Business Insider reporter Stephen Council outside the federal courthouse in Oakland.
Stephen Council/Business Insider
I've reported on CEO Sam Altman since ChatGPT's release, so I was eager to see his trial testimony.
The trial's stakes are sky-high for Altman as he fights to keep control of OpenAI.
Altman delivered his pitch for the company, though he didn't have answers for the hardest questions.
It's tricky business to define Sam Altman's "day job."
He's got the basic task of overseeing OpenAI's executives and staff, as any CEO does. Work doesn't stay at the office, though. Altman has become the public face of the AI boom, responsible for selling a technology that's upending workforces, capturing markets, and costing billions of dollars to build. That's often a high-wire act, and especially so this week — he also had to sell himself.
I watched Altman's testimony on Tuesday in the Oakland courtroom where, for weeks, jurors have weighed Elon Musk's arguments against those of OpenAI and Microsoft. Musk says Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman "stole" the OpenAI charity. They responded that the charity actually thrives because of the commercial moves they made.
It's a high-profile, high-stakes trial, and I was keen to see how Altman would perform. Reporting on OpenAI over the last few years, I've watched him schmooze with San Franciscans, chop it up with AI boosters, and hit softball questions from Jimmy Fallon. He posts to X, joins podcasts, writes blogs — it's all part of his gig. Altman is a content creator, a CEO working to spread hype.
So it was no surprise to me that Altman gave the jury an optimistic vision for both his company and for AI itself. The shocking part was how little he did to protect his own reputation.
The softball questions for Sam Altman ran out
Wearing a dark suit, a thin purple tie, and a slightly furrowed brow, Altman was the day's star witness. He followed OpenAI's lawyer William Savitt through anecdotes, details, and admissions for a breezy first hour of testimony. Then, as the attorney wound down his time, Savitt asked Altman about the OpenAI Foundation's work — the actual goals of the nonprofit at the center of all this legal trouble.
Altman was articulate, and, as usual, forward-looking. He talked about plans to research Alzheimer's and to prepare society for economic change. He expressed hope for a better future, saying that the new tech's benefits should spread widely. He said he was still "extremely" enthusiastic about the company's remaining nonprofit oversight and got off a line about Musk trying to "kill" the very charity he was accusing Altman of "stealing."
Do-gooder ideals, plus optimism about healthcare: It was a rebuttal built on Altman's practiced style of pitching AI to the general public.
The cheery rapport stopped there.
Musk's head lawyer, Steven Molo, then kicked off cross-examination by asking Altman whether he's "completely trustworthy."
"I believe so," Altman said.
The feeling in the courtroom had palpably shifted. Molo responded with a hint of incredulity, "But you don't know whether you're completely trustworthy?"
"I'll just amend my answer to yes," Altman replied.
Under Molo's barrage, Altman had an odd response
Attorneys usually try to strip credibility from an opponent's witness. Molo continued peppering Altman with questions aimed at doing exactly that.
The lawyer said Altman had repeatedly been called "deceptive," citing statements from four other witnesses: OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, former CTO Mira Murati, and former board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley.
Gone was the confident, loquacious CEO. Altman deflected on allegation after allegation, often stating that he hadn't heard the testimony or didn't know specifically what had been said.
Once, he made a larger rebuttal, saying there was "a breakdown in trust between me and the board and a difference — a big difference — of opinion." Then he returned to saying he hadn't heard McCauley's testimony.
Finally, Molo asked, "Is it important to you to find out what's going on in this trial?"
"Yes," Altman responded. "Although I also have a very busy day job and have not been able to be here every day."
He added that he "certainly" cares about the trial. A jury has sat for weeks, and the stakes are huge: Musk wants Altman removed as CEO and seeks $150 billion in damages. Most people I spoke with favor OpenAI to win. Still, Altman will need his credibility for the years ahead.
He stepped off the witness stand around midday, after more hammering from Molo. In the back of the courtroom, I was left thinking that the CEO could have — if only for a week — made the trial his day job.
I used Claude Design and Canva to create the same presentation to see how they stack up.
Aditi Bharade
Claude's new model, Opus 4.7, came with a new tool — Claude Design.
The tool allows users to create slide decks, graphics, and marketing collateral.
I tested how Claude Design compares to the tried-and-true Canva for designing a presentation.
For over a decade, Canva has been one of the most popular graphic design platforms. Now, Anthropic has an opportunity to capture some of that market with AI.
Anthropic announced its latest Opus 4.7 AI model on April 16, and a day later announced the launch of Claude Design, a tool which it said allows users to "create polished visual work like designs, prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more."
Designs created by Claude Design can be exported directly to Canva, Anthropic said in the release.
The new Claude feature comes as the industry warns of a "SaaSpocalypse," in which AI threatens the business models of software companies like Canva, website builder Wix, and management platforms Workday and Asana.
To better understand the SaaSpocalyse fears, I tested how Claude Design and Canva stack up when tasked with designing the same slide deck.
For this test, I asked Claude Design and Canva's AI tool to create an improved version of the Photography 101 slide deck that I made manually in January.
One of the slides in my original presentation deck. It could definitely use some help.
Aditi Bharade
I used the deck while delivering a photography workshop for reporters at Business Insider's Singapore bureau. Let's just say my photography skills are better than my design skills.
I tested Canva AI first
Canva AI's landing page looked like most other vibe-coding platforms.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
Canva, like other software companies, is embracing AI to fend off competition from AI. It's rolling out its AI 2.0 feature to all users, turning Canva into an agentic platform that can generate editable designs.
I tested out AI 1.0, then got an early trial also to see how 2.0 stacks up against Claude.
I submitted my prompt, asking for a presentation split into six sections with quizzes to test understanding, and a dark minimalist design with blue accents.
I liked that Canva confirmed the presentation's flow before generating it.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
Canva then asked me to choose the audience type — casual, professional, or educational — as well as the deck's style and length. And before designing the slides, Canva presented a rough outline of what each slide would include, which I could edit.
I thought that was neat.
The slides were decent, but required editing
AI 1.0 gave me two designs to choose from. One was an immediate no, with loud elements that clashed and made the text hard to read. The graphics used were also rather simplistic.
I didn't love how the elements overlapped with the text.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
The second design was better, but its text boxes overlapped, the text was misaligned, and it was at times minuscule. It also didn't have as many photos as I'd like. I fed Canva another prompt asking it to align and standardize the text boxes, add more pictures, and make it more engaging.
The final product I got from Canva AI was much better than what I had created myself.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
The final product was much better than the bad deck I made in January, something I could definitely use for a refresher workshop.
I repeated the same test a couple of days later with AI 2.0. The process was largely unchanged, except that I could manually change elements while chatting with the AI tool — a useful change from 1.0.
Canva AI 2.0 allowed me to use the chatbot and manually edit simultaneously.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
The design from AI 2.0 was a bit boring, so I asked it to regenerate the slide deck with more images and a cleaner aesthetic.
It gave me a warning — "This will use a significant amount of your AI usage since I'll need to regenerate each slide" — but I ended up with a slightly more polished presentation.
Canva AI 2.0 redesigned the slides when I asked it to, and I preferred the second set a lot more.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
I laughed when the AI got tired of redesigning and told me the redesign was complete, even though four slides remained unchanged. When I prompted it to look again, it hit me with the good old, "You're right, sorry about that!"
It took a couple of prompts to get it to where I wanted, but I was impressed by Canva's AI generation.
We were definitely off to a good start.
Then I tried Claude Design
Next, I turned to Claude Design. I had previously tried generating a logo of my initials with Opus 4.7, and the design left a lot to be desired.
I was initially not too impressed with Claude's design skills.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
So I was not expecting a lot when I asked it to create the photography presentation.
To my surprise, Claude asked me in-depth follow-up questions before starting to design. It asked what camera I would be using, the skill levels of participants — beginners, phone-photo experienced, hobbyists — and even the exact shade of blue I wanted as an accent color.
And the deck it generated surpassed my expectations.
I thought the graphics that Claude Design generated were clear and helped explain concepts.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
For example, one slide featured a graphic of the "exposure triangle," which illustrated how ISO, aperture, and shutter speed affect a photo's brightness.
Claude fixed errors without any prompting
Claude Design began editing its own work without my input.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
But what impressed me the most about Claude Design was that it anticipated my needs.
In the first version, some text boxes overlapped. Without prompting, Claude started identifying and fixing these problems, acting as its own editor without needing any input from me.
The only problem I ran into with Claude Design was when I tried to change an image in one of the quiz slides. The question was about photographing a politician at a podium, but the picture was of a young man sitting in front of a circular window.
I asked Claude to give me a relevant picture.
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
I asked Claude to change it to a picture of a politician.
Instead, it generated the image of a farmer. I tried again — it gave me a picture of the Senate. Third time, a handshake. At that point, I gave up and asked it to revert to the picture of the guy in front of the window.
Claude didn't really get what I meant by "politician at a podium."
Screenshot/Aditi Bharade
It gave me some insight into the criticisms of Claude's Opus 4.7, with users saying it burns through tokens too quickly and sometimes gives ridiculous answers.
However, it responded better to other prompts. For example, it initially lumped the five editing tips into one slide, but expanded each tip into its own slide seamlessly when I asked it to.
Canva's final product was good, but in my view, Claude Design's was better and required a lot less prompting on my part.
Final thoughts
At the end of building the slide decks, I remember thinking to myself, "I'm never making slides from scratch again."
It was a close competition, but Claude Design edged itbecause it identified its own errors and corrected them without prompting, while Canva needed to be told what to fix.
One consideration — there is a difference in the subscription costs for both platforms. An individual subscription to Claude Pro costs $17 a month, and a Pro Max subscription costs $100 a month and allows higher token usage.
Meanwhile, Canva AI is free for use, for up to "200 Standard AI uses," per its pricing chart. Canva Pro, which offers "10x more AI than Canva Free," costs $18 a month.
And of course, if you can't choose between the two, you can use both together.
"Now, when someone creates an idea or a draft in Claude, they can instantly take it into Canva and turn it into something real where it's fully editable, collaborative, and on brand," Canva's spokesperson said. "From there, it's easy to refine, adapt across different formats, and publish or share it anywhere."
Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Dean Grey, an entry-level software engineer, is participating in a new UBI and upskilling program.
Grey said entry-level jobs have evaporated, and hundreds of applications went nowhere.
Grey said the mentorship and the $1,000 monthly stipend renewed his sense of hope and structure.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dean Grey, a participant in a program by AI Commons that aims to upskill and retrain workers who have been displaced by AI alongside a monthly stipend. Grey is an entry-level software engineer who is struggling with his job search.
I never imagined I would become an early participant in what feels like a social experiment for the AI era. But after spending years trying to break into tech, only to watch entry-level jobs evaporate almost as quickly as I got there, that's exactly where I found myself.
I grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from UMass years ago. Before tech, I worked mostly in management jobs, "just sort of trucking along," as I like to joke — though eventually that became literal. I spent about 4 years working in trucking, but I knew I wanted something more stable and better paying, and tech seemed like the future. Shows like "Mr. Robot" and movies like "Hackers" made the industry feel exciting and creative.
So I saved up enough money to make the leap. I enrolled in Hack Reactor, a coding boot camp program, where I learned software engineering. At the time, I thought I was doing everything right.
I trained for a tech career as the market collapsed
After boot camp, I joined a training-to-hire company that promised to prepare people like me for jobs with large clients. The understanding was that we'd move directly into industry work afterward.
By the time my training ended, the market had changed dramatically. Hiring had slowed. Companies were suddenly obsessed with AI. Instead of moving directly into work, many of us were put on waiting lists for months. I waited about five months before eventually landing a contract position with Infosys.
It quickly became clear there wasn't much future there. Our contracts were finite, and there was really no upward mobility. I had put all of my eggs in this basket, and it was disappointing.
When that contract ended, I entered what became one of the hardest periods of my life.
I got a handful of phone screenings and two Zoom interviews that never progressed beyond the first round. At one point, it was exciting to get a rejection because a lot of companies were just ghosting me.
I burned through savings, called in favors, took gig work and temporary jobs, filled out online surveys — basically anything I could do to survive. Unemployment benefits helped for a while, but not enough to build a future.
The UBI program gave me structure and hope
A project Dean Grey is working on with the AI Commons, a high is a chatbot that helps newly unemployed individuals navigate their next steps.
Dean Grey
When the AI Commons approached me about joining a new basic income pilot program for workers displaced by AI, I was mostly grateful not to feel alone anymore.
The program provides a monthly stipend — up to $1,000 — along with technical training, mentorship, engineering projects, and community support.
The project is still so new, and the curriculum is still developing, but it gave me a sense of hope and structure again, which matters more than people realize.
Every morning starts with standups where we discuss what we're building and what's blocking us. I meet weekly with mentors and pair-program with more experienced engineers. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm moving forward instead of standing still.
The financial support has also been such a boon and life-changing. Being behind on all my bills has been a crushing stress. But with this basic income, I'm able to focus on improving my résumé, working on projects, attending meetings, and building my network.
The stipend doesn't feel like permission to stop working. If anything, it's the opposite. It gives me enough stability to actually invest in myself again.
Now I'm building an AI chatbot to help laid-off workers
One of the biggest projects I'm working on now is an AI-powered chatbot for people navigating layoffs and unemployment.
The idea is simple: when someone loses a job, they often don't even know what questions to ask first. My chatbot is designed to guide them through the process, explain unemployment laws by state, connect them to resources, and eventually help direct them toward real human support systems.
I don't know exactly what the future of work looks like. Honestly, sometimes it feels bleak. But this program has convinced me that people can adapt if they're given enough support, time, and community to do it.
I hear a lot of criticism of UBI, mostly about how it could erode agency and meaning and might be taken advantage of.
I'm optimistic because, at the end of the day, it might just mean we transition to a new way of finding purpose, if not in what we do for a living, then in how we express ourselves or what we do creatively. I don't think that we'll ever run out of ways to find purpose in life.
"Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary is planning a data center project in Utah.
Michael Buckner/Penske Media via Getty Images
Kevin O'Leary's Utah data center project may create fewer jobs than he initially said.
Wonder Valley's data center job estimates are closer to 4,000 construction roles.
Local residents have opposed the data center due to concerns about water use and air quality.
Kevin O'Leary has said his Utah data center development will create 10,000 construction jobs and 2,000 permanent roles.
There's one problem: It probably won't.
The "Shark Tank" investor may have overstated the data center's hiring potential during the construction phase, Business Insider learned in a conversation with O'Leary Ventures CEO Paul Palandjian.
The accurate estimate is closer to 4,000 new construction jobs over 10 to 15 years — and that isn't a guarantee.
"Look, these numbers are fluid, and they change by the day," Palandjian said, adding that the updated estimate is reflective of "our current thinking on the project."
Dubbed Wonder Valley, O'Leary's combined data center and power plant has the potential to reach 9 gigawatts of capacity. That would make Wonder Valley one of the world's biggest data centers if fully built out.
Data centers generally do not create large numbers of permanent, full-time jobs in local economies. Their impact on local economies is harder to measure, in part because the nascent industry is still being studied. They do come with an enormous demand for temporary skilled labor during the construction phase.
Once a data center of this scale is fully built and operational, the on-site workforce shrinks by an average of 78%, researchers at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business found.
Using the USC researchers' formula, a more likely estimate for permanent jobs at Wonder Valley is 1,350.
"It's all supply and demand-based, so we've analyzed it for its scaled potential," Palandjian said of his job estimate.
An FAQ sheet for the project, found on Utah Gov. Spencer Cox's website, said that the developer for Wonder Valley has "committed to a projected 2,000 permanent jobs in skilled trade, logistics, IT, and administrative positions to county residents."
Whether Wonder Valley reaches that scaled potential is an open question.
The data center doesn't have a tenant yet, though Palandjian said O'Leary Ventures is in "very early talks" with multiple large tech companies.
Wonder Valley's proposed site occupies a portion of a broader 40,000-acre zone backed by Utah's Military Installation Development Authority, a state agency tasked with raising tax revenues through economic growth.
A final development agreement is still being negotiated and is expected to be signed "in the next month or so," a MIDA spokesperson wrote in an email to Business Insider.
A draft version of the agreement posted on MIDA's website, dated April 24, shows that the data center will receive multiple tax breaks, including a 100% personal property tax rebate and an 80% real property tax rebate, for up to 30 years.
The agreement does not specify a required minimum number of jobs. Utah offers tax breaks to data centers without a job-creation requirement.
The Box Elder County community has expressed fierce opposition to the data center, citing concerns about water use, air quality, and lack of transparency from local officials. Residents of the county filed two referendums on Monday to overturn local officials' approval of the site.
O'Leary has dismissed the protesters, suggesting they were bused in from out of town, and has argued that their claims are based on misconceptions about data centers.
"Think about the number of jobs," O'Leary said in a post on X on Friday.
Thinking Machines Lab CEO Mira Murati and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Getty Images
Thinking Machines Lab has lost a third of its founding team to rivals amid fierce AI talent wars.
Meta, OpenAI, and xAI lured the founders of Thinking Machines Lab with huge compensation offers.
CEO Mira Murati's startup has also hired top talent and recently unveiled a new type of AI model.
Thinking Machines Lab has raised billions in capital while assembling one of AI's most elite technical teams. Now it's watching some of that talent walk out the door.
As Big Tech rivals dangle eye-popping pay packages and early employees unlock their first slice of equity, the buzzy, 1-year-old startup has become ground zero for tech's escalating talent wars.
Nearly a third of its 42-person founding team — 13 people — have left since its launch, a Business Insider review of LinkedIn profiles and conversations with four sources found. Those departures include three of its six co-founders.
Thinking Machines Lab's head count has more than quadrupled to over 150 people since it launched, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
The departures have been driven by a mix of factors, though a major one is the huge packages offered by rival AI labs like Meta and OpenAI, as well as the passage of an important milestone in startup compensation: the one-year cliff, four sources familiar with the matter said.
It's not unheard of for early members of a startup to jump ship over time, though Thinking Machines Lab was supposed to be different. It emerged from stealth last year as one of the highest-profile AI labs thanks to its leadership's deep ties to OpenAI. CEO Mira Murati previously served as OpenAI's chief technical officer, while other key figures helped train the early versions of ChatGPT.
Investors eager to back the next breakout AI company flocked to the startup, which raised $2 billion before launching a product.
The startup's reputation as a talent hub has put a target on its back.
Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment.
An opportunity they couldn't refuse
Some of the offers to founding members have reached well into nine figures — hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and stock over several years — according to one defector who shared notes with peers.
"I got an opportunity that I couldn't turn down," the person said.
Meta — which considered buying Thinking Machines Lab last year, The Verge reported — has been the most aggressive poacher, quietly luring away seven founding team members, plus a star AI researcher.
Such was the case of veteran software engineer Joshua Gross. Last year, Gross was deep in the trenches of AI development at Thinking Machines Labs, helping launch the flagship product, Tinker.
Gross "had a blast" shaping Tinker's early vision, he wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time. After helping build and ship the product from "zero to one," he's no longer at Thinking Machines Lab. Wired first reported on details of the compensation packages.
Subject line: $1.5 million cash 'and up'
The race for elite AI talent has become hotter than ever across tech, said Sam Agre, cofounder of recruiting firm People In AI.
While the pool of people with hands-on experience building leading AI models and products is small, it runs deep at Thinking Machines Lab. It's so difficult to poach rank-and-file workers from there that Agre said he has resorted to sending them LinkedIn messages with subject lines touting $1.5 million in cash compensation "and up."
That's more than three times the annual salary for software engineers offered by Thinking Machines Labs on its careers page, which mentions a range of $350,000 and $475,000 a year.
While the nine-figure offers are reminiscent of deals for major athletes, Big Tech firms like Meta covet people who can help them pull ahead in AI, Agre said.
"You don't want to fall behind in that type of arms race," he said.
Meta isn't the only tech giant circling Thinking Machines Lab. OpenAI has hired five founding members, and Elon Musk's xAI has poached one more. OpenAI and Meta declined to comment, and xAI didn't respond to a request for comment.
One-year cliffs opened the floodgates
Meta first began trying to lure away Thinking Machines Lab talent when it launched its superintelligence team last year. It scored a major coup by bringing on cofounder Andrew Tulloch. OpenAI brought on two more of Murati's cofounders, CTO Barret Zoph and researcher Luke Metz.
Then this year, the floodgates opened.
Because the company launched a little over a year ago, many founding employees started hitting their "one-year cliffs" — a standard startup threshold that unlocks the first chunk of equity after 12 months, after which it vests monthly.
Once they get their shares, employees can leave without walking away empty-handed, making it a natural moment for Thinking Machines Lab staffers to entertain outside offers, according to three people familiar with the matter.
One-year cliffs are supposed to help retain talent, though they have become something of an Achilles' heel for startups ever since the AI boom began, said Dan Walter, an independent compensation consultant. He told Business Insider that retention rates in tech startups are the lowest he's ever seen due to the ease of building a startup and rampant poaching.
"The entire model is being challenged," he said.
Some in the compensation industry are now arguing for the cliff to start at five years, not one, to lock in early team members, he added.
Thinking Machines Lab still attracts top talent
Despite the rampant poaching, Thinking Machines Lab has scored wins.
Its CTO — Soumith Chintala, the creator of the open-source AI project PyTorch — left Meta to join Murati's startup. Thinking Machines Lab regularly brings on research talent from Meta, including Kenny Yu, a member of the tech giant's hotshot TBD lab — a small team of AI all-stars launched for its superintelligence push.
Murati's startup has been putting that talent to use. On Monday, it announced that it had built a new type of AI model that interacts with people seamlessly, handles interruptions, and translates languages in real time. The model will launch more widely later this year.
The company is also taking steps to stem the losses. It's hiring a person to build a fresh framework for doling out equity and to implement systems that "attract and retain highly sought-after talent," a job listing says. The position, which pays between $250,000 and $425,000 in base salary, was posted in March.
For all the departures, Murati's reputation as a talent magnet hasn't faded.
When Business Insider asked Carina Hong, CEO and founder of Axiom Math — already valued at $1.6 billion — which company tries to poach most of her researchers, she didn't hesitate: Thinking Machines Lab.
A few weeks ago, Marco Bario texted his landlord with an unusual request.
Bario and his wife, Tracy Neill, rent a four-bedroom townhouse in Frederick County, Maryland, about an hour outside Washington, DC. When they got the place in June 2024, they felt lucky to find respite from a sizzling rental market. Recently, however, they'd noticed comparable rental homes in the area going for hundreds of dollars less — some landlords were even cutting asking rents in a desperate bid for tenants. With their lease renewal date fast approaching, Bario posed a simple question to his landlord: What would he consider a fair monthly rent for the next year?
The text kicked off a cordial but pointed back-and-forth. "You've been great tenants," the landlord replied, but he felt the rent was "already within a fair range." Bario persisted, noting that similar four-bedroom listings online were charging in the low $3000s — well below the $3,650 he and Neill were paying. After a few more exchanges over the ensuing week, the landlord sent a message with a new offer: he'd lower their rent to $3,375. A sharp eye and a handful of texts had saved the couple $275 a month.
"We like the relationship, but the market's the market," Bario tells me. "Why not ask?"
Such a request might have been met with a "😂" from a landlord just a couple of years ago. These days, though, many property owners are bracing for similar conversations. A historic wave of apartment construction, particularly in the lower half of the US, has put a lid on rent growth and shifted the balance of power in favor of tenants. Forced to compete with a glut of new units, property managers are more focused on keeping their buildings full than jacking up rents. It's not uncommon for lease renewal offers to go out with no change to the monthly payment, a far cry from the days of double-digit percentage increases at the housing reshuffle's peak. For prospective new tenants, landlords are doling out "concessions" like a month or two of free rent in hopes of getting them through the front door.
"It's definitely a renter's market right now," says Caitlin Sugrue Walter, the head of research for the National Multifamily Housing Council.
This state of affairs won't last long. Landlords are hustling to fill all those freshly built studios and one-bedrooms, betting they'll be able to bring back the rent hikes later. They're already looking ahead to next year, when developers are expected to deliver far fewer new units than during the 2024 peak.
For now, though, renters have a chance to flip the pandemic-era script. Landlords across the country no longer have free rein to lift prices and preside over rental bidding wars. Savvy tenants are embracing a time-worn mantra: If you don't ask, you don't get.
If you do manage to snag lower rent, there's one group of people you should thank: builders.
Current rental trends are mainly a story about new supply. Apartment developers and homebuilders pay close attention to the shifting winds of the real estate market. They track how many people are moving, where they're headed, and why, then try to adjust construction accordingly. Back in 2020 and 2021, the signals were obvious: build, build, build.
Coastal defectors were flocking to Sun Belt cities like Austin, Phoenix, and Denver, where they could get more bang for their buck than in, say, New York or San Francisco. Roommates were also striking out on their own, opting for studios or one-bedrooms instead of cramming into two- or three-bedrooms. Eager to meet the surge in demand, developers got busy. At the end of 2022, more than 971,000 apartment units were under construction, according to the real-estate software company RealPage, the second-largest number on record.
It's definitely a renter's market right now.Caitlin Sugrue Walter, head of research for the National Multifamily Housing Council
Even in the smoothest of scenarios, apartment construction typically takes a couple of years. This is why, despite all those bustling job sites, it didn't feel like renters were getting any relief. Between 2020 and 2024, the typical rent nationwide jumped by nearly 30%, according to Zillow. Behind the scenes, though, a wave of new supply was about to upend the rental market. In 2024, more than 600,000 new multifamily units opened their doors — the most in a single year since the mid-1980s, according to an Apartment List analysis of Census data. Last year, developers wrapped construction on a little under 500,000 units.
"It really has been a pretty historic surge," says Chris Salviati, the chief economist at Apartment List.
Apartment demand has held up better than expected, but it hasn't been enough to keep up with the construction boom. People are no longer moving at the breakneck pace of 2021— given the rise in both home prices and rents, an anxiety-inducing job market, plus economic uncertainty around borrowing rates and inflation, many are choosing to stay put. Immigration to the US is way down, slowing population growth and hampering housing demand. A lack of new hiring also means fewer reasons for Americans to relocate, which, in turn, means less leasing traffic for property managers. A recent college graduate who might have happily rented a studio apartment may instead be forced to shack up with their parents while continuing their job hunt from home.
The ultimate result is that nationwide rents have either fallen or flatlined, depending on who you ask. Apartment List data shows the national median rent was down 1.7% from a year ago and 5% from its 2022 peak. RealPage found a more modest 0.4% year-over-year decrease in April, while Apartments.com, a subsidiary of the real estate giant CoStar Group, reported a slight 0.4% increase in average rents from a year prior (the company also noted, however, that setting aside 2020 weirdness, rent gains in April were the weakest since 2014). These companies are all working with their own datasets and use slightly different methods to calculate their results, hence the minor variance. But regardless of the source, analysts and property managers are reporting more concessions, flat renewals, and outright rent decreases. Apartments.com, for instance, found that roughly 41% of multifamily properties nationwide were offering rent concessions, an almost 10 percentage-point increase from a year ago.
"For years, you'd post a vacancy, and you'd get a lease," says Tony Julianelle, the CEO of Atlas Real Estate, which manages more than 6,000 units across 15 states. These days, however, "leasing is just harder."
"If we're break-even on rent growth right now, that's something we should celebrate," he adds.
The national numbers obscure some significant regional differences. Because builders focused so much of their efforts on the Sun Belt, those metros are seeing the biggest slowdown. In April, multifamily rents were down 2.2% year over year in the South and essentially flat in the West, RealPage found. The Midwest and Northeast, however, didn't see the same construction boom: now rents are up 1.7% year over year in the Midwest and 1% in the Northeast.
If we're break-even on rent growth right now, that's something we should celebrate.Tony Julianelle, CEO of Atlas Real Estate
Some of the pandemic era's star cities are now home to the biggest rent declines. Rents are down 6.5% year over year in Austin and 6.2% in Denver, with San Antonio, Tampa, and Phoenix rounding out the top-five metros with the deepest rent cuts, according to RealPage. If you're bargain-hunting, keep an eye on Charlotte, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Raleigh, which have also posted significant year-over-year decreases.
In Denver, Kevin Tanner spent much of the past year trying in vain to find a tenant for his three-bedroom rental home in the Green Valley Ranch neighborhood, about 15 minutes from the airport. The previous tenants had been paying about $3,000 a month before they moved out last May. Tanner, who lives in Idaho, tells me he flew back to Colorado for a handful of tours over a few weekends, but returned each time with a still-empty property. Several dozen others started filling out applications, but never followed through. After the house sat vacant for almost half a year, he relented and hired a property management company, which advised slashing the rent by hundreds of dollars. In February, they finally secured a tenant at a monthly rent of $2,350 — almost $700 less than Tanner had been charging a year earlier.
"It's a 100% loss when I'm not making any rental income," says Tanner, who owns two other rentals and tells me he's never had to lower the rent on any of his properties before. "My hands are kind of tied."
Other landlords, hoping to dodge this exact scenario, are handing out bonuses to keep residents in place. One beneficiary is Ben Trepp, a 29-year-old who works for a government contractor and rents a one-bedroom in a large apartment building in Denver's Lower Highlands neighborhood, right outside downtown. Last fall, he got the offer for his January lease renewal: no increase to his monthly rent. But Trepp had been keeping a close eye on the market and saw there were deals to be had elsewhere — heck, his own building was offering a month of free rent to new tenants. He responded to the property manager with an email outlining the prices at comparable units nearby. The property manager countered with a one-time $800 renewal bonus.
"They probably knew what they were going to offer before that," Trepp tells me. "They just wanted to see if I was paying attention or not."
Bario, the Maryland tenant who scored a rent cut of nearly $300 a month, may have a better grasp of the housing market than most: his company, Porch Swing Funding, deals in real estate debt. Bargaining down your rent doesn't require an intimate knowledge of finance or a penchant for negotiations, however. Oftentimes, the "comps" — comparable rentals nearby — speak for themselves. After all, landlords across the spectrum also rely on cues from nearby properties to price their units. Much of this information is also readily available to the average renter via sites like Zillow or Apartments.com.
"Having that information was probably more helpful than I could have imagined," says Neill, Bario's wife.
A note of caution: If you threaten to leave unless your landlord cuts you a deal, be prepared to follow through. "Don't be afraid to move," Trepp tells me. "That's your leverage."
Landlords always fear leaving an apartment empty for an extended period. They may also be more willing to cut you a break because they're wary of the costs of a "turn," property-manager parlance for freshening up a unit for the next tenant. This process has never been more expensive, Julianelle tells me.
"The cost of paint has gone up. The cost of carpet has gone up," Julianelle says. "All of that stuff is just more expensive." A thorough turn for less than $1,500 "just doesn't really exist anymore," he adds.
Don't be afraid to move. That's your leverage.Ben Trepp, 29-year-old renter in Denver
Renters may have the upper hand for now, but their leverage is not long for this world. Walter, the researcher at the National Multifamily Housing Council, expects rent growth to be "fairly low this year," but she says it could pick up a little next year as fewer new units hit the market. In the group's most recent quarterly survey of the multifamily industry, a third of respondents said their expectations for construction starts this year had soured. The supply wave is undeniably receding: CoStar expects deliveries of new apartment units to drop by 55% this year, with a further decline in 2027. That said, this year's delivery volume should still come in roughly in line with the past decade's average, says Salviati, the economist at Apartment List.
"We're past the peak of that boom," Salviati tells me. "But it also hasn't really fallen off a cliff by any means, either."
Demand remains more of a question mark. Construction timelines are fairly easy to project, whereas the consumer psyche is subject to a vast range of economic forces. "Your forecast for demand is going to be as good as my forecast for demand, which is going to be as good as anyone else's," Sam Tenenbaum, the head of multifamily insights for Cushman & Wakefield, tells me. Things could change, in other words, and no one's got the crystal ball. If demand holds up over the next couple of years, though, "it's going to be much more landlord-friendly than it is tenant-friendly," he adds.
Salviati says he'll be keeping a close eye on the job market and inflation, the two factors that will play the biggest role in determining whether renters get footloose again. While the timing remains up in the air, he expects the market to eventually absorb the influx of units.
In the interim, renters are getting a welcome break from the usual housing-cost climb.
"You never hear of being able to go down in rent, right?" Neill tells me. "Historically, it just keeps going up and up, and there's no room for negotiation."
James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.
Now, the longtime iRobot CEO wants his next home robot to do something harder to measure. His new startup, Boston-based Familiar Machines & Magic, has built a four-legged, pet-inspired robot meant to offer companionship, emotional support, and gentle nudges toward healthier routines.
The company calls the robot the Familiar, a reference to the supernatural animal companions associated with witches. Familiar Machines will start selling it next year, and while Angle declined to say how much it will cost, he said its upfront price will be comparable to buying a pet.
Familiar Machines said it has raised $30 million from undisclosed investors and recruited talent from iRobot, Boston Dynamics, and Disney. The company also hired Hollywood screenwriters to create stories that define the Familiar's character and help train the AI model that powers the robot.
In the near term, Familiar Machines plans to market the robot to older adults who want some of the benefits of a pet without the responsibilities, as well as consumers looking to support their own well-being. Over time, the company hopes to license its AI to other companies.
He sees physical AI creating two big markets: machines that do physical work, and machines that can connect with people.
"Robots have long been associated with dull, dirty, dangerous, angular metal," Angle told Business Insider. "What we're trying to do is create something that uses robotic technology to a very different end."
The interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Business Insider: Tell us about the Familiar. How is it different from a Roomba?
Colin Angle: The Familiar is a pet-inspired robot that lives in your home, pays attention to you and your world, and supports you as an attentive physical presence that coaches you toward healthy routines.
It's not trying to be a copy of a pet, though it's certainly cute and accessible. It can understand what's going on at home and nudge you in positive directions. The Roomba was much more single-purpose. It's a vacuum. You know what it does, and you don't expect to have a human connection to it. People did name their Roombas, but that was hardly the point.
Familiar Machines CEO Colin Angle left iRobot in 2024 after three decades of leading the company.
Familiar Machines & Magic
Why would someone buy a Familiar over, say, a pet?
The core of a Familiar is that it has a personality. It has an appreciation for how humans like to interact with each other and with other creatures in our world.
How does it find a role in your life? That's going to be a very individual exploration. Is it the thing that makes you happy because it's waiting to greet you when you come home? Is it the thing that plays with your 5-year-old so they aren't on their iPad? Do I have my Familiar smack me in the leg when I've been doomscrolling on the couch for 45 minutes and could have gone outside for a walk? Say your Familiar's name is Daphne. You say, "Daphne, I've been doing this too long." Daphne will get up from being curled up at your feet and run over to the door. The Familiar can play a role kind of like a pseudo-coach.
Let's talk about the design. It's cute, it doesn't speak, and it's meant to be emotionally intelligent. How did you arrive at that combination?
We wanted a beautiful, expressive physical form that people are not intimidated by and that doesn't create expectations that will disappoint. There's a reason why it doesn't look like a human, cat, or dog. All of those morphologies create expectations that are challenging to deliver on. We're more of an abstract bear.
Our coat is beautiful to touch. We're layered in sensors, so as you touch it, it can respond. Even though the Familiar does not speak, it does understand human speech and will respond in an emotionally intelligent way.
That intelligence starts with us writing stories about what it means to be a Familiar. The stories were written by Hollywood scriptwriters, who wrote about these intelligent creatures that have a special connection with a person and about a day in their life. We then use generative AI to translate those stories into tens of thousands of mini stories and variations, and we use that to train the model that runs on the Familiar.
The Familiar robot can provide gentle nudges toward healthier routines.
Familiar Machines & Magic
There are a lot of social robots that have failed in the past. How is this time different?
I have seen almost zero robots that are supposed to be about human connection take advantage of touch. Same with physical agency. We can move in your space. We can go for a walk with you. When you go to the kitchen to cook dinner, we could follow you and demonstrate, by that act, that we actually are part of your world. If I only live on a table, I don't have much physical agency.
Then you add the fact that generative AI has given us the ability to perceive our environment and social context, recognize faces and emotional states, feed that into a small multimodal model trained on stories of supportive Familiars, and have that model output high-level, socially appropriate things to do.
Six months ago, some of this technology didn't exist. We are combining all three things — touch, agency, and AI — to create something distinct from any robot that has ever existed.
Some people may be uneasy about bringing an emotionally intelligent robot into their home. How do you think about privacy, and how much of the AI runs on the robot itself?
Our whole AI stack runs on the robot. We do not need to stream anything to the cloud. Since the Familiar does not speak, it's not going to convey information or bad advice, so you don't need to worry about leaving your Familiar to talk about dating advice with a 4-year-old.
You can choose to connect it to the cloud, which lets its behavior take better advantage of what it has learned, adapt over time, and download new behaviors and features. If you do choose to connect, I call it Roomba Rules: you get control, transparency, and benefit.
You've spent decades building robots, and the industry has seen plenty of hype cycles. Does this moment feel different?
We are absolutely at an inflection point. Physical AI, this coming together of robotic technology and generative AI, has created the opportunity to disrupt the world in exciting ways. It's estimated that $5 trillion of market value will be created over the next few decades. There's a lot of energy focused on humanoids and manufacturing, but that's about half of the theoretical value creation. The other half, $2.5 trillion, is focused on building machines that can actually connect and interact with people.
While most of the world is going one way on doing physical work, I am building a company that is going to lead the human-connection part of the physical AI transformation.
