Sara Blakely waited a decade for someone to invent a more comfortable high heel. After no one stepped up to the task, the entrepreneur decided her feet couldn’t wait any longer. That same frustration with a stagnant industry is what inspired her to launch Spanx nearly 25 years ago. The Atlanta-based company, now a billion-dollar…
Cognition AI, the San Francisco-based startup known for its A.I. software engineer Devin used by Goldman Sachs, has more than doubled its valuation to $10.2 billion after raising more than $400 million in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The deal, announced yesterday (Sept. 8), also drew participation from existing backers including angel…
As Apple prepares to unveil its iPhone 17 line today (Sept. 9), the company is widely expected to introduce its slimmest model yet. But that’s not the only change in store—this year’s new iPhones will also be manufactured in India from the start, underscoring Apple’s push to reduce its dependence on China and sidestep President…
Last year, Anthropic hired its first-ever A.I. welfare researcher, Kyle Fish, to examine whether A.I. models are conscious and deserving of moral consideration. Now, the fast-growing startup is looking to add another full-time employee to its model welfare team as it doubles down on efforts in this small but burgeoning field of research. The question…
The contest for A.I. leadership has shifted from lab breakthroughs to law books. Over the next eighteen months, the rule-making calendars in Washington, Brussels and Beijing will have a greater impact on margins, market access and M&A than any single model release. For investors, the divergence in the U.S., E.U. and China’s approaches is not…
The race to build the leading A.I. model has narrowed into a high-stakes duel between OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini, each embodying a different vision for the technology’s role in society. OpenAI leans on a consumer-first approach and creative fluency, while Google emphasizes enterprise integration and technical scale. Their dominance is underscored by the fact…
Paris-based Mistral AI is on track for a new funding round that would value the A.I. startup at 12 billion euros ($14 billion), Bloomberg reports. The investment, expected to total around 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion), would solidify the company’s position at the center of Europe’s sovereign A.I. strategy and bring it closer to its…
This Q&A is part of Observer’s Expert Insights series, where industry leaders, innovators and strategists distill years of experience into direct, practical takeaways and deliver clarity on the issues shaping their industries. At a time when loneliness is being called a public health crisis and nearly half of U.S. adults say they struggle to make…
Mike Liberatore, chief financial officer of Elon Musk’s xAI, has left the company after just three months, the Wall Street Journal first reported. His exit adds to a wave of high-profile turnover at the startup. Launched by Musk in 2023, xAI is best known for its Grok chatbot. The company’s technology has quickly caught up…
Every decade in business brings a new buzzword. The 1980s had “re-engineering.” The 1990s, “synergy.” The 2000s, “disruption.” The 2010s gave us “digital transformation.” Today the phrase still lingers in boardrooms and consultant decks, often sprinkled with “AI-native” promises that legacy companies can somehow shed their industrial skin and reemerge as sleek digital enterprises. It…
