Costco’s iconic $4.99 rotisserie chicken has earned a cult-like following among shoppers for years, but Consumer Reports says Sam’s Club now has the best bird in the warehouse club business.

After evaluating rotisserie chickens from 10 grocery chains, warehouse clubs and big-box retailers, Consumer Reports named Sam’s Club’s Member’s Mark Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken its top overall pick, edging out Costco’s Kirkland Signature bird.

According to Consumer Reports, tasters gave Sam’s Club the edge for its flavor, seasoning and juicy texture. Costco’s chicken also landed among the publication’s top picks, though reviewers found the seasoning to be less consistent between samples.

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Rotisserie chickens cook inside a commercial roasting oven. Consumer Reports evaluated chickens from warehouse clubs, grocery stores and big-box retailers based on taste, nutrition and other factors. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

The results may come as a surprise to Costco shoppers, whose devotion to the retailer’s rotisserie chicken has helped make the $4.99 bird one of the company’s signature products.

Costco has held the price steady for years despite inflation, using the popular item as one of its best-known value offerings and a draw for shoppers. The retailer’s loyal customers have even voiced frustration over seemingly minor changes to the product, including 2024’s switch from plastic clamshell containers to bags.

Consumer Reports did not publish a traditional first-through-10th ranking. Instead, it grouped the chickens into those it considered flavorful enough to serve on their own and those better suited for recipes such as soups, salads and sandwiches.

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Rows of freshly cooked rotisserie chickens are displayed for sale at a grocery store. Consumer Reports recently ranked rotisserie chickens from 10 major retailers, naming Sam’s Club its top overall pick. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

Along with Sam’s Club and Costco, the top group included Stop & Shop, Walmart, Wegmans and Whole Foods Market. BJ’s Wholesale Club, Hannaford, ShopRite and The Fresh Market fell into the second category.

FOX Business has reached out to Costco and Sam’s Club for comment.

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A Costco store in Vallejo, Calif., May 29, 2025. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images)

The evaluation went beyond taste. Consumer Reports purchased between 10 and 13 chickens from each retailer across multiple store locations and shopping trips.

Researchers weighed each bird, compared sodium levels with nutrition labels, conducted blind taste tests and screened the meat and packaging for chemicals commonly associated with plastics.

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Among its findings, Consumer Reports said it detected no PFAS in any of the meat or packaging it tested. It also found that many chickens weighed more than the net weight listed on their labels, with Whole Foods’ birds averaging about a pound heavier than advertised, effectively lowering their per-pound cost.

“We don’t have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat,” says Yann LeCun, one of the leading figures in the world of artificial intelligence.

He worked at Facebook-owner, Meta, for a decade, where he was chief AI scientist, but left in 2025 and founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs).

His goal is to move AI beyond current systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. They have their uses, he says, but will never be able to tackle complicated situations in the real world, like getting a robot to do household chores.

“They’re not a path towards human level or human-like intelligence, or even animal-like intelligence, because they cannot deal with real world data, they just are not built for that,” he tells me on the sidelines of VivaTech, France’s leading technology conference.

So, Paris-based AMI Labs is busy developing a new type of artificial intelligence not based on the tech behind ChatGPT and its rivals.

Investors think it has potential. Earlier this year AMI Labs announced that it had raised more than $1bn (£760m), with investors including US computer chip giant Nvidia and the fund that manages the private wealth of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos.

That so-called seed funding round – the earliest round of start-up fundraising – was one of the biggest of its kind in Europe.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are extremely good at some things like coding, mathematical problems and generating text, LeCun says.

But he argues that these are well defined and predictable problems.

“They [LLMs] basically just accumulate knowledge… They can regurgitate something, you train them to regurgitate, but they’re not particularly smart. They don’t have an underlying understanding,” he says.

In the real world there is a bewildering array of outcomes to any action, which requires a more flexible type of artificial intelligence.

LeCun holds a pen upright on its tip. What happens when you let go, he asks? Even a toddler would know that the pen would topple over. But no human would bother to guess in which direction the pen might fall, there’s no way to tell.

But an LLM might try to generate a single prediction about the pen’s next move based on statistical patterns from its training data.

The prediction would almost certainly be wrong, because the system is not reasoning about the physical reality of the situation – it is generating what appears to be statistically plausible.

LeCun says the system his company is developing, called Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), is set up to deal with problems like that.

It creates abstractions of the real world that allow it to assess the outcomes of actions.

Creating these abstractions involves difficult maths, but essentially they filter out useless information, just leaving the AI with useful pictures of the world.

In the case of the pen, the AI would know that there’s no point in trying to predict which way the pen would fall.

Palantir Technologies shares climbed further Thursday morning, adding to a string of daily gains as a fresh analyst upgrade from D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria amplified momentum already building from a Nvidia partnership announcement, a U.S. government contract win and the partial retreat of one of the stock’s most prominent short sellers.

Shares of the Denver-based AI software and data analytics company were trading at $130.19 as of 10:47 a.m. EDT, up $4.46, or 3.55%, on the day, extending what has been a sharp recovery from the 52-week low of $106.37 the stock hit just two weeks ago. The multiple-day winning streak has now pushed the stock roughly 23% off that low, though shares remain approximately 37% below their 52-week high of $207.18 reached in late November 2025.

Thursday’s specific catalyst was D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria upgrading Palantir from Neutral to Buy and raising his 12-month price target to $175 from $165, implying upside of roughly 39% from Wednesday’s closing price. Palantir shares rose more than 3% in the immediate aftermath of the upgrade publication, with the stock continuing to add to those gains as the broader market also strengthened following the weaker-than-expected June nonfarm payrolls report.

Luria’s upgrade framing was pointed and specific, centering on both valuation and a newly articulated competitive advantage argument tied to the ongoing friction between AI model providers and the U.S. government. He cited recent tensions between Anthropic and the Trump administration, which had placed restrictions on the company’s AI models, as evidence that customers who built their technology stacks on top of underlying AI models directly faced serious business disruption risk when those models became unavailable.

“Anthropic’s repeated choice to take a confrontational tact with the US government has resulted in the government placing restrictions on AI models and Anthropic pulling its own model from the market,” Luria said in a note to clients, adding that companies that built directly on those models risked catastrophic disruption. He contrasted that risk with Palantir’s orchestration model, where the company’s platform can swap underlying AI models without disrupting the broader solution it delivers to clients.

On valuation, Luria was equally direct.

“We believe Palantir’s valuation is the most attractive it has been in a while, especially in relation to other high growth software companies,” he said.

That argument resonates with a growing portion of the investment community that has been watching Palantir’s stock decline throughout 2026 while its underlying business has continued to accelerate. The company’s first-quarter results, the most recent available, showed revenue surging 85% year over year to $1.63 billion, beating estimates of $1.54 billion, while the company raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to approximately $7.65 billion. Operating margin for the first quarter reached 60% on an adjusted basis, and the company now counts more than 1,000 commercial customers, a milestone that underscores how broadly its AI platform has penetrated enterprise markets beyond its traditional government base.

Yet the stock had fallen approximately 29% year to date heading into the current recovery, a decline that reflected persistent investor concerns about competition from OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI tool providers that could eventually allow enterprise customers to replace dedicated data orchestration platforms like Palantir with more commodity-like AI services. Luria’s analysis suggests that very threat, and the political and regulatory complications that have accompanied it, may be creating demand for Palantir’s model rather than eroding it.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp also added to the week’s storyline Wednesday, when he used a public appearance to criticize what he called “tokenmaxxing,” a reference to AI providers who charge per token in ways that create what he characterized as a “wealth tax” on enterprise customers using AI tools at scale. Karp’s language was direct and provocative, positioning Palantir as a more efficient and accountable alternative to the per-token pricing models that have drawn increasing customer scrutiny as AI usage scales.

“Combining Palantir infrastructure with Nvidia’s AI and Nemotron models will allow the U.S. government to unleash the full power of LLMs while removing the underlying security risks,” Karp said in a statement accompanying the Nvidia partnership announcement earlier this week.

That Nvidia collaboration, announced Monday, involves embedding Nvidia’s Nemotron open-source AI models into Palantir’s core product stack, including its AIP, Foundry, Ontology and Apollo platforms, creating what the companies described as a secure, customizable environment for U.S. government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to train, customize and deploy large language models without exposing sensitive data to external model providers.

President Trump’s most recent financial disclosure added an unusual political dimension to the recovery. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics released Trump’s certified 2025 financial disclosure showing he owns at least $1 million in Palantir shares, a holding he reportedly added to in the period covered by the disclosure. While the filing does not establish any formal commercial relationship between the administration and the company, market observers noted it attracted renewed retail investor attention to the stock in the days immediately following its release.

“Big Short” investor Michael Burry, whose publicly disclosed short position against Palantir had been a recurring negative overhang on the stock throughout the spring, disclosed he had trimmed roughly half of that position, a partial retreat that some investors interpreted as a signal that even a prominent bear had decided the stock’s decline had run its course, at least for now.

According to data from 32 analysts tracked by Stock Analysis, the consensus rating on Palantir stands at “Buy,” with an average 12-month price target of $182.75, representing potential upside of more than 40% from Thursday’s trading levels. With the D.A. Davidson upgrade adding to that bullish chorus, investors now appear to be coalescing around the view that Palantir’s prolonged valuation compression has created the most attractive entry point the stock has offered since before its 2025 run to all-time highs, particularly given the acceleration in its underlying business metrics.