Hello! Welcome back to our Sunday edition, a roundup of some of our top stories. Ever wonder how much money you need to make to be considered middle class? What about the incomes of the upper class? We crunched the numbers.
But first: OpenAI’s in the spotlight (again).
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This week’s dispatch
When OpenAI’s GPT-4o started chatting during the AI startup’s livestream event, I was immediately reminded of “Her,” the Spike Jonze movie from a decade ago. I wasn’t the only one.
Scarlett Johansson, who voiced the AI Samantha in that movie, said last week that she had hired lawyers after she heard GPT-4o using a voice that sounded “eerily similar” to her own. This was after Sam Altman tried to hire her to voice the AI bot, and she declined.
OpenAI paused the voice, saying a different actress was behind it, and that the voice was cast before Altman reached out to Johansson. That one of the AI voices sounds a great deal like a Hollywood star who declined to work with OpenAI is purely coincidental. OK!
It’s not a good look for OpenAI, which is facing continued questions over its truthfulness right as it tries to become a fixture in all of our lives.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said OpenAI might have breached YouTube’s terms when training its Sora model. Authors are taking legal action over breach of copyright. There have been multiple high-profile departures in recent months.
Six months on from his brief ouster as CEO, Altman is under pressure again.
Oracle’s deadly gamble
Larry Ellison bet $28 billion that he could revolutionize healthcare. With the purchase of medical-records company Cerner, the billionaire planned to pump its vast trove of medical data into Oracle’s AI models and develop an electronic health record system of the future.
So far, it’s been a disaster.
Inside Ellison’s disastrous bet on healthcare.
The future of fertilization
Conceivable Life Sciences, a startup in Guadalajara, Mexico, is building robots and AI models to automate crucial parts of IVF. Though they’re just in the prototype stage, the robots can suck sperm into needles and place them into eggs.
The cofounders say automation will challenge an industry rife with arbitrary decision-making — and it could wind up saving patients tens of thousands of dollars.
Here’s how it works.
FI, not RE
For some millennials, the FIRE movement — financial independence, retire early — isn’t just about riding off into the sunset early.
A portion of the generation is focused more on financial independence than cutting out work completely. The result means they can create their own version of life after work.
Millennials throw some cold water on FIRE.
Also read:
Welcome to DumBro
Cities on the rise have a weird trend these days: Really dumb neighborhood names. Take Denver, where you can find RiNo, SoBo, LoDo, and LoHi. Two-syllable names for neighborhoods used to be an oddity.
But now it’s become a full-blown epidemic as builders try to redevelop portions of cities into their image. And it’s not just an innocent name game. Oftentimes it’s about erasing the history — and pushing residents out — of the original neighborhood.
The great neighborhood renaming.
This week’s quote:
“I channeled a thick-skinned character who thrived in a man’s world.”
— Lindsay MacMillan, a former Goldman Sachs VP who was driven out by the company’s “boys only” culture.
More of this week’s top reads:
- These are the top 15 places to live in the United States.
- Baby boomers have been America’s secret weapon for fending off recession.
- Homes on Nantucket are falling into the ocean — but the wealthy won’t stop buying them.
- Companies are “unbossing” the workplace. Millennial managers are getting axed.
- How Khaby Lame, the world’s most-followed TikToker, built his business.
- Deleting Slack and Gmail helped one woman become a better parent — and worker.
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Google AI said to put glue in pizza — so I made a pizza with glue and ate it.
The Insider Today team: Matt Turner, deputy editor-in-chief, in New York. Jordan Parker Erb, editor, in New York. Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York.
