Wailea Beach on the island of Maui in Hawaii on July 28, 2022.
Gado/Getty Images
A family is suing Hawaiian tourism authorities and a resort in Maui after a man died snorkeling.
They allege negligence and a failure to warn about the risks of snorkeling.
The family argues his death was caused by ROPE, not accidental drowning, as the autopsy stated.
A Michigan woman and her adult children are suing a Maui resort and Hawaiian tourism bodies after her husband's death, claiming they failed to warn him of the potential risks of snorkeling.
According to the lawsuit, the family is seeking an unspecified amount of damages and a trial by jury.
Patricia and Ray Johnson arrived at the Fairmont Kea Lani in Maui on February 23, 2022, marking the couple's sixth visit to Hawaii.
Two days later, Ray, 64, and other vacationers snorkeled around Wailea Beach, situated in front of the hotel resort. While walking on a trail adjacent to the beach, Patricia told USA TODAY that she saw other snorkelers helping her husband.
She told the news outlet that she rushed to the beach, where "things deteriorated quickly," and despite calling 911, medical professionals were unable to revive her husband.
Although the autopsy attributed Ray Johnson's death to accidental drowning, Patricia Johnson and her family contest this.
In the lawsuit, which was reviewed by Business Insider, the Johnson family argues that ROPE — Rapid Onset Pulmonary Edema —likely led to Ray Johnson's passing.
ROPE is a sudden-onset condition characterized by the accumulation of fluid in the lungs' air sacs, which can make breathing difficult, according to the Mayo Clinic.
A July 2010 Snorkel Safety Study, conducted in collaboration with the Hawaii State Department of Health and the Hawaii Tourism Authority, distinguishes drowning by ROPE from drowning by aspirating water.
It said ROPE does not necessarily need "submersion in or inhalation of liquid" and often looks different from drowning by aspiration.
The study said drowning by ROPE often involves shortness of breath, confusion, and unconsciousness, with an absence of a visible struggle.
Patricia Johnson told ABC 7 Eyewitness News that Ray had kept his head above water before appearing disorientated.
"It didn't make sense. When I got the autopsy report, it said drowning. I watched Ray come in," Patricia Johnson told KITV. "When you are drowning, you are not talking to the people around you."
According to the lawsuit, Ray Johnson eventually lost consciousness before reaching the shore.
The lawsuit cites the Snorkel Safety Study and accuses the defendants — the Fairmont Kea Lani, the Hawaiian Tourism Authority, and the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau — of negligence for failing to adequately warn tourists about the risks of ROPE when snorkeling.
The lawsuit said the defendants have "essentially ignored the Study, its conclusions about the risks to tourist safety, and especially its recommended warnings."
The study noted that several factors can contribute to ROPE, including snorkel resistance and underlying heart and lung diseases.
While acknowledging Ray's history of cardiac issues, the lawsuit said that he had not been advised by a doctor to refrain from physical activity.
The lawsuit also said that Ray wasn't aware that he should wait a few days after flying to snorkel: "Had he received the warnings crafted by the Study authors, he would have heeded them."
While the Snorkel Safety Study acknowledged the plausibility of air travel as a contributing factor to ROPE, it noted that it remains only a hypothesis.
The Johnson family's attorney, Jay Stuemke, told Business Insider by email that: "Since the tourism industry refuses to do the right thing and warn incoming tourists of these hazards, it is incumbent upon us to do so."
He added: "If even one life is saved by this message, then Ray Johnson will not have died in vain."
Speaking to USA TODAY, Patricia Johnson said she hoped the lawsuit would lead to more warnings. "I truly believe my husband would still be here if we'd been warned," she said.
The Fairmont Kea Lani and Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while the Hawaiian Tourism Authority declined to comment on litigation.
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati thanked Nvidia boss Jensen Huang as the company revealed its latest AI model.
It's a sign of just how important Nvidia is to the AI arms race.
Tech giants are stockpiling the company's H100 chips, and its profits are booming as a result.
OpenAI unveiled its latest model Monday — and the company gave a shoutout to AI's kingmaker.
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati thanked Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, for providing the microchips that allowed the AI startup to demo its brand-new GPT-4o model.
"Thanks to Jensen and the Nvidia team, for bringing us the most advanced GPUs to make this demo possible today," said Murati during OpenAI's "Spring Update" livestream.
It's yet another demonstration of just how important Nvidia is to the AI arms race. The company's H100 GPUs, which can sell for upwards of $40,000 apiece, are used by AI companies to train and run their models.
This demand has made Nvidia one of the world's most valuable companies.
Goldman Sachs described Huang as the "godfather of AI" before the company's fourth-quarter earnings, which saw Nvidia rake in $22.1 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 265% from the previous year.
Nvidia's stranglehold over the AI industry is unlikely to change anytime soon. The company unveiled its new "Blackwell" AI chip in March, which Huang said was twice as fast as the H100 and would enable advanced AI features such as turning speech into 3D video.
One person who could challenge Nvidia's dominant position in the GPU market is Sam Altman. The OpenAI CEO is reportedly trying to raise up to $7 trillion for a venture that would boost the world's AI chip supply amid a global shortage.
Huang has expressed skepticism over the reported plans, joking in comments at a summit in Dubai that $7 trillion could buy "apparently all the GPUs."
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.
Americans with a college degree say they'd need a six-figure salary to consider switching jobs.
FG Trade/Getty Images
College-educated Americans say they'd need at least a $100,000 salary, on average, to change jobs.
But higher-paying jobs are getting harder to find.
Hiring has slowed for some white-collar workers in higher-paying sectors.
A $100,000-a-year salary used to be something most Americans dreamed about. But nowadays, some workers have no interest in a job if it doesn't pay six figures.
In the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations, a nationally representative survey of roughly 1,300 US households, respondents provide their reservation wage — the lowest annual wage they'd be willing to accept for a new job.
As of the most recent March data, the average reservation wage for Americans with a college degree rose to a survey-high of $99,081, up from $97,270 in March 2023 and $81,758 in March 2020.
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Experts say the sharp rise in the reservation wage in recent years could be due in part to high worker satisfaction at their current jobs, enhanced worker bargaining power, and the desire to keep up with the rising costs of food, housing, cars, childcare, and other expenses. But there's a problem for Americans who are looking for a six-figure income: Jobs that pay this well aren't super common — and they may be getting even harder to come by.
The median weekly earnings for full-time workers aged 25 and older with a Bachelor's degree is $1,493, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's about $78,000 over the course of a year —quite a ways from $100,000. And, on average, job hunters overall are getting offered $73,668 when they receive new full-time offers, per the NY Fed data — further showcasing the disparity between what some Americans want out of jobs, and how much they're actually making.
Additionally, there's evidence that the job market for high-wage roles has cooled.
A Vanguard report published in March found that the hiring rate has held steady for workers who earn less than $55,000 a year, but has fallen for workers in the top third of earners — who make over $96,000 — to its lowest level since 2014. It means that not as many Americans are landing new jobs that pay in the six-figure range.
What's more, overall job growth slowed in April, and the sectors that added the most jobs were generally lower-paying, including retail trade, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, and healthcare and social assistance. Higher-paying sectors, including manufacturing, construction, and professional and business services, saw slower job growth — each of these sectors has fewer job openings than they did a year or two ago.
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When job openings were at record highs in 2022, more Americans were able to switch jobs to get higher pay. But the job market isn't quite as accommodating today, among the reasons the job-switching rate has fallen — and the Great Resignation has turned into the Big Stay.
To be sure, it's not just college-educated Americans who have raised their pay expectations.
The average reservation wage for people without a degree was $68,390, up from $59,683 in March 2023 and $48,778 in March 2020. The average reservation wage among all respondents was $81,822, up from $75,811 and $61,377 in March 2020.
While lower-income workers have generally seen strong wage growth in recent years relative to higher earners — and may face a more favorable job market — job openings and wage growth have declined across most sectors over the last year.
Where to find a $100,000-a-year job
If you're on the hunt for a $100,000 salary, certain career paths could be more promising.
An analysis published last fall by the job-listing site Ladders found that the 10 most popular job titles that paid more than $100,000 included software engineer, licensed clinical social worker, systems engineer, and project manager.
If one is curious about how well a certain job pays, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides the average annual wages of over 1,000 different job titles. With an average annual wage of nearly $450,000, pediatric surgeons come out on top.
Lastly, some college majors could put one on a better path to a six-figure income. A New York Fed analysis found that college graduates who majored in one of 14 areas of study had a median mid-career wage of at least $100,000 a year. One area of study accounted for nine of the 14 spots: engineering.
More Americans are becoming ALICEs — asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed. They live above the federal poverty line, but struggle to afford basic necessities.
Douglas Sacha/Getty Images, Tara Moore/Getty Images, Yevgen Romanenko/Getty Images, We Are/Getty Images, Abanti Chowdhury/BI
DINKs are known for having disposable income, but some childfree adults are also struggling.
In fact, many childfree adults are ALICEs — asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed.
Without dependents, many low-income workers have a harder time accessing tax credits and government assistance.
America's DINKs— dual-income couples with no children — are known for having disposable income and spending their paychecks on major investments, luxury vacations, and early retirement.
These households have previously told Business Insider that they can spend extra money on their lifestyle because they don't have any child-related costs. By definition, DINKs aren't necessarily rich, but they do have a reputation for living a life of freedom and excess cash.
A growing number of child–free adults, however, are falling through the cracks of the US economy. Many low-income childfree adults fall into the ALICE category — people who are asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed. Twenty-nine percent of US households make too much to qualify for government assistance but not enough to comfortably afford daily life. And ALICEs who aren't parents face unique challenges: it is especially difficult to qualify for financial help or tax credits without young children, even if you need the help.
Poor, non-elderly adults who are not raising children and don't qualify for disability benefits made up nearly 106 million people in 2017, according to a Census analysis. What's more, they have a higher risk of experiencing homelessness and long-term poverty, per the Brookings report.
Low-income adults without children face barriers to government assistance
Low-income, childfree adults have a higher likelihood of falling into poverty, and often stay in poverty long-term because they can't access assistance,wrote Robert Greenstein, the author of the Brookings report.
"The safety net for these non-elderly childless adults is so limited, those non-elderly adults who are poor tend to be poorer than others living in poverty," wrote Greenstein, who is also a visiting fellow of economic studies for the Brookings Institution, which is affiliated with The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative.
The report found that half of the Americans living in "deep poverty" — those with incomes that are at or below 50% of the poverty line, which is $7,290 annually for one person — are childfree adults not receiving disability benefits.
Greenstein wrotethat this population is at a disadvantage when applying for government support, especially as it comes to tax credits and housing assistance, even if their household income is low.
For example, they don't qualify for the child tax credit, which allows families with dependents to receive thousands of dollars in tax breaks each year. The Earned Income Tax Credit— which offers refundable tax credits for low- and moderate-income workers — is also very limited for childfree employees, who receive fewer than 4% of the EITC's overall benefits, according to the Brookings report.
Greenstein also wrote that over 7 million low-income adults who are between the ages of 18 to 61 and don't live with minors pay more than 50% of their income on rent — making them severely rent-burdened. The majority of these adults don't receive any state or federal rental assistance.
Additionally, parents can more easily access SNAP food benefits than childfree adults because they are exempt from having to work a required amount of hours each week to receive assistance.
Many Social Security and Medicare programs also primarily offer assistance to older adults, excluding adults under 62.
Although strengthening the US financial safety net for this population is complex, Greenstein offered a few solutions. He suggested expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to benefit more adults without children, along with removing the extra qualifications childfree adults must meet to access SNAP benefits.
An expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act would also allow more adults to get the healthcare they need — even if they don't qualify for disability benefits or Social Security, Greenstein said.
Are you making an income above the poverty line but still struggling to afford daily life? Have you faced challenges qualifying for government assistance because you don't have children? Reach out to this reporter at allisonkelly@insider.com.
March data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the state has a record-high number of people in the labor force and a record-high number of jobs.
Starting in June 2023, the unemployment rate in Texas has consistently been 3.9%, and the rate has been close to or at the national unemployment rate during 2024 so far. Plus, the state added over 80,000 jobs in the first three months of the year.
Amid a robust job market and with around 15.2 million people in the Texas labor force, Business Insider decided to look at what pay opportunities look like in the state based on recently published data.
Around two dozen jobs in Texas pay an average of over $175,000, including architectural and engineering managers, podiatrists, ophthalmologists, and athletes and other sports competitors.
That's based on average annual wage data from the May 2023 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BI focused on jobs that had data available for Texas from that release. While pediatric surgeon is a high-paying job in the state, we didn't include it in our ranking below because it didn't have a specific estimate stated.
Below are the highest-paying jobs in Texas along with their average annual wages and employment estimates in the state.
26. Postsecondary health specialties teachers
Nastasic/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $176,430
Employment estimate: 25,650
25. Lawyers
Maskot/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $177,890
Employment estimate: 45,950
24. Commercial pilots
Maravic/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $180,660
Employment estimate: 6,360
23. Architectural and engineering managers
South_agency/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $185,320
Employment estimate: 18,540
22. Podiatrists
pedro arquero/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $201,210
Employment estimate: 260
21. Psychiatrists
Fiordaliso/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $205,270
Employment estimate: 1,040
20. Family medicine physicians
Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $214,720
Employment estimate: 5,920
19. Nurse anesthetists
SDI Productions/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $216,280
Employment estimate: 5,390
18. Dentists
SeventyFour/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $220,000
Employment estimate: 10,910
17. General internal medicine physicians
Halfpoint/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $224,640
Employment estimate: 2,690
16. Pediatricians
Drazen Zigic/Getty Images
Average annual wage: $225,220
Employment estimate: 2,530
15. Airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers
Arlington, Virginia, retirees have the highest retirement income nationwide.
Nate Hovee
Residents of Arlington, VA have the nation's highest retirement incomes, per a SmartAsset analysis of Census data.
The average retirement income in large cities is $52,723, lower than the median US household income.
One in five older Americans claim they have no retirement savings, according to AARP.
Residents of some cities in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Texas have the nation's highest retirement income and Social Security benefits.
Arlington, Virginia, ranked highest in retirement income, followed by Cambridge, Massachusetts, and The Woodlands, Texas, according to a SmartAsset analysis of the Census Bureau's 2022 1-year American Community Survey. Three of the top eight large cities with the highest incomes were in the Washington, DC, area.
The analysis calculated that the average retirement income in large cities for which Census data was available totals $52,723, much lower than the median US household income of $74,580. Nationwide, many older Americans are worried they won't be able to retire comfortably, while younger Americans fear they're not saving enough.
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According to AARP, one in five older Americans said they have no retirement savings, while over half think they won't have enough money for a comfortable retirement.
Some "peak boomers," or those set to reach 65 in the next few years, previously told Business Insider they won't be able to retire for the foreseeable future, even those with master's degrees and long careers.
In its ranking of 345 cities, SmartAsset determined that Arlington residents aged 65 or over have an average total retirement income of $90,140, divided into $24,296 in Social Security income and $65,844 in income from pension plans, annuities, IRA plans, or 401(k)s.
The neighboring city of Alexandria ranked fifth with an average of $77,952 — $51,409 from retirement accounts and $23,632 from Social Security. Washington, DC, was slightly lower at $75,088 on average.
The DC area's high retirement incomes stem mainly from higher pension and IRA incomes instead of Social Security payments, which are lower than many other cities in the top 20.
The second-highest city, over $10,000 a year less than Arlington, is Cambridge, whose average retiree makes $79,563 a year. This breaks down into $51,344 in retirement account income and $28,219 in Social Security income.
Berkeley, Highlands Ranch in Colorado, and Naperville in Illinois are other cities with total retirement incomes above $75,000.
Though not in the top 10 overall, Ann Arbor ranked highest for Social Security income at $30,428, followed closely by Carmel, Indiana, at $30,069. The top 10 for Social Security income included many Southern cities including Goodyear in Arizona, as well as Allen and Sugar Land in Texas.
Meanwhile, residents of 14 cities in SmartAsset's study depend on Social Security for over half their retirement income, including Lewisville, Texas, at 54.4%. Other cities in this demographic include Spring Hill, Florida, and South Bend, Indiana.
People gather at Barton Springs Pool on June 21, 2023 in Austin, Texas.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Austin's cost of living is slightly below the national average, despite a surge in population.
While housing costs have risen over the last decade, prices have corrected as the city built lots of homes.
Austin is particularly attractive for new grads with the highest cost-of-living adjusted starting salary.
You might have heard Californians are moving to Texas. Austin, in particular, has become a magnet for Bay Area techies and others seeking a lower cost of living and slower pace of life, among other Texan perks.
The surge of people moving to Austin caused a long stretch of home price and rent growth, but the city has managed to build lots of new housing over the last few years, helping bring costs down significantly. While Austin housing costs are still elevated, home prices fell by 8.4% and rents by 7% over the past year — even as homes grew more expensive in all other major US cities. And even as the city has ballooned in size, it's stayed relatively affordable compared to similar American cities.
While Austin's housing costs are slightly higher than the national average, the city's overall cost of living was about 2% below average in the last quarter of 2023, according to the Council for Community and Economic Research's cost-of-living index. The index is calculated using six categories: housing, utilities, groceries, transportation, healthcare, and miscellaneous goods and services, and is based on the spending habits of "professional and managerial households in the top income quintile."
Goods and services and transportation in Austin are cheaper than the national average, according to data collected by the Council and shared with Business Insider. The cost of living in the Texas capital, overall, is comparable to living in Atlanta, Georgia; Albuquerque, New Mexico; or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Austin is a particularly hospitable place for new college grads: the Austin metro area has the highest cost-of-living adjusted starting salary in the country, Business Insider recently reported. New grads — defined as full-time salaried employees between 20 and 24 years old — earned an average of over $58,000 in cost-of-living-adjusted dollars, compared to less than $28,500 in New York City and just over $49,000 in San Francisco. In Atlanta, new grads earned an adjusted $57,500.
This is likely in part because Austin has become a hub of high-paying tech jobs. Giant companies like Apple, Amazon, and Tesla have expanded their presence in the city in recent years, attracting a slew of well-compensated workers. Austin was among the top cities in the country attracting tech talent between 2022 and 2023, behind New York City.
But homes are still pricey. Despite building housing at the fastest rate in the country, Austin has struggled to build the kind of medium-density, middle-income housing it's in desperate need of. Instead, the city's sprawl is growing as people leave the city proper for the suburbs and surrounding cities. The city has lots of relatively small apartments and expensive single-family homes, but not a lot in between. And as profit margins trend downward for Austin developers, there's even less incentive for them to build more affordable infill housing.
But after years of efforts by pro-housing activists and lawmakers, the policy environment might finally be starting to change. City leaders are poised to approve a series of fixes to encourage the construction of smaller single-family homes and promote density.
"It's just been an amazing sea change when it comes to the conversations happening in City Hall," Greg Anderson, the director of community affairs at Austin Habitat for Humanity, recently told Business Insider.
If local leaders manage to push their pro-housing agenda forward, Austin could become even more affordable — and not just for its young tech workers.
Did you move to Austin for a lower cost of living? Reach out to this reporter at erelman@businessinsider.com.
Warren Buffett expects Berkshire Hathaway's cash pile to hit more than $200 billion this quarter.
The investor can't find assets worth buying and seems to see "storm clouds" ahead, Steve Hanke said.
"Cash is king, and given what Buffett is being paid to hold it, the king is not going hungry," he said.
Warren Buffett is building a cash pile as he probably can't find anything worth buying, and may be bracing for a tempest to hit, says Steve Hanke.
"Buffett has already picked over the US-listed companies and there isn't much left to whet his appetite," the professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University told Business Insider.
Buffett pared Berkshire Hathaway's Apple stake last quarter, fueling a $21 billion rise in his company's pile of cash and Treasury bills to a record $189 billion. He predicted the money mountain would surpass $200 billion by June — roughly double its level two years ago.
The famed investor and Berkshire CEO isn't only in the market for cheap, high-quality stocks — he also wants to make an "elephant-sized acquisition" but years of hunting haven't paid off.
Buffett underscored the dearth of compelling purchases during his company's annual meeting this month: "We haven't seen anything that makes sense, that moves the needle."
Hanke, a former economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, served as the president of Toronto Trust Argentina when it was the world's best-performing market mutual fund in 1995.
He noted that if Buffett wants to buy 5% of a public company's stock, and to deploy at least $10 billion, he's limited to the handful of businesses worth more than $200 billion in which he's not already an investor.
Hanke also underscored that Buffett seeks to bet on companies that are attractively valued and virtually certain to increase their earnings over the next five years.
"My guess is that there are no companies out there that would meet Buffett's size and smell tests," he said.
'Cash is king'
Hanke added that Buffett is unlikely to invest in the S&P 500 either, as the benchmark stock index is incredibly expensive by historical standards: its Shiller PE ratio is in the top 95% of its monthly readings since 1881.
"That looks like a risky bet, particularly since Buffett seems to see economic and geopolitical storm clouds on the horizon," he said.
"So, cash is king, and given what Buffett is being paid to hold it, the king is not going hungry."
Buffett underlined the appeal of cash when stocks are pricey, global growth is depressed, and conflicts are raging overseas during this month's shareholder meeting.
"When I look at the alternative of what's available, in the equity markets, and I look at the composition of what's going on in the world, we find it quite attractive," he said.
Troubling trend
Berkshire's liquid assets are certainly yielding larger returns than in the past, thanks to the Federal Reserve's inflation-busting hikes to interest rates since 2022.
Buffett's company earned $15.6 billion in interest, dividends, and other investment income last year, more than double the $7.5 billion it made in 2021.
Hanke is one of severalcommentators pointing to Buffett's ballooning cash hoard as a striking and potentially troubling trend for investors.
It's called GPT4-o, and it can "see" through real-time cameras. That means it can interact with the user on a personal level not seen before in Big Tech.
A demo of the tech has taken the internet by storm — and it has triggered a reactionary wave of doomsaying over prospects for jobs like teaching, customer service, and translation.
It's easy to see why it's creating such a stir: As demonstrated on Tuesday, the assistant can detect sarcasm and speak with emotion, creating an intelligent persona that's being compared to the advanced Scarlett Johansson-voiced AI of the 2013 film "Her."
But while this version of ChatGPT might appear far more accessible and sophisticated than its competitors, it's unlikely to eliminate professions soon, AI experts told Business Insider.
They also cautioned that most people have been reacting to a tech demo, which can often be highly tailored and might not necessarily reflect the product's true capability.
Even if OpenAI's new ChatGPT is as powerful as advertised, it's more likely roles in these fields will be tweaked while the professions stay intact, they told BI.
What's getting people so riled up about GPT4o?
Clips from Monday's demo make ChatGPT look like a massive leap for artificial intelligence and how we can use it in the real world.
One X user said he might start using it as a personal assistant to make phone calls on his behalf.
OpenAI also showed potential adopters new use cases, such as translation and teaching services.
The company posted a demo video showing a group of OpenAI employees, including chief technology officer Mira Murati, asking the assistant to help with a math problem.
The assistant didn't solve the algebra equation. Instead, it walked presenters through each step of the problem, giving real-time instructions like: "Get all the terms with X on one side and the constants on the other side."
All the while, it responded to feedback and follow-ups whenever the presenters spoke up.
"When Siri and Alexa were first launched, they did cause concern about job security in similar areas," said Daan van Rossum, the founder of FlexOS, aSingapore-based,work-focused media company. "None of those AIs were even close to human-like. ChatGPT4-o changes all of that. The difference can't be understated."
The new video camera and voice features do wonders for ChatGPT's potential in roles like customer support, van Rossum added.
Companies and industries are already preparing for that AI disruption. In January, for example, language learning app Duolingo axed 10% of its contract roles, saying that generative AI will be used to create more content moving forward.
Why these jobs aren't going to disappear
It's unlikely that ChatGPT's new personal touch will eliminate professions in teaching, translation, and customer support, said Leslie Teo, senior director of AI products at AI Singapore, a National University of Singapore research institute.
That's precisely because these jobs need a personal touch, he said.
"There's something about human empathy," Teo said, highlighting that teachers have gone through the learning process themselves and understand how humans struggle, unlike AI. "Those are very powerful things."
Teo said that people working in teaching, translation, or customer support are more likely to use AI to make their roles easier, rather than be supplanted by technology.
"A good customer service agent exudes empathy and understanding, something that a machine cannot do," he added.
Ben Leong, a computer science professor at the National University of Singapore, said it's too early to draw conclusions from just a demo. He said he foresees interpreters' businesses being majorly disrupted.
"AI is really good for well-defined problems. Translation is a very well-defined problem," he said.
But it's going to be much more difficult for ChatGPT to take over customer support, teaching, or negotiation, Leong said.
"If someone negotiates a bad deal for you, who is responsible? Are you liable? Can AI be your legal representative?" he said.
Simon Lucey, the director of the University of Adelaide's Australian Institute for Machine Learning, said ChatGPT still makes errors when multiplying numbers of three digits or more, even in its later versions.
"So at the moment, it's a helper. At the end of the day, if you want to get something meaningful or do something reliably, you still need to get a human to cast desire over what it's producing," Lucey said.
Some people may lose their jobs in the next few years, Lucey said, but he added that they have reason to stay optimistic.
"In the 1980s, when Microsoft released Excel, people were petrified and said it would put all of these accountants out of a job. We've got more accountants now than in the 1980s," he said.
Teo agreed. "Many roles will be replaced by AI, but that doesn't mean jobs. Our jobs are bundles of roles," he said.
Apple needs a revolutionary new product. But Tim Cook doesn't seem to have the goods.
Andrew Burton/For The Washington Post via Getty Images; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/BI
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after a 12-year hiatus, the company was in free fall. It was on the verge of bankruptcy after cycling through a series of chief executives, faced immense competition in the personal-computer market, and desperately needed to find its next big thing. Jobs immediately cut bait on a series of dead-end projects to refocus the company.
The following year, his strategy bore fruit. Jobs unveiled the iMac, and its vibrant plastic shell instantly flew off the shelves and into the annals of iconic design. Then came the iPod in 2001, upending the personal-media-player space and popularizing iTunes. That set the stage for the iPhone in 2007, which shot Apple into the stratosphere and fueled a slew of side businesses, including the App Store, that generated many billions of dollars. By the time Jobs died in 2011, Apple was the most valuable tech company in the world.
Cook is a numbers guy, not a design guy. Under his tenure, Apple's share price has soared, and investors have been kept happy with increased share buybacks and a quarterly dividend. But other than the Apple Watch, which was already in the works before Jobs' death, there have been no earth-shattering product launches. Instead, his time as CEO has been defined by squeezing as much as possible out of the successes of the second Jobs era. But after a decade of doing that, iPhone sales are slowing, revenue is down, and the company, again, needs to find its next big thing.
The tech industry is littered with once dominant firms such as IBM and AT&T that lost their innovative edge once they'd grown to a particular size and were usurped by savvy upstarts. Those companies haven't disappeared, but they don't command the power or public image they once did. Silicon Valley's giants, including Google and Meta, are now facing a similar challenge — and Apple is no exception. Cook's strategy of focusing on short-term profit over long-term strategy is casting a shadow over Apple's future.
The iPhone is Apple's cash cow — sales of the smartphone are responsible for more than half the company's revenue. But in 2017, after Apple took over the US market and there were no more Americans to sell iPhones to, sales hit a wall. The phones were good enough that people didn't need to regularly upgrade, and growth in developing markets wasn't delivering as well as the company had expected. The following year, Apple stopped reporting how many phones it sold, focusing instead on revenue: If the company couldn't get more people to buy iPhones, it would start charging more for phones and iPads via premium tiers. That worked for a few years, but in 2022, sales slowed again, and Apple's other products took a hit, too.
While growth in other parts of the Apple universe — TV+, News+, and iCloud storage, to name a few — was a highlight on the recent earnings report, their continued success is dependent on Apple hardware. To make matters worse, this tidy ecosystem is coming under threat from the US and other governments.
The drawbacks of Cook's divestment from product design and development are now becoming clearer.
As the Justice Department's recent antitrust case against Apple makes clear, the company's success stems in part from its walled garden that makes it difficult for users to switch to Android devices. By ditching their iPhones, users lose their App Store purchases and access to proprietary features such as iMessage. The antitrust case seeks to lower the barrier to switching and remove some of the exclusive benefits of using Apple devices. One focus is on reducing the restrictions on "superapps" such as WeChat that offer many services within the same app regardless of the operating system. If users rely on superapps instead of those included with the device, it's easier for them to move between iOS and Android whenever they want.
In Europe, lawmakers are focused on breaking the monopoly of the App Store by trying to ensure third-party apps and stores can be loaded onto Apple devices. If that happens, it would be devastating for the revenue Apple receives from App Store purchases — up to 30% of each purchase. Both the EU and the US cases would also make some people more likely to switch to a cheaper phone, which would threaten iPhone sales even further. In response, the company plans to vigorously fight the US case and is trying to shape how EU rules apply to its business to weaken their effectiveness.
Back at Apple's showrooms, however, its problems have multiplied.
In his book "After Steve," Tripp Mickle describes how Cook was focused on growing Apple's share price and operational efficiency — with him saving the company money at every turn. He had a firm command of Apple's supply chain and was instrumental in setting up Apple's tax-avoidance mechanisms. After taking over the company, Cook slowly reined in the powerful design team, eventually leading Jobs' ally Jony Ive, the chief design officer, to leave the company in 2019 after years of reducing his time there. The drawbacks of Cook's divestment from product design and development are now becoming clearer.
Already this year, we've seen two major flops from Apple. The first is the Vision Pro headset, a cumbersome and obscenely expensive piece of hardware that users are supposed to wear on their heads for extended periods of time (never mind the potential for nausea or eye strain). Given that virtual-reality headsets have been pegged as the future many times in recent decades before fading back into obscurity, it's hard to believe Apple's current effort will be any different.
At its core, Apple is a hardware company, and Cook has not been able to shepherd another product of market-shattering scale to shelves.
The company's initial goal wasn't to build a headset but to put a computer in a regular pair of glasses. Even though the technical limitations to achieving that vision quickly became clear, people who worked on the project told Bloomberg that internal divisions and indecisiveness by management kept the project in limbo for years, even as the annual burn rate reached $1 billion. Once Cook decided Apple had to release something, it ended up with the Vision Pro — a far cry from the sleek, lightweight glasses he initially dreamed of. Already, surveys have found the devices are being left unused, and flagging demand has caused the company to cut back on production.
Meanwhile, the Apple Car didn't even make it out of the gate. It was born out of the self-driving-vehicle hype of the mid-2010s, and Apple poured $10 billion into its development. But after almost a decade of work, it finally canceled the project in February once it realized the autonomous-driving technology it had been working on simply wouldn't be able to pilot a vehicle without human intervention. The century-old car business, it turned out, was much trickier to navigate than it may have first appeared.
Let's be clear: Apple is far from irrelevant. It still occasionally claims the title of most valuable publicly traded company in the world and even eclipsed a market capitalization of $3 trillion for a time last year. Investors aren't too despondent because Apple has increased its profit margin even as it struggles to grow its revenues. But looking further down the road, its future is far from certain.
Apple's share price is down this year, and it's lagging behind the Nasdaq-100 index. Cook was recently jetting around Asia to try to shore up the supply chain with expanded production in India and a new footprint in Indonesia, but it's hard to see those countries becoming major markets for the iPhone. Like in China, most of those consumers are more likely to go for an affordable Android phone with features that are just as good — the iPhone just isn't the status symbol it once was.
Apple is now pivoting, like everyone else, to generative AI. It moved employees from the car project over to artificial intelligence and plans to incorporate AI into releases of its iPhone, iPad, and Mac software. But while AI might drive short-term investor interest, like so many fads in the tech industry — crypto, the metaverse, the mid-2010s AI hype cycle — it's unlikely to be the kind of product that makes a big difference to the bottom line, especially with growing concerns about the cost of generative-AI tools. Plus, what we call AI is not actually a new tool; there's already plenty of AI deployed through Apple's operating systems to check users' spelling or improve their photos.
As Business Insider's correspondent Peter Kafka explained in March, "For years, it has been clear that there is no next iPhone." Now that Apple has failed to deliver a big step forward with the Vision Pro or Apple Car, its retreat into AI suggests it's chasing trends to keep up interest as it struggles to chart a defining next step.
Apple has had a great run over the past decade, and Cook has returned a lot of value to shareholders by persuading consumers to pay more for the company's devices. But at its core, Apple is a hardware company, and Cook has not been able to shepherd another product of market-shattering scale to shelves. It's not clear he ever will.
Paris Marx is a tech writer and host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast. He also writes the Disconnect newsletter and is the author of "Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation."