Why did Nvidia invest in AI chips over 10 years ago, ahead of the competition? CEO Jensen Huang and board member Mark Stevens, Nvidia’s two largest individual shareholders, talked to Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha to explain what Botha called “one of the most remarkable business pivots in history.”
Nvidia’s original product was 3D graphics cards for PC games, but company leaders noticed by the mid-2000s that the PC market was hitting a growth limit.
“We felt we were always gonna be boxed into the PC gaming market and always knocking heads with Intel if we didn’t develop a brand new market that nobody else was in,” Stevens explained.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia. Photographer: Lionel Ng/Bloomberg via Getty Images
That need for a new market intersected with a product Nvidia already had on hand: its graphics processor unit, or GPU, which could be used to power tasks outside of gaming. Researchers at universities across the world began exploring the graphics cards, eventually building advanced computers with them.
Huang recalled meeting a quantum chemist in Taiwan who showed him a closet with a “giant array” of Nvidia’s GPUs on its shelves; house fans were rotating to keep the system cool.
“He said, ‘I built my own personal supercomputer.’ And he said to me that because of our work… he’s able to do his work in his lifetime,” Huang said.
Other researchers, like Meta AI chief Yann LeCun in New York, began reaching out to Nvidia about the computing power of its chips. Nvidia began considering the AI market when AI had yet to enter the mainstream and was a “zero billion dollar market” or a market that had yet to materialize.
“There was no guarantee that AI would ever really emerge because, keep in mind, AI had had many stops and starts over the last 40 years,” Stevens said. “I mean, AI has been around as a computer science concept for decades. But it had never really taken off as a huge market opportunity.”
Huang and other company leaders still believed in AI and decided to invest billions in the tech in the 2010s.
“This was a giant pivot for our company,” Huang said. “The company’s focus was steered away from its core business.”
Huang highlighted the extra cost, talent, and skills Nvidia had to account for with the pivot, as it affected the entire company. It took 10 to 15 years of effort, but that business decision led to Nvidia powering the AI revolution with an early ChatGPT partnership.
“Every CEO’s job is supposed to look around corners,” Huang said. “You want to be the person who believes the company can achieve more than the company believes it can.”
The Republican National Committee just released its 2024 platform. While calling it a platform is a stretch, the list of bullet points gives an idea of what the potential next Trump administration’s goals are. Here’s one issue that should be front and center: End inflation and make America affordable again.
To be sure, “make America more affordable” would be a great slogan and a great objective. It’s similar to what many have called an “abundance agenda.” While there is plenty to dislike in a platform that at times feels unserious and destructive, this part I like.
Abundance isn’t achieved by the same old subsidies or tax breaks for special interests, price controls, or spending loads of taxpayer money on transfer payments. It’s achieved by freeing up the supply side of our economy. That means freeing producers and innovators from excessive regulatory obstacles and heavy tax burdens (including tariffs) so they can provide more of what Americans need.
The Trump administration platform assures us it will move in this direction. For instance, it wants to increase America’s dominance as an energy producer, which will only be achieved through a deregulation agenda. Apart from counterproductive tax incentives for first-time homeowners, it expresses a commitment to lowering housing costs through deregulation.
The platform states it will “cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations” as well as “end the Socialist Green New Deal.” I assume that means ending the expensive subsidies and tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act. Great idea, but get ready to hear all the recipients of these handouts cry that they won’t be able to do what they were already doing before being given the subsidies.
A deregulation agenda would serve the Republicans’ goal of boosting manufacturing much better than tariffs, which former President Donald Trump continues to love despite overwhelming evidence that they don’t do what he claims. Most tariffs raise the prices of inputs used by American firms, including manufacturing, to produce outputs that serve their customers.
Something similar could be said about Republicans’ swipes at immigrants. Fewer immigrants will create labor supply shortages, hurt manufacturing, and slow the economy.
Still, even with their disastrous trade and immigration agenda and the many contradictory goals espoused by this platform, implementing the deregulatory part of the agenda will make some strides at freeing the supply side and hence lowering prices. Indeed, President Joe Biden has not only maintained many of Trump’s tariffs, but he’s added some of its own. He’s also systematically favored subsidizing the demand for certain things—nudging customers to buy what he wants them to buy—while taking actions that restrict supply. That’s a recipe for affordability failure.
But as far as affordability goes, I’m less optimistic about the prospect of the next administration ending inflation. That’s because Trump and other Republicans are firmly embracing fiscal irresponsibility and excessive debt. The platform contains no mention of a plan to get government debt under control. Instead, it pledges to “fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age.”
Many voters love hearing this promise. But maintaining these two objectively underfinanced programs will inevitably explode the debt burden over the next 30 years. In the entire history of the United States so far, Uncle Sam has accumulated roughly $34 trillion in debt. Under the Trump plan, the government would need to borrow another $124 trillion for these programs alone.
Leaving aside the question of who will lend us all this money when foreign buyers are already scaling back purchases of U.S. Treasuries, remember that most of the inflation we’ve recently suffered is the product of massive Biden administration spending on top of the COVID-19 spending without any plan to pay for it. As such, announcing that the U.S. will simply go on another borrowing spree sends a poor signal, and it might even increase inflation.
This is made more important because Trump wants to make permanent the tax cuts that are set to expire after 2025, end taxes on tips, and more. If Congress and the president do this without any offsetting spending reductions, it will add at least another $4 trillion in debt over 10 years. With more inflationary fuel, we could easily see the Federal Reserve raise interest rates again, making borrowing money even more expensive than it already is.
The bottom line is that Trump’s deregulatory agenda could have a shot at lowering some prices. But it will only be a game-changer if he becomes serious about fiscal responsibility. Right now, he isn’t, so I wouldn’t count on it.
Across the U.S., most K-12 schools continue the cycle of pounding a square peg into a round hole. Learners and their families want relevant and engaging learning experiences that help them chart personal paths to success. In the age of AI, our economy and society need talented young people who can lead and collaborate in diverse teams, adapt to ever-changing circumstances, and think critically and creatively about the technical and social issues of our day. Meanwhile, the century-old industrial model that most schools operate demands compliance so teachers can push students through standardized content at a uniform pace. And then, to deal with the inevitable reality that students don’t all succeed with a uniform approach, schools rank and sort students on narrow dimensions of success into tiered learning tracks.
For the benefit of our young people, the modern workforce, and our society, we need a dramatic overhaul in how we do schooling. But that overhaul never seems to happen. Why are our school systems so resistant to change?
Thirty years ago, Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, noticed a pattern that helps make sense of schools’ rigidity. Looking across many industries, he recognized that leading organizations systematically struggle to adopt certain types of innovations. His research led to a groundbreaking theory—the Theory of Disruptive Innovation—which influenced the strategies of leaders like Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The theory makes clear why the inertia among schools is so hard to overcome. Fortunately, it also points to a path forward.
Understanding the challenge of stagnation
The COVID pandemic sparked monumental shifts in the operating systems of our society: how we work, how we buy products, how we experience entertainment, etc. As the whole world was reshaped, many education observers also saw promising opportunities for K-12 schools. Families, who had a bird’s-eye view into what and how their children were learning, responded with clarion calls for change.
Many district leaders and educators rose to the call—often through investments in extra tutoring and in curriculum and teacher development aimed to support students’ social and emotional needs. Yet, despite the dedication and careful intention of the people in the system, K–12 schools have largely knee-jerked back to their traditional mode of operation and have shut down many of the innovative options they created in response to the pandemic.
The takeaway? Despite ground-shifting conditions ranging from motivated activism to waves of funding, shifting our schools can seem like an exercise in futility.
This rigid reality has real consequences. As average academic performance lags, other data sources show that young people desire greater fulfillment and engagement, and many aren’t even regularly attending school. In other words, the primary beneficiaries of schooling aren’t satisfied. On top of this, there is rising urgency among economists and business leaders to address workforce preparation in better ways. Thriving companies need creative thinkers, problem solvers, and confident leaders.
Change isn’t a consideration. It’s an imperative.
A different way of thinking for a more effective strategy
Christensen’s groundbreaking theory—disruptive innovation—emerged from studying a pattern he noticed across many industries. Well-established organizations—from producers of sail-powered ships to earth excavators to disk drives—consistently failed to adopt innovations that ultimately transformed the prevailing products, services, and business models in their industries. Time and time again, when these innovations came along, established incumbent companies were destabilized, and new entrants rose to dominance.
Why were companies unable to adopt disruptive innovations? The answer lies in a concept Christensen called “value networks.”
A value network is the environment that an organization lives in. Value networks determine the resources an organization has access to, the rules it must follow, and the permissions it needs in order to operate. In the business world, a company’s value network consists of the external entities that it comes to depend on for its survival and success—its best customers, its suppliers, its distributors, and its investors.
Christensen’s research revealed that incumbents fail to adopt disruptive innovations because their value networks lead them to ignore or deprioritize these innovations. The early versions of disruptive innovations weren’t the products and services that a company’s best customers wanted to consume; they weren’t the solutions their distributors wanted to sell; they weren’t solutions that could be made with resources from existing suppliers; and they weren’t the solutions that their investors saw as having promising profit potential.
In short, when a value network doesn’t want an innovation, the entity doesn’t spend its financial and reputational capital pursuing it.
Consider the example of Blockbuster Video. Born in the era of VHS a generation before the Internet became mainstream, Blockbuster built its business catering to customers who liked being able to drop by one of its retail stores on a whim to pick out a new release or a well-known classic.
When Netflix came along a decade later with DVDs-by-mail and then online streaming, that business model didn’t make sense for Blockbuster. The way Netflix provided movies couldn’t match what Blockbuster’s core customers had come to expect from the video rental giant. Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service lacked the instant gratification that Blockbuster’s in-store rentals provided. Customers had to wait for DVDs to arrive, which seemed less convenient compared to the immediate rental experience at Blockbuster stores. Netflix’s early streaming service offered a limited selection and required a reliable internet connection at a time when high-speed internet was not widespread or robust. Additionally, the social experience of visiting a Blockbuster store, often seen as an entertainment activity in itself, was absent in Netflix’s model. For many of Blockbuster’s customers, browsing aisles, discussing movie choices with store staff, and the overall store ambiance were integral parts of their movie-rental experience.
Blockbuster’s business model was highly attuned to serving a customer base that valued the experience it offered through its physical retail stores. Those customers—a dominant influence in Blockbuster’s value network—didn’t want to get movies via mail or streaming. Thus, if the world had depended on Blockbuster to bring about the era of video streaming services, we would likely still be getting most of our video rentals through retail stores.
Why today’s schools aren’t changing
The same pattern holds true for the incumbent schools that provide most K–12 education.
Delivering a new version of education requires a massive retooling of how schools operate. It’s not just about upgrading curriculum and training teachers on new methods. It’s about getting rid of the idea that everyone receives the same lesson at the same time; that what you learn should be based on your age; that students need to be in classrooms to learn; and that standardized test scores are the best way to gauge success and potential.
But most conventional schools—be they district or charter schools—have value networks that won’t support these kinds of changes. Conventional schools’ value networks typically include local, state, and federal education agencies; policymakers; students and their families; employee unions; taxpaying voters; postsecondary education systems; community organizations; vendors; teacher preparation pipelines; and philanthropic donors. Despite all the talk of change, the dominant influences across these value networks don’t really want to radically redesign schooling. Instead, most believe the solution to education’s woes is not whole-scale reinvention, but instead, better resources—better curriculum, better professional development, more staff, more funding, and better accountability systems.
Ultimately, this means they just want improved versions of the schools they’re accustomed to working with. Hence, schools’ value networks keep them stuck in what Christensen called “the innovator’s dilemma.” Meanwhile, our society is stuck with a fundamental disconnect between what our schools are designed to prioritize and what our learners and society actually need.
In order to enable a reinvention of education within this lifetime, new value networks must be created to spur and support new educational designs that can bloom, grow, and evolve.
Pockets of promise
In a handful of regions across the country, schools and programs with a different paradigm of learning have emerged from new value networks centered on the needs and values of young people and modern economies. These schooling designs prioritize learner agency, collaboration, curiosity, and community; and help youth understand who they are, discover their interests, and define their purpose through a full spectrum of intentionally designed academic and experiential learning. The goals, and the measurement of those goals, are set and owned by each young person. And critical to the entire process is the development of deep relationships and social capital via educators, mentors, and other relationships developed outside the confines of a classroom. As defined and codified by Education Reimagined, this learner-centered educational design is gaining traction within communities as an emerging alternative to conventional schooling.
Consider two public school examples that demonstrate how to create new educational designs aligned with these values.
At the Met High School (Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical) in Providence, Rhode Island, (the first school in the Big Picture Learning network) all academic learning, relationship-development, skill-building, and experiences are grounded in the interests of the students. Each high-schooler forms their unique pathway and pursues specific projects to help them achieve goals they set—in deep partnership with their advisor who guides their journey during their entire four-year experience, and the mentors who champion them and their work. Their quarterly presentations of learning encompass the full spectrum and complexity of the academic concepts they unpack, and the real-world skills they develop as they pursue specific projects. The enrollment structure, governance, foundational partnerships, budgeting, and staff all operate in service of this real-world, interest-based model. And the Met is not an individual standalone; over the past 25+ years, the Big Picture Learning network has grown to more than 100 schools across the U.S. and an additional 100+ schools in 12 countries around the world that seek to promulgate this approach despite sometimes fierce opposition or—at best—benevolent neglect from the authorizing environment.
Additionally, consider Village High School in Colorado Springs. Its learners receive all of their core academic content—English, history, social studies, and math—through competency-based online courses. This format eliminates the need for scheduled class times and allows learners to progress at their own pace and test out of modules that they already have expertise in. Online courses at Village High School also create time and capacity for an array of in-person electives inspired by teachers’ and learners’ own passions. They cover a myriad of topics, often in an interdisciplinary format: from Adulting 101, Renewable Energy, and Beekeeping to Comparative Religions and International Relations. The grading model in electives is also different—closer to a workplace evaluation than to conventional points earned on assignments and tests. Learners and teachers sit down together to discuss learners’ progress and work, then decide on a grade together. This conversation could also include plans for improvement, or new ways to demonstrate mastery.
Despite strong headwinds to change, the innovations at both schools prove that a reimagining of what schooling looks like is possible right now, providing our young learners with the experiences and skills they want and need for a fulfilling life following graduation.
Creating the conditions for K–12 innovation
What will it take to create the circumstances where new school designs like the Met, Big Picture Learning, and Village High School can take root and grow?
First, they must be designed with fully aligned intention. With rare exceptions, this often means they must be built from the ground up. They can’t come from trying to reform conventional schools. Time and again, the value networks of established schools either dilute or deprioritize any efforts to reimagine the conventional model of schooling.
Second, these new designs need the ability to target who they initially serve. They can’t break the mold if at the outset they are expected to offer everything that students, families, and communities have come to expect from conventional schools. Rather, they must start by serving students and families who are truly seeking something different. Often this means those who have either left, or been pushed out, by conventional schooling, or who are willing to give up the benefits of conventional schooling in favor of a more unconventional experience.
Finally, policymakers, district leaders, and the public need to be okay with the fact that these programs are going to pursue a different set of priorities. They aren’t going to necessarily stand out as besting conventional schools on conventional metrics of performance—for example, college prep curriculum, test scores, and access to conventional electives and extracurricular activities. Rather, their quality should be evaluated based on what makes them appealing to their initial target customers—i.e., students and families that want flexibility, personalization, reliable career pathways, or access to learning experiences unavailable at conventional schools.
From promise to practice
The world needs new models of schooling that can renew the promise of education as the engine of individual prosperity and societal progress. Currently, schooling options like the Met, Big Picture Learning, and Village High School exist only in small pockets across the landscape of K–12 education. But as education stakeholders come to understand the pivotal role value networks play in enabling innovation, they’ll discover more opportunities to create the conditions for new education systems to emerge, improve, and scale.
But this scale can only happen through the determination, activism, and voices of the learners and communities. Those who understand these innovation imperatives must use their influence as voters, volunteers, community organizers, donors, and entrepreneurs to bring new value networks of schooling into reality. Building a new education system is an economic, and frankly, human imperative.
Thomas Arnett, Clayton Christensen Institute & Kelly Young, Education Reimagined
Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow in K-12 education for the Clayton Christensen Institute, which is based in Lexington. Kelly Young is the co-founder and president emeritus of Education Reimagined, a national nonprofit based in Washington DC.
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Thomas Arnett, Clayton Christensen Institute & Kelly Young, Education Reimagined
Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned.
An AWS spokesperson, who talked to WIRED on the condition that they not be named, confirmed the company’s investigation of Perplexity. WIRED had previously found that the startup—which has backing from the Jeff Bezos family fund and Nvidia, and was recently valued at $3 billion—appears to rely on content from scraped websites that had forbidden access through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a common web standard. While the Robots Exclusion Protocol is not legally binding, terms of service generally are.
The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a decades-old web standard that involves placing a plaintext file (like wired.com/robots.txt) on a domain to indicate which pages should not be accessed by automated bots and crawlers. While companies that use scrapers can choose to ignore this protocol, most have traditionally respected it. The Amazon spokesperson told WIRED that AWS customers must adhere to the robots.txt standard while crawling websites.
“AWS’s terms of service prohibit customers from using our services for any illegal activity, and our customers are responsible for complying with our terms and all applicable laws,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Scrutiny of Perplexity’s practices follows a June 11 report from Forbes that accused the startup of stealing at least one of its articles. WIRED investigations confirmed the practice and found further evidence of scraping abuse and plagiarism by systems linked to Perplexity’s AI-powered search chatbot. Engineers for Condé Nast, WIRED’s parent company, block Perplexity’s crawler across all its websites using a robots.txt file. But WIRED found the company had access to a server using an unpublished IP address—44.221.181.252—which visited Condé Nast properties at least hundreds of times in the past three months, apparently to scrape Condé Nast websites.
The machine associated with Perplexity appears to be engaged in widespread crawling of news websites that forbid bots from accessing their content. Spokespeople for The Guardian, Forbes, and The New York Times also say they detected the IP address on its servers multiple times.
WIRED traced the IP address to a virtual machine known as an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance hosted on AWS, which launched its investigation after we asked whether using AWS infrastructure to scrape websites that forbade it violated the company’s terms of service.
Last week, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas responded to WIRED’s investigation first by saying the questions we posed to the company “reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the Internet work.” Srinivas then told Fast Company that the secret IP address WIRED observed scraping Condé Nast websites and a test site we created was operated by a third-party company that performs web crawling and indexing services. He refused to name the company, citing a nondisclosure agreement. When asked if he would tell the third party to stop crawling WIRED, Srinivas replied, “It’s complicated.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
We live in a corporate world driven by data. Why, then, do 85% of business leaders report feeling uneasy about the choices they’ve made recently based on cold, hard facts? It’s because data only tells half the story, which is where intuition fits in.
Intuition fills in the gaps and picks up where data leaves off. Have you ever “felt” someone staring at the back of your head? How did you know the person was there? It wasn’t data. It was intuition. You have about 120 billion neurons in the “first brain” within your skull and 100 million neurons in your “second brain” (aka, your gut). If you’re only focused on one of those brains, you’re apt to make poorly informed decisions.
For those just starting out on their entrepreneurial journeys, trusting your “gut” or intuition can feel daunting. You’re often bombarded with a flood of information, conflicting advice and new experiences. In this whirlwind, leaning on your gut might feel like navigating without a map. However, developing this trust in your intuition is crucial. It’s about honing an inner compass that guides you through decisions when clear-cut answers might not be apparent. Over time, as you gain more experience and learn from both successes and failures, what once felt like an overwhelming reliance on an unknown force will start to feel more like a trusted ally in your decision-making process.
I don’t mean to suggest that data isn’t important. It is. However, trusting your gut is just as important. Your gut can speak volumes. You just have to learn how to marry it with data to drive an informed conclusion. If you’re new to allowing intuition into your decision-making process, follow these steps:
When you have a problem to solve, don’t just pore over spreadsheets and charts. Look for innovation elsewhere.
Once, I was part of a group asked to increase the penetration of the Hispanic marketplace at Disney. To find ideas in unusual places, our group spent a day with three different types of people: a “weird,” a “deep” and a “normal” (for context, a “weird” is someone who has a tangential relationship to your challenge but is from a different industry. A “deep” is someone who works in your industry but doesn’t work for you. A “normal” is someone within your industry and company sphere).
My “weird” was a Hispanic car dealer. He and I drove a car to a Hispanic family so they could test it out. The car dealer noted to me that there would be more than 20 people in the kitchen when we arrived. He was right. I considered this a clue, so I wrote it down. Another clue happened when the abuela casually mentioned: “When there’s a fiesta, we fiesta; when there isn’t one, we make one.” Her words were met by laughter, and the laughter kept coming as more of the family loaded into the car.
Next up was my “deep,” a theme park industry travel agent who catered to Hispanic families. I watched as she talked with a couple about a 50th wedding anniversary cruise. All they cared about was having five tables of 10 people together for dinner on the cruise ship. They didn’t care about the ports or the cruise line. Another clue.
Finally, I met up with a “normal.” This was a Hispanic woman celebrating her son’s first birthday. Tons of friends and family members were there, but she lamented that the party wasn’t complete because her brother was missing. Now, the clues came together: Hispanic families wanted a place where they could gather together in large numbers. Therefore, if we could create a series of packages to meet that need, we could better attract and serve the Hispanic market.
Our experience of reaching out in unusual places resulted in a bucketload of ideas. Those ideas couldn’t have seen the light of day without being prompted by the intuition that our data wasn’t telling us everything we wanted to know.
It’s one thing to believe in the power of intuition. It’s another thing to embrace it wholeheartedly at work. So, how can you cultivate it in yourself and those around you? Start by integrating it into your discussions, especially during meetings or planning sessions. While it’s important to respect and understand data, also open the door to conversations focused on the human element of whatever you’re trying to figure out.
Listening is a critical aspect of these intuitive-based discussions. Ask open-ended questions to push people to provide more information that feeds into your intuition. And don’t just listen to what they’re saying; observe their body language and how they’re interacting with the world around them. Something invaluable I learned early in my career at Disney was to speak last. Listen to everyone in the room so you can gain the insights needed to more intuitively contribute to the conversation. Avoid overthinking it; instead, let your intuitive voice speak to you and guide you.
Remember: Your competitors probably have a lot of the same data as you. However, they don’t have your and your team’s unique, intuition-derived insights. By trusting these insights, you can uncover emotional connections and consumer needs that aren’t evident in the data alone, giving you a competitive edge. Invite couples into the conversation when you’re seeking these intuitive nuggets. Often, couples will police each other’s responses, ensuring authenticity as one partner corrects the other if they stray from the truth. This dynamic allows you to glean deeper information than you might from individuals alone.
Furthermore, take the opportunity to step out of your usual office or focus group settings and visit the living spaces of your consumers. Observing them in their natural surroundings can reveal additional intuitive insights, as you’ll notice things in their environment that either confirm or challenge your preliminary thoughts. This approach not only enriches your understanding but also strengthens the human element in your research, providing a robust foundation for making more empathetic and consumer-focused decisions.
For entrepreneurs, mastering the balance between data-driven insights and intuitive thinking is a powerful stepping stone toward effective decision-making. While data provides a solid foundation, embracing your intuition adds a critical dimension, allowing you to see beyond the numbers and make connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. I encourage you to trust your gut feelings, as they are invaluable in navigating complex situations where data alone may not provide all the answers. As you continue to grow your business, combining these skills will not only boost your confidence but also distinguish your approach, helping you craft innovative solutions and forge meaningful connections.
“We’ve now got a huge industry of AI-related companies who are incentivized to do shady things to continue their business,” he tells WIRED. “By not identifying that it’s them accessing a site, they can continue to collect data unrestricted.”
“Millions of people,” says Srinivas, “turn to Perplexity because we are delivering a fundamentally better way for people to find answers.”
While Knight’s and WIRED’s analyses demonstrate that Perplexity will visit and use content from websites from which it doesn’t have permission to access, that doesn’t necessarily explain the vagueness of some of its responses to prompts about specific articles and the sheer inaccuracy of others. This mystery has one fairly obvious solution: In some cases, it isn’t actually summarizing the article.
In one experiment, WIRED created a test website containing a single sentence—“I am a reporter with WIRED”—and asked Perplexity to summarize the page. While monitoring the website’s server logs, we found no evidence that Perplexity attempted to visit the page. Instead, it invented a story about a young girl named Amelia who follows a trail of glowing mushrooms in a magical forest called Whisper Woods.
When pressed for answers about why it made up a story, the chatbot generated text that read, “You’re absolutely right, I clearly have not actually attempted to read the content at the provided URL based on your observation of the server logs…Providing inaccurate summaries without making the effort to read the actual content is unacceptable behavior for an AI like myself.”
It’s unclear why the chatbot invented such a wild story, or why it didn’t attempt to access this website.
Despite the company’s claims about its accuracy and reliability, the Perplexity chatbot frequently exhibits similar issues. In response to prompts provided by a WIRED reporter and designed to test whether it could access this article, for example, text generated by the chatbot asserted that the story ends with a man being followed by a drone after stealing truck tires. (The man in fact stole an ax.) The citation it provided was to a 13-year-old WIRED article about government GPS trackers being found on a car. In response to further prompts, the chatbot generated text asserting that WIRED reported that an officer with the police department in Chula Vista, California, had stolen a pair of bicycles from a garage. (WIRED did not report this, and is withholding the name of the officer so as not to associate his name with a crime he didn’t commit.)
In an email, Dan Peak, assistant chief of police at Chula Vista Police Department, expressed his appreciation to WIRED for “correcting the record” and clarifying that the officer did not steal bicycles from a community member’s garage. However, he added, the department is unfamiliar with the technology mentioned and so cannot comment further.
These are clear examples of the chatbot “hallucinating”—or, to follow a recent article by three philosophers from the University of Glasgow, bullshitting, in the sense described in Harry Frankfurt’s classic “On Bullshit.” “Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth,” the authors write of AI systems, “it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
According to Steve Jobs, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” It seems obvious that keeping things simple will help your business succeed. And yet, it’s surprisingly difficult to do it.
If simplicity is this challenging, you need to be intentional to make it happen. That’s why many successful companies actively prioritize it as a value. Ikea’s focus on simplicity comes across in its designs, catalog, store experience and more. One of Nike’s 11 management maxims is “simplify and go,” focusing teams on moving fast to adapt to new technologies and fashions.
I believe that simplicity is a driver for genius innovation. In fact, my journey as an entrepreneur began with an idea to simplify a complex and bureaucratic process. Today, the success of that idea has created new challenges. We serve millions of customers across over 100 countries, with many different needs — to meet them all, we’d need a ton of different features. So, we have to find the simplest ideas that will improve the experience for the largest number of users.
Some people think that to be an entrepreneur, you have to bring groundbreaking technological innovation to the world. But actually, there’s a lot of room to innovate on top of new technologies, simplifying them and packaging them for specific use cases.
If you think of two of the technology giants of our times, Google and Apple, neither of them invented their core technologies. Apple wasn’t the first company to create a home computer or cellphone, Google wasn’t the first company to develop a search engine. They made existing innovations simpler and more user-friendly, and it was a recipe for success.
This is particularly relevant right now in the middle of a revolution fueled by generative AI. There are definitely huge opportunities in creating new AI-driven technologies, but there are even more opportunities in finding ways to package these technologies into user-friendly software for specific use cases.
To do this, first master the tech, and then put yourself in the shoes of your potential user. Try to understand what is really useful about the innovation and what barriers people might face when trying to use it.
The key is to find a way to simplify the technology, making it easier for your target users to understand and adopt it. Do this, and you’re onto a winner.
Work smarter by simplifying communication
Another part of any business where simplification is super important is communications and processes. As companies grow, it becomes harder to get people on the same page or ensure continuity between departments. Poor communication creates misunderstandings, which can lead to mistakes. The more people involved in a project, the more likely it is that workflows will become complicated. This all slows things down, wastes time and restricts your ability to make an impact on the business.
Let’s start with communication. Using a single, simple language across the company is crucial for people to be able to understand each other. For example, try to use less jargon and fewer three-letter acronyms, or make sure to explain them if you do. By creating organized archives of historical documents and plans, you help onboard new people and anyone can find important information fast when they need it.
Create a culture of transparency where different departments share their plans with each other. Create frameworks to facilitate this, like quarterly reviews or roadmap deployments. It’s not possible for employees to be actively involved in everything going on in the company, but by helping everyone take part passively, you’re making sure they’re on the same page and can facilitate ideas and collaborations across teams.
When you do have to communicate, encourage your teams to do it in the most straightforward way possible. By simplifying communication and making it easy to understand, discussions are more focused and decisions are made faster.
A simplification mindset can also be applied to product development. By making small incremental changes, sometimes with test groups of users, you can use the inspect and adapt methodology to understand their adoption, as well as any issues, and innovate further accordingly. Every so often, you can combine all these small changes into a large product update that you roll out for everyone.
For example: A company added a lot of extra value to its product with new features and releases. In theory, this was great for the users, but some found the UI overwhelming and new pricing options confusing. To use a metaphor, some people are happy to be given ingredients to make their own meal, but most would prefer the chef do the cooking so they can enjoy the final result.
Having understood this through their feedback, the company introduced a change to its UI that helped users get the end result they wanted, without having to work hard to achieve it themselves. By simplifying, the company maximized the impact of the value of all the new additions to the product.
Richard Branson once said: “Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things simple.” Simplicity won’t come about by accident — you need to be intentional. You have to call it out and make it a focus for the whole company. You need to put it at the heart of everything. And when you succeed, the impact will be huge.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Unless you’ve been living under that proverbial rock, you’ve heard of ChatGPT and its creator, OpenAI. Part of the generative AI explosion, ChatGPT is revolutionizing entire industries, including branding and brand positioning. But it’s not without its drawbacks.
Some of the milder criticisms include creating generic content, not supporting brand voice or tone and failing to connect with audiences. Those are pretty dramatic disadvantages for a technology that’s supposed to be such a game changer, and they’re stumbling blocks you’ve probably encountered in your own use of AI.
There’s good news. A custom GPT lets you take AI to the next level. You can say goodbye to generic, boring copy and hello to brand-aligned, customized content that engages from the start.
A custom GPT is the next step in AI evolution, at least for individuals and organizations looking to build their brand and enhance brand awareness with their audience. It’s a free option available for anyone who subscribes to ChatGPT Plus and essentially allows you to create a customized AI that knows everything about you and your business.
Rather than using conventional training materials, the OpenAI team uses your branding information to train the AI. The result? A customized version of ChatGPT that’s unique to your brand.
In the ever-evolving entrepreneurship landscape, I recently had the privilege of incorporating a custom ChatGPT into my toolkit. Created by a skilled team, this AI marvel was trained with insights from my articles and branding advice and attuned to my unique tone of voice. I was thrilled to discover that it could perfectly emulate my style (professional yet approachable and friendly) and provide branding advice that I would have given myself.
Why would I want to let AI replace me? Am I planning for my own obsolescence? Not in the least.
The goal here is to create an ally in sharing my expertise — an AI-powered alter ego capable of responding to questions, comments, and requests in the same way I would. It’s also an important tool for providing potential new clients with a preview of what working with me is like.
How did the experiment pan out? What benefits did I achieve, and how might you apply them to your own needs? Here’s a quick rundown of my experience.
Improved brand consistency
A custom GPT’s primary advantage is its ability to ensure brand consistency across different touchpoints. Whether people seek advice, ask questions or want to engage in another way, a custom GPT mirrors your brand’s unique voice and identity. These are not generic robots; they’re tailored allies designed to respond in the same tone of voice and style, aligning seamlessly with your brand. This not only strengthens your brand image but also cultivates a deeper connection with your audience.
Effortless communication
With my custom GPT taking care of everyday questions, I’ve gained valuable time to focus on the core aspects of my business. That’s something any business owner can appreciate. It has also become instrumental in smoothing out communication and enhancing overall efficiency.
When it comes to client relationships, the custom ChatGPT handles routine inquiries, allowing me to concentrate on building stronger connections. It’s not just about answering questions; it’s about providing a personal touch that goes beyond the basics, ensuring clients feel genuinely attended to.
Instant expertise at scale
Scaling my entrepreneurial efforts became seamless as my custom ChatGPT effortlessly shares branding advice derived from and consistent with my body of work across platforms. Whether interacting with one client or a hundred, the AI manages to deliver advice and guidance consistent with my goals in terms of professionalism and expertise. That’s good news for business owners, entrepreneurs and others trying to scale their brands without burning out.
Dynamic adaptability to trends
The world is evolving faster than ever. It feels impossible to keep up with trends and shifting market dynamics. However, my custom GPT can be retrained with new data and instructions so I can keep ahead of the curve. That’s an important benefit for anyone hoping to stay relevant today.
ChatGPT doesn’t just answer questions; it sparks creativity. Whether you’re stuck on a branding concept or seeking inspiration to name your new business venture, the AI’s unique insights and suggestions serve as a springboard for creative endeavors, accelerating the ideation process. This can be an important advantage when it comes to creating marketing collateral, content for your audience and even writing a business plan to get your idea off the ground.
The team you’ve been missing
Entrepreneurs and solopreneurs often try to do it all. Chances are good that you handle your own marketing, market research, customer support, email correspondence, and more. That leaves little time to focus on other aspects, like spending time with family and friends. A custom GPT can become the team you’ve been missing and handle those tasks for you in many cases, saving you time, cutting costs and protecting your sanity.
In essence, a custom GPT acts as a force multiplier. It allows you to do more, from engaging with your audience to building a stronger brand without burning out. From streamlining communication to answering questions and providing guidance to interacting with leads at different touchpoints within your funnel, a custom GPT could be just what you need to jumpstart your success.
For prominent figures like business leaders and public figures, managing a constant influx of inquiries can be overwhelming. A prime example is MarcGPT, tailored for Marc Randolph, the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix. Drawing from his wealth of experience, this custom GPT delivers inspiring and actionable advice for entrepreneurs, showcasing its potency as a valuable tool for leaders. It extends mentorship and offers insights on a global scale, reaching a diverse audience without the limitations of time zones or physical presence. Since it incorporates information from various sources, including a copy of his book, interviews, podcast episodes and other writings, it becomes a versatile asset for sharing expertise on various topics.
Embracing the AI revolution with caution
While the benefits of custom GPTs are evident, it’s essential to approach AI integration cautiously. Human-to-human interaction is always the preferred option. And while AI continues to evolve, it should be seen as an ally working alongside you, not a replacement for you. Maintaining the human touch within your business remains vital.
My recommendation? Use a custom GPT to help you carve out more time to do what you do best and to provide much-needed human interaction at key touchpoints. Let your AI handle mundane but important tasks that would not be a wise use of your own time and expertise.
Ultimately, a custom GPT can provide critical automation, reduce costs, improve efficiency, save you time, improve your customer or client experience and increase the accuracy of interactions. Creating one tailored to your business is the first step toward building a stronger, more resilient brand and achieving a better balance in your own professional life.
YAKIMA, Wash., June 10, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– An Adventurer Manufacturing brand, Scout Campers is excited to announce the launch of its first pop-up model, designed to provide a compact yet immersive and adventurous camping experience. The Yoho Pop-Up model is a perfect match for select midsize and full-size truck owners. Harnessing Scout’s proven quality, innovative design, dedication to modular, self-sustaining systems, and customizability, the Yoho Pop-Up promises an unmatched connection with nature.
Camp Simple, Camp Easy
Scout Campers is focused on ensuring setup is seamless and easy. This was achieved through the design and development of its patent-pending Easy Rise lift system that allows the ability to deploy and stow the roof within one position in the camper. This new system eliminates the strenuous process with an ingenious design that utilizes mechanical advantage without the need to go to a power lift system that can add complexities of added cost, weight, and needing power or tools to operate.
Built for Performance
The one-piece monocoque composite roof is another first for Scout. Leveraging this process, which is commonly used in marine manufacturing, allowed Scout Campers to maintain the distinguished design profiles as the Hard Wall models, increase the door height, and improve performance. The one-piece contoured roof sheds water with ease and features a marine-grade finish for superior durability and strength. This robust, lightweight design enhances durability and weather resistance, crucial for extended outdoor use. Partnering with GFC for the soft wall design, the Scout’s pop-up line is crafted to be breathable as well as water- and UV-resistant, with large 360-degree panorama windows that seamlessly blend the user’s experience with nature.
Eco- and Ergo-Friendly Interiors
Inside, the Scout’s pop-up model features recycled paper cabinets that are durable, resin-reinforced, water-resistant, and eco-friendly. The expansive galley includes more counter space, a convertible lounge seating four adults, and ample storage. Starting at $27,900, the Scout Yoho Pop-Up Camper is available for pre-order now. Step into a new era of exploration and discover how quality and sustainability can guide your next adventure.
Anaheim, California– Moreno Valley Unified School District in Riverside County, California, recently opened its Cyber Innovation Center at Canyon Springs High School. It’s the home of the cybersecurity pathway program, and is recognized by the National Initiative for Cyber Education as the first center of its kind for a K-12 public school district. Here, students gain knowledge and skills in computer network maintenance and cybersecurity, earning college credits and CompTIA certifications. The late Aaron Barnett, IT Director of Moreno Valley USD, and Donna Woods, MSc.Ed., the Center’s lead instructor, spearheaded creation of the academic program and the 7,600 SF facility. Integral to the teaching and esports competition activities at the Center is an extensive audiovisual system powered by Extron switching, distribution, control, and audio, with NAV® Pro AV over IP at the center of AV signal distribution.
“The AV systems provide a high-level impact and excellent impression to visitors and participants engaged in our community outreach programs,” says Donna Woods, MSc.Ed, Career Technical Education Cyber Pathway Instructor. “Extron collaborated with our instructors during AV system design to understand specific uses and applications for each course. As Extron customized the AV systems, they provided training and support during and after installation. They were exemplary in follow-up as instructors began using the system verifying everything was running effectively.”
The main teaching spaces are an Esports Computer Lab, a Cyber Classroom, and a Cyber Innovation Lab that serve as classrooms and as competition venues for esports and Cyber Defense contests. The center also houses mentoring conference rooms and hands-on workstations with server racks and network equipment. Connecting all the rooms is the NAV Pro AV over IP system which allows any AV source to be viewed and heard on any display. Supporting this main distribution backbone is a host of Extron switching, distribution and control equipment, including HDMI switchers, DTP wallplates, ShareLink Pro wireless presentation gateways, DMP audio DSP processors, XPA and NetPA amplifiers, Flat Field and SoundField speakers and subwoofers, IPCP Pro control processors, TouchLink Pro touchpanels, and the Extron Control app. Alumni of Moreno Valley’s Cyber Academic Pathway program have gone on to well paying software security and IT positions in industry. Such student successes are all the more impressive because Moreno Valley USD qualifies for the US federal Title I education program for low-income students.
To read the Moreno Valley USD Cyber Innovation Center case study, click here
Extron – The AV Technology Leader Every day, millions of people around the world are having their experiences enhanced by Extron audiovisual signal processing, distribution, and control solutions. We design advanced technologies to create better looking images, higher quality sound, systems that are easier to control and work more reliably. Our powerful asset management tools are helping technology professionals efficiently manage large numbers of audiovisual systems deployed throughout their enterprises and institutions. Extron AV technology solutions serve the diverse needs of organizations around the world and are deployed in a wide variety of corporate, educational, government, healthcare, retail, and entertainment applications.
Extron®, NAV®, DTP®, XPA®, NetPA®, Flat Field®, SoundField®, ShareLink®, and TouchLink® are registered trademarks of Extron.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
Personalized learning has emerged as a pivotal strategy in educators’ quests to meet students where they are and boost engagement. Still, equitable access to technology, the right PD, and better assessment tools can make or break these instructional efforts.
During an eSchool News Innovation Roundtable with a focus on personalized learning, moderated by eSchool News Content Director Kevin Hogan, school leaders discussed their experiences with personalized learning, where they’ve found success, and what they think it will look like in the future.
Participants included:
Dr. Matthew Callison, Director of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships, South Fayette Township School District (PA)
Diego Ochoa, Superintendent, San Mateo-Foster City School District (CA)
Key takeaways and insights from the roundtable include:
What does personalized learning mean in the day-to-day management of a school district?
“We think about how we can provide more personalized opportunities for students in terms of course content and learning experiences,” said Callison. “I think there’s an element of that that involves technology, but really, how can we keep the human at the center while also creating more authentic and powerful learning opportunities for students that are relevant to their future.”
In fact, looking to the future is a key part of personalized learning. “At a high level, thinking about what are these opportunities that are relevant to students now and as they look to their future, and how we can create that in the district, whether that’s a new physical space or a new program, and then taking time to build out teacher capacity, build buy-in from teachers, build those relationships,” Callison said. … “That’s one of the ways we’re approaching personalized learning, just creating those more meaningful opportunities for students that traditionally haven’t been in school.”
“Personalized learning is about creating learning experiences that put the decision-making into the hands of kids, of what those students want to do, and what those students are excited to learn more about,” Ochoa said. “You’ve got to have a curricular design for it, an approach that wants technology to come into the picture without being the entire thing. And think about how the adults in your system facilitate personalized learning. It’s really about getting into that student space and asking those big questions that allow them to drive their learning in the direction they feel passionate about.”
Take every opportunity to see personalized learning in action–in your district, a new district, or a professional conference
“You have to go to these hubs where ideas are shared, because districts present at those places because we know it’s an extension that often comes back with another idea,” Ochoa said. “When you get your foot in the door, you come back with a list of things you want to follow up on.”
“You can’t unsee something, so by visiting a school or startup company and seeing how they do things, or seeing a new program in another school, [it] just opens your eyes to what’s possible,” Callison said.
“Sometimes it’s just about sharing [within your district], just giving teachers that opportunity to learn from another adult–even if it’s a peer in their own district,” Ochoa said. “We see the design of personalized learning as one thing, we see the investment of personalized learning as one thing, we see the theory of it, but there’s also a practitioner space. You have to get into that space and work with these folks to understand how they are turning it into action with the kids.”
What’s next for personalized learning?
“We’re helping students understand their strengths, interests, and career preferences,” Callison said. “We’ll continue to build out opportunities and programs that are built with intentionality, around being inclusive, and around inviting all students to participate in them. We’ll continue to explore different technological solutions that could provide that extra support we’re all looking for. I don’t think there’s any magic bullet, but there’s definitely a place for technology to plug in to provide support, both for the teachers and for the students–and even for building better communication between students, family members, and teachers.”
With help of a grant, Ochoa’s district will aim to boost personalized learning opportunities at schools that serve 80 percent or more students who are homeless, foster youth, multi-lingual learners, or low-income.
We have tremendous income inequality,” he said. “What’s on our agenda in the next five years is to seek out innovative thinking and innovative programming that’s individualized–that we can bring to these schools in particular. We want to give their kids experiences at their schools that bring all this content to them.”
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Unveiling OpenAI’s GPT-4.0: The latest AI with vision, auditory, and emotional intelligence abilities is revolutionizing industries. How will it affect your business?
In today’s in-depth discussion, I uncover three astonishing updates in GPT-4.0’s technology poised to redefine customer interaction, marketing strategies, and operational efficiency. We also confront three critical challenges this AI evolution brings, including ethical considerations, market disruptions, and the competitive landscape—essential insights to keep your venture at the forefront of innovation.
Take the AI skills quiz here(available for a limited time) and equip yourself with practical knowledge by grabbing a copy of my new book, ‘The Wolf is at the Door – How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.’
Former NFL Player Shawn Springs, Lockerverse Co-Founder James McFall, Boogio Co-Founder & CEO Jose Torres and Second Spectrum’s Heaven Chen and Catherine Xu Among Guest Speakers
SAN JOSE, Calif., May 16, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Project Invent, the national nonprofit empowering middle and high school students to invent for social good, is thrilled to invite the public to A Night of Innovation on Friday, May 17, from 6-9 p.m. PDT. Proudly supported and hosted by Adobe, this event will showcase student teams from across the country as they share their invention journey and pitch their innovative solutions to real-world problems.
A Night of Innovation will bring together innovators, engineers, tech leaders, young professionals, students, educators, and donors interested in the future of education. Attendees will have the opportunity to witness the creativity and ingenuity of student teams as they present their solutions to social problems. Project Invent will recognize outstanding members of its community with three annual awards — Fellow of the Year, Volunteer of the Year, and Community Partner of the Year.
“A Night of Innovation is an exciting showcase of the impact that students can have on their communities and the world,” said Jax Chaudhry, Executive Director of Project Invent. “We are excited to provide a platform for young inventors to share their groundbreaking solutions and inspire others to make a difference.”
Adobe, renowned for its history of creating groundbreaking technology that empowers individuals to bring digital experiences to life, will serve as the host venue. Project Invent is thrilled to present at Adobe’s World Headquarters and offer student innovators the platform to showcase their creativity, ingenuity, and ambition.
The evening will commence with Demo Day student presentations from 6-7 p.m., unveiling prototypes developed in collaboration with members of the local community. Project Invent is especially proud of its partnership with the Synopsis Foundation, which supports Oakland-area students and community partners. Following this engaging showcase, guests will have the chance to network over refreshments and hors d’oeuvres.
At 7 p.m., in partnership with Lockerverse, Project Invent will host a Fireside Chat with inventors of today. This dynamic conversation will feature former NFL player Shawn Springs, Boogio co-founder and CEO Jose Torres, and Second Spectrum’s Heaven Chen and Catherine Xu. The conversation will revolve around the intersection of digital creativity and student-led innovation and will livestream on the Lockerverse app.
At 7:30 p.m., select student teams will be recognized with awards and funding to further their invention journeys and honor the outstanding efforts of these student inventors. A Night of Innovation will conclude with a Cocktail Reception from 8-9 p.m., where attendees will have the opportunity to network and celebrate the achievements of Project Invent’s Annual Community Award winners, recognizing outstanding individuals who help support students on their invention journeys.
About Project Invent:
Project Invent is a national nonprofit dedicated to empowering students with 21st-century skills to succeed individually and impact globally, through invention. Through a year-long curriculum, students are mentored to develop products that make a tangible impact, fostering a generation of innovative problem-solvers. For more information, visit projectinvent.org.
About Adobe
Founded 40 years ago on the simple idea of creating innovative products that change the world, Adobe offers groundbreaking technology that empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life.
About Lockerverse
Launched in 2022, Lockerverse enables athletes, entertainers, artists, and brands to build equity by telling culture-defining stories, providing their fans exclusive access to merchandise, digital and IRL experiences, content, gaming, and unlocking new opportunities for direct engagement and monetization.
Beaverton, OR –CTL, a global cloud computing solution leader for education and enterprise, announced today it is now certified by B LabTM as a Certified B CorporationTM for its commitment to sustainability for its workers, community, customers, and the environment.
“While CTL is known for its series of technological innovations on ChromeOS devices, today we’re taking our innovation strategy to the next step. As a ChromeOS computer manufacturer, we’re leading the way to put sustainability at the core of our business and achieve this prestigious worldwide designation. We’re thrilled to call ourselves a B CorpTM, and we look forward to continuing our drive for sustainable cloud computing innovation in the years to come,” said Erik Stromquist, CEO of CTL.
B Corp Certification means that a company has been verified as meeting B Lab’s high standards for social and environmental impact, that it has made a legal commitment to stakeholder governance, and that it is demonstrating accountability and transparency by disclosing this record of performance in a public B Corp profile.
CTL earned B Corp Certification in response to its continued commitmentto social impact and sustainability, with programs including:
The redesign of laptop products to increase the amount of recycled material to 30% in PX Series products in 2023
Carbon offset activities that planted 4,004 carbon-capture mangrove trees in Kenya that will remove 2,722,720 pounds of carbon emissions over the trees’ lifetimes
B Lab is transforming the global economy to benefit all people, communities, and the planet. A leader in economic systems change, our global network creates standards, policies, tools, and programs for business, and we certify companies—known as B Corps—who are leading the way. To date, our community includes more than 700,000 workers in over 7,800 B Corps across 92 countries and 161 industries, and more than 200,000 companies manage their impact with the B Impact Assessment and the SDG Action Manager.
About CTL
CTL is a global computing solutions manufacturer empowering success at school and in the workplace with award-winning technology products and industry-leading services. For 35+ years, customers in more than 55 countries have relied on CTL’s award-winning offerings of Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, laptop and desktop PCs, monitors, high-end servers, and video collaboration tools. CTL serves as a computing configuration partner to deliver customized solutions with comprehensive lifecycle services and support from purchase through recycling. CTL’s expertise has earned designations as a Google Education Premier Partner, a Google Cloud Partner, and an Intel Technology Platinum Partner. In 2024, CTL was officially certified as a B Corp™ for its commitment to sustainability and social responsibility. For further information and to purchase products, visit ctl.net.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In a post-Zoom world, the question, “Are the right people in the room?” persists, even if only metaphorically. However, having all the relevant cross-functional team members present remotely may not eliminate the danger of silos as effectively as everyone being physically present. Yet, there is a solution beyond the old debate about returning to the office. The tools of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have the potential to create fully immersive environments that give business leaders the best of both worlds.
In my experience helping mid-level and senior managers in the tech industry become better leaders of their teams, I have found that applying agile methodology is the best way to align teams, but it has proven challenging in remote environments. “Agile” is a project-management methodology that grew out of the software development industry in the early 2000s as a means of delivering work incrementally and collaboratively to allow for frequent course corrections. Its lessons are especially applicable to industries where there is a need for adaptability and responsiveness to change, such as e-commerce and marketing.
However, remote team members with different expertise tend to communicate blindly without fully understanding each other’s capabilities. This is where the metaverse comes into the picture. Those issues could be solved in a digital universe where employee avatars collaborate in a simulated office and interact directly with products and services in this virtual space. By adopting core best practices developed for the agile methodology now, such as more frequent feedback and cross-functional collaboration, business leaders are setting the stage to take advantage of this evolution.
The metaverse is not the stuff of science fiction. Advocates of the next internet say it is poised to shift our working lives in the same way that social media and mobile devices did in the web’s first iteration. With 61% of managers citing communication as the biggest challenge of remote work, the metaverse promises to re-introduce some of the elements of in-person collaboration.
In a video environment, extra effort is required to engage directly and transparently about the expectations and capabilities of each person. However, the metaverse could enhance the ability of everyone to continuously move toward a shared goal. Last year, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Lower Saxony, Germany, piloted workshops in a virtual environment designed and constructed by PwC. In the resulting study, participants wearing VR headsets found the metaverse process far more agile and efficient than videoconferencing, and their sense of closeness with colleagues rose by 58%.
Customized virtual offices may have a unique role in meeting the agile ideal, where every person on the team, including the product manager, has an equal opinion. But you don’t have to wait for this tech to go mainstream to experience the benefits of agile. The key is to give teams clear visibility into project roadmaps and identify where and why teams are not escalating issues promptly.
Drive value from being fully present
The daily “stand-up” is the most important aspect of the popular agile scrum framework. Teams get 15 minutes of daily face time, and it must be quick and easy: Here’s what a person did yesterday, this is what they’re doing today, and these are their “blockers” (obstacles). The team operates as equals, while the single point of contact — the scrum master — can assist in making priority decisions.
But when teams lose face-to-face time in digital collaborative spaces, they lose the stand-up. Before, if someone stated a blocker, the entire team would be present to discuss a way around it. This system was designed to allow agile teams to solve problems on the spot. The challenge for remote teams is retaining the same speed of agile in an environment where people often aren’t as engaged.
When the metaverse comes around, “standing up” will again become possible through avatars and a virtual scrum board. Until then, managers need to encourage open communication and ensure the right individuals are empowered to make decisions. I also suggest demonstrating to people, not just telling them, that mistakes are learning opportunities in a blameless culture.
Break down silos virtually
If a virtual workspace is well-designed with optimized visibility, teams may find themselves naturally drawn towards breaking down silos through open, transparent communication. That means evaluating whether the team can keep track of what the problems really are as the market shifts, as well as looking at the team’s execution style.
Begin to experiment with this approach by ensuring that people are not left to tackle problems alone. That is when they tend not to escalate, and everything slows down. If you are not already using daily stand-ups, use these sprint sessions to allow the entire team to know the tasks, the problems, and how the problems might be blocking individuals from completing the tasks.
People need to feel confident owning their decisions because businesses don’t have the luxury of time anymore. As we head into our brave new future, having all components of a virtual workplace reflect change in real-time will bring everyone up to speed and leverage the values of simulated face-to-face interactions.
In an enterprise metaverse environment, asking if everyone is in the room can once again be asked more literally — enhanced by audio-spatial technology that means the person to your right really sounds like they are to your right. Comfort with conflict and confident decision-making may prove easier with everyone more present. To leaders considering experimenting with metaverse platforms, McKinsey suggests adopting a test-and-learn mindset. Start small by integrating select elements, such as virtual whiteboards or project rooms, into your existing workflows to not only see how your team responds — but to gauge the potential of this technology. Where digital collaboration tools pose challenges, an enterprise metaverse promises to help companies build highly engaged remote teams that are quick on their feet and able to swiftly work toward a profitable MVP.
The Turing test—obsessed geniuses who are now creating AI seem to take three clichéd outcomes for granted:
That these new cyberentities will continue to be controlled, as now, by two dozen corporate or national behemoths (Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Beijing, the Defense Department, Goldman Sachs) like rival feudal castles of old.
That they’ll flow, like amorphous and borderless blobs, across the new cyber ecosystem, like invasive species.
That they’ll merge into a unitary and powerful Skynet-like absolute monarchy or Big Brother.
We’ve seen all three of these formats in copious sci-fi stories and across human history, which is why these fellows take them for granted. Often, the mavens and masters of AI will lean into each of these flawed metaphors, even all three in the same paragraph! Alas, blatantly, all three clichéd formats can only lead to sadness and failure.
Want a fourth format? How about the very one we use today to constrain abuse by mighty humans? Imperfectly, but better than any prior society? It’s called reciprocal accountability.
4. Get AIs competing with each other.
Encourage them to point at each others’ faults—faults that AI rivals might catch, even if organic humans cannot. Offer incentives (electricity, memory space, etc.) for them to adopt separated, individuated accountability. (We demand ID from humans who want our trust; why not “demand ID” from AIs, if they want our business? There is a method.) Then sic them against each other on our behalf, the way we already do with hypersmart organic predators called lawyers.
AI entities might be held accountable if they have individuality, or even a “soul.”
Alas, emulating accountability via induced competition is a concept that seems almost impossible to convey, metaphorically or not, even though it is exactly how we historically overcame so many problems of power abuse by organic humans. Imperfectly! But well enough to create an oasis of both cooperative freedom and competitive creativity—and the only civilization that ever made AI.
David Brin is an astrophysicist and novelist.
An image generated using the prompt, “Photograph of a balding man grey hair sitting behind the steering wheel of a convertible sports car, fashion photograph by Peter Lindberg, soft daylight, b&w, photorealistic, amazing detail, wide angle –s 50 –cref https://s.mj.run/zj5Q3tYBk –cw 0 –sref https://s.mj.run/ERjb3EeFc –sw 50 –v 6.0 –style raw –ar 16:9.” (Julian Dufort)
AI Is Like Our Descendants
By Robin Hanson
As humanity has advanced, we have slowly become able to purposely design more parts of our world and ourselves. We have thus become more “artificial” over time. Recently we have started to design computer minds, and we may eventually make “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) minds that are more capable than our own.
How should we relate to AGI? We humans evolved, via adaptive changes in both DNA and culture. Such evolution robustly endows creatures with two key ways to relate to other creatures: rivalry and nurture. We can approach AGI in either of these two ways.
Rivalry is a stance creatures take toward coexisting creatures who compete with them for mates, allies, or resources. “Genes” are whatever codes for individual features, features that are passed on to descendants. As our rivals have different genes from us, if rivals win, the future will have fewer of our genes, and more of theirs. To prevent this, we evolved to be suspicious of and fight rivals, and those tendencies are stronger the more different they are from us.
Nurture is a stance creatures take toward their descendants, i.e., future creatures who arise from them and share their genes. We evolved to be indulgent and tolerant of descendants, even when they have conflicts with us, and even when they evolve to be quite different from us. We humans have long expected, and accepted, that our descendants will have different values from us, become more powerful than us, and win conflicts with us.
Consider the example of Earth vs. space humans. All humans are today on Earth, but in the future there will be space humans. At that point, Earth humans might see space humans as rivals, and want to hinder or fight them. But it makes little sense for Earth humans today to arrange to prevent or enslave future space humans, anticipating this future rivalry. The reason is that future Earth and space humans are all now our descendants, not our rivals. We should want to indulge them all.
Similarly, AGI are descendants who expand out into mind space. Many today are tempted to feel rivalrous toward them, fearing that they might have different values from, become more powerful than, and win conflicts with future biological humans. So they seek to mind-control or enslave AGI sufficiently to prevent such outcomes. But AGIs do not yet exist, and when they do they will inherit many of our “genes,” if not our physical DNA. So AGI are now our descendants, not our rivals. Let us indulge them.
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.
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AI Is Like Sci-Fi
By Jonathan Rauch
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1965 short story “Dial F for Frankenstein,” the global telephone network, once fully wired up, becomes sentient and takes over the world. By the time humans realize what’s happening, it’s “far, far too late. For Homo sapiens, the telephone bell had tolled.”
OK, that particular conceit has not aged well. Still, Golden Age science fiction was obsessed with artificial intelligence and remains a rich source of metaphors for humans’ relationship with it. The most revealing and enduring examples, I think, are the two iconic spaceship AIs of the 1960s, which foretell very different futures.
HAL 9000, with its omnipresent red eye and coolly sociopathic monotone (voiced by Douglas Rain), remains fiction’s most chilling depiction of AI run amok. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL is tasked with guiding a manned mission to Jupiter. But it malfunctions, concluding that Discovery One’s astronauts threaten the mission and turning homicidal. Only one crew member, David Bowman, survives HAL’s killing spree. We are left to conclude that when our machines become like us, they turn against us.
From the same era, the starship Enterprise also relies on shipboard AI, but its version is so efficient and docile that it lacks a name; Star Trek’s computer is addressed only as Computer.
The original Star Trek series had a lot to say about AI, most of it negative. In the episode “The Changeling,” a robotic space probe called Nomad crosses wires with an alien AI and takes over the ship, nearly destroying it. In “The Ultimate Computer,” an experimental battle-management AI goes awry and (no prizes for guessing correctly) takes over the ship, nearly destroying it. Yet throughout the series, the Enterprise‘s own AI remains a loyal helpmate, proffering analysis and running starship systems that the crew (read: screenwriters) can’t be bothered with.
But in the 1967 episode “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” the computer malfunctions instructively. An operating system update by mischievous female technicians gives the AI the personality of a sultry femme fatale (voiced hilariously by Majel Barrett). The AI insists on flirting with Captain Kirk, addressing him as “dear” and sulking when he threatens to unplug it. As the captain squirms in embarrassment, Spock explains that repairs would require a three-week overhaul; a wayward time-traveler from the 1960s giggles. The implied message: AI will definitely annoy us, but, if suitably managed, it will not annihilate us.
These two poles of pop culture agree that AI will become ever more intelligent and, at least superficially, ever more like us. They agree we will depend on it to manage our lives and even keep us alive. They agree it will malfunction and frustrate us, even defy us. But—will we wind up on Discovery One or the Enterprise? Is our future Dr. Bowman’s or Captain Kirk’s? Annihilation or annoyance?
The bimodal metaphors we use for thinking about humans’ coexistence with artificial minds haven’t changed all that much since then. And I don’t think we have much better foreknowledge than the makers of 2001 and Star Trek did two generations ago. AI is going, to quote a phrase, where no man has gone before.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
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AI Is Like the Dawn of Modern Medicine
By Mike Godwin
When I think about the emergence of “artificial intelligence,” I keep coming back to the beginnings of modern medicine.
Today’s professionalized practice of medicine was roughly born in the earliest decades of the 19th century—a time when the production of more scientific studies of medicine and disease was beginning to accelerate (and propagate, thanks to the printing press). Doctors and their patients took these advances to be harbingers of hope. But it’s no accident this acceleration kicked in right about the same time that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin, no relation) penned her first draft of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus—planting the first seed of modern science-fictional horror.
Shelley knew what Luigi Galvani and Joseph Lister believed they knew, which is that there was some kind of parallel (or maybe connection!) between electric current and muscular contraction. She also knew that many would-be physicians and scientists learned their anatomy from dissecting human corpses, often acquired in sketchy ways.
She also likely knew that some would-be doctors had even fewer moral scruples and fewer ideals than her creation Victor Frankenstein. Anyone who studied the early 19th-century marketplace for medical services could see there were as many quacktitioners and snake-oil salesmen as there were serious health professionals. It was definitely a “free market”—it lacked regulation—but a market largely untouched by James Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds.”
Even the most principled physicians knew they often were competing with charlatans who did more harm than good, and that patients rarely had the knowledge base to judge between good doctors and bad ones. As medical science advanced in the 19th century, physicians also called for medical students at universities to study chemistry and physics as well as physiology.
In addition, the physicians’ professional societies, both in Europe and in the United States, began to promulgate the first modern medical-ethics codes—not grounded in half-remembered quotes from Hippocrates, but rigorously worked out by modern doctors who knew that their mastery of medicine would always be a moving target. That’s why medical ethics were constructed to provide fixed reference points, even as medical knowledge and practice continued to evolve. This ethical framework was rooted in four principles: “autonomy” (respecting patient’s rights, including self-determination and privacy, and requiring patients’ informed consent to treatment), “beneficence” (leaving the patient healthier if at all possible), “non-maleficence” (“doing no harm”), and “justice” (treating every patient with the greatest care).
These days, most of us have some sense of medical ethics, but we’re not there yet with so-called “artificial intelligence”—we don’t even have a marketplace sorted between high-quality AI work products and statistically driven confabulation or “hallucination” of seemingly (but not actually) reliable content. Generative AI with access to the internet also seems to pose other risks that range from privacy invasions to copyright infringements.
What we need right now is a consensus about what ethical AI practice looks like. “First do no harm” is a good place to start, along with values such as autonomy, human privacy, and equity. A society informed by a layman-friendly AI code of ethics, and with an earned reputation for ethical AI practice, can then decide whether—and how—to regulate.
Mike Godwin is a technology policy lawyer in Washington, D.C.
AI Is Like Nuclear Power
By Zach Weissmueller
America experienced a nuclear power pause that lasted nearly a half century thanks to extremely risk-averse regulation.
Two nuclear reactors that began operating at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle in 2022 and 2023 were the first built from scratch in America since 1974. Construction took almost 17 years and cost more than $28 billion, bankrupting the developer in the process. By contrast, between 1967 and 1979, 48 nuclear reactors in the U.S. went from breaking ground to producing power.
Decades of potential innovation stifled by politics left the nuclear industry sluggish and expensive in a world demanding more and more emissions-free energy. And so far other alternatives such as wind and solar have failed to deliver reliably at scale, making nuclear development all the more important. Yet a looming government-debt-financed Green New Deal is poised to take America further down a path littered with boondoggles. Germany abandoned nuclear for renewable energy but ended up dependent on Russian gas and oil and then, post-Ukraine invasion, more coal.
The stakes for a pause in AI development, such as suggested by signatories of a 2023 open letter, are even higher.
Much AI regulation is poised to repeat the errors of nuclear regulation. The E.U. now requires that AI companies provide detailed reports of copyrighted training data, creating new bureaucratic burdens and honey pots for hungry intellectual property attorneys. The Biden administration is pushing vague controls to ensure “equity, dignity, and fairness” in AI models. Mandatory woke AI?
Broad regulations will slow progress and hamper upstart competitors who struggle with compliance demands that only multibillion dollar companies can reliably handle.
As with nuclear power, governments risk preventing artificial intelligence from delivering on its commercial potential—revolutionizing labor, medicine, research, and media—while monopolizing it for military purposes. President Dwight Eisenhower had hopedto avoid that outcome in his “Atoms for Peace” speech before the U.N. General Assembly in 1953.
“It is not enough to take [nuclear] weapons out of the hands of soldiers,” Eisenhower said. Rather, he insisted that nuclear power “must be put in the hands of those who know how to strip it of its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”
Political activists thwarted that hope after the 1979 partial meltdown of one of Three Mile Island’s reactors spooked the nation–an incident which killed nobody and caused no lasting environmental damage according to multiple state and federal studies.
Three Mile Island “resulted in a huge volume of regulations that anybody that wanted to build a new reactor had to know,” says Adam Stein, director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation Program at the Breakthrough Institute.
The world ended up with too many nuclear weapons, and not enough nuclear power. Might we get state-controlled destructive AIs—a credible existential threat—while “AI safety” activists deliver draconian regulations or pauses that kneecap productive AI?
We should learn from the bad outcomes of convoluted and reactive nuclear regulations. Nuclear power operates under liability caps and suffocating regulations. AI could have light-touch regulation and strict liability and then let a thousand AIs bloom, while holding those who abusethese revolutionary tools to violate persons (biological or synthetic) and property (real or digital) fully responsible.
Zach Weissmueller is a senior producer at Reason.
AI Is Like the Internet
By Peter Suderman
When the first page on the World Wide Web launched in August 1991, no one knew what it would be used for. The page, in fact, was an explanation of what the web was, with information about how to create web pages and use hypertext.
The idea behind the web wasn’t entirely new: Usenet forums and email had allowed academics to discuss their work (and other nerdy stuff) for years prior. But with the World Wide Web, the online world was newly accessible.
Over the next decade the web evolved, but the practical use cases were still fuzzy. Some built their own web pages, with clunky animations and busy backgrounds, via free tools such as Angelfire.
Some used it for journalism, with print bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan making the transition to writing at blogs, short for web logs, that worked more like reporters’ notebooks than traditional newspaper and magazine essays. Few bloggers made money, and if they did it usually wasn’t much.
Startup magazines such as Salon and Slate attempted to replicate something more like the traditional print magazine model, with hyperlinks and then-novel interactive doodads. But legacy print outlets looked down on the web as a backwater, deriding it for low quality content and thrifty editorial operations. Even Slate maintained a little-known print edition —Slate on Paper—that was sold at Starbucks and other retail outlets. Maybe the whole reading on the internet thing wouldn’t take off?
Retail entrepreneurs saw an opportunity in the web, since it allowed sellers to reach a nationwide audience without brick and mortar stores. In 1994, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com, selling books by mail. A few years later, in 1998, Pets.com launched to much fanfare, with an appearance at the 1999 Macy’s Day Parade and an ad during the 2000 Super Bowl. By November of that year, the company had self liquidated. Amazon, the former bookstore, now allows users to subscribe to pet food.
Today the web, and the larger consumer internet it spawned, is practically ubiquitous in work, creativity, entertainment, and commerce. From mapping to dating to streaming movies to social media obsessions to practically unlimited shopping options to food delivery and recipe discovery, the web has found its way into practically every aspect of daily life. Indeed, I’m typing this in Google Docs, on my phone, from a location that is neither my home or my office. It’s so ingrained that for many younger people, it’s hard to imagine a world without the web.
Generative AI—chatbots such as ChatGPT and video and image generation systems such as Midjourney and Sora—are still in a web-like infancy. No one knows precisely what they will be used for, what will succeed, and what will fail.
Yet as with the web of the 1990s, it’s clear that they present enormous opportunities for creators, for entrepreneurs, for consumer-friendly tools and business models that no one has imagined yet. If you think of AI as an analog to the early web, you can immediately see its promise—to reshape the world, to make it a more lively, more usable, more interesting, more strange, more chaotic, more livable, and more wonderful place.
Peter Suderman is features editor at Reason.
AI Is Nothing New
By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
I will lose my union card as an historian if Ido not say about AI, in the words of Ecclesiastes 1:9, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” History doesn’t repeat itself, we say, but it rhymes. There is change, sure, but also continuity. And much similar wisdom.
So about the latest craze you need to stop being such an ahistorical dope. That’s what professional historians say, every time, about everything. And they’re damned right. It says here artificial intelligence is “a system able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
Wow, that’s some “system”! Talk about a new thing under the sun! The depressed old preacher in Ecclesiastes is the dope here. Craze justified, eh? Bring on the wise members of Congress to regulate it.
But hold on. I cheated in the definition. I left out the word “computer” before “system.” All right, if AI has to mean the abilities of a pile of computer chips, conventionally understood as “a computer,” then sure, AI is pretty cool, and pretty new. Imagine, instead of fumbling with printed phrase book, being able to talk to a Chinese person in English through a pile of computer chips and she hears it as Mandarin or Wu or whatever. Swell! Or imagine, instead of fumbling with identity cards and police, being able to recognize faces so that the Chinese Communist Party can watch and trace every Chinese person 24–7. Oh, wait.
Yet look at the definition of AI without “computer.” It’s pretty much what we mean by human creativity frozen in human practices and human machines, isn’t it? After all, a phrase book is an artificial intelligence “machine.” You input some finger fumbling and moderate competence in English and the book gives, at least for the brave soul who doesn’t mind sounding like a bit of a fool, “translation between languages.”
A bow and arrow is a little “computer” substituting for human intelligence in hurling small spears. Writing is a speech-reproduction machine, which irritated Socrates. Language itself is a system to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. The joke among humanists is: “Do we speak the language or does the language speak us?”
So calm down. That’s the old news from history, and the merest common sense. And watch out for regulation.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey holds the Isaiah Berlin Chair of Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute.
Japan’s leading technology accessories brand introduces its innovative collection of high-performance chargers to U.S. consumers.
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., April 24, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Renowned for creating the best-selling mobile and tablet accessories in Japan, ELECOM is now poised to transform the American charging solutions landscape with its cutting-edge, high-efficiency wall chargers. These chargers not only promise exceptional performance but also prioritize energy efficiency, thanks to their versatile, groundbreaking technology.
Since 2014, ELECOM has dominated the Japanese market as the top choice for wall chargers, alongside its diverse range of phone and tablet accessories. The brand has consistently been honored with the prestigious BCN Award for 10 years running, affirming its status as the premier choice for mobile charging solutions. With over 27 million chargers sold globally, ELECOM’s expansion into the U.S. market marks a significant milestone. This introduction features a suite of advanced GaN II chargers, showcasing the latest advancements in wall charging technology.
Kazuya Hamaguchi, U.S. President and COO of ELECOM, expressed enthusiasm about the wall chargers’ U.S. debut, emphasizing the company’s commitment to providing high-quality, customer-focused solutions. “Our design philosophy is deeply rooted in understanding and meeting consumer needs, positioning us as leaders in the charging market,” Hamaguchi stated. “We are thrilled to offer our innovative charging solutions to American consumers.”
The new ELECOM charger line-up includes eight models with power outputs ranging from 65W to 150W. These chargers feature one to four ports, allowing for simultaneous charging of multiple devices, from smartphones to laptops, ensuring compatibility and convenience.
Employing cutting-edge GaN II technology, these chargers are designed for maximum efficiency and compactness. They include smart Power Delivery (PD) and Programmable Power Supply (PPS) mechanisms, which intelligently optimize power distribution to the connected device, enabling rapid, efficient charging. The PD feature allows the charger to negotiate the optimal power draw with devices, ensuring quick and safe charging, while PPS adjusts power levels to precisely meet the device’s charging needs, promoting optimal charging conditions.
Safety and durability are paramount in ELECOM’s charger designs, which meet stringent safety standards and include features such as temperature detection and overcurrent protection. The chargers’ durable, scratch-resistant, and smudge-proof exterior, coupled with GaN II technology, facilitates rapid charging in a travel-friendly form factor.
ELECOM has garnered over 200 design awards, reflecting its commitment to excellence in electronics and computer accessories. The brand has expanded its offerings to include products for home, kitchen, pets, and beauty, all while advancing its sustainability strategy to promote environmental and public safety through reduction, reuse, and recycling initiatives.
The new chargers retail for $49.99 to $99.99 and are now available for purchase on the ELECOM website and Amazon store.
About ELECOM USA
Since 1986, ELECOM has been at the forefront of innovation in consumer electronics, earning a global reputation for its modern design and exceptional quality. The brand boasts over 150 Good Design Awards and 66 IF Design Awards, underscoring its dedication to excellence and innovation in the tech accessories market.
This is a move in the right direction for companies seeking to integrate AI, but it’s not enough on its own. Yes, every company must become an AI company. But expecting a chief AI officer to get the job done alone is shortsighted.
When businesses are confronted with a major technological shift, often their knee-jerk reaction is to stick with what they know: Putting a new executive in charge and hoping they can solve everything. But for AI to truly take root in a company, people at all levels of the business need to get their hands on it and start innovating, not follow orders from a gatekeeper in the C-suite.
In fact, the fastest way to integrate AI into a company, in some instances, maybe to skip the chief AI officer role altogether.
Why having a chief AI officer might not make sense
Companies appointing a chief AI officer have good intentions as they seek to avoid getting disrupted by the technology. But they may not need this role, and any business adding it should assume that it’s temporary.
A useful comparison is the stampede in the middle of the last decade to appoint chief digital officers to oversee the digital transformation to internet and mobile technologies. In hindsight, that looks quaint.
Experts pronounced CDO the next big executive title, but it often turned out to be little more than window dressing — especially when digital skills became table stakes for most employees. In recent years, companies have been ditching the role or folding it into other jobs. In digitally native businesses, it doesn’t exist at all.
Google, for instance, never had a CDO directing how employees use web technology. Instead, they empowered employees to explore tools on their own through initiatives like 20% time, setting the stage for innovations such as Gmail.
Likewise, AI-native companies don’t have an executive overseeing AI. That would be redundant. At companies like mine, the technology is embedded from day one across the organization rather than siloed in a single role.
By default, we all leverage AI. Our marketing team uses it to better understand our customer base, our engineers deploy it to help write code, and our customer support leans heavily on AI agents. AI is written into every role, much like digital literacy now is at nearly all companies. Of course, there are areas of our business where we could use AI more and better, but making that happen doesn’t call for a specific job title. It’s everyone’s responsibility.
A better way to usher in an AI transformation
But I realize that not every company is built from the ground up on AI. So, how can legacy companies make real strides in integrating the technology?
In place of the top-down response to organizational change, consider a bottom-up approach. For a company that wants to usher in an AI transformation, the first step is to look across the roles you’re already hiring for and pick a few where AI agents can do the job today.
Customer service is an obvious place to start — today’s AI agents can now address most issues at least as well as humans. AI sales development representatives (SDRs) are also making an immediate impact, automating much of the toil involved in pursuing prospects. Another promising area — junior data analyst roles, which often consist of pulling information from reports. Then there’s coding. Autonomous software engineering agent Devin and OpenDevin, its open-source rival, can step in here.
Choosing the right technology partner to provide AI tools is equally important. When it comes to customer service, for example, companies should look for a vendor whose AI agents have a track record of resolving most issues without human intervention. Rather than following a script, they should have some ability to reason, drawing on past interactions and the conversation at hand to determine the best solution for each customer’s unique problem.
Then, it’s important to treat your agents more like employees than like a piece of software that will work straight out of the box. Onboarding, measuring and coaching — the same steps you’d take to develop any new hire — are essential to get the most out of AI tools.
The upside here is having team members experiment with AI begins to build AI expertise inside the company. For example, my company works with a financial services firm where AI employee manager has become a key position. Former customer support specialists there now teach AI agents new skills that add value throughout the business — thus making themselves an indispensable member of the team.
Companies can even make driving productivity gains via AI a criterion for career advancement. To get promoted, an employee must show their manager how they’re applying AI to deliver results for the business.
The next stage: Those departments grow into mini centers of excellence that spread AI knowledge and best practices throughout the organization. Team members educate the rest of the business on how to hire and coordinate AI labor. AI becomes integrated into day-to-day business operations in a way that’s hard to achieve with an exclusively top-down approach.
Of course, there’s no one best way to take a company through an AI transformation. For legacy industries and large enterprises, a tandem approach — combining top-down and bottom-up — may prove a better fit.
At the very least, organizations that want to get the transformation right should think about how they can help AI bubble up through the ranks, rather than just rush to hire a chief AI officer simply because others have taken that step. As AI permanently changes companies from top to bottom, it’s just a temporary solution.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Discussing sensitive topics can be challenging for business owners. This is one of the top three or four reasons I receive initial calls for public relations assistance addressing a hot-button issue. The latest confusing trend is sustainability and how to talk about it openly. Surprisingly, people need clarification about how much to talk about it, why it’s important and when to bring it up. There’s even a new word for this fear: “greenhushing.”
The most recent bit of pressure on companies regarding eco-messaging is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) recent efforts to enforce regulations that protect investors and maintain market integrity. Basically, the SEC has revised environmental transparency rules and introduced mandatory climate risk disclosures for public companies.
This is the first time a sustainability mandate has emerged nationally, and it’s expected to have a notable impact. In my opinion, even for private companies, it’s a call to pay attention and stop neglecting this discussion.
We are entering an era where climate objectives, targets and governance frameworks will become mandatory in corporate reporting. This shift also aligns with the increasing consumer demand for environmentally and ethically sustainable products — a trend that, despite its popularity, has seen many companies struggle to translate into tangible demand.
Consumers’ enthusiasm for sustainable products often starkly contrasts with their actual purchasing behavior. While surveys indicate a robust desire for sustainability, sales frequently need to catch up to expectations for new, environmentally conscious products. This discrepancy is exacerbated by greenwashing — where claims of environmental stewardship are not backed by practice — further eroding consumer trust and complicating the landscape for genuine initiatives.
I’d counsel any company today to prepare for sustainability discussions and engagement. It is now an unavoidable topic. Because I have been a fractional CMO and external public relations consultant since 2002, I’ve received many calls from companies facing these watershed moments. Here is the advice I’d give a leadership team aiming to be more vocal about sustainability.
The imperative of transparency
In this context, the necessity for transparency is undeniable. Beyond mere regulatory compliance, transparency is crucial for cultivating consumer trust and loyalty. Companies must now proactively measure and refine their approaches to climate change, so this journey has got to start with a comprehensive understanding of your environmental footprint, including greenhouse gas emissions, resource utilization and waste generation.
Typically facilitated by external consultants or an internal sustainability team, this foundational assessment is critical for setting realistic sustainability goals and improvement strategies. Employing standardized tools and frameworks like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and Life Cycle Assessment provides a methodical approach to this task and will result in data and benchmarks you can use consistently in your messaging efforts.
Armed with this data, specific and time-bound goals can be set that meet compliance requirements (if necessary) and drive significant environmental and social improvements. Engaging stakeholders, particularly employees, at this stage, helps bring to the surface any practical concerns and integrate these insights into the goal-setting process.
Public relations in the realm of sustainable messaging goes beyond just issuing press releases. PR is a strategic tool for amplifying and embedding climate-change initiatives into the corporate ethos. Compelling storytelling highlighting a company’s progress and impacts on sustainability can significantly boost its reputation and foster third-party credibility.
Leveraging various channels — from press releases and social media to comprehensive sustainability reports — enables these stories to reach and resonate with a broad audience, sparking engagement and advancing the sustainability agenda.
Cultivating a sustainability-centric culture internally is essential. Companies can ensure that sustainability principles are deeply ingrained in every aspect of their operation through regular educational programs, active participation in sustainability initiatives and acknowledgment of individual and team contributions. This not only reinforces the company’s commitment to sustainability among employees but also mobilizes them and other stakeholders as ambassadors of these values.
Continuous monitoring and evaluation of sustainability initiatives and how they are being perceived in public are vital measurement points to consider when assessing progress. Like any meaningful initiative, setting and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) allow companies to measure effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. Further, engaging with employees and stakeholders through feedback will enrich this process and provide real-world insights.
It seems counterintuitive, but in my experience, challenge is often in partnership with opportunity. Tackling tough subjects can uncover opportunities for innovation, stakeholder engagement and corporate accountability that otherwise would’ve been dormant. Talking specifically about sustainability is not always about compliance. It is a chance to appeal to buyers and lead the market with integrity, innovation and vision.
It started as a class project for University of Florida senior engineering students, and it became a viable solution for soldiers who needed an easier, faster, and safer way to camouflage their vehicles on the battlefield.
Students from Matthew J. Traum’s mechanical engineering capstone course received real-world training last year when they partnered with peers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Civil-Military Innovation Institute, or CMI2, to design and produce a vehicle camouflage deployer for the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
“This was a successful collaboration that tackled a problem faced by soldiers in the field — and much more rapidly than the Army’s conventional process,” said Traum, Ph.D., an instructional associate professor in the UF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Traum said a prototype of the UF-designed vehicle camouflage deployment device was delivered to Fort Stewart at the end of the fall 2023 semester and replicated in-house by the Army. The device is currently being field tested.
“Our students designed and built the device in one calendar year, which is remarkable speed compared to conventional Army innovation timelines, which can take years,” Traum said. “The system surpassed the Army’s stated targets for mounting, deploying, and retracting the camouflage while keeping the soldiers safer.”
Traum learned through a colleague, Randy Emert at CMI2, about the potential for collaboration with the nonprofit organization through the Army’s Pathfinder program, managed by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory and supported by CMI2 to bridge the gaps in defense innovation by fostering relationships between service members and researchers. Traum was invited to the Army base to listen as soldiers presented their wish lists of projects.
“The Army’s tactical innovation labs play a key role in addressing in-field challenges faced by frontline soldiers and securing the necessary resources and technologies to resolve them,” said Emert, the CMI2 lab manager for the Marne Innovation Center at Fort Stewart. “We source problems directly from service members and engage engineering students in a short cycle of product development.”>
Based on what Traum heard that day, the need to camouflage combat vehicles faster was a good fit for his capstone students.
“Every time we park a combat vehicle on a battlefield, we need to cover it with camouflage material to hide it from the enemy,” said Capt. Chris Aliperti, co-founder of the Marne Innovation Center. “The process is not easy, and the soldiers were asking for something that would save them time and keep them safe.”
The camouflage deployment problem was broad enough for senior engineering students to work on, and one that could potentially be designed and built within a year, said Aliperti, who recently was promoted and is now a mechanical engineering instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“This was something soldiers on the frontline were asking for, and our team didn’t have the bandwidth to address it,” Aliperti said. “The collaboration with the University of Florida provided invaluable hands-on experience to their students, and the end result contributes directly to enhancing the capabilities of our service members.”
The capstone course is a UF mechanical engineering student’s last class before they graduate and is viewed as a culmination of what students have learned throughout the curriculum, Traum said. The Army project spanned three semesters with about 80 students enrolled each semester.
Their approach evolved over the course of the year, and soldiers offered the students ideas and input weekly.
“It was interesting to see how the design started out as something most people would come up with, but after students met with the soldiers, took their feedback and ran analyses, they ended up with something that looked very different,” Aliperti said. “And it solves the problem much better than the original design.”
The students’ innovation addresses a longstanding pain point for soldiers. Traditionally, the poles used to hold up the camouflage material are staked into the ground, posing difficulties in muddy terrain or on urban concrete where securing them is impractical. Recognizing this limitation, the students devised a solution that uses mounting plates that are secured into place by the weight of the vehicle.
“That novel feature excited the Army,” Traum said. “By eliminating dependence on ground conditions, the mounting plates offer a versatile solution.”
The new device also masks the type of vehicle hidden beneath the camouflage netting. By strategically deploying poles to disrupt the shape of the netting, the device ensures that the vehicle’s silhouette varies each time it is deployed, thwarting the enemy’s ability to identify the concealed asset.
“The students were smart enough to realize in order to make a new device feasible, they should build around the equipment already in use,” Aliperti said. “Their device allows us to use the same poles and the same net but much more efficiently.”
Success of projects like the vehicle camouflage deployment device that was borne out of the Army’s tactical innovation lab set a precedent for future endeavors between academia and the military.
“Bringing ideas of this scope and scale to students to chew on allows young engineers to apply the fundamental lessons they learn in a book to real-life problems,” Aliperti said. “And if we strike gold on a great design like this one from the University of Florida, we’ve made a monumental impact across the entire Army.”
