Block’s decision to cut 40 percent of its staff in February shocked many in Silicon Valley, but the company says the move was the culmination of a long-planned shift toward A.I.-driven operations, not a spur-of-the-moment cost cut. “This has been a two-year journey for us,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer,…
Brett Adcock has built and sold companies in robotics, security and air taxis, and now he wants to reinvent how people use A.I. His latest venture, Hark, is a new lab that pairs personalized intelligence with custom-built hardware. Instead of specializing in models or devices alone, Hark aims to own the whole pipeline—foundation models, software…
As a child growing up in the 1960s, Peter Diamandis’s world changed when he began watching Star Trek. The sci-fi show’s utopian vision inspired him to launch companies in health, space and education and to create ambitious competitions through his XPrize Foundation. Today, he believes pop culture has swung too far in the other direction. These days,…
For decades, the financial system has operated like a collection of walled gardens, each governed by its own rules, ledger and infrastructure. When a user moves money between banks, the process requires many intermediaries, including correspondent institutions, clearinghouses and manual reconciliations. The system has functioned because customers have had little choice but to accept the…
Executives often entertain wealthy clients, but James Arrowood’s conversations with them revolve around life, death and what comes after. As CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based nonprofit focused on cryonics—the practice of freezing human bodies, heads and even pets in hopes that future generations might one day revive them—he oversees a membership of…
Winston Weinberg understands what junior associates at law firms need because he was once one of them. In 2022, the then 27-year-old was working at O’Melveny & Meyers when he began experimenting with OpenAI models alongside his roommate, Gabe Pereyra, then a research scientist at Meta. After realizing A.I. could streamline inefficiencies in the legal…
Battery storage is scaling globally at historic speed. In just a few years, grids around the world have added record volumes of battery capacity, driven by renewable penetration, energy security concerns and surging electricity demand. Global installations reached approximately 270 gigawatts (GW)/630 gigawatt-hour (GWh) last year, achieving 43 percent year-over-year growth, with forecasts projecting exponential…
Shishir Mehrotra’s push to turn Grammarly, now parent-branded as Superhuman, into an A.I. powerhouse has delivered a major backlash. In less than a year as CEO, he has rebranded the company, led acquisitions and pushed an aggressive pivot into A.I. agents. But one of those tools, an A.I. “Expert Review” feature launched last summer, has…
The transition of A.I. from the experimental stage into real financial infrastructure may seem subtle, but it is unfolding steadily and quickly. Until recently, most projects remained pilot initiatives. According to PwC, in the financial sector, more than two-thirds of projects stayed at the trial-launch or research stage. The industry was testing the technology, but…
Nvidia is betting that the future of corporate A.I. will run on OpenClaw and that it will be the company making that happen. At its GTC conference yesterday (March 15), CEO Jensen Huang unveiled NemoClaw, a new enterprise agent platform built on top of viral open-source system OpenClaw, positioning Nvidia as the secure way for…
