Price cuts are becoming more common in housing markets across the country, a testament to how the real estate market has increasingly shifted toward buyers mortgage rates have steadily climbed in 2026.
Around 21% of sellers with active listings cut their asking price for their home in the four weeks leading up to September 20, according to a recent Redfin analysis. It marks the highest proportion of sellers that have slashed prices in this time of the year since at least 2022, when Redfin began tracking the data, the real estate listings site said last week.
The housing market has been anemic in the years following the pandemic buying frenzy, though the freeze appears to have deepened in the last few months as mortgage rates have climbed. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate broke above the 7% mark for the first time in years in September, reflecting how borrowing costs for consumers have risen dramatically amid the spike in bond yields. On Monday, the rate was close to 7.5%.
"Many are eventually cutting their price as they come to terms with reality: Mortgage rates are sitting above 7%, the economy is uncertain, and many homes are lingering on the market," Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin, said.
Here are the 12 cities in the US that are seeing the most homes with price cuts:
Denver, CO
Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 30.9%
YoY% change: +3.1 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $619,909
Indianapolis, INIndianapolis, IN
shermancahal/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 29.9%
YoY% change: +2.0 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $259,828
San Antonio, TXSan Antonio, TX
Sean Pavone/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 26.8%
YoY% change: +0.7 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $264,825
Dallas, TXDallas, TX
Chris LaBasco/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 26.1%
YoY% change: +1.1 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $448,703
Austin, TXAustin, TX
Art Wager/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 26.%
YoY% change: +0 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $549,636
Portland, ORPortland, OR
Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 25.9%
YoY% change: +0.9 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $524,653
Minneapolis, MNMinneapolis, MN
Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 25.3%
YoY% change: +3.7 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $374,752
Seattle, WASeattle.
Mekdet/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 24.3%
YoY% change: +3.5 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $874,421
Fort Worth, TXFort Worth, TX
adamkaz/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 24.2%
YoY% change: +0.2 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $332,480
Houston, TXHouston, TX
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 23.9%
YoY% change: -0.6 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $349,769
Boston, MABoston, MA
Erica Denhoff/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Share of active listings with a price drop: 23.8%
YoY% change: +7.6 percentage points
Median sales price (August 2026): $859,431
Jacksonville, FLJacksonville, FL
Visions of America/Joseph Sohm/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Finn Gomez/Getty Images; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
Luke Hartley realized how important Elon Musk's Starlink was to him when it fell overboard.
Two weeks into his voyage across the Pacific in October 2023, Hartley's sailboat, Songbird, was hit by an intense squall that knocked the Starlink dish balanced on the front of the boat over the side.
It was a major blow for the music teacher turned sailing influencer, who tells me he made far more money posting about his three-year voyage around the world on TikTok via Starlink than he ever had in the US education system. Without satellite internet, he had no way to upload the videos that were funding his voyage, check weather forecasts, or call his family.
From the remote Pacific to the front lines of Ukraine, Starlink's network of orbital internet satellites has become indispensable to 13 million people in more than 167 countries. Starlink accounted for more than 60% of the $18.6 billion in revenue SpaceX generated last year, and was the only part of the business to turn a profit.
Musk has grander ambitions for the flying crown jewels in his empire. The company plans to launch tens of thousands more satellites in the coming years as it targets new markets, in a push to transform Starlink from a boutique service for rugged survivalists into the world's premier wireless carrier and broadband provider.
Many users who like it love it, and have flooded social media with praise for Musk and his creation.
Beyond the profits, Starlink has also provided Musk a vital source of influence and soft power that stretches the globe.
The world's richest man's attempt to gut government bureaucracy with DOGE, his massive political donations, and his erratic and incendiary posting habits on X have cost him Tesla customers and inspired boycotts and protests against his other companies. But Starlink is so useful in far-flung and war-torn places — and has so few alternatives — that it has granted Musk a rare level of immunity to political gravity. It's also left governments, adventurers, and digital nomads struggling to reconcile their reliance on the technology with the controversies that swirl around Musk.
"We can criticize Musk till the cows come home, but it's an incredible product," says Hartley, who has mixed feelings about depending so heavily on Starlink. "It has a very controversial name behind it, but it is also a way for me to talk to my mom and inspire folks. Both things can be true."
Nowhere is this dance between reluctance and reliance more delicately choreographed than in Ukraine, where Starlink has been essential in the war against Russia. Starlink satellites have been widely adopted across the Ukrainian military as a comms system that cannot be hacked or jammed by Russian radio warfare. The service has allowed ground teams to adapt their targets mid-mission and remotely control drones with flawless video almost to the moment of impact, with no need for giant antennas that could reveal their position.
The technological advantage has come at the price of giving a mercurial CEO the power to tilt the balance of the war.
In 2023, Musk sparked global headlines when he revealed he refused a request to activate Starlink to assist a Ukrainian assault on Crimea because he was concerned that "SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war."
The billionaire also threatened to stop supplying Ukraine with Starlink terminals the year prior over a funding dispute, and Reuters reported last July that he jeopardized a 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive by cutting Starlink access to frontline troops.
Musk did not respond to the report, but he previously said in a March 2025 X post that he would never turn off Ukrainian terminals or use the threat of doing so as a bargaining chip, no matter how much he disagreed with the country's government.
More recently, Musk has given Ukraine an edge. In February of this year, SpaceX clamped down on Russian forces' illicit use of Starlink terminals after Ukraine's then-defense minister made a personal appeal to Musk. The cutoff severely disrupted Russia's military and allowed Ukraine to retake valuable territory.
Some servicemembers and researchers say Ukraine's dependent yet unstable relationship with Starlink leaves them uneasy. "If you are military and you're operating a drone, you cannot rely on something unpredictable. All the systems should be under control," says one drone pilot and sergeant in Ukraine's unmanned brigades. "But we have no alternative right now," he adds.
Starlink has been essential in the war against Russia. Starlink satellites have been widely adopted across the Ukrainian military as a comms system that cannot be hacked or jammed by Russian radio warfare.
Yevhen Titov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
Alessio Terzi, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge's Bennett School of Public Policy, tells me that governments risk entering a "Faustian pact" with Musk that would see the billionaire decide how, when, and where its citizens and militaries access the internet.
He said that the closest analogy for this level of geopolitical power is not pre-war titans of industry like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison but the East India Company, the British trading conglomerate that ruled over much of the Indian subcontinent. The company was granted exclusive rights to operate the trade routes between Asia and Britain in 1600. It leveraged that monopoly to grow into a quasi-empire with its own system of taxation and standing army that ruled over millions for nearly three centuries.
We can criticize Musk till the cows come home, but it's an incredible product.Luke Hartley
Terzi says that SpaceX's market share of everything sent into space — close to 80% in 2025 — outstrips the East India Company's share of global shipping at its peak. He adds that Musk and SpaceX are leveraging their own monopoly over satellite communication to act more like a sovereign state than a private company.
"This is a mega-company that is chipping away at some roles that would normally fall on the government," says Terzi.
A star is born
When Musk first announced plans for Starlink in 2015, launching internet satellites was an ambitious side quest. At the time, SpaceX's main mission was to lower the cost of launching cargo into space by perfecting its Falcon rocket, which could be partially reused over multiple flights rather than self-destructing on impact.
One former SpaceX employee said that SpaceX initially based its Starlink division in Redmond, Washington, in part to avoid distracting employees working on Falcon at the company's main facilities in Texas and California. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
By 2020, however, Starlink was at the center of SpaceX's plans. That year, Musk suggested the satellite internet service could become a $30 billion-a-year cash cow.
The company spun up a production line for Starlink user terminals in a corner of its Hawthorne, California, facility that was so far away from the main campus that early employees bought bikes to travel from one side to the other. The bikes were regularly stolen, another former employee said. In typical SpaceX fashion, the production line quickly expanded, the former employee said, so much so that it spilled out into unfinished buildings with compacted dirt floors.
Musk took a hands-on approach to the project, the person added, including telling employees to contact him if they encountered any roadblocks and providing technical feedback on new versions of the terminal.
"If his internet was down, then we were in trouble," the former employee said.
In Starlink's early days, Musk framed it as an effort to "rebuild the internet" into a space-based network that would eliminate lag while reaching the estimated 42 million Americans with no access to broadband internet. It had the added bonus, Musk said, of providing a steady stream of revenue to pay for SpaceX's Mars colonization efforts.
Musk's rivals are also chasing this vision. Jeff Bezos' Amazon and Paris-based Eutelsat OneWeb have attempted to build their own satellite constellations, but the dominance of SpaceX's rocket business — the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket 165 times last year, more rockets than the rest of the world combined — gives it a steep advantage. When Amazon put 24 of its Project Kuiper (now Leo) satellites into orbit last October, they traveled on a SpaceX rocket.
Recently, Musk has gone from describing Starlink as cheap internet for rural communities to something more fundamental: an oxygen source for an AI-saturated world. In SpaceX's August 2026 earnings call, Musk speculated that demand for Starlink would skyrocket as it became the connectivity network for fleets of robotaxis and armies of humanoid robots. (Tesla has already begun outfitting its Cybercab robotaxis with Starlink dishes.)
Beyond the financial success Starlink has afforded Musk, it has also become a useful tool for him and SpaceX to help people in need, which can also generate positive headlines. The company regularly offers Starlink for free in countries hit by natural disasters and it waived fees for Starlink access in Iran during a government crackdown on protests.
SpaceX has also used Starlink discounts to defuse the data center backlash that has spread across the US. The rocket giant's Colossus data centers in Memphis and nearby Southaven, Mississippi, have attracted opposition and lawsuits from local residents complaining about noise and pollution from the gas generators powering the sites. SpaceX responded in June by offering residents in Memphis 50% off Starlink for their "partnership and support." SpaceX extended the same offer to residents of rural Vermilion Parish in Louisiana, where it is building a $100 billion spaceport that will eventually support thousands of Starship flights a year.
Musk's ambitions for the service are growing more galactic. In SpaceX's August earnings call, he predicted that Starlink could provide the majority of the world's internet within the next 10 years.
One area where Starlink has already become a must-have is in the air. Executives said on the call that in-flight WiFi powered by Starlink, which has been adopted by more than 40 airlines, has become so popular that some passengers — including YouTube influencer Mr Beast — are booking short-haul flights instead of going direct because they have Starlink.
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell has signaled that Starlink plans to turn into a full-fledged mobile carrier that will aggressively target AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
IPO
The satellite internet service has become a major selling point for airlines that offer it and a headache for those who don't. United Airlines has used its Starlink in-flight WiFi to try and woo Delta loyalty flyers, after Delta picked Amazon's Leo for its fleet.
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell signaled on the call that the company plans to turn its mobile service into a full-fledged mobile carrier that will aggressively target AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. "I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better," she said.
Limited by liftoffs
To take on the telecoms, SpaceX is planning to fill the heavens with a lot more Starlink satellites.
The company has submitted proposals to regulators to launch 100,000 of its V3 Starlink satellites, which are larger units that can only be launched on SpaceX's massive Starship rocket.
Analysts say that this proliferation won't be enough to take on the likes of AT&T. Tim Farrar, president at technology consultancy TMF Associates, tells me that while low-earth orbit satellites are great at providing coverage to remote and rural areas, they struggle to provide service in densely populated cities. As they whiz around the planet at 17,000 miles an hour, Starlink's satellites spend a small fraction of their time in orbit over these areas, and far more time crossing large uninhabited expanses of ocean and wilderness.
Starlink would provide Taiwan a backup network for military and civilian comms that would be exceptionally hard for China to jam.
Pierre Lionnet, a space economist, says that as the company launches more satellites to try to meet rising demand in urban areas, the amount of capacity being wasted will increase, shrinking SpaceX's margins. "The problem of growing this capacity is that it means that the same satellite will spend a larger amount of time circling the earth in areas where there is no additional demand," he says. Lionnet estimates that the company would be unlikely to turn a profit on a 100,000-strong network of Starlink satellites at the current cost of launching cargo into orbit.
SpaceX is working hard to bring that cost down with Starship, its most advanced rocket, which executives estimate will reduce launch costs by 10 times compared to the Falcon 9. In September, SpaceX hit a major milestone for Starship when it deployed working Starlink V3 satellites into orbit for the first time.
Until Starship can ramp up to full commercial operation, SpaceX will face pressure to maximize revenue from the satellite capacity they do have, Lionnet says. That means adding new enterprise customers, such as governments and airlines, and launching Starlink in new countries.
When connectivity becomes power
Global expansion gives Musk new soft power opportunities, but also risks entangling other parts of his business empire in geopolitics.
Following the example of Ukraine and the US government — for which SpaceX has built Starshield, a secure military version of Starlink — other nations are looking closely at Starlink for military purposes. In July, Taiwan changed foreign ownership rules that previously collapsed negotiations with SpaceX to bring Starlink to the island nation.
Phoebe Pham, a researcher at Taiwan's state-backed Institute for National Defense and Security Research, says that low-earth orbit satellite internet networks like Starlink would be critical for the country in the event of a conflict with China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Starlink satellites lifts off from Cape Canaveral.
CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images
Some military analysts have predicted that in an assault on Taiwan, China would likely cut the undersea cables that provide internet to the island and launch a barrage of cyberattacks against the island's communications infrastructure. For the Taiwanese government, Starlink would provide a backup network for military and civilian comms that would be exceptionally hard for China to jam.
"It would be wrong to say they're not looking at lessons learned from Ukraine," Pham says.
In Taiwan, government approval or adoption of Starlink could be complicated by Musk's business interests in China and his previous comments about Taiwanese independence. He suggested in 2022 that the island become a "special administrative zone" similar to Hong Kong and described Taiwan as an "integral part" of China in 2023. Tesla has operated a giant EV factory in Shanghai since 2019, and around a fifth of the automaker's revenue last year came from the Chinese market.
Pham says that if Starlink applied to operate in Taiwan, the government would have to weigh the risk that Musk's business interests in China could be used as "potential leverage." It could seek to avoid giving Musk the kind of unilateral decision-making power he has enjoyed in Ukraine, she added.
"The question is, who makes these decisions about the activation and coverage?" she says.
Starlink has also run into geopolitical roadblocks in India. In June, Bloomberg reported that officials hit the brakes on the service's long-awaited launch after raising concerns over reports from local Iranian media that Starlink kits were being used in Iran, despite a state-mandated block on internet access during the conflict with the US and Israel. SpaceX executive Lauren Dreyer said in response to Bloomberg's report that the company remained in "active and productive discussions" about bringing Starlink to India, adding that SpaceX had set up a bespoke deployment model for operating Starlink in the country.
Ukraine is now exploring alternative methods for frontline communications. A senior figure at a company manufacturing drones for the country's military says Ukraine is planning for the day Starlink goes offline, whether because Musk has pulled the plug or as a result of direct Russian attacks on Starlink's satellites.
"Hopefully, it will not happen tomorrow. But if it happens in a year, Ukraine will be ready," the person says. "Every army should prepare for this scenario because it's not just a question if Elon Musk will shut it down. In the military, you always need to have backup options for connectivity. Otherwise, you may lose everything."
Katherine Naylor Pullman started Our Third Place, a networking group for women in media, as a part-time side project. It began four years ago with monthly, then weekly, dinners. Women in Chicago and Los Angeles reached out, wanting to host their own dinners. Now, Our Third Place is in 40 cities, and running it has blossomed into a full-time gig for Naylor Pullman, who left a previous job in brand partnerships.
Our Third Place has grown to 1,800 members without big investors, and that's by design. "If someone were to throw us millions of dollars, they would then want millions of members," Naylor Pullman says. "I firmly believe you cannot scale community by the millions." She and the company's CEO, Ashley Preininger, are building by seed-strapping, a tactic where companies raise smaller investments and forgo the traditional venture capital cycle of Series A and Series B fundraising, and then grow the company through revenue. They're raising money now from family, friends, and members, because they can work within that smaller fundraising space, and keep costs for members lower when the company isn't beholden to massive investor returns. "We actually don't feel like we need a huge influx of cash to do what we need to do," Preininger says.
Seed-strapping has become more appealing to founders as venture capital funding waned following the 2010s boom and the end of the zero-interest rate policy. The shift also comes amid the rise of the single-person startup, as more founders deploy AI agents to help with coding, accounting, marketing, and other tasks that once required expensive labor. The founders who spoke with me for this story tell me they're taking an alternate path to funding by choice, seeing that more money can come with more problems — more commitments, more expectations, and less control of their company. Amid "all the fundraising doom and gloom," says Caroline Lewis, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Nura Ventures, "the rules are being rewritten."
"You can go back to business fundamentals of building a product that customers want to buy, then you can raise some capital and get some decent traction, and don't necessarily have to be beholden to the traditional venture train," Lewis says.
For some founders, hopping off the venture capital treadmill allows them to build at the speed they want.
Seed-strapping isn't new. Software company Zapier seed-strapped before the term was in the zeitgeist, raising just $1.3 million seed-strapping and eventually growing to hundreds of millions in annual revenue. But the tactic has gotten new attention as founders struggled to raise venture capital. The number of global venture deals has steadily fallen from more than 17,000 in the first quarter of 2022 to about 8,500 in the second quarter of 2026, according to data from Pitchbook. Deal value is hitting an all-time high, but that's largely fueled by big deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Since late 2024, AI startups have captured at least half of venture funding, with their stranglehold on the market climbing to 80% at the beginning of this year, according to Crunchbase. Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI, and Waymo accounted for nearly two-thirds of the money invested that quarter.
The market is bifurcated between those companies that need lots of capital and can bring massive returns, and all the other good ideas that may need less compute power, less labor, and would bring smaller returns, says Charles Hudson, managing partner at venture firm Precursor Ventures. Big venture funds look for areas where they can make large investments and look for massive returns. "The biggest challenge is: how do you finance these companies through that little middle period?" He says. "There's lots of money to get started. If you're building something big, there's lots of money to shoot for the moon." But for companies that raise a seed round of a few million, and may need another few million down the line, there could be fewer investors in that sweet spot. "Who's going to provide you that money?"
The number of global venture deals has dropped from more than 17,000 in the first quarter of 2022 to about 8,500 in the second quarter of 2026.
According to Carta, 41% of the US-based companies that raised a seed round in 2022 didn't fundraise beyond that. Another 21% continued to fundraise, but did not pursue a Series A round. These companies have also maintained lower headcounts than those that did raise a Series A round or beyond, sticking with median staff numbers of between six and eight people, compared to 22 at firms that raised more money.
About half of startups that raised seed money in 2018 moved to a Series A within three years, according to data provided by Carta. But among those that raised a seed round in 2022, fewer than a third of new startups made the leap to a Series A by 2025. "The overall trend is that graduation rates have decreased," Hamza Shad, insights manager at Carta, tells me in an email. "This suggests that seed-strapping — whether willingly or unwillingly — has become more common."
Lauren Dines worked in venture for five years, but left to found and work full-time on Breaknine, an AI startup that handles personalized outreach, late last year. "While I was in venture, I saw a lot of companies where I was like, this is a good idea, it's just not venture scalable." By steering away from the venture route and shunning expectations of massive growth, she can potentially accelerate the typical venture timeline, exiting in three to five years instead of seven to 10. It's potentially less risky than seeking to raise tens of millions of dollars and get returns in the hundreds of millions.
Dines says her goal is to grow her business, and then make a strategic decision about how to move forward. "It was never my dream to have a venture-backed business." Dines thought about: "What do I need, and how can I best get there?" when it comes to her own needs and life. "This is probably the most efficient path to getting there."
Women have also struggled to raise venture capital, with all-female leadership teams taking home just 6.5% of venture deals in 2024. But women founders and investors make up nearly half of all angel investors. Boot-strapping and seed-strapping are ways around the funding blocks. That's part of the thought process behind how Shannon Davenport, who founded Esker Beauty, has built her company. She boot-strapped it for about four years, then went looking for venture capital. But Davenport says she found that the VCs had a thesis for how her business should fit the market that didn't align with what she knew about her products and customers. She raised smaller investments in a seed stage, and now, says her company is approaching profitability, targeting the end of the year.
"My most important valued asset is my time," Davenport says. And chasing venture money ate away at the time she could spend doing the product work that she's passionate about. "Instead of being super obsessed with your customer, you're super obsessed with the investors. You have to pick what's your priority." AI also makes this easier. Subject matter experts can do more with AI to start, and may need fewer hires, saving them money. Davenport says she has built an AI-powered dashboard to act as an assistant, pulling in metrics on everything she needs to know about the business. She has a small full-time staff of three, but AI takes on some tedious tasks. "I kind of have a personal assistant now that I could not afford before," she says.
At a time when the fundraising game is changing rapidly, there's opportunity in going back to the business fundamentals.
OpenAI on Thursday rolled out two shopping features globally, allowing users to virtually try on clothing and accessories and save their favorite finds for later.
The new Try On button lets shoppers upload a selfie or full-body photo to see how products might look on them. Users can also upload screenshots of items or celebrity outfits and ask ChatGPT to find similar pieces available for purchase.
Both features are powered by OpenAI's new ChatGPT Images 2.5 model, which the company said delivers more realistic lighting and textures.
I tested the function, from a simple necklace try-on to a complicated full-body costume, and included a cat in the mix to see if the AI could also dress our four-legged friends.
Here's what it excelled at — and where things began to get weird.
Starting with accessories
I let ChatGPT accessorize my original selfie (left) with a moon pendant (middle) and a full necklace stack (right).
ChatGPT/Business Insider
I started simple with a selfie and a request to find me products that could recreate a silver necklace stack I found on Pinterest, and a little moon pendant in particular, as a centerpiece.
Screenshot/Business Insider
The AI quickly found options for the moon pendant at various price points and gave me two options: I could try on the pendant, or I could try on the entire layered necklace look.
I tested out both looks. The proportions seemed correct and extremely realistic, and could convince me to make a purchase, even though I prefer to shop for jewelry in person.
Testing a full-body outfit
My original dressing room selfie (left), compared with the virtual try-on of a top (middle) and a full-body outfit change (right).
ChatGPT/Business Insider
I pulled out another Pinterest save for a concert outfit inspiration, and chose a dressing room selfie with a simple background to try it on.
Screenshot/Business Insider
The AI categorized the style I'm seeking as "whimsigoth"and recommended products consistent with the branding, including garments from Disturbia and Free People.
Screenshot/ Business Insider
I tried on both a single mesh top and a complete outfit. The result was nearly perfect. Even the wide lace sleeve that fell down my arm was perfectly placed.
The wedding dress
My mirror selfie (left) and a virtual wedding dress try-on (right) that didn't exactly go as planned.
ChatGPT/Business Insider
The AI did really well so far, so I decided to ask for more complicated outfits, and here is when we started to enter dicey territory.
Though I won't be getting married anytime soon, I love vintage wedding dresses from the 1970s, and was curious what one would look like on me.
Screenshot/Business Insider
The AI seemed to prefer brand-new products and surfaced real vintage items last, and I was surprised to find only one Etsy listing among a mix of brands I had never heard of.
I eventually asked to try on a 1970s ivory lace wedding dress, but the virtual rendering did not accurately represent it. The real dress was mostly made of satin and had solid sleeves, but the virtual try-on turned the dress into a full-length lace gown with cake-like layers and sheer sleeves. The original dress was also not meant to trail on the floor as the AI depicted.
I would not call this a successful virtual try-on.
A potential Halloween costume
I asked AI to help dress me in a fairy outfit for Halloween. The photo on the right was the result.
ChatGPT/Business Insider
To push the AI even more, I decided to ask for my dream Halloween outfit, complete with fairy wings.
Screenshot/Business Insider
ChatGPT recommended a combination of a Victorian-style white maxi dress and a pair of moth wings, so I asked to try them on together, but it did not turn out ideal.
Not only do the chunky wings look significantly different from the airy, semi-transparent, blush-colored moth wings I asked to try on, but the AI also began to "upgrade" my body so the dress would look more flattering, giving me exceedingly long legs.
I am fairly short and often can't manage to fit into a maxi dress like the AI wishes I could, so I would recommend always trusting the product measurements over the virtual try-on, which may not reflect actual proportions.
It works on cats
A photo of the author's orange cat (left), compared to a virtual try-on photo for a Halloween-themed cat collar (right).
ChatGPT/Business Insider
I was wondering if the AI was pet-friendly, so I ran a separate try-on test for my fluffy orange cat with an adorable Halloween collar, and now it's sitting in my shopping cart.
At the end of the day, ChatGPT may have given me longer legs and a wedding dress I didn't order, but it has at least one clear advantage over a real fitting room: I can bring my cat.
Nate Bargatze gave some career advice. It was remarkably similar to tips from high-powered CEOs.
John Lamparski/Getty Images
Business Insider attended the Ford Accelerate conference, an event full of CEOs — and Nate Bargatze.
They talked about their early careers. Their advice was very similar.
It comes as America struggles to fill skilled-trade roles that once powered US companies.
Nate Bargatze's first jobs weren't fancy.
Pizza deliveryman, valet driver, mover — titles that "were always exactly what the job was," he said.
"I remember going to one house, and they wanted me to go buy them beer," he recalled of his time working for Pizza Hut. "They'd give you a little extra cash, and you'd be like, 'Alright, that's nice.' A little extra $20 in the pocket, and you go."
Bargatze's career is now much more flashy. He's hosted SNL twice, starred in his own Netflix specials, headlined national tours, and is the leading man in Ford ad campaigns.
And that's how Business Insider met Bargatze on Wednesday — at Ford's Accelerate conference. He emceed the Detroit event that brought together business leaders to talk about America's skilled-trades shortage.
We asked Baratze about building a dream career. His response was remarkably similar to what CEOs at the conference were saying — but perhaps with less corporate frou-frou.
Their main piece of advice: Don't expect your first role to be the dream job, and once you find an opening, make the most of it.
A retail beginning?
Linda Hubbard, Carhartt's CEO, told Business Insider about a worker who wanted to be a data analyst, so he took a retail sales position instead.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Linda Hubbard, the CEO of the workwear maker Carhartt, told Business Insider that she had heard from a retail worker who had applied for an analytics role, but Carhartt did not have an opening for him. Instead, he took a job at the company's Detroit retail store — and got his foot in the door.
"He has all of our internal posting access," she said on Wednesday. "So he's now one step ahead, right? He'll meet other people, and, you know what? He may end up loving retail, becoming a store manager, a district manager, and like, all of a sudden, 'I thought I wanted the data position, but maybe I don't.'"
Several other executives used their own career trajectories as an example.
"I wanted to be an investment banker. That was my dream job," David Regnery, CEO of Trane Technologies, an HVAC manufacturing company, said onstage. He hated banking and pivoted to a job on Trane's factory floors. "Here I am, 40 years later. I'm at the same company."
Ford's CEO Jim Farley said he moved up in the company after working on the automaker's factory floor as a time-motion-study expert. Dan Schulman, CEO of Verizon, said he always wanted to be a fireman — and still has dreams of being a rancher. Patti Poppe, PG&E's CEO, started out as an automotive engineer before heading up California's biggest energy utility.
A fast-changing work environment
Several executives said there are concerning undercurrents in America's workforce economy.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
For the CEOs, their advice carries more urgency than a standard career pep talk. The conference was built around a growing shortage of skilled-trades workers, even as AI leaves many workers wondering which jobs will endure.
A frequently cited stat among the execs: For every five trade workers who retired over the past decade, only two Americans have been ready to pick up the slack.
Meanwhile, executives kept saying they don't know what AI is going to do to our jobs ("The pace of technological change right now is hard to even fathom, and we're right in the middle of it," Schulman said.)
Still, their advice was the same: remain open to whatever opportunities pop up, even if they surprise you. From there, you can build enduring skills.
Bargatze said his comedy career was also built on that premise. He said it started when he booked a contract to do stand-up on a cruise ship. It wasn't the audience he wanted to perform for, but it gave him a stage to test out his material.
"If I have an hour of material that I can rely on, that's something that nobody can take from me. I have this hour," he told Business Insider during a roundtable. "If you know how to build and take apart a car, you have an act, you have something you can use. That's just a giant backstop."
Creator Vincent Marcus and Shira Lazar, CEO of What's Trending, at AI Creator Day.
Randy Shropshire for TheWrap
Content creators at a conference in LA this week seemed largely unfazed by AI backlash.
While some influencers are avoiding AI, creators at the event showed off their AI-generated work.
Some attendees said they came to the event for a "safe space" to talk about creating with AI.
How do influencers and content creators feel about getting roasted for using AI?
Mostly unbothered. At least, that was the vibe at a conference for AI creators that I attended in Los Angeles this week.
I joined hundreds of creators, marketers, brands, and AI enthusiasts on Tuesday at "AI Creator Day," hosted by industry trade publication TheWrap and media brand What's Trending. The one-day event took place at UCLA and featured talks like "What It Actually Takes to Make an AI Series" and "Who Decides What's Human?"
"We're taking it in the head right now," said DeStorm Power about people leaving "slop" comments on content made with AI. He spoke on a panel about how OG YouTubers are using the tech.
Despite the comments, Power, who has over 3 million subscribers on YouTube, said he ignores them and focuses instead on the thousands of people who enjoy the AI-generated content he makes.
Going in, I had expected plenty of conversation about how creators can navigate AI backlash — like the influencers who got skewered for attending a brand trip hosted by OpenAI or the dramatic apology issued by longtime YouTuber Hank Green for "relying too heavily on AI."
Instead, I found a lot of hype, practical AI filmmaking tips, and few apologies. Creators proudly presented their AI-generated projects — from a comedy sketch about having a Merman for a roommate to a black-and-white, old-Hollywood-style short — and dished about how many humans and AI credits they used to make them.
Most of the creators were well past debating whether they should use AI to tell stories and were far more interested in how they should use it and what they could do with it.
Filmmaker Chris Capel said AI helped him make a short about living with a merman that had first been conceived of two decades ago.
Kelsey Vlamis
A 'safe space' to talk about AI
Several of the attendees I spoke with said they came to "AI Creator Day" in part because it represented a "safe space."
The overarching sentiment among creators was that they were excited to share how they used AI and what it enabled them to do.
Makers of an AI-generated sci-fi action thriller series called "The Arc" said they were able to fully complete the first episode, from ideation to final cut, in three and a half weeks. Chris Capel, a YouTuber who screened his AI-generated short "Living with a Merman," said the idea for the sketch was 20 years old, but that he never had the resources to make it happen, until now.
It wasn't always clear how much each of the works shown had been generated by AI — were the ideas, jokes, and dialogue all generated by AI, or was it a human-written story and script with AI supplying the visuals? — but creators repeatedly emphasized the same message: A human made this, and AI was a tool they used.
AI tools that repeatedly came up included Seedance and Kling for generating video, Midjourney and Nano Banana Pro for creating images, and ChatGPT and Claude for ideation and writing.
David Bianchi, an actor, producer, and director whose credits include work on traditional film and TV productions, said he wanted to dispel the notion that making AI cinema is easy.
"It does take serious craft," he said during a panel discussion. "You have the tools, but you can't make taste."
While the work shown was far more impressive than some of the AI slop that's become increasingly common online, the photorealistic productions still had a bit of that uncanny valley effect at times.
The AI hype at the event was a sharp contrast to the backlash some influencers and filmmakers have received for using the tech.
Kelsey Vlamis
The inevitability of AI
Some talks confronted the tougher questions around AI. During a panel called "Who Decides What's Human?," James Douglas, a vice president at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said it's important that consumers aren't misled about what's AI and what's not.
"The person who is consuming the content should not be deceived," he said.
There was less discussion about other common concerns about AI, like how to ensure AI-generated work is not too derivative of others' and whether the opportunities presented by AI will outweigh the human jobs that could be lost when productions can be made with much fewer people.
Vincent Marcus, a creator with more than 1.3 million Instagram followers, said he expects he'll no longer be needed for the voice acting work he does: "I'm already preparing for my job to not exist." He said that has pushed him to embrace AI and prepare for the future.
A major theme of the day was the idea that the AI wave is inevitable and that creators who don't embrace it will be left behind.
"The game is changing," Bernie Su, a web series creator and head of creative for the AI entertainment company Pickford, said. "We'll do our thing. Audiences will react to us, and we'll see what happens."
CUDA inventor Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing at Nvidia.
GTC
CUDA engineers are elite coders who squeeze speed out of Nvidia's chips.
AI is reshaping the job as demand for scarce expertise continues to grow.
AI could soon write CUDA code that humans can verify but not fully understand.
For years, CUDA engineers who optimize Nvidia chips have been among tech's most sought-after specialists. Now, they're increasingly managing AI that does it for them.
These engineers specialize in using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) — Nvidia's software for programming its AI chips, known as GPUs — to write code that can run AI as efficiently as possible.
The jobs are coveted because compute costs are massive; engineers who can squeeze the most value from a chip can save companies millions.
CUDA engineers traditionally spent their days writing kernels — the small pieces of code that tell a GPU how to do a single job as quickly as possible — and then testing them to find the fastest version. Now, AI is taking over much of that painstaking work by generating hundreds of kernels, testing them, and picking the best one.
As a result, CUDA engineers increasingly spend their time supervising coding agents. It's part of a broader shift across the software industry, where developers are moving from writing code to managing AI.
This involves setting goals, checking results, and stepping in when the AI gets stuck, said Jeremy Nixon, founder of the startup Infinity, which builds AI that optimizes chip software.
Because AI can introduce "bizarre" bugs that humans wouldn't have written, the job of reviewing AI code has become "more intense," said Anne Ouyang, cofounder of the AI infrastructure startup Standard Kernel.
Despite the shift, hiring data suggests demand for CUDA engineers remains strong. While overall demand for software engineers is lower than in 2023, "demand for some specialized skills, like CUDA, has grown," said Elena Magrini, head of global research at the labor market analytics firm Lightcast.
And scarcity remains a challenge, even as AI has supercharged productivity, said Bing Xu, founder of the AI optimization startup INT21. That's because the deepest CUDA expertise was built over more than 20 years, long before AI sent demand soaring.
"In the past, we couldn't hire enough good-quality CUDA engineers, and now AI is filling the gap," Xu said.
CUDA engineer jobs are evolving
CUDA engineering roles exist both inside and outside Nvidia — including at AI labs and cloud giants. There have already been more US job postings requiring CUDA skills through the first eight months of 2026 than during all of 2025, per Lightcast.
Nvidia remains the largest employer hiring for these positions, according to the firm, with over 300 active US job postings requiring CUDA skills as of September. Public Nvidia job postings for CUDA-related engineering roles advertise base salaries as high as $431,250 before stock and benefits.
Nixon said that AI lowers the barrier to entry for engineers with less experience while simultaneously pushing veterans toward higher-level work, like overseeing AI.
Ouyang said AI could hit junior CUDA engineers hardest, while specialists who can outperform AI and verify its work will become more valuable.
And over time, AI could take on a greater role.
Xu said his company's research had already shown that AI can outperform human engineers on certain benchmarks for writing kernels.
In some cases, AI already writes CUDA code that engineers can't fully understand, though they can verify it's correct, Nixon said.
He said this ability to outperform human engineers offers an early glimpse of "superhuman" AI in the real world.
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