Desde que Harold Bloom puso el Juicio Final de Miguel Ángel en la cubierta de su famoso catálogo occidental de 1994 sabemos que todo canon es fruto del miedo. O por decirlo de un modo menos apocalíptico y con una palabra empleada por el propio Bloom: que todo canon es una elegía. También lo es este, centrado en el premio Formentor.
© ARCHIVO FUNDACIÓN FORMENTOR (EL PAÍS)
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of […]
The post Love it or loathe it, AI is birthing a golden age of science appeared first on Asia Times.
Google shares fell 12 percent in morning trading after the company reported its first combined revenue and profit miss in nearly four years, driven in part by a sharp swing into negative free cash flow. The drop, which is the largest in Google's history, wipes out about $500 billion in shareholder value.
The post Google Stock Craters 12% on Disappointing Earnings, Wiping Out $500 Billion in Shareholder Value appeared first on Breitbart.
On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN News Central,” Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-VA) reacted to the GDP report by saying that investment in AI and data centers is boosting GDP, “The question is, are hard-working families seeing the benefits of that? And
The post Dem Rep. Walkinshaw: AI, Data Center Investment Boosting GDP, But Families Aren’t Benefiting appeared first on Breitbart.
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For WeWork's CEO, Fridays are for sneakers. Sometimes.
At Business Insider's The Long Play event on Thursday, John Santora told Deputy News Chief Cadie Thompson that he rebuilt WeWork in part by establishing a sense of trust and decorum among employees.
In pursuit of that goal, Santora instituted a dress code for employees, but also gave them one day a week to work from home.
"I didn't have the ability to go watch my son play a 3 o'clock baseball game," Santora said, adding, "We have to give our employees that flexibility to do all that."
Santora, formerly the chief operating officer at Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate firm, became WeWork's CEO in 2024 as the once-buzzy office startup emerged from a disastrous Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.
Santora had a short time to decide whether to join the faltering company, he recalled. And it wasn't exactly an easy choice.
"I was kind of at that point of, 'Should I retire?'" he said. "My daughter Nancy said, 'Dad, you know we love you, but when you have too much time on your hands, you're a pain in the ass.'"
Since those deeply red days in 2019 when WeWork's valuation plummeted from $47 billion to roughly $8 billion before it was bailed out, the company has stabilized. It posted eight quarters of EBITDA profitability and expects a fourth straight quarter of cash-flow profitability.
In 2025, it reported about $2.3 billion in revenue.
Though it hasn't hit the valuation it once had, the fact that the company could be revived at all is remarkable. WeWork, founded in 2010, rents out office space, spruces it up, and parcels it out to freelancers, startups, and other businesses.
Its first CEO and founder, Adam Neumann, made bold pronouncements that WeWork would "change the world" and "elevate the world's consciousness" by renting out office space to startups.
But after a bungled IPO, it became clear to the new stakeholders that a different type of leader was sorely needed.
As it turned out, Santora was that leader.
Having worked for 47 years at Cushman & Wakefield, Santora had the real estate experience that Neumann lacked, albeit without the magnetism of a Silicon Valley whiz kid.
"From a leadership standpoint, I'm a very structured, disciplined person," he said. "I'm a suit and tie, buttoned-up real estate person."
Santora recalled an early trip to one of the offices, where he discovered employees wearing jeans, pajamas, slippers, and shorts.
"I grabbed my head of HR," he said. "See that? I don't want to see it anymore."
Santora, who at one point described himself as an "old chubby guy from Staten Island," didn't just force employees to wear sports coats to important meetings. In his words, there was some "give and take."
"I don't look at what time they leave, what time they come in," he said of his employees. "As long as they're getting their work done and they're keeping their clients happy."
And Santora allows himself one exception to his suit-and-tie persona.
"Fridays, I'll actually sometimes wear sneakers, depending on what my schedule is," he said.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Amazon is already spending a record amount on AI data centers. Next year will be even bigger.
The world's biggest cloud-computing company reported third-quarter results on Thursday and reiterated its plan for $220 billion in capital expenditure for 2026.
Then, CEO Andy Jassy shared his outlook for next year, saying Amazon expects "to spend meaningfully more in 2027."
Amazon’s spending has become the central question hanging over the company. It's building massive data centers and buying expensive chips and other gear to meet surging demand for AI.
That's pushed its free cash flow into negative territory, with third-quarter results showing a hole of $42.4 billion for the trailing twelve months.
Amazon spent $75.9 billion in cash capital expenditures during the third quarter alone, CFO Brian Olsavsky said, primarily on AWS and AI infrastructure.
The results did little to ease investors' concern about the spending. Amazon's third-quarter revenue and earnings came in below Wall Street expectations, and its shares fell roughly 6% in after-hours trading.
"The cloud unit's improving operating margin was one welcome signal, but it may not be sufficient to alleviate concerns about the sharp spike in capex spending and corresponding freefall of its free cash flow," Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at eMarketer, said in a statement.
Amazon has argued that AI infrastructure takes years to build before it can begin generating revenue, and that AI chip servers typically break even in less than three years once deployed. But the scale of the outlay has raised the stakes for Amazon's cloud business to sustain rapid growth as competitors make similarly enormous bets.
On Thursday, Jassy reiterated his confidence in the company's AI business model and outlook, saying there's a "clear line of sight to attractive financial returns."
The time it takes Amazon to turn newly delivered servers into revenue-generating capacity has also come under scrutiny.
Last week, Business Insider exclusively reported that Amazon has begun receiving billions of dollars in Nvidia server racks before all of the gear can be deployed at their final data-center sites, as power shortages and construction delays hold back new capacity.
Jassy argued Thursday that Amazon has visibility into the demand supporting its huge AI investments. Customers that need the largest AI deployments reserve capacity well ahead of time, he said, in blocks ranging from hundreds of megawatts to, in some cases, as much as a gigawatt.
"We have very good visibility into 2027 and 2028 and some of '29 too with respect to what customers want in those really big chunks of capacity," Jassy said.
AWS revenue rose 39.3% year over year to $46 billion in the third quarter, its fastest growth in nearly five years. Jassy said he expects AWS revenue to grow more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028, a projection that requires the company to keep rapidly adding capacity.
Jassy described the spending as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity rather than an optional expansion. It would be more convenient, he said, if Amazon could spread the investment over 25 years. But the speed of the AI market does not allow that.
"We can fund this plan," he said. "It will forever change our revenue. It will forever change our free cash flow."
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Before Smartbird was powering large language models, it was making shoes.
The CEO of the AI infrastructure company, Nadia Carlsten, spoke about the transition with chief correspondent Ben Bergman on Thursday at Business Insider's The Long Play.
Its roots are the sustainable sneaker company Allbirds, which skyrocketed in the late 2010s. The shoes were particularly popular among the Silicon Valley crowd. Allbirds went public in 2021 before the market turned on many direct-to-consumer businesses. The stock quickly fell, and it sold to American Exchange Group in March for $39 million.
"The short answer is the shoe business wasn't doing that well," Carlsten said.
The company then sold off its footwear business and shed most of its workforce, rebranding as Smartbird. The AI pivot skyrocketed the stock and was briefly up 800%, though it has since come back down. Carlsten, who became CEO in June, said she had never worn those wool shoes.
"The goal of the company was to do something valuable and meaningful. And for me, I knew I wanted to do AI infrastructure," she said.
After looking at the emerging AI infrastructure sector, she believed with the company's transformation, it was the "right place at the right time" for her to join.
In the five months since she took over, Carlsten said the experience can be described in one word: exciting.
"Never in my life thought that I would be the CEO of a former shoe company and managing what is essentially a startup." Since taking on the role, she has focused on building out a new team, scouring new technologies for the company to look into, and producing a new pipeline of customers.
While the stock price has gone down since the initial pivot-induced spike, Carlsten does not regret taking on the challenge. She is betting on the company's long-term potential.
"The stock market is going to do what the stock market does," she said. "What I care about is making sure that we're putting the company on the right path, and that we're able to build it quickly enough and well enough that we have a sustainable business that investors will love. So what happens in the short term? Not that important. What happens in the long term is very important."
When asked why the company decided to reinvent itself in the public eye instead of beginning as a private start-up, Carlsten countered with a question: "Why not?" she said, "It will come back up."
Having to reinvent the company from scratch can be challenging, and the public's presence is clear, she said. Yet, Carlsten said reinvention is inevitable for companies.
"This is a very public reinvention of the company, and people are watching," she said. "I think every company needs to reinvent itself every now and then."
When asked why the company is fully remote, Carlsten said most of the work at Smartbird is done virtually or at data centers, meaning an office would not be of much use.
"We spend a lot of time actually building things, which I actually love. So if my people are sitting in an office, something's wrong," she said.
Carlsten said that although her competitors are building similar AI infrastructure, the way Smartbird is going about it is unique.
"For us, it's about the right infrastructure for the right company at the right time," she said. "Our business model allows us to work more closely with customers, but it also is a lot less capital intensive."
Smartbird is looking to work with companies that have yet to explore implementing AI in their systems, she said. As more companies outside the tech realm look to adopt AI into their businesses, they have the choice to build infrastructure themselves or outsource it, and Smartbird wants to be the one to do it for them, she said.
"We'll do the infrastructure part. We'll let you focus on the actual business," she said.
The most common misconception Carlsten said she has encountered in the business is that it's all about GPUs. She said the company does a lot more than just run GPUs.
"It's really about having a holistic system that a customer can use to do AI," she said.
Another rumbling that's taken over the tech company discourse is whether there's an AI bubble and if it will pop. Carlsten said that depends on how people go about defining the bubble.
Excitement in the sector means funding might be going into companies that may not prosper in the future, but this is something that happens with the arrival of new technologies, she said.
"Every time there is a transformational technology, this happens," she said. "Even if we assume that there is a bubble, that doesn't mean that the technology is not good. It also doesn't mean that the adoption of the technology is going to go away."
Media titan Barry Diller, the chairman of publishing empire IAC, has built and rebuilt his career more than most executives, from network television to Hollywood studios to the earliest internet empires.
As part of Business Insider's The Long Play, Diller talked to Peter Kafka, Business Insider's chief correspondent covering media and technology, about what successful businesses require: good timing, nerve, and the willingness to walk away from what's working.
During this conversation, titled "The Art of the Comeback: A Masterclass on Resilience," Diller shares his perspectives on AI adoption. He also talks about why his MGM Resorts deal fell apart and how he's leveraging legacy print publications like Southern Living to create new revenue streams.
The 84-year-old media and tech exec told Kafka he wants to keep working as long as he can be engaged and useful.
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