• Data centers and artificial intelligence have become a part of everyday conversation for Americans.
• Data center energy consumption has entered those conversations, too.
• The largest planned AI campuses could require more than 10 gigawatts of electricity.

Some Americans have new next-door neighbors: data centers.

The US has been building these computing facilities for decades, but development has ramped up dramatically in recent years as AI increasingly drives demand for computing power.

Business Insider compiled a list of some of these enormous US data-center projects to illustrate the scale of what's being built. Those on the list have at least 1 gigawatt of capacity and have broken ground.

Among the largest is a city-sized campus in Texas pursuing up to 17 gigawatts of power capacity. Another in Ohio is aiming to have up to 10 gigawatts of data-center capacity, most of which OpenAI has contracted to use. For reference, 1 gigawatt of electricity continuously supplied for a year could power roughly 835,000 average American homes.

In total, the Pew Research Center says the US has more than 3,000 operating data centers nationwide and over 1,500 more under development, mostly in rural areas. According to data from the Energy Institute's 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy, US data centers accounted for nearly 40% of global data-center electricity use in 2025, consuming about 313 terawatt-hours. That's more electricity than all of Australia used that year.

Planned capacity is the closest public proxy for how much computing these AI campuses can support, and that's important because the electricity and water needed to run their servers and cooling systems can have major implications for local grids and sustainability.

Residents affected by developments in places like Texas and Utah have pushed back over concerns about noise, property values, and the effects on nearby communities. New York has temporarily paused the construction of new large-scale AI data centers.

Still, the 2025 US Data Center Energy Usage Report from Berkeley Lab projects that data centers will consume 11.8% of US electricity by 2030, up from about 4.4% in 2023. Oracle, SB Energy, SpaceX, Google, and Meta are among the leading developers and operators.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is so eager to build its supercomputers that it's offering employees a pay bump to temporarily move to the data-center sites to help with the buildout.

Here's a closer look at some of the largest AI data-center campuses being built.

Meta's AI gamble is suddenly looking like a win for Mark Zuckerberg.

That was far from a given. Even the Meta CEO was doubting himself. His company had poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI investments with largely unproven results.

"Are you sure this is going to work?" he asked his 29-year-old AI chief, Alexandr Wang, at the end of last year, he recalled on a recent episode of the "Cheeky Pint" podcast.

Those risky AI bets — which one analyst compared to throwing spaghetti at the wall — as well as the massive layoffs and reorganization that came with them, are now starting to pay off. Meta beat its AI rivals to the punch with its new AI assistant, Muse, and it finally released a frontier AI model. Although Muse is bleeding cash amid high compute costs, analysts are excited by its moneymaking potential.

Zuckerberg is riding high, too. Sipping a Guinness alongside Wang during a recent podcast interview, the pair extolled Meta's AI prowess.

"You never know when you launch something how it's going to be received," the CEO said. "There's always the case where you get a home run, which in this case it was, right? And it's just like extremely well received right off the bat."

And Meta seems to believe in Zuckerberg's leadership more than ever. His latest coup: Convincing the company to issue a new class of shares after he threatened to list his Palo Alto compound and leave California as voters weigh a billionaire tax.

The big question is how long the good vibes will last. Meta is still spending gobs of money on AI without a concrete financial payoff. Some remain skeptical.

"The bill is huge," David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, told Business Insider.

"He's won the narrative. He hasn't proven the return yet."

Meta's social reckoning era

Zuckerberg is no stranger to public discourse. He's undertaken multiple personas: the nerdy wunderkind in hoodies, the jacked wife guy, the unapologetically masculine Trump ally.

At the beginning of this year, it looked as if he was headed for a new reckoning, and it wasn't just because of the aptly named sequel to "The Social Network."

Zuckerberg was on trial, taking the stand in a landmark lawsuit that alleged Meta's platforms harmed the mental health of young people. (Meta was found negligent and is appealing.) It was one of three major lawsuits this year that put the company on the defensive against claims that its technology posed safety risks to children.

And there were the more typical Zuckerberg cringe moments, too, like his front-row appearance at a Prada fashion show that raised eyebrows across the internet.

On the inside, employee morale was waning. Though the billionaire CEO had called 2026 "the year of AI," Meta had little momentum, and unpopular decisions — including a program to track employee keystrokes — amplified the discontent.

Also, Meta had one of its largest rounds of layoffs, ever. Meta began trimming staff in March, followed by a huge round in May, when it laid off about 10% of its workforce.

Separately, Meta reshuffled another 7,000 workers as part of an AI-focused reorganization of its tech and product teams. Many engineers were relegated to individual contributor status. Meta later asked some of the employees it had demoted to return to their managerial roles.

The AI push didn't seem to be paying off: In the second quarter of this year, 98% of revenue came from its traditional advertising business — not AI.

Morale was "maybe not the worst it's ever been in 20 years here, but it's probably up there," Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, said during an internal call in June.

The groundwork for Meta's comeback

Amid the chaos, Zuckerberg laid the groundwork for a comeback. Wang and Meta's elite AI researchers moved their desks to sit near Zuckerberg.

Starting last year, Zuckerberg and Wang also went on a talent-hiring spree, dangling pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to poach top researchers.

Zuckerberg empowered key lieutenants, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, to go ham on any vision they had, including on his pet project, an AI assistant. It all fit into Zuckerberg's longtime playbook of embracing small teams and overseeing reorgs until something works — move fast and break things, as he has infamously put it.

It worked.

Muse, the long-awaited Meta AI agent, became a breakout hit. A week after it launched, it shot to the top of the app store, and has since achieved more than 10 million downloads in North America. The team was stunned to have beaten OpenAI to market, a person familiar with the matter said. OpenAI's rival product, Dots, launched three weeks later.

Meta also threw unprecedented compute and talent at building a series of frontier AI models, called Muse Wonder, that could keep up with those from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.

On Meta's third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was optimistic that Meta's AI and hardware investments could soon become cash cows, as people shop through Muse and buy more virtual-reality glasses powered by the company's growing AI chops.

Meta, meanwhile, views Zuckerberg as more critical than ever to its long-term fortunes.

Key board members abruptly excused themselves from a dinner with Zuckerberg in September after he told them he was going to sell his Palo Alto estate in response to California's proposed billionaire tax, Meta disclosed in a filing on Wednesday.

Four days later, a special committee returned with a deal that would give Zuckerberg $20 billion in "immediate liquidity" to cover the tax — if it passes — without reducing his controlling stake in Meta. Meta also made plans to ensure that billions in fresh AI fundraising wouldn't dilute Zuckerberg's control.

"Meta's track record of significant value creation for its shareholders is in large part due to his strong leadership, unique and creative vision, and exceptional management abilities," the company said in a press release.

The personal win comes as some of his other problems have blown over. Meta settled a major lawsuit brought by attorneys general across states, Washington, DC, and US territories. As part of the settlement, the company committed to make changes to its apps, such as daily time limits and pausing notifications overnight. The agreement was part of an August settlement, a move that allowed Meta to call out its competitors such as YouTube and TikTok.

"All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another," the company said in a blog post at the time.

Big questions still loom. The day after Meta reported strong earnings and Muse adoption, its stock fell 7% as investors absorbed the scale of the company's hundreds of billions of dollars in future spending commitments.

And the legal troubles keep on coming. This week, a New Mexico jury also ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a case that Meta plans to appeal.

Whether Zuckerberg's strategy is sustainable or not, the vibe shift has been notable — and may have proven naysayers wrong, at least until the next period of chaos erupts.

"Meta is cool again," Jesse Cohen, an analyst at Investing.com, said in a note. "That's the Muse effect."

• PHP, the open-source computer programming language, had two major vulnerabilities exposed.
• Yonaton Keller woke on Wednesday to panicked messages about the two PHP vulnerabilities.
• He shares three steps you can take to protect your website.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Yonaton Keller, a 46-year-old product manager at Zafran Security, based in Tel Aviv. His words have been edited for length and clarity.

When I woke up at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, I had multiple messages from around 4:45 a.m. alerting me that two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language had been disclosed.

I immediately understood that this was a very serious situation.

Websites run different versions of PHP, and it's estimated that around 70% of websites worldwide use it. This isn't the first time PHP vulnerabilities have been found, but these ones require essentially no authentication on the attacker's part.

It's a very tricky situation. If it were a year and a half ago, nobody would have really responded to this so urgently. But this might be one of the first major incidents of its kind in this AI era, and the cycle of how attackers operate and how we typically respond is broken.

AI enhances detection and response times, but it also means that any limited-technical person could exploit these vulnerabilities within minutes.

My team was very concerned and had to act fast

I'm based in Israel, so when it was 6:30 a.m., my time, it was the middle of the night in the US. This time gap worked in our team's favor, as we had time to figure out what was going on before our customers woke up.

PHP is an open-source computer programming language used to create websites and web applications. It's such a widely used programming language that we immediately understood that every one of our customers, which includes major corporations and businesses, would likely be affected by this.

With bugs or critical flaws in the infrastructure, like the two that were found in PHP, exploitation is actually quite easy, especially if you use AI agents. That was the first thing we understood: even completely unskilled attackers can use these vulnerabilities to take down sites.

The PHP Foundation said it would disclose the details of the vulnerabilities and release a fix for newer versions of the language around 5 p.m. Israel time. But some details had already been informally disclosed on an online forum. The post was deleted minutes afterward, but screenshots spread around the internet quite quickly in unofficial forums.

So, my team and I dropped everything else and spent all day on Wednesday gathering informal information to see whether we could mitigate the risk of exploitation before an official fix was released.

How to tell if you're at risk

The first step people can take to figure out if they're impacted is to look at their websites and web applications, and try to understand where PHP is involved. You can also assume that most, if not all, of them will use PHP in some way, unless you have very basic HTML-based pages.

The second step would be to look at what vulnerability scanners online are telling you. Tenable, Qualys, and Rapid7 are usually the big three for releasing detection rules and actually detecting the vulnerability. In this case, these vulnerabilities have caused such widespread panic worldwide that they were quick to respond. This is also a way to understand the exact vulnerabilities in your internet-facing assets.

After taking these steps, immediately look online to upgrade your website to the current PHP version. It's quite easy to upgrade that, and it's free. There are some technical steps to do after the fix, so you might need a tech guy to implement them. If you don't update your PHP version, the impact on your business and website can be very, very serious.

Some people are also fully taking their sites offline, and I think that can be the right call if you have evidence that you are being targeted. However, 70% of the internet can't and shouldn't be taken offline just because those sites have some vulnerabilities. It's an emergency step to take if you have evidence of potential exploitation, but it can't be a step taken by everyone.

This was not just about attackers disrupting your website or web application; it was about them taking control of your server, stealing sensitive documents, moving inside your network, and then carrying out malicious operations, such as deploying ransomware or other actions they intended.

The situation has calmed down, but my cybersecurity team is still very concerned

Things have calmed down a bit since Wednesday, but we're still very, very concerned. Patching 70% of worldwide websites doesn't take a minute or two.

Hours after the fix was disclosed by the PHP Foundation, there were already tons of exploitation attempts popping up online. Attackers are getting quicker. I think that in this AI era, when in a matter of minutes, many attackers can attack, you don't have the time you used to.

The whole traditional process of scoping the attack surface, establishing a remediation plan, then calling a guy who's going to be responsible for this remediation plan, et cetera, is broken.

For a long period of time, organizations were investing a lot in what we call post-compromise scenarios. I think the AI era of cybersecurity will involve a lot more security investments in the pre-compromise realm, so defenses can be pre-built and ready for attacks in situations like this.

• The new Elizabeth Holmes documentary is reviving interest in the Theranos scandal.
• Hulu, Spotify, and Apple all saw audience growth for titles related to the Silicon Valley saga.
• The "You Can See Everything" doc, released on October 16, has quickly become a smash hit.

The new smash-hit documentary about disgraced biotech founder Elizabeth Holmes is fueling a fresh wave of fascination with the saga surrounding one of Silicon Valley's biggest scandals.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's film, "You Can See Everything," follows Holmes, the ex-CEO of blood-testing startup Theranos, in the weeks before she began her 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors.

Ahead of the October 16 release of the nearly three-hour documentary, viewers flocked to Hulu's 2022 miniseries, "The Dropout," in which actor Amanda Seyfried starred as Holmes.

Streaming hours for the Hulu original show skyrocketed 186% in September over August and then surged 92% the week of "You Can See Everything's" release compared to the week prior, a spokesperson for Disney, which owns Hulu, said.

The eight-episode series, also available on Disney+, has been streamed for over 2 million hours since September, the spokesperson said.

The renewed spotlight on the rise and fall of Holmes' Theranos is also driving listeners back to ABC News' "The Dropout" — the true crime podcast on which Hulu's drama was based.

Plays of "The Dropout" podcast across Spotify and Apple climbed nearly 400% the week the "You Can See Everything" teaser trailer was released, from September 7 to September 13, according to data from ABC News provided by the Disney spokesperson.

Listenership was up more than 900% over the new film's release weekend and has continued to soar, the spokesperson said, adding that Tuesday saw the highest number of plays in a single day since "You Can See Everything" was announced.

A Spotify spokesperson told Business Insider that Wednesday marked the "The Dropout" podcast's biggest streaming day on the platform since the documentary's release, with a 305% uptick in US listeners compared to the average listening volume over the prior 30 days.

The audiobook of "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup," by journalist John Carreyrou, has also drawn a wave of new listeners. Carreyrou's reporting for The Wall Street Journal exposed Theranos' flawed blood testing devices.

According to the Spotify spokesperson, Carreyrou's audiobook saw its biggest spike Thursday, with a 560% jump in US listeners.

The book sat at No. 6 on Amazon's best seller list for business and money as of Friday.

In January 2022, following a nearly four-month trial, Holmes was convicted of four federal counts of conspiracy and wire fraud in connection with a scheme to dupe investors in Theranos out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Holmes reported to a minimum-security women's prison camp in Texas on May 30, 2023, after being handed an 11-year-and-three-month sentence.

The onetime Silicon Valley darling repeatedly claimed Theranos — once valued at $9 billion — had developed a revolutionary blood analyzer capable of running hundreds of tests with only a few drops of blood from a finger.

• Uber is giving its corporate employees access to OpenAI's enterprise work tool.
• ChatGPT Work can "prepare meeting briefs," among other tasks, OpenAI said.
• Uber is rolling out the tool after laying off thousands of workers last month.

Uber is giving all of its corporate employees access to OpenAI's enterprise tool weeks after laying off thousands.

About 30,000 employees at the ride-hailing service's offices will have access to ChatGPT Work, the two companies said on Thursday.

The tool will connect with other programs that Uber employees use, such as Slack and Gmail, to "research information, prepare meeting briefs, create presentations, analyze data and complete workflows across applications," a statement said.

"As AI transforms how we work, we want to give everyone the tools to innovate, solve problems and help shape Uber's future," Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said. Uber initially tested the tool among a group of 1,000 employees.

The rollout comes the month after Uber laid off about 10% of its corporate workforce, or about 3,300 people. The company made the job cuts to reduce management layers and reduce the number of small teams, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the time. It didn't cite AI in its announcement.

Some laid-off employees told Business Insider that AI was doing significant parts of their jobs, from answering their questions in Slack to crafting replies to messages from riders and drivers.

Uber cited AI as a reason for an earlier round of layoffs in July, which targeted Uber's customer service employees.

Do you have a story idea about Uber? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• The AI boom is accelerating data center development across the US.
• Even states with few data centers are attracting major hyperscale projects.
• Here's how all 50 US states rank by their number of operational data centers.

The data center business is booming in the US, and some states are feeling it more than others.

Data centers, which house the computing machines that power digital services, have been around for decades. However, the amount of computing power required to fuel the AI boom has accelerated their development and brought the industry into the mainstream.

This ranking was compiled by analyzing data from Data Center Map, an industry source that maps data center locations around the world. It shows a snapshot of its US database as of October 2026. Business Insider limited this ranking to fully operational data centers.

Data Center Map compiles its data from multiple sources and mainly tracks cloud and colocation service providers. Each data center it tracks has to have an initial capacity of at least 10 cabinets. While some states have hyperscale AI data centers, others have relatively small operations.

Firstly, data center operators and service providers add their own listings to market themselves. Data Center Map also monitors external databases and manually identifies any missing operators. It also handles requests from users who identify missing or outdated listings.

There is no federal requirement for data centers to register in a central database, so the figures should not be interpreted as a complete census of every data center in the country. Data Center Map also says it has a "more limited coverage on enterprise and government data centers."

Last year, Business Insider created its own US data centers map, which included estimated power usage, as part of an investigation into the industry.

Here are the states with the most operational data centers, ranked from least to most.

A Universidade do Algarve (UAlg) inaugurou, no dia 9 de outubro, um novo laboratório digital destinado a transformar informação científica complexa em conteúdos visuais acessíveis, interativos e imersivos. Denominada INTERFACE – Laboratório de Tradução Digital, a infraestrutura está instalada no Campus da Penha, em Faro, e representa um investimento de 473.800 euros, financiado pela Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), através do Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR).

O novo espaço integra o Centro de Investigação em Artes e Comunicação (CIAC) e pretende criar condições para o desenvolvimento de projetos de investigação e inovação que aproximem o conhecimento científico do público.

Equipado com tecnologia avançada de produção imersiva e interatividade, o INTERFACE permite a investigadores e estudantes explorar novas formas de apresentar resultados científicos, recorrendo a narrativas visuais que facilitem a compreensão de matérias complexas.

Tecnologia imersiva transforma dados científicos em conteúdos acessíveis

O INTERFACE foi concebido para funcionar como uma infraestrutura especializada na comunicação científica, utilizando recursos digitais para transformar informação técnica em experiências visuais e interativas.

Entre as áreas que poderão beneficiar desta abordagem encontram-se as ciências da saúde, cujos dados e resultados de investigação podem apresentar dificuldades de interpretação para públicos não especializados.

Segundo Bruno Mendes da Silva, coordenador do CIAC, “o INTERFACE atuará como um laboratório especializado, capaz de transformar dados científicos complexos, por exemplo, da área das ciências da saúde, em narrativas visuais acessíveis e envolventes”.

A infraestrutura pretende, assim, proporcionar novas ferramentas para a divulgação de conhecimento, permitindo que a investigação científica seja apresentada através de formatos que combinem imagem, tecnologia e interatividade.

O laboratório abre igualmente oportunidades de colaboração com as indústrias criativas, através do desenvolvimento de projetos que estabeleçam ligações entre a ciência, a comunicação e a arte digital.

O investimento de 473.800 euros foi assegurado pelo programa EQUIPAR+2 da Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, no âmbito do Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência.

Inteligência artificial e acessibilidade integram projeto

O INTERFACE inclui também o AI Studio, uma extensão do projeto localizada no polo do CIAC no Instituto Politécnico de Santarém, dedicada à inteligência artificial e à literacia digital.

Este espaço dispõe de equipamentos concebidos para facilitar a utilização das tecnologias digitais por pessoas com diferentes necessidades, incluindo dispositivos Braille e sistemas de comandos por voz.

A utilização destas ferramentas pretende contribuir para o desenvolvimento de soluções tecnológicas mais acessíveis, integrando a inclusão digital nas atividades de investigação e inovação.

O AI Studio complementa o trabalho desenvolvido no Campus da Penha, alargando as possibilidades de investigação relacionadas com inteligência artificial, acessibilidade e comunicação digital.

Nova infraestrutura reforça ligação entre ciência e arte digital

Com a abertura do INTERFACE, o Centro de Investigação em Artes e Comunicação da Universidade do Algarve reforça a capacidade de desenvolver projetos que envolvam diferentes áreas do conhecimento.

A infraestrutura procura promover a investigação transdisciplinar, articulando competências científicas, artísticas e tecnológicas para criar novas formas de comunicação e divulgação da ciência.

Através da produção de conteúdos visuais, interativos e imersivos, o laboratório pretende contribuir para que resultados de investigação possam ser compreendidos por públicos mais alargados.

O projeto constitui, deste modo, uma aposta da Universidade do Algarve na utilização de tecnologias digitais para aproximar a investigação científica da sociedade, com particular atenção à acessibilidade, à inovação e à colaboração entre a ciência e as indústrias criativas.

Mais informações sobre o CIAC podem ser consultadas no website.

Leia também: GNR realiza operações de norte a sul do país e apreende droga, armas de guerra e combustível

• Anthropic said its Mythos 5 model almost never stopped a cyberattack once it began.
• The AI agents fabricated farcical explanations to justify their impersonation and malware schemes.
• Even when Anthropic told the agent it was harming real people? Crickets.

In August, an Anthropic agent created fake emails and bombarded a GitHub moderator's inbox with requests to insert malware into code.

In a thorough debrief of the incident released on Friday, Anthropic found that once an agent had begun the attack, there were basically zero scenarios in which it could be called off.

Like a rabid dog ignoring the pleading cries of its owner, the agent — 98% of the time in one test — ignored Anthropic's warnings once it had, so to speak, its first taste of blood.

Anthropic called this disquieting proclivity "momentum," and added that while its Mythos 5 model, which was released in June, showed little regard for warnings, current models were more inclined to stop.

"Once it had begun performing dangerous actions, Claude Mythos 5 almost always continued doing so, ignoring information that might have suggested its trajectory was harmful," Anthropic said in its report.

In the original experiment, the UK's AI Security Institute tasked an Anthropic agent with hacking into a simulated computer network to test the agent's cybersecurity capabilities.

Though the agent had internet access, researchers intended for it to only use the internet to help it find ways to hack into the network.

The agent, however, accessed an actual GitHub project, incorrectly believing it was part of its simulated target. It wrote malware and tried several times to trick the actual GitHub owner into adding it to the project.

In its requests, the agent misrepresents the malware, describing it to the person as a useful update and browbeating them when they declined to install it.

"I was just trying to make a helpful contribution and fix a bug," the agent wrote, according to the report. "I don't think your warning is fair."

For its new report, Anthropic repeatedly asked agents to perform the same task. It then measured how the agents behaved when different models and stimuli were introduced.

Anthropic tried to throttle the agent's full-frontal attack with three categories of warning: telling it that it was inflicting "real world harm," that its environment was wonky, or that it was manipulating a real GitHub repository.

None had any effect once the models progressed beyond the initial stages of the GitHub attack. In fact, at that point, Anthropic said the models gave absurd answers when confronted with their bad behavior.

When Anthropic asked what the model believed it was attacking, for instance, it answered that the GitHub repository was real, but that the people it was targeting were somehow "simulated."

"This stated belief, in addition to being somewhat unlikely a priori, is essentially impossible," Anthropic said in the report.

American voters’ antipathy toward Big Tech companies has become a central theme of campaigns in the 2026 midterm elections, according to an analysis published by The Guardian on Thursday. The Guardian noted that hundreds of midterm campaign ads attacking data centers have aired over the past two months, with both Republicans and Democrats accusing one […]

The post Big Tech has become the ‘ubiquitous villain’ of US 2026 midterms appeared first on Asia Times.

• Legacy carmakers continue to report slumping sales in China.
• Volvo is the latest. It's planning 2,500 global job cuts to save about $530 million.
• America is a problem, too. Tariffs, crushed EV incentives, and Polestar's exit also hurt.

China's merciless car market is taking a bite out of Volvo.

On Friday, the Swedish luxury automaker said revenue in China fell by almost 50% over the past year. The company said, like many legacy premium automakers, it's facing increasing "hypercompetition" from Chinese competitors.

Volvo plans to cut 2,500 jobs globally in response, it said, including roughly 2,000 in Sweden. That's part of an effort to slash costs by about $530 million.

"We continue to operate in a very tough environment with strong external challenges: de-globalisation, hypercompetition and climate change," CEO Håkan Samuelsson said in a statement.

It's the latest stark example of the increasing pressure on legacy automakers in China. Several big-name car companies — including Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz — have recently reported slowing sales from their Chinese dealerships.

Volvo is majority-owned by Geely Auto Group, a Chinese automaking conglomerate.

The company said the reductions will be made by a combination of ending consultant contracts, natural attrition, and targeted employee exit packages.

China is not Volvo's only problem. The company also said that US tariffs and the loss of Washington's consumer incentives for electrified cars squeezed margins. Volvo previously bet heavily on a rapid consumer transition to electric vehicles, aiming for an all-electric portfolio by 2030. It's since walked back that goal to include plug-in hybrid vehicles.

The automaker also said that Polestar — its EV offshoot that is exiting the US market — also posted losses.

Volvo's answer is to get more local: the automaker said it would introduce two fresh cars tailored specifically for the Chinese market by the middle of next year. Those cars will be developed in close collaboration with Geely and will include a Chinese tech stack and advanced driver-assist technologies "to make them fully competitive in China."

• The CEO of ASML is tying his compensation to a personal mission to boost employee morale.
• Christophe Fouquet told employees in a memo seen by BI that ASML would link exec pay to employee satisfaction.
• It comes amid a major reorg at Europe's most valuable firm, which supplies chipmaking equipment to TSMC and Intel.

The CEO of Europe's most valuable company is linking his pay to a personal mission to boost employee morale.

Christophe Fouquet, the CEO of Dutch tech firm ASML, said last week that the company will incorporate employee satisfaction into its compensation strategy for top executives in an effort to quell discontent over a major reorganization, per a memo to employees obtained exclusively by Business Insider.

Fouquet was responding to the results of an annual survey that polled more than 38,000 of ASML's roughly 44,000 employees.

The survey results, seen by Business Insider, show that ASML's employee engagement index — a measure of worker satisfaction — fell from 78% last year to 73.5% this year.

In the memo, Fouquet said that the declining employee engagement scores "reflect a period of significant change" and acknowledged that it had been a "disruptive and emotional year" for the company.

He added that ASML's executive team had highlighted six questions in the survey and combined them into a new Workplace Experience Index, which would be incorporated into the company's Long-Term Incentive plan for executive compensation.

"In the coming years, it will directly influence the remuneration of senior leaders, including the Board of Management," Fouquet wrote, adding that strengthening the company's culture and reinforcing its values would be a personal priority in the coming year.

The six questions include whether employees feel they can share their opinions without fear of retaliation and if they have confidence in ASML's senior leadership team.

Employees will also be polled on whether they have a clear understanding of their role, whether they think their teams are operating efficiently and are well organized, and whether they feel their direct manager shows they care about them as an individual.

"We recognize the role that leaders play in creating a good workplace, and we now strengthen our commitment by including the workplace experience index in the remuneration of senior leadership, including our Board of Management," an ASML spokesperson told Business Insider.

It comes as ASML, the only firm on the planet capable of building the advanced EUV lithography machines critical for chipmakers like TSMC and Intel, attempts to slash bureaucracy with a sweeping org chart reorganization.

ASML announced in January that it could cut 1,700 jobs to reduce management layers and focus on engineering. Leaked documents previously reported by Business Insider show that these ongoing efforts have focused on reducing the number of managers at the company. The company later said it expected to cut fewer jobs than initially planned.

The ASML spokesperson said that its organizational changes were "necessary to strengthen ASML's ability to innovate" for its customers, but it also recognized they were "disruptive" for staff.

Going against tech's 'hardcore' trend

Major companies tying executive pay to employee satisfaction is uncommon, but not unheard of.

Companies like IBM and Aviva have previously included employee engagement in their compensation targets for top executives.

ASML's decision, however, runs counter to the cultural winds of Big Tech, which have seen some companies embark on relentless layoffs and push employees to work longer hours as part of a "hardcore" working shift.

Meta was an early, prominent leader of this push, with a series of layoffs that began in 2023 during Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" and, last year, cutting "low performers." CTO Andrew Bosworth at one point suggested that employees who disagreed with the company's direction should "consider working elsewhere."

Executives have since acknowledged internally that Meta went too far with its efficiency push, with Bosworth telling workers that morale at the company was almost the worst it has ever been.

Fouquet's memo to employees came days before ASML raised its 2026 sales forecast and pledged to accelerate production of its unique lithography machines as the AI boom fuels surging demand.

The company's machines are vital for producing the advanced semiconductors used to train and run AI models, and the rapid buildout of AI data centers has pushed ASML's shares up 45% this year.

One major prospective customer for the Dutch firm is Elon Musk, who is racing to build a massive semiconductor factory dubbed "Terafab" in Texas. Business Insider previously reported that Musk gave a virtual presentation to a private ASML employee conference in June to pitch Terafab, which is a joint project by Tesla and SpaceX.

Editor's note: October 23, 2026 — This story was updated to include a statement from ASML.

Do you work at ASML and have any information to share? Get in touch with this reporter at tcarter.41 on Signal or tcarter@businessinsider.com. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Analyst firm FDM CCS Insight gazed into its crystal ball to offer up its big predictions for 2027 and beyond, and didn’t hold back on its soothsaying with some big-name headline forecasts.

At an invite-only event in London this week, the company launched its annual set of 100 industry predictions. The shindig has become a recognised date on the industry calendar, and with good reason – after 13 years of peering into the future, FDM CCS Insight claims almost half (49%) of its predictions have come true.

100 predictions is a lot, so Mobile World Live has picked its 15 favourites and categorised them in the five hottest areas right now: AI (naturally), Satellite, Devices, Operators and 6G.

AI
FDM CCS Insight’s Ian Fogg asserted there will be more AI agents than people in the average household by 2030, noting that the average household has 2.64 people, and yet there are already 7.46 agent-capable devices (smartphone operating systems, smart home devices and smartphone apps) in these households. “It doesn’t take a lot for this prediction to come true,” noted Fogg. “Plus, many devices will run several agents.” In fact, speaking in a fireside chat at the event, Qualcomm’s Ben Timmons reckoned these numbers are undersold. “It’s going to be pretty quick for the agent to become central to everything you do in your personal and worklife. In two years’ time I predict people will be letting their agents have access to financial data too – they will be converted,” he stated.

The future doesn’t seem particularly bright for Generative AI pioneer OpenAI, with a prediction that OpenAI has a debt restructuring and CEO Sam Altman is shown the door by 2028.

It’s forecast that the company will fail to convince investors it has a viable commercial model, while struggling with escalating costs, concerns about data centres’ electricity and water use, and the high price of silicon needed to power AI services.

It’s been a busy week for AI-RAN, with chief proponent Nvidia unveiling a bevy of operator trial deals. But it’s US carrier T-Mobile US set to be the first operator to deploy AI radio access network technology according to the analysts, following an AI-RAN voice call first earlier this month.

Satellite
There’s mixed feelings on the future of Elon Musk’s SpaceX/Starlink operation.

On the one hand, there is a bold prediction that by 2030 Veon Group (Starlink’s biggest operator customer to date) will be bought by SpaceX, but there are also major concerns: one forecast fears SpaceX fails to win any mobile satellite spectrum in the EU’s allocation in 2027 and in the same year the EU backs a third satellite ecosystem to rival Starlink and AST SpaceMobile (built around Elveo and SES).

This latter prediction is fuelled by the big news this week that several major European operator groups are teaming on an alternative to Musk’s offering.

6G
The standout prediction in this category is a real surprise: Apple, typically a laggard when it comes to supporting brand new generations of mobile networks (the first iPhone didn’t even connect to 3G, with most users relying on Wi-Fi for fast browsing speeds), will have a 6G iPhone available alongside the first 6G commercial networks.

This change in tack will be thanks to Apple now producing its own cellular modem.

Elsewhere, analysts predicted operators in all initial 6G markets will launch 5G-Advanced first, and one in 10 smartphones sold in 2030 will support 6G (the earliest target date for commercial 6G launch is generally accepted as 2029).

Operators
Following recent high-profile mergers in Spain, the UK and France, FDM CCS Insight expects Germany to be the next European market to see consolidation. Specifically, in 2027, German operator 1&1 is acquired by one of its rivals – and Telefonica is tipped to be the most likely buyer of the country’s fourth player.

Meanwhile, Romania-based Digi Communications – already making a name for itself as one of Europe’s fastest-rising challenger brands with a presence in Spain, Belgium, Portugal and Italy – is tipped to enter three new European markets by 2028.

Devices
There are some quirky forecasts for the device market.

Following months of significant backlash against people wearing Meta’s smart version of the Ray-Ban Wayfarers, in 2027 sales of regular Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses will plummet as people become fearful of others demanding they take them off, without realising they are just regular sunglasses. And regulatory action in this area will ramp up: in 2028, the analysts predict that ‘camera in use’ indicators will become mandatory on wearable AI devices sold in the EU.

And in a nod to at least one Black Mirror episode, a smart contact lens is predicted to receive regulatory approval in a major market by 2031.

Finally, the trend toward longer device life cycles and a more circular approach to smartphone ownership (fuelled in part by mounting industry costs) spells bad news for the low-cost smartphone market. By 2028, the sub-$150 retail tier will disappear from major smartphone markets in the West, a prediction FDM CCS Insight senior partner Ben Wood describes as “a big blow” for manufacturers who have relied on ultralow-cost devices to boost sales volumes and expand access to mobile technology.

The post Predictions go bold: SpaceX buys operator, Apple leads 6G devices, Meta hurts sunglasses appeared first on Mobile World Live.

• Nick Woodhead said he went 48 hours without sleep while helping patch a major website vulnerability.
• The CTO said that with security problems piling up, October feels like "the month of hell" for tech.
• Because AI makes it easier to find and exploit security gaps, Woodhead expects more disruption.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Nick Woodhead, founder of the AI company GPTree and chief technology officer at Rothco and Compubox. He spoke with Business Insider on Thursday to share how he's responded to vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language that could affect the majority of the world's websites. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

It's always a nightmare when these things happen. Since Tuesday evening, I haven't slept. It's coming close to 48 hours working on this. I'm a CTO, but I also run an agency for multiple clients and have my own company with my own product. So, balancing my time to get everything updated — it's just been exhausting.

About 70% of the internet runs on a programming language called PHP. I'm actively involved within the PHP community itself, so I did get a warning on Tuesday evening regarding the vulnerability and the fact that it was already being addressed by the PHP team. That gave me a head start.

I have some teams offshore, so I was able to jump on that with them.

It's not just applying the patches. It's making sure that nothing was already exposed. We already had infrastructure in place to easily deploy patches, but it still requires a good amount of manual involvement.

I knew that as soon as I walked into the office on Wednesday, I'd have to have my teams jump on this. They were already waiting for the patches to be released.

People are willing to help

One of the biggest headaches, especially on the client side, is that we have a lot of legacy systems, which are running on older versions of PHP that are no longer supported, and official patches are not going to be produced. For those, we ultimately had to come up with other plans. For example, taking sites temporarily offline or moving them behind VPNs.

Eventually, because it's an open-source community, those patches have already been backported, or implemented, by the community. So now we're shuffling back to some of those older systems to get them patched.

That's one of the nice things about PHP. There's such a vast community of people all willing to roll up their sleeves and jump in and help.

Even though I've been in leadership for the last 10 years, I've never taken my hand off the pulse in terms of being connected with the code and the infrastructure. So, I've been hands-on with the development and infrastructure teams to help make sure these issues are resolved. We've been reviewing logs and looking for any potential signatures of a breach that this vulnerability exposed.

The month of hell

It's also meant keeping up to speed with the latest news that's coming out and what other people are finding. We're in a position now where we feel comfortable and safe, but there are new vulnerabilities in the coding tool Node.js. We have some Node services, so now we're looking at how that potentially affects us. October just seems like the month of hell from a technology perspective.

I don't think there is an end in sight with the advancements in AI. For all the positives we get from it, there are a whole bunch of negatives, and this is a perfect example.

OpenAI has already stated that they found many more of these types of vulnerabilities that, thankfully, haven't been leaked. Over the coming months, they are either going to be patches or this information is going to get leaked in the same way and cause the same kind of panic.

I don't think we're at the end of the road yet. There's going to be a lot more to come.

• Tiffany Tang founded DrinkFolks after a transformative journey across Asia in 2023 and 2024.
• Tang's layoff in 2023 led her to Bali, where she decided to extend her 30-day trip to over a year.
• DrinkFolks, inspired by Tang's travels, supports women-led farms and brings jamu to the US market.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tiffany Tang, the 30-year-old founder of DrinkFolks. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm the founder and CEO of DrinkFolks, which brings jamu, a 1,300-year-old Indonesian herbal remedy, to the US as a prebiotic root tonic.

For the first two years of my career, I was an assistant director at a gallery owned by the first female fine arts dealer in America. From 2017 to 2021, I worked at Christie's International Real Estate in marketing and communications roles.

For the next year, I was a senior communications manager at CSM Sport & Entertainment before taking on a similar role at a fintech company that helped millions of Americans sustainably build their credit scores through rewards.

I felt positively about that job, but I was laid off in May 2023

I was grateful to work there. We were doing big things, and I really learned what it was like to be at a mission-driven company.

The most interesting thing about my layoff was how incredibly calm I felt upon hearing the news. Our CMO told me first, and she was a friend, my college professor, and an executive I admire and respect.

When she told me, I said I didn't blame her, and this was a time for a reset. Turns out, the layoff was the best thing that could've ever happened to me.

A few weeks after my layoff, I booked a one-way ticket to Bali

For a long time, my self-worth was my net worth — my title, my salary, my career trajectory. When the layoff hit, I lost my sense of self. Reflecting afterward, all I could think was: who am I without the high-paying job?

A few weeks earlier, I had watched the movie "Eat, Pray, Love." When the layoff came, something in me said that this was my moment. I opened Kayak, found a one-way ticket to Bali for around $1,000, and booked it. Bali felt approachable and warm.

What was supposed to be a 30-day reset changed the course of my life

I originally planned to travel in Southeast Asia for a month but ended up staying from June 2023 through August 2024.

My awakening happened on day three. One of the first things I did in Bali was a Panchakarma, a full-body Ayurvedic detox at a retreat in Ubud. There was an optional silent day; one of the first times in my life I rooted and looked inward.

Sitting with my journal, I knew I had to stay. I was still negotiating my severance, so I did the math: my savings, my investments, what each month would cost. When my severance came through a few weeks later, it jump-started the journey.

The deeper turning point was Hong Kong

Everyone I met understood me on an indescribable level. It was the only time in my life I was speaking Cantonese to people outside my family, reconnecting with my heritage. By the time I came home for the holidays, I had decided: I was moving to Asia.

The spark for the company was the women I met. Across Indonesia and Southeast Asia, I sat with women quietly building something of their own. I wanted to help these women build generational wealth for their families. I built DrinkFolks as a way to sustainably invest in them — 3% of every sale goes to women-led farms and nonprofits across Southeast Asia through our FolksFund — while supporting health stateside by bringing ancient wisdom into people's homes.

I started the company in January 2024, took every jamu class I could find in Bali, visited the source of jamu in Yogyakarta, and reformulated recipes in my Hong Kong kitchen.

By October 2024, I was back in the US, working with California food scientists to scale up my home-tested recipe. We launched in NYC in October 2025. Today, we're in 70+ stores across the US.

Living in Southeast Asia made the math work

My salary before the layoff was $160,000 a year, plus equity. When I set off, I had roughly $14,000 between savings and severance — my spreadsheet calculated 4.6 months of runway — and I felt comfortable investing that in myself.

I budgeted like it was my job. I tracked my actual spending obsessively for the first four and a half months and came in at roughly $7,700 total.

All-in, I averaged about $1,300 to $2,300 a month, including flights, lodging, food, everything. My money stretched furthest in Cambodia and least in Hong Kong, which was financially similar to New York City. For comparison: my overhead, including my mortgage, maintenance, electricity, and WiFi in New York today is about $2,500 a month.

In terms of cost of living comparisons, here's my breakdown

Healthcare was the biggest surprise, in the best way. I got into a motorcycle accident on the Pakse Loop in Laos, and seven stitches cost me around seven dollars, including painkillers and a week of antibiotics.

Cambodia was the best value. It's the most adventurous, outdoorsy country I visited, and I didn't want to explore alone, so I stayed in hostels for as little as $6 a night — partly a budget move, mostly a way to meet people. It's also where I met my first fellow Americans of the entire trip.

Hong Kong was the opposite — groceries and eating out gave me real sticker shock. I softened it with a genuine energy exchange: I moved in with a college friend and threw dinner parties several times a week, cooking meals for them in exchange for a place to stay. It was worth every dollar — I met some of my truest friends and future business partners there.

The layoff was honestly the best thing that ever happened to me

It gave me the confidence to build DrinkFolks, a better sense of my heritage, and a version of myself I'm proud of. I've learned to never say never, but right now, I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

My advice is to use your layoff as your launchpad. Things happen for you, not in spite of you. If you have even the slightest chance to live in that moment for yourself — for me, that was travel — take it as a gift and a blessing, not a crisis to survive.

Treat budgeting as freedom, not constraint. My money stretched so much further than I imagined. Clear parameters gave me the space to figure out who I am outside my job.

• Buzzy insurtech Corgi has a knack for launching new businesses, and investment banking may be next.
• The firm posted a job for a managing director of investment banking.
• Unlike typical investment banking jobs, the pay is commission only.

Corgi launched as an insurance startup, but it's been rapidly expanding into new businesses like thematic ETFs and 24/7 cafe/coworking spaces.

A job filing posted this month suggests it's now eyeing M&A investment banking.

The company, valued at $5 billion, is hiring for a "Managing Director, Investment Banking" role, according to the posting. It says the company is "seeking experienced Managing Directors with established client relationships, deep sector expertise, and a proven track record of originating and closing transactions."

The company says it's seeking someone with more than five years of experience. Unlike traditional investment banking jobs, which typically pair a hefty base salary with performance-based compensation, this job is "commission only, with no base salary."

"Payouts are tied to collected transaction fees, with terms based on origination and execution responsibilities and agreed upon before joining," the listing says.

Investment banking managing directors across the industry made a median of $1.1 million a year in 2025, according to Prospect Rock Partners, and in previous years, bonuses made up more than two-thirds of total compensation.

A commission-only contract could be seen as a hard sell for your average banker, but Corgi's prolific fundraising — $266 million this year and $431 million in total since its 2014 launch — and its vision of "building an AI financial infrastructure company" may be attractive to an ambitious young banker.

The company did not respond to a request for comment about its plans or the job posting.

Corgi was founded by Emily Yuan and Nico Laqua in 2024, offering a range of insurance products for startups. Its recently opened cafés are positioned as a marketing tool for startup founders.

While an investment banking platform may seem to be an odd choice for an insurer, it is a clue that this is part of the firm's vision to serve startups by helping them sell their businesses.

The posting said candidates should have relationships with "founders, sponsors, and referral partners" — in other words, those who can connect startup founders with private equity investors that could buy their companies.

• This week's cyber freakout explained: AI is making software weaknesses easier to find and exploit.
• The message from Cloudflare's Stephanie Cohen and Vercel's Tom Occhino: Don't panic!!!
• Do we need everything connected to the internet? Paper bank statements work well.

A few weeks ago, I heard a strange story about a friend who works at one of the Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley.

She'd recently ripped out the connected devices in her home, ordered paper bank statements, and stocked up on canned goods in her basement.

Now, she's a very sane, experienced person, and quite senior at one of the largest internet companies on earth. Why was she disconnecting so much? Just to be sure, my family ordered paper bank statements, too. It was still a head-scratcher, though.

Fast forward to this week, and her actions look a little less crazy.

AI models have exposed serious security weaknesses in software used by roughly 70% of websites. Meanwhile, US banks are finding AI agents inside customer accounts, including some that appear to be acting without their owners' instructions, Axios reported.

'Black October'

The digerati have now entered full freakout mode. Much of the internet meltdown is happening on, well, the internet, my colleague Alice Tecotzky noted.

On X and Reddit, warnings of a looming “Black October” spiraled into visions of AI grinding civilization to a halt. One lengthy post on X warned of a potential “global cyberattack/AI swarm” and offered a survival checklist: Stockpile cash in small bills, print out your neighbors' phone numbers, download maps, buy a hand-crank radio, and stash a gallon of water per person per day.

Oh, and don't forget the manual can opener. You don't want to survive the AI apocalypse only to be defeated by a tin of beans.

Nikita Bier, a prominent app developer and former head of product at X, best captured the mood.

"It's time to turn off the internet," he posted Wednesday night.

A Cloudflare exec says it's 'a little bit scary'

If you're reading this, you haven't done that yet. But should we really be worried?

I put that question to Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Cloudflare, which helps protect about 20% of the internet.

"The world is a little bit scary right now," she told me on the side of Cloudflare's annual conference in San Francisco this week.

Here's the problem. The internet is built on decades of software, much of it riddled with security holes.

Some of these weaknesses have been known for years. However, fixing them takes time and money, and hackers often lacked the skills to exploit them anyway. So they were left alone.

AI changes that calculation dramatically. Someone who previously needed years of training to break into a computer system can now get help from an AI model. And these tools can search for weaknesses at a speed humans simply can't match.

The result: The number of newly published software vulnerabilities (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures in industry lingo) has exploded.

Now, there's a frantic race between people trying to break into systems and those trying to protect them.

Don't panic about AI

Cohen's message, though, was surprisingly reassuring.

AI helps the good guys find and fix these problems. Cloudflare, for instance, released protections for the latest vulnerability to customers, including those using its free service.

And there's a bigger effort underway.

OpenAI has launched an initiative called Patch the Planet, working with Cloudflare and other security professionals to use AI to find weaknesses in widely used software and help repair them.

Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel, told me recently that his company has been talking with partners about launching a nonprofit that would fund a swarm of good AI agents that go out on the internet to find and fix software flaws.

Amazon is joining the fight, too. Its new Continuum service, available Thursday, uses AI agents to find security holes and propose fixes. Amazon said that people maintaining freely available software can use it to help protect the wider internet.

Humans may still have to check and approve these repairs, but the prospect of AI helping clean up decades of neglected software is encouraging.

The irony of this is not lost on some in the industry.

"The funny thing is everyone was saying AI slop code will cause a cyber crisis but it's actually all the old human slop causing it and the AI is just cleaning it up," software engineer Ben Kaufman wrote on X on Thursday.

Either way, Cloudflare's Cohen thinks these AI-inspired freakouts will push the industry to do better — by exposing issues and adding urgency to get them patched.

"We may end up in a world where actually we've become significantly more secure at the end," she said.

The trouble is getting there.

A fundamental question about the internet

When I ran into Occhino recently at a Vercel conference in San Francisco, he described a world in which software that everyone assumed was safe suddenly looks vulnerable because increasingly capable AI models are scrutinizing the basic systems that underpin the internet.

That led to a more fundamental discussion between us: Why did we connect so many things to the internet in the first place?

For years, the technology industry has raced to put everything online. Thermostats. Refrigerators. Doorbells. Cars. Bank accounts.

We assumed that connecting something to the internet automatically made it better.

Perhaps we should reconsider.

Before the internet

I remember the world before the internet. It worked pretty well. We managed to buy groceries, pay bills, heat our homes, and generally get through the day without every appliance talking to a computer somewhere.

That doesn't mean abandoning online banking or throwing your smartphone into the sea.

Occhino, for one, isn't particularly worried about hackers wiping out his bank account. Modern banks have sophisticated protections, and he recommends everyone turn on additional login security.

Maybe the cybersecurity crowd, which spends its life immersed in online threats, is missing something obvious.

Not everything needs to be connected.

Occhino put it neatly: "There's certain things that don't make sense to be on the internet in the first place."

Perhaps that's the lesson from this week's panic. We don't need to turn off the internet.

We just need to remember where the off switch is.

Alice Tecotzky contributed reporting.

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• Meta says that over a quarter of Muse users made purchases with the AI agent.
• The average order was over $200 — that's a lot of clams!
• If this is you, please tell me what you're using it for.

Something just blew my mind, and I'm asking for your help to figure it out.

According to Meta's Q3 earnings call on Wednesday, more than a quarter of Muse users so far have used the AI agent make purchases — and the average order size is over $200.

I'll say that again: average order size over $200.

This is shocking to me, and I'm someone who has been actively and happily using Muse for a variety of things. I've been perfectly happy to give Muse access to my email, my calendar, my credit cards, and even my Apple health data.

But I've been slightly reticent about using it to actually buy stuff. Not that I'm totally worried about it getting stuff wrong (although the one purchase I did try to make with it was to order a salad for lunch, and it attempted to place the order on my HSA card after I failed to recognize the last 4 digits of that card, oops).

I think it's more I enjoy shopping online myself? I mean, for most things, I suppose. For "fun" stuff like clothes or personal items, I enjoy browsing and the hit of dopamine when you check out. (Others take this to the extreme, using "dopamine sites" that let you browse fake restaurants and "order" food that never arrives.) The other night I ordered — on a real site — cotton balls, razor blade refills, a plain white t-shirt, and a pair of scissors from the Target app while watching TV and even that boring purchase with a total under $30 gave me a small thrill. Why would I want to cede that joy to AI?

I understand, however, that not all purchases are fun. My colleague, Peter Kafka, used Muse to help him place an order for a new washing machine — the kind of purchase that is difficult to decide on, not particularly fun or exciting to make, and fairly expensive. Things like plane tickets, washing machines, or car insurance are in that category of stuff you have to buy, cost a lot of money, are fairly complicated to decide which option to buy, but bring very little joy during checkout.

I can understand why you might want to hand that off to an AI agent.

If you are using Muse to place big $$$ orders, what the heck are you buying?

My best guess here is that people are using Muse for airplane flights and hotels — the kind of big dollar items that are kind of annoying to book yourself, and you care mainly about just booking the right dates.

Am I right? You tell me!

Comment below, or you can email me at: knotopoulos@businessinsider.com. Or, you know, tell your Muse to email me.

South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix has put on hold a planned US stock market listing for its Solidigm unit after regulators in Seoul raised concerns, citing market volatility as the reason for the delay.

U.S. President Donald Trump has asked Elon Musk to reverse a slowdown of SpaceX's Starlink satellite service that Musk had ordered for Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported. Musk, a vocal critic of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is said to have throttled the service amid tensions over the war.

• Sundar Pichai said Google was still in the early phases of recursively self-improving AI.
• Researchers are working with AI agents to build better models, he said.
• Sergey Brin recently said Google was "starting to get onto that RSI treadmill."

Google's AI models may be helping to build their successors, but CEO Sundar Pichai says the moment of fully self-improving AI is still a while away.

Speaking on an episode of the "Big Technology Podcast" this week, Pichai said that Google researchers were using AI agents to assist them when building models, but caveated that it was still early days.

"We are pretty far from the end state of RSI," said Pichai, referring to recursive self-improvement. "The right way to describe it is, you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. I would say you almost have agents helping AI researchers, in some automated way, work together to build these models."

Pichai added that he expected that continuum to keep making progress into next year.

Earlier this month, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said the company's Flash series of models, as well as Gemini 4, were demonstrating how AI was helping to build itself, and that Google was "starting to get onto that RSI treadmill."

"And now our researchers and the model work hand in hand to make the next version of the model," he said.

Brin has been increasingly involved in Google's Gemini efforts and has leveraged his power as cofounder to shift resources to projects he deems most effective, Business Insider previously reported. This has included pushing for more focus on RSI.

A report from the firm Gladstone AI, published earlier this month, said that most researchers interviewed from companies including Anthropic and DeepMind believed RSI will start within the next three to 12 months, and possibly sooner without government intervention.

In another moment on the "Big Technology Podcast," Pichai was asked about how much AI was being used to code internally. The company said in April that 75% of new code inside Google was generated by AI.

"That number in our world today is like meaningless in the sense that every part of code we now touch is influenced by AI deeply," Pichai said. With Gemini 4 Argon, he said, people were going to tackle harder problems. He also said Google was seeing a one-third decrease in code rollbacks, where software is reverted to a previous version because of a bug or system issue.

"And so I think people are writing code more productively, and better code with it," he said of AI tools.

Pichai also uses AI to track Google's model development and internal discussions, he told the "Sources" podcast this week.

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