Author: Sam Allcock
Because it doesn’t make a good slide, there is a problem that is rarely discussed at AI conferences. This is how it works: a company develops an AI agent, runs it through a demo, observes that it performs flawlessly on a carefully chosen set of tasks, and then deploys it into their real production environment, where it begins to make decisions that no one can quite explain, fails in ways that don’t neatly map to anything covered in the test suite, and improves at no discernible rate because no one has a rigorous way to measure whether it’s improving at…
Imagine a retired Ohio suburban schoolteacher sitting at her kitchen table with a printed Medicare Part D plan summary. Late last year, she learned that a deal had been negotiated by the government. medications for losing weight. $50 a month. For years, she has been managing the cardiovascular risk associated with obesity, and her doctor has repeatedly brought up Zepbound, only to shrug about coverage. There was a number now. An actual, precise, reasonably priced figure. She began phoning. Depending on the plan she was enrolled in, what she discovered might or might not match what she was told. Eli…
A risk manager was staring at a screen displaying numbers that shouldn’t have been possible in late January 2021, somewhere on a glass-walled trading floor in Midtown Manhattan. In just a few weeks, GameStop, a physical video game retailer that had been steadily losing customers to digital downloads for years and that serious analysts had been convictively shorting, saw a 1,800 percent increase. What had started out as a textbook wager on a clearly failing company had turned into a disaster. One of the hedge funds with a sizable short position, Melvin Capital, would require a $3 billion emergency fund…
Hard plastic chairs, a reception desk with software that hasn’t significantly changed in ten years, and a stack of forms requesting information that the system already has somewhere are all familiar sights when you walk into most hospital waiting rooms these days. Given what’s going on in labs, government agencies, and research hospitals only a few miles from any one of these waiting rooms, it’s an odd contrast. Seldom has the gap between the medication being developed and the medication being administered felt so large or worthy of careful examination. It turns out that there is more than one invention…
The Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo, Iowa, is a squat concrete building surrounded by level farmland that hardly registers as you drive by. It has been inactive for years. By 2029, one of the world’s most powerful technology companies will be using the nuclear energy produced by that same plant to power data centers that handle artificial intelligence workloads. Google agreed to purchase the majority of its output under a 25-year contract. The restart is being carried out by NextEra Energy. The entire setup serves as a helpful synopsis of the AI infrastructure story up close, which is unglamorous,…
Traders recall a specific type of morning. Among them was March 9, 2026. Shares of Hims & Hers Health were already skyrocketing before the opening bell, rising 40%, 50%, and even 54% in premarket trading—the kind of move that causes people to stop scrolling and contact their brokers. The news that drove it arrived late on Friday night, almost casually: the rivalry between Novo Nordisk and Hims & Hers had been resolved. They had completely changed it from a lawsuit to a partnership, not just put an end to it. Wegovy and Ozempic, the company’s popular obesity medications, will now…
Imagine someone tapping a protein bar’s barcode into a calorie-tracking app while standing in a grocery store aisle with their phone in hand. The number shows up. After doing some mental math and determining that it fits, they place it in the cart. This scene occurs millions of times every day in supermarkets, office kitchens, and gym bags all over the nation. It is based on an assumption that is so ingrained in diet culture that very few people take the time to question it. It is assumed that weight management is just math and that a calorie is a…
A benefits manager in the HR department of a mid-sized business is currently investigating a new option on a vendor platform: a means of providing employees with access to a weight-loss injection without ever sending the paperwork through a traditional insurance company. Eli Lilly sets the terms of the option, which has a fixed monthly cost of $449. When a pharmaceutical company determines that the traditional method of selling medications isn’t working quickly enough, it looks like this. Employer Connect, Lilly’s direct-to-employer platform for Zepbound, the company’s popular obesity shot, was formally introduced on March 5, 2026. Although the announcement…
When something truly historic feels near, a certain kind of electricity flows through financial circles. It’s evident in the discussions at industry conferences, in the cautious optimism of analysts who’ve been let down in the past, and in the way venture capitalists talk about companies in their portfolio that they’ve owned for ten years. The electricity is currently operational. Additionally, it is known by a number of names, including SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks. The next wave of tech initial public offerings (IPOs) is no longer just a pipe dream. With the weight of years of private-market build-up, the…
A small group of workers with handmade signs congregate outside a glass-fronted office building that resembles a boutique hotel rather than a place of employment on a pleasant afternoon in Silicon Valley. The slogans are cautious, almost courteous. Don’t yell. Not a single megaphone. It was just contract workers, engineers, and designers standing in the California sun, shifting their weight and checking their phones in between talks. It doesn’t appear to be a labor movement. Not in the conventional sense. However, something is taking place. Category Details Industry Technology / Labor Movement Core Concept Tech worker unionization Key Location Silicon…