Tag: News

• Max Altman urged tech workers to prioritize joining the fastest-growing companies.
• He criticized tech's past focus on mission over business growth.
• Today's tech companies emphasize efficiency, lean teams, and rapid growth.

Max Altman's career advice: Focus on picking the fastest-growing company.

On an episode of the "20VC" podcast published on Sunday, Altman said that tech once became too focused on prioritizing mission over "winning."

"I say, don't care about the product. Don't care about anything, just go work at the fastest growing company," the venture capitalist said. "Because winning feels great. It feels amazing."

Altman is the cofounder of Saga, a $125 million venture fund that launched last March. Its investments include defense tech startup Anduril, Reddit, and Rippling. He is the younger brother of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the older brother of Jack Altman, also a VC.

On Sunday's podcast, Max Altman said that tech lost its way in the last few years before 2020. Before becoming an investor, he worked at Microsoft, Zenefits, and Rippling.

He said that everyone in tech was making their company about their mission and "saving the world."

"We're doing on-demand dry cleaning and on-demand dog walking, but it's gonna help the world this way, and you should feel good about yourself," Altman added.

"I'm like, just go build a great business," he said. "Winning's the most fun thing here. And I think we really lost our way for a little a bit."

In the last two years, tech has largely moved in the direction Altman says he prefers. The industry has been prioritizing growing quickly and doing more with less.

Companies have cut middle-level management in favor of more streamlined teams and fewer tiers of hierarchy, which they say should lead to less bureaucracy.

Across the industry, execs are sharing memos filled with words such as "efficiency" and "scrappiness and frugality."

In April, Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan detailed his plan for the company's culture: more time in the office, less admin, and leaner teams.

"The most important KPI for many managers at Intel has been the size of their teams," Tan wrote, referring to key performance indicators. "Going forward, this will not be the case. The best leaders get the most done with the fewest people."

"We want to operate like the world's largest startup," Amazon's Andy Jassy wrote in a September 2024 letter. "That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it's a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration."

Late last month, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees, citing AI's rapid advancement.

• Elon Musk is urging engineers to apply to Tesla as the company ramps up efforts for its AI chips.
• Tesla's open jobs on its AI hardware team include design engineering roles.
• Musk said he's "deeply involved" in Tesla's chip design and meets with engineers twice a week.

Elon Musk isn't just talking about AI chips. The Tesla CEO is now asking engineers who are interested in a job to email the company, and he's personally running twice-weekly design meetings.

In a post on X on Saturday night, Musk called for job applicants for Tesla's AI chip engineering team. He asked candidates to send an email with three bullet points proving their "exceptional ability" to Tesla.

"We are particularly interested in applying cutting-edge AI to chip design," he said.

Musk said in the post that the company aims to "bring a new AI chip design to volume production every 12 months."

"We expect to build chips at higher volumes ultimately than all other AI chips combined," he added.

The current chip in Tesla cars is known as AI4, and the company is "close to taping out AI5" while work is starting on AI6, Musk said.

"These chips will profoundly change the world in positive ways, saving millions of lives due to safer driving and providing advanced medical care to all people via Optimus," Musk added. Optimus is Tesla's humanoid robot project.

Musk has been ramping up Tesla's chip ambitions. In July, the company signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to manufacture Tesla's A16 chip at its new plant in Texas.

Tesla has posted Palo Alto, California-based engineering roles for its AI hardware team, including openings for physical design engineers and signal and power integrity engineers.

The physical design engineer job requires candidates with 10 or more years of experience in designing and building integrated circuits, also known as chips. The role involves designing, constructing, and integrating the building blocks of Tesla's AI chips. The listing said the position pays about $152,000 to $264,000 a year, plus cash and stock awards and benefits.

The signal and power integrity engineer role helps develop next-generation AI chips and systems for Tesla vehicles and Optimus robots. The position is focused on testing and validating the chips. The listing said the job pays about $120,000 to $318,000 a year, with cash and stock awards and benefits.

Musk is 'deeply involved' in chip design and meetings

Musk said in the post on X on Saturday that he is "deeply involved in the chip design" and meets with the engineering team "every Tuesday and Saturday."

"The Saturday meetings are short-term and will no longer be needed in a few months when AI5 is taped out," he added.

Musk has long been known for inserting himself into the day-to-day work at his companies. Musk said in July he would personally oversee Samsung's new chipmaking plant in Texas. The plant, located in Taylor, Texas, is expected to open in 2026.

"This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress," Musk said on X, adding that the fab is "conveniently located not far from my house."

During Tesla's Model 3 ramp-up in 2018, Musk said he slept on the company's factory floor. After taking over Twitter — now X — in 2023, he renamed the company and rehauled its entire structure.

• Ciara, 40, says her biggest parenting fear is where her four kids get their information.
• "This world is like bananas, and so I think you've got to be locked in even more now because the access is so high," she said.
• The singer also described herself as a "partial" helicopter mom who likes to "be up in the mix."

Ciara, 40, says motherhood keeps her learning every day.

During an appearance on Friday's episode of the "Angie Martinez IRL" podcast, Ciara spoke about staying connected to her kids and what it takes to keep up with their world.

"I think my kids also keep me young, too. You know, mama's got to stay tapped in," Ciara told podcast host Angie Martinez.

The singer is a mother of four. She shares a son with her ex, rapper Future, and two daughters and a son with her husband, New York Giants quarterback Russell Wilson.

Staying current helps her better understand her kids and the challenges they face at their ages, Ciara said.

"I want to be, like, aware of what's happening in their world," she said.

She added that she often reflects on what life was like when she was their age, so she can better understand what her kids are experiencing now.

"I want them to feel comfortable with me, but I also want to make sure I'm like, thinking about what I could have done better to serve them better," she said.

Ciara also described herself as a "partial" helicopter mom, and said she likes to "be up in the mix."

"This world is like bananas, and so I think you've got to be locked in even more now because the access is so high," Ciara said. "And my greatest fear is that the world tells my kid information that shapes them when I could be the one telling them."

As her kids get older and start talking at school, they can pick up and sometimes make up all kinds of things, she said.

"I feel really proud sometimes when you beat the world to telling your kids something," Ciara said. "I feel really proud of those moments, like having real conversations with them. So you're just only empowering them, you're only armoring them for the world."

In March, Ciara told Parents that she wants her daughters to learn to create their own self-worth.

"I want my girls to know that they're not limited by their gender or the color of their skin," she said.

Speaking to Vogue in August, Ciara said becoming a mother changed how she saw her career and herself.

"When I first began, I'm in an industry where it was taboo to have a child. The moment you had a child, you were automatically labeled as older or not focused. So having my babies and being on this journey to go after all that I'm trying to achieve has just been one of the coolest things," she said.

• X announced that the platform will display the region in which an account is based.
• The information is visible under the new "About This Account" section.
• On Saturday, X removed the feature for some accounts.

Elon Musk's X played a starring role in another weekend internet kerfuffle.

It began when Nikita Bier, X's head of product, posted on Saturday that the platform had rolled out a change intended to increase transparency: an "About This Account" page that, among other things, reveals the country or region where a user's account is based. The company announced plans for the feature in October.

"This is an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square. We plan to provide many more ways for users to verify the authenticity of the content they see on X," Bier wrote on X.

It turns out that not everyone was eager to reveal the origin of their accounts. Users in places that limit freedom of speech could face political repercussions. Some users called it forced doxxing. Others pointed out that if a user created an account using a VPN routed through another country, the location information may not be accurate.

On Saturday, X removed information about where some accounts were created. Bier said the data "was not 100 percent," especially for older accounts, and that the company plans to "bring it back by Tuesday."

Five hours later, he posted again: "I need a drink."

X users started tapping into the about pages of their online rivals to discover anything they might deem amiss.

Several prominent X accounts that promote MAGA talking points, for instance, appeared to be based in places far from the United States.

The account MAGA NATION, which has some 400,000 followers and describes itself as "America First" is, according to the new feature, based in a non-European Union country in Eastern Europe. Another account called America First — which was created in March, has close to 70,000 followers, and posts things like "Thumbs up if you're a Trumper who loves God" — appears to be based in Bangladesh.

The examples go on.

Some users started making memes, of course.

It should come as little surprise that many accounts are perhaps not what they seem. Fake profiles, disinformation, and coordinated efforts to sow discord online have long been a problem on X and other social media platforms, and the threat has only worsened with the advent of AI.

MAGA NATION, for its part, has not addressed its location and continues to post at a healthy clip. The account has changed its name five times since its creation in April 2024, according to X. One of its most recent posts asks if its followers think Hillary Clinton should be arrested. The people behind the account could not be reached for comment.

• After retiring early, Katie and Alan Donegan share their tips for Gen Zers chasing financial independence.
• They emphasize the importance of compounding, mindful spending, and building savings accounts.
• The couple advises prioritizing health early and committing to lifelong learning.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Katie and Alan Donegan, who retired at the ages of 35 and 40, respectively. The couple is originally from the UK and has been nomadic since 2020. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

Katie: Alan and I retired in 2019 after running our own separate businesses for several years. We heard about financial independence, retire early, after we got married, and we wanted that freedom and lifestyle for ourselves. We started our savings and investing journey in 2015.

Alan: I didn't earn very much in my 20s. I was a bit of a mess — I had lots of different jobs and eventually started my own entrepreneurship consulting business at 28. I spent my early 30s figuring out my business, and it wasn't until my late 30s that I started to make a good living.

When you're in your 20s, a year feels like a lifetime, but you have so much potential, and there is so much opportunity coming for you. We tell 20-year-olds that they are not even anywhere close to their best earning years.

Here are five things we tell Gen Z'ers who are looking to become financially independent or retire early.

1. Compounding is your friend

Katie: In the FI world, there is this idea that you have to have a million dollars invested, and people often say, "I will never earn a million, there's no way."

We keep telling them that they don't have to earn a million. Compounding will earn at least half of it for you. At this young age, if you can just invest a little money and let it grow over the years, it is phenomenal.

2. Learn how to spend

Alan: Another piece of advice is to get the spending balance right. When people discover FI at such a young age, they are excited about the idea of retiring in their 30s. They think: let me pin my expenses to the floor and do things like ditch a friend's wedding to save. Don't do that — enjoy your life.

Katie: Equally, your enemy is lifestyle inflation, trying to keep up with your friends, and societal expectations. You have to stand up to pressures such as acquiring a larger house or another status symbol when you secure a certain promotion. Most people increase their spending when they start earning more.

Alan: Happiness doesn't have to cost money. It could be cooking dinner with friends, or playing board games, going for a run, or arm wrestling the neighbor.

Work out where you get your happiness from and invest your time, energy, and money there. I get zero happiness from expensive watches or expensive random things, but I love Marvel, and I invest my resources there.

3. Have these four accounts

Katie: Build three to six months of your basic expenses in case things hit the fan, such as losing your job. Have another account with a little bit of cash for planned spending over the next couple of years, such as a car, money saved for a holiday, or other short- to medium-term expenses.

Alan: Everything else should go into tax-advantaged accounts. And after you've used your tax-advantaged allowance, invest the rest in a brokerage account.

4. Don't stop learning

Alan: 20-year-olds out there don't spend enough time learning on their own. The mindset is: I've done education, education was done to me at university, and I'm now educated, and that's it.

Traditional education will earn you a wage, but lifelong learning will earn you a fortune. Reading books, studying, taking courses, learning from people who are excellent at what they do, and modeling them, will really help you. Ask people how they got their current job or what they would do if they were your age.

Education shouldn't stop when you leave school. It should start.

5. Focus on your health

Katie: Another thing you should learn, which we are learning now, is about health and things like vitamins and mineral supplements, eye masks for better sleep, and water.

You don't have to optimize for everything, but try to follow the 80-20 rule: eat well, sleep well, move your body 80% of the time, and enjoy yourself the other 20% of the time.

• After 22 years as a military wife, Bryanne Salazar's marriage ended after her husband retired.
• After moving to Hawaii, she booked a solo trip to Thailand and Vietnam to conquer her fears.
• The journey taught her how to live on her own terms.

For 22 years, I was a military wife, putting aside my needs to support my husband's career — all for the promise that after retirement, when our children were grown, we'd travel the world together.

In 2018, retirement finally came, and not long after, our nearly 25-year marriage crumbled. When his military career ended, it felt like he lost his sense of purpose. I tried to hold things together, but the unhappiness and bitter fights left me drowning, too.

It wasn't love that kept me there, but fear. I came from a toxic home and no longer had contact with my family, so I worried that without my husband and children, I'd have no one. That fear kept me complacent until the pain of staying was greater than the fear of leaving.

Our divorce was finalized in February of 2022, and just before, I had moved to Hawaii to stay with a recently widowed woman.

I gave myself a year to heal

It was time to figure out who I was on my own. I walked for exercise, but over time it became an act of penance.

Some days I covered more than 12 miles, each step bringing realizations about my marriage and myself. I realized that I'd been a people-pleaser who sacrificed my own needs for others, only to resent them for it.

During that year, I dove into therapy, read voraciously, leaned on female friendships, and stayed close to my sons through video calls and visits. I worked hard to unlearn the habit of putting everyone first, but me.

Near the end of 2022, I was fulfilled but restless — ready for something new.

First stop: Thailand

On December 31, I booked a solo flight to Bangkok. I had little savings but wanted to see the world.

When I told friends and family, everyone — including my adult sons — asked if I was afraid. I was nervous, but fear was no longer in the driver's seat of my life.

"You're so brave, Mom," my oldest son told me. I may not have felt it then, but I promised I would be what he saw in me.

Two days before my 43rd birthday, I landed in Bangkok. I was consumed by the food and temples, and by the freedom of being entirely on my own.

Six days later, in Chiang Mai, I visited a massage studio that employed former female prisoners. My late mother had once been incarcerated, and I felt drawn to the place. After the massage, my masseuse asked if she could braid my hair — that small act of kindness made me cry.

In Thailand, I felt free. Some days I slept late and ate too much; others I explored sacred sites. It was the first trip I'd ever taken where I didn't have to conform to someone else's desires.

I was living for me.

Second stop: Vietnam

Eleven days later, I flew to Hanoi and was struck by the city's chaotic yet charming atmosphere. Crossing the streets felt like an act of courage — all it took was confidence and a steady pace forward.

One afternoon, I hopped on the back of a motorcycle with a kind man named Lee, who offered to show me his city. Instead of landmarks, he took me to the sites where bombs had struck during the Vietnam War. He told me that his family had fled to Cambodia during the city's destruction.

"Hanoi people are strong," Lee told me. He was right. They had lost everything and rebuilt. I realized the city's vibrant pulse came from determination and grit — from picking up the pieces and starting over.

In a small way, I was doing the same.

Ready to start over

I ended my trip with a cruise and some kayaking on Ha Long Bay, where the quiet and gray skies gave me time to reflect. I hadn't just dreamed of adventure; I made it happen and proved my son right.

Once home in Hawaii, I decided to bring my gap year to a close and restart my career as a freelance writer and book editor. It was time to get back to the business of living — but this time, on my terms.

Do you have a story about taking a gap year that you want to share? Get in touch with the editor: akarplus@businessinsider.com.

For non-technical people, vibe coding is opening doors.

When vibe coding took off earlier this year, many saw it as the domain of developers tinkering with tools. For a growing number of non-technical people, it's become a way to finally bring an idea to life, improve their work processes, or carve out a creative side hustle.

Four people told Business Insider how they built their apps after hours of work and parenting, and the lessons they learned along the way.

The product designer who vibe coded a dog ID app

Cynthia Chen, a product designer, had dreamed for years of an app to catalogue dogs spotted.

In her free time over about two months, she built Dog-e-dex: an iOS app that lets users snap pictures of dogs, identify the breed, and save their profiles.

The San Francisco-based designer with no formal engineering training had turned to platforms like Replit, ChatGPT, and Cursor. It wasn't until she discovered Anthropic's Claude in January that things started to click.

She copied the code generated from Claude into Xcode — a tool for building apps on Apple devices — even when she didn't fully understand how it worked. "It was like magic," she said.

"Every time I pressed the preview button, it was an exciting little gift opening," she added.

Chen said people who want to vibe code should treat prompting AI like "gentle parenting."

"You have to be very intentional, very specific, and I think you have to be very nice," she said.

Sometimes, AI needs to be "babied," she said. When Claude got stuck, she broke down instructions step-by-step until it understood.

The mother who built an app to help others emotionally reset

When Karima Williams felt herself spiraling emotionally, she turned to Claude, which she said helped her process emotions she wasn't ready to share with others.

The 34-year-old mother from Maryland told Business Insider that talking to AI also helped her become a better parent. AI was her reset button, helping her decompress before stepping into mom mode.

Seeing how useful Claude was for her own venting, Williams vibe coded a web app to help people offload and regulate their emotions.

What worked was telling Claude to talk to her like she's 10 or 15 years old, Williams said. As she didn't know how to structure a product or set up a backend, Claude would walk her through what needed to be done.

"I also tell it to tell me one thing at a time, because it can be overwhelming," she added.

Williams also said speaking to AI worked better than typing.

"It makes it 10,000 times easier for me to say what I need to say and then get the context out," she said, adding that she dictates to AI about 90% of the time.

The accountant who vibe codes after his kids are in bed

For more than 18 years, Wei Khjan Chan worked as an accountant, a profession often considered vulnerable to automation.

To stay ahead of the curve and make a bigger impact in his field, the audit partner at an accounting and advisory firm in Malaysia picked up vibe coding after attending coding workshops in June.

"It'll be great if I get to know AI earlier. At least I replace myself rather than let other people replace me," the 39-year-old told Business Insider.

Chan built a web app to speed up filing expense claims after business trips. Using AI-powered optical character recognition, it scans receipts and automatically exports them into the right files for his company's finance teams.

He also used AI to automate his workflow, such as generating invoices. "Without the vibe coding tools and the skill set, an accountant is unable to do this," he said.

Chan said that when he first started experimenting with AI, he was advised to write long, detailed prompts. But experience taught him that smaller, iterative steps work better.

"The initial prompt is very important to set everything right," he said. After that, when changes are needed, it's more effective to adjust one small part at a time instead of piling on an entire wish list.

For debugging, Chan watches if the error message changes — a sign that the AI is working through the issue. If the same error persists, he resets the chat and reframes the request with fresh examples.

Chan also said vibe coding doesn't require endless hours of grinding. The father of two usually vibe codes after his kids go to bed, adding a feature here or refining a function there. Over time, it builds up, and the pieces eventually come together.

"It's like playing a game," he said.

The HR professional who said AI acts like a 'young, over-enthusiastic intern'

Laura Zaccaria, a Singapore-based HR professional, taught herself to build an AI-assisted web app while on maternity leave.

The new mom signed up for a coding class in June and created a family meal planner.

She vibe coded mostly in the evenings or when her baby was napping. On weekends, her husband took care of the baby while she worked.

Zaccaria told Business Insider that learning vibe coding gave her confidence she could keep evolving as both a mother and a professional.

When she was vibe coding, Zaccaria said she sometimes got stuck in a loop. AI can be like a young, over-enthusiastic intern, she added.

"You need to know when to pause and ask yourself: Where was I not clear?" she said. "Sometimes it's OK to scrap the whole conversation and start afresh."

"I realized I hadn't phrased things properly, or I had asked for something too big. Then I'd have to break it down again," she added.

Do you have a story to share about vibe coding? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.

• Jacqueline Gathers is a home inspector and owner of a Pillar to Post franchise in Brooklyn.
• She worked for New York City for 30 years and had no interest in entrepreneurship.
• When her husband died at the age of 55, Jacqueline became a home inspector.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jacqueline Gathers, owner of JS Gathers Pillar to Post Home Inspectors franchise. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm a third-generation civil servant. I spent 30 years at the New York City Housing Authority. I enjoyed the work and felt that I was helping people find safe and affordable housing.

When I first joined the Housing Authority back in the '80s, my dad insisted I sign up for early retirement. At the time, the extra contributions to my pension seemed expensive, but my dad assured me the investment was worthwhile. A lot could change between 55 and 62, he said, and being able to retire early would give me choices.

He was so right. Decades later, that decision allowed me to take early retirement in order to be home with my husband, Joseph, as he fought brain cancer. Joseph died when he was 58, and I was 55.

When my husband died, I considered selling our franchise back

A little more than a year before he died, Joseph said he wanted to take me into the city. I thought it was a date night, but when I came out in my heels, he told me to put on something more comfortable.

Turns out, he wasn't taking me to a fancy dinner: we were going to the franchise expo. That's when Joseph dropped the bomb that he wanted to purchase a franchise. I said OK, but I wasn't particularly interested. I didn't have any plans to be involved.

Joseph researched Pillar to Post, a home inspection company, and underwent training with the organization. But before he could open the franchise, he died. The company offered to repurchase our franchise. I was tempted, but then I thought about how hard Joseph had worked to prepare the business. I decided to launch it in his legacy.

It took time to build a business as a Black female inspector

That's when things got scary. I had retired from the Housing Authority, but I knew nothing about home inspections. I had to train with Pillar and Post and obtain a license from the state of New York.

Most home inspectors don't look like me. That became abundantly clear when I tried to work in Staten Island and other areas known for their racial tension. I wasn't well received there. However, when I expanded into more diverse areas of the city, such as Flatbush, Brownsville, and East New York, business picked up.

I initially got to work when other inspectors didn't show up. In those situations, my customer service skills from the Housing Authority helped me stand out from the crowd. Plus, people saw I knew what I was talking about. Before long, people were asking for "that Black lady inspector in Brooklyn."

I found my niche with first-time buyers

During the first year, I would go to work, then come home and cry. The business was a huge distraction and gave me a reason to get up every day, but my grief was raw, and the tears were never far. Eventually, I started crying less and focusing more on business.

Today, it's been eight years since Joseph died, and seven years since I launched the business. I've created a niche working with first-time homebuyers. I also work with educational nonprofits in the city.

Particularly in my community, first-time buyers may be the first people in their family to ever own a property. They need guidance and a relationship that doesn't end once the sale closes. My clients can reach back out to me whenever they have questions about their homes.

I've set an example for my kids

Joseph and I always lived below our means and planned to travel in retirement. In addition to running the business — which still bears his name — I try to take two international trips in his honor each year. Our first grandchild was recently born in Guam, and I'm looking forward to spending time there.

I'm surprised to find myself an entrepreneur at 64. I never imagined myself running a business, let alone one that's super successful. In doing so, I've set an example for my three kids: sometimes in life, you get curveballs, and you just have to keep pushing. There's something else waiting around the corner.

• Fei-Fei Li, founder of World Labs, immigrated to the US from China when she was 15.
• She ran her family's dry-cleaning shop for seven years, helping her parents make ends meet.
• She says the experience helps fuel her ambitions to build the future of AI.

Every influential scientist has an origin story — and the "Godmother of AI" is no different.

Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor best known for her work on ImageNet, is now the founder of World Labs, a one-year-old AI startup that's already valued at over $1 billion.

Her start, however, was far more humble.

Li immigrated to the United States from China at the age of 15 and helped her parents run a dry-cleaning business in Parsippany, New Jersey, to make ends meet.

"We were not financially very well off at all. My parents were doing cashier jobs and I was doing Chinese restaurant jobs," she told Bloomberg in a Q&A. "My family and I decided to run a little dry cleaner shop to make some money to survive."

Li said she likes to joke that she was the "CEO." She ran the shop for seven years, from when she was 18 until the middle of her graduate studies.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Li attended Princeton University for college, keeping her close to her parents' shop. Later, while pursuing her Ph.D. at Caltech in California, she continued to run the business remotely.

"I was the one who spoke English. So I took all the customer phone calls, I dealt with the billing, the inspections, all the business," she said.

The experience, she said, taught her the value of resilience — a principle that continues to guide her career.

"As a scientist, you have to be resilient because science is a non-linear journey. Nobody has all the solutions. You have to go through such a challenge to find an answer. And as an immigrant, you learn to be resilient," she said.

At World Labs, Li has big ambitions. She is working on building world models. These are AI models that leverage spatial intelligence, which Li says is "the ability for AI to understand, perceive, reason and interact [with the world]. It comes from a continuation of visual intelligence."

A growing number of AI experts believe that world models are what will propel the AI revolution into its next phase. Some believe large-language models, which are trained on, as the name suggests, lanaguage, and which the leading products are now based, are limited.

Li said ImageNet, a comprehensive training dataset of visual information, was a precursor to world models.

At the core of Li's research is the idea that visual information, a passive way of understanding the world, is a crucial foundation for real-world action, which remains one of the ultimate goals of some top AI builders, like Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who recently announced he would step down to launch his own world model startup.

The through-line between Li's research and her immigrant story is the same.

"I was always a curious kid, and then my curiosity had an outlet, which was science — and that really grounded me," she told Bloomberg. "I wasn't curious about nightclubs or other things. I was an avid lover of science."

• Amanda Yochum, 44, has worked at childcare company Bright Horizons for nearly 23 years.
• She oversees the company's 24-hour day care centers in Indiana and Kentucky.
• The night shift children stay up all night to match their parents' schedules.

This story is based on a conversation with Amanda Yochum, 44, of Haubstadt, Indiana. She oversees Bright Horizons' 24-hour day care in Indiana and Kentucky. The account has been edited for length and clarity.

If you've never played football or dodgeball outside at 3 a.m. with preschoolers — or watched the sunrise with them — you're missing out.

I know this because I'm a regional manager at childcare company Bright Horizons, overseeing the 24-hour day care centers we run in Princeton, Indiana, and Georgetown, Kentucky, which are located at the Toyota manufacturing plants in both areas.

The business of making cars runs 24/7, and so do our day care centers. When you're a parent on night shift — and need to sleep during the day — you need your child to be on that schedule, too. Especially if both you and your partner are working night shift, or you're a single parent, which is often the case at these plants, which are some of the largest employers in both regions.

So while some people on a more conventional schedule might baulk at the idea of 3-year-olds staying up playing happily all night long, that's just what we do here.

Staying up all night is part of the routine

The night shift runs from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m., so when the plant workers drop their children off, we'll have some that are still half asleep on their parents' shoulders. However, they typically run excited to see their friends. We'll have activities that are already planned out on the table to engage them as they transition into the classroom. Once they're settled in, then they have some free play and can explore our different learning environments.

When these plants were established in 1996 and 1986, respectively, there were few quality childcare centers available, so Toyota recognized the need to provide this service for its employees.

That's why our nighttime day care service is in such high demand. At our Princeton childcare center, 164 children are enrolled during the day, while 44 are enrolled at night. In Georgetown, about 159 kids are enrolled in the day program, and 32 are enrolled at night. The center is also open on Saturdays. Around 25 are booked in the day and around 20 at night.

Keeping our nighttime routine as close as possible to our daytime routine is a strong principle that we have implemented throughout the years. It's that equity piece. We don't want our children or our families to feel that they are missing out because of the shift that they are on. For example, if it's Grandparents Day during the day, we will replicate that at night. We often say that the only difference is that we swap sunscreen for bug spray.

It's so fun to be outside with the kids in the middle of the night

The rest of the night runs like this: once they have settled in, they will eat breakfast. Then they will play outside, and come back in for some activities and projects. We follow a curriculum, but we also discuss with the children what they are interested in learning.

They typically have lunch around 10:30 p.m. Then, after lunch, just like daytime children, some will take a nap of up to two hours at this point. For those children who don't nap, they'll transition into rest time and quiet activities. We offer "inner explorer," our mindfulness program that helps calm the mind and body, promoting relaxation.

After this, it will be snack time, and we will go outside again. They return for some additional curriculum time, and then, toward the end of the shift, they'll have some extra learning time. It will then be time to go home.

It's actually a lot of fun being outside with the children in the middle of the night. We are in the middle of a cornfield, so we have high fencing and stadium lighting. There is nature outside to contend with, but we know how to keep safe. The children like to holler at the deer, and we often get mice wandering in. We might also see the occasional coyote, and the children love it. The lights are so bright you often forget what time of night it is.

Kids can come starting at 7 weeks up to before they start kindergarten

Many children start with us at around 7 weeks old and stay with us until they begin kindergarten. Typically, night shift families have it made in this regard – their babies sleep the best and they don't struggle.

We are often asked if we plan to open a kindergarten program, but there are no plans at the moment. We do everything we can to support them in their transition into kindergarten and school, where they will have to adhere to more conventional hours. We'll lengthen naptime, so by the time they're graduating, they'll be sleeping for an extended period at night.

Our families will also tend to take off the week before school starts, to get into that new groove and routine. Parents aren't guaranteed to be moved to the day shift when their children start kindergarten, so they may have to drop their children off at Grandma's and Grandpa's or arrange for someone to come to their house.

In Kentucky, though, we do have a school-age program. The children have their own beds, dressers, locker rooms, and showers, and they will go to bed by 9:30 p.m. while their parents work the night shift.

Our facilities are crucial to working parents

We don't tend to have issues with our children not being rested enough — they have learned to follow their parents' schedules, and they start young enough that it's easy for them to adapt. Sometimes, life admin needs to be taken care of during the day, and we might not get a full night's sleep, but that happens to all of us at times.

However, there is a doctor's office, pharmacy, and store on-site, and we also have health professionals visit us to support the children. For example, twice a year a local hospital will send in occupational, speech, developmental, social and emotional therapists, and they will come in and do developmental screenings. They will bill the health insurance providers directly at no cost to the families.

We also have optometrists and dentists come on-site. Then we have professional family photographers come too. These events occur both during the day and night, benefiting everyone.

Even though I am a regional manager now, I still will go in and work nights. I just drink an extra Diet Coke. I also have an almost 19-year-old autistic son who has never slept well anyway, so he's been conditioning me my entire adult life to do this kind of work.

It's a big misconception that we just keep the kids up all night. Yes, we do that. But that work-life balance is critical for parents who work hard. That's why we pioneered this style of childcare years ago — and it works for everyone.