• UBS is using AI to create avatar videos from analysts' notes.
• 36 analysts covering a range of sectors are taking part in the Swiss bank's initiative.
• UBS told Business Insider that clients have been seeking more video options.

Banks are using AI to save their analysts' time while giving clients what they want.

Bank of America uses "Banker Assist" to aggregate information to offer insights unique to each client, while Goldman Sachs has a "GS AI Assistant" that functions as an in-house ChatGPT for staff.

Swiss bank UBS has gone further, using AI to generate avatars of analysts that explain their research to clients, and it's planning to do this more.

The Swiss bank started using AI avatars of some analysts in January. About 36 UBS analysts, or 5% of its total, have volunteered to take part. They cover sectors including technology, consumer goods, and energy.

UBS's use of AI avatars was first reported by The Financial Times.

Using OpenAI and Synthesia tools, a script is generated in a matter of seconds that is then edited by staff.

Scott Solomon, head of global research technology at UBS, told Business Insider that his team started creating videos of analysts a decade ago, but capacity restrictions meant they were capped at about 1,000 annually.

Analysts were writing an average of two notes a week but would only go to the video studio once a quarter, he said.

The new tools are "enabling somebody to use a capability in video that they weren't really able to use before," he said.

It also gives clients another way to digest information and meet their rising demand for video, Solomon said.

He compared an avatar to other parts of an analyst's toolkit. "When an analyst joins UBS, we give them Excel, we give them our authoring platform, we give them a CRM [customer relationship management] tool so they can talk to clients. I want them to have an avatar," he said.

Solomon said the next step would be integrating the technology so that a video can eventually be created when an analyst publishes a note — without the need for editing.

He said he hoped this would become possible by the end of the year.

Even if the process was fully automated, UBS said analysts will still assess a video based on their notes before it is sent to clients.

Solomon said that ideally, the avatars would eventually become part of the onboarding process, so that whenever a note is published, there's a video too.

The next step would be integrating this capability directly into the authoring platform.

"We have the script generator, we have the ability to send the script to generate the avatar, and then we obviously have the ability to deliver the avatar to clients," Solomon said.

"We want to string all that together so that as they're writing the note, they can get the video with it as well. Our goal is absolutely not to do 50,000 videos a year, but clearly there's an opportunity to do more videos than we are today."

• Systems engineer Michael Floyd worked at Lockheed Martin for four years.
• Floyd was the breadwinner for his family, but chose to become a stay-at-home dad.
• He and his wife budgeted for the transition and even built a chicken coop to counter egg prices.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Michael Floyd, a 36-year-old stay-at-home dad from Ithaca, New York. It's been edited for length and clarity.

When my wife was pregnant with our child, I was the main breadwinner for our family. We were deciding between two options: putting our daughter in childcare or me becoming a stay-at-home dad.

My wife's plan has always been to become a full-time professor at a top university, so we knew she wouldn't be staying home with our daughter. On the other hand, I was working as a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin, with a six-figure salary.

I took three months of parental leave, and after that, my decision was clear. I left my six-figure engineering job to care for our child while my wife focused on her career. Here's how we decided and budgeted for the change.

New York state childcare would've cost us $30,000 a year

While I was at Lockheed Martin, my wife was working a postdoctoral position at Cornell University. We were also making additional income from our Airbnb rental and two full-time rental properties.

We did calculations, and in our city in New York state, childcare would cost about $30,000 annually.

But I didn't officially decide to be a stay-at-home dad until I spent time caring for my daughter during my parental leave. I noticed just how much attention she needs. I don't trust that even the best childcare worker could attend to my daughter to the degree that I would want.

Plus, until my daughter is of the age where she can raise her voice and let me know something's wrong, it's really hard for me to allow a stranger to watch her. I'm sure 99% of workers are amazing, but I don't want to take a chance on the 1%.

I enjoyed my job, but I left to take care of our daughter full time

I found my job to be fun because it felt like solving Sudoku puzzles all day, but it required me to sit at my desk for 10-hour shifts.

Since I hurt my back during my 6-year service in the military, long periods of sitting or standing make it flare up. After four years doing my job, the last two of which were remote, I felt isolated, so I knew I had made the right decision to leave.

I don't have any plans to return to work at the moment, but it's not off the table for the future.

Since I was the main breadwinner, we had to budget for me to stay home

We canceled our housekeeper and our CrossFit memberships. We also switched from Verizon to T-Mobile, which saves us over $100 each month, and removed one of our three vehicles from our insurance.

I've cut down on our grocery bill by adjusting my diet to rely on more plant-based sources of protein like lentils rather than expensive meats. We also switched to cloth diapers, which we estimate will save us up to $2,000 by the time she's potty-trained.

I even built a chicken coop in response to egg price inflation. I converted the old shed in our backyard into a chicken coop. We currently have five chickens, but our coop can hold up to 20, and we spend $60 on chicken feed monthly.

Being a stay-at-home parent is demanding, but worth it

The biggest challenge of being a stay-at-home dad has been how emotional my daughter's crying rants can be. You'd think that you could just put her in a crib and leave and let her cry it out, but you can't.

It's constant work, but that doesn't affect me much. What affects me is that when she's crying, there's not always something I can do. It's an emotionally difficult experience. Sometimes, it'll be 6 p.m. and she's tired of me and the bottle, and she just wants to be comforted by her mother. In those moments, she's completely inconsolable.

But the best part about being a stay-at-home parent is seeing all of her firsts. When she started smiling after one month, it made everything worth it. There's a lifetime of firsts coming, and I can't wait to see all of them.

If you left a high-paying job to be a stay-at-home parent and would like to share your story, please email the editor, Manseen Logan, at [email protected].

• Coworker.ai nabbed $13 million in VC funding from Triatomic Capital, Abstract Ventures, and Eniac.
• Founded by former Uber managers, the startup builds a general-purpose AI teammate for the workplace.
• Business Insider got an exclusive look at the pitch deck Coworker used to raise its seed round.

Your newest work colleague might not be joining you at the water cooler or at the team's next happy hour: AI agents are infiltrating the workplace, and one startup building those — aptly named Coworker — just cleared a big funding round to put "AI teammates" to work.

Jeff Huber, managing director at Triatomic Capital, led Coworker's $13 million seed funding round, which was announced on Tuesday. Ramtin Naimi of Abstract Ventures, Mallun Yen of Operator Collective, Tim Young of Eniac Ventures, and Clark Golestani, Ken Hausman, and Jack Greenfield of K2 Access Fund also participated in the raise.

Based in San Francisco, Coworker bills itself as a general-purpose AI teammate that can research, plan, and execute high-level work just like an experienced colleague can. The startup said its technology, which about 25 companies have been beta testing since late 2024, has been used across engineering, product management, sales marketing, and operations functions.

For example, a Coworker can act as an engineering teammate to write code, create and review pull requests, and automate release notes, keeping human developers focused on shipping new features. It can also act as a sales teammate, analyzing sales calls and generating proposals and follow-up emails.

Coworker uses its own products at work, which gives the startup a leg up in shipping new features and developing the technology, said CEO and cofounder Alex Calder. For example, Coworker's agents do work like drafting product requirement documents based on customer feedback, creating tickets, writing code, and turning that code into sales talking points, he said.

"In the last six months, we've seen our internal team going from 'AI is good at giving me information' to 'AI is good at using that information to do work for me'," Calder told Business Insider. "That's only possible when you give AI really rich context on your company, your goals, and how you do work."

Calder and his cofounder, Coworker chief product officer Bradford Church, are former Uber managers who led the transportation company's shared rides team.

AI agents are generating strong interest from VCs, and there's high demand, especially for agents that take over rote workplace tasks and free up human employees to focus on more creative and high-impact work. In May, ThriveAI, which builds AI agents that act as junior software engineers, announced a $1.2 million pre-seed round, and AI coding agent startup StackAI announced it landed $16 million.

Another general-purpose AI workplace agent, Artisan, announced in April it raised $25 million.

Calder acknowledged that the AI agent market is getting crowded. When it came to getting VCs excited, focusing on customers helped Coworker close the round, he said.

"There are so many jaw-dropping AI demos these days that VCs are totally desensitized to them," he said. "What they really care about is how customers are actually using the product and whether it can solve real problems at scale. I think what worked in our favor is that we were able to show the real impact Coworker is having inside large companies during our fundraise."

Coworker previously raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding from Soma Capital, Focal VC, Mischief, and Karman Ventures.

Check out the 14-slide presentation Coworker used to raise $13 million in seed funding.

• Google announced 100 updates at I/O, aiming to dominate the AI landscape.
• Google's AI model Gemini will integrate into Chrome, challenging OpenAI's ChatGPT.
• Google's strategy shows ambition but risks a lack of focus amid competition from OpenAI.

Google made literally 100 announcements at I/O this week, a clear sign that the tech giant intends to dominate every aspect of AI, from its overhaul of Search to its latest AI models and wearables tech.

The event was packed and, at times, felt electrifying. Google showed impressive stats about how its AI has taken off. It had plenty of far-out goals, too, like building a universal AI assistant and extended reality glasses that give directions in real time.

I/O also showcased Google's vulnerabilities. Some releases clearly overlapped, while arch-rival OpenAI upstaged Google on Wednesday with a big announcement of its own.

With the conference now over, here are six main takeaways.

Google wants a 'total overhaul' of Search

The biggest change touted at I/O was AI Mode — what CEO Sundar Pichai called a "total overhaul" of Google's most iconic feature. In AI Mode, users will have a far more conversational Search experience, asking Google questions directly about what they're looking for.

That's a marked change from the traditional experience of going through a long list of links to find the right answer, which feels more clunky than ever in an age of AI chatbots.

At the same time, AI features like these could cannibalize Google Search and threaten the tech giant's main cash cow, Google Ads. Google risks not figuring out how to heavily monetize these AI tools. That being said, it's already testing ads in AI Mode.

Gemini everywhere

Google's AI model family, Gemini, took center stage at I/O. Google announced that it will integrate Gemini into Chrome, allowing users to chat with its latest AI models while they browse. (The feature rolls out to subscribers this summer.) It's a shot across the bow to OpenAI's ChatGPT, which already has a popular Chrome extension.

I/O also announced an array of updates to its Gemini app, which recently passed 400 million monthly active users — an impressive figure, though still behind ChatGPT. With an update called Personal Context, Gemini app users can get tailored responses based on personal data from Google services, like asking its AI to find a long-lost email.

It's all part of a long-term plan to build a universal AI assistant: what Google calls Project Astra. While it's still unfinished, that plan feels more fleshed out now than when Business Insider tested Astra a year ago.

Soaring AI traction

New AI features are undeniably cool, though Google's AI traction garnered some of the biggest reactions at Pichai's keynote speech on Tuesday.

Onstage, Pichai boasted that the number of tokens generated by Google across all its platforms a month had exploded 50 times to over 480 trillion since last year.

The crowd gasped—it was a big moment. Last year's I/O felt like a giant teaser for coming AI features, with plenty of promise but little to show for it. This year felt different.

Sergey Brin goes founder mode

There was no greater manifestation of Google tripling down on AI than cofounder Sergey Brin crashing a fireside chat with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. That was after Brin wandered around a pavilion trying on a pair of Google's XR glasses.

At the chat, Brin said he goes into the office "pretty much every day now" to work on AI. He also said that retired computer scientists should get back to work to take advantage of the current environment.

Brin has been back at Google since 2023 as the search giant races against AI rivals, and it's obvious he's in "founder mode" — something quite rare at a mature company.

Google's smart glasses are here — sort of

Google let BI briefly try on its prototype Android XR glasses, which have Gemini's AI features and allow users to ask questions. While the tech shows promise, it's still early days. Google staffers asked the throngs of I/O attendees lining up for demos not to ask about price, availability, or battery life.

"We just don't know!" they said.

The prototype glasses feel impressively lightweight — almost too much so, to the point that they felt like they might fall off our faces. The display sits only on the right lens and is practically invisible unless viewed at just the right angle under the right light. It's full-color, but it's small and subtle enough that you might miss the display entirely.

We weren't allowed to view Google Maps or Photos in the glasses like Google showed off in its keynote. Instead, we put on the glasses and walked around a room filled with artwork on the walls and travel catalogs on a table that we could ask Gemini questions about.

While Gemini correctly identified the artwork, it couldn't answer a basic travel query when we looked at the travel catalogs: "What is the cheapest flight to New York next month?" And because the display is only on one side, focusing on it made us feel a bit cross-eyed.

The version we saw isn't the final design. It's missing the coming Warby Parker and Gentle Monster flair, though we did see glimmers of something promising here.

Throwing everything against the wall may or may not work

Google's announcements are undeniably impressive, though some of them felt repetitive. It's hard to understand the difference between Search Live and Gemini Live, for example. Both of them involve chatting with your phone about what it sees through its camera.

Google's strategy of launching literally 100 different things at once could work for the company. It could also signal a lack of focus.

BI was at an I/O panel when the news broke that OpenAI was buying former Apple design chief Jony Ive's hardware startup. Seeing OpenAI upstage Google like that felt a little ominous.

The Google panel BI attended was quite dry and technical, with terms like AI-powered "tool calling" mentioned several times. The contrast with OpenAI's buzzy announcement couldn't be clearer. We even saw several attendees check their phones when the news came out.

Google does have massive advantages in scale and distribution, thanks to Android and Chrome.

Still, it's possible that in the long term, something like an AI-native device that ditches Google's ecosystem altogether eventually takes over.

Investors got a taste of that risk last month, when the stock of Google's parent company, Alphabet, briefly tanked after Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue said search volume was shrinking due to AI.

The America that marched for George Floyd five years ago is gone, buried beneath a backlash that has hardened — for now — into a new political and cultural order.

Why it matters: Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer shocked the national conscience. But what looked like historic momentum for racial justice has collapsed — eclipsed by a reactionary movement backed by the full force of the U.S. government.

• Still, activists aren't giving up: They're recharging and refocusing their efforts — shifting from mass protest to defending what remains, and planting the seeds for what's next.
• The fight has moved from the streets to the margins: In courtrooms, classrooms and city councils, a quieter form of resistance is taking shape — often out of the spotlight, but no less determined.

Zoom in: Civil rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, Urban League, and NAACP are investing in long-term infrastructure — working to build durable political power and economic resilience in Black communities.

• Angela Rye, a political strategist and former adviser to the Congressional Black Caucus, is leading a 12-city "State of the People Power" backed by over 200 local and national partners.
• Rev. Jamal Bryant's boycott of Target over its rollback of DEI commitments — which dented the retailer's Q1 sales — shows how economic pressure is becoming a central tool of resistance.
• Selwyn Jones, George Floyd's uncle and co-founder of the Justice 929 Organization, is launching the MYTH app this summer to help record police interactions and alert emergency contacts in real time.

What they're saying: "Progress isn't a straight line. It swings like a pendulum," NAACP president Derrick Johnson told Axios.

• "And for some people, especially younger folks, it can feel like we're going backward. But the truth is we're still perfecting democracy, and the Black community has always been at the center of that work."

Flashback: While the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery stirred anger and protests in early 2020, it was Floyd's murder on May 25 — captured on camera and seen around the world — that ignited a global uprising.

• Statues toppled. Streets filled. Cities pledged reforms. Fortune 500 companies embraced diversity initiatives.
• For a moment, it felt like transformative change was coming.

Five years later, the pendulum has swung hard in the opposite direction.

• DEI: On his first day in office, President Trump ordered a government-wide purge of DEI programs and offices — the opening salvo in a systemic effort to dismantle the racial justice agenda that emerged in 2020.
• Civil rights: The Trump administration has moved aggressively to unravel President Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legacy, including by reorienting DOJ priorities to focus on "anti-white racism."
• History: Trump ordered a federal review of Confederate monuments toppled during the 2020 protests, targeting what he called a "concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history."
• Police reform: Days before the anniversary of Floyd's murder, the Justice Department scrapped proposed consent decrees for the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments — and dropped nearly a dozen other investigations into alleged police abuse.
• Refugee policy: The administration has effectively ended most refugee programs — except for one tailored to white South African farmers, justified by Trump's false claims of "white genocide."

Zoom out: The racial justice backlash hasn't been confined to government.

• Major corporations that once championed diversity initiatives have slashed DEI staff, removed racial equity language from mission statements, and dropped even the appearance of activism.
• Open racism, antisemitism, and white nationalism have flourished online, with viral incidents — like the cases of Shiloh Hendrix and Karmelo Anthony — fueling toxic tribalism and fundraising.
• Prominent MAGA influencers have even launched a campaign to convince Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering Floyd.

The big picture: Advocates, experts and Floyd family members tell Axios that the 2020 racial reckoning has a mixed legacy, with victories often overlooked amid today's backlash.

• Most Americans say the heightened focus on race and racial inequality following Floyd's death did not lead to improvements for Black Americans, according to a February survey by the Pew Research Center.
• But civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who has represented the families of Floyd, Taylor, and countless others in the Black Lives Matter era, argued there has been incremental progress — especially in police accountability.

In the five years since Floyd's death, dozens of cities and states have passed bans on no-knock warrants, expanded crisis response teams and introduced civilian review boards — wins drowned out by public fatigue.

• The NAACP's Johnson acknowledged that fatigue, but he pushed back against the idea that people have stopped fighting.
• "No one is resting," he stressed. "We've earned the right to reflect. But we are still organizing, still fighting — because not only do our lives depend on it, this democracy does too."

Facing a revolt from Miami Republicans, President Trump salvaged his giant spending plan in Congress late Wednesday by ensuring the death of a Chevron oil deal in Venezuela that the lawmakers lividly opposed.

Why it matters: Trump's decision was a matter of political necessity and a nod to his secretary of state, Marco Rubio — a longtime critic of Nicolas Maduro's socialist dictatorship in Venezuela and Chevron's oil export license that helps enrich the regime.

• Trump's move also offered a window into the last-minute dealmaking that saved his priority legislation in the House.
• "Ultimately, he trusts Marco," a senior White House official said of the president.
• "The pro-Maduro Biden oil license in #Venezuela will expire as scheduled next Tuesday May 27th," Rubio announced late Wednesday on X.

The intrigue: The decision marked an abrupt reversal of Trump's special Venezuela envoy, Ric Grenell, who'd announced the day before that the administration would grant a 60-day extension of Chevron's license to export oil from Venezuela.

• As a special envoy, Grenell wants to engage with Maduro.
• As secretary of state, Rubio wants to enforce policies on Venezuela set in Trump's first term.
• Grenell's announcement Tuesday blindsided officials at the White House, the Treasury and State departments, and Rubio's fellow Cuban-Americans from Florida in the House: Carlos Gimenez, Mario Diaz-Balart and Maria Elvira Salazar — all critics of Maduro's regime.

Zoom in: With a razor-thin GOP margin in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson and administration officials knew Wednesday they couldn't lose the three Miami representatives' votes on Trump's big tax-cut and spending bill. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie was already a no for other reasons.

• "We just got three new no votes on the 'One Big Beautiful Bill,' " a second White House official groused Wednesday morning. "The Cubans plus Massie kill the bill."
• "Marco was apoplectic," a person who spoke with the secretary of state told Axios.

Zoom out: The Venezuelan and Cuban exile communities share a common bond — relatives who escaped leftist regimes. The Miami Cuban-American Republicans are under pressure at home over the Trump administration's deportation policies and its elimination of immigration protections for thousands of Venezuelans.

• As anti-socialist hardliners, they don't want Chevron to operate in Venezuela and enrich Maduro's regime, which is propped up by Cuba's intelligence services.
• In February, the lawmakers agreed to support Trump's budget plans in return for the president canceling Chevron's license, set to expire Tuesday.
• With that deadline in mind, Grenell negotiated with Caracas, secured the release of an American prisoner, and relayed Trump's interest in extending Chevron's license temporarily. But the timing of Trump's bill gave the Miami representatives leverage against those plans.

Inside the room: "The Cubans didn't have to tell us they were a 'no' again. We just knew it," said a third administration official involved in the discussions. "We knew they wouldn't fold on this."

• So Trump — who spent Wednesday afternoon arm-twisting and cajoling conservative House members to back his massive tax-cut and spending plan — had to engage with the Miami representatives as well.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Rubio arrived at the White House for an event honoring the University of Florida's national championship basketball team (Rubio is a Gator). Afterward, he huddled with Trump in the Oval Office to make his case against the oil deal.

• About 6 p.m., Gimenez — an occasional golfing partner of Trump's —called in by phone.
• Deputy White House Chief of Staff James Blair, a congressional liaison, was a constant presence.
• "Marco spoke to [Trump] about why it's good policy. Blair emphasized the need to keep these members happy to get the bill passed. It was a tag-team effort," a senior White House official said.

People briefed on the discussions told Axios that Rubio, Gimenez and White House officials who met with Trump countered the arguments by Grenell, Chevron and its legion of lobbyists and commentators who have warned that China would benefit from a U.S. withdrawal from the oil deal.

• They noted that China didn't significantly expand in Venezuela when Trump first slapped sanctions on Maduro's regime, which owes China as much as $10 billion.
• The oil market is almost glutted, and its $62-per-barrel price is about break-even for producers. So there's no crisis — and Venezuelan oil is more expensive to refine than others because it's so heavy and sulfurous.
• Finally, they reminded Trump that he'd given his word to the Miami-area lawmakers to end Chevron's deal with Venezuela.
• Gimenez declined to comment. Rubio couldn't be reached for comment.

After Wednesday's meeting, hours went by without word from Trump. The Miami representatives didn't want to push him, but they didn't want to get steamrolled, either.

• "When you negotiate with Trump on something like this, you can't make it look like you're negotiating. You have to apply pressure but not say you're applying pressure. It's delicate," a person involved in the talks said.
• Finally, at 10:57 p.m. Wednesday, Rubio posted his statement on X saying the Chevron lease would still expire Tuesday.

It was a sign to the three Miami lawmakers that Trump would honor his promise.

• Thursday morning, they voted yes on the president's big bill.

Google's newest AI video generator, Veo 3, generates clips that most users online can't seem to distinguish from those made by human filmmakers and actors.

Why it matters: Veo 3 videos shared online are amazing viewers with their realism — and also terrifying them with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred.

The big picture: Unlike OpenAI's video generator Sora, released more widely last December, Google DeepMind's Veo 3 can include dialogue, soundtracks and sound effects.

• The model excels at following complex prompts and translating detailed descriptions into realistic videos.
• The AI engine abides by real-world physics, offers accurate lip syncing, rarely breaks continuity and generates people with lifelike human features, including five fingers per hand.
• According to examples shared by Google and from users online, the telltale signs of synthetic content are mostly absent.

Case in point: In one viral example posted on X, filmmaker and molecular biologist Hashem Al-Ghaili shows a series of short films of AI-generated actors railing against their AI creators and prompts.

I did more tests with Google's #Veo3. Imagine if AI characters became aware they were living in a simulation! pic.twitter.com/nhbrNQMtqv

— Hashem Al-Ghaili (@HashemGhaili) May 21, 2025

Special effects technology, video-editing apps and camera tech advances have been changing Hollywood for many decades, but artificially generated films pose a novel challenge to human creators.

• In a promo video for Flow, Google's new video tool that includes Veo 3, filmmakers say the AI engine gives them a new sense of freedom with a hint of eerie autonomy.
• "It feels like it's almost building upon itself," filmmaker Dave Clark says.

How it works: Veo 3 was announced at Google I/O on Tuesday and is available now to $249-a-month Google AI Ultra subscribers in the United States.

Between the lines: Google says Veo 3 was "informed by our work with creators and filmmakers," and some creators have embraced new AI tools. But the spread of the videos online is also dismaying many video professionals and lovers of art.

• Some dismiss any AI-generated video as "slop," regardless of its technical proficiency or lifelike qualities — but, as Axios' Ina Fried points out, AI slop is in the eye of the beholder.
• The tool could also be useful for more commercial marketing and media work, AI analyst Ethan Mollick writes.

It's unclear how Google trained Veo 3 and how that might affect the creativity of its outputs.

• 404 Media found that Veo 3 generated the same lame dad joke for several users who prompted it to create a video of a man doing stand-up comedy.
• Likewise, last year, YouTuber Marques Brownlee asked Sora to create a video of a "tech reviewer sitting at a desk." The generated video featured a fake plant that's nearly identical to the shrub Brownlee keeps on his desk for many of his videos — suggesting the tool may have been trained on them.

What we're watching: As hyper-realistic AI-generated videos become even easier to produce, the world hasn't even begun to sort out how to manage authorship, consent, rights and the film industry's future.

• Two Anthropic researchers talked about how to embrace AI to build a successful career.
• Think about what you're doing and how AI can make it better, one researcher said.
• AI is reshaping job markets, affecting sectors like software engineering and consulting.

The secret to building a career in a world where AI is the main character: Lean into it, say two Anthropic researchers.

In an episode of the "Dwarkesh Podcast" released on Thursday, a pair of the researchers behind Claude — Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken — shared three strategies for early careers. They suggested thinking big picture, being lazy, and not letting a previous job stop you from working with AI.

Douglas, who works on reinforcement learning, said everyone should imagine what they want to do, now that AI can help.

"If you had 10 engineers at your beck and call, what would you do?" Douglas said. He added, "What problems, and domains suddenly become tractable? That's the world you want to prepare for."

He suggested that people gain technical depth by studying biology, physics, and computer science and that they think hard about what challenges they want to solve.

Bricken, who researches mechanistic interpretability at the AI company, said college students and young professionals should "be lazier" and outsource more to AI.

"You need to critically think about the things you're currently doing, and what an AI could actually be better at doing, and then go and try it," Bricken said.

The researchers' third piece of advice was about not letting "sunk costs" get in the way. Sunk costs are a concept in which people continue to invest more time and resources because so much has already been spent.

"Whatever kind of specialization that you've done, maybe just doesn't matter that much," Bricken said. "My colleagues at Anthropic are excited about AI. They just don't let their previous career be a blocker."

"It's not as if they were in AI forever," he added.

People across industries are talking about how to AI-proof their careers as AI chatbots and agents become more powerful and capable. The technology is displacing jobs in sectors like software engineering, content creation, and consulting.

Top tech leaders have said all professionals need to think about how AI can improve their workflows.

Last month, Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said people must stop perceiving AI as a "tech thing" and see it as a tool for everyone.

"Within Uber, we're a highly technical company — 30,000 employees — and not enough of my employees know how to use AI constructively," Khosrowshahi said, adding that the company is working to change that.

Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, has repeatedly touted the use of AI agents in companies, saying that they will not only change every job but will also secure employment instead of hurting it.

"AIs will recruit other AIs to solve problems. AIs will be in Slack channels with each other, and with humans," Huang said late last year. "So we'll just be one large employee base if you will — some of them are digital and AI, and some of them are biological."

This past summer, I experienced a modern-day miracle: I matched on Hinge with an attractive guy, with an interesting job and hobbies, and he messaged me. He asked me on a date, planned it, and showed up (and was actually over 6 feet tall, as advertised). He asked me on a second date the next day, then a third. All seemed to be going well in a dating world defined by ghosting and low-effort meetups.

That all changed when I saw his apartment. A futon was scattered on the floor in pieces. He quickly assembled the body, but it had no legs (I didn't get a clear explanation as to what had happened to them). In lieu of a TV, a laptop was perched precariously near the futon shambles. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling, giving the space an interrogation-room vibe. Most concerning was a plaid shirt, disembodied into three pieces and strung across a window as a makeshift curtain, a horror my best friend later named The Shirtain™.

I spent the two days after moping around my curtained and couched apartment, thinking about what could have been but knowing that I was not willing to become an unpaid interior decorator for a man in his mid-30s. It was another disappointment in a string of bad dating luck. An ex-boyfriend who refused to keep his apartment clean told me "I just saw you as a whole person for the first time" only after we broke up. An attractive, highly educated, highly paid consultant ghosted me twice, telling me between the first and second offense that A) the 40-minute subway ride between us was too long and B) he had experienced a recent glow-up and was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of attention he was receiving from women.

Maybe it wasn't just bad luck. At happy hours, on TikTok, at sociology conferences, and in the board rooms of dating app companies, it's a common refrain among women, and there's data to show it: The average man is not keeping pace with the average woman. In 1995, one-quarter of both young men and young women held bachelor's degrees, an analysis of population data by the Pew Research Center found. The analysis also found that by 2024, 47% of women ages 25 to 34 had one, compared with 37% of men. Single women own 2.7 million more homes in America than single men, a Lending Tree analysis of US Census Bureau data found. Even if a man and a woman match up on paper, the social divides and expectations between them can make partnership feel uneven. In couples where both the man and the woman work, women still do the bulk of domestic labor and childcare. Women are more likely than men to seek out mental health treatment and less likely than men to die of a drug overdose, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Women are also more likely to have close friends with whom they talk about personal topics like their work, families, and health than men, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found.

If dating is a numbers game, the math isn't adding up.

There's been much talk of a "male loneliness epidemic" — the idea that men are becoming increasingly isolated and lonely, particularly as marriage rates fall to record lows. There's reason to question whether men really are lonelier, as a recent Pew Research Center survey found that men and women reported similar rates of loneliness but that women were more likely to turn to their family, friends, or mental health professionals for emotional support. Still, vibe shifts are leading some young men to turn toward a growing number of content creators in the misogynist manosphere online. In a 2023 Survey Center on American Life survey, almost half of young men said they faced discrimination. Young men are becoming more conservative as young women become more liberal. All this mismatch is frustrating the remaining single ladies who are looking around and deciding not to settle.

But as many women are ready to throw their phones out and swear off dating, a winner of the male loneliness epidemic is emerging: men. In today's dating world, men who are 1) employed and 2) meet baseline social skills seem to be cleaning up, having their pick of attractive, successful, and smart women to sort through. Niko Emanuilidis, a dating coach and TikToker who goes under the name The Daddy Academy, tells me that while many men have turned inward and isolated themselves amid criticism of men and masculinity, those "who are comfortable in social situations" and confident "basically have skyrocketed ahead of all the rest."

Among these men embodying what Emanuilidis calls the "winner effect" is Jason, a 34-year-old who works in management consulting and asked me not to publish his last name. He tells me wants to meet a "nice Jewish girl" and settle down, but in the meantime, there are other "brilliant, smart, funny, often attractive women" he casually sees amid his search for a long-term relationship. He's learned to communicate what he's looking for in both serious and casual dating situations. Jason says he's casually seeing two to three women and had to postpone a call we scheduled to chat for this story last weekend because, as he texted me, he unexpectedly had a woman sleep over and was taking her to get breakfast.

It's rough out there, but some nice guys with jobs are suddenly drowning in women.

There has always been a set of Most Eligible Bachelors, but the qualifications for a husband have changed. Where men were deemed marriage material for their income, and women for domestic labor and child rearing, shifts in gender roles are "creating a situation in which there is this disconnect, and you have a marriageable pool that isn't on an equal footing among men and women," says Jess Carbino, a former in-house sociologist for Bumble and Tinder.

The heterosexual women I spoke with for this story all want basically the same general thing: a man who is smart, kind, and emotionally intelligent, and has friends and hobbies — plus a spark. Haleigh, a 33-year-old who works in marketing, tells me she's looking for a man who's employed, kind, and independent. But those three requirements increasingly feel like a Venn diagram that's hard to connect: "You always have to pick two of the three; you can't have it all."

Jana K. Hoffman, a 39-year-old writer, feels the pool of men who meet her preferences is small, particularly because she does not want kids. But in the past few years, she clicked with two guys who checked her boxes — until both courtships fell apart unexpectedly and suddenly, she says. The first was a man who told her he realized he actually didn't want "a woman with her shit together." The second, after about a month of dating, decided their different cuddling preferences were a dealbreaker. "They're choosing these very strange things to pick at," Hoffman tells me. It's been sad and discouraging, but she says the bigger problem comes not from realizing these individual relationships weren't going to pan out but from realizing it's a pattern that makes her feel reluctant to be vulnerable again. "I used to be upset over the guy," she says. "Now I just feel upset over the fact that it happens."

The mismatch problem plays out on the dating apps — even though most have more male than female users. Women are more likely to report finding not enough "high-quality" matches and getting way too many likes from men they aren't interested in, says Chandler Willison, a research analyst at the research and analytics firm M Science. Many men, conversely, report that they get lost in the crowd and have few to no matches. "The demand for these high-value, highly educated men in the dating marketplace outstrips the supply, and so you're inevitably going to end up with women who are not going to be able to be in a relationship with these men," Willison says. "There's inevitably going to be that sort of mismatch between the men's qualifications and the women's desires at large."

Meanwhile, the men I spoke with for this story are going on lots of dates that start on the apps. Mo, a 43-year-old who works in tech and is looking for a serious relationship, has his dating app strategy solidified: He reopens his Hinge account for about two to three weeks and then works through the matches he has. He shifted his strategy after continuously swiping when he was in his mid-30s and found that he passed up getting serious with some great women because he was wondering: "What if there's somebody better than who I just met now?" Since opening up Hinge in the past month after getting out of a relationship, Mo says he has been on nine first dates and a handful of second dates, and already has one woman he is particularly interested in pursuing — maybe Hinge really is "designed to be deleted" for some of these top-tier men. "The whole point of a date is to have fun," he tells me — even if it's not a perfect match, he usually meets an interesting woman. "I don't think I've ever not enjoyed any dates that I've been on."

Some of the women I spoke with say they had fun dating in their 20s but now feel mostly frustrated by the apps. There's a crop of smaller alternatives to the likes of Hinge and Tinder that are trying to fix that, but they still run into vast differences in how men and women want to date. On Fourplay, an app that allows friends to date in pairs, 85% of users are women, say Fourplay's cofounders, Danielle Dietzek and Julie Griggs. They also tell me that men who started to sign up but never added a friend often said they didn't have a single guy friend who they felt comfortable seeing them in a dating environment — and they worried about how their friend would act on a date.

Some women also feel like there's confusion between men and women about expectations. Emily Azrael, a comedian and writer in Brooklyn, tells me that she once dated a man who offered to make her breakfast, but asked for her credit card to buy butter — since she would be the one keeping the leftover sticks. Azrael says it can feel like she's not on the same page as men on dating roles, like who plans a first date. More communication, she hopes, could turn the problem around. "Let's talk to each other and close the gap so we can speak the same language," she says.

Most of the public conversations about the gap between men and women in dating are playing out on social media, where a misandrist slant isn't helping. If you scroll through TikTok, it's easy to find women who say they hate men and who call men trash. There are dating coaches who give black and white advice, telling women to pull back and manipulate men into chasing them. They give broad, evergreen descriptions of attachment styles that help jaded daters pathologize former matches, blurring the line between who's a sadist and who just wasn't that interested in them. People are more concerned about "engagement on their content than they are about the effect that content will have on the greater society," Griggs says. "When you put out content that is hating on men," she says, "it's not helping the cause.

Emanuilidis of The Daddy Academy thinks there aren't as many manipulative, toxic guys as social media would lead one to believe — the ones who play games have dated so many women that they have an outsize place in the conversation. But he worries about videos and posts that trash-talk men. "There's this group of men who, their winner effect is already low, and then now take all that negativity on top of it," he says. They have a "victim mindset" and turn inward, he says, adding: "There needs to be more male role models online that are speaking to the types of men." Scott Galloway, whose recent book, "Notes on Being a Man," focuses on modern masculinity issues, has a similar solution: "We don't need the S&P and the Dow to hit more highs; we need more men who have the relationships and the strength and the will to go have those conversations with other young men," he said on a recent podcast.

For the men I spoke with, dating has gotten more fun, in part because they've learned to be candid and decisive. In his 20s, Jason tells me he would casually date and hook up with women and not communicate his intentions well. It led to drama in his friend group when he hurt acquaintances' feelings, and he tells me dating is better now that he sees women he actually likes to hang out with, even if it's just casually. Now he lays out what he's looking for early on, whether it's a serious partnership or something casual. He says he's baffled by the lack of respect other men have for women. "It's a fairly basic thing: If you treat someone with respect, they're going to give you respect," he says. "It just naturally goes positive places from there."

His advice for guys who want to rise up in the dating pool is simple: "Be better, men. Get her a bagel in the morning and hang out with her."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Women-owned startups made up 49% of new businesses in 2024, up from 29% in 2019, per a new report.
• Women of color, especially AAPI and Black women, are driving this entrepreneurial growth.
• However, women were 75% less likely than men to receive equity financing for their startups.

Younger women and women of color are starting more small businesses than men.

Women-owned startups made up 49% of all new businesses in 2024, up from 29% in 2019 and the highest share recorded in the past six years, per a new report from Gusto. The HR and payroll platform surveyed its users and also found that AAPI, Black, and young women were driving this trend.

Despite the risks and barriers that women face in starting their own businesses, many are choosing entrepreneurship because of the independence and autonomy it can offer, said Nich Tremper, senior economist at Gusto.

"It's seeing a shift from this necessity entrepreneurship to this opportunity entrepreneurship," said Tremper, referencing a change he saw in 2022. "So we've seen women go from saying, 'I need to start a business to make ends meet, to take care of my kids,' to, 'I want to start a business because of the benefits that it provides.'"

Even with the growth of women-owned businesses, barriers still exist for women seeking investments to start or scale their startups. As a result, many rely on financing from their personal networks and debt to launch their enterprises.

Women of color are driving entrepreneurship

Tremper said the growth of new businesses is driven by women of color who are seeking more independence and ownership of their work.

Fifty-four percent of all new AAPI- and Black-owned businesses were started by women, compared to 46% that were started by their male colleagues, per Gusto.

Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Stop AAPI Hate bolstered support for businesses owned by women of color, per a report published earlier this year by Wells Fargo. Tremper added that Black and AAPI women-owned businesses gained more momentum during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Hispanic women made up 43% of new business owners compared to 56% of Hispanic men. Gusto reported that the disparity was because women-owned businesses are focused on the community and personal services sectors, while almost half of all Hispanic-owned businesses are concentrated in goods production like home remodeling or construction. Men started nearly 70% of businesses in that sector.

Younger generations of women are also reaching gender parity: More than half of the businesses created by millennials and Gen Zers were women-owned. On the other end of the spectrum, male baby boomers made up 64% of new business owners compared to 36% of boomer women.

Although it's typical for people to launch businesses in their mid- to late 30s and early 40s — after they've developed an expertise in a particular field — that trend has been changing, Tremper said.

"As women are increasingly a large share of the labor market over the last several years, millennial and Gen Z women are really starting businesses at higher levels," Tremper added.

The equity gap in business financing

Women-owned businesses earn a higher return at $0.78 for every dollar invested compared to men's $0.31, Tremper said. Additionally, women-owned businesses have seen faster revenue and employment growth in the past five years compared to businesses started by men, per Wells Fargo.

However, Tremper said there's a persistent gender gap between equity financing for women and men.

"The women who do receive this equity financing really outperform men, but they're still getting it at a lower rate," Tremper said. Women who apply for private investments are 75% less likely to receive equity funding than their male peers, per Gusto.

Gusto's research found that women largely relied on their social networks and accruing personal debt to finance their new businesses. It was more common for women to also secure private loans through collateral in their homes or vehicles, which can expose them to more financial risks.

That means that the stakes can be higher for women-owned businesses—if the founders fail, their personal finances could take a hit.

Despite these challenges and barriers, women-owned businesses are resilient and continuing to find success in the market, Tremper said.

"We're seeing these women-owned businesses coming into the economy and sticking around," he added. "They're keeping their course, they're active players in the economy."

Do you have a story to share about taking on personal debt to start your own business? Contact this reporter at [email protected].