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      A.I. Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups

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      Tech start-ups typically raised huge sums to hire armies of workers and grow fast. Now artificial intelligence tools are making workers more productive and spurring tales of “tiny team” success.Almost every day, Grant Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, hears from investors who try to persuade him to take their money. Some have even sent him and his co-founders personalized gift baskets.Mr. Lee, 41, would normally be flattered. In the past, a fast-growing start-up like Gamma, the artificial intelligence start-up he helped establish in 2020, would have constantly looked out for more funding.But like many young start-ups in Silicon Valley today, Gamma is pursuing a different strategy. It is using artificial intelligence tools to increase its employees’ productivity in everything from customer service and marketing to coding and customer research.That means Gamma, which makes software that lets people create presentations and websites, has no need for more cash, Mr. Lee said. His company has hired only 28 people to get “tens of millions” in annual recurring revenue and nearly 50 million users. Gamma is also profitable.“If we were from the generation before, we would easily be at 200 employees,” Mr. Lee said. “We get a chance to rethink that, basically rewrite the playbook.”The old Silicon Valley model dictated that start-ups should raise a huge sum of money from venture capital investors and spend it hiring an army of employees to scale up fast. Profits would come much later. Until then, head count and fund-raising were badges of honor among founders, who philosophized that bigger was better.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A.I. Is Prompting an Evolution, Not an Extinction, for Coders

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      A.I. tools from Microsoft and other companies are helping write code, placing software engineers at the forefront of the technology’s potential to disrupt the work force.John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence.The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes.To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few keys and the software tool suggests the rest of the line of code. It can also recommend changes, fetch data, identify bugs and run basic tests. Even though the A.I. makes some mistakes, it saves him up to an hour many days.“I can’t imagine working without it now,” Mr. Giorgi said.That sentiment is increasingly common among software developers, who are at the forefront of adopting A.I. agents, assistant programs tailored to help employees do their jobs in fields including customer service and manufacturing. The rapid improvement of the technology has been accompanied by dire warnings that A.I. could soon automate away millions of jobs — and software developers have been singled out as prime targets.But the outlook for software developers is more likely evolution than extinction, according to experienced software engineers, industry analysts and academics. For decades, better tools have automated some coding tasks, but the demand for software and the people who make it has only increased.A.I., they say, will accelerate that trend and level up the art and craft of software design.“The skills software developers need will change significantly, but A.I. will not eliminate the need for them,” said Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, a technology research firm. “Not anytime soon anyway.”The outlook for software engineers offers a window into the impact that generative A.I. — the kind behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is likely to have on knowledge workers across the economy, from doctors and lawyers to marketing managers and financial analysts. Predictions about the technology’s consequences vary widely, from wiping out whole swaths of the work force to hyper-charging productivity as an elixir for economic growth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      HP to Buy Humane, Maker of the Ai Pin, for $116 Million

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      Humane, which marketed its Ai Pin as the next big thing after smartphones, had raised $240 million from investors, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. The pin will be discontinued.Humane, the ambitious start-up behind the Ai Pin device that aimed to one day replace smartphones, agreed to sell parts of its business to HP for $116 million, the companies said on Tuesday.HP said it planned to acquire Humane’s “A.I. capabilities,” including its software platform, intellectual property, patents and some employees. The Ai Pin will be shut down, Humane said in a message to customers.The deal caps a downfall for the high-flying start-up, which heavily promoted the $699 pin with ads, a TED Talk and at Paris Fashion Week with supermodels. Humane raised $240 million in funding from high-profile investors, including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, and his counterpart at OpenAI, Sam Altman, valuing the company at $850 million before it released a product.Humane was created by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, husband-and-wife founders who previously worked at Apple. The pair envisioned a wearable device that people would clip to their clothes and interact with using voice commands and a laser display projected onto their hand. The idea was to cut down on time spent staring at smartphone screens.Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri at Humane’s office in San Francisco in 2023.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesBut the Ai Pin, which began shipping to customers last spring, was a flop.Reviewers criticized the product, with the A.I. software often giving wrong answers or taking a long time to respond, while the pin’s batteries sometimes overheated. Humane had hoped to sell 100,000 pins in its first year but got only around 10,000 orders. At one point, the company told customers to stop using their charging cases because of the fire risk.Last year, Humane hired an investment bank to sell itself, while also seeking new funding. The start-up sought a sale price of more than $1 billion.On Tuesday, a letter posted to Humane’s website said that the pins would no longer work at the end of this month and that customer data would be deleted. “Our business priorities have shifted,” the letter said.HP, which sells an estimated 53 million PCs a year, has said it wants to add A.I. capabilities to its laptops to make them more useful. Last year, HP worked with Microsoft to develop a line of A.I. computers called Copilot+ PCs.In its announcement, HP said it would use Humane’s technology to become a more “experience-led company.” Humane’s workers will be part of a new innovation lab called HP IQ, which will focus on “building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services.” Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno will join the company, as will the majority of the start-up’s employees, an HP spokeswoman said.“We are investing and innovating aggressively in new A.I.-powered capabilities and software,” said Enrique Lores, president and chief executive of HP, during a call with analysts in November. “We will focus on delivering a cutting-edge A.I.-powered tech.” More

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      Vance, in First Foreign Speech, Tells Europe That U.S. Will Dominate A.I.

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      Speaking in Paris at an artificial intelligence summit, the vice president gave an America First vision of the technology — with the U.S. dominating the chips, the software and the rules.Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.On his first foreign trip since taking office, Mr. Vance used his opening address at an A.I. summit meeting hosted by France and India to describe his vision of a coming era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to chose between using American-designed and manufactured technology or siding with authoritarian competitors — a not-very-veiled reference to China — who would exploit the technology to their detriment.“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips,” he said, quickly adding that “just because we are the leader doesn’t mean we want to or need to go it alone.”But he said that for Europe to become what he clearly envisions as a junior partner, it must eliminate much of its digital regulatory structure — and much of its policing of the internet for what its governments define as disinformation.For Mr. Vance, who is on a weeklong tour that will take him next to the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s premier meeting of leaders, foreign and defense ministers and others, the speech was clearly intended as a warning shot. It largely silenced the hall in a wing of the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Leaders accustomed to talking about “guardrails” for emerging artificial intelligence applications and “equity” to assure the technology is available and comfortable for underserved populations heard none of those phrases from Mr. Vance.He spoke only hours after President Trump put new 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, essentially negating trade agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, precisely composed and delivered with emphasis, seemed an indicator of the tone Mr. Trump’s national security leaders plan to take to Europe this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When It Comes to Investing, Is A.I. Worth the Hype?

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      After the arrival of a less costly A.I. model from China, U.S. markets and academics are wrestling with the ultimate economic value of the technology.A.I. chatbots are fun, sometimes even useful and, until recently, endowed with the uncanny ability to mesmerize investors and fuel the U.S. stock market.But the excellent performance of a new, relatively cheap artificial intelligence engine from a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek, has perturbed the market and complicated the A.I. story.Investors are re-evaluating prominent companies swept up in A.I. fever, including Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and the private start-up OpenAI. The notion that full-blown superhuman intelligence is imminent has spurred the-sky-is-the-limit valuations, as well as concerns about the political and social risks posed by advanced intelligence.One immediate question: Is the main approach to developing A.I. in the United States — pouring billions of dollars into chips and infrastructure — worth the expenditure for all companies if similar results can be achieved far more cheaply? DeepSeek’s lower-cost innovations add urgency to bigger, longstanding financial questions: How much are artificial intelligence companies really worth, and what will the broader economic value of A.I. ultimately be?Daren Acemoglu, a winner of the 2024 Nobel in economic science, gave me some answers. “There is a lot of hype in the industry,” he told me in a telephone conversation. Yes, he said, A.I. companies have made some “impressive achievements,” but he added that many financial and economic calculations were being based on mere “projections into the future that are sometimes exaggerated.”Professor Acemoglu, an M.I.T. economist with an interest in the impact of technical innovations on global economics, is skeptical about the more fervent A.I. claims. He ranks A.I. as a significant advance, perhaps with a macroeconomic effect akin to the telephone, which was no small thing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sam Altman on Microsoft, Trump and Musk

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      The OpenAI C.E.O. spoke with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit.Since kicking off the artificial intelligence boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has amassed more than 300 million weekly users and a $157 billion valuation. Its C.E.O., Sam Altman, addressed whether that staggering pace of growth can continue at the DealBook Summit last week.Altman pushed back on assertions that progress in A.I. is becoming slower and more expensive; on reports that the company’s relationship with its biggest investor, Microsoft, is fraying; and on concerns that Elon Musk, who founded an A.I. company last year, may use his relationship with President-elect Donald Trump to hurt competitors.Altman said that artificial general intelligence, the point at which artificial intelligence can do almost anything that a human brain can do, will arrive “sooner than most people in the world think.” Here are five highlights from the conversation.On Elon MuskMusk, who co-founded OpenAI, has become one of its major antagonists. He has sued the company, accusing it of departing from its founding mission as a nonprofit, and started a competing startup called xAI. On Friday, OpenAI said Musk had wanted to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company in 2017 and walked away when he didn’t get majority equity. Altman called the change in the relationship “tremendously sad.” He continued:I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero. I thought what Elon was doing was absolutely incredible for the world, and I’m still, of course, I mean, I have different feelings about him now, but I’m still glad he exists. I mean that genuinely. Not just because I think his companies are awesome, which I do think, but because I think at a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously. And grateful is the wrong kind of word. But I’m like thankful.You know, we started OpenAI together, and then at some point he totally lost faith in OpenAI and decided to go his own way. And that’s fine, too. But I think of Elon as a builder and someone who — a known thing about Elon is that he really cares about being ‘the guy.’ But I think of him as someone who, if he’s not, that just competes in the market and in the technology, and whatever else. And doesn’t resort to lawfare. And, you know, whatever the stated complaint is, what I believe is he’s a competitor and we’re doing well. And that’s sad to see.Altman said of Musk’s close relationship with Trump:I may turn out to be wrong, but I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon has it to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. And I don’t think people would tolerate that. I don’t think Elon would do it.On OpenAI’s relationship with MicrosoftMicrosoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, has put more than $13 billion into the company and has an exclusive license to its raw technologies. Altman once called the relationship “the best bromance in tech,” but The Times and others have reported that the partnership has become strained as OpenAI seeks more and cheaper access to computing power and Microsoft has made moves to diversify its access to A.I. technology. OpenAI expects to lose $5 billion this year because of the steep costs of developing A.I.At the DealBook Summit, Altman said of the relationship with Microsoft, “I don’t think we’re disentangling. I will not pretend that there are no misalignments or challenges.” He added:We need lots of compute, more than we projected. And that has just been an unusual thing in the history of business, to scale that quickly. And there’s been tension on that.Some of OpenAI’s own products compete with those of partners that depend on its technologies. On whether that presents a conflict of interest, Altman said:We have a big platform business. We have a big first party business. Many other companies manage both of those things. And we have things that we’re really good at. Microsoft has things they’re really good at. Again, there’s not no tension, but on the whole, our incentives are pretty aligned.On whether making progress in A.I. development was becoming more expensive and slower, as some experts have suggested, he doubled down on a message he’d previously posted on social media: “There is no wall.” Andrew asked the same question of Sundar Pichai, the Google C.E.O., which we’ll recap in tomorrow’s newsletter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      OpenAI Fires Back at Elon Musk’s Lawsuit

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      The artificial intelligence start-up argues that Mr. Musk is trying to hamstring its business as he builds a rival company.Earlier this month, Elon Musk asked a federal court to block OpenAI’s efforts to transform itself from a nonprofit into a purely for-profit company.On Friday, OpenAI responded with its own legal filing, arguing that Mr. Musk is merely trying to hamstring OpenAI as he builds a rival company, called xAI.What Mr. Musk is asking for would “debilitate OpenAI’s business, board deliberations, and mission to create safe and beneficial A.I. — all to the advantage of Musk and his own A.I. company,” the filing said. “The motion should be denied.”OpenAI also disputed many of the claims made by Mr. Musk in the lawsuit he brought against OpenAI earlier this year. In a blog post published before Friday’s filing, OpenAI portrayed Mr. Musk as a hypocrite, saying that he had tried to transform the lab from a nonprofit into a for-profit operation before he left the organization six years ago.The filing and blog post included documents claiming to show that in 2017, Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office, registered a company called Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc. that was meant to be a for-profit incarnation of OpenAI.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Illustrator Oliver Jeffers Reflects on 2024

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      The fine artist and illustrator Oliver Jeffers on climate change, A.I. and the idea that maybe everything is pretty much our fault.This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.The following is a close look at an emerging global trend or insight through creative narrative.Oliver JeffersNo One Is ComingOne of the biggest issues, I believe, with the current global narrative on climate change is that it’s (deliberately) abstractly big. It is, therefore, no fault of anyone in particular. By speaking of climate change in the way that we do, we give ourselves permission to ignore it, convincing ourselves it is someone else’s problem. And, if climate change is someone else’s problem, it is definitely up to someone else to fix it.But the brutal truth is that we are the only ones here — or anywhere, for that matter. The scale of the universe is so vast that it is incomprehensible, and we have yet to find any indication of life other than on Earth. So, whether it’s our fault or not (spoiler alert: it is!), it is certainly up to us alone to do something about it. Our current attitude is the cosmic equivalent of covering our eyes because we are going downhill too fast on a bicycle.Oliver JeffersThe Weather Doesn’t Need a PassportWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More