What's on Your Mind?

The boom in data center construction is taking up much of the supply of high-tech components, especially processor and memory chips. This demand is squeezing consumer device makers, which are having trouble acquiring enough chips. This is happening even though data center servers and smartphones use different types of chips. The key distinction between consumer electronics and data centers is what they need chips to be optimized for. Smartphones and PCs require low power use, thermal efficiency, and tight integration. Data centers that run AI systems such as large language models, or LLMs, require maximum compute power, memory bandwidth, and storage throughput. To…

On Wednesday, Nvidia and Corning announced a $500 million deal to build fiber-optic cables to power AI data centers. For Nvidia, which manufactures graphics processing units key to building and training top-tier AI models, the partnership will help the chipmaker reduce latency and energy consumption for AI systems and likely accelerate its move to co-packaged optics. This would have fiber connections more directly integrated with chips. Per a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Nvidia now has a pre-funded warrant to purchase 3 million shares in Corning and the option to purchase 15 million more. As part of the agreement, Corning says it will increase its optic…

Fire Rover is all about responding quickly and efficiently to crises: The Farmington Hills, Michigan-based tech company—which has now cracked the Inc. 5000 list five years in a row—works to detect and extinguish industrial fires before they get too big. So it’s fitting that Will Schmidt, Fire Rover’s CEO, joined the company in a moment of crisis, too. Schmidt says he initially met the Fire Rover team at a trade show in early 2018, back when he was still working for Pacific Western Bank. The firefighting company so interested him that he made a trip out to their Detroit-area headquarters for a tour. “It didn’t really fit into any box that I had at the time—it w…

Is it just me or is every app update lately promising to “reimagine my workflow” with a new generative assistant? My toaster probably has a chatbot now. We’ve reached a point where software is trying so hard to think for us that it’s actually making it harder to just do the work. In other words, when everything is “smart,” everything is noisy. If you’re feeling the same AI fatigue while trying to manage a career, a household, and a few side projects, here are three pure-utility apps that are actually free and refreshingly, wonderfully dumb. Joplin If you’ve been in the tech world for a while, you remember when Evernote was the king of the mountain, before i…

One of the most daunting tasks when you start a new job is developing trust with your new colleagues. Whether you’re new to the world of work or an experienced hand, you are still starting at ground-zero with your new colleagues when you walk in the door. While you’re likely to get the benefit of the doubt, you still need to develop a rapport quickly and help people to see that you can be relied on. Here are four suggestions to get you started. 1. Find a couple of quick wins You want your new colleagues to see that you can be successful at your work. Unfortunately, many projects can take a while to complete and determining whether those projects are successful …

Middle managers are at a crossroads right now. With the “Great Flattening” reducing management layers, many managers face an uncomfortable choice: stay put and risk layoffs, burnout, and declining mental health, or try a different career strategy entirely. Fractional work presents a new solution to this growing career dilemma. In a fresh spin on part-time work, fractional workers perform a “fraction” of a full-time job, often for multiple companies at once. For companies, middle managers “going fractional” actually solves several problems. First, fractional middle managers form a workforce that scales upward to meet business needs but can be reduced in a downtur…

“No more reading emails, OK?” says tech founder and content creator Jason Yeager’s satirical boss character MyTechCeo in a recent TikTok skit. “I want your AI reading my AI-generated email—and answering my email.” It’s a parody, but only just. AI emails are proliferating across industries. In October, LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky said he uses AI for almost every “super high-stakes” email he sends. And a recent survey from the email verification software company ZeroBounce found that one in four respondents admit to using it daily for drafting or editing their own emails. On Reddit, employees swap stories about bosses who use AI “to answer every email at wo…

Weight loss culture in America is nothing new: Our collective obsession with being thin is more than a societal ideal—it’s practically a religion. But in a country where self-improvement through hard work is lauded, the quick-fix GLP-1 weight loss revolution—without the “no-pain, no-gain” labor—might just rub people the wrong way. That’s the suggestion of a new Rice University study published last month in the International Journal of Obesity. According to the study, despite the popularity of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound and their impressive effectiveness, and despite that many people praise the dramatic results, your friends and neighbors may still …

As a CEO operating within the global supply chain—where every purchase is tied to efforts to end forced and child labor—I think often about what work is for: not just making it faster, but making it matter. That’s what makes the latest Gallup findings on AI so striking. The headline insight isn’t productivity. It’s something more revealing: We’re becoming more efficient, but not more engaged. Employees say AI is making them more productive, yet global employee engagement has declined for two consecutive years, now sitting at just 20%. We’re optimizing how work gets done, but for many people, we’re eroding the experience of doing it. That gap is a failure of intent…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Before a home falls into foreclosure, the warning signs typically appear months earlier. A borrower first misses a payment or two, landing in the 30- or 60-day delinquency bucket. If financial stress persists, they fall further behind—90 to 180 days past due—and only around then (lenders generally can’t start foreclosure until a borrower is at least 120 days delinquent) does the foreclosure process typically begin. This progression matters because the pipeline of early-stage delinquencies today tells us a great deal about where foreclosure activity i…

Owners of some iPhones are in line to get cash payments of up to $95 from Apple after the company on Tuesday reached a $250 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit for false advertising of its artificial intelligence capabilities. Apple The Presidenteted new AI features for its virtual assistant Siri when it rolled out the iPhone 16 in 2024, part of new software updates that the company billed as “Apple Intelligence.” The company has been scrambling to keep up with tech rivals amid the AI boom but still hasn’t delivered on the Siri revamp two years later. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of U.S. consumers in the San Francisco federal court for the Northern District of…

When you’re building sets for a musical that’s populated by flying vampires, you have to challenge yourself to think three-dimensionally. But Dane Laffrey is used to challenging himself. Over the course of his decades-long career in theater, the Tony-winning scenic designer has been tasked with bringing to life some of the most memorable sets in recent Broadway history—from a sandy, 360-degree Caribbean archipelago for the 2017 revival of Once on This Island to the futuristic South Korea setting of 2024’s Maybe Happy Ending. Now Laffrey’s set designs are literally soaring to new heights—while also sinking to new depths—in The Lost Boys, a dynamic and a…

If you thought that embodied AI was all about humanoids and robotic good boys, allow me to introduce you to the Shuanglin K7. Equipped with a Level 4 driving brain that allows it to operate with no human intervention, this massive robot on four wheels can literally move on a dime, rotating 360 degrees on its own vertical axis and moving sideways like a crab, operating 24/7. According to its developers—Shuanglin Group and Tsinghua University—this massive 17.1-foot-tall robo-truck is the first of its kind and they believe it will forever change the mining industry. The vehicle represents a structural shift toward replacing human operators with digital systems to im…

A new survey of 900 CEOs around the world made one thing clear: company execs are feeling the heat when it comes to delivering on AI promises. According to new research from AI company Dataiku and The Harris Poll, most CEOs surveyed view the survival of a company as being tethered to the success of AI tools. The survey shows that nearly three-quarters (72%) of U.S. CEOs are feeling the pressure from their boards to prove AI-driven outcomes and ROI. That anxiety is fueling how executives think about their futures. A total of 80% of CEOs said their job is at risk if AI fails this year. The survey also shows that 81% of U.S. CEOs said they believe a fellow CEO …

Like many domestic workers, Leydy is no stranger to wage theft. In a previous job, Leydy had been hired as a cleaner and then asked to take on more and more responsibilities, from cooking to childcare—with no additional pay. When she approached her employer and said she either needed a raise or additional help, she was fired, and she never got paid for her work that week. “In my rage, I went to the police,” she told Fast Company through a translator. (Leydy requested to only use her first name to avoid potential retaliation.) “They told me I had to get a lawyer and go to court in Newark. If I wasn’t getting paid, how could I pay for a lawyer?” A new AI chatbot bu…

Pay transparency is having a moment. Across Europe and beyond, new regulations are pushing organizations to disclose salary bands, justify pay differences, and confront longstanding inequities. It is a necessary shift and it’s long overdue. But there is a risk that, in focusing exclusively on base salary, companies miss a more elusive and equally consequential driver of inequality: the bonus gap. Bonuses, incentives, and variable pay are often treated as secondary components of compensation. They are not. In many roles, they represent a substantial share of total earnings. More importantly, they are where discretion thrives and bias follows. I learned this early. …

Fake accounts have been around as long as social media. So when it was recently revealed that a “hot girl” MAGA personality named Emily Hart was actually a 22-year-old male medical student in India, it might have seemed a little mundane. Just another catfisher, another sock puppet, another scammer—the internet is full of them. Except this one had photos. And videos. And thousands of followers across multiple networks with some posts getting millions of views. Emily Hart was a full-on influencer, not just some anonymous egg. The person who created Emily confessed to Wired that while the account was active, he was making thousands of dollars every month from posting sof…

AI isn’t all about automating core business functions at Fortune 500 companies. Small and medium-sized businesses can also use AI to optimize, economize, and in some cases compete more effectively against much larger rivals. An Austin, Texas–based vegan cheese-maker called Rebel Cheese used it to level the playing field against a larger supplier. Specifically, the company developed a small system of AI tools to help it claw back overcharges from a major shipping carrier. The company is perhaps best known for winning a $750,000 investment from Mark Cuban, money it used to grow Rebel Cheese into what it says is now a $20 million business. Cuban recently spoke about …

Yesterday, Giorgia Meloni posted to X an AI-generated photo of herself wearing only lingerie. The Italian prime minister published the image to warn others about how easy it is to create perfectly believable images and videos. Her warning: Never believe anything you see without thoroughly fact-checking it. After all, we live in the end of reality. “Deepfakes are a dangerous tool, because they can deceive, manipulate, and hit anyone,” Meloni said on X. “I can defend myself. Many others don’t.” She is right, even though the image is not technically a deepfake. It’s a fully AI-generated photo that features her face. Unlike early deepfakes, which simply switched t…

The conversation is changing. For the first time ever, the person or thing on the other side of an interaction isn’t always human. Every time I talk with other executives, the “agentic future” comes up. It’s a compelling idea: agents replacing old systems to actually solve problems for us without oversight. With more than a billion AI agents poised to handle everything from customer complaints to complex trades by 2029, the hurdle isn’t the tech itself. It’s whether we can actually trust it. The reality is that most businesses are stuck in the pilot stage. Not for failure of imagination, but because we don’t have the right tools to move from a cool demo to a smart sys…

Sales are booming for Novo Nordisk’s new weight loss pill. In its first earnings report since the release of an alternative to its hit GLP-1 shot, Novo Nordisk’s outlook is looking a bit brighter. The company, which now makes Wegovy in pill form, raised its guidance for the year in light of the first quarter’s success. Novo reported 1.3 million prescriptions for its weight loss pill, which is now available in the U.S., in the first quarter of 2026. The drugmaker plans to launch the pill outside of the U.S. in the second half of the year, expanding the new medication’s reach considerably. “The strong Wegovy performance, combined with continued growth in Inte…

Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated Tax Day by making good on a campaign promise. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich,” Mamdani said in a viral video posted to social media. “Today, we’re taxing the rich.” Mamdani went on to describe New York’s proposed pied-á-terre tax, a collaboration with Gov. Kathy Hochul. The tax specifically targets the owners of residential properties in New York City worth more than $5 million that they don’t live in full time, or “the richest of the rich,” as Mamdani called them in his video. One such property that would be subject to the new tax belongs to billionaire Citadel CEO Kenneth …

From dating apps spreading the paradox of choice onto young daters to social media stunting the social skills of generations to come, modern relationships are comically complicated. For daters trying to navigate what seems like a minefield of one bad experience after another, they are turning to social media to share their past experiences and dating dealbreakers with the new “date cancelled” trend. The meme is simple: users follow a template-like structure, posting “date cancelled” followed by their personal icks and irks collected from past relationships. While the format has expanded to various social media platforms, most of the users engaging with the tre…