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With birth rates down around the world, Procter & Gamble is leaning into premium diapers to bolster sales figures. Specifically, the conglomerate is planning to sell diapers made with silk fibers in China, the companys second-largest market, in hopes of attracting new parents. The news came out of Procter & Gambles earnings conference call on Thursday, during which president and CEO Shailesh Jejurikar discussed the logic behind leaning into the premium diaper category with Pampers Prestige. The China team created a product, he said, that leveraged Chinese history with silk. The shiny, soft-yet-strong, luxurious material has been a status symbol for more than 2,000 years, he said. Pampers Prestige is the only leading diaper brand that has real silky ingredients in the product. Delivering the ultimate experience of skin comfort and protection. The shiny soft feel package conveys superiority at first touch. The data does support the decision, too. Jejurikar noted that P&Gs latest earnings report showed that in Greater China, the companys baby care business line has seen robust organic sales growth and increased its market share by almost 3%. Meanwhile, in North America, organic sales were down 2%. But again, with fewer babies in China and elsewhere, the company needs to find ways to keep sales figures upso, its going with higher-priced, premium products, rather than aiming for volume. Overall, the global diaper market is huge, valued at around more than $72 billion as of 2025, according to data from Precedence Research. That number is expected to grow to nearly $118 billion by 2035. Also important: Research indicates that Gen Z and millennial parents have expressed a willingness to pay more for premium, sustainable products, such as diapers. That includes diapers that use plant-based materials and fibers, which could include silk or bamboo. P&Gs pre-market earnings announcement was met positively by investors, and as of 12 p.m. ET, shares were trading up more than 2%.
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Large language models feel intelligent because they speak fluently, confidently, and at scale. But fluency is not understanding, and confidence is not perception. To grasp the real limitation of todays AI systems, it helps to revisit an idea that is more than two thousand years old. In The Republic, Plato describes the allegory of the cave: prisoners chained inside a cave can only see shadows projected on a wall. Having never seen the real objects casting those shadows, they mistake appearances for reality, and they are deprived from experiencing the real world. Large language models live in a very similar cave. LLMs dont perceive the world: they read about it LLMs do not see, hear, touch, or interact with reality. They are trained almost entirely on text: books, articles, posts, comments, transcripts, and fragments of human expression collected from across history and the internet. That text is their only input. Their only experience. LLMs only see shadows: texts produced by humans describing the world. Those texts are their entire universe. Everything an LLM knows about reality comes filtered through language, written by people with varying degrees of intelligence, honesty, bias, knowledge, and intent. Text is not reality: it is a human representation of reality. It is mediated, incomplete, biased, and wildly heterogeneous, often distorted. Human language reflects opinions, misunderstandings, cultural blind spots, and outright falsehoods. Books and the internet contain extraordinary insights, but also conspiracy theories, propaganda, pornography, abuse, and sheer nonsense. When we train LLMs on all the text, we are not giving them access to the world. We are giving them access to humanitys shadows on the wall. This is not a minor limitation. It is the core architectural flaw of current AI. Why scale doesnt solve the problem The prevailing assumption in AI strategy has been that scale fixes everything: more data, bigger models, more parameters, more compute. But more shadows on the wall do not equal reality. Because LLMs are trained to predict the most statistically likely next word, they excel at producing plausible language, but not at understanding causality, physical constraints, or real-world consequences. This is why hallucinations are not a bug to be patched away, but a structural limitation. As Yann LeCun has repeatedly argued, language alone is not a sufficient foundation for intelligence. The shift toward world models This is why attention is increasingly turning toward world models: systems that build internal representations of how environments work, learn from interaction, and simulate outcomes before acting. Unlike LLMs, world models are not limited to text. They can incorporate time-series data, sensor inputs, feedback loops, ERP data, spreadsheets, simulations, and the consequences of actions. Instead of asking What is the most likely next word?, they ask a far more powerful question: What will happen if we do this? What this looks like in practice For executives, this is not an abstract research debate. World models are already emerging (often without being labeled as such), in domains where language alone is insufficient. Supply chains and logistics: A language model can summarize disruptions or generate reports. A world model can simulate how a port closure, fuel price increase, or supplier failure propagates through a network, and test alternative responses before committing capital. Insurance and risk management: LLMs can explain policies or answer customer questions. World models can learn how risk actually evolves over time, simulate extreme events, and estimate cascading losses under different scenarios, something no text-only system can reliably do. Manufacturing and operations: Digital twins of factories are early world models. They dont just describe processes; they simulate how machines, materials, and timing interact, allowing companies to predict failures, optimize throughput, and test changes virtually before touching the real system. /ul> In all these cases, language is useful, but insufficient. Understanding requires a model of how the world behaves, not just how people talk about it. The post-LLM architecture This does not mean abandoning language models. It means putting them in their proper place. In the next phase of AI: LLMs become interfaces, copilots, and translators World models provide grounding, prediction, and planning Language sits on top of systems that learn from reality itself In Platos allegory, the prisoners are not freed by studying the shadows more carefully: they are freed by turning around and confronting the source of those shadows, and eventually the world outside the cave. AI is approaching a similar moment. The organizations that recognize this early will stop mistaking fluent language for understanding and start investing in architectures that model their own reality. Those companies wont just build AI that talks convincingly about the world: theyll build AI that actually understands how it works. Will your company understand this? Will your company be able to build its world model?
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Valentino, who died on Monday at 93, leaves a lasting legacy full of celebrities, glamour and, in his words, knowing what women want: to be beautiful. The Italian fashion powerhouse has secured his dream of making a lasting impact, outliving Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Valentino was known for his unique blend between the bold and colourful Italian fashion and the elegant French haute couturethe highest level of craftsmanship in fashion, with exceptional detail and strict professional dressmaking standards. The blending of these styles to create the signature Valentino silhouette made his style distinctive. Valentinos style was reserved, and over his career, he built upon the haute couture skills he had developed, maintaining his signature style while he led his fashion house for five decades. But he was certainly not without his own controversial views on beauty for women. Becoming the designer Born in Voghera, Italy, in 1932, Valentino Clemente Ludovico began his career early, knowing from a young age he would pursue fashion. He drew from a young age and studied fashion drawing at Santa Marta Institute of Fashion Drawing in Milan before honing his technical design skills at École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the fashion trade association, in Paris. He started his fashion career at two prominent Parisian haute couture houses, first at Jean Desss before moving to Guy Laroche. He opened his own fashion house in Italy in 1959. His early work had a heavy French influence with simple, clean designs and complex silhouettes and construction. His early work had blocked colour and more of a minimalist approach, before his Italian culture really came through later in his collections. He achieved early success through his connections to the Italian film industry, including dressing Elizabeth Taylor fresh off her appearance in Cleopatra (1963). Elizabeth Taylor wearing Valentino while dancing with Kirk Douglas at the party in Rome for the film Spartacus. [Photo: Keystone/Getty Images] Valentino joined the world stage on his first showing at the Pritti Palace in Florence in 1962. His most notable collection during that era was in 1968 with The White Collection, a series of A-line dresses and classic suit jackets. The collection was striking: all in white, while Italy was all about colour. He quickly grew in international popularity. He was beloved by European celebrities, and an elite group of women who were willing to spend the moneythe dresses ran into the thousands of dollars. In 1963, he travelled to the United States to attract Hollywood stars. The Valentino woman Valentinos wish was to make women beautiful. He certainly attracted the A-list celebrities to do so. The Valentino woman was one who would hold themselves with confidence and a lady-like elegance. Valentino wanted to see women attract attention with his classic silhouettes and balanced proportions. Valentino dressed women such as Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Julia Roberts, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway and Valentino Garavani attend the 2011 Oscars. [Photo: Fairchild Archive/Penske Media/Getty Images] His aristocratic taste inherited ideas of beauty and old European style, rather than innovating with new trends. His signature style was formal designs that had the ability to quietly intimidateincluding the insatiable Valentino red. Red was a signature colour of his collections. The colour provided confidence and romance, while not distracting away from the beauty of the woman. French influence Being French-trained, Valentino was well acquainted with the rules of couture. With this expertise, he was one of the first Italian designers to be successful in France as an outsider with the launch of his first Paris collection in 1975. This Paris collection showcased more relaxed silhouettes with many layers, playing towards the casual nature of fashion. A model in the Valentino Spring 1976 ready to wear collection walks the runway in Paris in 1975. [Photo: Fairchild Archive/WWD/Penske Media/Getty Images] While his design base was in Rome, many of his collections were shown in Paris over the next four decades. His Italian culture mixed with the technicality of Parisian haute couture made Valentino the designer he was. Throughout his career, his designs often maintained a classic silhouette bust, matched with a bold Italian colour or texture. Unlike some designers today, Valentinos collections didnt change too dramatically each season. Instead, they continued to maintain the craftsmanship and high couture standards. Quintessentially beautiful is often the description of Valentinos work however this devotion to high beauty standards has seen criticism of the industry. In 2007, Valentino defended the trend of very skinny women on runways, saying when girls are skinny, the dresses are more attractive. Critics said his designs reinforce exclusion, gatekeeping fashion from those who dont conform to traditional beauty standards. The Valentino runways only recently have started to feature more average sized bodies and expand their definition of beauty. The $300 million sale of Valentino The Valentino fashion brand sold for US$300 million in 1998 to Holding di Partecipazioni Industriali, with Valentino still designing until his retirement in 2007. Valentino sold to increase the size of his brand: he knew without the support of a larger corporation surviving alone would be impossible. Since Valentinos retirement, the fashion house has continued under other creative directors. Valentino will leave a lasting legacy as the Italian designer who managed to break through the noise of the French haute couture elite and make a name for himself. The iconic Valentino red will forever be remembered for its glamour, and will live on with his legacy. A true Roman visionary with unmatched craftsmanship. Jye Marshall is a lecturer of fashion design at the School of Design and Architecture at Swinburne University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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