Tag: News

• Early menopause at 29 deeply impacted Claudia Zimmerman's personal life and work as a nurse manager.
• Medically induced menopause brought her years of anxiety, hot flashes, and weight gain challenges.
• Access to menopause-specific healthcare and support at work finally improved her well-being.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Claudia Zimmerman, 48, who went through medically induced early menopause at 29 while working full-time as a nurse manager. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been a registered nurse for almost 25 years, and I've spent the bulk of my career working in labor and delivery and at a fertility clinic. I always felt passionate about women's reproductive health due to my own experiences with endometriosis since I was a teen.

I had stage three endometriosis, a disease that happens when tissue grows outside the uterus. The pain was excruciating, and I went to multiple physicians who dismissed my symptoms as something women just go through.

This was frustrating and isolating, and it made me doubt the symptoms my body was showing me.

I had to do something to help with the pain

At 29, I was done having children, and my symptoms were escalating, so I decided to have a hysterectomy to relieve my pain once and for all. The hysterectomy removed my ovaries, uterus, and cervix, which put me into medically induced early menopause.

I knew of the general symptoms of menopause, but nothing could've prepared me for the experience I was about to undergo.

The next few years were a struggle between my body and menopause. One of the most challenging aspects was working full-time while going through it.

I was working full-time as a nurse manager at a fertility clinic

After my hysterectomy, I went back to work as an IVF nurse. I didn't become menopausal right away. I had an ovarian remnant that was producing enough estrogen to hold off menopause.

Two years after my hysterectomy, they removed this third-ish ovary, which then led to the first wave of my menopausal symptoms. I experienced increased anxiety, a bit of weight gain, and increased depression in addition to hot flashes, which I mitigated with estrogen tablets and patches.

I powered through hot flashes, even though they took a toll on me

My hot flashes were a slow build that would start with a sudden panic. I'd feel pressure in my abdomen and chest that would take my breath away.

I'd keep getting warmer and warmer to the point where my cheeks would get red, and sweat would leak out all over my body.

It didn't matter if it was snowing outside or freezing inside; for 30 seconds to up to three minutes, I'd be drenched in sweat, and my heart would race.

I was open with my coworkers about what I was going through, and that was helpful

I worked alongside many women. I would often turn to them for advice on my symptoms, and they helped me feel empowered and supported.

At work, I tried a menagerie of things to help combat my symptoms, from drinking iced water, eating straight ice, and bringing in my own fan for my desk, to taking a walk on a break while talking to my mom, who always helped me work through anxiety and fear.

I was so self-conscious about the weight gain. I started wearing larger scrubs so that I could conceal some of the changes, but there were also days when wearing scrubs wasn't an option, like when meeting new patients or traveling from office to office.

Given that my job was very patient-centric, back-to-back interactions dominated most of my day. On days when I wasn't feeling great, I knew I could share with my colleagues that I "needed a minute," and they would step in immediately to offer their support.

A lot of my coworkers and I were the same age, but our bodies were different

My coworkers and I were all in our mid-30s, yet our bodies were so different. Although they never made me feel that difference, it was hard for me to ignore.

I often had to remind myself of why I made the decision to get a hysterectomy. It was saving me from decades of severe pain, even though it was forcing me to come to terms with a new version of myself I wasn't ready for.

I was most shocked at how long my menopause journey lasted

I experienced menopause symptoms for roughly 17 years. The weight gain and hot flashes were one thing, but the anxiety continued to escalate. I was not prepared for how it seemed to overtake my life seemingly overnight.

All these changes, coupled with the pressure of my role as a mother and wife, left me feeling resentful and short-tempered. It was hard to sleep more than a few hours at night.

I tried to mask my symptoms as much as possible

I was so uncomfortable all the time because of these changes. I didn't want others to see me as weak or different, or to judge me.

Additionally, I was caring for people every day who were going through journeys far worse than my own. I had three children, and I was taking care of people who would do anything just for the ability to have one. I wanted to be strong for them.

After 10 years in this fertility practice, I transitioned into benefits management with Progyny, a fertility, family building, and women's health benefits company, as a clinical educator and patient care advocate. When I started working at this new job, just after I turned 40, everything began shifting dramatically.

My menopause symptoms reached their peak

In 2018, my body played every trick known to man on me. I was averaging about three to four hours of broken sleep a night. My diet didn't change, but I felt like I had gained 10-15 pounds overnight.

My anxiety spiked even further. I felt the brunt of it in the evening and the night.

The weight of fear, worry, guilt, and shame would overcome me, and my thoughts would race during the hours I was supposed to be relaxing and resting. To top this off, my libido vanished, and the short temper I mentioned previously turned into straight anger.

I also experienced a crippling loss. My sweet mother, who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer only a year before, succumbed to her disease. This devastation wrecked any stability I had left of my mental state.

My job had benefits that were very helpful

I was now working from home, so I no longer had to commute up to three hours round-trip to work or be in the clinic.

This also meant I didn't have to mask my symptoms from colleagues and patients, but it began affecting my family and loved ones. My "mask" that I could keep while I was a nurse fully came off.

To distract myself and shield my husband and children from the person I had become, I threw myself into work. It was the only place I felt any sense of control. My family knew how much I was suffering, and my husband was very helpful.

My new role focused on helping companies offer fertility, family building, and women's health benefits to their employees. Through my work there, I stumbled on a breakthrough.

My insurance offered me specific coverage

At my new job, I was helping develop a menopause-specific benefit. I was both shocked and elated to learn that menopause-certified clinicians were available through a new digital health platform.

I thought about how incredible it would be for women to access this type of coverage, regardless of how their menopause stories unfolded. As soon as the product went live, I made my first appointment with a menopause specialist.

I cannot describe how life-changing that appointment was for me

The nurse practitioner listened intently as I described my symptoms, as well as the misery and isolation I had felt several years prior. Every aspect of my health was carefully considered, and I received proper, focused care.

After three new medications, I was able to sleep eight hours again. I lost 25 pounds, all while maintaining balanced hormones and a balanced diet. I still have anxiety from time to time, but it no longer weighs me down. I'll spare you the details, but my libido once again exists.

The most important thing an employer can do for its female population is to acknowledge the unique healthcare challenges that women face and be proactive by offering access to this specific type of care. That, and an empathetic ear, will go a long way for the women of their organizations.

Menopause can feel like you're being introduced to somebody that you do not know, which can upend your life, in and out of work. I wish I had known at 29 to advocate for myself, and that eventually things would get better.

• Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen said data labeling is much more creative than it gets credit for.
• "I think a lot about what we're doing as a lot more like raising a child," Chen recently told "Lenny's Podcast."
• Surge AI is one of the larger startups competing to help train leading AI models.

It could be easy to dismiss the work data-labeling firms do. Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen said that could stem from misunderstanding what they do.

"I think a lot of people think of data labeling as it relates to simplistic work, like labeling cat photos and drawing boundary marks around cars," Chen told Lenny Rachitsky on his "Lenny podcast."

Chen, who previously worked at Google, Twitter, and Meta, said that he's "always hated the word data labeling."

"Because it just paints this very simplistic picture when I think what we're doing is completely different," he said.

Surge AI, which Chen founded in 2020, competes in the AI data labeling space with companies like Scale AI and Mercor. Surge also has a partnership with Anthropic and also runs DataAnnotation.tech, where freelancers can sign up to get paid for training AI models. These remote workers are often referred to as "ghost workers" for their behind-the-scenes labor that is critical to AI's development.

Beyond any rote work it can entail, Chen said data labeling is a much more creative endeavor. He compared what companies like Surge do to how parents instill lifelong values in their children.

"I think a lot about what we're doing as a lot more like raising a child," he said. "You don't just feed a child information. You're teaching them values, and creativity, and what's beautiful, and these infinite subtle things about what makes somebody a good person."

In this way, Chen said, companies like Surge AI are "raising humanity's children."

Chen's view can also be seen when you navigate to Surge's website, which greets visitors with the question: "What made Hemingway, Kahlo, and von Neumann extraordinary?"

"Their life experiences: war, love, triumph, loss. The people they met, the cities they explored, the thousand choices that made them who they were," the website reads. "Data does for AI what life did for them — transforming it into intelligence that could one day prove the Riemann hypothesis, imagine new philosophies, and send rockets to the stars."

'You don't need to become someone you're not'

Chen previously worked in Big Tech at companies including Twitter, Google, and Facebook — and you might remember one of his Twitter projects.

While at the company, roughly a decade before Elon Musk would acquire it, Chen became known for making the "Pop vs. Soda" map by geo-tagging data from tweets around the US to illustrate which word users used to refer to soft drinks.

Looking back at starting Surge AI, Chen said he was surprised to find out that he never had to stop burying his head in the data.

"I thought if I started a company, I'd have to become a business person looking at financials all day, and being in meetings all day, and doing all this stuff that sounded incredibly boring, and I always hated," he told Rachitsky. "So, I think it's crazy that didn't end up being true at all."

Chen said he wishes he had known that you don't need to spend "constantly tweeting and hyping and fundraising."

"You don't need to become someone you're not," he said. "You can actually build a successful company by simply building something so good that it cuts through all that noise. And I think if I had known this was possible, I would've started even sooner."

Do you work in data labeling? Contact the reporter from a non-work email and device at bgriffiths@businessinsider.com.

• Modular aims to break Nvidia's dominance in AI chips with a new portable software stack.
• The startup's platform lets AI models run on different GPUs, not just Nvidia's.
• Modular CEO Chris Lattner helped bring Google TPUs to market, with cofounder Tim Davis.

In Silicon Valley, where bold technical bets abound, few bets look bolder than trying to break the grip of Nvidia's CUDA, a software stack that's quietly become the operating system of the AI boom.

That's what Modular, a startup founded by software gurus from Apple and Google, is trying to do.

Cofounders Chris Lattner and Tim Davis have spent decades building the software plumbing that sits beneath the modern tech industry. Lattner is famous for creating Apple's Swift programming language. He also built the software underpinning Google's TPU AI chips, with Modular cofounder Tim Davis.

They're now aiming that expertise at CUDA itself. The attempt borders on madness, but it's the kind of audacious project that could transform the AI industry.

"It's seen by a lot of people as somewhat crazy," said Kylan Gibbs, CEO of startup Inworld AI and a former product manager at Google DeepMind. "That's where Chris has the advantage: He's smart enough to actually know how to do it, and somewhat crazy enough to set out to do it."

CUDA entrenched. Competition fragmented.

CUDA began life almost 20 years ago as a way to make graphics chips programmable. Today, it has grown into a multilayered software ecosystem — language, libraries, compilers, inference systems — that most AI companies rely on.

That success comes at a cost: Most of the industry is now optimized around a single vendor's hardware. CUDA binds AI workloads to Nvidia GPUs. That is great for Nvidia, but deeply limiting for everyone else.

On the surface, there seems to be a ton of competition: AMD sells GPUs. Google has TPUs. Amazon created Trainium AI chips, and a host of startups are building similar hardware.

The problem is that each chip comes with its own software stack optimized just for that component. That means an endless reinvention of the wheel. Most of the time, it's simpler to just stick with CUDA — and Nvidia's GPUs.

And yet, AI developers crave portability: Being able to use any combination of GPUs from multiple providers without juggling different software stacks.

"Nobody is building portable stuff, because why would anyone work on software for more than one chip when the chip projects themselves are doing the software?" Lattner, Modular's CEO, told me in an interview.

Nvidia could extend CUDA to run well on rival AI chips. But doing so would undermine Nvidia's greatest moat: the closed-loop bond between its software and its chips. "Obviously, they don't want portability," he said.

Paradox = opportunity

For Lattner, this paradox presents a big opportunity.

"We realized there's nobody in the industry that's actually incentivized to do this. It's very expensive, very hard," he said. "And at the same time, everybody wants it."

That's what inspired Lattner and Davis to leave Google and start Modular in 2022, the year ChatGPT took the world by storm.

Since then, Modular has raised $380 million from investors including Greylock, General Catalyst, and GV, Google's venture capital arm. The latest financing in September valued the startup at $1.6 billion. Modular isn't the only effort to break the CUDA lock-in. There has been ZLUDA, an open-source project that was funded by AMD, and more recently, the startup Spectral Compute, which has raised $6 million.

Lattner has used some of this money to hire talented programmers from Google, Apple, and other tech companies. They spent three years working in relative obscurity to create the building blocks of a new AI software stack.

The new AI software stack

The foundation starts with a brand-new programming language, called Mojo, that offers deep controls for making AI chips run as efficiently as possible.

Modular designed this to work similarly to Python, a popular and easy-to-use programming language. But Mojo also has the speed and power of other, more complex languages, such as C++, that are essential for AI development. Mojo also works well with PyTorch, an open-source framework that is often used when building AI models and applications.

I first heard about Modular earlier this year when interviewing Carles Gelada, a former OpenAI researcher. "There are several interesting projects to create GPU-agnostic frameworks and platforms, and challenge CUDA," he said at the time. "Mojo is the most interesting one."

MAX is the next major layer of Modular's new software stack. It powers AI inference, which is how models are run. This part of the system works with Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPUs, and similar chips from Apple. Modular hopes to add more AI chips in the future.

On top of that is another layer called Mammoth, which helps AI developers manage GPU clusters.

In late September, Modular announced that it got top performance out of Nvidia's new Blackwell B200 GPUs and AMD's latest MI355X GPUs — crucially on the same software platform.

Lattner said Modular got these AMD GPUs to perform roughly 50% better than when these chips run on AMD's own software.

More importantly, the ability to run different GPUs on the same software stack now supports the tantalizing opportunity to compare Nvidia's offerings with rival AI chips on a more level playing field.

"The obvious question is: can MI355X compete with Blackwell?" Modular wrote in a blog announcing the results. "Early signs point to yes."

A customer test

Gibbs, the CEO of Inworld AI, has been putting Modular's software through its paces in the real world.

Inworld builds high-speed, real-time conversational AI technology that supports offerings from big companies, including Disney, NBCUniversal, and Niantic Labs.

Earlier this year, when the startup designed a new text-to-speech AI model and got early access to Nvidia B200 GPUs, they issued Modular a challenge: Cut our costs by 60% and reduce our latency by 40% and we'll work with you.

"Within about four weeks, we were able to get this incredible performance," said Gibbs, who signed a partnership deal with Modular soon after. "I've bet with my wallet."

While Inworld was mostly lured by Modular's performance gains on Nvidia's latest GPUs, Gibbs likes the flexibility of using different AI chips more easily in the future, if needed.

"The promise is that we'd be able to move to new hardware," he said. "Let's say AMD takes off, let's say TPUs take off for Google, or there could be other new hardware that comes online. So it's nice to have that optionality."

'Nvidia doesn't have to die'

In fact, Google's TPUs are suddenly having a moment. The internet giant released a new AI model called Gemini 3 to rave reviews recently. That was trained and run using TPUs, and some other AI companies have signed deals to use these chips instead of, or alongside of, Nvidia GPUs.

That's put Nvidia on the defensive. A project like Modular, with its promise of portability across different AI hardware, adds to this pressure.

"Nvidia could kill this in a day," said Gibbs of the Modular project. "Nvidia could basically say, 'okay, we don't really care that you run just on Nvidia hardware. Here's a CUDA option that runs on AMD GPUs as well.' It'd be a bit crazy for them to do that, but it's something they could do and that would of course be somewhat bad."

For all Lattner's critique of the industry, he says Modular is not trying to kill Nvidia. In fact, he argues that Nvidia will continue to thrive, even if Modular succeeds spectacularly.

"We're trying to build something like Android, but for AI hardware," he told me, referring to Google's mobile operating system that powers most of the world's smartphones.

Despite billions of people using Android devices, this success didn't kill iOS, Apple's mobile operating system. iPhones still rule in the US, for example.

Lattner thinks something similar will happen in AI as Modular's software makes other hardware more competitive, giving developers more freedom, and chipping away at the industry's single-vendor monoculture.

"So Nvidia doesn't have to die, but we do want more competition. We do want more innovation," he said. "I think that's good for the world."

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

• EQT is the world's second-largest private equity firm, but it's not a household name in the US.
• Peter Aliprantis, EQT's US private wealth head, aims to change that and attract affluent investors.
• He walked BI through the firm's plans to win over retail investors and why it's grown so much.

EQT is one of the largest private equity investors in the world — yet most wealthy Americans have barely heard of it. That's the uphill battle facing Peter Aliprantis, the Swedish firm's head of private wealth in the Americas, as EQT tries to pitch in a market dominated by Wall Street brands with plenty of CNBC airtime.

"Most people in the United States are not familiar with us, and the way we say it, we're the best-kept secret," Aliprantis told Business Insider.

Private Equity International ranked the firm as the second-largest private equity firm, with $312 billion of assets under management. It raised more than $113 billion in third-party private equity capital from 2020 to the end of 2024, putting it ahead of Blackstone, and just behind KKR so far this decade.

Like many of its competitors, it's turning to private wealth as the newest source of growth. The industry's change of fundraising focus comes as private equity firms are slow to return cash to investors, and over-allocation among institutional investors means that institutional funding is slowing.

But the same reasons that the firm isn't as well-known in America are actually an advantage, Aliprantis said.

In a world where debt-heavy buyouts are proving more difficult and an increasingly concentrated American private market is pushing some to invest internationally, a global industrialist approach can be attractive.

EQT has returned capital at a normal pace, with $23 billion in distributions for the year ending June 2025. The firm has also been building a private wealth business for the past four years, which accounts for 10% of its current assets. The firm has a goal to reach between 15-20% during its current $100 billion fundraising cycle, according to its second-quarter report.

Aliprantis walked Business Insider through the firm's pitch to financial advisors and private wealth distribution networks, explaining why its global reach is a significant advantage in 2025.

The key for EQT, Aliprantis said, is for the firm to offer individual investors the "exact same deals" it gives institutional investors.

EQT's industrialist, international advantage

EQT was founded in 1994 as a spin-off from industrial holding company Investor AB, but the firm's history stretches back to Sweden's Wallenberg family. The Wallenbergs, called the "Rockefellers of Europe," have created an empire of business holdings including massive stakes in Sweden's biggest firms, like ABB, AstraZeneca, or Saab.

"The Wallenberg family has a 160-year heritage of owning and developing companies," Aliprantis said. "We're not financial engineers. We don't add a lot of leverage to what we do, and we're very, very different from what a lot of our peers on Wall Street are doing."

Aliprantis's comments echo a larger change in the industry, which is running out of easy money-making deals and cheap financing and now has to extract returns by actually building stronger companies.

But the firm's biggest advantage, Aliprantis said, is its global nature.

Only 35% of its assets are based in North America, and the firm has 26 global offices where its deal teams invest in local private equity, infrastructure, and real estate deals.

"A lot of our colleagues based in New York will fly deal team partners over to different places around the world to do the deal and then get on a plan and fly home," Aliprantis said. "Our deal teams are pretty much based in the locations where they do deals."

This means the firm "gets the call" when local companies are looking to sell, and keeps them from larger "bake-offs" where the price might be bid-up.

This has also meant the firm can continue to provide distributions to its clients even if the market is slow in one locale.

"If you're a US-based domicile private markets firm that has 70 to 80% of your assets in the US, guess what? If the US IPO market is slowing, you're going to have a problem exiting," Aliprantis said.

"Here in the US, it's always been too much money chasing too few deals. You know what? That's a US thing," Aliprantis said." If you go to Europe and you go to Asia, it's the opposite."

For example, Bain estimates there's about $480 billion in dry powder for European private funds, including venture capital, compared to Pitchbook's $914.5 billion for US-focused private equity firms, not including VC. Apollo's Marc Rowan also recently told the Wall Street Journal that as an industry, they find themselves short ideas rather than capital.

Aliprantis said investors' biggest reason to diversify away from the US market is its concentrated bet on AI.

"Their concern is that the Mag Seven is roughly 37% of the S&P right now, and valuations are stretched," Aliprantis said. "Is AI really going to work? Is it not? How additive is it going to be to the bottom line? We don't know."

How to keep retail investors happy

Across the spectrum, Aliprantis said, the "biggest concern" is that retail investors are getting a set of less attractive deals, while institutional investors are getting a "separate set of deals."

Aliprantis said that the firm's six evergreen vehicles are composed of the "exact same deals" that its institutional clients invest in.

The key to doing that, and to being a responsible investor or retail capital, is "size and scale," Aliprantis said.

Size also helps with the balance sheet necessary to launch a private wealth business. It can cost millions of dollars to hire the necessary staff to start selling to financial advisors and other wealth management channels before any revenue is returned to investors.

EQT was able to use its balance sheet, as a public company in Sweden, to build its private wealth team and now has 70 private wealth professionals globally, with 20 based in the US.

That's not to say that smaller funds won't succeed, but it will be much harder, Aliprantis said. With so many investors competing for retail capital, consolidation is inevitable.

"The race is on in the industry right now," Aliprantis said.

This summer, after Meta made a $14 billion investment in Scale AI and poached its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, and after A-list clients like OpenAI and Google halted work with the startup, a worker for Scale AI anxiously asked ChatGPT what it thought of his company's fate. He knew the chatbot well, having tested it for vulnerabilities. Its prognosis was grim.

"Scale AI will no longer exist as a credible independent entity within 24 months," ChatGPT, which isn't any kind of official authority, wrote. "Its infrastructure will be repurposed for Meta's internal needs. Its client base will evaporate. Its role as a neutral red teamer or external evaluator is effectively over."

The contractor shared the chat logs with fellow workers at Scale AI. In one reply reviewed by Business Insider, one worker said that they were already on their way out, describing the startup as a ticking time bomb.

The chatbot was drawing from a storm of headlines about Scale AI, which until this summer had been touted as one of the most ascendant startups in tech — the place Big Tech companies vying for AI supremacy went to when they wanted their chatbots stress-tested and perfected. Lately, it's lost some of its gleam, with investors significantly lowering valuations, workers sniping about pay, and rivals coming for its clientele.

The vast army of human data labelers that made Scale AI a juggernaut are chafing at what they say are pay cuts, lengthy unpaid onboarding sessions to join new AI projects, and thinning workloads — and are increasingly leaving the platform altogether, according to interviews with five current and former contractors and internal correspondence obtained by Business Insider.

Activity in the main internal chatroom for Outlier — Scale AI's flagship gig work platform, which touts more than 100,000 taskers — has plummeted since the Meta investment, with weekly discussion threads drawing dozens instead of the usual hundreds of replies, according to screenshots reviewed by Business Insider.

One tasker said that they'd spent close to 40 hours in a single month in unpaid onboarding sessions without landing any actual work, noting that other platforms like Scale AI's rival Mercor do pay for this kind of work. Elizabeth Boyd, another tasker, says she rarely does work for Outlier anymore after seeing effective pay rates for some projects slashed to around $20 an hour — down from the $50 she used to make. One gig that advertised $20 an hour only allowed three minutes of working time every two days, or a 99-cent payout, according to screenshots obtained by Business Insider.

Joe Osborne, a Scale AI spokesperson, says the balance sheets show the company is on the right path. "This quarter is on track to be our biggest of 2025, our data business is more profitable today than it was before the Meta deal, and our applications business, which includes work with Fortune 500 companies and governments, has doubled revenue" in the second half of the year compared to the first, Osborne wrote in an email. He also noted there has been an increase in active users on Outlier since the Meta deal, and that pay rates are based on the skills for each project and contributors always see the rates upfront, and have the option of declining any gig.

The company is also looking to diversify. The startup has embraced fields like robotics, announcing a new lab to meet booming demand for robot training data this fall. It's doubling down on its US military and other government work, winning up to $199 million worth of defense contracts since the Meta deal.

Some investors are bullish. In one current investor's view, Meta has mostly left Scale alone, letting it operate as an independent company. With around $1 billion on the balance sheet, the investor added, there are no plans to fundraise. And an IPO could still be on the table at some point.

Other investors see Scale AI as more like a gutted fish. The Meta investment — which valued Scale AI at $29 billion — has dented Scale AI's valuation in private markets where people buy and sell equity from pre-IPO startups. Noel Moldvai, Augment's CEO, tells Business Insider his platform used to process millions of dollars' worth of transactions in Scale AI stock before the Meta deal, but that dried up as sellers waited to see if the startup rebounded. Activity is picking up again, he said, but at lower valuations of around $15 billion to $9 billion. The underlying message of Meta's semi-acquisition is clear to Moldvai. "It seems like Meta was just after Alexandr Wang, and so this is probably the structure that let them get him," he says. He adds that Scale AI's valuation could still bounce back.

On another marketplace, Caplight, Scale's valuation has dropped to $7.3 billion. Osborne says that the valuation is not accurate because there have been no sales of stock at that price and multiples of comparable companies would yield a higher valuation.

If the company doesn't pull it off, it could become the latest example of a once-promising startup that morphed into a "zombie" after being invested in by a tech giant.

This summer, Scale AI painted a rosy picture of the Meta investment, describing it as a major cash infusion and source of future work in its official statement at the time of the deal. That messaging was also conveyed to the startup's corporate workforce, says another former member of Scale AI's red team, which tests chatbots for flaws and vulnerabilities. Just a few weeks after the investment, he was laid off as part of a major downsizing that saw 14% of Scale AI's full-time staff of 1,400 let go.

Osborne said the layoffs were aimed at making the data division profitable, which it now is.

Those weren't the only cuts. In September, Scale AI terminated 12 contractors on its red team, citing performance issues. Two ex-red teamers told Business Insider that the team's work had been drying up since the Meta deal, blaming thinning workloads for the cuts. Later that month, Scale AI shuttered a team in Dallas of contractors focused on generalist AI work as it moved towards more specialized fields.

Osborne said the 12 contractors were part of Scale's temporary workforce and represented a small fraction of its overall red team, which the company is still committed to investing in. He said the Dallas cuts were part of an industry shift towards higher skilled work and represent a small fraction of its overall workforce.

Meanwhile, a swarm of AI training startups has rushed in to poach Scale AI's workers and clients. Some are now raising capital at soaring valuations. Surge AI hit a valuation of $24 billion while Mercor, which is run by three 22-year-olds, announced in October it had raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation.

Mercor has won at least one major AI training project from Meta, Scale AI's 49% shareholder. In September, Scale AI filed a lawsuit in California against Mercor alleging it hired one of its sales employees to poach its biggest customers, allegations Mercor denies.

Spam and low quality data became accepted as a cost of doing business.Tammy Hartline, a former Scale AI consultant who now works at Mercor.

One Scale AI investor said he'd been frustrated with Scale AI's leadership losing customers to Surge AI in particular, which reportedly brought in more revenue than Scale in 2024, despite never having raised outside funding. (Scale AI had raised more than $1.5 billion before the Meta deal.)

Brendan Foody, Mercor's CEO, has publicly criticized Scale AI for what he claims are low pay rates and data quality issues. "Scale lost the focus on product, on scaling quality," Foody said in a September podcast appearance. In response, a Scale AI spokesperson told Business Insider its quality metrics are at "record highs."

It's not just rival CEOs making that point. Tammy Hartline, who managed projects for Scale AI as a consultant until the summer of 2025, said Scale grew so quickly that the work became more about needing bodies than skills. "Spam and low quality data became accepted as a cost of doing business," she said. Hartline joined Mercor in September.

Scale AI has also been beset with security issues that predate Meta's investment. In June, Business Insider reported that Scale AI routinely used public Google Docs to track work for high-profile customers, including Google, Meta, and xAI. That practice left AI training documents labeled "confidential" accessible to anyone with the link and exposed reams of personal information, like private emails and pay details, about contractors. "We take data security seriously," Osborne said. "We conducted a thorough investigation and disabled any user's ability to publicly share documents from Scale managed systems."

Sloppy security isn't uncommon in the AI training space — Surge AI similarly left open sensitive work for its client Anthropic. But the exposed documents seen by Business Insider show that for a project for Google, Scale AI faced security and quality issues throughout 2023 and 2024. Thousands of taskers were flagged for being "suspected spammers," "cheaters," with hundreds of workers listed in spreadsheets with titles like "Good and Bad Folks" and "suspicious non-US taskers." Meta recently removed more than 40 groups buying and reselling AI training accounts, including from Scale AI, in response to a recent Business Insider investigation. Osborne said Scale's data quality metrics are the highest they've ever been.

The company has notched some recent wins. It once appeared bogged down by litigation, but recently agreed to settle multiple lawsuits filed by ex-workers in California who alleged they were underpaid and misclassified as contractors. (Scale no longer accepts gig workers from the state.) The big question remains whether Scale AI can thrive in the increasingly competitive AI training industry it helped give birth to. For many former workers, it'll be too late to find out.

Charles Rollet is Business Insider's tech correspondent in San Francisco. Ben Bergman is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where he investigates the tech industry with a focus on venture capital and startups.

Last month, "Walk My Walk" hit number one on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart. The moody stomp-clap tune, with lyrics like "Every scar's a story that I survived, I've been through hell, but I'm still alive," has been played more than 8 million times on Spotify. The song wasn't performed by a human artist — Breaking Rust, despite having the face of a handsome, rugged man in a cowboy hat on its Spotify profile, is an AI project. But there is a real person claiming that Breaking Rust's work is a copycat: Blanco Brown, an artist who mixes country and rap together, who claims the song's creator used AI to emulate his style. The person behind Breaking Rust did not respond to a message I sent asking about the origin of the sound.

It's the latest example of ways that AI-generated music, with its opaque origins, can create confusion around who really made a song just as easily as it can create a hit. AI-generated music that sounds a lot like your faves but was made with a few prompts has been going viral, spreading far and wide and more quickly than music labels can always have it removed.

When some of the first AI-generated tracks started racking up listens two years ago, music labels went to battle, threatening and filing legal action to stop AI generators from training on and using their artists' voices and music stylings. Universal Music Group (UMG) pushed to have a YouTube video where Eminem's voice rapped about cats taken down. Spotify removed AI slop songs that were listened to by bots to reap the streaming earning pool, and UMG also got streaming platforms to remove a viral "Drake" song that wasn't by Drake and The Weeknd at all, but a song written by Ghostwriter, an anonymous artist that uses AI to produce music and appears publicly only when cloaked in white and dark glasses.

Now, the labels are starting to drop their fists and shake hands with AI music generators.

Warner Music Group announced last month it had settled a lawsuit against AI music generator Suno (a test of the service by plaintiffs in the suit found that Suno would churn out works similar to ABBA and Chuck Berry when prompted in their style) and entered into a partnership with the company. Robert Kyncl, CEO of WMG, called it "a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone." The announcement came just weeks after UMG, the world's largest record label, settled its copyright infringement lawsuit with AI music generator Udio, and said the two have partnered to create a new subscription service, slated to launch next year, run on gen AI and licensed music from the label's artists.

Every minute that is spent listening to a generative AI track is a minute less spent listening to an artist track.Mark Mulligan, founder and senior music analyst at research firm MIDiA

AI companies face a litany of lawsuits after using copyrighted material to train their models. The battle is playing out in Hollywood, the news industry, and in visual arts — the music industry is the latest to decide it might be better to play nice with AI than continue a prickly, drawn out court battle when their rights sit in a gray area. "AI is here to stay, it's transformative," Chris Wares, assistant chair of the Music Business Department at Berklee College of Music. The record labels, he says, are "futureproofing themselves."

The proliferation of AI-generated voices and music stylings has sent a flood of new songs — some good, many uncatchy slop — onto streaming platforms and social media. There are more than 100 million songs on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp, and many are rarely or never played. Deezer, a French streaming platform, said in April that people were uploading some 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks each day, comprising nearly a fifth of all new content. As more playlists and artists making gen AI music are uploaded, human artists must fight for your ears. In July, a group called The Velvet Sundown rapidly racked up 1 million listens on two albums, something that many indie bands struggle to do on streaming platforms — but the photos of the band on social media are AI generated, and the real person or people behind the project remain unknown. In November, Billboard identified at least six AI or AI-assisted songs that had climbed onto its various charts. Amid the deluge, Spotify updated its impersonation policy in September, saying it would remove songs that featured the unauthorized use of someone's voice.

If someone makes a banger AI cover song or viral mashup, like reuniting Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham for a new Fleetwood Mac album or squashing the beef between Kendrick and Drake in a generated collaboration, the novelty factor could drive listening numbers that cut into original work from those artists. But the aim of these partnerships is to create new revenue streams for artists. The Warner deal stipulates that Suno will allow only paid accounts to download generated audio, and says artists must opt-in to having their names, voices, compositions, and likeness regenerated. In an industry where streaming has dramatically reduced royalties, that could be a boost — if fans make music of their faves, it could lead to passive income for the musicians. But that also means the artists' original works will be competing for ears against derivatives of themselves not just for your ears, but for streaming dollars.

"The reason why no generative AI music can be artist-first is because we are in a finite attention economy. Every minute that is spent listening to a generative AI track is a minute less spent listening to an artist track," Mark Mulligan, founder and senior music analyst at research firm MIDiA says. "We are definitely in a world now where more and more consumers are creating, and that is competing with entertainment time."

Part of that creative process may draw us back to older roots in how people interact with music. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, music was communal. People played it together and used it to pass down stories. With recording technology and radios, music became widely distributed, which "created this moat between artist and fan," Mulligan says. "We got to this idea that music is a creative full stop, and that the audience doesn't help shape what the music is apart from when you go and see the band play live." But now, AI tools are becoming the ultimate form of fan expression. "We're widening the funnel of creativity," says Mulligan.

That's if artists authorize their voices to be used by the platforms. Some forward-thinking musicians, like Grimes, have already made clones of their voices and invited listeners to experiment. It's less clear if your typical popstar will OK the use of their voice to sing words they haven't seen, and if the potential new revenue streams of such an experiment would prove worth the risk. On Friday, Brown released a "trailertrap" remix of "Walk My Walk," a sort of taking back of his own style after seeing it emulated. So far, it has just 2,000 streams. "If someone is going to sing like me, it should be me," Brown told the Associated Press last month. Going forward, it will likely take more than one listen to know if the music we hear is performed by the artists we've come to love.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Pinterest did a vibe check of the internet in 2026.
• Its annual Pinterest Predicts report identified 21 trends the company says will be hot next year.
• Mismatched beauty, nostalgic toys, and an obsession with cabbage are just a few of them.

Pinterest did a pulse check on the internet's 2026 mood. It predicts glamorous, glittery fashion will return, layered scents will be popular, and people might just develop an obsession with cabbage.

The San Francisco-headquartered company released its annual "Pinterest Predicts" report on Tuesday. It said it analyzed "billions of Pinterest searches and the visual content Pinterest users are engaging with," which helped it uncover emerging words, colors, styles, and aesthetics.

"With a boost from machine learning, our trend experts find patterns by combining data insights with real-world observations," the report said.

The company predicts that 21 trends will be hot globally in 2026.

Take a look at the top five in the US:

1. Cabbage Crush

The topic that Pinterest says will trend highest in the US in 2026 isn't a fashion or home decor trend — it's cabbage.

"In the year ahead, boomers and Gen X will say goodbye to their cauliflower obsession and crown cabbage the new kitchen champ," it wrote. "Think blistered-edge 'steaks', kimchi cocktails and even crispier taco wraps."

It said the search terms cabbage dumplings had risen 110% from September 2024 to August 2025 compared to the same period the year before, while Golumpki soup and cabbage Alfredo saw similar spikes.

This falls right in line with one of 2025's top diet trends, "fibermaxxing," which stresses the importance of consuming enough fiber for heart and gut health.

2. Glitchy Glam

Second on the list is "Glitchy Glam," which refers to imperfect beauty. The report said that in 2026, "beauty is missing the mark — on purpose."

"Gen Z and millennials will rock mismatched manicures, two-toned lipstick, and bright eyeshadow in two binary hues. So long, symmetry," it wrote.

The search terms that led Pinterest to believe mismatched beauty would trend were "eccentric makeup," "weird makeup looks," "avant-garde makeup editorial," and "nails with different colors on each hand."

This marks a departure from the "clean girl" makeup trend that has reigned supreme on social media in recent years.

3. Throwback Kid

Pinterest says thrifting and parenting will remain top of mind in 2026.

The search terms "1970s childhood toys," "upcycled baby clothes," and "vintage kids fashion" had done well on Pinterest between September 2024 and August 2025, the report said.

"In 2026, childhood gets a throwback twist with vintage-inspired outfits, classic toys from the '60s and upcycled baby looks," it wrote. "Crocheted play mats will bring cosy vibes to any nursery, while baby boomers and Gen X will thrift mini fits."

4. Scent Stacking

Gen Z and millennials won't be satisfied with store-bought perfumes in 2026, Pinterest said.

"Gen Z and millennials are ditching one-and-done scents for bespoke notes, blending oils and perfumes to craft their very own fragrance formulas," it wrote in the report. "Expect luxury to linger in layers next year."

Pinterest said search terms pointing to this trend include "perfume layering combinations," "scent layering," and "niche perfume collection."

5. Extra Celestial

Lastly, Pinterest predicts that an "intergalactic" aesthetic will trend highly in the US, particularly among Gen Z and millennials.

"Think holographic home accents, opalescent eyeshadow that looks like moon dust, and cosmic silhouettes straight out of a sci-fi movie," the report said.

The search term "alien core aesthetic" increased by 80% between September 2024 and August 2025 compared to the same period in the previous year. Other trending search terms include "opalescent," "futuristic truck," and "soft dewy makeup."

Special mentions: Glamoratti, Pen Pals, and Gimme Gummy

Pinterest says 2026 is also set to be the year of "Glamoratti," which spells a return to loud, decadent, and maximalist fashion. Think chunky gold jewelry, funnel neck outfits, and tailored suits.

Another trend worth noting is "Pen Pals." This is a hobby-based trend that Pinterest says could lead to a resurgence of letter writing, as Gen Z and millennials grow tired of texting and social media.

And lastly, Pinterest coined "Gimme Gummy," an ASMR-loaded, gummy-bear aesthetic which is predicted to be hot in 2026. "Gimme Gummy" is characterized by "bendy phone cases," "3D jewelry," and "rubberized nail art."

Pinterest reported third-quarter revenue of $1.049 billion in November, representing a 17% increase compared to the same period the previous year. Its monthly active users increased by 12% compared to the previous year, reaching 600 million.

The company's stock is down about 6% since the start of the past year.

• Senior-level women say they're frequently burned out.
• The burnout level among these women is the highest it has been in the past five years, said a report from McKinsey and LeanIn.org.
• The report also found that women want promotion less than men — unless they receive the same support.

Women are hitting the top of the corporate ladder only to find something waiting for them: exhaustion.

According to a report published Tuesday by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, a nonprofit founded by Sheryl Sandberg, burnout among senior-level women is the highest it has been in the past five years.

Around 60% of these women said they have frequently felt burned out at work in the past few months, compared with 50% of senior-level men, per numbers from the "Women in the Workplace" 2025 study.

Women who are newer to leadership roles are feeling the strain more acutely. Among senior-level women who have been at their companies for five years or less, 70% reported frequent burnout, and 81% said they are concerned about their job security.

"These high levels of concern align with research that shows women often face extra scrutiny when they're new to organizations and have to work harder to prove themselves," the report said, adding that Black women in leadership face exceptionally high burnout and job insecurity. "In contrast, when women and men in leadership have longer tenures, their levels of burnout and job security are quite similar."

The report, an annual study of women in corporate America, surveyed 9,500 employees across 124 companies between July and August. The study also includes interviews with 62 HR executives and company-reported data from 124 organizations that together employ about 3 million people.

LeanIn.org launched a study with McKinsey in 2015 to track how women progress through the corporate pipeline and where companies fall short. The group is named after Sandberg's 2013 book "Lean In," which sparked a national debate about women's ambition, leadership, and workplace equality.

This year's findings paint a bleak picture for women at the top. Senior-level women who are hesitant to advance their careers say they see a steeper path forward compared to their male counterparts. Eleven percent of senior women who don't want to advance say they don't see a realistic route to promotion, compared with 3% of senior men. And 21% say more senior-level people look burned out or unhappy, nearly double the share of men who say the same.

It's not because women are less committed — the report found that women and men are equally locked in. What differs is the desire to keep climbing, per the report.

The data shows a clear ambition gap: 80% of women want to be promoted to the next level, compared with 86% of men. That gap is widest at the beginning and the top of the pipeline — 69% vs. 80% at the entry level, and 84% vs. 92% among senior leaders.

This is the first time in the report's 11-year history that women have shown lower interest in promotion than men, it said.

This gap in ambition to advance falls away "when women receive the same career support that men do," the report added. In other words, companies are responsible for creating the burnout problem for women.

"This is only happening in the companies that aren't doing the right thing when women get the full support and the same stretch opportunities. They're not leaning out at all," Sandberg said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg Television.

"What's happening is that women face more barriers at every level of the career," she added.

More companies are cutting back on DEI and support for women

Even as companies say they are committed to diversity and inclusion, at least one in six have reduced the teams or resources behind those efforts, the report said.

About 13% of employers have pulled back or eliminated women-focused career-development programs, and another 13% have cut formal sponsorship programs, which play a key role in helping employees advance, it added.

"Women overall are less likely to have sponsors — and this really matters. Employees with sponsors are promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without," the report said.

The report also found that companies are rolling back remote and flexible work options, which can hinder women's ability to stay and advance in their careers. One in four has scaled back remote or hybrid work arrangements, and 13% have reduced flexible working hours over the past year.

At the same time, the report said that women who work remotely most of the time are "less likely to have a sponsor and far less likely to have been promoted in the last two years than women who work mostly on-site." Meanwhile, men receive more similar levels of sponsorship and promotions regardless of their work arrangement.

At the entry level, a stage where advocacy and visibility are essential, women are also less likely than men to receive stretch assignments and other opportunities, the report added.

Last year, the "Women in the Workplace" study found that more women were advancing to senior leadership roles. By 2024, women held 29% of C-suite roles, up from 17% in 2015.

However, progress fades at the entry and management levels, per the report. "For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2018, 79 women were promoted. And this year, just 81 women were," it added.

• Rivian's CEO said the US needs a lot more affordable electric vehicles.
• He said there was a "shocking lack" of choices for EV buyers in the country, leading to low adoption.
• The carmaker is set to start production of the R2, a $45,000 SUV, which is its most affordable EV yet.

Rivian's CEO and founder, RJ Scaringe, said the US needs a lot more cheap electric vehicles.

Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Scaringe said a lack of choices was the reason for low EV penetration in the US.

He said that electric vehicle adoption in the US, at 8%, is significantly lower than in the rest of the world.

"I really think the constraint isn't the demand side, I think it's the supply side," Scaringe said. "I think there's a shocking lack of choice, that there are much better choices in Europe. And by far, there's the most choice in China."

He said that for consumers interested in EVs, there were "well under five great choices" at a price point close to the average price of a new car in the US.

He added that, within a price range of $50,000, there was only one compelling choice of EV: a Tesla. In October, Tesla unveiled its most affordable models to date: the $36,990 Model 3 Standard and the $39,990 Model Y Standard.

"And that's not a reflection of a healthy market with lots of choice," Scaringe said. "If you think of it as a consumer, you have 300 different internal combustion engine choices at that price or lower, and you have maybe one highly compelling EV choice."

Rivian is working to provide cheaper EV alternatives. It is gearing up to start production on its cheapest EV to date, the R2 model, a $45,000 SUV.

In the interview, Scaringe also said he agrees with the Trump administration's push to bring manufacturing back to the US.

"I think the push to industrialize in the United States is appropriate, and it's something we're very aligned with the administration on," he said.

The US EV industry comprises Rivian, Tesla, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, BMW, and Kia, among others.

Brands like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesla dominate the EV market in Europe. Chinese brands like BYD, NIO, and MG also sell on the continent.

Meanwhile, the EV industry in China is seeing fierce competition. BYD, Tesla's biggest global rival, saw its sales fall 12% in October compared to the same period a year earlier, as it faces a tough fight from local EV startups Xpeng, Nio, and Leapmotor.

Other players, such as smartphone manufacturer-turned EV maker Xiaomi, are also seeing success in the country with strong sales.

• Sequoia partners said they prioritize conviction over consensus in startup investment decisions.
• The firm uses a voting system to gauge conviction, valuing high variance in partner opinions.
• Sequoia trains junior investors to embrace risk to spot "outliers."

Sequoia's partners go into investment decision meetings to determine whether startups make the cut — and there's a system for striking gold, two partners said.

In an episode of the "Jack Altman" podcast released on Tuesday, Sequoia partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady shared how their team decides which startups get a cheque.

"We've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now," Grady said. "Our internal data shows that consensus versus non-consensus does not matter at all."

He added: "Presence of conviction is what matters."

The storied venture capital firm, based in Menlo Park, has invested in companies including Apple, Nvidia, Reddit, and SpaceX. Its more recent investments include prediction markets company Kalshi, and the legal tech startup Harvey.

Grady, who has been with the firm for nearly 19 years, explained that before a startup gets a yes or no, everyone on the team votes on a scale of one to 10. A score above six is considered "positive," and a score of four or below is considered "negative."

"If everybody's a six, probably shouldn't make the investment. It's consensus, but nobody has conviction," he said. "If three people are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment because the presence of the nines is a much more powerful signal than the presence of the ones."

Lin, who has been with the firm since 2010, said they follow this strategy because the firm is in the business of risk-taking.

"We need that volatility because the truth is not somewhere in the middle where everybody agrees," he said.

The partners said that they train their junior investors, who are historically "A+" students, to build a risk appetite.

"A lot of the people that join our team haven't had much failure, and we have to help them get comfortable with it because otherwise we're not going to get the outlier wins," Grady said.