On Wall Street, the question is no longer how much artificial intelligence will grow, but who will foot the bill. After years of market domination, tech companies have stopped being a safe bet, and the time has come to pick carefully, identifying which ones are going to fall prey to their own pharaonic investment plans and which ones are not.
© Dado Ruvic (REUTERS)
Stephen Council/BI
As AI labs go on the hunt for real-world data, Micro1 is throwing everything at getting it for them.
The startup is one in a new class of fast-moving data brokers, gobbling up companies' internal data and packaging it for the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model developers. The executives who sell their companies' data to Micro1 find themselves suddenly participating in a new sector of the economy, where terabytes of mundane workplace interactions can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ilya Brotzky, the CEO and cofounder of the recruiting startup VanHack, told Business Insider he was shocked when he filled out a Micro1 survey about his company's data and received a "substantial" offer.
"I didn't believe it, to be honest," he said. "I felt like it was a little too good to be true."
Micro1 says it pays $100,000 to $2 million for a single midsize company's data. It recently announced plans to spend $1 billion on the project over the next year. Brotzky and the other executives Business Insider spoke to for this story wouldn't share the exact amounts their companies received.
For Micro1, the new focus on workplace data matches a broader evolution in the industry, as Business Insider has written about in The AI Data Grab, a series about how tech giants are increasingly turning to workers, users, and the physical world to get data to train AI.
First, AI companies gobbled up text from the internet and corpora of old books. Then they realized that humans grading AI responses could improve their models. And now, companies are using complex simulations, built on real-world data, to improve the tenacity and skill of their AI.
Micro1
Gartner estimated that spending on AI data is likely to surge from less than $1 billion last year to almost $6.5 billion in 2027. Micro1's chief revenue officer, William Almeida, told Business Insider in September that his company has been explaining to prospective customers why their data is suddenly so valuable for those simulations.
"Every time I talk to companies, I tell them, 'Hey, I see this as a booming business,'" Almeida said.
Micro1 has three ways of working with AI model developers.
First, it can take a company's raw data, transform it to protect privacy, and license it to a lab. In addition, Micro1 provides an in-progress AI agent to companies and gets feedback on how it works. The third route is the simulation: Micro1 takes a company's data up to a certain timestamp, freezes it, and then provides that "environment" to a model developer trying to teach its AI how to work from existing context.
Micro1 pays more for larger, more complex datasets, as well as for data that represents a unique type of work or knowledge. It usually wants to license a company's entire data corpus, so that an AI model can replicate what it would be like to be a human employee.
"The connection, the diversity, the traceability of all of these data points, they matter a lot when you think about model training," Almeida said.
Brotzky also received an offer from AI data startup Mercor to buy his company's data, though he opted for Micro1. Once Brotzky dug into Micro1's privacy process, he said he felt comfortable sharing all the data they requested. That included VanHack's Google suite, Confluence data, Slack messages, and customer relationship management software.
Grant Gooley, the CEO of the marketing agency MyPortal Marketing, also views his deal with Micro1 as an innovation. He has sold internal design files from Figma and Canva, as well as checklists from Monday.com.
"When we were building these processes years ago, I didn't think that we would be using it to support AI learning," Gooley said. "But doing that, it's very fulfilling."
Micro1 and its rivals are full steam ahead. Still, there are open questions. Former and current employees aren't likely to get any compensation from — or a voice in — their work becoming AI fodder. Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University, previously told Business Insider that data sales are an "ethically gray area."
When pitching to potential customers, Almeida tells them this business is in the early days.
"If you wait too much, you won't get the premium that the first companies are getting," he said.
VanHack's team got a confidence boost from the Micro1 deal, Brotzky said, because of the additional revenue stream it represents
Gooley said he's kept MyPortal Marketing's employees in the loop about the deal with Micro1 and hasn't heard any complaints.
"I told my team that this is something that you're going to tell your grandchildren about one day, because we are literally supporting the future growth of marketing agencies," Gooley said.
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One of the world's largest investment firms says that only tech companies are getting a share of the AI pie.
In an economic analysis published on Saturday, Apollo Global Management said that while the Magnificent Seven — a group of established tech companies that includes Nvidia and Meta — are seeing revenue growth during the AI boom, this growth isn't being shared by other industries.
"Mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins," Torsten Slok, a partner and chief economist at Apollo, said in the report. "The technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."
In a series of graphs, Slok measured three main metrics that have boomed for tech companies but not for regular companies: revenue per worker, profit margins, and productivity growth.
Since 2022, revenue per employee figures have skyrocketed for tech companies — rising from $550,000 to nearly $800,000 today. Meanwhile, that figure hasn't changed much for everyone else in the S&P 500, lingering around $550,000 for the last seven years.
Similarly, while profit margins soared among tech companies since 2022, they've stagnated at about 10% for everyone else.
And across the economy, AI hasn't yet dramatically increased productivity growth as some AI optimists have predicted.
Apollo's research portends a dark shadow over a US economy throwing massive amounts of dough toward AI tools and companies, whose leaders have promised that an "age of abundance," where people won't have to work as much, will soon be upon us.
"The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins," Slok said.
"That may be harder than it sounds," he added.
Business Insider
Canva wants a shot at winning the AI image generation race.
The design platform launched Canva Craft on Thursday, its first image-generation model, similar to those from Google, Meta, and OpenAI.
Users can access Craft through Canva’s Dream Lab, including with free accounts, though it is subject to AI usage limits. You’ll need to sign in to a Canva account to get started.
In the release announcement, Canva said the tool plans a design’s layout, proportions, and text before generating an image, an approach that aims to help it produce legible lettering and accurate details.
The company also said that the model was trained on human-designed Canva templates, including posters, menus, and presentations, rather than photographs.
To test how Canva performs, Business Insider created three image generation prompts with escalating difficulty levels — from designing a simple greeting card to creating a photorealistic image from scratch.
Here is how Canva's brand-new image generation tool stacked up against three of the most powerful models.
Canva did not respond to a request for comment.
Business Insider
We started off simple with a prompt for a birthday card.
Create a cartoon "Happy Birthday" greeting card for a friend named Jessica who has pink hair, brown eyes, likes to wear paisley, and is turning 28 years old in November.
Surprisingly, Canva, the design platform, fell short in its design of the birthday card, from the awkward font to the outsize head of the cartoon character. It didn't even bother to include any paisley.
By comparison, ChatGPT and Muse understood the assignment.
ChatGPT guessed that the recipient's favorite color might be pink, while Muse thoughtfully wove in cozy fall elements for the November birthday girl.
Screenshot/Business Insider
Meanwhile, Gemini took the request literally and produced an image of an actual card. Extra points!
Winner: Muse
Screenshot/Business Insider
For the second task, I tested the AI models' ability to identify an element and place it in a brand-new setting.
Edit this image of me holding a necklace pendant. Take the red garnet pendant off my hand and make it look as if it is displayed in a vitrine in a jewelry showroom.
Canva did a great job of identifying the pendant and creating an atmospheric setting, but, like Gemini, it depicted the jewelry in a way that defied physics and common sense. It would be unrealistic for a pendant to float in the air or sit propped on a metal pole.
Business Insider
ChatGPT and Muse once again outperformed other models in understanding how things typically look in reality. Muse, however, made some alterations to the pendant, which I didn't ask for.
Winner: ChatGPT
Made with Canva/Business Insider
With Halloween approaching, I asked for a realistic depiction of my favorite animal.
Generate a photorealistic image of a long-haired orange tabby cat in a Halloween costume with bat wings, perched on the edge of a gothic medieval castle under the full moon and a starless night sky.
Though the cat's fur looks a little too strandy and high-contrast in Canva's creation, no components are missing or malformed, and the image composition pretty much matches the quality of Muse and Gemini.
The clear winner for me in this round, however, would be ChatGPT.
Business Insider
Not only is the cat's posture majestic, but the soft glow on his left side is extremely realistic, and the white balance is well done. There are also clouds softly cradling the moon, which could be a response to my request for a starless sky.
Winner: ChatGPT
Overall, it's evident that Canva still has a lot of room to grow compared to other models, especially if graphic design is its focus. For now, I'll stick to moving components around by hand.
Richard Drury/Getty Images
If you're still using the same password for everything, it might finally be time to get on that.
While the major cybersecurity vulnerabilities that OpenAI agents helped expose on Wednesday primarily impact the owners and operators of websites, it could also give hackers the opportunity to hijack your personal information, researchers said.
"Be extra careful visiting ANY web site in the next few days," Changpeng Zhao, the cofounder of cryptocurrency platform Binance, said on X.
OpenAI said on Wednesday that researchers using its AI models uncovered two "critical" flaws in the infrastructure of PHP, a popular open-source programming language used on about 70% of the world's websites.
Because digital commerce websites, for instance, can store personal shopper information in PHP systems, that information would be accessible to a bad actor exploiting the web provider's system if that provider hasn't updated it.
The National Security Administration warned that hackers using one of the PHP exploits could "steal sensitive data, disrupt services, or move deeper into a network."
"Even if you yourself are not building software and that's not where your core business is, a lot of your life does depend on companies that depend on those systems," Madeline Lawrence, cofounder of Aikido Security, an application security platform, told Business Insider on Thursday.
"And they could be deeply, deeply vulnerable," she added. She said that one day after the disclosure, cybersecurity platform Cloudflare reported millions of attempts to exploit the vulnerability.
If you do own a website, PHP has released updates it says will help shield websites from hackers. Instructions for applying those updates are available on PHP's homepage.
For everyone else, here are a few tips cybersecurity researchers say you can use to protect your info.
"You can ask your claude code to audit what on your laptop is out of date and needs updating," Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Network, a bipartisan nonprofit that advocates for safety guardrails and federal oversight, added in a post on X.
PSA: in light of recent cyberattacks and vulnerabilities, I recommend everyone:
— Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 (@peterwildeford) October 21, 2026
* use a good password manager (1Password) and do not duplicate passwords
* use two factor auth for everything important (not via sms!! Google Authenticator or better yet YubiKey)
* Auto-updates on,…
Though Lawrence called the vulnerability "very severe," she cautioned against people running to close their bank accounts to protect themselves.
"Assume that if you're getting a notification that your data has been leaked," she said. "Take action on that because you could have credentials or information floating around the dark web."
In the heart of the historic working-class and Latino Mission district in San Francisco, the door of a ground-floor unit next to a trendy coffee shop keeps opening. A private shuttle that ferries tech workers to their Silicon Valley headquarters farther south passes by every morning. The 796 sq.ft. (74-square-meter) apartment, recently renovated and furnished, is thoughtfully laid out, from the small open kitchen to the built-in closets. But it gets very little light. Of its two bedrooms, one has no windows. And it costs $4,750 a month.
© Michael Macor (The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Years ago, when people asked Geoffrey Hinton why he worked on artificial intelligence, he would repeat a line from J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
© Ramón de la Rocha (EFE)
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