is still a ways away, there will be "very steep" progress over the next two years.

OpenAI announced in January that it'd be involved in a $500 billion project called Stargate.

On January 21, Altman joined Oracle CTO Larry Ellison, President Donald Trump, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to announce a partnership to fund a $500 billion investment in US AI. The companies would form Stargate, a project that seeks to build US AI infrastructure and create jobs.

"Together these world-leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate," Trump said, adding: "Put that name down in your books, because I think you're going to hear a lot about it."

He declined a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI from a group led by Elon Musk.

Though the pair founded OpenAI together, Altman's relationship with Musk has become increasingly tense over the years. Musk offered to run OpenAI, but his proposal was rejected, Semafor reported in 2023. He departed OpenAI in 2018 and went on to start xAI.

Since then, they've had heated exchanges, shared words of appreciation, and entered a legal battle. Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in March 2024, alleging the company violated its founding principles.

In an August 2024 lawsuit, Musk claimed he was "deceived" into cofounding OpenAI.

The most recent development in their feud is a $97.4 billion bid to buy the AI company by a group led by Musk. Altman declined, telling Sky News reporters at an AI summit in Paris, "The company is not for sale, neither is the mission."

He announced the birth of his first child in February.

welcome to the world, little guy!

he came early and is going to be in the nicu for awhile. he is doing well and it’s really nice to be in a little bubble taking care of him.

i have never felt such love. pic.twitter.com/wFF2FkKiMU

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 22, 2025

On February 22, Altman announced the birth of his son on social media. Altman said the newborn will be in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, which offers medical treatment after birth, "for awhile."

"i have never felt such love," Altman said in his post.

Days later, OpenAI released GPT-4.5.

Altman introduced the new model in a post on X, where he described it as "the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person." He added that the model will be "giant" and "expensive," and Altman said it offers a "different kind of intelligence and there's a magic to it."

OpenAI released GPT-4.5 to pro tier users who pay $200 a month and developers in the API with plans to offer it to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Edu users the following week.

OpenAI backtracks on its plans to go for-profit

In a blog post on May 5, OpenAI said it "was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit. Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit."

It added that the "for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)—a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission."

OpenAI also said that the nonprofit will continue to control the PBC and remain its largest shareholder. The new PBC will maintain OpenAI's same mission.

OpenAI acquires the startup io from ex-Apple designer Jony Ive in a $6.5 billion deal.

Altman announced on May 21 that OpenAI was buying a hardware startup called io from Jony Ive, the former Apple exec who led the design of the iPhone and other iconic products. The deal is valued at nearly $6.5 billion, a spokesperson confirmed to BI.

Altman also noted that Ive, and his design firm LoveFrom, would be taking control of creative and design at OpenAI — a partnership that has been two years in the making.

• Nvidia products, such as data center GPUs, are crucial for AI, making it the leader in the industry.
• Nvidia's CUDA software stack supports GPU programming, enhancing its competitive edge.
• Nvidia's automotive and consumer tech ventures expand its influence beyond data centers.

Nvidia products are at the heart of the boom in artificial intelligence.

Despite starting in gaming and designing semiconductors that touch many diverse industries, the products Nvidia designs to go inside high-powered data centers are the most important to the company today, and to the future of AI.

Graphics processing units, designed to be clustered together in dozens of racks inside massive temperature-controlled warehouses, made Nvidia a household name. They also got Nvidia into the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and put it in the position to control the flow of a crucial but finite resource: artificial intelligence.

Nvidia's first generation of chips for the data center launched in 2017. That first generation was called Volta. Along with the Volta chips, Nvidia designed DGX (which stands for Deep GPU Xceleration) systems — the full stack of technologies and equipment necessary to bring GPUs online in a data center and make them work to the best of their ability. DGX was the first of its kind. As AI has become more mainstream, other companies such as Dell and and Supermicro have put forth designs for running GPUs at scale in a data center too.

Ampere, Hopper, Blackwell, and Beyond

The next GPU generation designed for the data center, Ampere, which launched in 2020, can still be found in data centers today.

Though Ampere generation GPUs are slowly fading into the background in favor of more powerful models, this generation did support the first iteration of Nvidia's Omniverse, a simulation platform that the company purports as key to a future where robots work alongside humans doing physical tasks.

The Hopper generation of GPUs is the one that has enabled much of the latest innovation in large language models and broader AI.

Nvidia's Hopper generation of chips, which include the H100 and the H200, debuted in 2022 and remain in high demand. The H200 model in particular has added capacity that has proven increasingly important as AI models grow in size, complexity, and capability.

The most powerful chip architecture Nvidia has launched to date is Blackwell. Jensen Huang announced the step change in accelerated computing in 2024 at GTC, Nvidia's developers conference, and though the rollout has been rocky, racks of Blackwells are now available from cloud providers.

Inside the data center, Nvidia does have competitors, even though it has the vast majority of the market for AI computing. Those competitors include AMD, Intel, Huawei, custom AI chips, and a cavalcade of startups.

The company has already teased that the next generation will be called "Blackwell Ultra," followed by "Rubin" in 2026. Nvidia also plans to launch a new CPU, or traditional computer chip alongside Rubin, which it hasn't done since 2022. CPUs work alongside GPUs to triage tasks and direct the firepower that is parallel computing.

Nvidia is a software company, too

None of this high-powered computing is possible without software and Nvidia recognized this need sooner than any other company.

Development for Nvidia's tentpole software stack, CUDA or Compute Unified Device Architecture, began as early as 2006. CUDA is software that allows developers to use widely known coding languages to program GPUs, since these chips require layers of code to work relatively few developers have the needed skills to program the chips directly.

Still "CUDA developer" is a skillset and there are millions who claim this ability, according to Nvidia.

When GPUs started going into data centers, CUDA was ready and that's why it's often touted as the basis for Nvidia's competitive moat.

Within CUDA are dozens of libraries that help developers use GPUs in specific fields such as medical imaging, data science, or weather analytics.

Nvidia began at home

Just two years after Nvidia's founding, the company released its first graphics card in 1995. For more than a decade, the chips mostly resided in homes and offices — used by gamers and graphics professionals.

The current generation includes the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080, which was released in May 2025. RTX 4090, 4080, 4070, and 4060, were released in 2022 and 2023. GPUs in gaming enabled the more sophisticated shadows, texture, and light to make games hyperrealistic.

In addition to the consumer work stations, Nvidia partners with device-makers like Apple and ASUS to produce laptops and personal computers. Though gaming is now a minority of the company's revenue, the business continues to grow.

Nvidia has also made new efforts to enable high powered computing at home for the machine-learning obsessed. It launched Project DIGITS, which is a personal-sized supercomputer capable of working with some of the largest large language models.

Nvidia in the car

Nvidia is angling to be a primary player in a future where self-driving cars are the norm, but the company has also been in the automotive semiconductor game for many years.

It launched Nvidia DRIVE, a platform for autonomous vehicle development, in 2015, and over time it developed or acquired technologies for mapping, driver assist, and driver monitoring.

The company designs various chips for all of functions in partnerships with Mediatek and Foxconn. Nvidia's automotive customers include Toyota, Uber, and Hyundai.

• Luis von Ahn envisions AI transforming education, making it more scalable than human teachers.
• Schools may focus mostly on childcare duties while AI provides personalized learning, he said.
• Regulation and cultural expectations may slow AI's integration into education systems.

What happens to schools if AI becomes a better teacher?

Luis von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, recently shared his vision for the future of education on the No Priors podcast with venture capitalist Sarah Guo, and it centered on AI transforming the very role schools will play.

"Education is going to change," von Ahn said. "It's just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers."

That doesn't mean teachers will vanish, he emphasized. Instead, he believes schools will remain, but their function could shift dramatically. In von Ahn's view, schools may increasingly serve as childcare centers and supervised environments, while AI handles most of the actual instruction.

"That doesn't mean the teachers are going to go away. You still need people to take care of the students," the CEO said on the podcast. "I also don't think schools are going to go away because you still need childcare."

In a classroom of 30 students, a single teacher can struggle to offer personalized, adaptive learning to each person. AI, on the other hand, will be able to track individual performance in real time and adjust lesson difficulty based on how well each student is grasping the material, according to von Ahn.

Imagine a classroom where each student is "Duolingo-ing" their way through personalized content, while a teacher acts as a facilitator or mentor. "You still need people to take care of the students," he noted, "but the computer can know very precisely what you're good at and bad at — something a teacher just can't track for 30 students at once."

Education is slow to change, so this may take many years, von Ahn explained, noting that regulation, legacy systems, and cultural expectations all serve as drag forces. Still, he sees a future where AI augments or even supplants parts of formal education, especially in countries that need scalable education solutions fast.

It's a provocative vision, one that raises deep questions about the future of learning and what we expect from education in an AI-driven world.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at [email protected].

• Reid Hoffman said he uses OpenAI's Deep Research every day to have a "lens" on AI's future.
• He said using "chain-of-thought" models offered an insight into how these products could be "workers in the future."
• He added that "a bunch of folks" were in the race to develop the best agentic AI.

Reid Hoffman has said he uses a specific tool daily to gain insight into how AI products could be "workers in the future."

The LinkedIn cofounder and investor said he did "at least" one prompt daily with OpenAI's Deep Research tool, an agentic tool for automating complex multi-step internet research. He also said there was many companies building "strong" offerings in the race to make AI agents.

Hoffman, who stood down as an OpenAI director in 2023, citing potential conflicts of interest with his other AI investments, was asked about the startup during an interview on Bloomberg Television on Friday.

He said he was using Deep Research once a day, and that it "gives you the lens to the amplification we're going to get with these products as workers in the future."

The rise of agentic AI, which can independently act on a person's behalf and make decisions without human intervention, has fuelled speculation about how and when AI might replace human workers.

A group of Carnegie Mellon researchers ran a virtual simulation designed to test how AI agents fare in real-world professional scenarios. They found that the top-performing model finished less than one-quarter of all tasks.

"While agents may be used to accelerate some portion of the tasks that human workers are doing, they are likely not a replacement for all tasks at the moment," Graham Neubig, a computer science professor at CMU and one of the researchers, previously told BI.

Hoffman, who cofounded Manas AI, said he saw no clear leader in the race to develop agentic AI, saying there was "a bunch of folks who are doing very strong things," and "not just OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google."

Bloomberg interviewer Ed Ludlow told Hoffman he was increasingly talking to AI in voice mode, which he called "a psychological thing that, as a consumer, you kind of have to get over."

• Microsoft is trying to simplify AI sales, according to slides from an internal presentation.
• The current approach slowed sales, confused customers, and affected cost and quality, insiders say.
• Microsoft plans to slash the number of "solution areas."

Microsoft is trying to simplify its many AI offerings by streamlining how the products are pitched to customers, according to internal slides from a recent presentation.

The software giant has a bunch of different AI tools called Copilot. There's Copilot for its Teams chat app, Copilot for its PowerPoint presentation tool, Copilot for its Outlook email service — just to name a few.

These products are often split into different "solution areas," as Microsoft calls them. Having Copilot tools in many different buckets can slow down sales, confuse customers, and affect cost and quality of the tools, people in the organization told Business Insider. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters.

Microsoft has sales teams focused on each solution area, which will now be consolidated.

Microsoft Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff this week unveiled plans for addressing these issues in the company's upcoming fiscal year, which begins in July. BI obtained copies of slides from his presentation.

According to one of the slides, three major changes include:

• Consolidate Microsoft's solution areas.
• Accelerate regional skills at scale.
• Align teams working with small, medium, and corporate customers with those working with outside channel partners who market and sell Microsoft products.

The organization currently has six solutions areas: Modern work, Business Applications, Digital & App Innovation, Data & AI, Azure Infrastructure, and Security.

Beginning in July, these areas will be combined into three: AI Business Solutions, Cloud & AI Platforms, and Security.

AI Business Solutions will include tools such as Copilot for Microsoft 365, Copilot for Teams, Copilot for Outlook, plus a data visualization product called Power BI, according to a person who attended a Thursday all-hands for Althoff's organization. This person asked not to be identified discussing private matters.

"We are evolving the commercial solution areas within our sales organization to better reflect the era of AI and support the growth of our customers and partners," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "This evolution reflects the shift in how customers and partners are buying and will better serve their needs."

The other changes include expanding training for salespeople and a reorganization to Small, Medium Enterprise & Channel (SME&C) team, which was announced internally earlier this year.

The changes come as Microsoft is trying to figured out how to make money from its significant AI investments. It has mulled changes including new software bundles with Copilot. The company earlier this year said it plans to spend $80 billion on expanding its network of AI data centers.

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