We should all know less about our bodies

Getty Images; raditya/iStock; Prykhodov/iStock; Tyler Le/BI

Katie Anne Hayes felt like her Garmin watch was giving her a lot of valuable information, at least at first. She took particular interest in the "Body Battery" feature, which purports to tell users how much energy they've got left in the tank. Hayes says she started checking it "pretty religiously" to gauge whether she could handle a workout or weekend concert. If her battery was low, "that was usually a good predictor of how I'd feel at the end of the day," she says.

Hayes, 29, wasn't doing all this for fun: Her doctor shrugged off long Covid symptoms she developed in 2023, and she got the Garmin to try to manage the condition herself. But what began as a simple way to track her daily stamina quickly turned into an unhelpful obsession. She'd get frustrated if her battery level was unexpectedly low ahead of an important work meeting and wake up anxious to see what happened while she slept. Eventually, her family members suggested she ax the watch.

"I got into this bad negative feedback loop with it," Hayes says. "Taking off the watch, and having it be less of a mental reminder of the fatigue that I might experience, I think, was helpful."

Thanks to technology, we can know more about our bodies than ever before. From wearables to full-body scans, deep-dive blood and DNA tests, and even at-home vaginal microbiome kits, we have a wealth of insights at our fingertips. In a matter of seconds, chatbots can turn heaps of data and metrics into personalized advice that sounds right. But at what point does so much data become too much? Where does the balance tip from self-knowledge into self-surveillance?

Doctors, researchers, patients, and consumers are trying to figure out where that line should be. People are increasingly outsourcing their relationships with their own bodies to the algorithm. Consumer wellness tech is generating mounds of quasi-medical data without the systems or expertise to interpret it.

"You stop asking, 'How do I truly feel?' and you may start asking, 'What does my app say?'" says Dr. Sandeep Kishore, a physician-scientist and associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. "This is subtle, but it is a significant shift."

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In the wellness space, "longevity" is the word of the day. People are increasingly focused on preventive medicine and optimizing their health. The "quantified self" phenomenon, first coined in 2007, has snowballed into a multi-billion-dollar web of gadgets, tests, and analyses that promise to help you live your most perfect life.

The flood of health metrics raises a hard-to-answer question: How much of this is actually useful?

The global wearables tech industry hit nearly $100 billion in revenue in 2025, according to Grand View Research, and is expected to reach $230 billion by 2033. About a third of Americans wear smart watches, rings, and bands to track their health and fitness. Tens of thousands have signed up for elective whole-body MRI scans that can cost $2,500 a pop. Function Health, a personalized health testing platform that lets patients get upward of 150 tests, is valued at $2.5 billion. Smart ring maker Oura, valued at $11 billion, is expected to go public later this year.

Few people have taken the pursuit of optimization as far as the "Don't Die" entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, but less extreme versions of this impulse have gone mainstream. You've likely noticed friends, family, and coworkers chatting about their sleep scores, step counts, and stress levels — or maybe you're fretting about it yourself. Yelp searches for "full body MRI scan" and "genetic testing" are up more than 200% during the first three months of this year compared to last, and searches for "VO2 max testing," "body composition analysis," and "metabolic testing" have increased, too.

The flood of health metrics raises a hard-to-answer question: How much of this is actually useful?

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Self-tracking can be a positive experience if it sparks motivation to move more, eat better, or go to bed earlier. Ten thousand steps a day is an arbitrary number made up by marketers, but if your smartwatch goal inspires you to get off the couch, so be it. Deborah Lupton, a sociologist at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, says trackers may also give us a sense of control over our health, and they can help those with chronic or contested conditions gain better acknowledgment, "because they have 'real data' to show healthcare providers."

But it can also be a slippery slope — much of the tech is designed to give people a lot of noise and not much signal. "The vast majority of metrics that we can measure are a complete waste of time. They don't tell us anything meaningful about health," says Nick Tiller, an exercise scientist and research associate at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

While wearable consumer technologies have improved in recent years, they still have limitations in terms of accuracy and usefulness. Take the example of sleep.

Kelly Baron, a clinical psychologist at the University of Utah who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine, tells me devices have come a "long way" in their ability to track sleep, though their estimates of sleep stages remain limited. And even so, she tries to encourage people not to fixate on their REM or how much rest they get in a single night. Certain medications can affect sleep stages, and people may not realize this unless they talk to a doctor. And as much as we all aim for that perfect eight hours every night, life often gets in the way. What matters are averages and patterns.

Just like anything, we can take sleep tracking too far. "Is it making you feel better or for worse? Do you get up in the morning and look at the number and decide that's how your day's going to go?" Baron says. She's one of the researchers who coined the term "orthosomnia," where people's preoccupation with their sleep readings actually makes their sleep worse and leads to insomnia. It's modeled after "orthorexia," where people become fixated on healthy eating to an unhealthy degree.

Users may also misunderstand what their trackers do and do not tell them. Apple Watches have an FDA-approved feature that can look for breathing disturbances and alert wearers if they show signs of potential sleep apnea (which they should then take up with a doctor). What many of those wearers don't realize is that if the watch doesn't send an alert, that doesn't mean they don't have a problem, and most devices aren't cleared to detect sleep apnea at all.

Dr. Jesse Greer, a former Special Forces physician and the founder of Preamble Health, a preventive healthcare clinic, tells me he's had a number of patients who "if I had to bet five bucks, they've got some sleep apnea," but they insist they don't because of their device data. "I can't tell you how many times we've actually tested, found pretty bad sleep apnea, and the Oura ring is sitting there telling them that they've got a 90 sleep score," he says.

The Oura ring does not detect sleep apnea, nor is it FDA-approved to do so. A spokesperson told me that its sleep and breathing insights "are intended for general wellness purposes only."

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Catching a dangerous tumor or detecting heart abnormalities early can be critical. As Dr. Kishore puts it, imagine if the Titanic had shifted by a degree when it left port — it probably would have missed the iceberg. At the same time, many devices and tests are causing people to get worked up over ice cubes.

Full-body scans can detect cancers and other issues life-savingly early, but they can also lead to a lot of unnecessary spending, testing, and anxiety. If you look hard enough, you'll almost always find something. It's only after expensive, invasive follow-ups that you discover that little something was often nothing.

"I think we're setting ourselves up for a lot of physical harm and a lot of financial harm," says Dr. Adam Cifu, a general internist and professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and an editor at Sensible Medicine on Substack. He warns that this can put a financial strain on individuals and the broader health system, as going down the rabbit hole for a benign speck can cost thousands of dollars.

Indeed, major medical groups advise against full-body MRIs for the general public. Dr. Cifu discourages it among his patients because in many cases "they'll just give you something else to worry about."

Doubts from the medical community aren't keeping patients away from all of this testing. Victoria Usher, who runs a communications firm in London, tells me she's become "completely addicted to" the extensive checks she undergoes every year in Bangkok. She spends $1,000 for five hours of "every test known to mankind," including MRIs, CTs, cancer markers, ultrasounds, chest x-rays, and more. "It's health tourism at its best," she says. A friend caught a cancerous growth on her leg this way a few years ago, but thus far, Usher's endeavors have resulted in the detection of an unproblematic heart abnormality and the realization that, like a lot of women as they age, her bone density is low and she's got some plaque in her arteries. She doesn't tell her doctor back home about the tests in Thailand for insurance purposes, though, when the heart thing was detected, and a Bangkok clinician didn't have time to talk it over, she got it double-checked while back in the UK.

"There's a couple of weird birth defects that they found in me that wouldn't ever become a problem, but at least you know they're there," Usher says. She's addressing bone density and arterial issues through lifestyle changes.

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As people are swimming in this sea of information, they're turning to AI, not their doctors, to make sense of all of it.

Dr. Kishore tells me he regularly has patients show up in his clinic with scores and metrics from wearables that aren't yet clinically validated. To complicate matters further, patients are tossing test results and readings into ChatGPT and then presenting to their doctors with AI-generated diagnoses or agenda items for discussion. He says the AI is about "fifty-fifty" in terms of accuracy right now. When it's right, it's quite good and directionally helpful, but it's also led to instances where he's ordered extra workups largely to assuage patient anxieties. "I was reassured the AI was perhaps wrong, but we spent some resources in doing that and some emotional energy," he says.

Many people aren't taking their AI-generated medical records to their doctors. Instead, they're keeping it to themselves and self-directing care. According to a recent KFF survey, 29% of American adults say they've used AI tools for information or advice about their physical health, and of those, 42% did not follow up with a doctor.

AI will bullshit you until you're convinced that it's giving you the right answer.

The issue is that AI often gets it wrong. Tiller, from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, recently published a study that found that half of responses to 250 health-related questions posed to five popular chatbots were "problematic," including 20% that were so problematic as to be dangerous. In many instances, the bots were ingesting online misinformation online and spitting it back out.

"The research shows that actually a lot of the advice that AI is giving is not always based on rigorous science," Tiller says.

Separate research from Mass General Brigham found that publicly available LLMs home in on single answers and diagnoses prematurely when prompted with basic, early-stage queries, getting it wrong most of the time. When the chatbots had all of the pertinent patient readings and insights, they generally got diagnoses right — but often, when someone is asking AI health questions, they're not bringing a complete picture.

"That's the problem, people just assume that it's right," Tiller says. Whereas a doctor or fitness coach would question a patient or be honest when they're not sure about an answer, AI is sycophantic, and it won't say when it doesn't know.

"AI will bullshit you until you're convinced that it's giving you the right answer," Tiller says.

It's not that AI doesn't have potential in this space. It's that patients, doctors, and consumers need to be clear-eyed about where it is right now.

To be sure, people aren't turning to all of these trackers and AI analyses in a vacuum. They're emerging because preventive care feels inadequate and inaccessible, healthcare is fragmented, and patients feel unheard. Consumer tech is eagerly but haphazardly filling in the medical system's many gaps.

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It's natural to want to be your best self, but some of us are optimizing ourselves so relentlessly it's a little miserable. It's fine to want to get enough sleep and eat well, but if that means you become so rigid in your schedule that you refuse every mid-week dinner with friends, is that trade-off really worth it? After all, social connections boost longevity, too. If missing your step goal sends you into a spiral, maybe it's time to put down the fitness tracker. What's important to pay attention to is the overall trend — there's no upside in weighing yourself every day if it means panicking over an extra pound or two the morning after a salty meal. Many of the best runners in the world don't do fancy analyses; they just … run. Even Bryan Johnson has admitted that most of the most effective life-elongating hacks are basic and free.

Dr. Cifu says it sounds like some of the health-tracking obsessives "need a better hobby, because in a way, that's what it becomes." If it nudges you toward better behavior, fine. But also, you don't need an Oura ring to tell you heavy drinking isn't good for you, and you can record your sleep with a notebook.

The direct-to-consumer health market is booming, meaning there's no shortage of new gadgets and tests. If you want to treat your body like a dashboard, you can. But people will be wise to remember that these data points are just that — data points. And as hokey as it sounds, the best data point you have is how you feel.

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Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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GM developed its Hummer EV in 20 months. It wants that speed to be routine.

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.

General Motors

GM has spoken with Business Insider before about using AI in design, including tools that help turn sketches into animations and monitor its supply chains.

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.

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San Francisco homebuyers have officially lost their minds

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

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.

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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."

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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."

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James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.

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Uber is facing a David-and-Goliath battle in a 'must-win' market

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."

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OpenAI draws a line between the company and a cofounder's political donations

Greg Brockman gave $25 million to a political action committee.

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• 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.

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Why Jensen Huang says now is an 'incredible time' to be a software company

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it's a great time to be a software company.

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• 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.

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I'm a San Francisco bar operator. Young tech bros are going sober — but they still want to sip on mocktails

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.

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