Electric truck and SUV manufacturer Rivian on Tuesday announced the rollout of its new Rivian Assistant AI via software update to all compatible R1T and R1S owners subscribed to its Connect Plus cellular data plan. The new functionality will also be unlocked for the upcoming R2 at launch later this year. Powered directly by the EV’s onboard hardware and software rather than layered atop a phone-mirroring system or living in the cloud, Rivian’s Assistant will gain native access to almost all vehicle systems — which enables advanced features beyond just answering questions.
Rivian first announced at its Autonomy & AI Day event last year that an AI-powered in-vehicle assistant was coming. At the time, the automaker’s engineers and software developers detailed how it planned to use the powerful compute hardware in its R1 and R2 series EVs for everything from a new generation of driver-assist and autonomous features to Rivian Assistant, which ships today. For current and future Rivian owners, the feature set is substantive enough to be worth the wait.
Rivian Assistant sits on top of what the automaker calls Unified Intelligence, described as “a multimodal AI foundation” that runs across the company’s products and operations. Basically, it’s Rivian’s version of the shared-AI-backbone pitch that automakers and tech giants have been making in various forms for a few years now. The idea is that the same “unified” AI model can learn from customer data, vehicle telemetry and operational context together rather than treating each data set as a separate silo to provide more comprehensive and useful functionality to you, the end user.
First announced in December, Rivian Assistant is now rolling out to R1 EVs.
The promise is that the assistant will become more capable and more personalized over time. It learns driver preferences, retains context across sessions (stored in each driver’s profile), and uses real-time vehicle logs to inform its responses. Whether that learning loop delivers measurable year-over-year improvements (and whether automakers like Rivian can be good stewards of drivers’ privacy) will take time to evaluate. At the very least, the architecture enables such improvements in ways that basic voice command systems don’t.
Holding the left steering wheel button or saying, “Hey, Rivian,” tells the assistant to start listening. The basic vehicle control functions range from the familiar — call Mom, navigate home, adjust the temperature, etc. — to more advanced tasks like changing drive modes, adjusting ride height, opening the front trunk or checking range-on-arrival estimates. The utility of such voice commands is proven and well-covered.
More interesting are the context-aware commands. Instead of requiring precise phrasing, the assistant parses natural language and interprets intent. Rivian’s own example — “Make everyone’s seat toasty except mine” — is a good illustration of what this looks like in practice. The system understands the implicit (all seats except the driver’s) and executes accordingly. That’s a different category of interaction than “set passenger seat heat to level 2,” and the kind of thing that makes voice control actually useful for normal people rather than just people who speak like robots.
Navigation works in natural language as well. You can ask for a coffee shop near your destination rather than searching by category in the map UI, or ask for directions without specifying the exact address. Media queries follow a similar pattern; you can ask when a song came out or ask for something similar to what’s playing. None of this is revolutionary relative to what smartphone assistants do, but the integration with the vehicle’s native software and hardware is tighter than what you get through Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. (Though the latest generation of vehicles running native Google Built-in software seems similar.)
Being able to understand natural language and intent is what makes the difference between a useful feature for regular folks and voice command system for techies who talk like robots.
Messaging is handled through AI-assisted dictation that goes beyond simple voice-to-text. The assistant reads incoming texts, summarizes them, and helps draft replies. For anyone who’s tried to compose a text by voice while driving and ended up with something barely coherent, the summarization and drafting layer looks like a genuine improvement.
Additionally, Rivian says the assistant is grounded in real-time vehicle data and has a custom-built system for the owner’s manual, meaning you can ask operational questions — “How do I change a tire?” or, “What does this warning light mean?” — and get answers specific to your vehicle and its current state rather than a generic response pulled from the web. Even for car enthusiasts and automotive experts like me, this vehicle knowledge base is sure to be one of the more practical and useful features.
The most forward-looking piece of the rollout is the agentic integration with Google Calendar, which Rivian is positioning as the first in a series of external connections. The pitch is straightforward: Managing calendar events through your phone while driving is a bad idea, and doing it through a native vehicle assistant promises to be safer and faster.
The integration allows you to check your schedule, reschedule appointments or execute multistep tasks in a single voice command. Rivian’s example walkthrough — checking your schedule, finding a coffee stop on your route, and texting your ETA to a contact, all as one continuous flow — illustrates the agentic part of this. Rather than issuing three separate commands and waiting for each to complete, here Rivian Assistant acts more like a human flunky you’ve delegated a task to and chains the steps together — at least, that’s the vision.
At the AI Day event, Rivian demonstrated Assistant’s deep integration with Google Calendar.
What comes after Google Calendar hasn’t been specified yet. The word “first” is doing some load-bearing in Rivian’s announcement, suggesting a pipeline of integrations yet to be announced.
According to the automaker, owners will retain control over the data Rivian Assistant collects. The “Hey, Rivian” wake word can be toggled off, location sharing can be restricted and the memory feature — which stores personal context across sessions and trips — can be disabled entirely. Data is tied to individual driver profiles, not the vehicle, which feels like the right approach for multi-driver households.
Full Rivian Assistant functionality requires an active Rivian Connect Plus data subscription or an active trial and is currently available in English only. Rivian hasn’t announced any pricing changes (still $15 per month or $150 per year) or bundling adjustments alongside this rollout, so the math on Connect Plus’ value is somewhat better than it was before this feature existed, particularly for owners who were on the fence about renewing.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
To the narcotics agents investigating drug smuggling in Puerto Rico prisons, it seemed at first like a typical scheme: associates of an inmate gang sneaking drugs into the prison, gang members distributing them inside and bank records showing the money flowing.
Then the agents discovered something unusual.
Leaders of the prison gang known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, were selling drugs to inmates not only for money, but for their votes. Specifically, votes for now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón, a longtime Republican and supporter of President Donald Trump, investigators found.
To make sure the inmates — many of whom were addicted — complied, the gang’s leaders threatened violence and to withhold drugs, the investigators learned. Corrections employees in on the plan looked the other way as the gang, formally known as Group 31, ran the enterprise.
What at first seemed like a routine drug case had turned into something bigger. Puerto Rico, along with just a couple of U.S. states, allows inmates to vote. Puerto Ricans living in the territory can vote in all contests except federal general elections. It is a felony to willfully offer money or gifts in exchange for support at the polls. A conviction carries fines of as much as $250,000 and imprisonment of up to two years.
Investigators had gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff, and they were working toward determining whether González-Colón or her campaign was involved, four people with knowledge of the case told ProPublica. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.
In December, they filed an indictment charging 34 inmates and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm. And while prosecutors described the drugs-for-votes scheme in the court filing, they did not include a single charge related to it.
Soon after Trump took office, the lead prosecutor, Jorge Matos, was told by a supervisor to take the investigation no further, according to four people familiar with the case.
“Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead,” said one person familiar with the case. “After the election, that all changed.”
Matos, who left the Justice Department in June 2025, did not respond to phone calls or texts from ProPublica or attempts to reach him on social media.
For those working on the case, the decision to scrap the investigation was especially puzzling given the new president’s agenda; Trump issued executive orders in early 2025 aimed at eradicating drug traffickers and declaring election integrity “fundamental” to maintaining American democracy.
“We invested so much effort to make a difference,” said another person. “We’re frustrated, but there’s nothing we can do.”
People close to the case wondered if politics had played a bigger role than law and order. Trump congratulated González-Colón in a letter shared at her January 2025 inauguration saying, “I am so proud of your resounding victory.” That same month, she pushed to erect a statue of him at the Capitol building in San Juan alongside other presidents who’ve visited the island. “He deserves that,” she said, according to an official post from the Federal Affairs Administration of Puerto Rico on X.
W. Stephen Muldrow, the U.S. attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, was appointed by Trump in 2019 and has served continuously since then. His name appears on the indictment along with those of three assistant U.S. attorneys. Muldrow told ProPublica his office does not comment on open investigations other than in press releases or press conferences. While a couple of the inmates have accepted plea deals, most of the drug and money-laundering cases against the inmates and associates are still making their way through the court system.
In a follow-up email, a spokesperson for the office noted the indictment was filed during the Biden administration and under the previous governor of Puerto Rico.
Charging corrupt public officials “has always been and remains a top priority” of the office, wrote spokesperson Lymarie Llovet-Ayala.
“When sufficient admissible evidence exists to charge persons involved in public corruption, as required by the Justice Manual, the Puerto Rico U.S. Attorney’s Office will aggressively pursue such charges,” she wrote.
In court documents tied to a different case, in October 2025, a magistrate judge mentioned “an unrelated white-collar investigation involving the Governor of Puerto Rico.” Muldrow’s office responded in a filing, stating, “There is no white-collar investigation (or any other investigation) of Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González-Colón.”
González-Colón has not been charged with a crime. The governor declined ProPublica’s repeated requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions sent to her communications team.
Muldrow had a friendly working relationship with former Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general in Florida and he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the middle district of that state, according to people who know him.
A Department of Justice spokesperson said in an email, “Neither Attorney General Bondi nor Acting Attorney General Blanche was involved in any charging or investigative decision in this Biden administration prosecution.”
The attorney general’s office noted in a statement that the indictment mentioned allegations of voting coercion, and said: “This office did not limit the underlying investigation in any way.”
In May 2025, in a move that federal prosecutors and political observers alike said was highly unusual, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seized the voting machines from Puerto Rico over concerns about “vulnerabilities,” according to testimony in March by Director Tulsi Gabbard to Congress.
A spokesperson from the office told ProPublica the seizure was at the request of the U.S. attorney’s office in Puerto Rico and was “not about any election in particular.” The goal was to “assess risk to this critical infrastructure, given similar infrastructure is used throughout the United States,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Muldrow didn’t answer questions from ProPublica about the matter.
Lydia Lizarribar, an attorney for Juan Carlos Ortiz-Vazquez, a Group 31 member who prosecutors named as one of the leaders of the drug operation, declined to comment on the case.
The Puerto Rican prison system has a long and well-documented history of overcrowding, inadequate medical care and other human rights violations so egregious that in the late 1970s they prompted federal oversight that continued for decades.
The grim conditions spurred inmates to form advocacy groups like Group 31, which was officially created as a nonprofit to lobby corrections officials and lawmakers to improve inmates’ quality of life. Over time, federal prosecutors say, several of these groups operating in the prisons evolved into violent criminal organizations such as Los Tiburones and Ñetas, with memberships in the thousands.
The poor conditions were also the backdrop for a push in 1980 by the New Progressive Party governor at the time, Carlos Romero Barceló, to codify voting rights for prisoners.
Inmates have been aligned with the party ever since, political analysts said. Political parties in Puerto Rico differ dramatically from those on the mainland. They don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, the two main parties center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.
It’s not unheard of for politicians of all parties to court the inmate vote, but the New Progressive Party has made it a “stronghold,” said Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a political scientist with expertise on Puerto Rico and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.
“It’s been a huge advantage for them particularly as elections in Puerto Rico have been decided by small margins,” Tormos-Aponte said of the New Progressive Party. In the 2024 general election for governor, the party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to a ProPublica tally of voter returns on the State Elections Commission’s website.
Inmate votes were especially key in the 2024 gubernatorial primary as González-Colón, a longtime New Progressive Party member, was challenging the incumbent governor of the same party.
She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide.
In her first months in office, González-Colón signed a law allowing people with criminal records to obtain professional licenses in Puerto Rico.
In July, she signed off on a law expanding inmates’ ability to hold jobs in the private sector, calling it “part of a vision of social justice,” adding “we believe in the second chance, in the value of work and in the capacity for transformation of the human being.”
In March, González-Colón signed a law requiring the parole review board increase the pace at which parole denials are reconsidered. She said in a press release the law is aimed at a “fairer, more transparent system focused on rehabilitation.”
Political analysts said rumors have swirled over the decades about coercive tactics being used to mobilize the prison vote, raising significant questions about the extent to which that support comes in exchange for favors from the ruling party.
This time was different, sources said. They had evidence. Prosecutors had “locked up” the voting-for-drugs scheme among the gang, inmates and staff, and were deep into investigating a potential political connection when Muldrow’s office pulled the plug.
“These are the type of questions you would think an administration that has publicly declared this war on drug trafficking would investigate further,” Tormos-Aponte said of the Trump administration. “You would think it would be a priority.”
For the people familiar with the prison election fraud investigation, it was clear politics were at play in the decision to abandon charges prosecutors were confident they could win. What wasn’t clear, they said, was who was pulling the strings and how. It was “like you’re watching a puppet show but you can’t see the strings,” one person said.
“You know what you’re seeing isn’t telling the whole story,” the person said. “There was some kind of invisible hand.”
Although they excluded drugs-for-votes charges, prosecutors didn’t scrub the Dec. 12, 2024, indictment of how they believed the operation worked.
Outside associates of Los Tiburones, the indictment alleged, primarily used drones to drop drugs on prison grounds. Then staff participating in the scheme helped in the “introduction and distribution” of the drugs inside the prison or acted as lookouts. The employees also allowed the gang members to enforce their own discipline system against those who didn’t do as they asked, including when voting. Punishments included withholding food from inmates or forcing them to sit with their arms folded while they were beaten and kicked. In four cases, the drugs led to overdose deaths, the indictment says.
The indictment also alleged that Los Tiburones made connections with government officials “for the purpose of reducing prison sentences,” and the gang mandated both the prisoners’ political affiliations and “who to vote for in primary and general elections.”
A relative of one of the prisoners told ProPublica that inmates had to show their ballots to gang leaders when they voted to avoid punishment.
Puerto Rico’s Civil Rights Commission, which for decades has sent observers to polls across the territory, reported “serious difficulties” in gaining access to several prisons during the 2024 general election. After being denied entry at multiple locations, the commission successfully sought a court order, but much of the day had already passed by the time the observers were allowed in.
“We strongly condemn the lack of diligence and indifference shown by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in hindering the functions of this Commission on the day of early voting in correctional institutions,” the agency later wrote in a special report on the 2024 elections.
The report said observers witnessed prisoners voting in cramped quarters that didn’t allow for privacy and having to hand their ballots to others to put in the box.
Ever Padilla-Ruiz, the commission’s executive director, told ProPublica that inmates sent written complaints to the office detailing their experiences of being pressured to vote in the primary — some for González-Colón and others for her opponent, Pedro Pierluisi. They did not mention any gangs by name, Padilla-Ruiz said.
He said inmates reported that inmate group leaders were “always sending messages” up until election day, adding that they were too afraid to say much more.
Several people familiar with the case said investigators had evidence that González-Colón had spoken to a Group 31 member, but they had not determined whether she was involved in vote buying.
One of the imprisoned gang leaders had bragged on Facebook about his connection to González-Colón, posting a picture of him talking with her on WhatsApp while the primary campaign for governor was underway, two sources said.
She clearly benefited from the scheme, they said. “There was no doubt about that,” one said, noting that thousands of votes were likely at stake.
The indictment notes that gang members were provided preferential treatment such as relaxed visitation policies and the use of Sony PlayStations, big screen TVs and cellphones, but investigators had not connected the privileges to González-Colón or her campaign.
González-Colón has been a longtime advocate for Puerto Rico statehood and has been engaged in Republican politics for more than 20 years. She was elected chair of the Republican Party of Puerto Rico in 2015 and two years later became resident commissioner, a role similar to a U.S. representative but with limited voting power in Congress.
She’s been an active participant in Latinos for Trump, praising the president over the years as “wise” and in 2019 saying on social media, “Latinos are winning under his leadership.”
As she continues to lobby for Puerto Rico to become the 51st state, González-Colón has also leaned in to her relationships with other members of Trump’s Cabinet, posting well wishes on social media to Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and congratulating Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security director Trump picked to replace Kristi Noem, calling him “my good friend.”
“I know he will provide strong leadership as he works with President Donald J. Trump to strengthen our nation’s security,” she wrote in a March Facebook post.
Experts on Puerto Rican finance and politics say the relationship between González-Colón and the Trump administration is symbiotic though lopsided.
“I see it more as a situation of unrequited love,” said Alvin Velazquez, an associate law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law and an expert on Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy in 2017.
The territorial island, whose residents were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, receives less federal funding than most states. Political leaders in Puerto Rico, González-Colón included, have perpetually lobbied for more support.
Republicans in turn have capitalized on González-Colón’s rise as she helped bolster GOP support among the Puerto Rican diaspora and other Latino voters on the mainland. Now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed González-Colón in her 2024 gubernatorial election.
Polls specifically isolating Puerto Rican voters show that Trump saw at least a 4 percentage point uptick in votes from Puerto Ricans living in states compared to the 2020 election, garnering 45% of the group’s vote in the 2024 election, according to the nonprofit research center Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.
And perhaps most importantly, experts say, Trump has counted on González-Colón to support his strategic geopolitical initiatives in the region, including the controversial reopening of long-abandoned naval bases in Puerto Rico. González-Colón welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the island in September and thanked Trump on X for “recognizing the strategic value Puerto Rico has to the national security of the United States and the fight against drug cartels in our hemisphere.”
That’s despite the sentiment among many Puerto Ricans who were angered by Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 and a comedian at one of Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” And while Trump has said that González-Colón was “wonderful to deal with and a great representative of the people,” he later called Puerto Rico “one of the most corrupt places on earth.”
Filed Under: doj, donald trump, drugs for votes, jennifer gonzalez-colon, jorge matos, los tiburones, puerto rico, voter fraud
RedMagic’s next compact gaming tablet won’t be arriving as soon as expected.
The company has confirmed that its long-rumoured OLED gaming pad will miss the upcoming launch event. Instead, it will debut after the RedMagic 11S Pro series, which is scheduled to be revealed on 18 May 2026 in China.
The company expected to launch the tablet — unofficially dubbed the Gaming Tablet 5 Pro — alongside the new 11S Pro phones. The phones will run on the overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. However, RedMagic product manager Jiang Chao says the team still needs to resolve “bottlenecks” before it can launch the tablet.
Instead, RedMagic says it will share more updates during the 11S Pro launch event. This suggests the tablet is still very much in development, just not ready for its moment yet.
On paper, this is shaping up to be one of RedMagic’s more ambitious tablets. Previous leaks point to a compact OLED display with a 185Hz refresh rate, paired with a large 8,300mAh battery. It’s also expected to pack up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. This puts it firmly in “overkill gaming device” territory.
Performance is clearly the focus here. The company also expects the tablet to feature a cooling system similar to the RedMagic 11 Pro series that should help sustain high performance during longer gaming sessions. Like its predecessor, it may also include a pre-installed PC gaming emulator designed to bring desktop titles onto a handheld form factor.
That said, competition in this space is only getting tougher. Devices like Lenovo’s gaming tablets are already pushing high-refresh displays and flagship chips. This may explain why RedMagic is taking extra time to fine-tune performance before launch.
For now, the company makes one thing clear: it has not cancelled the tablet, only delayed it. And with RedMagic expected to reveal more at the May event, we’ll likely get a clearer picture in a week’s time.
Data breaches and cyberattacks are becoming more and more common. Given that hackers are adept at exploiting vulnerabilities of unsecured networks, the worst thing you can do is neglect the security of your home Wi-Fi network. After all, if your Wi-Fi is compromised, it can put almost all of your wireless devices and smart home appliances. Cybercriminals can use your connected devices to access sensitive information like your Social Security number, login passwords, financial details, and even surveillance footage. They can also gain your router’s control and easily intercept and read the data you receive and send.
With that said, if you want to keep your work private and personal data safe, you’ll want to secure your home network by following basic router hygiene steps. Now, if you’re like many people, you’ve probably never changed your router’s default login details. The thing is, a good chunk of routers (especially older ones or rentals from your ISP) usually use generic passwords, which come in variations of “admin” or “password”, and you can easily find them online. Considering that there are tools specifically designed to exploit router vulnerabilities within a few hours, if they fall into the hands of a mischievous neighbor, they could change your Wi-Fi network password. As such, you may end up dealing with malware attacks, data theft, and hijacking of connected devices.
That’s why the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recommends that you change your Wi-Fi network name and password, as well as your router’s admin password. Just make sure the password is strong and unique, and that your Wi-Fi name doesn’t include your name or address.
One of the worst cybersecurity mistakes you’re probably making is ignoring the need to update your router’s firmware. Sure, firmware updates aren’t fun, but they can make a huge difference for your smart home security. The moment you fail to update your router updates, security vulnerabilities will appear, and they’ll become easy targets for cybercriminals. That’s why it’s wise that you check for updates through your router’s web interface or app. These updates will bring patches that’ll close security loopholes and also fix random connection drops and slow internet speeds.
However, if your router is no longer receiving updates, you should replace it with a newer, factory-supported model. You’ll also want to replace your router if it’s been pushing five years now, or if you can’t even remember the last time you heard anything from your manufacturer. This is because any security loophole discovered after the manufacturer stops issuing updates will remain open forever. Apart from updating your router, you’ll also want to verify if your router’s built-in firewall is actually switched on. The firewall serves as the primary security guard for your home Wi-Fi network, which keeps unwanted traffic out. While at it, it’s also advisable that you navigate to the security settings and choose the highest level of Wi-Fi encryption available (WPA3 or WPA2).
If your Wi-Fi feels overloaded with too many users and devices, you’ll want to set up a guest Wi-Fi network. As the name suggests, it’s a separate Wi-Fi network that your friends can use without accessing your primary Wi-Fi. This protects your computers, smartphones, and other smart home gadgets from unwanted access or interference. Also, given that hackers can use your smart refrigerator or security camera to invade your privacy, a guest network will add a layer of protection by keeping your always-chatty smart home gadgets separate from your personal ones.
Even though your visitors don’t plan to access your private information, a guest network can protect your devices from being infected with malware and viruses. In addition to making your smart home safer, a separate network can improve your Wi-Fi network’s performance by reducing congestion.
With that said, creating a guest Wi-Fi network is quite easy. You just need to log in to your router’s dashboard and create a new SSID name and password. Just keep in mind that you’ll need a modern router with this security setting. However, if you have an old router, you can repurpose it to create a separate network.
Sam Altman faced pointed questions Tuesday about his personal financial ties to Helion Energy, the Everett, Wash., fusion startup that’s aiming to supply vast amounts of energy to both OpenAI and Microsoft to power future data centers for artificial intelligence.
Testifying in the Musk v. Altman trial in Oakland, the OpenAI CEO confirmed under cross-examination that he owns roughly one-third of Helion, a stake valued at approximately $1.65 billion as of late 2025, according to financial disclosures in the case.
Altman, who left the Helion board in March, said he consistently recused himself from OpenAI’s dealings with the fusion company. Asked by Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo to explain what that meant in reality, Altman said it covered “the decision to proceed and the final approval of terms.”
He noted that OpenAI has never bought or received any power from Helion but said a 2024 agreement was “a way for us to have the opportunity to do that in the future.” Altman said he was aware of a second agreement in March 2026 but was not familiar with its details.
He acknowledged that “a huge percentage” of his time at OpenAI is spent securing energy and compute resources, which he was previously doing while also chairing Helion’s board.
Helion has separately agreed to sell power from its first commercial fusion plant, under construction in central Washington, to Microsoft starting in 2028. Microsoft, OpenAI’s longstanding partner and one of its largest investors, is also a defendant in the case.
It was part of a broader argument by Musk’s attorney that Altman used his position at OpenAI to boost the value of his personal investments. Financial disclosures in the case showed that Altman has a stake of more than $2 billion in companies that do business with OpenAI.
Musk alleges in the lawsuit that Altman and other OpenAI leaders secured his donations to found OpenAI as a nonprofit before converting it into a for-profit venture, enriching themselves in the process. OpenAI and Microsoft, which is also a defendant, have countered that Musk supported the conversion and sought unilateral control of the company for himself.
Molo also pressed Altman on his role negotiating a $200 million data deal between OpenAI and Reddit while holding a significant personal stake in the social media company. Altman said the deal arose from mediation under threat of legal action and that the board asked him to participate because he had the most context.
The conflict-of-interest questions extend beyond the courtroom.
The House Oversight Committee sent Altman a letter on May 8 requesting documents related to OpenAI’s handling of potential conflicts, citing the Helion relationship specifically.
In the letter, the Oversight Committee said it wanted to ensure that “funds donated for charitable purposes are not diverted for unintended uses, such as artificially increasing the market value of other companies in which an executive or board member may hold an interest.”
A group of Republican state attorneys general separately called on the SEC to scrutinize the issue ahead of OpenAI’s planned IPO, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Helion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s not the only local company caught up in the issue. The WSJ also reported that Altman last summer approached Kent, Wash.-based rocket maker Stoke Space about partnering with OpenAI on data centers in space. Altman is an investor in Stoke through his family office.
Helion, founded in 2013, is developing technology to generate electricity from nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun. No company has yet demonstrated that fusion can produce commercially viable power, but Helion has raised more than $1 billion from investors and broke ground last summer on its first plant in Malaga, Wash.
Altman has been one of the company’s biggest backers, personally investing $375 million in a $500 million round in 2021 and joining as board chairman in 2015, shortly after recruiting the company into the Y Combinator startup accelerator.
The Helion questions were part of a wide-ranging day on the stand for Altman. He also sparred with Musk’s lawyer over accusations of dishonesty from former colleagues and defended his decision to return to OpenAI after being fired by the board in November 2023 — saying he was “willing to run back into a burning building” to try to save the company and its mission.
GeekWire reported on today’s proceedings via the court’s audio livestream.
SAP embedded Berlin-based n8n inside Joule Studio as the orchestration layer for its Autonomous Enterprise platform, doubling n8n’s valuation to $5.2 billion and making the fair-code workflow automation startup Germany’s most valuable AI company.
TL;DR
Jan Oberhauser started n8n in 2019 as a side project in Berlin because the workflow automation tools he used at work were too expensive and too closed. Seven years later, SAP has embedded his company’s software inside Joule Studio, the agent-building environment at the centre of the Autonomous Enterprise platform that SAP unveiled at Sapphire last week. n8n’s valuation has doubled to 5.2 billion dollars. SAP took a stake of roughly 1.3 per cent. The side project is now Germany’s most valuable AI company, and the world’s largest enterprise software maker just told 300,000 customers that n8n is the orchestration layer their AI agents need.
The deal says less about n8n than it does about a gap in the enterprise AI stack that nobody else has filled.
SAP now has more than 200 specialised AI agents and 50 domain-specific assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, human resources, and customer experience. The agents can automate a financial close, reconcile invoices, resolve procurement exceptions. What they cannot do, natively, is talk to the thousands of non-SAP systems that every enterprise runs alongside its ERP. The average large company operates between 200 and 400 software applications. SAP covers dozens. The rest are CRMs, ticketing platforms, communication tools, data warehouses, custom internal APIs, and the accumulated debris of two decades of SaaS procurement.
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n8n connects them. The platform offers a visual workflow canvas where developers and technical operators drag, drop, and wire together integrations between systems. It supports more than 1,000 integrations, over half of them built and maintained by technology partners, and can call any API with a generic HTTP node. The workflows can be triggered by events, scheduled on timers, or invoked by AI agents that need to take action in external systems. n8n runs on SAP’s Business Technology Platform cloud infrastructure, which means the data stays inside the customer’s SAP environment. It does not leave.
The multi-year commercial agreement makes n8n a native capability inside Joule Studio. SAP customers building agents in Joule can use n8n to connect those agents to systems outside the SAP ecosystem without writing custom integration code. General availability is planned for Q3 2026. The partnership also supports Cursor and Claude Code inside Joule Studio, but n8n is the workflow orchestration layer, the piece that turns an AI agent’s decision into an action across multiple systems.
n8n was founded in Berlin in 2019 and operates under a fair-code licence, a model that makes the source code visible, allows self-hosting, and permits modification, but restricts commercial redistribution without a licence. The approach sits between open source and proprietary software. Users can inspect every line of code, deploy n8n on their own infrastructure, and build custom nodes. Enterprises that want managed hosting, support, and governance pay for n8n Cloud or an enterprise licence.
The model has produced 183,000 GitHub stars, making n8n one of the most-starred JavaScript projects in the world. It has more than 230,000 active users, over 3,000 enterprise customers including Microsoft, KPMG, Vodafone, Delivery Hero, Volkswagen, Decathlon, and Twitch, and annual recurring revenue of 40 million dollars growing at ten times year on year. Total funding is 240 million dollars, with a Series C led by Accel that included backing from Nvidia.
Accel raised five billion dollars in early 2026 for late-stage AI investments after returns from Anthropic and Cursor soared, and n8n sits in the same portfolio thesis: infrastructure tools that developers adopt bottom-up before enterprises buy top-down. Accel backed Anthropic at the model layer, Cursor at the coding layer, and n8n at the orchestration layer. The SAP deal validates the bet. A tool that 1.7 million developers chose voluntarily is now being distributed to 300,000 enterprises by the company that runs their back office.
n8n competes with Zapier, which offers more than 7,000 integrations and has built its own AI agent capabilities, and Make, which provides a visual workflow builder with a strong following among marketing and operations teams. Both are closed-source, cloud-only platforms. Neither can be self-hosted. Neither exposes source code. In a market where enterprises increasingly demand auditability, data sovereignty, and the ability to run AI workflows inside their own infrastructure, n8n’s fair-code model is a structural advantage rather than an ideological choice.
The SAP partnership changes the competitive dynamics. Zapier and Make serve the long tail of small and medium businesses connecting SaaS applications. n8n now has a distribution channel into the largest enterprises on the planet through the software they already run. A procurement officer at Volkswagen does not evaluate workflow automation tools. They use what SAP provides inside Joule. n8n just became the default.
European technology leaders have argued that Europe’s competitive advantage lies in AI applications rather than AI infrastructure, building the tools that sit on top of foundation models rather than competing to build the models themselves. n8n is the embodiment of that thesis. It does not train models. It orchestrates them. It connects the intelligence that foundation model companies produce to the business systems where that intelligence creates value.
n8n is now Germany’s most valuable AI company and one of Europe’s most valuable startups. The 5.2 billion dollar valuation places it above most European enterprise software companies that have been operating for decades. It reached that valuation with 40 million dollars in annual revenue, a ratio that reflects the market’s judgement of what n8n’s revenue will become once the SAP distribution channel is fully operational.
Five European startups crossed the billion-dollar valuation threshold in the opening weeks of 2026 alone, spanning sectors from cybersecurity to defence technology. n8n’s trajectory illustrates a pattern that is becoming more common: European companies building developer-first tools that accumulate community adoption before converting that adoption into enterprise revenue through partnerships with established platforms.
Europe’s scaleup ecosystem faces structural growth barriers including fragmented markets, talent competition, and the absence of the hyperscale distribution channels that American startups access through partnerships with AWS, Google, and Microsoft. n8n’s SAP deal is a European answer to a European problem. SAP is headquartered in Walldorf, 600 kilometres from n8n’s Berlin office. The distribution channel is European. The enterprise customers are global. The infrastructure runs on SAP’s own cloud. For a continent that has struggled to turn technical innovation into market-scale enterprise businesses, the partnership is a template.
The enterprise AI stack is settling into distinct layers. Foundation model companies build the intelligence. Application companies embed that intelligence into domain-specific software. But between the model and the application sits a layer that is less visible and arguably more valuable: orchestration. The part that connects an AI agent’s reasoning to the systems where that reasoning must produce an action. The part that routes a procurement approval from Joule to a Slack notification, a Jira ticket, a DocuSign envelope, and a general ledger entry, in sequence, with error handling, retry logic, and an audit trail.
That is what n8n does. That is why SAP embedded it inside the platform it is betting its future on. The model layer has Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google competing on benchmarks. The application layer has SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow competing on process coverage. The orchestration layer, the glue that makes agents useful across systems rather than within them, had no incumbent. n8n just became one.
Building a scaleup requires an ecosystem, and n8n’s ecosystem was never a corporate partnership programme or a venture-backed growth playbook. It was 183,000 developers who starred a repository, built custom integrations, filed issues, and told their colleagues. SAP did not discover n8n through a vendor evaluation. It discovered n8n through the developers inside SAP’s own customer base who were already using it. The side project from Berlin became the orchestration layer of the Autonomous Enterprise because the developers got there first.
Sam Altman took to the witness stand to defend his reputation in the Musk v. Altman trial on Tuesday, as Elon Musk’s lawyers peppered the OpenAI CEO with hours of questions regarding his alleged history of deceptive behavior.
The cross examination was a much needed win for Musk, who has so far struggled to make a convincing case. Tuesday’s testimony included several heated exchanges in which the OpenAI CEO had to respond to allegations from former colleagues suggesting he’s untrustworthy.
Highlighting this evidence is not only important for Musk winning over a jury, but also for beating OpenAI in the court of public opinion. Days before the trial started, Musk texted OpenAI President Greg Brockman and told him that he and Altman would soon “be the most hated men in America.”
Musk’s lawsuit accuses Altman of effectively stealing the OpenAI charity, and taking the $38 million Musk donated to the non-profit organization and using it to create a for-profit business worth more than $850 billion.
However, there was little evidence on Tuesday to address the gaps in Musk’s legal case. Altman and Sam Teller, Musk’s former chief of staff, testified on Tuesday that they did not recall Musk ever attaching any special conditions to his donations to OpenAI. Additionally, it appears increasingly likely that Musk filed his case too late, years after he made his last donation to OpenAI and developed suspicion that the organization had breached its charitable trust. By then, the statute of limitations had already expired.
Brockman and his wife, Anna, sat in the gallery alongside OpenAI’s chief futurist, Joshua Achiam. While Altman and Brockman were present to watch Musk on the witness stand, Musk did not stay for Altman’s testimony. (Flight records suggest he was traveling to the Washington, DC area on Tuesday to fly to China with President Donald Trump.)
Before fielding questions from Musk’s lawyers, Altman had the chance to tell his side of the story, answering gentle questions from OpenAI’s lawyers. Wearing a purple tie, Altman painted himself as an entrepreneur and investor who’s always been fascinated by, and concerned about, the power of artificial intelligence.
Altman testified that Musk has long been obsessed with controlling OpenAI. He recalled “a particularly hair-raising moment” when Musk suggested that control of OpenAI should pass to his children if Musk were to die. “We didn’t feel comfortable with that,” Altman said. Altman also suggested that Musk’s attempt in 2018 to start an AI unit within Tesla—and offering him the chance to run it—felt like a “vague, lightweight threat” that Musk would effectively crush OpenAI with or without him.
Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, wasted no time in his cross examination, asking Altman:“Are you completely trustworthy?” as his first question. Altman responded that he believes so, and then Molo immediately asked whether the jury should trust the testimony he just gave. Altman responded, “That’s up to them. I’m not going to tell the jury what to think.” Here’s the heated exchange that followed, as best as WIRED could capture it:
Molo: Do you always tell the truth?
Altman: I’m sure there is some time in my life where I have not.
Molo: Do you tell lies to advance your business interests?
Altman: No.
Molo: Have you misled people with whom you do business?
Personal Tech
If you’re not a fan of having AI baked into your OS, look elsewhere
Google is rolling out a new line of laptops based on Android instead of ChromeOS, and using the opportunity to try and move upmarket from the budget-conscious Chromebooks – while also baking AI into every fissure of the system.
The new line of so-called Googlebooks seems even more obtrusive about pushing embedded AI than Windows 11 embedding Copilot into everything. With the OS on Googlebooks, which the company touts as the best of Chrome OS and Android, even moving the cursor over an on-screen task such as the text of an email nags you to offload work to Gemini.
Google was has been publicly planning to merge Android and ChromeOS for a while, with Android boss Sameer Sama saying last year that the Android codebase would be the core of the new platform. This gives the company a chance to break into the premium laptop market, using one of its core assets, the Android ecosystem, to differentiate from the kid-friendly and budget-oriented Chromebook lineup.
While the laptops won’t be coming until later this year, we can already see from the press materials and video demo that this new kind of notebook is meant to out-Copilot Microsoft. One of the main features demoed, Magic Pointer, activates when you wiggle the cursor and shows you contextual suggestions based on what you hover over. For example, in the video, Alexander Kuscher, Senior Director of Laptops and Tablets at Google, showed how hovering over the date in an email brought up options to view his schedule, craft a reply saying “I’m in town on May 19,” or even use Google maps to suggest meetup spots. Having AI crammed into Windows Notepad seems quaint by comparison.
Kuscher also showed how dragging images on a Googlebook can combine them. He dragged a photo of a nursery onto an image of a swath of wallpaper and a picture of a crib and the system generated a picture of the nursery with the crib and the wallpaper included. The Google exec pointed out that an act like combining photos normally involves logging into a chatbot, uploading the photos, and giving it a prompt. Here it was just drag and drop. No word on whether the system can use your photos as training data.
Android apps will also work on Googlebooks, and users will also be able to launch them from the phones, much like Apple’s iPhone Mirroring. In the demo, Kuscher showed Duolingo running in a portrait-shaped window on the desktop operating system as if it were on his phone.
Google said that Googlebooks are being “built with premium craftsmanship and materials” by partners like Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo. They also sport a Google-colored glowbar on the cover so everyone knows who owns your digital soul.
Considering the RAM shortage and the fact that IDC expects PC shipments to decline by 11.3 percent in 2026, Google has picked a challenging time to come out with a whole new category of laptop. While the company has not released pricing, we can only imagine that Googlebooks will be significantly more expensive than Chromebooks, which are currently in the $200 to $500 range in the US.
These new notebooks are likely to compete with premium consumer Windows and macOS laptops at a time when demand is declining and people are holding onto old devices longer. We see no evidence that Google is even targeting businesses and we doubt IT departments would be interested in the features the company has focused on.
Google also announced the expansion of Gemini Intelligence onto high-end Android devices (i.e., Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices) as part of Tuesday’s I/O preview, noting that it’s designed “to help your phone handle boring tasks for you.” Google provides examples like filling out online forms, summarizing websites, and even rewriting voice-to-text messages to get rid of pauses and other natural speech patterns that detract from the written word.
Speaking of Chromebooks, we asked Google what will become of its budget hardware line with the release of the Googlebook, but we didn’t hear back. We imagine that they will probably continue to serve the educational market for some time.
Google made several other announcements during Tuesday’s presentation, including a new Pause Point feature in the upcoming Android 17 that follows in Apple’s steps by protecting you from your own worst instincts to scroll endlessly or waste half your day playing chess on your phone. It allows you to mark certain apps as “distracting” so that when you launch them, the phone asks you to take a deep breath and reconsider your actions, which is something Apple’s mindfulness app doesn’t do.
To the bane of everyone tired of social media reaction videos, Google is also baking the format right into Android with Screen Reactions that will allow users to capture video of their device screen along with sticking themselves in the lower corner so they can regale everyone with their opinion about whatever they’re talking over. ®
Early-stage venture firm A* on Tuesday announced a $450 million Fund III. The firm takes a generalist approach, backing companies across categories such as AI applications, fintech, healthcare, and security.
The average check size for this fund will be between $3 million and $5 million, with the aim to back at least 30 startups. The capital will be deployed over the next two to three years, as with the firm’s previous funds. Limited partners include nonprofits, foundations, and endowments; Carnegie Mellon University is among the publicly named backers.
A*, founded in 2020 and run by Kevin Hartz and Bennett Siegel, previously raised a $315 million Fund II in 2024 and a $300 million Fund I in 2021. Hartz is a serial entrepreneur best known for co-founding Xoom, the international money-transfer service PayPal later acquired for $1.1 billion in 2015, and Eventbrite, the event-ticketing platform that went public in 2018. Siegel came up through Boston Consulting Group and Altamont Capital Partners before spending four years as a partner at Coatue Management.
The firm has also drawn attention for backing unusually young founders, even as the practice has become more common since. Hartz told TechCrunch last fall that close to 20% of the firm’s current portfolio involve teenage entrepreneurs. Among others of its investments, it has backed the fintech company Ramp and the AI firm Mercor.
This story was updated to clarify the name of the firm.
OpenAI is acquiring Tomoro, the Edinburgh-based AI consulting firm it was born alongside, as the founding acquisition of its $14 billion Deployment Company — copying Palantir’s forward-deployed engineer model to close the gap between AI capability and enterprise adoption.
TL;DR
Tomoro was created in 2023 in alliance with OpenAI. The Edinburgh and London-based firm built AI concierges for Virgin Atlantic, in-game support agents for Supercell, and deployment systems for Fidelity International, Tesco, Red Bull, Mattel, and the NBA. It grew monthly revenue tenfold in 12 months. It pledged 10 million pounds to Scottish AI talent. It employed roughly 150 forward-deployed engineers and deployment specialists whose job was to sit inside client organisations and make OpenAI’s models work in production.
On Monday, Tomoro announced it has signed an agreement to become the founding acquisition of the OpenAI Deployment Company, the 14 billion dollar subsidiary that OpenAI launched with more than four billion dollars in initial capital from 19 investment firms. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and standard closing conditions. The model company just became the services company. The AI lab that spent a decade building intelligence is now building the consulting army to install it.
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OpenAI launched the Deployment Company with four billion dollars from a syndicate led by TPG, with Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners. The remaining 15 investors include SoftBank, Goldman Sachs, Warburg Pincus, B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, and consulting firms Bain and Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey. OpenAI holds a majority ownership and control stake. The structure guarantees its private equity backers a 17.5 per cent annualised return over five years.
The subsidiary exists because enterprise AI adoption has hit a wall that better models cannot fix. OpenAI’s annualised revenue reached 25 billion dollars in February 2026. Enterprise customers represent more than 40 per cent of that figure and are on pace to reach parity with consumer revenue by the end of the year. More than a million businesses use OpenAI’s products. But the gap between using a product and deploying it inside core business operations remains enormous. Model performance is no longer the bottleneck. Integration, change management, security review, evaluation harnesses, and the slow work of redesigning business processes around AI are the actual constraints.
The Deployment Company’s answer is to place engineers directly inside client organisations, partnering with those companies’ own teams to identify the highest-value opportunities and build production systems on site. The model is not new. It belongs to Palantir.
Palantir pioneered the forward-deployed engineer model over years of defence and intelligence engagements where software had to work inside institutions too complex and too classified for remote support. The company sent its own engineers directly to intelligence agencies, military clients, and later private-sector companies because its platform was nearly unusable without heavy customisation. That operational intimacy drove Palantir’s US commercial revenue to surge 133 per cent year on year, and the FDE model has been credited with generating 640 per cent returns for early investors.
OpenAI is applying the same logic to a broader market. Tomoro’s 150 engineers become the founding cadre of a deployment operation that will scale through further acquisitions funded by the four billion dollar war chest. The engineers will not sell software. They will sit inside enterprises and build the systems that make OpenAI’s software produce business outcomes. The distinction matters. A software licence is a product. An embedded engineer is a relationship. The relationship generates switching costs that no competing model can erode.
Anthropic’s own multi-billion-dollar fundraising has signalled that the AI lab model is evolving beyond research and into enterprise infrastructure. Anthropic has built a 1.5 billion dollar joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, and Goldman Sachs that operates as its own deployment arm. Google has committed 750 million dollars to fund partners deploying agentic AI. The three largest foundation model companies have independently concluded that the money is not in selling intelligence. It is in installing it.
Tomoro was structured from inception as an OpenAI-aligned consultancy. Its co-founders, Rishabh Sagar, Albert Phelps, Chris Spencer, Ed Broussard, Chloe Kelleher, Ash Garner, and Sandi Chanda, built the firm around a single premise: that the gap between AI access and AI deployment was a business in itself. They were right. In two and a half years, Tomoro assembled a client list that most consulting firms spend a decade building.
At Supercell, the Finnish gaming company behind Clash of Clans, Tomoro launched an in-game support agent serving 110 million users in 12 weeks. The system processes 500 million daily tokens on GPT-4o and 200 million on GPT-4o-mini across five games, reduced the cost of resolving a support ticket by 90 per cent, raised customer satisfaction scores by 20 per cent, and delivers an average response time of seven seconds. At Virgin Atlantic, Tomoro built an AI travel concierge that handles booking queries and customer service. The firm quadrupled its headcount in the 12 months before the acquisition.
Sebastian Steinhaeuser, who serves as SAP’s chief operating officer, described Tomoro in different terms last week when discussing the SAP-n8n partnership. But the Deployment Company’s own framing is revealing. Tomoro is the “founding acquisition,” language that implies it is the first of many. The four billion dollar capital base is explicitly earmarked for scaling operations and acquiring firms that can accelerate the mission. Tomoro is not the Deployment Company. It is the template.
Accenture’s stock fell three per cent on the announcement. Cognizant dropped five per cent. Infosys declined four per cent. The market’s immediate verdict was that OpenAI had entered their business. UBS maintained its buy rating on Accenture, arguing that scale advantages in legacy infrastructure, regulated environments, and geographic coverage make the two companies more complementary than competitive. The argument has merit in the short term. In the long term, it misses the point.
The consulting industry’s business model rests on a simple asymmetry: clients know less about a technology than the consultants they hire to implement it. That asymmetry is durable when the technology is complex and general-purpose, like ERP systems or cloud migration. It erodes when the technology vendor decides to close the gap itself. OpenAI is not licensing its models to consultants and hoping they deploy them well. It is embedding its own engineers inside the same clients that Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey serve, with deeper access to the models, faster iteration cycles, and a direct feedback loop into the next generation of capabilities.
Google committed 750 million dollars to finance agentic AI deployments through partners including Accenture, Deloitte, and KPMG, choosing to fund the existing consulting ecosystem rather than compete with it. OpenAI chose differently. It built its own. The consulting firms that invested in the Deployment Company are hedging, putting money into the entity that threatens to displace them in the hope that partnership will protect what competition would destroy.
The Deployment Company is part of a broader shift in which AI companies are vertically integrating into services. Anthropic’s joint venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs. Google’s partner fund. Palantir’s FDE expansion. Salesforce’s Agentforce with its 540 million dollars in annual recurring revenue and 18,500 enterprise customers. The model layer is commoditising. The application layer is fragmenting. The services layer, the part where engineers sit inside companies and make AI work, is where the margins are migrating.
Europe’s largest startup funding rounds in 2026 reflect the same pattern, with capital flowing toward companies that deploy AI inside enterprises rather than companies that build AI in laboratories. Tomoro’s journey from Edinburgh to the centre of OpenAI’s enterprise strategy is an extreme version of the trend: a consulting firm so aligned with its technology partner that the partner absorbed it entirely.
SoftBank assembled a 40 billion dollar bridge loan to fund its OpenAI investment, capital that flows through to subsidiaries like the Deployment Company and the acquisitions it will make. The financial architecture behind OpenAI’s enterprise push is not venture capital. It is private equity, structured returns, and leverage at a scale that no consulting firm can match. Accenture’s annual revenue is 65 billion dollars. The Deployment Company launched with a 14 billion dollar valuation and a mandate to acquire.
Tomoro’s own announcement was characteristically understated. “Our belief hasn’t changed,” the company wrote, “but the scale of the mission has.” The belief, as Tomoro articulated it from the beginning, is that AI should be shaped around how people think and create, redefining how work gets done. The scale is now 300,000 enterprises that OpenAI wants to convert from product users into production deployers.
The deployment gap is real. Eighty-eight per cent of organisations report using AI in at least one business function. Only a third have scaled it enterprise-wide. The distance between those two numbers is the market that the Deployment Company was created to serve. Tomoro’s 150 engineers are the first wave. The four billion dollars will fund the next. And the 17.5 per cent guaranteed return tells the private equity backers exactly how confident OpenAI is that the gap will close on its terms.
The model company built the intelligence. The Deployment Company will install it. Tomoro, the Edinburgh firm that existed for 30 months, is where the installation begins.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of your hearing worsening overtime are higher than they’ve ever been, thanks in no small part to the fact that many of us walk around with headphones clamped to our heads or earbuds firmly planted into our aural canals. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) is so concerned about hearing loss that they’ve issued some very dire warnings that we should all pay attention to.
According to the WHO, 2.5 billion people will experience some degree of hearing loss by 2050, with at least 700 million requiring hearing assistance and/or rehabilitation. Right now, over 95 million kids between the ages of 5 and 19 already have some level of auditory impairment, and more than one billion (with a B!) more are vulnerable. The American Osteopathic Association reports that 1 in 5 teens will experience hearing problems, which is a 30% increase from just 20 years ago.
Both Dr. Kelly Conroy, a Mayo Clinic audiologist, and James E. Foy, DO, an osteopathic pediatrician from Vallejo, California, suggest one way to help prevent hearing loss is to follow what’s known as the 60/60 rule. Thankfully, it’s an easy rule to follow — the first 60 represents listening to a portable music device at just 60% of its maximum volume, while the second 60 refers to only listening for 60 minutes at any given time.
The 60/60 rule is based on scientific research conducted by audiologists and hearing experts that shows long-term exposure to loud noises can cause permanent damage. Many cells in the body can regrow or repair themselves, but not the cochlear hairs that line the inside of the ear. Those tiny hairs are important because they’re needed to convert sound into electrical signals that your brain can make sense of.
As you may know, sound is measured in decibels (dB). Everything under 70 dB is considered safe, but anything above that can be problematic. To put this all into perspective, a normal whisper registers around 30 dB, and a normal inside voice conversation typically sits around 60 dB. A vacuum cleaner hits 70 dB, and smaller DIY power tools and lawnmowers routinely exceed 71 dB. More powerful tools, like jackhammers, can easily surpass 120 dB, a range where instantaneous damage can occur.
So, what’s worse — headphones or earbuds? According to the experts, definitely earbuds. Yes, they’re more convenient and easier to carry around than big ole cans, but buds sit directly inside the ear, putting them much closer to the eardrum. Cranking the volume up will only cause damage more quickly.
Something else buds do, that over-the-ear headphones don’t, is push wax and funk farther into the ear canal, which by itself can cause temporary hearing loss. Worst-case scenario: An infection takes root, turning your life into a nightmare that nobody wants to deal with. The WHO also advises that we should get our hearing checked annually, something most of us probably neglect.
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