In 2023, not long after ChatGPT made generative AI mainstream, a poll on the anonymous workplace forum Blind asked, bluntly, whether young software engineers were "fucked." Some 42% of the more than 13,000 respondents picked the response "Yes? U guys are pretty much fucked."

This past October, Sundar Pichai proudly announced on an earnings call that AI was writing more than 25% of new code at Google. Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta will build an AI engineer to write code. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced a hiring freeze for engineers in 2025, saying AI had increased productivity by 30% — and then news broke that Salesforce planned to lay off 1,000 workers. (It's still hiring salespeople for AI-powered products.) Stripe intends to cut some engineers while also growing its overall head count this year.

All of this raises the question of what junior engineers will take on if some basic tasks become automated. Some product managers have speculated that AI will increasingly take on some technical coding tasks and circumvent their need for engineers. Overall, job postings for software engineers on Indeed are at a five-year low.

Are engineers really coding themselves into obsolescence?

AI is knocking down the career ladder by doing more of the coding work of entry-level engineers, but, at least for now, the increased coding output from AI is also increasing the demand for and value of experienced, creative developers to interpret and put the AI's work to good use.

While many obituaries have been written to mourn the death of coding, engineering is more than writing code: It requires creative thinking to solve problems and expertise to read code. As it is now, AI isn't an original thinker.

"AI can't support what it doesn't know," says James Stanger, the chief technology evangelist at CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry. "I still don't think that it is something that can fully replace a good developer." He adds, though, that "if a developer is not creative, then you can replace them very easily."

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oftware engineering has been around since the 1960s, but hiring boomed in the '90s with the dot-com era. Coding boot camps became common in the 2010s as the demand for engineers outpaced the supply. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.9 million people worked as software developers, quality-assurance analysts, and testers in 2023. The bureau projected that the industry would grow by 17% from 2023 to 2033, outpacing the national average of 4% for all jobs.

An analysis from CompTIA found that the rate of job postings for software engineers fell by 50% from January to December 2023, recovering slightly by the end of 2024. While posts for jobs across tech, finance and accounting, and marketing, communications, and creative roles all fell as well, the dip for software engineers was the sharpest. But CompTIA says the reason for the fall wasn't clear. Tech companies — including some that acknowledged overhiring during the pandemic — laid off thousands of workers in 2022 and 2023, with many citing economic uncertainty.

But there's a widening divide within software engineering regarding experience level. CompTIA found that the proportion of open software engineering roles seeking entry-level workers had dropped since January 2023, to just over 20% from nearly 30%, while job postings for those with seven years of experience or more increased to make up nearly 40% of the open roles, up from just over 30%.

The experienced engineers I talked to seemed confident that AI wouldn't come for the jobs anytime soon.

Jeremy Chua, a software engineer for the AI Lab at the venture firm Georgian, turns to chatbots when he hits issues with coding. He may prompt ChatGPT or Claude to cull answers from the depths of Google and Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers, or to help him write in coding languages he's less fluent in. Chua, who has more than a decade of experience, says he was skeptical about whether gen AI could help him at work. He says that now he can sometimes complete projects that would have taken a week in a day or two, and he thinks of the chatbots he uses as coding partners. "It's not like it will replace me — it augments the way that I work," Chua tells me.

Caleb Tonkinson, an engineer at a clinical AI company called SmarterDx, tells me that AI is changing programming through two paths: "I can deliver the same thing faster, or I can deliver something better in the same period of time." He views AI as similar to other tech tools that became available to engineers — except more exciting as it advances rapidly. "There have been tons of tools for 20 years now" to debug software, generate code, or evaluate code, he says. "Your best companies and best software engineers are almost always leveraging those tools."

Cody Stewart, a principal software engineer at the software company CallRail, says he doesn't use gen AI for everything at work but might use it to get answers to "stupid questions" that he could spend a long time looking for on Google or Stack Overflow. He began using chatbots at work in 2022. "I read something that was like, you either learn to adopt new tools and figure out how they can enhance your day-to-day life and you stay with the times, or people are going to outlevel you," he said. "I saw that and thought I should probably give this a shot."

While more-experienced engineers are optimistic about AI, young engineers have more reason to worry.

The startup Cognition AI last year widely released an AI-powered software engineer called Devin, designed to work on bugs and small feature requests. In a December video, it described it as "a junior engineer" who "works best with a great manager." Cognition AI and its CEO, Scott Wu, did not respond to questions about whether it's meant to replace engineers or reduce the number the companies need.

Jayesh Govindarajan, a Salesforce executive vice president focused on AI, told my colleague Ana Altchek that the company was building "a system that can pretty much solve anything for you" but "just doesn't know what to solve," making knowing how to code less important. "I may be in the minority here," Govindarajan said, "but I think something that's far more essential than learning how to code is having agency."

Alexander Petros, a freelance open-source software engineer, is an AI holdout; he tells me he doesn't use generative AI to code. "I do worry that because AI is in many ways doing things that you used to hire junior developers to do, it does remove the ladder upon which junior developers would try to do those things, make those mistakes, and then learn," he says. Petros says he tried ChatGPT but found that the code could be clunky. If something in that code breaks, humans may not know how to fix it. "The process of producing code with LLMs, for the foreseeable future, is almost entirely distinct from the process of producing good software systems that last for a very long time," he says. Plus, using AI to solve problems means he may not learn how to get through those roadblocks on his own.

Chatbots lack creativity — that's where engineers, especially those who have been doing the job for a while, have an in-demand advantage. Stanger says he hopes companies use AI not as justification for cutting back on engineers but as a way to help them "get deeper into this code and get more creative."

Stanger says that treating engineers as a faucet that can be turned on and off as a business needs, or even replaced with AI, is likely to backfire in the long term. "If you've got toxic companies that are interested in that binge-and-purge, on-and-off hiring of developers, I'm not sure they're going to create very good products," he says.

People have long panicked that technology will take their livelihood. But even as automation eliminates some jobs, tech often creates a demand for new roles; most people today are working jobs that didn't exist before 1940.

The wholesale elimination of software engineers likely won't come to fruition in the near future, but the picture for more-experienced engineers is brighter. In the best-case scenario, AI will mean they get more time to flex their muscles and solve deep problems.

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

Two years ago, Erika Burghardt got into an MRI machine. She didn't think she was sick — the hourlong full-body scan was preventive, to search for cancer, aneurysms, and medical conditions that people often don't know they have until they feel symptoms. She had a stopper in one hand in case she felt panicked, while she watched "Sex and the City" on a screen above her.

The MRIs cost about $2,500 a person, but Burghardt's bill was fully covered by her employer, the media company 1440. Recently, the company added preventive scans as a benefit for its 19-person team and their spouses. Burghardt, 1440's director of growth, said she found one minor health issue and was able to follow up with her doctor to keep an eye on it, which gave her peace of mind. "It is very much a privilege to work for a place that offers this," she told me. "I've never seen anything like it."

"We actively look for our benefits to be the best in the world," Tim Huelskamp, 1440's cofounder and CEO, said. Beyond the usual package of healthcare, paid time off, and retirement savings, his company also allows remote work for all employees and contributes $500 each year to college funds for employees' children. Offering a suite of perks is not only "the right thing to do," he said, but also an effective weapon in what he called the raging "talent war." Only one worker has quit since 1440's founding in 2018, Huelskamp said, adding: "I want people here who want to be here for the next couple decades."

It's one of many smaller companies festooning their benefits packages with new bells and whistles to compete for hires.

A decade ago, trendy perks were everywhere. Dropcam offered employees helicopter rides, piloted by the company's CEO. Eventbrite added an arcade game to its office each month, and Google had a concierge service to run errands, making any employee feel like an executive. But Big Tech bosses have stopped caring about your feelings. Layoffs have been rampant. Last year, in what was dubbed Grubgate, Meta fired employees for using $25 Grubhub credits on personal care items instead of food. This year, Mark Zuckerberg has told all employees to "buckle up" for an "intense year." Companies like Target, Meta, and McDonald's are scrapping or toning down DEI initiatives as President Donald Trump's administration ends the practices in federal agencies. Companies are also enacting return-to-office mandates, and workers are rebelling in manners both quiet and loud.

As the gap in work-life balance grows at many major companies, smaller firms are seizing on a chance to stand out and using more individualized benefits to signal to workers that they do care — while hoping workers repay them with higher rates of productivity and loyalty.

People aren't likely to pick a job for a one-off benefit. But companies are focusing on "flexible, personalized, and inclusive" perks that appeal to employees across generations, Theresa Adams, a human-resources knowledge advisor with SHRM, said. "Employers are trying to make benefits more unique to their employees to gain top talent."

The real benefit comes when a company's perks can speak to and influence its culture overall.

Companies used to measure how successful their benefits were by how many workers used them, but the focus has shifted, said Samantha Saxby, the director of marketing for the National Human Resources Association and a managing director at the benefits company Perky. "Instead of prioritizing sheer numbers, they're investing in targeted, high-impact support that enhances employee well-being and commitment, even if it serves a smaller segment of the workforce," Saxby said. She cited robust benefits for new parents as an example — they might be accessed by only a small number of employees at any given time but create more engagement, satisfaction, and retention.

At the software company Pipedrive, its 750-some employees can receive five days of "pawternity leave" when they adopt a pet (as long as it has furry paws; sorry, turtles). It also offers "compassionate leave," an expanded bereavement category for anything from the death of a loved one or a pet to a breakup. The benefits, added late last year, signal that Pipedrive isn't catering only to traditional family structures. "It's about recognition that everyone's situation is different," Tanya Channing, Pipedrive's chief people and culture officer, said. The company's benefits are ways to showcase its culture, she said, and Pipedrive trusts its employees to work hard and not abuse them. If management strictly polices who takes what benefits when just a small number of people might exploit them, "you're penalizing the 98% who don't," she said.

Across all industries, companies' health benefits have stayed relatively flat, with some falling slightly, a recent Society for Human Resource Management survey of more than 4,500 employers found. In the survey, the proportion of companies offering paid mental health days dropped from 20% in 2022 to 16% in 2024, and dependent-care flexible spending accounts fell by 6%, with 58% of employers offering them in 2024. Surveyed companies offering access to elder care services and information fell from 11% in 2020 to 7% in 2024. And just 1% gave employees subsidies for elder care, while 3% handed out childcare subsidies. Dependent care is an increasingly valuable but still rare perk as Gen Xers and millennials find themselves caring for children, parents, or, sometimes, both at once.

For some companies, holding on to benefits is a way to signal their values. Run for Something, which recruits and supports young progressive political candidates, offers workers a four-day workweek and fully covered health insurance premiums, along with a $500 "treat yourself" stipend to be spent on anything from a nice dinner to a night in a hotel, to encourage work-life balance. Amanda Litman, Run for Something's cofounder, sees the company's benefits as central to its mission. And as more places look to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, Run for Something has no plans to change its policies about being an inclusive workplace. "It is fundamental to the way that we operate," Litman told me. "Even if it wasn't a moral good — to hire the best possible people of all backgrounds — it's good for business." It seems to be working: Litman said the team of 30 had seen incredibly low turnover, and each time the company lists a new position, hundreds of people apply.

A flashy benefit can catch the eyes of prospective workers. Grant Lowe, a technical writer at the streaming service Philo, was applying for his job two years ago, when one benefit stood out: a $2,000 bonus that gets paid out when employees take their vacation. It was the "cherry on top" of an already appealing role, he said. Last month, Lowe flew to Hawaii and visited his two brothers, the first time the three were together in eight years. "The signal that it sends is, 'Hey, we want you to take that time,'" he said.

The idea is to get people to take at least two weeks of their unlimited PTO, said Pearlie Oni, Philo's head of people. The company also allows employees to work fully remote but will pay a $500 monthly bonus to employees who commit to being in the office three days a week, as well as subsidies to help with commuter costs. It's the kind of balance that lets people choose between extra cash or being home for kids after school. Forcing people back to their cubicles doesn't work, Oni said: "The vibe is going to be off." With the bonus, "we can get the people that want to be there," she added.

With grocery and restaurant costs rising sharply since the pandemic, money to splurge on food is another valuable benefit. Since 2020 the cloud-based web accessibility company AudioEye has offered employees a $20-a-family-member weekly meal credit. "The shift to remote work blurred the lines between work and home, and we wanted to encourage our employees to step away from their screens and enjoy quality time with their families," Brittani Morelli, the company's vice president of human resources, told me in an email. Close to two-thirds of employees use it regularly, she said, and the company also covers some in-office lunches as people return to working in person.

Regardless of what the benefits are, the days of dangling lavish perks in front of people in lieu of good salaries and health benefits are over. Mostly, people need to like the work they do and feel valued by compensation and benefits that actually support their lives. In the 2010s, "they all needed to have this long laundry list of, 'Here's all the quirky things we offer,' just to seem like they did a lot," Amy Spurling, the CEO and founder of the HR services company Compt, said. Now, that can backfire. "The market and the employees are smarter than that," she added.

Flexibility in benefits is the future, Spurling said. If you offer pet grooming, that's attractive to pet owners only. The same goes for fertility or commuter benefits for all — some will love the stipends, and those who don't need them may shrug them off. But personalized stipends for things like childcare or wellness, or commuter benefits and lunch stipends for companies with RTO mandates, can help people to pay for what they need as they need it.

As costs for workers pile up, fun perks won't be the whole answer. Ultimately, people want to work jobs they like for equitable pay and work-life balance. The real benefit comes when a company's perks can speak to and influence its culture overall. And the more that the line between work life and personal life blurs, bosses may have to keep doing more to show they care about your feelings.

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

Lisa Shah started telling people she wanted to be a doctor at age 6. She went straight from premed to medical school to her residency at the University of Chicago. But as much as she loved caring for patients, after connecting with dozens each day she "would come home feeling really emotionally drained," she says. Losing patients also deeply affected her.

Now, Shah works as the first chief medical officer at Twin Health, a startup that uses wearables and AI to monitor people's metabolism and prevent and treat conditions like diabetes and obesity. Far from the hospital, in her new role overseeing the company's clinical operations and innovation, she's working to treat "not just one person at a time, but populations at a time," she says.

Healthcare companies have long employed chief medical officers or chief health officers to oversee clinical settings. But in the wake of the pandemic and amid a booming health tech market, health tech companies — and even tech giants like Google and Salesforce — have been adding the CMO role to their ranks, and poaching physicians from hospitals in the process.

"We're seeing a lot of chief medical officers coming on board to grant that clinical, medical legitimacy to whatever products people are developing," says Chris Myers, an associate professor of management and medicine at Johns Hopkins University. The rise of CMOs, he adds, is "capitalizing on — if not feeding on — the trend that we're seeing more and more MDs looking for nonclinical jobs."

The COVID-19 pandemic left doctors overworked, underappreciated, and constantly exposed to new workplace hazards. The World Health Organization estimated that tens of thousands of health workers died globally in 2020 and 2021. A study published in the JAMA Health Forum found the proportion of clinicians looking to leave their roles jumped from 30% in 2019 to more than 40% in 2021. A 2022 survey from the consulting firm Bain & Company found that one in four clinicians were considering a career switch, many due to burnout. Today's physicians have been "pushed," says Myers, "to think about different options." And one of the most compelling options is the booming digital health industry, which is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2032, growing by nearly 19% each year.

For many doctors, the sense they have a calling to medicine makes the near-decade of school, often hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and grueling on-call hours worth it. "No one gets into medicine to be an administrator," says Dr. Guy Maytal. But the starkly inequitable healthcare system at times left him feeling helpless. He says patients have told him they could afford medication or food — but not both. Eventually, he decided, "I could grumble on the sidelines or roll up my sleeves and do something about it." In 2023, after nearly two decades of practicing psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and then Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, Maytal joined Forge Health, a startup that offers mental health and substance use treatments in-person and via telehealth. He says he now feels he has a much broader impact and ability to influence change at a quicker pace than he could when he was seeing patients.

The CMO role has expanded and evolved as the health tech industry has come under more scrutiny. Theranos, the cautionary tale of the biotech world, had a board that lacked medical expertise. A dermatologist who had treated Theranos' president, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, was hired as the company's lab director in 2014. He had no board certification related to pathology or laboratory science. Only after The Wall Street Journal exposed flaws in the validity of the company's blood-testing method in 2015 did the company create a medical and scientific advisory board. A company that wants to build trust, and avoid becoming another Theranos, "might certainly consider hiring a CMO to give a trusted voice to their product," Myers tells me. "People trust their doctors to have their best interest in mind" over a CEO.

It's hard to quantify the rise of the CMO. Major medical associations in the US told me they don't have data on the number of people working in these positions. But Data from ZipRecruiter found the number of job postings seeking chief medical officers jumped from 767 in 2019 to more than 5,000 in 2021. In 2024, there were 2,154 such job posts. In 2022, Emory University began offering a first-of-its-kind executive program to train chief medical officers for leadership positions in healthcare.

The average salary for a CMO is about $275,000 — comparable with the average doctor's salary, but with more humane hours.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffery, the chief of health care affairs at the Association of American Medical Colleges, says that people rarely leave medical school to directly take on administrative work but slowly add those tasks throughout their career before making the switch. For the most part, doctors aren't jumping from the ER to startups; the decision to use their medical expertise for work other than seeing patients happens gradually.

Because it's still relatively new, the CMO remains an amorphous role, bending to meet the needs of an app and its users or a company's workforce. They might work on product development, research consumer safety, or analyze employee benefits and policies. In some cases, they're often balancing the business objectives of a startup with the Hippocratic oath they've taken to support patients.

Salesforce added a CMO in 2019, whose role focused on employee well-being. Google hired its first chief health officer in 2019. These are jobs that don't always focus on patients or a product; they might involve deciding which benefits companies offer to their employees or implementing ways to protect employees' health. "Companies are trying to take ownership more and more of employee health and well-being," says Anna Tavis, a clinical professor of human capital management at New York University. With ever-growing healthcare costs, there could be more demand for health tech and healthcare coaching as part of employee benefits packages or for medical experts who can advise companies on the best tech tools to use for preventive care and mental health treatment.

Dr. Joshua Sclar serves as the chief clinical and public health advisor at Uber Health, a division of the ride-hailing giant that transports people to doctor's appointments and delivers medicine or groceries. "Being a physician, I know what happens when that care is missed," not just to a patient, but to the healthcare system as whole, Sclar says of his role in translating healthcare needs to the transportation company. Sclar previously worked in three other CMO roles and was the first hired at each. At Uber Health, Sclar says he was surprised to learn how complex the technology behind the app was, given how seamlessly ride-hailing apps appear to consumers. Other CMOs agree that there's a learning curve when moving from the medical world to the business world. Maytal says his new role has him translating medical jargon and learning business jargon. "It's my first time in my professional life where my boss wasn't a doctor," he says.

Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, the chief medical officer at the online therapy company TalkSpace — and formerly the chief of psychiatry at a psychiatric center — has had similar experiences. As her role as CMO has shifted, "oftentimes, it was me sitting in the room as the only mental health clinician thinking really critically about how I communicate my unique perspective in this room with all these business folks," she says. "There can be really different end goals when you're talking about business objectives versus healthcare objectives." Sclar believes many healthcare companies could benefit from bringing physicians into leadership roles. Those on the business side might know how to scale a company, but physicians give insight into whether the product will "translate to the impact on health that we want."

Despite these challenges, for physicians accustomed to sleeping next to phones while on call and spending hours fighting insurance companies after seeing sick patients, moving from the ER to the C-suite can take less of an emotional toll. "They're busy, they're hectic, they seem very stressful, but they're not life and death," Jaffery says of the issues that often arise in administrative positions. The average salary for a CMO across the US is about $275,000, according to ZipRecruiter data — comparable with the average doctor's salary, but with more humane hours.

The rise in CMOs comes as America faces a dire shortage of physicians. The Association of American Medical Colleges said the US is on track to be short 86,000 physicians by 2036, as a large number of doctors near retirement age and the demand for care grows. But the lure of the CMO role doesn't necessarily mean exacerbating the shortage — at least that's the hope among the CMOs I spoke to. "I don't think it's a zero-sum game," says Maytal. Many health tech startups are aimed at shortening wait times in hospitals and clinics or bringing primary care to underserved regions and underserved groups who are more prone to end up in emergency rooms with illnesses that could have been treated.

Like Shah, Dr. Nate Favini, who started as his company's first CMO last year, sees his role as "doctoring at a larger scale." The company, Pair Team, is a San Francisco-based digital health startup that uses AI to connect Medicaid patients to care. After watching his dad work in emergency medicine in rural Pennsylvania, he entered the field "knowing the healthcare system was broken," he says. "I knew I wanted to have a higher-level impact on the system." When he made the transition to health tech from caring for primarily Medicare patients, some colleagues thought he was crazy or selling out, he says. Now, more are coming around. "There's a massive opportunity to harness technology to deliver better care at a fraction of the cost and get really good care to everyone," Favini tells me. In the new age of medicine, the call to be a doctor may increasingly come from the tech world.

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

On one of the coldest nights in New York this year, I bundled up and went to a trendy tourist trap to meet up with five people who also felt that the pull to make new friends was stronger than the windchill. I didn't know anything about my matches aside from a text I'd received that told me that two of them also like reading, that several enjoyed the same irreverent TV shows I do, like "Arrested Development" and "Broad City," and that one had bungee jumped in New Zealand.

We were meeting as a group curated by the app 222, which asks users to fill out questionnaires with info like their birth order among their siblings, the economic class they grew up in, and how spontaneous they are. I was delighted to see I was paired with other people in their late 20s and early 30s, so I wouldn't have to be the aging millennial at the Gen Z table. (There was a collective sigh of relief on this point.) Despite the freezing cold, everyone showed up — no doubt given extra motivation by the app's strict no-show policy that not only involves added fees but kicks out people who don't cancel with notice.

The app, acting as a sort of virtual host, gave us prompts to get the conversation going, such as "If you could pick another name for yourself, what would it be?". I didn't find them particularly enlightening. We read through some but decided we didn't need generic prompts to chat. The people who had bought into this experience (by paying a small fee to 222 and by opening themselves up to strangers) were friendly and eager to meet someone new.

Founded in 2021, 222 is one of several apps that launched in recent years with the aim of fighting loneliness and finding people real, in-the-flesh friends. Bumble has for years had a friendship setting for swiping. There's also Clockout, Timeleft, and Pie. Timeleft says it has brought more than 400,000 people together in more than 170 cities. In 2023, Bumble estimated that about 15% of its monthly active users were using the friends setting. While social media algorithms are often blamed for entrapping people and isolating them as they spend more of their time on screens than with friends, apps like 222 say their algorithms can pair us up with our new besties or potential romantic partners, sussing out similarities and determining compatibility. A cottage industry of apps is raising millions of dollars on the idea that IRL is the next big thing online.

The apps feel like the next iteration of online dating, which normalized the virtual meet-cute. But they're having a moment as more young people feel burned out by the churn of commodified romance. Finding friendship is lower stakes than finding true love, but that's also a part of the barrier to it. There are fewer norms for pursuing a potential friend: How soon after meeting do I text them? How do I know if they're interested as well? Am I being too needy? Does this person think I'm a total freak? The anxiety spiral can keep any of us from texting someone to hang out.

The point of 222 is to get past that. "If we can use technology to be an invisible facilitator to just nudge people gently in the direction of spending more time with each other, then I think we've truly created more connection in the world," Keyan Kazemian, the 25-year-old cofounder and CEO of 222, tells me. "We've created a chance encounter and potentially a relationship that didn't exist before."

Before the pandemic there was a rise in the celebration of canceling plans, as showcased by viral social media posts and several articles unpacking the psychology behind the act. It felt so good, many people said, to bail and binge Netflix instead of shuttling around to after-work catch-up cocktails with friends. "I'm just not feeling it" became a justification for ditching someone over text on short notice and choosing to rot on the couch instead. Leaving friends on read for days became the norm. People prioritized individualism and the idea of self-care over community and friendships.

The backlash from the self-involved era is in full swing. Turns out, people want friends. They want to practice the lost art of hanging out, central to '90s sitcoms like "Friends" and "Seinfeld." But as we've increasingly lost our connection to "third places," like religious centers, local coffee shops, and community centers, and pivoted toward hybrid or remote work, finding our people has become so much harder. Former US surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy called loneliness an epidemic in 2023, highlighting the serious physical health risks and financial costs of isolation. In a 2024 poll conducted by Morning Consult for the American Psychiatric Association, 30% of adults said they felt lonely once a week, and 10% said they felt lonely daily. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, 30% said they felt lonely each day or several times a week. The definition of loneliness for the poll wasn't just having a slow week or lacking a romantic partner but the much darker dread of "feeling like you do not have meaningful or close relationships or a sense of belonging."

When you look at the increasing ways people are trying to study and understand the science of making friends, the idea of using algorithms doesn't seem so far-fetched. A 2018 study from Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, found that people had to spend about 50 hours together to become casual friends and 90 hours to reach general "friend" status. Another study he conducted in 2023 suggested that reaching out to friends for even quick quality interactions daily could help lower stress and increase happiness.

How much of our compatibility is innate, and how much have we built into each other by spending thousands upon thousands of hours together?

With apps like 222 and Timeleft, the algorithms may matter less than the buy-in: The apps gather people who want to make new friends and then push them to follow up, avoiding some of the awkwardness of pursuing something unreciprocated. "Whether or not the specific magic sauce of the matching is necessary is an open question. It might work, it might not work, it may not matter," Hall tells me. "What really matters is people are caring enough to sign up and show up, and showing up is what we do for our friends." I tried another matched dinner on Timeleft, which tries to match compatible people for Wednesday-night dinners around the US, but half of our group ditched, which made it harder to have the full group experience.

There's also Pie, which brings people together around shared interests — like book clubs, dinner clubs, and dancing — in Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco. The company pays local creators to host events, leveraging the concept of the gig economy and local social groups as an engine for new connections. Andy Dunn, who founded Pie after his run as the cofounder and CEO of the menswear brand Bonobos, says people have to keep seeing each other to form those strong ties. For now, Pie brings people together for recurring events, but it's working on ways to better pair up people at those events who are likely to get along. Dunn says he thinks the answer to ending loneliness isn't technology itself but rather people who decide to show up and put themselves out there. "I don't think the algorithm can do it," he said. "I think we can do it."

The idea is catching on. Pie raised $11.5 million in a Series A round last year, and 222 raised $3.6 million so far. "While technology has offered us so much, including a new dimension of connectivity via social networks, it has had many unintended consequences that have led in part to, ironically, less connectivity in real life," Kirsten Green, the founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures who invested in Pie, tells me in an email. "We are entering what we see as the next phase of digital adoption where we better learn to live with this — not by being consumed by it, but by thriving because of it."

I'm thinking about the gaggle of people I've collected as my closest friends over the past 20 years. Two I met through Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace as random roommates who also needed someone to split the rent with. Another was my last-minute prom date, and the fourth I picked out of my 300 or so seventh-grade peers because she wore a Panic! At The Disco T-shirt. Each was brought into my life by repeated proximity — we shared classrooms or kitchens and living rooms and experiences for so long that we eventually became inseparable.

I recently asked one of them: Do you think we're best friends because we can see the subtleties of the world in the same way, or do we see the world the same way because we've been hanging out since 2007? How much of our compatibility is innate, and how much have we built into each other by spending thousands upon thousands of hours together?

Hall says friendships are likely forged at both ends. You discover that you have a similar worldview or sense of humor in certain situations. Over time, your friends also shape you: They can influence your values, your exercise routine, your eating and drinking habits. Similarity alone is not enough. We could read the same book but have completely different interpretations. We might both be dog people, but that doesn't mean I'll like you and your dog. But my random roommates and I, who look different on paper and were brought together over nothing more than similar budgets in the same city, can look at a social situation and walk away with the same vibes and opinions. Would an algorithm match me with these people for dinner? If it did, would I even recognize their potential to be the people who'll stand by me during my most important life events? There's no way to know.

A day or so after my 222 dinner, the app asked me to rate my dinner companions and provide more info on why I did or didn't like someone. It said that would help boost my chance of getting better matches going forward. After filling out the questionnaire, I found that someone I had positively reviewed said the same about me, and the app nudged us to hang out again — taking the awkwardness of pursuing a new pal out of my hands. It may matter less what the algorithm sees in the two of us and more that we're open to keep trying to find our people together.

Yahoo, the platform once adored by Gen Xers and millennials alike, turned 30 last year with little to no fanfare. But like any addled millennial starting to stare down middle age, it has sprinted into its fourth decade determined to become cool again.

The company spent 2024 upgrading just about everything in its arsenal. Yahoo Mail got AI updates to help search, summarize, and write emails. The Yahoo Fantasy app was redesigned, and Yahoo saw a record number of players this football season. The company acquired Artifact, the Apple News competitor built by Instagram's founders, and used it to revamp Yahoo News with more personalized recommendations. And a new AI-augmented Yahoo homepage customized for each user is set to be out soon.

But amid all this modernizing, Yahoo is also hearkening back to the ye olden days when it ruled the internet. Since this past fall, the company has been on a nostalgia-washing blitz, making memes about AIM and using dial-up-internet sounds and Microsoft WordArt in unhinged posts on Instagram and TikTok. The company also released a purple button that plays the iconic Yahooooooooo yodel, which quickly sold out on TikTok Shop.

Turn-of-the-millennium nostalgia runs high across the culture, with low-rise jeans, point-and-shoot digital cameras, and even flip phones resurfacing. It's an era romanticized by Gen Z, who knew little of a time when interactions online were more fleeting, anonymous, and, frankly, more fun. For Yahoo, it's an eye-catching way to win over eyes and hearts in an era when more people are fed up with the ways Big Tech has encroached on our lives.

But it's also a great test for a company attempting to reclaim its place in Big Tech's Mount Rushmore. "Yahoo was the original internet pioneer," says Matt Sanchez, president and general manager of Yahoo Home Ecosystem, in which he oversees platforms including Yahoo.com, Yahoo News, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Search. In 2025, he says, Yahoo is thinking about: "How do you draw from the past and all the great things that people relied on Yahoo for 30 years, but how do you also start to layer on AI and all these other capabilities that start to supercharge that?"

Nostalgia for certain jeans in the ever-cyclical fashion industry is one thing; nostalgia for a more wholesome internet in the ever-accelerating tech industry is another. Ultimately, Yahoo will need more than memories of better days on the interwebs to keep people hanging around.

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So far, this "modern-vintage" strategy seems to be working for Yahoo. For the past decade, emails with an @yahoo domain have raised eyebrows. But after revamping Yahoo Mail in the summer, the company said it saw a 125% increase in new users connecting their Gmail accounts to Yahoo Mail on their desktops. The number of Yahoo Mail monthly active users on iOS has been growing by double digits year over year for the past several months. Traffic on Yahoo News on mobile is up 10% year over year, according to Comscore data provided by Yahoo, and Similarweb ranks Yahoo as the top news and media destination in the US.

Yahoo is one of the few companies to survive the dot-com bubble and continue to thrive. Back then, the internet "was a place where you could freely make mistakes," says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked as Tumblr's head of content until 2021. People in their 30s and up feel "nostalgia for this internet that didn't have all this heaviness" and where more anonymous interactions dominated over virality and cancel culture, she adds. With its campaign, Yahoo is also reaching younger people and "selling the idea of what the internet was to people who cannot grasp the idea of what actually existed," Brennan says. As people are increasingly interested in setting boundaries around their social media and screen time, Yahoo is playing up the good old days with its fun, purple, cartoonish design scheme on its site and app, and some webpages load with an oversize cursor reminiscent of early browsing designs. On Yahoo's info page, the company touts itself as "a nice place to stay on the internet."

Yahoo's nostalgia strategy has another thing going for it: backlash against its competitors.

Cultural monoliths are disappearing as the media landscape fractures. In calling back tech's early days, the company is leveraging a rare "connection point for multiple generations," says Juan Pellerano-Rendón, the chief marketing officer at the e-commerce-software company Swap. By referencing a more adored internet of the recent past, he adds, the company is saying, "Hey, Gen Z, look at this cool thing. And hey, millennials and Gen X, remember this old thing?"

This also seems to be effective: Despite the fact that Gen Z users didn't come online until after Google had become synonymous with search, millennials and Gen Zers combined make up more than 45% of visitors to Yahoo in the US, and Yahoo Finance is the top destination for financial information among the two generations, Comscore data provided by Yahoo shows.

Several other brands have been deploying this tactic. UScellular last year put out an ad featuring Alanis Morissette that played on her hit song "Ironic" and focused on using phones less; Levi's got Beyoncé to recreate an ad spot from the 1980s. This nostalgia-washing could be great for engagement, but it's a fleeting microtrend, particularly in tech, Pellerano-Rendón says, rather than a long-term brand-ethos strategy. If "part of your brand is talking about the past and that's what's bringing people in, I don't think investors are going to stand behind a lot of these brands" if that's all they have going, he says. While we may long for the days of a more freewheeling internet, that's not what pays the bills for Big Tech. People may buy old, colorful iPod Nanos and Shuffles, Apple isn't leaning heavily back into the products. The relaunch of the Motorola Razr generated viral hype, but you probably don't know anyone who bought one.

That said, Yahoo's strategy has another thing going for it: backlash against its competitors.

This isn't the first time Yahoo has tried to take back its cool. In the early 2010s, Yahoo redid its logo to be what then-CEO Marissa Mayer called "whimsical, yet sophisticated." It also made several big swings that ultimately fizzled: Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1 billion and tried to get into streaming with Yahoo Screen. But a series of high-profile missteps caught up with the company. In its early years, Yahoo passed up a chance to buy Google and missed a shot to acquire Facebook in deals that would have cost pennies on the dollar compared with what those companies are now worth. In 2013, all 3 billion Yahoo accounts were hit by a security breach. The company was too late to adapt to mobile, a move that some declared the death knell of Yahoo. In 2016, Verizon bought Yahoo for less than $5 billion and took it private. In 2021, Yahoo was bought by the private-equity firm Apollo. By then, Yahoo's relevance had long been eclipsed by Meta and Google.

But now it's Meta, Google, and several other Big Tech companies that are losing their cool. Meta's big bid to transform the social web into the metaverse has flopped, leaving the company to scramble in pivots toward glasses as the future of computing. Google's push to compete in the AI realm has led the company to torpedo its search results in favor of telling people to put glue on pizza or that water will freeze at 32 degrees but not 27. Elon Musk has remade Twitter in his image. Apple added artificial intelligence to its iPhone 16, which was met with a shrug from consumers. As all these companies push for the future, Yahoo is marketing itself as a relic of a time when the internet was fun and full of opportunities for discovery but also signaling that it wants to be part of a generative-AI future. That's its challenge: "In this very fragmented world where the algorithms maybe pushed everyone deeper into the things that they're reacting to most, how do you bring back the best of the internet and find those serendipitous or delightful moments mixed in with the stuff that we know you need to know or we know are going to help you accomplish your goals today?" Sanchez says.

After pioneering the early days of the internet, Yahoo became a media company more than a tech company. While everyone is doubling down on building their own AI, Yahoo's approach is different. Its tools are built on large language models from OpenAI and Google, as well as other open-source LLMs, Sanchez tells me, while Google, Meta, and even Musk's xAI are building LLMs. The idea is to "supercharge" Yahoo's functions, he says, by using AI to summarize sporting events or organize unwieldy inboxes. That could be a boon to the company. "Yahoo can be cool by making its search engine more conversational, assistive, and agentic," Nikhil Lai, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, says in an email. More than one-third of people are using these conversational features to search "whenever they can," Lai says, citing data from Forrester's Market Research Online Community. In addition to traditional search, Yahoo's search has an AI-powered chatbot designed to work much like ChatGPT or Perplexity.

To date the platform, and myself, I probably last used my Yahoo email to apply to colleges in 2012, and it's since become a repository for promotional emails from companies I rarely shop from. For all the nostalgia Yahoo is playing up, it's still a company moving to add AI into its various apps, tech that has a lot of hype with yet-to-be-realized returns. The nudges to the '90s don't mean the company is actually moving backward to a young internet many long for. Those who come for the memories are going to find a very different Yahoo from the one they remember from 2005. But in the Big Tech landscape of 2025, Yahoo might not need to be cool to succeed — it just needs to be useful.

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

Three days a week, Annie spends two hours commuting to her public relations job outside Denver. Her company changed its office policy last year from remote to hybrid, leading her to lease a car and get back on the road. So on Fridays — without telling her coworkers — Annie typically doesn't work.

On the final day of the workweek, Annie watches TV, goes to the gym, takes a walk, or sometimes goes skiing. She keeps her phone or computer nearby to be available for messages in case something unexpected happens, but pushes her easiest work to Fridays, wraps it up quickly, and starts her weekly long weekend as early as possible.

When Annie is on the mountain instead of at her desk, she has "zero remorse," she tells me — on a phone call she scheduled on a Friday afternoon — even if she's a little worried about getting caught. (She asked that I change her name for this story for fear of retribution from her employer.)

Annie says the return-to-office mandate has worn down her social battery and made her less productive than when she worked from home full time. She was recently diagnosed as autistic, she says, and working from home has allowed her to focus better without coworkers interrupting. "If they expect me to come into the office and be fully present and sacrifice a lot of really important things that have improved my quality of life," she says, "then Fridays are the very least that I can do for myself to get through it."

What was once the final push to the weekend is becoming a sneaky personal day for some remote workers. The trend has been called "quiet Fridays" or "gentle Fridays" — a clandestine progression of casual Fridays or summer Fridays from the prepandemic era.

Some companies are instituting policies to ban meetings from being scheduled on Fridays and discourage sending emails. Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation last year calling to shorten the workweek to 32 hours. In Tokyo, government workers will soon have the option of four-day workweeks, a move meant to give people more time to prioritize family as fertility rates in Japan have fallen and some have overworked themselves to the point of death.

OpenTable saw 44% more diners book reservations between noon and 5 p.m. on Fridays than on other weekdays.

But the dream of an official four-day workweek stays largely out of reach from many. Greece last year enacted a law enabling a six-day workweek in certain industries, a move to combat a shrinking population and lack of skilled workers. Workers are revolting against unpopular RTO mandates. Now, fed-up remote workers are sometimes taking back the day for themselves, particularly as the rise-and-grind girlboss mindset of the 2010s has been eclipsed by the ascent of the anti-work movement. Since the pandemic, burnout is up, workplace loyalty is shrinking as companies conduct mass layoffs, and people are prioritizing self-care over impressing the boss with long hours. Office attendance may be creeping back up, but Friday remains the least popular day to commute, by far. And as I found, for many workers at the end of the week, the W in WFH is in scare quotes.

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A search through Reddit and TikTok will reveals number of viral hacks to trick your boss into thinking you're actively online. There are mouse jigglers and apps that keep screens on but also tips like turning off your phone's auto-caps settings so Slack messages look like they're sent from a computer and not a phone. More rogue hacks include putting PowerPoint into presenting mode to keep a screen on, entering into a Zoom meeting with yourself, or tying a mouse to an oscillating fan.

While workers may appear to their employers to be online and grinding away, evidence suggests that many have shut their laptops and gone out into the world. In 2024, for example, OpenTable saw 44% more diners book reservations between noon and 5 p.m. on Fridays than on other weekdays. "Shifts in work culture are definitely impacting dining habits," Debby Soo, OpenTable's CEO, told me over email. Similarly, on Resy, 28% of weekday-afternoon reservations were on Fridays, more than on any other weekday. Zocdoc shared booking data with me that shows that booking appointments on Fridays have crept up slightly since 2021, and that several types of appointments are more common on Fridays, including acupuncture, IUD procedures, and annual physicals.

ActivTrak, a workforce-analytics and productivity-software company, has found that people are in fact calling it quits earlier on Fridays. In an analysis of 71,000 workers at more than 800 companies that are ActivTrak customers, the company found that in late 2024 workers clocked out about an hour earlier on every day of the week than they did in early 2021. The steepest drop was on Fridays, with workers leaving at 3:42 p.m., some 80 minutes earlier than they did four years ago.

A Friday-morning Costco run is magical. Jenna, a sales professional in Philadelphia

Some people may be out and about more on Fridays because their companies encourage them to log off. Buffer, a social media management software company, moved to a four-day workweek in 2020. It started as an experiment but proved so positive for morale that the company has kept it in place, says Hailley Griffis, its head of communications and content. After the initial adjustment of cramming more meetings into the first four days of the week, the schedule now "really helps reduce the amount of stress and anxiety," she says. "It would be very difficult for me to go back to working five days a week, in terms of energy management."

Stok, a sustainability consulting company, started offering "quiet Fridays" every other week in 2020. The goal is to have no emails or meetings that day, and instead allow employees to put their heads down on projects or take the day for themselves, says Madeleine Drake, Stok's director of people and culture. "Each of us has the awareness and autonomy and collaborative spirit to understand what's best each day," she says, adding that some 90% of the company's employees typically participate.

But flexible gigs are getting harder to come by. Job posts offering four-day workweeks have dropped 42% since late 2022, according to data from Indeed, and those offering flexible Fridays are down 18.5%. Employees are likely "more interested than they've ever been" in flexible Fridays and shorter workweeks, Kyle M.K., Indeed's talent-strategy advisor, says. "But the implementation is probably slowing down," in part due to economic pressures and labor market uncertainty, he adds. There's a disconnect between what employees want and what employers are offering, despite growing evidence that shorter workweeks improve productivity and employee satisfaction and that workers are getting fewer things done on Fridays anyway. "I think employers will start to see a decline in the ability to attract top talent and see their turnover grow if they're not focusing on the work-life balance, the burnout, and the stress level of their employees," he says.

Some workers feel there's no reason to hang around on Fridays if they can get all their work done by Thursday. Jenna, who works in sales in Philadelphia and whose name has also been changed, says she felt burnout in 2020 and would have to log off midday because of exhaustion. Nearly five years later, she's taking nearly all of Friday off and expects her clients or coworkers to be doing little on the last day of the workweek, too. Like Annie, she chats with me on a Friday afternoon — between hanging out at a neighborhood brewery and running an errand. It's a typical Friday for her, which can include vet appointments for her dog, trips to the gym, or boozy lunches with a friend. "A Friday-morning Costco run is magical," Jenna tells me.

The trust gap between bosses and workers is widening. A 2024 survey from PwC found that 86% of business executives believe employee trust to be high, but just 67% of employees say they have high trust in their employer. About half of business executives say they have a great extent of trust for senior leadership, while just 38% say the same of entry-level workers.

Employment is a contract, where both parties should have clear communication to maintain trust, says Shaun Hansen, a professor of management at Western Oregon University. If you're instructed or it's implied that you should be working Fridays, then that's the agreement. But employers can build trust by better communicating their expectations and shifting to more flexible arrangements, Hansen says. That might mean analyzing roles and admitting that not every white collar job has to fit a 40-hour, 9-to-5 schedule to be done well. "If you have a job that you can finish on a Thursday night, but your employer is insisting that you're there on Friday, it not only puts you in an ethical pickle, but it also will cause you to probably look for a better job where you have more flexibility," he tells me.

Of course, no-work Fridays are a privilege reserved for white-collar remote or hybrid workers. The more room they have to slack off, the greater a divide we might see in work-life balance across industries. "I feel guilty about it from the level of: What a privilege I have that I have a job that I can even do this," Jenna tells me. But guilt about not being fully honest with her employer as she fields occasional Microsoft Teams pings from the bar? Not so much.

On a Friday afternoon last summer, a friend and I packed up the car to head away for the weekend. I, taking advantage of my then-employer's summer Fridays, left my laptop at home. But I watched as my friend connected her laptop to a hot spot, opened it on the back seat, and began playing a lengthy fireplace video on YouTube that would keep the green circle next to her face on Slack aglow for the ride. I was given her phone to act not just as a road-trip DJ but also as her secretary, responding to any messages from her boss. It took some teamwork, but where there's a will to work less, there's a way.

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

While Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk never did face off in that cage match, "Uncle Elon" has bested Zuck in the political arena, becoming one of the most powerful unelected figures in modern US history. Now, in hopes of forging a friendlier relationship with the Trump administration a second time around, Zuckerberg seems to be following a new mantra: If you can't beat Elon, be him.

On Tuesday, Meta announced it would end third-party fact-checking and replace it with a more hands-off content-moderation policy in which users police one another through community notes — just like Musk's X. In a video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg said that "governments and legacy media" had pushed for more censorship in recent years, and that Meta had decided its "complex systems" had "too many mistakes and too much censorship." "The recent elections," the Meta CEO added, "also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech." His language would have sounded natural coming out of the mouth of Musk, who shared Zuckerberg's video on X and dubbed Meta's move "cool."

Community notes is only the latest page Zuckerberg has taken from his billionaire rival's playbook. Whether conducting mass layoffs or removing the guardrails to social media or joining forces with Musk against their shared competitor OpenAI or spending time at Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg has been following Musk's lead more often.

This isn't the first time Zuckerberg, who has helmed Facebook since he was 19, has reinvented himself. From the brash, hoodie-wearing Harvard dropout in Facebook's early days to the suit-wearing, meat-smoking, Silicon Valley nice guy in the years after the company went public to the hardened, martial-arts-practicing "wartime"-mode Zuck who emerged in the wake of the most turbulent period in company history, Zuckerberg has fashioned several personas that approximate what his company most needs him to be at the time. In 2025, don't let his longer hair, oversize T-shirts, and statement jewelry fool you. The persona Mark Zuckerberg has taken on to ensure Meta's success as his historical adversary Donald Trump returns to the White House acts a lot like Donald Trump's right-hand man, Elon Musk.

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When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he shaved content moderation to bare bones in the name of free speech and cut more than 80% of its staff, sending shockwaves through the tech world. Many speculated that Twitter would crack under the pressure, and die. When, despite some hiccups, the platform continued to function largely as normal, Zuckerberg, like several other tech CEOs, applauded Musk for making Twitter "leaner" (doing so on the Musk superfan Lex Fridman's podcast). Meta also laid off 11,000 workers days after Musk took over Twitter, and Zuckerberg then dubbed 2023 "the year of efficiency" at Meta, cutting another 10,000 people. Zuckerberg now also plans to move trust-and-safety workers from California to Texas, following in step with Musk, who has relocated X from San Francisco to Texas, where he has also located Starlink and The Boring Company.

And as Zuckerberg stayed quieter throughout the 2024 presidential election after Meta took heat for misinformation in 2016 and 2020, Musk did the opposite. The world's richest man appeared onstage alongside Trump, backed Trump with more than $250 million, and posted to X incessantly in support of the now president-elect. Musk has again come out on top, as he now sits at the pinnacle of political influence and is poised to radically reshape government spending as he and Vivek Ramaswamy spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency. Big Tech's other power players who want a favorable relationship with Trump are left to follow in his path.

Since November, Apple's Tim Cook, Open AI's Sam Altman, and Amazon have each donated to Trump's inaugural fund. Zuckerberg has done that and more, including visiting Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with the president-elect; naming UFC CEO Dana White, a close Trump ally, to Meta's board; and promoting Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican lobbyist, to chief global affairs officer. (On Tuesday, Kaplan gave an interview on "Fox & Friends" to promote the company's content-moderation changes.)

All of this is meant to quell a once adversarial relationship between Zuckerberg and Trump, who had threatened to imprison Zuckerberg if his social sites interfered with the 2024 election and years ago accused Facebook of being "anti-Trump" and colluding against him (Zuckerberg pushed back against such claims).

As my colleague Peter Kafka wrote of the community notes news: "There's no way to see Zuckerberg's moves as anything other than a straightforward attempt to please Trump and the incoming president's conservative allies, who have often complained that Zuckerberg's properties were biased against them." Even Trump said Tuesday that Meta was "probably" responding to his own past threats against Zuck by pivoting.

The very fact-checkers who will soon be dismissed by Meta began with a program in December 2016, after Facebook faced harsh criticism for its role in spreading misinformation in Trump's first election a month prior. Meta actively worked to downplay political content following the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and it suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram (Meta lifted the suspension in early 2023, saying the public should be able to access what politicians are saying; the move came shortly after Musk allowed Trump back on Twitter). When Meta launched Threads, its own Twitter competitor, in 2023, the Instagram head, Adam Mosseri, said the new app would not encourage breaking news and politics posts. But Musk, who has rebuilt X in his own image to favor conservative and far-right accounts, has found that a social-media site can win when embracing the president. On Tuesday, Meta also said it would reverse course and stop downgrading political content, and start phasing politics back into users' feeds. (A Meta spokesperson referred to past public statements but did not provide new comment for this story.)

Early research on X's community notes shows the move has led to mixed results when it comes to combating misinformation. But changes at X have certainly proved a mammoth victory for Musk, whose wealth has grown by an estimated $200 billion since the election. As he's molded himself more in Uncle Elon's image, Nephew Zuck may also find himself in Trump's favor.

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

Abstaining from alcohol can have immediate benefits. But lasting gains require lasting change.

Stumped on what to get my mom for Christmas this year, I turned, desperately, to Perplexity AI's chatbot. In response to my initial broad question: "What should I get my mom for Christmas?," the robo-elf gave me links to several gift guides published on sites including Target and Country Living. Then the chatbot suggested generic favorites like a Stanley mug and a foot massager. But as I scrolled, it also dropped links directly to more esoteric gifts, including a mug with Donald Trump on it. "You are a really, really great mom," the mug read. "Other moms? Losers, total disasters." I hadn't given Perplexity any indication of political ideology among my family, but the bot seemed to think sipping from Trump's visage every morning was a gift any mother would love. Then it suggested I make a jar and stuff it with memories I've written down. A cute idea, but I did let Perplexity know that I'm in my 30s — I don't think the made-at-home gift for mom is going to cut it.

'Tis the season to scramble and buy tons of stuff people don't need or really even want. At least that's how it can feel when trying to come up with gifts for family members who have everything already. Money has been forked over for restaurant gift cards that collect dust or slippers and scarves that pile up; trendy gadgets are often relegated to junk drawers by March. As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into online shopping, this whole process should get easier — if AI can come to understand the art behind giving a good gift. Shopping has become one of Perplexity's top search categories in the US, particularly around the holidays, Sara Platnick, a spokesperson for Perplexity, tells me. While Platnick didn't comment directly on individual gift suggestions Perplexity's chatbots makes, she tells me that product listings provided in responses are determined by "ratings and its relevance to a user's request."

There are chatbots to consult for advice this holiday season, like Perplexity and ChatGPT, but AI is increasingly seeping into the entire shopping experience. From customer-service chatbots handling online shopping woes to ads serving recommendations that follow you across the web, AI's presence has ramped up alongside the explosion of interest in generative AI. Earlier this year, Walmart unveiled generative-AI-powered search updates that allow people to search for things like "football watch party" instead of looking for items like chips and salsa individually; Google can put clothes on virtual models in a range of sizes to give buyers a better idea of how they'll look. In a world with more options than ever, there's more help from AI, acting as robo-elves in a way — omnipresent and sometimes invisible as you shop across the web.

For the indecisive shopper, AI may be a silver bullet to choosing from hundreds of sweaters to buy, plucking the best one from obscurity and putting an end to endless scrolling — or it might help to serve up so many targeted ads that it leads people to overconsume.

AI can help people discover new items they may never have known to buy online, but it can't replace that intuition we have when we find the perfect thing for a loved one.

Either way, AI has been completely changing the e-commerce game. "It allows a company to be who the customer wants it to be," says Hala Nelson, a professor of mathematics at James Madison University. "You cannot hire thousands of human assistants to assist each customer, but you can deploy thousands of AI assistants." Specialization comes from using third-party data to track activity and preferences across the web. In a way, that's the personalized level of service high-end stores have always provided to elite shoppers. Now, instead of a consultation, the expertise is built on surveillance.

Companies also use AI to forecast shopping trends and manage inventory, which can help them prepare and keep items in stock for those last-minute shoppers. Merchants are constantly looking for AI to get them more — to bring more eyes to their websites, to get people to add more items to their carts, and ultimately to actually check out and empty their carts. In October and early November, digital retailers using AI tech and agents increased the average value of an order by 7% when compared to sites that did not employ the technology, according to Salesforce data. The company predicted AI and shopping agents to influence 19% of orders during the week of cyber deals around Thanksgiving. And AI can help "level the playing field for small businesses," says Adam Nathan, the founder and CEO of Blaze, an AI marketing tool for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

"They don't want to necessarily be Amazon, Apple, or Nike, they just want to be the No. 1 provider of their service or product in their local community," Nathan says. "They're not worried about AI taking their job — they're worried about a competitor using AI. They see it as basically a way to get ahead."

AI early adopters in the e-commerce space benefited last holiday season, but the tech has become even more common this year, says Guillaume Luccisano, the founder and CEO of Yuma AI, a company that automates customer service for sellers that use Shopify. Some merchants that used Yuma AI during the Black Friday shopping craze automated more than 60% of their customer-support tickets, he says. While some people lament having to deal with a bot instead of a person, Luccisano says the tech is getting better, and people are mostly concerned about whether their problem is getting solved, not whether the email came from a real person or generative AI.

After my ordeal with Perplexity, I turned to see how ChatGPT would fare in helping me find gifts for the rest of my family. For my 11-year-old cousin, it suggested a Fitbit or smartwatch for kids to help her "stay active." A watch that tracks activity isn't something I feel comfortable giving a preteen, so I provided some more details. I told ChatGPT she loved the "Twilight" series, so it suggested a T-shirt with the Cullen family crest and a "Twilight"-themed journal to write fan fiction. It told me I could likely find these items on Etsy but it didn't give me direct links. (As her cool millennial cousin who has lived to tell of my own "Twilight" phase in 2007, I did end up buying a makeup bag from Etsy with a movie scene printed on it.) I also asked ChatGPT for suggestions for my 85-year-old grandpa, and it came up with information about electronic picture frames — but the bulk of our family photos are stuffed in albums and shoeboxes in his closet and not easily digitized.

I could navigate this list because these are deep contextual things that I know about my family members, something AI doesn't know yet. Many of the best gifts I've ever received are from friends and family members who stumbled upon something they knew I would love — a vinyl record tucked in a bin or a print from an independent artist on display at a craft show. AI can play a role in helping people discover new items they may never have known to buy online, but it can't replace that intuition we have when we find the perfect thing for a loved one. "We're still really wrestling with: How accurate is it? How much of a black box is it?" says Koen Pauwels, a professor of marketing at Northeastern University. "Humans are way better still in getting cues from their environment and knowing the context." If you want to give a gift that's really a hit, it looks like you'll still have to give the AI elves a helping hand.

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

In the early days of the pandemic, Josh Kramer and his wife set up a Discord server to stay in touch with their friends. Branched off from the main group of about 20 people are different channels for topics — like AI and crypto, which took over a channel previously devoted to "Tiger King," and another called "sweethomies" to talk about their houses and apartments — that only some people might want to be notified about to avoid annoying everyone all the time. Now, more than four years later, it's become "essential" for the extended friend group, says Kramer, seeing them through the early anxiety of COVID-19 and two presidential elections.

While the chat is made up of friendly faces, it's not really an echo chamber — not everyone has the same ideology or political opinions, Kramer tells me. But it's more productive than screaming into the void on social media. Now, when he has a thought that may have turned into a tweet, he instead takes it to the group, where it can become a conversation.

"It's a way to have conversations about complicated issues, like national politics, but in context with people I actually know and care about," Kramer, who is the head of editorial at New_ Public, a nonprofit research and development lab focusing on reimagining social media, tells me. The success of the server has also informed how he thinks about ways to reform the social web. On election night, for example, using the group chat was less about scoring points with a quippy tweet and "more about checking in with each other and commiserating about our experience, rather than whatever you might take to Twitter to talk about to check in with the broader zeitgeist."

In the month or so since the 2024 election, thousands have abandoned or deactivated their X accounts, taking issue with Elon Musk's move to use the platform as a tool to reelect Donald Trump, as they seek new ways to connect and share information. Bluesky, which saw its users grow 110% in November according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, has emerged as the most promising replacement among many progressives, journalists, and Swifties, as it allows people to easily share links and doesn't rely as heavily on algorithmic delivery of posts as platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok have come to. But some are turning further inward to smaller group chats, either via text message or on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal, where they can have conversations more privately and free of algorithmic determinations.

It's all part of the larger, ongoing fracturing of our social media landscape. For a decade, Twitter proved to be the room where news broke. Other upstarts launched after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and tried to compete, luring people with promises of moderation and civility, but ultimately folded, largely because they weren't very fun or lacked the momentum created by the kind of power users that propelled the old Twitter. But for many, there's still safety in the smaller group chats, which take the form of your friends who like to shit talk in an iMessage chain or topic-focused, larger chats on apps like Discord or WhatsApp.

"Group chats have been quite valued," Kate Mannell, a research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child at Deakin University in Australia, tells me. They allow people to chat with selected friends, family members, or colleagues to have much "more context-specific kinds of conversations, which I think is much more reflective of the way that our social groups actually exist, as opposed to this kind of flattening" that happens on social media. When people accumulate large followings on social media, they run into context collapse, she says. The communication breakdown happens as the social platforms launched in the 2000s have taken on larger lives than anyone anticipated.

The candid nature of group chats gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy.

By contrast, some more exclusive chats are seen as cozy, safe spaces. Most of Discord's servers are made up of fewer than 10 people, Savannah Badalich, the senior director of policy at Discord, tells me. The company has 200 million active users, up from 100 million in 2020. What started as a place to hang with friends while playing video games still incentivizes interacting over lurking or building up big followings. "We don't have that endless doomscrolling," Badalich says. "We don't have that place where you're passively consuming content. Discord is about real-time interaction." And interacting among smaller groups may be more natural. Research by the psychologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s found that humans could cognitively maintain about 150 meaningful relationships. More recent research has questioned that determination, but any person overburdened by our digital age can surely tell you that you can only show up authentically and substantially in person for a small subset of the people you follow online. A 2024 study, conducted by Dunbar and the telecommunications company Vodafone, found that the average person in the UK was part of 83 group chats across all platforms, with a quarter of people using group chats more often than one-to-one messages.

In addition to hosting group chats, WhatsApp has tried more recently to position itself as a place for news, giving publishers the ability to send headlines directly to followers. News organizations like MSNBC, Reuters, and Telemundo have channels. CNN has nearly 15 million followers, while The New York Times has about 13 million. Several publishers recently told the Times that they were seeing growth and traffic come from WhatsApp, but the channels have yet to rival sources like Google or Facebook. While it gives them the power to connect to readers, WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which has a fraught history of hooking media companies and making them dependent on traffic on its social platforms only to later de-emphasize their content.

Victoria Usher, the founder and CEO of Gingermay, a B2B tech communications firm, says she's in several large, business-focused group chats on WhatsApp. Usher, who lives in the UK, even found these chats were a way to get news about the US election "immediately." In a way, the group chats are her way of optimizing news and analysis of it, and it works because there's a deep sense of trust between those in the chat that doesn't exist when scrolling X. "I prefer it to an algorithm," she says. "It's going to be stories that I will find interesting." She thinks they deliver information better than LinkedIn, where people have taken to writing posts in classic LinkedIn style to please the algorithm — which can be both self-serving and cringe. "It doesn't feel like it's a truthful channel," Usher says. "They're trying to create a picture of how they want to be seen personally. Within WhatsApp groups or Signal, people are much more likely to post what they actually feel about something."

The candid nature of group chats — which some have called the last safe spaces in society today — gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy. Some of the larger group chats, like those on Discord, have moderation and rules. But when it comes to just chatting with your friends or family, there's largely no established group-chat etiquette. Group chats can languish for years; there's no playbook for leaving or kicking out someone who's no longer close to the core group. If a couple breaks up, who gets the group chat? How many memes is a person allowed to send a day? What happens when the group texts get leaked? There's often "no external moderator to come in and say, 'That's not how we do things,'" Mannell says.

Kramer, while he likes his Discord chat, is optimistic about the future of groups and new social networks. He says he's also taken over a community Facebook group for his neighborhood that was inactive and made more connections with his neighbors. We're in a moment where massive change could come to our chats and our social networks. "There's been a social internet for 30 years," says Kramer. But there's "so much room for innovation and new exciting and alternative options." But his group chat might still have the best vibes of all. Messaging there "has less to do with being right and scoring points" than on social media, he says. "It has so much value to me on a personal level, as a place of real support."

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

Airbnb has its sights set on global domination. In earnings calls this year, its cofounder and CEO, Brian Chesky, mapped out what he sees as the short-term-rental giant's biggest expansion markets: Mexico and Brazil in the Americas; in Asia, Japan, India, South Korea, and China, for Chinese residents looking to travel outside the country; and further into Germany, Italy, and Spain in Europe, where it already has a stronghold.

What's connecting these scattered countries? Dave Stephenson, the chief business officer at Airbnb, says they're all places where the company's footprint is small compared to the amount of money people spend on travel there. The company is working on ways "to show up locally relevant," he says, "so that people think of why it's better to travel on Airbnb." Stephenson maintains that Airbnb, despite its name recognition, has a smaller footprint than hotels. The company says it has 8 million active listings globally, compared to, by one estimate, some 17 million hotel rooms. Airbnb aims to close that gap, continent by continent.

There's something else tying this far-flung strategy together: Airbnb is looking for new frontiers at a time when cities around the world are cracking down on the company and other short-term rental platforms, largely in response to complaints that short-term rentals draw (often unruly) tourists and displace locals. Barcelona, which has an estimated 20,000 Airbnb listings, has said it will ban all short-term rentals by 2028. Málaga will stop giving out new short-term-rental permits in dozens of neighborhoods. New York enacted a law in 2023 that wiped nearly all short-term rentals off the map. Other cities, like London and Paris, have been enforcing strict limits on the number of nights each year that a property can be listed for short-term renting.

For Airbnb, terra incognita looks more appealing as some of its terra firma becomes less firm.

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When Airbnb was new and growing rapidly in the 2010s, there was little regulation on short-term rentals. Many did not anticipate how homeowners, and even renters, would turn Airbnb into overnight miniature business empires. But complaints mounted over the years. Residents reported that short-term renters often had parties that brought trash, noise, and general chaos to buildings and neighborhoods, even after the company barred guests from hosting large gatherings. Locals also blamed the lucrative rentals for pushing up housing prices. Housing costs are influenced by many factors, but in 2020, researchers found that Airbnb growth in the median ZIP code accounted for an increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in home prices, making up one-fifth of rent growth and one-seventh of property value increases. A report by the New York City comptroller found that between 2009 and 2016, 9.2% of the jump in rental rates could be tied to Airbnb.

At this point, dozens of local governments around the world have enacted laws regulating short-term rentals that are bespoke to their cities. This gives places where Airbnb is looking to expand the advantage of seeing how various regulations have started to affect housing availability elsewhere, should they want to move proactively. "Even though those places that Airbnb could be pushing into may not have a [regulatory] framework, there's at least these examples where governments have recognized the need to protect housing and implemented successful ways of regulating it," says Murray Cox, founder of Inside Airbnb, which scrapes Airbnb data to show its footprint in cities around the world. Cities could take approaches from other playbooks, such as requiring Airbnb to share data with local officials, zoning short-term rentals to more commercial neighborhoods, or allowing hosts to rent out primary residences a limited number of nights a year.

Chesky is more than confident that Airbnb can win over the hearts and minds of the masses anywhere it expands into.

For Airbnb, the patchwork regulation around the world is both "a problem and an opportunity," says Cox. If rentals are curtailed in Paris, the company could look to expand to nearby cities or rural parts of France where there are fewer regulations. For Airbnb, that might mean moving into new countries. "They either can't grow or they're declining in cities or some parts" of their core markets, Cox says. "The only way that they can either maintain their revenues or grow is to push into other markets."

Airbnb isn't opposed to rules outright. If regulations are in place before the company expands to a new market, it could make the process simpler for hosts and guests and spare Airbnb from having to pivot and wipe tens of thousands of listings from its platform in one swoop after a new law passes. "We really do welcome sensible regulation," Stephenson tells me. "In a sensible, reasonable way, it works quite well." Airbnb is still pushing back against what it believes are overreaching regulations, like those in New York City. And despite the regulations, Airbnb is growing. Its revenue is up 10% year over year, and the number of nights booked grew, along with experiences, which include activities provided by local businesses and tour guides, by 8%.

But Airbnb's challenges don't stop at the regulations. It must also get people around the world to buy in. "Each country is going to have its own dynamics," Jamie Lane, the senior vice president of analytics and chief economist at AirDNA, tells me. In some countries, hosting strangers in your home wouldn't be culturally acceptable. Lane also says there are local competitors to Airbnb in some places "that have been impactful and made it hard for them to compete."

Those challenges are partially why Airbnb pulled out of hosting in China in 2022, wiping out 150,000 listings there. For one, the country's strict travel regulations around COVID-19 lasted longer than measures taken by most other nations, which created a drag on travel bookings. But Airbnb struggled to compete with Chinese companies offering short-term rentals long before that. The homegrown alternatives there included Tujia, which was designed to attract Chinese travelers specifically by anticipating peak travel times and rates, Melissa Yang, the company's cofounder, told CNN several years ago.

Chesky is more confident that Airbnb can win over the hearts and minds of the masses anywhere it goes. "Airbnb pretty much resonates pretty equally everywhere once there's the awareness," he told investors in a call earlier this year. "In fact, I could argue that Airbnb might resonate better in Asia because there's a younger travel population that's not predisposed to hotels, and they're on social media. And we are disproportionately on social media versus our competitors. So I'm very, very bullish about that."

While the company isn't telegraphing its expansion strategy in every country, one of its most obvious moves began in Japan this fall. Airbnb ran an ad in English last year promoting travel in Kyoto, but it ramped up its Japanese ads in October. It's looking to court young Japanese travelers who want to take weekend trips, showing photos of a family traveling to a sleek, modern cabin in a wooded area, where they sing karaoke. Stephenson says Airbnb has also learned that local travelers want proximity to onsens, Japanese hot springs and bathing facilities, so listings there now show nearby onsens.

Elsewhere, Airbnb has been implementing payment methods preferred by locals. The company recently added KaKao Pay in South Korea and Vipps in Norway, among dozens of other options. It may seem like a small step, but Airbnb thinks meeting people where and how they pay will make the service more appealing.

Researchers are closely watching Airbnb's ongoing spread. Bianca Tavolari, a researcher and member of the advisory board of the Global Observatory of Short-Term Rentals, a group of Latin American organizations focused on housing, says Brazil has lagged in regulating short-term rentals, though a court ruled last year that hosts must have explicit consent from property owners to list apartments or condos as short-term rentals. Airbnb shares some tourism trend information with local officials through its city portal, but researchers like Tavolari still have questions about Airbnb's full impact. "We are in the dark," she tells me. Yet "cities are seeing it as a great opportunity," particularly those that depend heavily on tourism dollars, she says, and thinking less about the long-term costs to residents.

Cox says he's "hopeful that some of these locations that Airbnb is planning to push to have already started thinking about" how they'll handle its growth. If Chesky's hypothesis is right, Airbnb could continue to spread rapidly once people in other parts of the world get used to couch surfing or navigating a hidden lockbox to let themselves into their rentals. Cities should be ready before more tourists start packing their bags.

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

Spotify Wrapped arrived on Wednesday, packaged in its usual neon, Instagram-ready glory.

The annual release dominates social-media posts for a day, but beneath the colorful cards (designed to be bespoke but distributed en masse), it's Spotify's brag about the amount of data the company has collected on you, mirrored back in a way that's meant to make surveillance sexy, silly, and shareable.

In recent Decembers, the wrap-ification of our data has spread beyond Spotify. Apple Music, Spotify's main competitor, now has a similar feature called Replay, unveiling this year's version on Tuesday. Starbucks has sent out emails telling people about their favorite beverages and number of store visits, shocking some with exactly how many dozens of Frappuccinos they bought. Duolingo kicked off the Wrapped season earlier this week, showing people how many mistakes they made while trying to learn a new language. The British supermarket chain Tesco has sent Clubcard members a review of what they bought in recent years, called Unpacked. And on Tuesday, Tinder hosted a Year in Swipe party, where it revealed the top trends in online dating the app gleaned from its broad swath of 50 million monthly users, which included people getting specific about what kind of person they're looking for or putting a hand emoji in their bios to indicate they're searching for real connections.

All this is getting weird. The type of lattes we drink and the music we listen to are things we fundamentally know about ourselves. The most common names of men and women on Tinder (Alexes and Daniels dominated among men, Marias and Lauras women) tell us nothing about how to find love. But these year-in-review trends still catch avid attention and, in turn, provide free advertising for companies when they're reshared. About an hour after Spotify unveiled this year's Wrapped, its market cap reached $100 billion for the first time. Spotify did not respond to requests for comment.

"People are so excited about seeing data collected from them and then being shown back to them in a way that feels meaningful and relatable," Taylor Annabell, a researcher with Utrecht University who has studied the Wrapped phenomenon, said. "Wrapped taps into this belief we have that data is meaningful and that we want to see it because it helps us understand ourselves."

Wrapped 2024 included the usual unveiling of top songs and artists, but Spotify has added a "Wrapped AI podcast," which features two voicebot hosts chatting through your listening habits without really saying much about the songs, in particular. There was also a section picking apart how listening styles changed over different months of the year. For me, that meant going from "van life folkie indie" to "mallgoth permanent wave punk," mildly embarrassing phrases that might describe my musical tastes from a distance but tell me little new about myself.

Wrapped content has proven so effective on social media that people are making up new categories themselves, packaging parts of their private lives not captured by apps.

Of course, Spotify can't capture everything about your tastes — maybe you played a vinyl record on repeat or shared a streaming account with someone in your family. ("It's not me who can't stop listening to Chumbawamba. It's my cousin, I swear!") Maybe you opted for a mysterious approach and kept your Tinder bio short and sweet.

But where data is lacking, some have set out to create it themselves. Wrapped content has proved so effective and viral on social media that people have taken to making up new categories, packaged parts of their lives not captured by apps, and turned it over to their followers. Here, at least, these people get to curate their experiences and post them as they wish. Last December and already this week, some people took to TikTok to talk through how many first dates they went on during the course of a year, using cute and colorful slideshows to walk their users through their year of bad dates, situationships, and ghosting. A third-party project called Vantezzen takes TikTok data and generates a Wrapped-like analysis for those who want to know how many minutes they spent doom scrolling.

All this comes as people have largely thrown up their hands and given in to sharing their data with their apps. Companies have "gotten us to move past just accepting that they are spying on us to celebrating it," said Evan Greer, the director of the digital-rights advocacy group Fight for the Future and a vocal opponent of Spotify who released an album called "Spotify Is Surveillance" in 2021. "That's the shift we're seeing with this explosion of these types of year-end Wrapped viral gimmicks," Greer added. "They're actually about hypernormalizing the fact that the online services that we use know so very much about us."

Tinder's year in review looked at data from profiles in the US and globally and its own survey results, determining the most popular love languages and zodiac signs, the fastest-growing words mentioned in bios (freak, pickleball, and finance all soared this year), and how people like to communicate (ironically, "better in person" won out over the messaging app). It also created an interactive vision-board feature for people to set intentions for their 2025 dating plans. The company's in-person Year in Swipe party was held in a moody Manhattan bar, where attendees could make charm bracelets or have a tarot-card reading, and each sported a button designed to correspond with their dating vibe, like a black cat or delusional. Tinder did not respond to a request for comment about whether people could opt out of being used in the aggregate data.

But Spotify, in particular, wants to tell its users more about themselves throughout the year. In September 2023, the company began making "daylists," or curated playlists released multiple times throughout the day. While they don't come with the sharable, flashy cards to post on Instagram, they're given catchy names that hint at something about you, changing several times a day. Just this week, Spotify has dubbed me a "Laurel Canyon hippie" and crafted a vibe for a "yearning poetry Tuesday afternoon."

The daylists feel like Spotify's attempt to take the Wrapped success "to the next level," said Nina Vindum Rasmussen, a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science who worked on the Spotify research with Annabell. It's "data fiction that accompanies people throughout the day," she said, adding: "What does it mean for them to have this mirror constantly shoved in their face?"

Most of us have gotten comfortable with — or at least resigned to — the fact that Big Tech is watching our every move. Wrapped season is a shiny reminder of all we've done, seemingly in private, on our phones. But don't count on your friends to stop sharing their elite spot as a 0.05% top listener of Taylor Swift anytime soon.

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

If it didn't already look like Drake had lost the feud of the year, it certainly does now.

In a legal filing Monday, an LLC owned by Drake called Frozen Moments alleged that Universal Music Group and Spotify worked together to make "Not Like Us" — a viral diss track Kendrick Lamar released about Drake earlier this year — a bigger hit than it naturally would have been. The petition, filed three days after Drake's rival released the critically acclaimed surprise album "GNX," claims UMG did this by offering lower licensing rates on the song to Spotify in return for promotion, then paying third-party companies to have bots inflate streams of it; "Not Like Us" has surpassed 900 million plays on Spotify. ("Family Matters," a Drake diss track about Lamar released around the same time, has 122 million plays.) The filing also accuses UMG of using pay-to-play tactics to increase the song's radio play and have influencers promote it across social media. It's not a lawsuit yet, but a petition seeking more information about the alleged practice.

"Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game," Drake's filing says. "Every time a song 'breaks through,' it means another artist does not. UMG's choice to saturate the music market with 'Not Like Us' comes at the expense of its other artists, like Drake."

The twist: UMG doesn't just represent Lamar but also Drake. And Drake is one of the biggest artists streaming on Spotify, with about 10 million more monthly listeners than Lamar. If major companies like UMG and Spotify really are conspiring to help one artist over another, they would be severely disrupting the way people discover and come to love music and risking the entire streaming model the music industry now relies on.

Hip-hop fans are mocking Drake's litigiousness as petty and destructive to his street cred. "This is Drake's Jan. 6," the musical artist and former NFL running back Arian Foster posted on X. Music industry insiders, meanwhile, are skeptical of the allegations themselves.

"It's not in Spotify's interest for their model to be undermined by people not getting paid fairly," Tony Rigg, a music industry advisor and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, tells me. "Bots, potentially, would undermine both" Spotify and UMG. In other words, for the top of the music industry, rigging with bots would be "not like us."

The kind of manipulation, also called artificial listening, that Drake is talking about does happen. Some artists use third-party companies that enlist accounts made by bots to listen to the same playlist on repeat. That's an issue because of how streaming companies pay. They divide up royalty payments from a limited pool of cash. More plays means more of the pie. And as more people have taken to uploading AI-generated slop to streaming platforms like Spotify, they risk becoming more diluted. In September, a North Carolina musician was charged with music streaming fraud; the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York claims he made more than $10 million using those kinds of tactics. (The case is ongoing.) Smaller artists looking to make money off streaming can suffer. But it's harder to know how it could affect megastars like Drake and Lamar, who are already among the top performers in Spotify's streaming ranks.

In the end, the attention, and ears, on the two artists' beef may have made Spotify and UMG both winners.

There are more than 100 million songs each on popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. Last year, Spotify booted tens of thousands of songs from its platform reported to be generated by AI and also listened to by bots — essentially, computer music for computers. UMG itself has pushed back against AI-generated music, trying to block AI from training on its catalogs on streaming platforms.

Spotify declined to comment, but the company does have policies in place to detect and combat artificial streaming. A UMG spokesperson told me that "the suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue. We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear."

Fans can argue whether Drake or Lamar won the feud. By throwing lawyers and corporations into the rap battle, Drake has made it much less street and much more corporate. It's hard to imagine bots would be driving so many listeners to Lamar, a 17-time Grammy award winner. The song itself has been nominated for five Grammys, has been used at political events and protests around the world, and became a hit on TikTok. In the end, the attention, and ears, on the two artists' beef may have made Spotify and UMG both winners.

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

Elle took a job in the tech industry about seven years ago, right when product management was "getting hot," she says. While the companies she's since worked for have had vastly different expectations of her, one thing has been consistent: clashes with other teams. Product managers serve as a bridge between engineers, salespeople, customer-service agents, and workers in other departments, and getting them to work together to build products that people actually need can be fractious.

"If you're an engineer and you have an idea, and then you have this outside figure come in and say, 'Why are you doing it this way?' — some can see that as great collaboration," says Elle, who asked that I use only her first name. "Other people are like, 'Whoa, you're slowing me down.'"

The product manager has become a powerful, highly paid, and polarizing figure. At some tech companies their colleagues refer to them, both affectionately and disparagingly, as "mini-CEOs" of the products they manage. Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and YouTube's Neal Mohan climbed their way up from product manager to CEO, and they deploy legions of PMs to help run their companies.

Coworkers don't always have fuzzy feelings about product managers. X abounds with snarky memes about their purposelessness, their illiteracy of Python and C++, their penchant for saying "no updates from me" in update meetings. On forums and subreddits, their more-technical colleagues belittle their work as fluff. "Is product manager the most useless role in tech?" an engineer posted on Blind. Another accused product managers of "stealing a living": "As an engineer, I feel I can easily do their job in addition to mine with not much extra effort," they wrote. One person on Reddit argued that product managers "just attend meetings and get paid more than the actual people doing the work."In a LinkedIn post titled "Product is too important. So we got rid of product managers," the founder of a digital banking startup wrote, "Any function that needs a decade to explain what it actually is or isn't doing is at very high risk of somehow being lost."

Several companies, from Airbnb to Snap, are now reconsidering the utility of product managers entirely, while others claim that the product manager's reign will only expand in the age of AI. How did a role that barely existed before the 2000s become one of the most influential and controversial presences in tech?

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The seed of product management dates back to at least the 1930s, when Procter & Gamble created a position called the "brand man" whose job it was to understand customer problems. Inspired by this, Hewlett-Packard pioneered the tech product manager role in the 1960s. Microsoft began hiring what it called "program managers" in the 1980s. In the 2000s, as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon expanded to create ever more products, product managers proliferated. Hardware and software also became more complicated, and the engineers and developers building it had less time to figure out what was actually useful — companies realized they needed someone dedicated to translating customer needs.

Product became a path into tech for people with backgrounds in consulting or MBAs. A "golden era" of product management emerged in the run of zero interest rates in the 2010s. Companies gobbled up talent, sometimes hiring beyond their needs just to keep smart workers from going to competitors. Big Tech companies became bloated, paying middle managers high salaries to optimize products and development. Carnegie Mellon University began offering what it calls a first-of-its-kind master's degree in product management in 2018. The next year, U.S. News and World Report named product manager a top-five job for MBA grads.

"The shift in power moved from engineering to product managers," says Hubert Palan, the CEO of Productboard, a company that provides software for product managers. That's part of the friction: Those on the tech side often think the product manager doesn't understand how things work, but the product manager may think the engineers are building tools that people don't actually want or need, even if they're feats in coding.

"The product manager is at the center of everything," says Avi Siegel, a former product manager who's working on his own startup, Momentum. "If sales wants one thing and marketing wants one thing and customer success wants one thing, they disagree, and you can only choose one of the groups to side with — you're only going to keep one of those people happy."

"Product management is mostly necessary, but it can be done very badly," says Aaron, a software engineer who asked me to use only his first name. He says he's worked with both excellent and terrible product managers. At best, they bear the burden of understanding the tech a market needs. At worst, they don't acknowledge how technically difficult a solution they demand might be, which leads to ire, fatigue, and failure. "We would be asked for the moon with no collaboration," Aaron says.

Whether their coworkers are happy about it or not, product managers are gaining recognition. A 2007 study found that as the product-management role became more formalized at companies, projects were finished closer to deadlines and with more predictability. A 2020 report from McKinsey said that "creating a comprehensive product-management function" was one of the four most important things a company could do to grow its software business faster. According to ZipRecruiter, the average product manager in the US makes about $160,000. Software engineers, meanwhile, average about $147,000, and tech marketing specialists average about $87,000.

Product managers described the role to me as more intuitive and right-brained than left-brained (though there are plenty of technical PMs, many of them former engineers). The career site Zippia says the proportion of women working in product management rose to nearly 35% in 2021 from about 19% in 2010. That's compared to just 22% of all tech workers. Some women in product management I spoke to say part of the suspicion of their role's utility could be rooted in sexism. In 2022, two women who worked as product managers posted a TikTok explaining what they did for work, while they worked from a pool. The video drew hundreds of harsh comments. "Dealing with most product managers is a headache and a half and we usually hate talking to you," one person responded.

"Every woman that I've met with, if they're interested in a company, their first question is: Am I technical enough?" Elle says. "Every guy I've met, that question doesn't cross their mind." It makes her wonder if it's easier for men in product management to push back and say no to some ideas without looking like naysayers.

Empathy came up in every conversation I had for this story. Like a deft diplomat, a good product manager can empathize with the needs and concerns of every stakeholder, Palan says. Meg Watson, a product manager who has worked for Spotify and Stitch Fix, says product managers who try to rule with an iron fist "quickly learn that doesn't work." She describes working as a product manager as emotional and intense and says many of them experience the tension of their role daily. When she asks people looking for advice on getting into product management why they want to, they say they want power. "You will have power," Watson says. "You will also have accountability and pressure and stress."

And now some companies are ditching them. The Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky said last year that the company had combined the product-management function with product marketing. The rising call for executives to go "founder mode" — a concept touted by Chesky and coined by the Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham — has some questioning whether they should be delegating product decisions to product managers. A spokesperson for Snap told The Information last fall that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company's decision-making. Smaller firms ponder the utility of bringing on product managers at all.

But others say the scope of product managers, though it may draw engineers' ire, is more likely to expand across the industry. "The future really does belong to product managers," says Frank Fusco, a product manager turned CEO of a software company called Silicon Society. As artificial intelligence gets more adept at coding, he says, some engineering tasks could become redundant — and that could be a boon for product managers. (Pichai, a former product manager, said last month that more than a quarter of Google's new code was created by AI.) Fusco says the AI boom is a classic product-manager problem: What do customers actually want the tech to do? As investors and executives are hungry for AI and many consumers are skeptical, Fusco predicts a rising demand for product managers to help bridge that gap.

"The revenge of the PMs is coming," he says. "I would expect to see PMs becoming more prestigious and empowered."

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