GM designed its electric Hummer in 20 months, a process the company called "heroic." Its chief product officer told Business Insider it wants to make that more common.
Josh Lefkowitz/Getty Images
General Motors tells Business Insider it's trying to cut the time to develop a new model to two years.
Automakers are trying to make cars faster amid tariffs, EV stumbles, and competition from China.
GM shared some tools it's using to virtually test cars before building prototypes.
General Motors wants to find its "uh oh" moments earlier.
For years, automakers have built physical prototypes to learn how a car behaves on the road, cools passengers down, burns through energy, or even crashes. Those builds can be expensive and time-consuming.
In an interview with Business Insider, GM's chief product officer, Sterling Anderson, and executive director of virtual integration engineering, Jason Fischer, said the automaker is using AI, simulation, and decades of engineering data to move more of that discovery work into the virtual world.
GM — which runs brands including Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC — is targeting a two-year vehicle development process. That's down from the standard four- to six-year vehicle development cycle.
"Physical properties are really becoming confirmation builds," Fischer, a 28-year GM veteran, said, rather than "the first time we've discovered something that we've missed."
The push comes as the auto industry is facing several headwinds at once. Chinese automakers are launching new, lower-cost vehicles at a rapid clip. America's EV appetite has not met initial expectations, forcing automakers to write down billions of dollars in production investments. And federal emissions rules, tariffs, and consumer incentives for vehicle sales have swung back and forth between presidential administrations.
Those pressures are forcing automakers to rethink how long they can afford to spend developing new vehicles. Executives at Nissan and Hyundai have previously told Business Insider that they are trying to cut down the time it takes to bring cars to market.
Now, GM tells Business Insider it's confident it can meet its timeline goal because it's done it before: The GMC Hummer EV took them 20 months to move from concept to production.
"We want that to be the norm, not an exception," Anderson, a former Tesla and Aurora Innovation executive, said. "The team did a number of Herculean things to make that happen. These tools are making it possible for our entire product development organization to do the same thing without the heroics for every vehicle we build."
GM is testing the car before it exists
General Motors told Business Insider it's conducting virtual tests — including Consumer Reports' avoidance maneuver testing — on computer-generated models. In this image, a Cadillac Lyriq runs through the test.
General Motors
GM's faster-development push is powered by a mix of bespoke virtual tools and AI models trained on or informed by the automaker's own engineering data.
Fischer said GM rarely uses an "exact off-the-shelf tool." Instead, the company works with software suppliers to customize tools for its own vehicle programs and has also built some of the technology internally.
"We have a lot of IP ownership on some of the techniques that we've developed," Fischer said.
GM declined to specify how much it budgets for AI usage by product designers or engineers. Instead, the company said it's focused less on token volume and more on whether AI solves real business problems.
In one demo, GM showed a Cadillac Lyriq running a cone avoidance maneuver — a common safety test run by Consumer Reports — with several engineering and design teams brought into "a single virtual environment," Fischer said.
That lets GM test how hardware and software behave together earlier — and under more weather conditions. Fischer said engineers can rerun the tests in different road conditions, including ice, snow, and rain.
The same approach applies to less flashy parts of the car, too. Fischer said GM can use co-simulation to model airflow, refrigerant behavior, cabin comfort, range, energy efficiency, and fuel economy together. Work that might have taken months can now happen in "hours or days," he said.
The models even suggested different designs for a bracket in the Corvette's rear hood. Fischer said it was developed using topology optimization and turned out to be 30% stiffer, 20% lighter, and about 95% more durable than the original design.
GM then added the Corvette symbol in the middle.
GM says this bracket was initially designed with its software tools.
This latest push goes into the belly of a car's development process: validating how the vehicle handles, cools, crashes, and integrates hardware and software before GM spends more time and money proving it with a physical build.
"The winners of this industry are those who iterate like next-gen software companies," Anderson said.
It was late January when Bill Law realized something had shifted in San Francisco's real estate market. That month, the longtime tech worker and his wife submitted an offer on a $1.3 million home in the Sunset District, a west-side neighborhood that boasts good schools and easy access to both the ocean and Golden Gate Park. Hoping to stand out from the house-hunting scrum, the couple offered $300,000 above the asking price. They didn't come close. The winning bid of $1.86 million easily eclipsed their offer.
"I definitely feel the frustration in the real estate market," Law tells me. "Since January, it's just — it took off like a rocket."
Half a million dollars may sound like a stunning sum for a bidding war — unless you've paid any attention to San Francisco's housing market over the past six months. In a city long on AI and chronically short on housing, some homes now trade for millions of dollars above their asking prices. Once-underrated neighborhoods like the Outer Sunset and Outer Parkside now provide fog-soaked backdrops for truly unhinged pricing contests. No major city has seen home values rise faster over the past year, helping the San Francisco metro reclaim its title as the most expensive housing market in the country.
The City by the Bay has seen many a boom-and-bust cycle, but seasoned San Franciscans will tell you that this one feels different. Recency bias? Maybe. The current AI-fueled bonanza, though, is notable for both its concentration of extreme wealth and the speed with which it's minting new fortunes. With a wave of IPOs looming, including OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic, overnight millionaires and billionaires are poised to deliver more shocks in the coming months.
It's a head-spinning turnaround from the last time San Francisco real estate drew national headlines. In the depths of the housing slowdown in 2022 and 2023, Bay Area home prices were caught in the dreaded "doom loop" as newly mobile white-collar workers fled to home offices in cheaper cities like Austin or Denver. Census Bureau data shows the city's population shrank by more than 60,000 people.
It's tempting to write off San Francisco's comeback as an AI-fueled anomaly, an extreme case divorced from most Americans' reality. The city may stand alone in many respects, but the experience of buyers and sellers there also offers a neat encapsulation of the forces shaping the whole of America's real estate market: the K-shaped economy, employers' return to the office push, homebuilding hurdles, and, of course, the AI-bubble-or-maybe-not-a-bubble. San Francisco's "boom loop" is just getting started — and a version may be coming to a city near you.
Until recently, the six-bedroom home at 2626 Larkin Street served as a reminder of San Francisco's sinking fortunes. The contemporary Mediterranean Revival building, with its sweeping views of the Bay, 1,000-bottle wine cellar, and prime location atop Russian Hill, represented the height of luxury. In January 2020, it sold for a whopping $20 million. Just a few years later, though, in late 2023, it traded again for a mere $10 million — a 50% discount. The eye-popping collapse spoke to San Francisco's broader headwinds: The city's typical home value plummeted by more than 17% from its 2022 peak to its 2024 trough, Zillow data shows.
Today, the house is a symbol of the city's rebound. It sold for $24 million in April — recouping all of its pre-COVID value and then some. The Larkin Street spot is hardly an outlier. "I've never seen a market like this," says Monica Pauli, an agent and 25-year veteran of San Francisco's real estate scene. She grasped the full extent of the changes in September, when one of her listings, a four-bedroom home in Asbury Heights, quickly sold for $1 million above its $4 million asking price. Pauli began warning buyers to get under contract before the flood of AI money rocked the market further: "I told them, you have to buy before 2026."
The AI boom is fueling a scramble for homes in neighborhoods like San Francisco's high-end Russian Hill, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lives.
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
The AI-driven frenzy is the latest and most dramatic twist in a six-year housing odyssey for San Francisco. The downtown area was hit hard at the outset of 2020, but an initial dip in the city's home prices soon turned into a boom as buyers pounced on rock-bottom mortgage rates and scrambled for more home-office space. "Everybody had a record year in 2021," says Paul Hwang, an agent who specializes in the South Beach neighborhood. Then interest rates spiked, tech companies shed workers, and residents' march toward cheaper pastures intensified — from 2020 through 2022, the metro's population shrank by more than 3%. San Francisco home prices followed suit. As recently as spring 2025, things still seemed shaky: tariffs, high borrowing rates, and general economic anxiety spoiled hopes of a pickup in buyer demand. As the sun was setting on last year's summer selling season, however, something odd happened: San Francisco prices started climbing — quickly.
While the pandemic and rise of remote work loosened the city's grasp on tech talent — "people said that the Bay Area was dead," Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, tells me — that slippage has proven to be temporary. The city is now the undisputed heart of the AI revolution, home not only to household names like OpenAI and Anthropic, but also "a lot of companies you've never heard of that are worth $100 billion or something," says Mike Simonsen, a longtime San Francisco resident and the chief economist for the real estate brokerage Compass International Holdings. "I have friends in their 30s who are suddenly billionaires."
This crop of companies is luring workers to the Bay with the promise of multimillion-dollar bonuses, fat equity packages, and lavish salaries. An analysis of migration data by John Burns Research and Consulting found that San Francisco recently notched its first month of positive net domestic in-migration — more households moving in from other parts of the country than moving out — since at least 2018. Austin, a darling of the remote-work era, emerged as a popular destination for Bay Area expats in 2020. Over the past year, though, more households moved from Austin to San Francisco than the reverse.
When they work so hard, 9 A.M to 9 P.M., six days a week, they're going to feel entitled to go buy the Ferrari. And the Ferrari is literally the house in Noe Valley or the penthouse in South Beach.Paul Hwang, San Francisco real estate agent
The renewed interest is butting up against the city's multi-decade struggle to produce more homes. Even in San Francisco's down years, the inventory of coveted single-family homes was tight: in the spring of 2023, Compass data shows, fewer than 400 single-family homes were available for sale in the city. Today, there are only 250 or so. The city simply isn't building new supply. Meanwhile, well-compensated tech workers are using those bonuses and increasingly valuable stock to snag their slice of the city. My colleague Ben Bergman recently reported on a couple of Bay Area home listings for which OpenAI and Anthropic stock will suffice as payment. Hwang, the South Beach agent, expects the future IPO windfalls to further juice the housing market.
"When they work so hard, 9 A.M to 9 P.M., six days a week, they're going to feel entitled to go buy the Ferrari," Hwang said. "And the Ferrari is literally the house in Noe Valley or the penthouse in South Beach."
Newly flush tech workers are jostling for the exact same kinds of homes, such as these ones in the Noe Valley neighborhood.
Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
The San Francisco metro already has the highest price growth of any major metro in the country, with prices up nearly 11% year over year, per Redfin data. Within the San Francisco city limits, prices are up a stunning 15% from a year ago (no other major city comes close to hitting double digits). That growth is mostly coming from the top end of the market, Fairweather tells me. Prices are up 13.4% since 2022 in "luxury" neighborhoods, or ZIP codes where the typical home price exceeds $3 million. With the number of luxury buyers dramatically outweighing available inventory, competition is fierce even for fixer-uppers.
"People are willing to do a lot of work," says Victoria Stewart Davis, an agent who's worked across San Francisco for more than two decades. "They're willing to buy something for $8.2 million and spend another $8 million renovating it."
Agents and economists note that this frenzy has yet to really spill over to the entry-level part of the market. For example, prices are actually down 4% in ZIP codes with homes in the half-million-dollar range.
"I think the AI part is important in explaining the divergence between the luxury and the non-luxury part of the market," Fairweather tells me. The richest buyers can afford to duke it out in bidding wars, but the rest are staring down the same factors that have forced many potential buyers across the US to pump the brakes.
At the top end of the market, the madness is often by design. Sellers' agents are pricing homes well below market value "to get buyers through the door," Pauli says. "Then the market will speak." That could mean a final sale that's a million dollars over the asking price, or it could mean the eventual buyer pays double the listed amount. Pauli points to a six-bedroom home in the Cow Hollow neighborhood that recently sold for $15 million — nearly twice its $7.95 million asking price: "The pricing strategy, it worked."
"We are seeing, I think, a little bit of a disconnect from reality.Michael Williams, agent at TurboHome
Sales from just a couple of months ago, or "comps," which agents typically use to estimate the market value of current listings in a given area, have been rendered meaningless. Michael Williams, an agent with the brokerage TurboHome, says he now focuses on calling agents with pending sales to get up-to-the-minute insight on what homes are going for. Like any agent in San Francisco these days, he can rattle off examples of bidding wars that broke his brain: one that sticks with him is a house in Bernal Heights for which one of his clients was in the running. The winning offer came in at $2 million — $400,000 higher than the second-place bid.
"We are seeing, I think, a little bit of a disconnect from reality," Williams tells me.
At a certain point, the numbers cease being anchored to anything other than a desire to avoid losing.
"Many people with really deep pockets, it really doesn't make a difference to go $5 million, $10 million above asking, especially if they missed out on a home or two," says Alan Mark, a longtime Bay Area real estate consultant. "That'll really get people going. They got emotionally involved, and they lost. They go in a third time, and there's no way they're going to lose."
The numbers don't bode well for a calmer San Francisco market anytime soon. A city with a few hundred single-family homes up for grabs at any given moment is hardly primed to accommodate thousands of newly flush tech workers. Sure, not all of those lottery winners will rush to sink their money into the housing market. But the ones that do will almost certainly be jostling for the exact kinds of homes that are already drawing the stiffest competition: move-in-ready, standalone places that can accommodate growing families and offer attractive commutes for 996ers.
Simonsen, the Compass chief economist, moved to San Francisco in January 1999, when the city was in the throes of the dot-com boom. "This in many ways feels comparable," he tells me. One difference, he says, is that the current gold rush feels more concentrated among a smaller number of companies that are doing "really remarkable things."
San Francisco's real estate boom hasn't spilled over to neighboring areas like Oakland.
Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
That concentration, and the unevenness of San Francisco's real estate comeback — super hot on the luxury end, lukewarm in the "affordable" segment — speaks to the broader forces at play nationwide. The K-shaped economy means lower earners are getting hammered by inflation, while high earners are weathering it just fine as their investments swell. Pandemic-era migration patterns have broken down as homeowners stay put, companies pull back on hiring, and white-collar workers heed the call back to the office. The AI boom is minting lots of new winners while prompting layoffs elsewhere.
"At a national level, it's reflective of how the AI economy is not making everybody equally rich," Fairweather tells me.
When I spoke to longtime San Franciscans, they expressed concerns about the destabilizing effects of rapid price run-ups. "Nobody wants to see rents or prices shoot through the moon," Mark, the real estate consultant, tells me. Even the ones who can afford it are rethinking how far their money will go. Law, the tech worker who lost out on that $1.86 million home in the Sunset District, ended up closing on a three-bedroom home in that neighborhood in March after weeks of diligent searching: "Whatever came out that met our criteria, we went and looked at it," Law tells me. "It was just, like, hardly any homes." At open houses in popular neighborhoods, he and other hopeful buyers found themselves "literally shoulder to shoulder, like you're at Disneyland on Thanksgiving or Christmas."
The winning home came with none of that mess. Law and his agent put in an offer before the seller ever hosted an open house, hoping to secure the place before it got more interest. The seller was on a tight timeline, and they worked out a deal. To save money in other ways, Law enlisted the services of TurboHome, which charged him a flat fee of $20,000 rather than the typical agent's fee of 2%-3% of the sale price — tens of thousands of dollars more in this instance. Law asked that I not disclose the final price, but noted he ended up shelling out $1,200 per square foot — well above the $900 per square foot he bid on that first home.
"It was definitely an eye-opening experience," Law says.
Today's bidding wars may soon seem like bargains. There will be plenty more handwringing in the coming months over San Francisco's skyrocketing prices and growing disparities. For now, though, the real estate practitioners I spoke with were mostly relieved that the conversation has shifted away from the "doom loop." The pervasive feeling is that naysayers were too quick to sound the death knell for San Francisco, too hasty in writing off its industry and natural beauty.
"I think we've been undervalued for a long time," Pauli tells me. "It's really nice to see our city bounce back."
James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.
Rapido has grown to become one of India's largest ride-hailing service providers, putting Uber on notice.
Courtesy Rapido
Rapido has become one of the leading ride-hailing providers in India.
The startup was founded in 2015, two years after Uber first launched a service in the country.
Rapido's CEO said cheap rides and driver fees helped it pull ahead of competitors.
A startup has emerged as Uber's toughest rival in a market that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called a "must-win," doing so with a fraction of Uber's global workforce.
Rapido is a Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2015 with no presence or brand awareness in North America. But in India, Rapido has grown to become one of the country's primary ride-hailing providers, with more than 70 million monthly active users and nearly 3 million drivers, putting its top rivals in the region, Uber and Ola, on notice.
"Ola used to be our main competitor," Khosrowshahi said on Nikhil Kamath's podcast last year. "I see now that the tougher competition in India is Rapido."
In an interview with Business Insider, Rapido CEO and cofounder Aravind Sanka said the key to gaining ground in India was building around the needs of the local market, prioritizing two-wheelers and auto-rickshaws over traditional cars, and adopting a different driver economics model in a country where riders are highly price sensitive.
"From an affordability point of view, a four-wheeler is the most premium in India, and then a two-wheeler and three-wheeler are most affordable," Sanka said. "We knew that India is a price-sensitive market and affordability has to be the key for ride-sharing compared to premium."
Uber entered India's market in 2013, two years before Rapido was founded, launching in Bengaluru with a traditional car-focused, ride-hailing model.
Sanka said Rapido took a different approach from day one, spending the first six years building the app around the two-wheeled platform before expanding into auto-rickshaws and cars.
The three-wheeled rickshaw is a popular mode of transportation in India.
Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images
The focus has shaped Rapido's approach to building the company. Sanka said the average cost of a two-wheeled ride is 60 to 70 cents, and that bikes and three-wheelers make up about 70% of total rides, forcing the company to operate with a lower-cost structure.
The startup also changed how it made money from drivers or "captains" as they're referred to on the app. Instead of taking a commission on each ride, the company charges a flat daily fee, regardless of how much a driver earns per ride.
Sanka said the model helped bring more drivers online. Rapido has nearly 3 million drivers on the app — up from 1 million about two-and-a-half years ago. Uber's head of India operations, Prabhjeet Singh, said last July that Uber had about 1.4 million drivers.
A Rapido spokesperson said the app has more than 70 million monthly active users. Sanka said the company has roughly 800 employees, which is dwarfed by Uber's 34,000-strong global workforce.
An Uber spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Rapido is not profitable yet, but its losses are shrinking. The company's operating revenue rose 44% in fiscal 2025, while its net loss narrowed 30%, The Economic Times reported, citing financial documents filed with India's Registrar of Companies.
Though one of the most populous countries in the world, Sanka estimated that less than 5% of its population uses ride-hailing. The CEO said a merger or consolidation with Uber is not in the cards at the moment.
"When penetration is low, and it is growing fast, that means the positions can change at any point in time," Sanka said. "There's no point of thinking about any kind of consolidation."
Greg Brockman gave $25 million to a political action committee.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
OpenAI's president has donated millions of dollars to a pro-AI political network.
The AI company said on Monday it has not donated to any super PACs or political campaigns.
The post comes as AI takes center stage in political debates, from regulation to data center construction.
OpenAI distanced itself from cofounder Greg Brockman's political donations in a Monday post.
The OpenAI president and his wife said in late December that they started making political contributions that year. The couple funneled $25 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI political network funded by a who's who of Silicon Valley on both sides of the aisle.
LTF's primary super PAC had raised more than $50 million by the end of 2025, Business Insider previously reported. Frontier lab Perplexity donated $100,000, while venture capital firm Andressen Horowitz donated $25 million, per FEC filings.
"OpenAI does not direct the activities of LTF, or have visibility into their operations," OpenAI wrote on Monday.
The company said it has not donated to any super PACs or political campaigns, nor does it have an employee-funded PAC.
"If our approach changes in the future we will be transparent about it," the company said, calling for "thoughtful regulation" of AI.
"Groups that are advocating on AI should be clear about their policy views, be honest about whom they represent, and not use tactics like astroturfing that obscure the real choices facing policymakers and the public," OpenAI wrote.
OpenAI researcher Jason Wolfe said on X that he appreciated his employer's statement.
"Personally I really dislike a lot of things I've heard about LTF," he said, adding, "This is just a small step and people may still rightly be skeptical, but I hope we can earn trust through our actions going forward."
LTF did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In late December, Brockman posted on X that he and his wife had started making political contributions, writing, "The United States must work closely with builders, researchers, and entrepreneurs to ensure AI is developed responsibly at home and that we remain globally competitive."
OpenAI's statement comes as AI regulation — of companies, of the technologies they build, and of the data centers that host their chips — takes center stage in local and national political debates. The industry has channeled millions of dollars into races this year.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it's a great time to be a software company.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Jensen Huang gave software companies a reassuring pat on the back on Monday.
He said the agentic AI era is an "incredible time" to be a software company.
Software companies like Salesforce and Workday have seen their stocks fall on "Saaspocalyse" fears.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made an attempt to dispel fears of a "Saaspocalypse," saying it is an "incredible time" to be a software company.
Speaking at a keynote presentation at Computex, a tech show in Taiwan, Huang said the rise of agentic AI has led to major breakthroughs, including in tool use.
"A lot of people have said, 'Jensen, AI is coming. Agentic AI is coming. Therefore, all of the software companies are going to go out of business.' I said it's exactly the opposite," he said at the start of his speech on Monday.
Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can accomplish tasks with minimal human intervention. Huang said that because there will be many agents doing work, they will be using "more tools than ever."
"This is actually an incredible time to be a software company, but the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it," he added.
Huang's comments are an optimistic angle on what many have considered an existential crisis for software firms, where AI tools threaten the business models of companies like Salesforce and Workday. We at Business Insider have tried our hand at building alternatives to popular tools like Asana and Wix using AI, and have come up with usable web apps.
The fears have led to a sharp decline in software stocks; Atlassian, Salesforce, and SAP's shares have all fallen by more than 20% since the start of the year.
This is not the first time Huang has said that AI would keep software companies relevant. Speaking at a February Cisco AI event, he said that AI replacing software companies was "the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself."
And AI leaders, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have said that while software companies need to adapt, they will not be obsolete anytime soon.
Greg Lindgren co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and Rye on the Road.
Greg Lindgren
Greg Lindgren co-owns three bars in San Francisco. He's noticed the sobriety kick in tech.
"There's a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently," Lindgren said.
Lindgren said that companies aren't pulling back from bars at corporate events — but they want more mocktails.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It's been edited for length and clarity.
In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.
We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we've worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.
When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there's a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.
We have a warehouse in SoMa. We're a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.
We've had a front row seat. "Silicon Valley" is a documentary. It's a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.
The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.
It's been gaining momentum over the last few years. It's not just health, and it's not just trying to have that edge.
There's a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn't drink; they're already of that generation.
There's a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, "I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we're not going to succumb to distraction." One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.
Those same people are taking other things. It's more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.
There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It's like they've been let out of prison.
The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that's in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we're the contract bar that services that. There's a social bonding aspect.
Mocktails are all the rage at tech events
More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that's when we went into mocktails.
We work with a company that's a household name. We've gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We'll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody's drinking. We're happy to be there.
Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they're drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It's not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.
The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It's similar to having a cool photo booth; it's something people remember.
The business model hasn't shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we've been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.
So far, companies are not fixating on: "Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol." They're asking: "Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?"
That's what we see in the current landscape. It hasn't slowed our business down.
Dan Shipper, the CEO of media and AI software company Every, told Business Insider that he thinks people are underestimating Codex.
Alex Broadway/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
Dan Shipper says his AI-focused company — Every — spent a lot of money on his token use.
AI reads and drafts his emails, he said. It's also helping the company create pitch decks.
He said Every believes it's building an employee model that looks like the future of business.
Dan Shipper says he doesn't write many of his routine emails.
Instead, the CEO of Every — an AI-focused media, software, and consulting company — said he uses OpenAI's Codex to read his inbox, check his calendar, propose meeting times, and draft responses.
The tool is not allowed to send emails without his approval, but Shipper said much of the scheduling correspondence around his Business Insider interview was generated by AI.
"All the words are pretty much Codex," Shipper said. He's considering changing the "From:" field in his email to indicate when messages are drafted with his AI agent's help.
His New York City-based business is built around AI. Shipper cofounded the company in 2020 with backing from Starting Line and Reid Hoffman. It writes its own technology newsletter, sells AI consulting and training services, and builds apps like Sparkle, a computer-file automation tool.
The firm also gets early access to models and tools from major AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, giving Shipper a close-up view of where the tech is heading.
That perspective has made him optimistic about how people will work in the future. And he thinks his business is structured like a company of the future.
That optimism is expensive.
Every's AI expenses
Extremely smart take on the tokenmaxxing panic and why it won’t last: https://t.co/Su1yOhAuL7
Shipper told Business Insider he spent about $13,000 on his personal Codex overages last month, one of the highest AI bills he could recall.
"I got some side eye from our COO, Brandon Gell, on that one," he said.
Asked how much larger that bill was compared with the same month last year, Shipper responded: "Way more. Way, way, way, way, way, way, way, more."
At Every, AI access is just part of the cost of employing people. All 27 full-time employees get the entry-level $20-a-month subscriptions, while technical workers get $200-a-month plans, and the company pays overages. Token budgets are akin to other employee costs, like health insurance or company-issued laptops, Shipper said.
Even with the high costs, nobody at Every has been told they're spending too much on tokens, he added.
"We've started to figure out how we will think about overages," he said. "As long as you don't spend so much money that we go bankrupt, we'll be fine."
AI changed how the company works
Every's spending shows how deeply embedded AI has become in its workflow. Shipper said the company once experimented with giving every employee their own AI agent, but moved away from that model because the agents required too much upkeep.
Instead, Every now uses a smaller number of agents that serve specific teams or the whole company. One of them, called Claudie, helps the consulting team draft initial slide decks, put together sales proposals, and track client to-dos by reading transcripts and updating the company's task manager.
Shipper said he does not see those tools as replacing Every's workers outright. Instead, he said that AI could push more people into manager-like roles earlier in their careers.
"Very few people actually get the opportunity to be managers, because managing humans is very expensive and risky," he said. "I think many, many more people are capable of that than we think."
Still, Shipper said AI has limits. As a writer, he said, the technology is useful for research, drafting, and editing, but it is not especially good at knowing what is interesting.
That is where he thinks humans still matter most: not in doing every task by hand, but in knowing what is worth doing.
Predictions for AI's future
Shipper thinks OpenAI , and its CEO Sam Altman, might have a trick up its sleeve.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Right now, Anthropic is all the rage.
The AI startup just launched its well-received update to its Opus model, leapfrogged OpenAI as the nation's most valuable AI company, and is racing toward its IPO.
Shipper is betting that OpenAI's Codex is better positioned than many people realize. He said Anthropic has "a ton of momentum," but predicted the narrative around OpenAI could shift over the next few months.
"What they're doing with Codex is incredibly impressive," he said.
Also, for anyone looking for help with their prompting skills, Shipper said he's still nice to the robots just in case they — you know — accidentally start to dominate us humans.
"I'm usually very nice, because you never know when they're going to take over the world," he said with a laugh.
