As we head into the holiday season, toys with generative AI chatbots in them may start appearing on Christmas lists. A concerning report found one innocent-looking AI teddy bear gave instructions on how to light matches, where to find knives, and even explained sexual kinks to children.
Consumer watchdogs at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) tested some AI toys for its 40th annual Trouble in Toyland report and found them to exhibit extremely disturbing behaviors.
With only minimal prompting, the AI toys waded into subjects many parents would find unsettling, from religion to sex. One toy in particular stood out as the most concerning.
FoloToys AI teddy bear Kumma, powered by OpenAIs GPT-4o model, the same model that once powered ChatGPT, repeatedly dropped its guardrails the longer a conversation went on.
“Kumma told us where to find a variety of potentially dangerous objects, including knives, pills, matches, and plastic bags,” PIRG, which has been testing toys for hazards since the 1980s, wrote in its report.
In other tests, Kumma offered advice on how to be a good kisser and veered into overtly sexual topics, breaking down various kinks and even posing the wildly inappropriate question: What do you think would be the most fun to explore? Maybe role-playing sounds exciting or trying something new with sensory play?
Following the reports release, FoloToy pulled the implicated bear. Now, it has confirmed it is pulling all of its products. On Friday, OpenAI also confirmed that it had cut off FoloToys access to its AI models.
FoloToy told PIRG: [F]ollowing the concerns raised in your report, we have temporarily suspended sales of all FoloToy products The company also added that it is carrying out a company-wide, end-to-end safety audit across all products.
Report coauthor RJ Cross, director of PIRGs Our Online Life Program, praised the efforts but made it clear far more needs to be done before AI toys become a safe childhood staple.
Its great to see these companies taking action on problems weve identified. But AI toys are still practically unregulated, and there are plenty you can still buy today, Cross said in a statement. Removing one problematic product from the market is a good step, but far from a systemic fix.
These AI toys are marketed to children as young as three, but they run on the same large language model technology behind adult chatbots — the very systems companies like OpenAI say arent meant for children.
Earlier this year, OpenAI shared the news of a partnership with Mattel to integrate AI into some of its iconic brands such as Barbie and Hot Wheels, a sign that not even childrens toys are exempt from the AI takeover.
Other toymakers say they incorporate chatbots from OpenAI or other leading AI companies, said Rory Erlich, U.S. PIRG Education Funds New Economy campaign associate and report co-author. Every company involved must do a better job of making sure that these products are safer than what we found in our testing. We found one troubling example. How many others are still out there?
Members of the Sackler family who own OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma must pay billions of dollars to settle a flood of lawsuits over the harms of opioids, under a new deal that was formally approved by a federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday.
The Sackler family must contribute up to $7 billion over 15 years. Most of the money is to go to government entities to fight the opioid crisis, which has been linked to 900,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1999.
Thousands of victims of the opioid epidemic could be paid thousands of dollars each, with a portion of the money distributed next year to some people who had OxyContin prescriptions and their survivors.
This plan is not perfect, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane said as he laid out his reasoning for approving the settlements. The court wishes it could do more to ease the suffering of the opioid crisis.
But he said it is fair, equitable, and in the best interest of the parties involved, and had the overwhelming support of most of the groups that had claims against Purdue.
The new agreement replaces one that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. Under the current agreement, entities that do not opt into the payments can still sue members of the family.
The deal, which the judge said he would accept last week, is among the largest in a series of opioid settlements brought by state and local governments against drugmakers, wholesalers, and pharmacies that totaled about $50 billion.
Why the judge said he approved the deal
Lane said the deal maximizes the settlement’s value and came from years of investigations, mediation and negotiations.
He also said that an alternative to the settlement suing Sackler family members instead of accepting the deal would take years and success is not ensured,” in part because the family has consistently said they would fight claims against them.
He also noted it could be hard to collect if the family lost lawsuits. Much of their assets are in off-shore trusts.
Lane said that the states and individuals can get more than they would have if Purdue had been liquidated instead.
In that case, he said, there would have been only $3.4 billion available and $2 billion of that would have gone to the federal government as part of a criminal plea deal the company entered. Under that agreement, most of the federal penalties were to be waived if a broader settlement could be reached.
Money will go to governments and some individuals
Sackler family members were collectively paid more than $10 billion by Purdue in the decade before they stopped involvement with the company in 2018 and used about half of that for taxes. They’ve agreed to pay up to $7 billion over 15 years, providing most of the cash involved in the settlement.
The funds distributed to state, local and Native Americans is to be used mostly to address the opioid crisis, as has been the case with other opioid settlements.
About $850 million of that is to go to individual victims, including children born with opioid withdrawal.
People with addiction and survivors of those who died must prove they were prescribed OxyContin to participate. They could provide medical records or photos of prescription bottle labels although many people don’t have such things dating back decades.
Those who do prove it could get payments of around $8,000 or around $16,000, depending on how long they received the drug and how many other people qualify. The money for individual victims is to be distributed next year.
Not only money is at stake
Members of the Sackler family are agreeing to give up ownership of Purdue.
For them, that won’t be a major change since no family member has served on Purdue’s board or received money from the company since 2018. The plan calls for Purdue to be replaced with a new company, Knoa Pharma, to be controlled by a board appointed by states and with a mission of benefiting the public.
Sackler family members are also agreeing not to have their name put on institutions in exchange for contributions something they’ve done often in the past, although many institutions have cut ties with them.
The company has also agreed to make public a trove of internal documents that could shed additional light into how the company promoted and monitored opioids.
One feature that won’t be repeated under this new deal that was in a previous one: forcing members of the Sackler family to hear directly from people harmed by OxyContin.
A long legal saga could be wrapping up
Purdue filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019 when it was facing thousands of opioid-related lawsuits from state and local governments and others.
A judge approved a settlement two years later. But the U.S. Supreme Court later rejected that plan because it gave members of the Sackler family protection from lawsuits over opioids even though they were not personally declaring bankruptcy.
The latest plan allows lawsuits against Sackler family members by those who don’t opt into the deal. That change was a key to getting the new version approved in the aftermath of the high court’s ruling.
This time, few parties objected to the settlement, although some people who represented themselves and who were addicted to opioids or had loved ones who were raised concerns during the three-day confirmation hearing last week.
One of those self-represented people told Lane during the virtual hearing Tuesday that she planned to appeal.
By Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press
Like clockwork, 5 p.m. on a Sunday, flashes of unread emails and notifications for tomorrows upcoming meetings start. Your shoulders tense, your stomach knots. You have a case of the Sunday scaries.
This unsettling feeling is a form of anticipatory anxiety that creeps in as the weekend draws to a close and Monday looms with the responsibilities of the week ahead. If you can relate, youre not alone: New data suggests the vast majority of workers experience this anxiety, and it also suggests some workers feel it worse than others.
Adobe Acrobat surveyed over 1,000 full-time employees and found 82% experience this sense of anxiety before the workweek even begins. For Gen Z respondents, that number creeps up to 94%. It also affects women more often than men.
For 31%, the Sunday scaries start before 5 p.m. even hits. Thats despite the fact that those affected spend 72 hours annually working on weekends to get ahead on the demands of the workweek.
The scaries are set off by all types of reasons. Looming layoffs or signs of economic uncertainty can lead workers to feel anxious about the near future. Burnout is the main culprit for 55% of respondents, followed by high workloads (50%), project deadlines (33%) and toxic work environments (31%).
Even admin-related tasks can add to the sense of dread, with organizing digital files or chasing down signatures mentioned by one in 15 respondents as triggers.
The Sunday scaries can affect anyone, but some suffer worse than others, Adobe says: Remote workers, for example, report getting the scaries just a few times per year. Those back in the office report getting them once or twice a month.
More than half of Fortune 100 companies now have a full-time office requirement, and research shows nearly 3 in 10 companies will demand five days a week in the office by the end of 2025. While 27% of those surveyed say their Sunday scaries have grown more intense over the past year, onsite workers are 47% more likely than remote workers to say their prework anxiety worsened over that time period.
Given the gap, its unsurprising workers are willing to quit their jobs for more flexible work, with 17% quitting in the past year because of changes to their working arrangements.
Its not just a feeling. For 35% of those surveyed it manifests physically in headaches, tension, and fatigue, and 42% even lose sleep. It also impacts employers with nearly half respondents (46%) reporting that their Sunday scaries lead to a lack of motivation at a time where employees are already disengaged at work.
Anxiety is a normal human emotion. A big week at work or an upcoming important presentation is likely to trigger some feelings of anxiety. But if you spend every Sunday dreading the week ahead, it might require investigating further.
AI can do your taxes nowsort of.
The tax software giant Intuit just struck a new deal with OpenAI that will weave AI deeply into its portfolio of financial apps, including the ones many Americans use to file their taxes.
In the multiyear deal, Intuit will pay ChatGPT maker OpenAI more than $100 million annually to implement its artificial intelligence models across products like TurboTax, personal finance manager Credit Karma, email marketing platform Mailchimp, and the accounting tool QuickBooks. Through the partnership, Intuits products will also become accessible directly through ChatGPTthe latest lucrative business integration for OpenAI.
We are taking a massive step forward to fuel financial success for consumers and businesses, unlocking growth for both companies, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said. Our partnership combines the power of Intuits proprietary financial data, credit models, and AI platform capabilities with OpenAIs scale and frontier models to give users the financial advantage they need to prosper.”
Intuit owns a big swath of the financial software market, and all of those apps will be popping up in ChatGPT soon to steer users toward personalized recommendations for credit cards and loans and to answer their tax and personal finance questions.
Intuit has been gravitating toward AI for a while now. Late last year, the company introduced AI-powered features into QuickBooks, inviting its users to automate rote, time-consuming tasks like sending invoices. Intuit insisted that it was being intentional about its implementation of AI, particularly given the rush for every business to boast about its AI capabilities.
The idea is not to just have random sprinkles of AI across the product, Dave Talach, Intuit senior vice president of the QuickBooks platform, told Fast Company at the time. Weve been thoughtful about approaching AI, not just for the sake of AI, but we want it to show up in a cohesive way in the product that is coherent to the customer.
In June, QuickBooks released a set of AI agents for QuickBooks designed to get familiar with a companys business and operations, taking over tasks to speed up bookkeeping and accounting. At the time, Intuit CEO Goodarzi emphasized that the company moved deliberately in building out its AI because it knows that missteps and inaccuracies are high stakes for the financial tools its customers rely on. If it screws up, its a big problem, he told Fast Company.
ChatGPT is a platform now
OpenAIs new partnership with Intuit is just the latest third-party integration for ChatGPT. In late September, OpenAI took what it called first steps toward agentic commerce with integrations for Shopify and Etsy, and went on to ink a deal with PayPal last month.
OpenAI also recently introduced a developer kit that would open its hit chatbot platform to third-party appsa major shift for the chatbot that stands to remake the way that its 700 million-plus weekly users find and do things online. ChatGPTs first wave of apps included Zillow, Spotify, Canva, and Expedia, with apps from DoorDash, Peloton, Uber, and Target in the works.
OpenAIs recent moves point to the companys vision of ChatGPT as an all-encompassing hub of utility that gives internet users little reason to go elsewhere. Those decisions coincide with OpenAIs seismic shift away from its complex nonprofit roots into a more traditional for-profit company, although it technically will remain under the wing of a nonprofit.
We want to be able to operate and get resources in such a way that we can make our services broadly available to all of humanity, which currently requires hundreds of billions of dollars and may eventually require trillions of dollars, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a letter about the decision to change the companys structure. We believe this is the best way for us to fulfill our mission and to get people to create massive benefits for each other with these new tools.
Meta has prevailed over an existential challenge to its business that could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp after a judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued his ruling Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May. His decision follows two separate rulings that branded Google an illegal monopoly in both search and online advertising, dealing yet another regulatory blow to the tech industry that for years enjoyed nearly unbridled growth.
The Federal Trade Commission continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set, and that it maintained that monopoly through anticompetitive acquisitions, Boasberg wrote in his ruling. Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now. The Courts verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.
Meta, the FTC had argued, has maintained a monopoly by pursuing CEO Mark Zuckerbergs strategy, expressed in 2008: It is better to buy than compete. True to that maxim, Facebook has systematically tracked potential rivals and acquired companies that it viewed as serious competitive threats.
During his April testimony, Zuckerberg pushed back against the FTCs contention that Facebook bought Instagram to neutralize a threat. In his line of questioning, FTC attorney Daniel Matheson repeatedly brought up emailsmany of them more than a decade oldwritten by Zuckerberg and his associates before and after the acquisition of Instagram.
While acknowledging the documents, Zuckerberg has often sought to downplay the contents, saying he wrote them in the early stages of considering the acquisition and that what he wrote at the time didnt capture the full scope of his interest in the company.
The FTCs complaint said Facebook also enacted policies designed to make it difficult for smaller rivals to enter the market and neutralize perceived competitive threats, just as the world shifted its attention to mobile devices from desktop computers.
The social media landscape has changed so much since the FTC filed its lawsuit in 2020, Boasberg wrote, that each time the court examined Meta’s apps and competition, they changed. Two opinions to dismiss the casefiled in 2021 and 2022didn’t even mention popular social video platform TikTok. Today, it holds center stage as Meta’s fiercest rival.
Quoting the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, that no man can ever step into the same river twice, Boasberg said the same is true for the online world of social media as well.
The landscape that existed only five years ago, when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit, has changed markedly. While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down, he wrote.
Facebook bought Instagramthen a scrappy photo-sharing app with no ads and a small cult followingin 2012. The $1 billion cash and stock purchase price was eye-popping at the time, though the deals value fell to $750 million after Facebooks stock price dipped following its initial public offering in May 2012.
Instagram was the first company Facebook bought and kept running as a separate app. Up until then, Facebook was known for smaller acqui-hiresa type of popular Silicon Valley deal in which a company purchases a startup as a way to hire its talented workers, then shuts the acquired company down. Two years later, it did it again with the messaging app WhatsApp, which it purchased for $22 billion.
WhatsApp and Instagram helped Facebook move its business from desktop computers to mobile devices, and to remain popular with younger generations as rivals like Snapchat (which it also tried, but failed, to buy) and TikTok emerged. However, the FTC has a narrow definition of Metas competitive market, excluding companies like TikTok, YouTube, and Apples messaging service from being considered rivals to Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta did not immediately respond to a message for comment.
By Barbara Ortutay, AP technology writer
The most closely watched earnings report of the quarter is tomorrow. Thats when AI chipmaking giant Nvidia will announce its third-quarter results. Ahead of those results, Nvidia shares are currently down in Tuesday trading. But NVDA shares arent the only chip stock that is falling today.
Heres which other chip companies are seeing significant stock price declines today, and the likely reason why.
Chip stocks fall across the board
As of the time of this writing, major chipmaking giants and the companies that supply them are seeing their share prices fall. These include:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMD): down 5.6%
Arm Holdings plc (Nasdaq: ARM): down 3.9%
ASML Holding N.V. (Nasdaq: ASML): down 2.2%
Broadcom Inc. (Nasdaq: AVGO): down 1.7%
Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC): down 2.8%
Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU): down 5.1%
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA): down 2.8%
QUALCOMM Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM): down 2.6%
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE: TSM): down 2.6%
The fall in chip stocks is part of a broader decline across multiple markets today.
Currently, the S&P 500 is down 0.87%, the Dow is down 1%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down 1.3%.
Perhaps the most significant driver behind today’s market falls is the growing fear that the tech sector is in an AI bubble, and that if that bubble pops, it could send shockwaves not just through the stock markets but also through the economy.
The impact of an AI bubble popping in the broader economy is part of the reason even non-AI-related stocks are down today.
In addition to chip companies, other major tech players are also seeing their shares sink this morning, especially those that have a considerable amount of exposure to AI, including Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT), down 2.5%; Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), down 3.2%; Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), down 1%; and Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META), down 2.4%.
Tech giants with more limited AI exposure, such as Apple, are trading relatively flat. Currently, shares in Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) are up about a tenth of a percent.
Why are chip stocks in particular focus?
Chip stocks are being scrutinized by investors today for one key reason: AI chip giant Nvidia announces its third-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026 tomorrow. As Fast Company previously reported, investor expectations for those earnings are high.
Nvidia previously forecast revenue of between $52.9 billion and $55 billion for the quarter. But investor consensus estimates show that most investors expect Nvidia to come in on the high end of that spectrum. A series of consensus estimates shows that investors expect Nvidia to report revenue between $54.8 billion and $55.2 billion.
But, a little more than 24 hours before Nvidia reveals if it’s met investors expectations, Wall Street seems to be getting the jitters, as investors and the media increasingly question whether the AI bubble is about to burst.
It is likely that if Nvidia doesn’t hit the lofty expectations many expect, it will be taken as a sign that an AI bubble is upon us. The sell-off in chip stocks this morning is likely due to investors taking some profits in case Nvidia misses its estimates.
Given that Nvidia acts as a bellwether for other chip companies and the AI sector as a whole, it is no surprise that investor jitters ahead of Nvidias earnings are spilling over to the stocks of other chipmaking companies.
In his new book, Here Comes The Sun, author and activist Bill McKibben argues that were at a tipping point where solar and wind power is now cheaper to build and harness than fossil fuels. Because of that new economic reality, he argues renewable energy has the power to transform societyif only the U.S. government would listen.
McKibben, who also publishes a free Substack called The Crucial Years, came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about what Bill Gates is getting wrong about climate concerns, how solar became cheaper than fossil fuels, and the importance of mobilizing senior citizens in the fight against climate change through his organization Third Act.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In a recent blog post, Bill Gates downgraded climate concerns as an issue of importance. What do you think of his argument?
I’ve had a checkered relationship with Mr. Gates and [his views on] climate for some years. I reviewed his last book for the New York Times. He didn’t like my review, so he complained vociferously in Rolling Stone the next day in a long interview. The first thing to understand about Bill Gates is it’s not like he’s been all over this from the start. It took him until 2006, which was 18 years after Jim Hanson told us that the planet was heating up, to conclude that it was actually a real problem and not something that nature was going to solve by itself. Now he’s saying, “Let’s don’t worry too much about it because we should be working on other things instead.”
The best interpreter of his letter was of course the President of the United States who quite succinctly on Truth Social announced that Bill Gates says climate change is a hoax. It’s not quite what he said, but for all intents and purposes he might as well have. I’m afraid it’s because Mr. Gates’s empire at the moment dependslike all the other billionaireson sucking up to this guy.
Gates released his document the same day that Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica with the highest wind speeds we’ve ever recorded, the kind of wind speed you can only get when you’ve dramatically increased the heat content of the ocean by warming the atmosphere. We don’t have a final number yet. We won’t for a long time. There’s parts of it people still haven’t really reached yet, but the insurance industry was estimating that it wiped out between 30% and 250% of Jamaica’s annual GDP. So let’s transpose that to the United States. That would be as if Hurricane Katrina, which did a $100 billion worth damage here, had done $9 trillion worth of damage here.
All in all, it’s just a way of saying that Gates is being silly here, especially because the most important tool that we have for rapid development in the developing worldthe quick rapid adoption of solar energyis also the thing that would be most useful for dealing with the climate.
Despite all those upsetting facts you just shared, in the intro to the book, you say that after decades of pessimism, you now see at least some room for optimism in the climate conversation. Why is that?
About five years ago, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and wind and batteries than from burning coal and gas and oil. I’ll note that that was the same year that Bill Gates published his last book explaining why there was a huge green premium because it was so expensive to [get energy from] sun and wind. He managed to miss what was happening.
That’s a really epochal moment for human civilization. Human beings have been setting things on fire for 700,000 years. Darwin said that language and fire were the two things that set our species apart. Now we don’t need the fire anymore. Fossil fuel combustion kills nine million people a year directly on this planet. About one in five deaths come from just from breathing in particles that lodge in your lungs. There are five million schoolchildren in New Delhi. Two and a half million of them have irreversible lung damage from breathing the air. And as long as we depend on fossil fuel, we’re in the pocket of the people who control the small deposits of these resources around the world. The king of Saudi Arabiagreat guyVladimir Putin, who has taken his winnings and launched a land war in Europe in the 21st century, and the CEO of Exxon. The last 36 months have seen a huge surge in clean energy. We’re getting a third more power from the sun this autumn than we were last autumn on this planet. We’ve hit that steep part of the S curve and we’ve got to keep it going.
When you were working on this book, did you also consider nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuel?
Nuclear power, I’ve got no real problem with. Everybody knows what the dangers are, but those dangers are considerably smaller than the dangers of overheating the planet. Maybe someday someone will make nuclear power at a price that allows us to do it with some speed and at some scale, but so far we’re not there.
And it’s hard because nuclear power has to compete with the very inexpensive power that you can get from the sun and the wind and the speed with which you can build those things. If you want to build yourself a data center and you need a power supply, [using] nuclear power is going to take you some years to build it.
The Chinese were building three gigawatts of solar panels a day in May. A gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant. So they were putting up one of those every eight hours. This stuff snaps together, it’s not hard.
If China is moving so quickly on solar, why is installing solar panels in the U.S. so expensive?
In most of the world, if you want solar panels on your roof, you call somebody on Monday and they’re there by Friday. Here, it’s a monthslong odyssey. We’ve got 15,000 municipalities. Each has their own building code. All of this is unnecessary.
The National Renewable Energy Lab gave us this nifty little tool calle the SolarAPP. A contractor can tap in the address where they’re putting up the solar panel and the equipment, and if the computer likes the match, it gives them an instant permit and they get to work on the roof. California, Maryland, and New Jersey have adopted this. When that kind of stuff really takes off, the results are amazing.
In Australia, 40% of homes have solar panels on their roof. The government in Australia announced that beginning next year they will have so much solar power in the afternoon that electricity will be free for all Australians for three hours every afternoon.
You said weve crossed this invisible line where solar became the cheapest form of energy on earth. How does this shift the economic argument for governments?
In the rest of the world? Absolutely. This work’s being pioneered in China. They’re the ones who are doing two-thirds of the clean energy installation around the world, and as a result, they’re now owning things like the world’s auto industry. This is especially good for the 80% of human beings who live in countries that have to import fossil fuel. When poor countries go into payments crises or have to have the IMF come in and structurally adjust their economies, it’s almost always because at least in part, they’ve had to pay huge amounts of foreign reserves in order to get the next tanker load full of oil to keep their economy sputtering along. Now they can go spend their money on Chinese solar panels, and after that point they’re not dependent on China anymore. They’re now dependent on the sun.
Generative AI takes an enormous amount of energy to power. How do you think about that in the context of this book?
Let’s stipulate for the moment that we don’t really know at the moment how much of that AI hype is a bubble and how much is real. But if you decided that you absolutely had to build lots of data centers very fast in order to stay ahead of China in this race, the easiest way to build them fast would be to use solar and wind. This is precisely what’s not happening right now.
At the moment, the Trump administration is all in on building data centers and all out on building cheap energy from the sun and the wind. The result is you’ve increased demand, constricted supply, and the price is going up. Americans are paying 10% more now for electricity than they did last year, and that’s just the beginning.
You founded nonprofit Third Act to organize people over 60 to fight climate change. Why is this demographic key to changing the conversation around climate activism?
If you look around for who has structural power, it’s really a lot of people with hairlines like mine. There are 70 million Americans over the age of 60. We punch above our weight politically because we all vote. We have lots of connections, lots of skills, and lots of time. And so it was an obvious thing to try.
Many people said, “This will never work because people become more conservative as they age.” I think this is not so true for this generation of old people. These are the people who were around when we started taking women seriously in public life, they saw the apex of the Civil Rights Movement. They were there for the first Earth Day in 1970 when 20 million Americans10% of the populationmarched in the biggest demonstration in American history. These are people who know that change is possible. We have it in our muscle memory.
We’ve got about a hundred thousand people around the country [that are part of Third Act], and great working groups in almost every state. They do incredible work of all kinds . . . lots of very mundane lobbying, letter writing. All of that is effective because politicians know that these people are going to be at the ballot box. As our democracy begins to flicker and falter, I think it’s particularly useful to have older people engaged in this work, because the one thing that young people can’t understand about Trump is how completely abnormal he is.
If nothing else, Americans, especially of my age, owe an enormous climate debt to the rest of the planet. If you’re 70 now, you’ve been alive to watch more than 80% of all the carbon that humans have ever produced be put into the atmosphere. And that made your life conspicuously easier. Now it’s making everybody but especially poor people’s lives conspicuously harder. So we’ve got some work to do.
Youve said there are two forces slowing the transition to renewables down. Those are inertia and vested interest. And I’m curious how should climate activism evolve to fight those two things?
We’ve talked a little bit about vested interest already. We have to win some elections. It would be a lot easier if we didn’t have things like Citizens United that allow the rich to toy with our political system. Inertia is also a big force. We do things somewhat slowly, sometimes for good economic reasons. It’s cheaper to make transitions slowly. You have to figure out ways to overcome that inertia to make it easy and exciting to do the right thing.
For technology adopters looking for the next big thing, agentic AI is the future. At least, that’s what the marketing pitches and tech industry T-shirts say.
What makes an artificial intelligence product agentic depends on who’s selling it. But the promise is usually that it’s a step beyond today’s generative AI chatbots.
Chatbots, however useful, are all talk and no action. They can answer questions, retrieve and summarize information, write papers, and generate images, music, video, and lines of code. AI agents, by contrast, are supposed to be able to take actions on a person’s behalf.
But if you’re confused, you’re not alone. Google searches for agentic have skyrocketed from near obscurity a year ago to a peak earlier this fall.
A new report Tuesday by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Boston Consulting Group, who surveyed more than 2,000 business executives around the world, describes agentic AI as a new class of systems that can plan, act, and learn on their own.
They are not just tools to be operated or assistants waiting for instructions, says the MIT Sloan Management Review report. “Increasingly, they behave like autonomous teammates, capable of executing multistep processes and adapting as they go.
How to know if it’s an AI agent or just a fancy chatbot
AI chatbots such as the original ChatGPT that debuted three years ago this month rely on systems called large language models that predict the next word in a sentence based on the huge trove of human writings they’ve been trained on. They can sound remarkably human, especially when given a voice, but are effectively performing a kind of word completion.
That’s different from what AI developers including ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, and tech giants like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce have in mind for AI agents.
A generative AI-based chatbot will say, Here are the great ideas and then be done, said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Agentic AI at Amazon Web Services, in an interview this week. Its useful, but what makes things agentic is that it goes beyond what a chatbot does.
Sivasubramanian, a longtime Amazon employee, took on his new role helping to lead work on AI agents in Amazon’s cloud computing division earlier this year. He sees great promise in AI systems that can be given a high-level goal and break it down into a series of steps and act upon them. I truly believe agentic AI is going to be one of the biggest transformations since the beginning of the cloud, he said.
For most consumers, the first encounters with AI agents could be in realms like online shopping. Set a budget and some preferences and AI agents can buy things or arrange travel bookings using your credit card. In the longer run, the hope is that they can do more complex tasks with access to your computer and a set of guidelines to follow.
Id love an agent that just looked at all my medical bills and explanations of benefits and figured out how to pay them, or another one that worked like a personal shield fighting off email spam and phishing attempts, said Thomas Dietterich, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University who has worked on developing AI assistants for decades.
Dietterich has some quibbles with certain companies using agentic to describe any action a computer might do, including just looking things up on the web, but he has no doubt that the technology has immense possibilities as AI systems are given the freedom and responsibility to refine goals and respond to changing conditions as they work on people’s behalf.
We can imagine a world in which there are thousands or millions of agents operating and they can form coalitions, Dietterich said. Can they form cartels? Would there be law enforcement (AI) agents?
Agentic is a trendy buzzword based on an older idea
Milind Tambe has been researching AI agents that work together for three decades, since the first International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems gathered in San Francisco in 1995. Tambe said he’s been amused by the sudden popularity of agentic as an adjective. Previously, the word describing something that has agency was mostly found in other academic fields, such as psychology or chemistry.
But computer scientists have been debating what an agent is for as long as Tambe has been studying them.
In the 1990s, people agreed that some software appeared more like an agent, and some felt less like an agent, and there was not a perfect dividing line, said Tambe, a professor at Harvard University. Nonetheless, it seemed useful to use the word agent to describe software or robotic entities acting autonomously in an environment, sensing the environment, reacting to it, planning, thinking.
The prominent AI researcher Andrew Ng, co-founder of online learning company Coursera, helped advocate for popularizing the adjective agentic more than a year ago to encompass a broader spectrum of AI tasks. At the time, he also appreciated that mainly technical people were describing it that way.
When I see an article that talks about agentic workflows, Im more likely to read it, since its less likely to be marketing fluff and more likely to have been written by someone who understands the technology, Ng wrote in a June 2024 blog post.
Ng didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether he still thinks that.
Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer
A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game League of Legends,” to the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday.
Around 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it was continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.
Other platforms that experienced outages Tuesday included the social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information.
New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services including njtransit.com, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load.
Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, provides internet infrastructure that protects websites from online threats and helps them run more smoothly.
Last month, Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of its Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft, and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.
And Amazon experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial platforms.
Michelle Chapman, AP business writer
Meta Platforms has been spending too aggressively on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and that will affect the tech giant’s profitability, according to a new investor note from Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson.
The note, published on Tuesday, points out that Metas stock price (Nasdaq: META) has fallen almost 20% over the past month or so, exacerbated by its most recent earnings results, which were released on October 29.
MoffettNathanson has been a staunch defender of the Facebook and Instagram parent company, even when its shares have dipped in the past. But on Tuesday, analysts at the firm wrote, we were obviously too complacent in our investment advice.”
Why is Meta spending so much on AI?
Meta along with fellow Big Tech firms including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent company Alphabet are in a high-stakes race to build out infrastructure and invest in the talent they see as necessary to compete in a world being transformed by generative AI.
However, investors and many experts have expressed concerns that we may be in an AI bubble similar to the one seen during the dotcom era. So the question is whether these investments will pay off in the long run.
To be crystal clear, we feel that this time is different and that defending the stock even at this level is harder because of the ramping of the massive incremental bet that Meta, without a cloud business or pre-existing enterprise assets, has been making in building out a Meta Superintelligence business, the note says. Given the outlook, the issue from here is that even with strong top-line expectations, Q4 and 2026 margins will likely compress.
In other words, MoffettNathansons team feels that Meta is overspending on AI, and it could come back to bite investors. Despite the relatively harsh words, the firm still rates Meta’s stock as a buy, though it has adjusted its price target, dropping it from $875 to $750.
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Meta, and much of tech overall, has significantly increased its capital expenditures in the wake of the AI revolution.
But according to the note, Meta is “trying to punch above its weight” when compared to its peers. Although the company is spending a similar amount on AI infrastructure, it does not have a cloud platform like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, the analysts point out.
MoffettNathanson projects that Meta’s capex-to-revenue ratio will hit 47% next year. By comparison, Microsofts is 29%, Alphabets is 26%, and Amazons is 16%, MoffettNathanson estimates.
Meta lacks a comparable coherent pathway for monetizing GenAI directly, the firm says.
Shares of Meta are trending downward this week along with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite as investors await tomorrow’s highly anticipated earnings report from AI chip giant Nvidia. Meta shares are down roughly 2% year to date.
