Your #1 guide to start a business and grow it the right way…
InSmartBudget
Search
This Startup Wants You to Pay Up to Talk With AI Versions of Human Experts
The company isn’t exactly breaking new ground. The idea of a chatbot standing in for a human is fairly common. As is the idea of cashing in on it. For instance, Manhattan psychologist Becky Kennedy has built a parenting advice business that features a chatbot named Gigi trained on her acumen and knowledge. Kennedy’s company pulled in $34 million last…
Wake up with our popular morning roundup of the day's top startup and business stories
Stay Updated
Get the latest headlines, discounts for the military community, and guides to maximizing your benefits
Robotaxi Outage in China Leaves Passengers Stranded on Highways
An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an…
Merrell’s pitch to non-outdoorsy consumers: Go outside instead
Touching grass is good for you, and it’s actually not that hard. At least, not according to Merrell.The 45-year-old hiking footwear brand, which is owned by Wolverine Worldwide, recently debuted a spot titled “It Starts…
Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain
Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests…
Meet the newest ‘Running Point’ character: Jake from State Farm
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there—“there” being the Netflix show Running Point.Today, the insurance company announced a collaboration with the streamer, which includes a co-branded ad featuring characters from Running Point, the basketball-centric…
Top Picks
Special Features
How The Trade Desk is aiming to remain ‘king of the open web’
It’s been more than 10 years since The Trade Desk was named to Forbes’s list of America’s Most Promising Companies.…
AI Research Is Getting Harder to Separate From Geopolitics
The world’s top AI research conference, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—better known as NeurIPS—became the latest organization this…
How IBM’s Masters campaign marks a shift in its sports strategy
With the Masters Tournament starting today, many golf fans will have Georgia on their minds. Since not all of them…
Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take On Claude Code and Codex
Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding…
More Stories
Social platforms are facing increased scrutiny. How long will advertisers stick around?
It’s all fines and games for the social media platforms recently.Last month, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for violating state consumer protection laws and ordered the company to pay $375 million in damages in a case related to child safety on its apps. The next day, a California…
AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being Deleted
In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine.But Gemini did not want to see the…
How Meta’s AI push is changing ad creation
Mark Zuckerberg has laid out a vision for the future of Meta’s core business: One day, advertising on the company’s platforms will be as simple as inputting a credit card number and a business goal. AI will take care of the rest.The company has reportedly said that day could come…
John Perry Barlow, JFK Jr., and a Night of Grief I Can’t Forget
Watching the wildly popular television series Love Story took me back to a strange week in my past. One day in April 1994, I was working in a studio apartment that I used as an office. I split the cost with Cynthia Horner, a psychiatrist who’d recently moved out to…
Welcome to the era of the college jersey patch
Think you’ve seen a logo on every inch of sports stadium and uniform imaginable? Think again.Earlier this year, the NCAA’s Division I Cabinet approved a proposal that will allow teams to have up to two additional logos on their uniforms and one additional logo on their gear during preseasons and…
Where should retail media networks make their pitch for ad dollars?
Retail media is in a liminal space.WPP’s 2025 forecast has retail media accounting for almost a fifth of total ad revenue by 2030, and the channel has outgrown retail, with financial and travel businesses getting into the space under the broader umbrella of commerce media. Still, the exponential growth seen…
‘Uncanny Valley’: Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI,’ Tesla Disappoints, and Meta’s VR Metaverse ‘Shutdown’
This week on Uncanny Valley, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer discuss the highlights from Nvidia’s annual developer conference, and why Tesla recently got in trouble with some of its most loyal fans online. Plus, Meta’s initial decision to shut down Horizon Worlds VR on the Quest headset signals the…
Hockey-stick growth: The year of the PWHL
Women’s hockey found massive success on the international stage this year, with record-breaking viewership of the overtime Olympic gold-medal game between Team USA and Team Canada.But until last weekend, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) had never had a nationally televised game in the US.PWHL games air on regional sports…
Kalshi Has Been Temporarily Banned in Nevada
Kalshi has been temporarily banned in Nevada, marking the latest escalation in the widening regulatory war over prediction markets. The First Judicial District Court of Nevada issued a 14-day restraining order, effective immediately, barring the company from “offering a derivatives exchange and prediction market which offers event-based contracts relating to…
Tech companies are churning out agentic AI tools, but agencies are still scratching their heads
Super Bowl viewers who were able to peel their eyes away from the spectacle of a brunette Guy Fieri in the Bosch ad may have noticed a trend in the commercials this year. Not that one— a lot of them were from AI companies.With 125 million people tuning into the…
Most Popular
‘A Rigged and Dangerous Product’: The Wildest Week for Prediction Markets Yet
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour posted a video on Wednesday of six men decked out in…
How Paramount+’s ‘Dutton Ranch’ came blazing to life at SXSW
Since 2023, Paramount+ has taken up residence at South by Southwest with The Lodge, an…
Livestream Replay: The War Machine
The defense tech industry has been supercharged under President Trump. Our panel of experts will…
How InStyle is reaching the next gen with its original social series
This story is the latest in a series exploring how brands craft standout social media…
OpenAI Enters Its Focus Era by Killing Sora
OpenAI said Tuesday it would discontinue Sora, its AI video app, roughly six months after…