Tech
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Exclusive: Eigen raises a seed round from Benchmark to build the world’s first ‘mutual friend’
More than 600 million people watched the moon landing live in 1969. When NASA’s Artemis program returned astronauts to the lunar surface, an estimated 27 million tuned in, even as the world’s population had doubled. The shared cultural experience, the kind that once stitched strangers together, has quietly collapsed—and Paul Scherer thinks AI is about…
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Harvey’s 30-year-old CEO says failing is a ‘good way to learn’ and says ‘destroying your ego’ led him to an $11 billion success
How do you build an $11 billion startup? For Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of AI legal startup Harvey, it’s all about failure. “I think it’s really hard to figure this out without failing. You just have to fail a million times,” Weinberg said on a recent episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast. The 30-year-old…
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Gen Z turning its back on AI isn’t irrational — it’s a verdict on everyone who failed them
America has a problem with young people and AI. Gen Z has looked clearly at what the AI revolution is doing to their lives and rendered a verdict: the institutions that were supposed to prepare them for this moment have failed, the employers that were supposed to hire them have vanished, and the government that…
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Canva debuts a new suite of agentic tools, as the design app quietly becomes one of the world’s most used AI services
Canva, the Australian startup that’s won over 265 million users with its design software, is launching a new suite of tools that combine visual creation and workflow automation, run by AI agents that respond to conversational prompts Dubbed “Canva AI 2.0,” the new platform of services lets users create and alter designs using natural language,…
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Most of you are rejecting AI. The data shows you’re running out of time
The resistance is measurable, the anxiety is real—and neither will slow down what’s coming. A new global survey of 3,750 executives and employees across 14 countries finds more than 54% of workers bypassed their company’s AI tools in the past 30 days and completed the work manually instead. Another 33% haven’t used AI at all.…
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Exclusive: The doctors and education experts who studied AI’s impact on the young call for a 5-year moratorium in schools
The researchers, doctors, and child development experts have studied what generative AI does to developing brains. Their conclusion: it shouldn’t be anywhere near a classroom, and action needs to happen fast. “We just don’t want to waste another 10 years in which our kids’ education is undermined,” Leonie Haimson, executive director of the Parent Coalition…
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Pause AI and Stop AI: Meet the anti-AI groups facing questions after the attack on Sam Altman
The attempted firebombing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home last Friday, allegedlycarried out by 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, has drawn attention to two anti-AI groups with similar names: Pause AI and Stop AI. Both have condemned the violence and said the suspect is not and was never a member of their organizations. Still, the…
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From wool sneakers to GPUs: Allbirds’ desperate AI pivot and 600% stock surge, explained
Many companies, from Walmart to United Airlines, have been heavily touting their use of artificial intelligence to get some more love from Wall Street during this AI boom—and some have successfully boosted their stock’s value. Now Allbirds has joined the fray: The shoe company announced on Wednesday it would reinvent itself as an AI computing…
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Starbucks wants you to ask ChatGPT about what coffee to get, right as America boils over with AI backlash vibes
Starbucks has a solution for unsure coffee lovers who face a truly dizzying amount of choice: Just let software make a selection for you. The Seattle-based chain is testing a beta app in ChatGPT that helps users discover drinks based on vibes and gut feelings alone, the company announced Wednesday, marking another step in corporate…
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Allbirds ditches sneaker business to pivot to AI compute, stock surges over 700%
Two weeks ago, Allbirds was a cautionary tale. The maker of the wool sneakers seemingly glued to the feet of every Patagonia-vested VC in 2019, once worth $4 billion, had a humiliating fire sale on April Fools’ Day and sold itself to a brand management company for $39 million—roughly 1% of its peak valuation. It…