Tag: News

• E. Gluck Corporation, the maker of Armitron watches, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• The decades-old company struggled as consumers shifted from traditional watches to smartwatches.
• Armitron has touted itself as the "official timekeeper" of the New York Yankees.

The decades-old watchmaker behind the "official" clock at the home of the New York Yankees filed for bankruptcy last week.

E. Gluck Corporation, the maker of the Armitron watch line and the manufacturer of timepieces for fashion brands like Anne Klein and Nine West, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Manhattan federal bankruptcy court last Monday.

The family-owned company, founded by late Holocaust survivor Eugen Gluck in 1956, said in legal filings that it has been squeezed as consumers have drifted away from traditional watches, thanks to the rise of smartwatches and other devices.

This financial strain, the watchmaker said, was compounded by its own failed expansion into the smartwatch accessories market.

At its peak, the New York-based company generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue through brand licensing deals as well as distribution to department stores, off-price retailers, club stores, and more, its chief financial officer, Adam Gelnick, said in court papers.

The company's website lists name brands like Juicy Couture and Vince Camuto among the labels it has worked with. A Google search shows Armitron watches can be purchased at places like Amazon, Walmart, and JCPenny, and tend to cost between $30 and $85.

"For many years, this mix created a stable and profitable foundation," wrote Glenick. "Yet, in recent years, management recognized that traditional watches were a mature, slow-growth category, increasingly pressured by shifts in consumer behavior and the rise of smart devices."

As of October 31, the company owed more than it was worth, with over $36 million in liabilities versus just under $36 million in assets, court documents show.

Over 30 years with the Yankees

The company's bankruptcy filings list the Yankees among its 20 largest creditors with unsecured claims. E. Gluck owes the Major League Baseball team $590,000 in contract damages, court papers said.

E. Gluck's ties to the Yankees stretch back decades. Armitron, the company's proprietary brand, has touted itself as the baseball team's "official timekeeper" since an Armitron clock has sat above the scoreboard at the Bronx's Yankee Stadium for more than 30 years.

Armitron has even previously produced Yankees-branded watches.

In a December 2024 post on the official Facebook page of the 27-time World Series champions, Armitron was described as "an Official timepiece of The New York Yankees."

Representatives for the Yankees did not respond to a request for comment by Business Insider for this story, nor did the bankruptcy attorney for E. Gluck.

Smartwatch bet backfires

In an effort to diversify its business, E. Gluck acquired WITHit in 2021, a company specializing in smartwatch and wearable tech accessories.

E. Gluck hoped that WITHit would help push the company into "faster-growing product categories," Glenick wrote in court papers.

However, the deal "did not deliver the benefits that management anticipated," wrote the CFO.

The smartwatch accessories market "proved more fragmented, competitive and difficult to scale than projected," Glenick wrote.

Sales fell, and margins were further eroded due to supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as tariffs and increased freight costs, Glenick wrote.

Through the Chapter 11 process, E. Gluck plans to shed "unfavorable service contracts" tied to the WITHit acquisition and "unwind operational redundancies that never integrated cleanly with the core watch business," Glenick wrote.

It was Friday afternoon, and I'd just hit send on my weekly report to Amazon's Retail vice presidents, detailing what the Global Merchandising team I'd created had accomplished that week.

I was 38, and the role — which oversaw standards, best practices, and technology for Amazon's 200+ site merchandisers — was the biggest of my life by far, one I'd been thrust into just three months after my arrival in Seattle and at Amazon.

I was thrilled (and a bit terrified) by the size of the opportunity, and threw myself into it. Two years in, my team had 18 sizable projects underway. We accomplished so much that documenting our progress in that weekly email took me hours — and yet in two years, I'd rarely received so much as a "thx" in return.

"At Amazon, silence from the top means you're doing a good job," a colleague reminded me, with rueful humor. She was right.

But the feedback vacuum made it increasingly difficult to know if I was fulfilling my mandate. Was I moving fast enough? Still aligned with their priorities? Anxiety filled the void. I pushed myself and my team harder and took on even more.

I'd once been someone with passions — yoga, reading, arthouse movies — but all of that had faded. When I did find time for something I enjoyed, I was distracted, worried that I'd miss an urgent email. It felt easier to stay vigilant at all times.

As I stared at my email that day, I thought, None of this actually matters — followed by the sense that I had to keep pushing forward anyway. That if I slowed down even a little, my career would collapse.

Later in the parking garage, I stared numbly at the car in front of me when it hit me: Is this what burnout feels like?

It was. I just hadn't realized it could happen to me.

I used to think burnout was for the weak

I was a naturally driven person who liked being busy; I thought burnout was for the weak. And at work, it was hard to distinguish between burning out and just keeping up. In school and at other jobs, I'd often wished that other people would think bigger and move faster; now I was surrounded by smart, fun, driven coworkers on that same wavelength. I rarely had a moment of boredom at Amazon, and I loved that.

But there was a dark side. Add in scarce resources, time pressure, and our inability to say no — to our bosses, to each other, and to ourselves — it was a recipe for exhaustion.

I'd been raised to believe I could do anything if I only tried hard enough. That worked out pretty well when it was roller skating or long division, but it started to work against me by high school. When I earned my first Cs, I saw it as a failure of willpower, not a sign that I had strengths and weaknesses like any other human.

I carried that harsh self-judgment through college and grad school and into the working world. My version of self-care was drinking white wine and shopping, which often drained me further.

When it dawned on me that I was burned out, I was finally able to face it. And over the next months, without ever saying a word about burnout to my boss or co-workers, I slowly pulled myself back to health.

Here's what I did to get there.

I practiced true self-care.

Shopping is fun, but what I really needed were things like sleep and food. I started reading novels before bed instead of emails. I made a point of eating lunch every day, even if it was at my desk. Occasionally, I snuck out for a short walk around the block. The views and movement left me calmer.

I waited for my gentler lifestyle to blow up in my face — all that time working at a frantic pace had convinced me that slowing down would backfire terribly. But nothing happened. It didn't seem like anyone at work even noticed, though my husband and dog did, and I even passed the occasional coworker on a walk outside the building.

The stories I'd told myself about being "found out" hadn't been based in reality.

I learned to say no.

I couldn't change Amazon's culture of overwork, but I could dial back some of the work I volunteered for to be helpful and prove my worth.

I was someone who'd rarely turned down ad hoc committees or mentorship requests, especially when it could help elevate women. But those "after-school" assignments did little to advance my career. At performance review time, all that really mattered was what I'd done to grow the business.

I decided that unless an opportunity offered a clear benefit not just to Amazon but to me —or unless it was important to my boss, whom I trusted — I'd turn it down. I felt like a selfish jerk at first, but once again, the sky didn't fall. People simply moved to the next candidate on the list.

When I did say yes, I was more engaged and effective, sitting in hiring loops for teams I was curious about and joining occasional projects to work alongside former colleagues. Fun counts as a benefit, and pleasure helps cure burnout.

A day where I laughed a lot, did work that fascinated me, or simply learned something new was a day where I got something instead of just giving.

I became a beginner again.

A fear of embarrassment or failure at work meant I was always ready with a fast response to any executive's question, but it also kept me from challenging myself in new ways.

To keep stakes low, I began looking for modest challenges outside work that I could squeeze into small pockets of time, like learning to solve British-style crosswords or making a soufflé. Later, I added Italian lessons, trained for a half-marathon, and joined the board of a local nonprofit serving prison inmates.

My "electives," as I thought of them, became a safe place to make and learn from rookie errors, reminding me that being a beginner is exhilarating — and that I was more than just my job.

I got help from a pro.

I found a therapist who specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy who showed me how to distinguish between passing thoughts and objective reality.

When I thought, "If I say no to this project, someone will think I'm lazy," I learned to ask questions: Did I have evidence of that happening in the past? How about evidence of saying no and still being respected? If someone did think I was lazy, how might I cope? What would I say to a friend with the same worry?

I still experienced panicky feelings, but I stopped mistaking them for facts.

Recovering from burnout wasn't a perfect process

My comeback from burnout was imperfect and sometimes halting. At times, it scared me to feel calm and well, so I'd dive back into frantic overwork — only to learn all over again that I wasn't more effective that way, just busier.

I never worked up the courage to talk to my managers or peers about burnout, even though signs of it were everywhere. In a culture where exhaustion and overwork were worn as badges of honor, I feared that even broaching the topic would mark me as lazy or weak. As a leader, I wish I'd had the courage to push for a broader dialogue about burnout, but I also understand why it didn't feel safe.

I have 2 tips for people facing burnout

In an era of mass layoffs, I hear from tech workers who feel pushed to work harder and longer than ever before to avoid losing their jobs. They know they need to pull back, but they're afraid.

I have two pieces of advice for people in that situation. The first is to recognize that pushing through burnout won't make you better at your job. The numb, frightened, sleepless version of you can't fire on all cylinders, which could put your job at risk.

Prioritizing your own basic needs can be scary, but it's critical.

Second, understand that small steps matter. Maybe you're not in a position to turn down extra assignments; maybe the thought of adding an Italian class or half-marathon to your life makes you laugh hysterically to keep from crying.

But you can make sure to eat lunch. You can carve out a three-minute breathing space to calm your nervous system. (No one can find you in a restroom stall.) You can run modest experiments, like closing your email after a certain time in the evening, just to see how it goes.

Pick something to try, and once it becomes a habit, add something else. The benefits will slowly accumulate, and you'll begin to recognize yourself again.

Amazon did not provide a comment for this story.

Kristi Coulter spent 12 years at Amazon and left in 2018. She's the author of "Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career" and "Nothing Good Can Come From This."

• "YOLO" is making a comeback. This time, it's shaping the AI industry.
• The term has been used to describe huge investments and fast-moving AI development.
• That YOLO culture presents a risk for a technology that can have far-reaching implications.

The term "YOLO" was cool once, made so in 2011 by Drake in his hit song, "The Motto." Then it slipped into the domain of the unhip and out-of-touch.

Well, it's now back.

This time, it's being used by the AI vanguard to describe the state of the industry, which is a tad worrying to those concerned about AI's far-reaching implications for the world.

Last week, at The New York Times DealBook Summit, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took a dig at his competitors, like OpenAI and Meta, when he said, "There are some players who are YOLO-ing, who pull the risk dial too far, and I'm very concerned." In other words, their approach to developing AI models is more reckless than rigorous.

Anthropic, he said, is trying to manage its growth as "responsibly as we can."

The term is being used by AI researchers, too.

Jason Wei, a researcher at Meta, wrote on X that one of the great skills he's seen is "yolo runs" — a sort of instinctive flow state where a researcher or developer throws caution to the wind.

In a "yolo run," he said, a researcher "directly implements an ambitious new model without extensively de-risking individual components. The researcher doing the yolo run relies primarily on intuition to set hyperparameter values, decide what parts of the model matter, and anticipate potential problems. These choices are non-obvious to everyone else on the team."

This approach contrasts with the traditional research approach to carefully change one thing at a time, he added.

During a discussion at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, which seeks to understand the impacts of technology, Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain used the term to describe the AI industry's current approach.

Zittrain said the "YOLO model" is driven by founders and VCs who will try anything quickly: Launch an idea, see if it sticks, and if the company collapses, just move on to the next startup. If it succeeds, he said, they cash in.

The resurgence of the term highlights a growing tension between the AI industry's full-throttle race to build ever-larger and smarter models and the more safety-minded voices urging caution.

On the one hand, competition is fierce in the AI industry, with tech giants issuing "code reds" to their teams every time a competitor launches a successful new model. And the money is flowing. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all logged record-breaking capital expenditures on AI chips, servers, and data centers this quarter. The scale of AI spending pushed the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to record highs in recent weeks.

At the same time, others warn this sort of YOLO culture ignores AI's potential threats — anything from misuse by bad actors to unintended AI model behavior.

AI "godfather" Geoffrey Hinton said in a conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders at Georgetown University last month that the rapid development of AI could spark mass unemployment, deepen inequality, and even change the nature of human relationships.

An analysis conducted by AlphaSense found that 418 publicly traded companies valued at more than $1 billion have cited AI as a risk to their reputations and security in reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Many companies have also been slow to implement AI ethics officers and governance experts in their rush to make productivity gains.

As the "YOLO" mindset takes root in the AI industry, Zittrain asked: "Is that an OK model of development for this possibly transformative tech?"

• OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair said the key to a small and efficient team was not hiring middle managers.
• She only hires senior and junior talent in the company, which has a lean team of 42 full-time staff.
• In recent years, Big Tech has endured the "great flattening," a rapid culling of middle management roles.

The CEO of OnlyFans has a rule on how to rake in big bucks with a tiny team: don't hire middle managers.

Keily Blair, OnlyFans' chief executive, spoke with Jeff Berman, the host of the Masters of Scale podcast, during the November Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon.

Blair said in the interview that OnlyFans, a subscription-based content platform founded in 2016, has only 42 full-time employees.

Berman chimed in, saying that it was "very powerful" that the company was making $7 billion in annual revenue with such a lean team. Blair said she was proud of her team, which she called a "pretty efficient bunch."

The key to this, she said, was to eliminate middle management roles in the company.

"So we hire incredibly senior talent, and then we hire incredibly hungry junior talent, and we look for attitude and aptitude in hiring rather than experience," she said.

"And we do not have that sort of squidgy layer of middle management in the middle, because nobody's ever had a really good middle manager in my experience," Blair added.

She said that leaders in big companies are often judged by the number of people reporting to them, a concept she did not agree with.

"We've said to our teams, 'You can be a team of one and deliver exceptional results, and that will be so valued,'" she said. She added that there is no "manager track" for her staff's career progression in the company, and every OnlyFans employee is an individual contributor.

OnlyFans, which initially started as a platform for creators to earn money from paywalled content, has become synonymous with adult, NSFW content. Blair, who became the company's CEO in 2023 after years of work as a lawyer, said in the interview that OnlyFans has 400 million users globally and 4 million content creators.

OnlyFans' middle-managerless workforce aligns with the broader trend of Big Tech firms eliminating this layer of staff. In recent years, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Intel, and Google have all reduced the head count of middle managers, opting for a flatter hierarchy in the name of efficiency.

• A steel shield preventing radiation spread from the Chernobyl site isn't working as intended anymore.
• The IAEA said on Friday that the New Safe Confinement shelter had "lost its primary safety functions."
• The shield was hit in February by a drone strike, which created a 160-square-foot hole.

The steel structure sealing off the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site has suffered so much damage that it's no longer containing radiation effectively, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Friday.

The agency, or IAEA, wrote in an update that its team had visited the protective shield in the prior week and found that it "had lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability."

This shield is known as the New Safe Confinement, or NSC, which was installed in 2016 as a second protective layer to stop the spread of radioactive material from Reactor Four of the Chernobyl power plant.

Damage to the shield increases the risk of leaks, which are difficult to contain because radioactive materials, such as gas and dust, can easily disperse widely and remain hazardous for extended periods.

The NSC fully encases an original, smaller concrete structure for containment called the Sarcophagus, built by the Soviet Union after Reactor Four exploded in 1986 and sparked a nuclear crisis across continental Europe.

The NSC, which cost $1.75 billion to install, was urgently needed because the Sarcophagus had an estimated lifespan of 30 years and wasn't airtight, allowing radioactive dirt and gas to escape.

Now, the IAEA said its team confirmed that the NSC can't do its job after being "severely damaged" by a drone strike in February.

The strike, which Ukraine has said was caused by a drone belonging to Russia, set fire to the steel structure's outer cladding.

"Limited temporary repairs have been carried out on the roof, but timely and comprehensive restoration remains essential to prevent further degradation and ensure long-term nuclear safety," said the IAEA's director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi.

The February drone strike left a roughly 160-square-foot hole in the shield, which is shaped like a massive aircraft hangar. At its tallest point, the shield stands at about 360 feet above the ground.

The fire created by the strike lasted for weeks, and the structure's main crane was damaged, the IAEA said earlier this year.

In the months following the strike, the IAEA reported that emergency work to extinguish the resulting fire had created about 330 openings in the NSC's outer cladding.

Authorities were initially concerned that radioactive dust around the shield could be scattered if the shelter was hit by an explosive. No radiation leaks were reported, authorities had said at the time.

The IAEA's latest findings, however, now indicate that the long-term damage to the NSC may be more significant than first understood. Still, the agency added that it hadn't found any risk to the shelter's load-bearing structures or monitoring systems.

The nuclear watchdog urged major repairs and upgrades to the shield, including humidity control measures and an improved program to monitor corrosion.

After the February drone strike, Ukrainian officials accused Russia of deliberately targeting the Chernobyl disaster site, a claim that the Kremlin has denied.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone was initially captured by Russia in 2022 when its forces tried to sweep into Kyiv in the early months of the war.

Moscow later withdrew from the area, and Ukrainian authorities could resume work on the Chernobyl disaster site in April 2022.

• Young people face a tough job market, but AI isn't the main culprit, an economist says.
• Hiring has stalled after post-pandemic overexpansion, policy uncertainty, and tariffs.
• Sectors most exposed to AI aren't losing more jobs, suggesting deeper economic issues.

Young people entering the job market are facing the toughest conditions in years — but artificial intelligence isn't the reason.

A new analysis from a London-based economics consultancy suggests something much more old-fashioned is going on: Companies simply aren't hiring.

Since 2023, unemployment among new entrants to the US labor force has jumped more than 2.5 percentage points — a sharp contrast with older workers, whose jobless rates have remained flat, according to the analysis from Dario Perkins, a managing director at Global Data.TS Lombard.

"For the AI maximalists, this is 'proof' that companies are deploying the technology rather than hiring graduates. And it is also consistent with what business leaders are saying, with 'AI' now a synonym for 'cost cutting,'" wrote Perkins.

But Perkins argues the real reason is simply the normal course of business.

"US hiring is weak across the board. In fact, the economy as a whole is currently experiencing recessionary levels of job creation," he wrote.

Perkins' analysis shows that sectors with higher AI exposure are not experiencing larger increases in unemployment.

The report identifies three main drivers behind the hiring slowdown — and none involve automation replacing workers.

First, firms rapidly expanded their workforces during the post-pandemic surge and are now normalizing head count.

Second, policy uncertainty has made businesses cautious about taking on new staff.

Third, Trump-era tariffs have squeezed profit margins, prompting companies to push for more output from existing employees instead of hiring new ones.

This leaves young people getting squeezed, but the good news is that net employment is stable.

The job outlook should improve once hiring rebounds, Perkins wrote.

"When the economy reaccelerates and hiring rates recover, new entrants' employment prospects should improve," he wrote.

Perkins' report came as markets continue to assess the impact of AI technology on the economy and employment.

Other analysts have concluded that young tech workers seem to be taking the brunt of the impact. The unemployment rate for 20- to 30-year-olds in tech has risen by nearly 3 percentage points since early 2024, over four times the increase in the overall jobless rate, according to Goldman Sachs in an August report.

In October, Goldman warned of an era of "jobless growth" in the US due to AI, even as the broader economy remains strong.

• Surge AI CEO says companies are focused on flashy AI responses over solving real problems.
• He criticized industry leaderboards such as LMArena, where anyone can vote on responses.
• Other experts have criticizde AI benchmarks for prioritizing performance over economic usefulness and truth.

AI companies are prioritizing flash over substance, says Surge AI's CEO.

"I'm worried that instead of building AI that will actually advance us as a species, curing cancer, solving poverty, understanding universal, all these big grand questions, we are optimizing for AI slop instead," Edwin Chen said in an episode of "Lenny's" podcast published on Sunday.

"We're basically teaching our models to chase dopamine instead of truth," he added.

Chen founded AI training startup Surge in 2020 after working at Twitter, Google, and Meta. Surge runs the gig platform Data Annotation, which says it pays one million freelancers to train AI models. Surge competes with data labeling startups like Scale AI and Mercor and counts Anthropic as a customer.

On Sunday's podcast, Chen said that companies are prioritizing AI slop because of industry leaderboards.

"Right now, the industry is played by these terrible leaderboards like LMArena," he said, referring to a popular online leaderboard where people can vote on which AI response is better.

"They're not carefully reading or fact-checking," he said. "They're skimming these responses for two seconds and picking whatever looks flashiest."

He added: "It's literally optimizing your models for the types of people who buy tabloids at the grocery store."

Still, the Surge CEO said that AI labs have to pay attention to these leaderboards because they can be asked about their rankings during sales meetings.

Like Chen, research scientists have criticized benchmarks for overvaluing superficial traits.

In a March blog post, Dean Valentine, the cofounder and CEO of AI security startup ZeroPath, said that "Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit."

Valentine said that he and his team had been evaluating the performance of different models claiming to have "some sort of improvement" since the release of Anthropic's 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024. None of the new models his team tried had made a "significant difference" in his company's internal benchmarks or in developers' abilities to find new bugs, he said.

They might have been "more fun to talk to," but they were "not reflective of economic usefulness or generality."

In a February paper titled "Can we trust AI Benchmarks?" researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Center concluded that major issues exist in today's evaluation approach.

The researchers said benchmarking is "fundamentally shaped by cultural, commercial and competitive dynamics that often prioritize state-of-the-art performance at the expense of broader societal concerns."

Companies have also come under fire for "gaming" these benchmarks.

In April, Meta released two new models in its Llama family that it said delivered "better results" than comparably sized models from Google and French AI lab Mistral. It then faced accusations that it had gamed a benchmark.

LMArena said that Meta "should have made it clearer" that it had submitted a version of Llama 4 Maverick that had been "customized" to perform better for its testing format.

"Meta's interpretation of our policy did not match what we expect from model providers," LMArena said in an X post.

• Trump has thoughts about Netflix's $72 billion acquisition of Warner Bros.
• He said their combined market share "could be a problem" and said he would be involved in the deal.
• In 2017, Trump opposed AT&T's proposed acquisition of Time Warner.

President Donald Trump is getting involved in the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal.

On Friday, Netflix announced that it would acquire Warner Bros., including its TV and film studios, HBO and HBO Max, for $72 billion. If the deal goes through, it will be Netflix's biggest acquisition to date.

Speaking to reporters at the Kennedy Centre on Sunday, Trump said Netflix is a great company that has done a "phenomenal job."

But he added, "They have a very big market share, and when they have Warner Brothers, you know, that share goes up a lot."

"So I don't know, that's going to be for some economists to tell. And also, I'll be involved in that decision, too," Trump said.

Trump added that Netflix's CEO, Ted Sarandos, visited him in the Oval Office last week. He said Sarandos was a "great person" who has done "one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies."

"But it is a big market share, there's no question about that. It could be a problem," he added.

Representatives for Netflix and Warner Bros. did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

The announcement of Warner Bro.'s sale has drawn criticism. Paramount CEO David Ellison was at the White House last week, where he objected to the deal on antitrust grounds, per a report by The New York Post. Paramount Skydance had been competing with Netflix and Comcast to buy Warner Bros.

This is not the first time Trump has become involved in an antitrust case. In 2017, he opposed AT&T's proposed acquisition of Time Warner, saying it was "not good for the country."

Netflix's stock price is down about 7% in the past five days, while Warner Bro.'s stock price is up more than 8% in the same period.

• OpenAI staff recently shared six tips on how to get better results from ChatGPT.
• I tested each one to see whether it actually improves the experience.
• The tips made my use of ChatGPT feel more intentional and smarter.

OpenAI staff recently shared several tips for getting more out of ChatGPT. I tried them, and it felt like my chatbot got smarter.

The tips came from Christina Kim, a research lead in post-training, and Laurentia Romaniuk, a product manager for model behavior, in an episode of "The OpenAI Podcast" published Wednesday.

1. Ask the hard questions

Kim said users should throw ChatGPT "harder questions" so it can "decide how much it wants to think." The tougher the prompt, the deeper the reasoning.

Scrolling through my old chats, I realized I'd been doing the reverse — but for good reason. My job is to take complicated ideas and translate them for a general audience, so I mostly use ChatGPT for clarity checks or background research.

This week, I was reading about embodied intelligence and asked ChatGPT an easy question: "What is embodied intelligence?" It gave a clean, simple answer: AI systems embedded in physical agents like robots.

Wanting to understand the mechanics behind the concept, I asked a harder question: "How do robots fuse vision, audio, touch, and feedback in real time?"

That's when the model shifted gears. It talked about multimodal sensor fusion, specialized encoders, and cross-modal alignment — terms I'd never seen before and sounded like something overheard in a robotics lab.

I asked if this was PhD-level. ChatGPT answered: "Yes — roughly master's-to-early-PhD level."

2. Tell ChatGPT who to be

Romaniuk shared that her brother, a biochemical Ph.D., once complained ChatGPT Pro was responding at an undergrad level — until she told him to specify his expertise. After he primed the model as a "frontier researcher," it produced an insight so advanced it mirrored a breakthrough his lab had made just two weeks earlier.

I'd never experimented with assigning the model a persona, so I figured I'd try it on a low-stakes question: my coffee preference.

As someone who prefers cappuccinos to lattes, my usual explanation is simple: It tastes punchier and less milky.

I asked ChatGPT to become a barista who studied coffee the way sommeliers study wine and explain my preference to me.

The cappuccino-latte divide became a masterclass. It broke the differences into texture, flavor balance, and mouthfeel. A cappuccino is light on top and dense underneath; the foam "lifts" the espresso, sharpening its flavor. A latte, on the other hand, is silkier and more uniform, with milk that folds into the espresso and softens it.

I can now explain my coffee preference with something more informed than "it tastes nicer."

3. Audit the chatbot's memory

Romaniuk said memory is one of ChatGPT's strengths. It lets the model infer what a user really wants or proactively surface information they might care about.

Romaniuk said the way to stay in control is to audit what the model remembers: Delete anything you don't want it holding onto, or toggle memory on and off in the settings so the chatbot only draws from what you choose.

It's something I've been doing. I don't turn memory off because most of what I share ends up being useful later. But I do clear out meaningless or throwaway chats so they don't clutter things or muddy what the model learns about me.

It's paid off. ChatGPT now understands me as a journalist who interviews AI founders by day and trains for fitness races after hours. It answers like it knows I'm just as likely to ask about model behavior as I am about Hyrox training plans.

4. Ask ChatGPT to improve prompts

Kim said users can ask ChatGPT to help come up with better prompts.

I needed to understand free-electron lasers, which help create the high-energy light sources behind semiconductor manufacturing (for journalism, of course). Instead of pretending I knew what to ask, I asked ChatGPT what questions I should be asking it.

It responded with a set of "high-leverage questions" — grouped from foundational to research-level — that showed me exactly how to think about the technology. For someone without much technical background, this framing was helpful. ChatGPT was teaching me how to ask smarter questions.

5. Switch through personality modes

Romaniuk said she switches between ChatGPT's personality modes "all the time" to understand how each one feels. It's part of her job shaping model behavior.

One of her favorites is the "nerd" mode, which gives the model a "very exploratory response style," she said.

I love a good cynic, so I asked ChatGPT in "cynical mode" to explain embodied intelligence.

It didn't move my work forward, but the explanation made me laugh: "Embodied intelligence is one of those tech terms people throw around like everyone has a robotics Ph.D. hiding under their bed."

"People in AI land obsess over this."

6. Retry tasks regularly and 'pressure-test' the model

Romaniuk said she likes to "pressure test" the model — pushing it to its limits to see how it's changing over time.

For something that couldn't work now, it might work in three months' time. "Just keep at it, keep playing, keep trying," Romaniuk added.

I've been "pressure testing" the model through my Korean studies, regularly throwing it prompts that stretch its ability to break down the language. I've spent months asking ChatGPT to teach me grammar, extract vocabulary from worksheets, and explain unfamiliar sentence structures.

Earlier versions often pulled out the wrong words or mixed up written forms. Now, it parses text accurately, distinguishes between formal and polite forms, and explains grammar in clear, beginner-friendly steps.

The tips made my use of ChatGPT feel more intentional. Some effects were small, others more striking, but they certainly nudged the model to reveal more of what it can do.

• When Toccara Best's request for a year off was denied, she quit her job anyway to travel with her husband.
• Their "gap year" stretched into five as they kept traveling through blog work and housesitting gigs.
• Their son's birth brought them back to the US. Traveling the country with him was easy; returning to full-time work wasn't.

When one of my favorite graduate school professors died just weeks into her retirement, it hit me: I didn't want to spend my life working toward a future I might never get to experience.

I started my career in education as a high school counselor. My husband, Sam, was a self-published author who could work from anywhere, so we took full advantage of my school holidays and long summer breaks, jetting off to new places whenever we could. We created a travel blog, ForgetSomeday, to share our stories.

But the trips we took during school breaks left me yearning for more, and I approached my husband about taking a year off from our careers to travel full-time.

It didn't take much convincing. We didn't own a home and hadn't yet started a family, so the timing seemed right.

I submitted a request for a year of leave, but it was denied due to pending budget cuts. We decided to move forward with our plan anyway, not wanting to wait until retirement to make this dream a reality.

Time for an adventure

Over the next year, we slashed our spending and saved more than $30,000 by cutting out anything nonessential.

We sold our car for $5,000 and brought in a bit more by selling smaller items, storing the rest in a 10×10 unit because we thought we'd be gone for just a year.

By June 2015, we had about $40,000 in the bank, walked away from our lease, and flew to Prague on one-way tickets.

We ate our way through Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, partaking in bucket-list festivities like Oktoberfest in Munich and St. Patrick's Day in Dublin along the way.

We visited more than a dozen countries — island-hopping in Croatia, Thailand, and Portugal; exploring Cambodia's temples; soaking in Hungary's thermal baths; and driving 500 miles through Scotland in a campervan.

From hiking in Austria and Slovakia to swimming with seals in Sweden, the year became a crash course in adventure travel.

As our official gap year came to an end, our bank account was still surprisingly healthy, thanks to housesitting opportunities and blog partnerships that helped stretch our budget. And because I didn't have a job to go back to, we decided to keep traveling.

Little did we know, our biggest adventure was right around the corner: 6 months later, we found out we were expecting.

And then we were three

We returned to the US to have our son, but just a few months after his birth, we began traveling full-time again, this time exploring America.

By his third birthday, my son had already visited 27 states. Eventually, the pandemic put a halt to our full-time travels, and we took that as a sign to settle down.

We returned to California five years after the adventure started.

When we planned our gap year, it was supposed to be just that, a year. But as time went on, the gap on my résumé grew, and my motivation to return to the career I once loved began to fade. My husband was also trying to figure out what he wanted to pursue next.

Reentering the workforce

We didn't realize that our global adventure would end with such a hurdle — a career pivot after five years away, right in the middle of a global pandemic.

Maybe it was the break we both needed to reevaluate our next steps, but it has taken us both quite a while to get back in the saddle.

Once our son started preschool, I transitioned back into the workforce as an executive personal assistant for a busy entrepreneur, putting my organizational skills to good use.

When the executive moved out of state just over a year later, I quickly found a new role as operations manager at a nonprofit organization, where I've worked part-time for nearly four years. I've been searching for meaningful full-time employment for the past year and a half, which has been especially challenging in today's competitive job market.

Was our gap year impulsive? Not exactly. We spent a year saving and planning. Was it risky? Definitely. More so than we imagined. Would we do it all over again? Absolutely.

That said, if we were to do it again, we'd probably just stick to a year.

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