Author: Editor

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gautami Nadkarni, 33, who lives in New Jersey. The following has been edited for length and clarity.In 2024, six years into my time at Google, I started questioning myself.I joined as a customer engineer in the Google Cloud org in 2018. My job was to design scalable cloud solutions that would help Google’s enterprise customers manage their data and operations. At the time, cloud computing was the thing everyone in the industry was talking about.By 2023 and 2024, AI was cropping up more in my projects and client conversations. In one,…

Generative AI couldn’t have come along at a better time for Target.That’s the assessment Target’s tech chief, Prat Vemana, told Business Insider after newly minted CEO Michael Fiddelke spent the morning laying out an ambitious turnaround strategy at the retailer’s Minneapolis headquarters.The company had just reported its 13th consecutive quarter of weak sales — a stretch that saw big box competitors like Walmart and Costco gain market share — and leaders from across the organization were assembled to make the case that it was a new day at Target.”I couldn’t have asked for a better time for AI to show…

The logo for the Food and Drug Administration is seen ahead of a news conference at the Health and Human Services Headquarters in Washington, DC on April 22, 2025.Nathan Posner | Anadolu | Getty ImagesA key U.S. Food and Drug Administration official who oversees vaccines and biotech treatments will step down from the agency following multiple decisions that raised concerns within the industry.Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, will leave the FDA at the end of April, an agency spokesperson confirmed on Friday. It is his second departure from the position: he briefly left the…

As Anthropic and the Pentagon clashed over how the military should use AI, another new reality of warfare emerged several thousand miles away: data centers are now targets.This week, Amazon said that three of its data centers in the Middle East — two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain — had been damaged by drone strikes during the US-Iran war.Amazon Web Services, its cloud division, evacuated staff and closed access to at least one data center due to “structural damage” and flooding caused by the Sunday attacks, according to an internal document reviewed by Business Insider.The two…

Investors are concerned about the fates of multiple experimental drugs for hard-to-treat diseases following a string of recent rejections from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA in the past year has denied or discouraged the applications of at least eight drugs, according to RTW Investments, including a gene therapy for Huntington’s disease from UniQure, a gene therapy for Hunter syndrome from Regenxbio and a drug for a blood condition from Disc Medicine. The agency initially refused to review Moderna’s flu shot before reversing course. In each case, the FDA took issue with the evidence the companies were using to support…

Gas prices continued their ascent on Friday as the escalating conflict with Iran sends shockwaves through global energy markets. Loading audio narration… The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline climbed to $3.32 on Friday, according to AAA — that’s an 11.4% increase from last week’s price and the highest level since August 2024.The jump follows a surge in crude oil prices after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iranian targets last Saturday, prompting retaliatory attacks from Tehran.Brent crude, the global benchmark, traded above $91 a barrel Friday morning, its highest level since mid-2024, according to…

Paul Krugman says the US-Iran conflict is causing a key energy price to spike — and that’s bad news for President Donald Trump, given he’s under pressure to bring down living costs and tackle an affordability crisis. Loading audio narration… “Many people talking about how gasoline prices at the pump have already jumped,” Krugman wrote in a BlueSky post on Wednesday.”But what should really terrify Republicans is RBOB — the futures price on wholesale gasoline. This is up 75 cents a gallon since its low earlier this year,” he added.Many people talking about how gasoline prices at the pump have…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Saurabh Khandelwal, a 28-year-old machine learning engineer at Meta, based in Bellevue, Washington. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… There are so many different paths within the world of AI and machine learning.For people getting into the field, it’s important to be deliberate with how you spend your time learning. I’ve worked in both startups and Big Tech companies, and I’ve had to be intentional about how I present my career. I’m now a machine learning engineer at Meta.The technology will keep changing, and new…

When Julian Miller and his husband, David McGranaghan, founded McMiller Games — maker of the viral It’s Bananas game — it was simply a side hustle. Both were professional actors who had initially created different board games as multi-generational entertainment for their families. They soon saw an opportunity to create and distribute their games more widely, but immediately faced their first challenge: getting them into stores.Within a year, they began selling in Amazon’s store because of the convenience and tools it provided. “We just didn’t have the bandwidth to launch our own website,” says Miller, who serves as the company’s…

Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles bound for shipment at the Port of Nagoya in Tokai, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, on Tuesday, April 29, 2025. Toru Hanai | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesDETROIT — Toyota Motor, Hyundai Motor and Chinese automakers such as Chery face the most potential impact of non-domestic automakers from the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, according to an analysis by Bernstein.Those international automakers account for roughly a third of sales in the Middle East, according to the report, led by Toyota at 17%, Hyundai at 10% and Chery at 5%. In Iran specifically, Bernstein reports Iranian automakers Iran Khodro and SAIPA…