Artificial intelligence will give the US economy a massive boost, according to a new report.
No country is better positioned to benefit from the technology's rise, Capital Economics said.
China's tech crackdown means it'll be left behind, its strategists added.
Artificial intelligence could transform the global economy – and it's the US that's best placed to benefit, according to Capital Economics.
In a report published Wednesday, the research firm assessed the countries set to receive the biggest boost from the technology, which has seen its popularity explode following the rise of ChatGPT.
The US topped the leaderboard, which strategists attributed to the country's high levels of investment and top-quality universities and colleges. Singapore and the UK were ranked second and third place respectively.
"AI has the potential to be a game-changer for productivity growth, but a host of factors will determine whether countries can reap the benefits," wrote a team led by Capital Economics' chief Asia economist, Mark Williams.
"The US ranks first. This suggests that it will once again assume the role of the global technological leader as it has done for much of the past 100 or so years. This reflects its size, the rise in both private and public investment in research and development, and the rapid expansion of the higher education system," they added.
Here's the full ranking:
Capital Economics
China is unlikely to benefit to the same extent, according to the report.
Beijing's strict approach to regulating tech will stop AI from spreading as fast as it potentially could – and that means the US is likely to retain its position as the world's largest economy, Williams' team said.
"AI is likely to help the US economy sustain its primacy over China in terms of GDP measured at market exchange rates," the strategists wrote. "The AI revolution is another reason to think that expectations of China's economy streaking ahead of the US will have to be further reined back."
The two countries' economic fortunes have diverged in 2023 – with US growth remaining resilient despite the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest-rate hikes, but China grappling with deflation, surging youth unemployment, and a property-market crisis that's fueled the financial collapse of major developers including Country Garden and Evergrande.
Boreout is a workplace phenomenon caused by little "stimulation" at work and is gaining traction on TikTok.
Gen Z are posting about being bored at work and how working life isn't what they expected.
Experts warn that boreout is "just as problematic" as burnout and can lead to quiet quitting.
Gen Z are new to the workplace and sharing their experiences of professional life from managing up to quiet quitting on social media, and now some are discovering what it's like to be bored at work.
The hashtag #boredatwork has racked up over 470 million views on TikTok with young people sharing the realization that working life isn't what they expected. One TikToker posted a video of herself spinning around in her chair saying: "When you get your first corporate job and you're progressing at a faster pace than expected and constantly have nothing to do for half the day. I'm bored."
Another TikToker who works at a hospital as a unit secretary shared a video of herself fidgeting at work in her uniform with text over the video saying: "Do I really get paid $20 an hour to sit and do nothing."
This feeling may be new to Gen Z but being bored at work is an age-old phenomenon that workplace experts call "boreout" and it can be just as harmful as burnout.
Andrew Brodsky, a management professor at The University of Texas, explained that boreout is when you're experiencing little "stimulation" at work.
"Boreout is basically often the opposite extreme of burnout, but also can be just as problematic in terms of our work experience," Brodsky said in an interview with Insider.
"What people don't often think about is that being under-stimulated can also create stress and negative feelings as well."
Ruth Stock-Homburg, chair of the marketing and human resources department at Technische Universität Darmstadt and an expert on boreout, explained that it is "a largely neglected phenomenon," at companies because workers may be ashamed to admit it.
"In contrast to boreout, burnout is something cool, because a person performs so much, which is so well appreciated in our society," Stock-Humburg said to Insider. "People usually hide their boreout."
Boreout, when left untreated, can lead workers down the path to quiet quitting and disengagement.
Boreout originates from a lack of purpose at work
People are looking for impactful roles more than ever now.
This is particularly important to young workers between the ages of 18 to 25 who say "meaningful work" is one of the most motivating factors that keeps them in a job, according to a Handshake report in 2022.
Boreout starts to creep in when workers feel like their energy is being wasted on menial tasks.
"People often talk about extrinsic motivation which is related to pay and promotion but there's also intrinsic motivation which is whether we are interested in our own jobs," Brodsky said adding that workers may not feel like they have enough variety, control, or autonomy over their own job.
Stock-Humburg pointed out that boreout doesn't just affect "losers" or those with low performance. Instead high performers could be prone because they can be impatient and desire exciting work.
Job crafting — also known as quiet thriving — is one way to overcome this feeling of boreout and it's "the idea that we can try and craft our own jobs to fit our motivations and what we're looking for," Brodsky said.
This could include mentoring other employees, finding ways to interact with people across your team, or even reframing the work in your own mind so that it's more exciting to you by asking yourself questions like: "How can I make this work more fun in my own head?"
Monitoring employees leads to 'busyness theater'
Some companies are keeping a closer eye on employees by using technology that monitors how much they're working. Such tech can include tracking keystrokes per hour or monitoring how long they're actually clocked into work.
Brodsky explained that boreout is often rooted in workplace cultures where employees are measured on how much they're working rather than the outcomes of their work.
In fact, 43% of employees in the US engage in so-called "productivity theater" for more than 10 hours a week by doing things like attending too many meetings or sending lots of emails to appear busy, according to a Visier survey in May.
"This busyness theatre can be a real source of boredom because someone's really just pretending to work and they're not actually using their mind," Brodsky said.
Instead, it should be okay for employees to take a break and engage in stimulating activities from watching a video to relax or going for a 15 to 20-minute jog so "you can come back to work refreshed."
Lotta Harju, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at EM Lyon Business School in France, added: "Don't assume that keeping people busy will cure boredom. It does not."
She explained it's a popular misconception that boreout comes from having inadequate work — workers can still get bored at companies where work piles up. Harju pointed to factors like red tape, organizational regulations, and role conflict.
Ultimately it's not just down to employees to make the work environment more stimulating for themselves. Managers also need to step up and have "open conversations," with their direct reports, Brodsky said.
"Very rarely are those in power asking those beneath them 'What can I do to make your job better?' They can find ways to make the jobs objectively better so those employees perform better. Even just asking employees for their feedback makes them feel more involved in the workplace, makes it feel like their voice is more heard."
"Men are all the same," Errol Musk told Insider. "Any man — that I know of anyway — very happily, if he finds the right girl, would have another child. It doesn't matter if he's 90, 20, 50 — doesn't matter what age. I mean, that's what we're built for — that's what we're made for."
To date, Errol Musk has seven known biological children, including three children he had with Elon Musk's mother, Maye Musk, two kids he had with his ex-wife Heide Bezuidenhout, and another two children he had with his former stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, when she was in her 30s. Errol Musk announced he'd fathered his most recent child with Jana Bezuidenhout in 2022.
Errol Musk has faced some scrutiny for the relationship with Jana. In a biography on Elon Musk, author Walter Isaacson wrote that the billionaire Tesla CEO was worried his father was "uncomfortably attentive" to the stepdaughter when she was 15 years old.
Errol has said there was nothing inappropriate, saying he was equally attentive to all of his children and pointing out that he'd fathered children with Jana when she was in her 30s and when he was no longer married to her mother. Jana Bezuidenhout did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Errol Musk told Insider he lives in close proximity to Jana and their children and sees them about every other day, but he didn't specify whether he plans to have more children with Jana, who is now in her mid-30s.
"I'm 77, but I feel fine," he said. "I have an athlete's physique. So if a woman came along who was able to have children, she'd have to be under 35 because a woman's cutoff for having children is 35, believe it or not." Errol Musk contended.
"But if she's under 35 and I loved her and everything, I wouldn't think think twice about having another child, of course," he said.
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, women are most fertile between their late teens and late 20s. Some women of course have children well into their 40s. A 2023 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that "delayed childbearing — having a first child at age 35 or over — increased ninefold between 1972 and 2012" and the number of women giving birth in their 40s has continued to increase since 1985 — a statistic that could be tied to the increasing costs of having children.
Errol Musk said he understands people's concerns about the affordability of having children — and he said he'd be concerned himself about who would take care of any children after he died.
"At my age you have to think, 'Well, how will they be looked after if you pass away?'" Errol said. "Unlike with Elon, when I was 24, I have to think 'Well, do I have some investments I can put away if I did have another child that they would be able to go on?' It wouldn't be just based on — like with Elon, when I was 24 — I just figured I've got my whole life to make make enough to look after him."
Cristiano Ronaldo signed for Saudi Arabian soccer team Al Nassr in January.
Getty Images
Saudi Arabia is pouring billions into sports in a bid to transform its economy.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has made the sector a key part of his Vision 2030 plan.
The Saudis have bought Newcastle United and bankrolled a breakaway golf competition since 2021.
Saudi Arabia is on a drive to transform its oil-reliant economy – and big sports stars like Cristiano Ronaldo, golfer Phil Mickelson, and boxer Anthony Joshua are all part of the plan.
Spending billions of dollars on sports is a key part of Vision 2030, an ongoing project spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that aims to make his country less dependent on crude and cement its place on the world stage.
But the reality is that the crown prince has a grander ambition: to level up Saudi Arabia's economic growth.
Sports spending spree
The world's biggest oil exporter has ploughed billions of dollars into soccer, golf, combat sports, and Formula 1 over the past two years.
Saudi Arabia's drive to dominate soccer hinges on an industrial city in north-east England: in October 2021, the government-controlled Public Investment Fund (PIF) paid £305 million ($372 million) to buy an 80% stake in Premier League club Newcastle United after 18 months of negotiations.
In just under two years, they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new players to help the perennial underachievers qualify for Europe's top competition, the UEFA Champions League.
The Saudi Public Investment Fund has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on players since buying Newcastle in 2021, helping the team to reach the UEFA Champions League.
In June, the fund took controlling stakes in the country's four biggest clubs – and Ballon d'Or winner Karim Benzema, Brazil legend Neymar, and former Liverpool forward Sadio Mané are among the big-name stars who've since swapped Europe for the Saudi Pro League.
"Soccer is by far the most popular global sport so certainly, the rationale to invest in it will always be there," Danyel Reiche, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University Qatar, told Insider. "But Saudi Arabia is piling into other sports too, because they want to achieve a lot in a short period of time."
The same month it took over Newcastle, PIF invested an estimated $2 billion in the breakaway competition LIV Golf – and global stars like Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka soon flocked to the new competition, which is set to offer prize money of $405 million this year alone.
The competitions agreed in June to merge into a combined entity that will be funded and chaired by PIF, in what many see as a political hole-in-one for Saudi Arabia.
Beyond soccer and golf, the Kingdom has also spent tens of millions of dollars hosting high-profile events – including two heavyweight boxing fights featuring Joshua, multiple WWE shows, and an Formula 1 Grand Prix that's been held in Jeddah since 2021.
The Gulf state is also set to host an undisputed heavyweight contest between champion boxers Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk in what boxing promoter Frank Warren said will be "the biggest fight that could possibly be made in our sport."
"Call it whatever you want"
Crown Prince Mohammed had a blunt response to accusations that his investment drive constituted sportswashing. "I don't care," he told Fox News last week.
If it will boost the Saudi economy, "then I will continue doing sportswashing. I have 1% growth of GDP from sport and I'm aiming for another 1.5%. Call it whatever you want, we're going to get that 1.5%."
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has made investing in sport a key part of his Vision 2030 project.
Leon Neal/Getty Images
The crown prince's words are an indication that the kingdom is piling into sports as much to boost its own economy as rehabilitate its reputation abroad.
Crown Prince Mohammed has "set out on a sport industry journey that he's going to seek to fulfil, irrespective of how we label Saudi Arabia," says Simon Chadwick, a professor at SKEMA Business School in Lille, France.
"He laid it out very clearly … his principle objective is to secure GDP growth of between 2% and 3% through sport, and he doesn't care if we call that 'sportswashing'," he adds, noting that sport makes up a similar proportion of the US, French, and German economies.
As well as boosting growth, Saudi Arabia's sports splurge will fortify the crown prince's own political position, according to both Chadwick and Reiche.
Under-35s make up 70% of the Saudi population and the government's growing track record for luring megastars like Ronaldo – and his 600 million-plus Instagram followers – will likely boost its appeal with that demographic, they say.
"The crown prince is strengthening his authority and power by providing young people with more entertainment opportunities as a way to make them happy," Reiche tells Insider.
For Chadwick, three sports in particular sum up the Saudi government's desire to appeal to its young and aggressively patriarchal population.
"The triumvirate of football, fast cars and fighting have guided investment," he told Insider. "There's a macho hue to that – but Saudi Arabia is still a very macho, patriarchal society."
Riyadh's golf investments likely form part of a different strategy – to boost the country's fast-growing tourism industry, which bin Salman said last week was already accounting for 7% of all GDP growth.
"Saudi Arabia is seeking to build its tourism sector – and so golf is very much connected to its economic development," Chadwick says.
"My reading of LIV is that it's part of a strategy that will eventually lead to people choosing to make a trip to play in Saudi Arabia – rather than Miami, Augusta, or St Andrews."
Saudi Arabia won't stop pouring money into soccer, golf, Formula 1, and fighting anytime soon – but appears ready to widen its sports investment strategy as well.
Nick Kyrgios is among the tennis players who've voiced support for Saudi Arabia's efforts to bankroll a breakaway competition.
As Crown Prince Mohammed made clear last week, all this forms part of a broader strategy to supercharge Saudi Arabia's economy through investment. That means its huge spending is likely to remain one of the biggest stories in sport for some time.
Ray Dalio is worried about America's borrowing binge and economic growth cooling.
The billionaire investor warned of a "debt crisis" and a "meaningful slowing of the economy."
Dalio has previously flagged interest rates, civil unrest, and geopolitical tensions as concerns.
Ray Dalio rang the alarm on the ballooning federal debt, and warned the US economy is set to slump, in a CNBC interview on Thursday.
The billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, flagged America's record $33 trillion of debt as "risky" during a fireside chat at the Managed Funds Association, CNBC reported.
"We're going to have a debt crisis in this country," Dalio said, pointing to an imbalance between the massive scale of public borrowing and insufficient demand for government bonds.
Dalio, an official mentor to Bridgewater's three co-chief investors, cautioned the mountain of federal debt and other challenges could mean US growth dwindles to zero.
"I think you're going to get a meaningful slowing of the economy," he said.
The veteran investor has previously flagged America's financial challenges —a historic debt pile, higher interest rates, and quantitative tightening — as well as political infighting and fraught relations with Russia and China, as a "perfect storm" for the country.
Dalio has also noted that high debt levels could spark a "balance sheet recession," where growth cools because people and companies focus on paying off loans instead of spending and investing.
Several experts have issued even bleaker outlooks, where they've predicted stocks and house prices will tumble, and a full-blown recession will occur. Their fears have mounted since inflation hit 40-year highs last year, spurring the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates from almost zero to over 5% in the past 18 months.
Higher rates encourage saving over spending and raise borrowing costs, which can relieve upward pressure on prices. But they can also slash the appeal of risky assets like stocks by raising bond yields, pull down house prices by lifting mortgage rates, hammer debt-reliant sectors like commercial real estate, and even trigger recessions by crushing overall demand.
A 90-year-old McDonald's employee in Japan swears working is the key to her health, and she doesn't plan to stop before age 100
Stanislav Kogiku/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Tamiko Honda, a 90-year-old McDonald's employee, says that work is the key to her health.
"I have never missed a shift due to illness. Coming to work and talking with young people keeps me lively," she told local outlet Mainichi.
Nearly one-third of Japan is aged 65 and up, making it the world's oldest population.
At 90, Tamiko Honda is the oldest female employee at McDonald's Japan, per local news reports. But she's not ready to hang up her work boots just yet.
Honda says that working is the key to her health — and that she plans on continuing until she's at least 100 years old, according to variousmedia reports in September.
"I have never missed a shift due to illness. Coming to work and talking with young people keeps me lively. Even the coronavirus is no sweat," Honda, who lives in Kumamoto city, told local outlet Mainichi.
A typical day in her work life begins with a 20-minute commute to her McDonald's branch in Kumamoto. She works five days a week, starting her three-hour shifts at 7:30 a.m. by sweeping the restaurant.
Though she is currently the oldest female employee at McDonald's Japan, the country's oldest worker at the fast-food giant appears to be 95-year-old Yoshimitsu Yabuta, according to Japanese media outlet SoraNews24.
According to SoraNews24, Honda had to leave her previous jobs as a nurse and cleaner. That's because these jobs had a mandatory retirement age which she crossed at age 61 as a nurse and at age 67 as a cleaner.
She then applied for a job at McDonald's in 2000 — which has no age restriction — based on a suggestion from her daughter, per Mainichi.
Though her daughter passed on in 2011, Honda told news outlets she always says goodbye to a picture of her daughter before she heads off to work.
Japan has the world's oldest population, with nearly one-third of its population aged 65 and up. That means the country has over 36 million senior citizens, according to a World Economic Forum report in 2023. And there are now over 9 million workers aged 65 and up — making up over 10% of the national workforce — according to government data released last week.
McDonald's Japan did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Sam Altman speaks to members of the media during Microsoft's announcement of a new, AI-powered Bing search at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Tuesday, February 7, 2023.
Jovelle Tamayo/Getty Images
Artists and image owners can now ask OpenAI to remove their images from DALL-E training data.
However, the process places a huge burden on creators to extract their own work.
One artist called the arduous opt-out process "enraging."
OpenAI for the first time is letting artists remove their work from training data used for DALL-E 3, the latest version of its AI image generator. The opt-out process is so onerous that it almost seems like it was designed not to work.
OpenAI recently unveiled a new form that image owners and creators can use to request that owned or copyrighted images be removed from DALL-E training data.
AI models need high quality, and human generated training data to perform well. There's a race to accumulate all this information. But the original creators of this content have now realized that the value and intelligence embedded in their work is being ingested and processed for someone else's benefit. That's putting pressure on big tech companies to offer ways for creators to either actively decide to take part, or extricate their data from this grand AI experiment.
One by one
To have an opt-out request even be considered by OpenAI's new process, an artist, owner or rights holder has to submit an individual copy of each image they'd like removed from DALL-E's training dataset, along with a description.
For most artists, that could mean hundreds or thousands of works that need to be submitted one by one. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, for example, as the holder of rights to that artist's work, would need to submit individual requests for each of O'Keefe's more than 2,000 artworks to have them considered for removal from DALL-E's dataset.
OpenAI is full of very smart technologists. The company could have rolled out a process through which an artist or owner could make a single request that all of their work be removed from the training data. But the company did not do this. Why? Probably because it needs as much data as possible to build its AI models.
"Enraging"
Toby Bartlett, an artist with a namesake consulting firm, wrote on Threads that OpenAI's DALL-E opt-out process is "enraging."
"Now artists are going to have to almost ruin their work with watermarks of epic proportions in the hopes that their work doesn't get used… if that even works!" he added.
Greg Madhere, an IT consultant, also wrote on Threads that he's recently been getting into photography and wanted to share his images online. He's hesitant now, given the degree to which online content is being scraped and used to train AI models like DALL-E and ChatGPT.
"Where is it safe to even post online anymore?" he asked.
Too late
Even if OpenAI grants an artist or owner's opt-out request, it will only apply to "future" training data for DALL-E. The version 3 that was just released will have already made use of artistic work that a person requests be removed from its training data. Or, as OpenAI put it, its model will have "learned from their training data" and be able to "retain the concepts that they learned."
Translation: Here's the opt-out process, but it's too late because we've already sucked out most of the value from your work.
Several issues surrounding the use of copyrighted works for AI training are currently part of a rule-making process at the US Copyright Office, including opt-outs.
"We've heard from artists and creative content owners that they don't always want their content to be used for training and so we're offering them the ability to opt out their images from future training of models," an OpenAI spokesperson said.
Robots.txt option
For those with large bodies of work or "high volume of images from specific URLs," the company suggests blocking OpenAI's web crawler GPTBot by deploying robots.txt. OpenAI said last month that it would respect the decades-old method of websites signaling they do not want to have their data scraped by a web crawler.
The trouble is, for an artist or owner to deploy robots.txt, not only would they need to know every website that hosts their images, they would need access to those websites' codebases to add a robots.txt file that could block GPTBot.
Without such access, it's likely impossible that an artist or owner will be able to have their works removed from DALL-E training data at all.
Are you a tech employee or someone else with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com, on secure messaging appSignalat 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.
One expert suggests Kelce's newfound stardom could help him earn an extra $5 million off the field this year.
Travis Kelce may be best known to NFL fans for catching touchdowns, but his biggest win of the season may happen off the gridiron, thanks to the Swiftie effect.
After social media posts earlier this month ignited speculation, rumors of a relationship between the Kansas City Chiefs tight end and Taylor Swift have been heating up. They reached a peak this weekend when the pop star was spotted cheering on Kelce's team at Arrowhead Stadium alongside his mother Donna.
Whether the relationship is a real love story, a PR stunt, or something in between doesn't really matter when it comes to one thing: financial gains in the millions for Kelce.
Since Sunday, Kelce has gained more than half a million Instagram followers, according to data from SocialBlade. Sales of Kelce merchandise — including jerseys, fatheads, and onesies — spiked 400% on Fanatics' network of sites on Sunday, the company told the Associated Press, earning him a spot as one of the top five sellers of the weekend. "New Heights," Kelce's podcast with his brother, Jason, has climbed the charts and is now the number one show on Apple Podcasts.
All of this means big money for the two-time Super Bowl champion and one-time "Saturday Night Live" host.
"It's estimated Kelce currently makes around $5 million a year in off-the-field earnings, and I wouldn't be surprised if he doubles that number," Bob Dorfman, a sports marketing analyst at Pinnacle Advertising, told Insider. "Kelce was already one of football's most successful endorsers before his hot romance, but now he's sizzling hot — swiftly grabbing the attention and buying power of a whole new fan base and demographic."
The merchandise sales translate directly to cash: Thanks to a deal negotiated by the NFL Players Association, athletes earn royalties on any merch — jerseys, playing cards, video games — that bears their name, image, and likeness.
Tom Brady, for example, earned $9.5 million in licensing income in the 12 months ending February 28, 2022, according to the NFLPA's 2022 filing with the US Department of Labor. Kelce's teammate, Patrick Mahomes, made $3.3 million in the same time frame.
Kelce's new social media followers, meanwhile, could mean a payoff that lasts longer than a quick fling.
Though NFL players earn less than some other athletes in endorsement deals, those who have mastered marketing can score quite a payday. Mahomes, for example, will bring in $25 million off the field this year, Sportico reported, and most of that will come from endorsements.
Kelce's big-name sponsors include Nike, Pfizer, and State Farm. As he's moved up the social media ranks — he now has 3.4 million followers, compared with Mahomes' 5.8 million — his earnings could multiply.
Sports influencer marketing agency OpenSponsorship anticipates his rates for social media endorsements could increase "3-5x," OpenSponsorship CEO Ishveen Jolly told Insider over email. A "good tight end," like Kelce, could command low-to-mid six figures per deal, she added.
"We are already seeing more interest in brands around Travis because he's tapping into a new audience of Taylor's," Jolly wrote.
Swift, by comparison, has 272 million followers on Instagram, and it's likely many of them have different interests frp, Kelce's typical fans. If the relationship lasts, Dorfman said, it's possible Kelce will break into new sponsorship categories that appeal more to her young, female base, like beauty or fashion.
Plus, if the Kelces' podcast remains popular, with Swifties tuning in for any details on the pair's potential romance, the ad dollars could pile up.
"Sometimes, these moments can be distracting to an athlete, but with the proper structure in place, it is a great opportunity to maximize a moment for deal flow," Chase Garrett, CEO of endorsement marketplace Icon Source, told Insider in an email. He likened the spotlight to those of Olympic athletes "who get thrust into unforgettable moments."
(On this week's episode of "New Heights," Kelce said he would not be commenting any longer on his relationship with Swift in an effort to maintain his and her privacy. That may explain why his representatives did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.)
For over two decades, there was the Oprah effect: Everything — and everyone — Oprah Winfrey touched turned to gold. Think about brands like Spanx and Carol's Daughter, which all became household names, and people, like Dr. Oz and Toni Morrison, who reached huge new audiences, after being featured on Winfrey's show.
Swift has had the same impact for a number of years. While she, herself, is the biggest beneficiary of her popularity — her Eras tour is set to gross more than $1 billion — the products and people she interacts with often experience spikes in popularity.
The day after Swift was spotted in a pair of bejeweled jeans in April, the $673 pants sold out, Billboard reported. The same thing happened to a dress she wore on TikTok. (So far, the New Balances she sported in Kelce's private box are still available.)
Her paramours have seemingly benefited from her success, too. Her longtime partner Joe Alwyn, for example, scored a Prada campaign the year after the two started dating; many write-ups of the deal referred to him as "Taylor Swift's boyfriend."
Who knows how this will all turn out for Swift and Kelce. They may not even be an item by the time the next Chiefs game — though thanks to Swift, who's reportedly planning to attend, that match-up has broken a sales record for their opponent, the Jets, Town and Country reported. But for Kelce, the romance, or whatever it is, could be fruitful beyond his wildest dreams.
KPMG US expects it will need more people as it looks for its employees to work more with AI.
Malte Mueller/Getty Images
KPMG's head of an AI and digital innovation group expects the tech will require more workers.
Steve Chase is tasked with transforming KPMG US through adoption of AI, analytics, and other tech.
The company previously said it would invest $2 billion over five years in AI.
Tech bonanzas can throw a lot of people out of work.
That's one of the concerns about the stampede toward artificial intelligence. Steve Chase, a longtime consultant at KPMG US, has heard the warnings. And he heard them in the late 1990s and mid-2000s about the rise of the internet and the job-killing effect it could have on consulting.
Chase, who will run a new AI and digital innovation group at KPMG US, expects AI will be like other tech waves — just bigger. And like those prior waves, he expects the company will continue to grow.
"We're absolutely envisioning needing more people," he told Insider, "because the number of questions we're getting from clients is increasing."
That's likely welcome news for the 35,000 US employees at the accounting and consulting giant. KPMG said over the summer it would invest $2 billion into AI over five years as part of an effort with Microsoft.
"We have the ability to be much faster and much more comprehensive using these tools to put knowledge in the hands of someone who needs it to be able to solve a business problem," Chase said. One way people will remain essential, he said, is to ensure the information and recommendations AI produces have merit.
Humans will need to be able to ask the right questions of AI to get sound answers, Chase said. They'll also need to ask for and evaluate citations so they can understand what AI might be basing its recommendations on, he added.
That need for humans to interact with AI is notable because, in the past, automation has made some jobs obsolete. Yet, over time, those same technological gains can end up creating more jobs than they snuff out because they make workers more productive. One question some observers have is whether the AI wave will be different than the many tech innovations before it — whether it will be so profound that the number of jobs created won't keep pace with those lost.
Remaking the company and how work gets done
Chase said the goal he's been assigned is to transform KPMG US through the systematic adoption of AI, analytics, and other emerging tech.
Part of what makes AI unique, he said, is that in the past, people on the business side of a company would often turn to the tech folks and ask them for help in achieving a goal. "It's now technology is literally changing the opportunity to think about the business model," Chase said.
One example of a change at KPMG US could be in how the company pulls together the decisions that emerge from meetings with clients, especially big, multiday gatherings where many people need to know the outcomes. There's traditionally been a lot of work in documenting decisions and outlining next steps. "We're bringing online the ability to radically change that in terms of how that occurs, and be able to summarize out, have the emails written, and the follow-ups done, etc.," he said, referring to how AI will help.
Beyond having a bot make recommendations on next steps, using AI will mean rethinking how teams are set up. Groups focused on client engagement or on functions like marketing won't be set up the same way as in the past, he noted.
"And so you have to teach people what their new job is," Chase said. Those jobs will involve "people enabled or augmented by an ever-increasing, better set of tools."
Chase said clients are often asking how AI gets used inside companies. He said KPMG US has examples to point to, particularly in areas like internal audit, finance, human resources, and operations. But the wider impact, he said, is the broad knowledge AI can bring to all workers within an organization.
Companies will need to be able to articulate an AI strategy, Chase said, yet also think in more sweeping terms. "Tell me what your business strategy is and put AI in it," he said. "Think about where your business model could be disrupted and think about what you're going to do about it."
By handing over some of the heavy lifting to AI, Chase said he expects more employees will have time for analysis and to work with others to make sure those insights are shared and understood.
"I know people are talking about, 'Well, it's going to cut down on human interaction,'" he said, referring to AI. "I see it exactly the opposite."
Jen Glantz is the founder of the wedding business Bridesmaid for Hire and a new mom.
When she got pregnant, she started testing how AI could help her cut down her working hours.
Now, she's saving 15 hours a week by using AI tools to write speeches and plan bachelorette parties.
I started my business Bridesmaid for Hire when I was 26. I was a bridesmaid so many times for my own friends that I decided do it for strangers, too.
I posted an ad on Craigslist letting people know that I was a bridesmaid available for hire. The ad went viral, and days later, I started the business.
At the time, I was single and had recently been laid off from my full-time job. I spent weekdays meeting with brides, going to vendor appointments, or planning bachelorette parties. I spent weekends at the parties, bridal showers, and actual weddings. I was also doing freelance work on the side as a professional speaker and writer and working a total of 60 to 70 hours a week.
I'm now a new mom without childcare and trying to run my business at full speed. When I found out I was pregnant, I decided I needed a plan to slowly remove myself from much of the day-to-day work and interactions with clients. I turned to AI to help me scale my business, earn passive income, and do less of the work myself.
A year later, I've been able to do that in three ways, while saving over 15 hours of work a week. Here's how.
I built an AI tool that replaces one of my most popular services
The second-most popular service I offer clients is maid-of-honor speechwriting. I spend an hour chatting with a maid of honor to learn about the relationship she has with the couple getting married and write down stories, details, and key memories. Then I spend three to four hours writing the maid of honor speech for a fee of $375.
I get anywhere from 15 to 20 inquiries a month about this service, but because of how much time it takes, I can only work with three to five people.
I decided to build an AI tool that replicates this service so I can offer it to more clients — at a lower price point of $35 — and remove myself from the process.
I teamed up with a developer who worked on a project with my husband in the past. He agreed to work with me on an equity basis, which meant his team would build the tool for free and then take a commission from every sale.
I provided the developer's team with a list of all the questions I usually ask maids of honor before writing their speeches, anonymized audio transcripts from the calls I've had with clients, and finalized speeches that I wrote.
The team trained the AI to ask the same core questions that I do in a conversational tone and take the information the user provides to write a personalized speech based on the speeches I've written for past clients.
The tool is able to write speeches for clients within minutes instead of the one- to two-week turnaround that I used to offer when I did this manually. It launched in late August and it's already written 45 speeches for paying customers.
While the speech output isn't always perfect, it provides clients with a satisfactory result that they can then edit further. If a customer wants me to review the speech that the tool generated and make quick edits, I do that for free.
In the past month, we've only had to issue one refund and that was because the tool was temporarily out of service when a customer went to use it.
I use ChatGPT to help with marketing
I used to spend 10 to 15 hours a week on different marketing efforts to help get new clients and provide new content to my 92,000 social-media followers and 70,000 newsletter subscribers.
Occasionally, I hire contractors or virtual assistants to help me create content, schedule posts, and write posts for my website. But these services can cost a couple thousand dollars and require a lot of hands-on instruction.
Now I use ChatGPT to streamline a lot of my marketing efforts and save time.
ChatGPT helps me come up with a batch of social-media posts I can use each month. I ask the tool to write five social-media posts for a business that posts tips for bridesmaids on how to save money and be better at the role. I put the answers into a free Canva template and schedule the post. The entire process takes 15 minutes, whereas it would've taken about 90 minutes to do it myself.
I also asked ChatGPT to write me a marketing strategy that I can use to help me promote my AI maid-of-honor speechwriting tool. I asked for a partnership plan and email templates to send to potential partners. I copied and pasted the templates into an email and sent them out to a handful of partners I had previously identified. This also saved me an hour's worth of work.
I let other AI tools do client dirty work for me
I'm often tasked with helping brides do a lot of the bridal-party duties, from planning bachelorette-party itineraries to coming up with suggested bridesmaid dresses for their friends to wear. This involves doing research that can take me five to 10 hours a week. Now I use AI to help me.
If a client asks me to help her put together a registry, I'll use AI gift-searching tools and export results into a spreadsheet for them to review. I'll use Roam Around to help plan an itinerary for the bachelorette party. If they're asking for help coming up with bridesmaid-dress styles to pick from, I'll use an AI styling tool that generates these looks, based on a few questions.
My goal isn't to ever use AI to fully replace the services I provide clients as a hired bridesmaid, but it is to use AI tools to cut down up to 20 working hours a week.
In the future, I hope to build out a suite of AI tools to replicate more of the services I offer clients. Until then, I'll use existing AI tools to supplement my work.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, right, with his boyfriend, Oliver Mulherin, at a White House dinner in late June. Altman said the couple wants to have children.
The leader behind the buzzy conversational AI chatbot told New York Magazine that he and his boyfriend, Oliver Mulherin, an Australian programmer, want to have kids soon. Altman, who grew up as the oldest of four siblings in what he calls a "middle-class Jewish family," said he likes big families.
Altman has kept his relationship with his partner Mulherin — who he calls Ollie — fairly private. During the work week, Altman and Mulherin live together in a house on Russian Hill in the city of San Francisco, he told the New York Times. On the weekends, they reside in 25-year-old remodeled house on a private ranch in Napa, California where Altman, who is vegetarian, raises cows.
In late June, Altman brought Mulherin with him to a White House dinner in honor of Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. Tech leaders like Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook also were invited as guests.
Like Altman, Mulherin seems to have an interest in AI.
As a computing and software systems student at the University of Melbourne, Altman's boyfriend worked on AI projects related to language detection and games, according to a blog post from David Sønstebø, the founder of the IOTA Foundation, an open-source coding organization Mulherin joined in 2018. Insider couldn't confirm if he still works there.
Before Mulherin, Altman was last known to be dating Nick Sivo; they were together for nine years, Altman told the New Yorker.
In 2004, the couple broke up after they sold the company in 2012, New York Magazine reported.
Altman didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made through OpenAI before publication. Mulherin also didn't respond to an email from Insider.
Is aggressively posting on LinkedIn actually good for your career? That may depend on your prospective employer's LinkedIn persona.
Xavier Lalanne-Tauzia for Insider
It was a hard day for Matthew Sciannella: He was officially getting divorced.
After 12 years of marriage and multiple children, he and his wife had drifted apart during the pandemic. In early 2021, they decided to call it quits. As the Washington, DC-area marketing executive grappled with the realities of being suddenly single again, he told his friends, he journaled about it, and he told his family. And then he told LinkedIn.
"I'm getting a divorce. God it sucks to write that," Sciannella shared with his several thousand professional connections.
He explained why he'd decided to publicize his news on the work-focused social network. "This is a human network for me now. A place where I feel most myself. Most at home. And most among my peers," he wrote. "We all build our professional castles here on LinkedIn, but real life shit happens, too."
Over the past year, remote work across the world had blurred the lines between work and life. Sciannella's post touched a nerve. It accrued thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments. "Let it out brother," a growth advisor wrote. "Fuck the ROI conversations right now and focus on your family."
Then the backlash began. Other commenters started criticizing his decision to share so openly with his colleagues, clients, and potential future employers. And a meme account on Instagram, @BestOfLinkedIn, screenshotted and mocked his post to its tens of thousands of followers. It wrote: "Maybe this wouldn't have happened if you didn't share every detail of your personal life on a professional networking platform?"
It was the start of a madcap workplace drama that laid bare an awkward truth: No one really knows what it means to be "professional" anymore.
With 950 million members as of July, LinkedIn is poised to soon have a billion users, joining a rarefied three-comma club with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Started in 2003 as little more than an online repository for résumés, the Microsoft-owned behemoth has recently transformed. Not only are there more users to post, but they're posting much more often. The number of LinkedIn posts grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But it's the content of the posts that's shifted the most, turning LinkedIn into one of the world's strangest social networks.
Take one post from Peter Rota, an SEO specialist from Massachusetts. "I have a secret," he wrote to his thousands of followers in August 2022. "Most people are not even aware this is a real thing. Since 2015, I have struggled with peeing in public restrooms."
Rota went on to explain that his social-anxiety condition, also known as shy-bladder syndrome, had caused years of discomfort, and even provoked him to miss friends' weddings. He had a blowout trip planned to tour Europe with friends, he wrote, and was seriously considering not going.
So why post it? "I had basically seen other people, I guess, share more vulnerable things, so to speak — and I feel like it's kind of just something that I wanted to share," he told me. Over the past couple of years, he'd seen and taken part in a pivot toward personal sharing on LinkedIn, and saw posting about his condition as a way to both confront his demons and help with the condition for others. "I feel like sometimes it just helps other people to know that it's possible to do something," he added.
Personal sharing on LinkedIn is booming, people who use the platform say, because of tidal shifts in both social norms and the social-media marketplace.
For one, broad cultural attitudes toward the workplace, as well as what's appropriate to share, are evolving. This is partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic: People were suddenly given free rein to be vulnerable and express their fears in front of their colleagues, while remote work simultaneously lowered inhibitions and eroded much of in-office etiquette.
Xavier Lalanne-Tauzia for Insider
There's also a generational shift, with some younger people having fewer hang-ups sharing with their colleagues. Oversharing comes "pretty much down to Gen Z, to be honest with you," said Catalina Valentino, a 21-year-old entrepreneur. She found some notoriety from Davos earlier this year when she posted on LinkedIn about taking off her "swanky new pair of Louboutins" to walk nearly a mile barefoot in the snow to a meeting at the World Economic Forum after her car got stuck. "People were shocked, but to me it seemed normal to stop at nothing," she wrote. "And that's exactly the mindset of an entrepreneur."
LinkedIn was also, for a long time, virgin territory for posters. As the platform built out its sharing functionality, it had hundreds of millions of users but without the same culture of posting as Twitter or Instagram. "It was very untapped," Rota says. Some users found that the same post would receive far more engagement on LinkedIn as compared with rival social platforms — making it an attractive place to concentrate their energies.
And now it's becoming the only game in town. Facebook has been a wasteland for years. X, as Twitter is now known, is subject to Elon Musk's mercurial whims. TikTok's short-form video is a different form of content. Users have stopped posting on most other platforms. As Sarah Frier wrote in a Bloomberg column in August, "LinkedIn is becoming a site where regular people actually want to hang out and post their thoughts. It might even be cool."
In 2018, John Hickey was working in tech sales and sick of the culture of endless self-promotion. He wanted to be a writer, but his days were filled with self-aggrandizing emails. So he decided to have some fun.
The millennial in San Francisco started posting the worst-offending "LinkedInfluencers" he found to his personal Twitter page — the shameless humblebrags, the personal anecdotes of dubious veracity, the #HustleCulture koans promoting a questionable approach to work-life balance. They were an instant hit, and the retweets rolled in. So he decided to spin up a dedicated meme page poking fun at the excesses of online professional culture and the Ted Talkification of LinkedIn. He called it @BestOfLinkedIn.
"If you worked for me, and you represented my brand this way, you'd be terminated immediately."
It quickly racked up tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and Instagram, and people started sending Hickey examples they found from their own networks. He had inadvertently transformed into a warrior on the front lines of the internet's weirdest, lowest-stakes culture war.
In one post, he skewered a CEO who talked about being "vulnerable" and shared a crying selfie after laying off employees. In another, he criticized a user who wrote about taking time off after her father died but made sure to keep checking LinkedIn. (He also leaked Peter Rota's bashful urinary tract.) A larger rival account emerged, State Of LinkedIn, and a Reddit community thrived — "LinkedIn Lunatics."
When Hickey came across Sciannella's post about his divorce, he thought it was a perfect example of online oversharing. "It was like, 'Oh, my God — he really just put that all out there,'" he recalled thinking. He redacted Sciannella's name, as he always did for the posts he featured, but it made it back to Sciannella anyway.
Hickey wasn't ready for what happened next. A couple of days after he posted, an angry email landed in his inbox — from Sciannella's boss. "Do you realize how dangerous it is to troll via LinkedIn posts? In two seconds, I found who you work for, who the partners of your agency are, who your clients are, etc.," he warned ominously. "If you worked for me, and you represented my brand this way, you'd be terminated immediately."
The message Hickey received from Sciannella was even more blunt. It sent him an address and challenged him to repeat what he had written to his face.
In the surest sign of LinkedIn's hotness, its posts are now the subject of scathing satires.
Jack Raines, an MBA student at Columbia Business School, has perfected the art of LinkedIn parodies. After New York announced a $100 incentive to encourage residents to get vaccinated, he posted that he'd earned $100,000 by getting 1,000 jabs in 16 days. "Opportunities like these are rare, but you have to capitalize on them if you want to successfully build wealth," he sagely advised his followers. Some of them inevitably fall for his shtick and believe they're real.
Alexander Cohen, a healthtech executive in the San Francisco Bay Area, is another prolific LinkedIn shitposter, whose best work includes an infamous lifehack post about cooking butter-garlic chicken in a hotel coffee machine. ("Although my company allows me to expense dinner while traveling, I wanted to save money because I know that every dollar counts on the P&L," he explained.)
But the irony of Raines is that despite his insincerity, he's just as relentlessly self-promotional as the LinkedIn users he mocks. He consistently hawks the newsletter he works for, Young Money, and has started running sponsored posts for health supplements. He intends to parlay the audience he's built into a content-related finance job once he finishes his MBA.
"My way of looking at it is being funny on the internet, and, yeah, it's the same thing as somebody building a YouTube channel: They're trying to get engagement, but if their content's good, is it really engagement-bait?" he said. "No. The ones that I don't like are people trying to act like they're some finance guru — 'Here's how you get rich, escape the 9-to-5' — and then sell you some pyramid scheme-leadership course."
Not long after, he found himself abruptly called into the Columbia dean of students' office. An outraged alum had complained about what they thought was a sincere admission of theft by a student and wanted him punished. Thus proceeded a surreal conversation in which he explained to the dean the ironic bent of his LinkedIn persona and that, no, he wasn't really stealing food from hotels around Manhattan.
She ultimately thought it was "funny," he said. (The dean declined to comment.) And he doesn't regret the post: The meeting with the dean was a good networking opportunity.
Is aggressively posting on LinkedIn actually good for your career? That may depend on your prospective employer's LinkedIn persona.
John Reid is skeptical of LinkedIn self-aggrandizement. A creative director in the Bay Area, he's hired, fired, and managed throughout his career — and views a lot of nominally self-promotional posts as potentially problematic.
"I think the oversharing in general is definitely at least a pink flag, probably a red flag," he said. "It just shows, to me, misunderstanding how that platform in particular, in social media in general work, and it just shows bad judgment. So I think looking out at people's social footprint or hiring, is there evidence of spectacularly bad judgment?"
His feelings on the subject were perhaps hardened by an unusual phone call to his employer, an Oakland marketing firm, in early 2021. At the other end of the line was a man named Jon Franko, and he was furious about one of Reid's subordinates: John Hickey.
Speaking with Reid's boss, the outraged Franko asked whether the company knew that Hickey operated a pseudonymous meme account on Twitter and Instagram — and that @BestofLinkedIn had just mocked an employee at Franko's marketing firm: Matthew Sciannella, the divorcé. Franko wanted to see consequences.
After a short and surreal conversation, Reid and his boss spoke with Hickey. Hickey had already deleted the post, as he does when he gets blowback. Reid viewed Franko's call as an implicit demand for Hickey to be fired, but that was never going to happen — because he had actually taken a chance and first hired Hickey for his copywriting job off the strength off the meme account. "He obviously understood how to mold culture through media and social media, " Reid had thought. (Franko said he would not have asked for Hickey to be fired, though he may have called for a disciplinary conversation.)
Sciannella was acting hypocritically, Reid believed: He was willing to put himself out there with highly personal posts but couldn't take the heat that came with being in the public eye. "Jump in the snake pit, and you get bit," he said.
Franko, meanwhile, thought that the @BestOfLinkedIn post was an unfair and wildly unprofessional jab — and that he had a duty to have his employees' backs. "Frankly, there are a lot of people that use LinkedIn in a really bad way that's super annoying and is a major turnoff," he told me. "'I saw a starving dog today and I saved it, and then it made me think about business.' That shit's annoying, and I get it. I didn't see Matt's posts like that at all."
For most people, their LinkedIn posts don't escalate so rapidly. According to Joseph Yeh, a tech recruiter in California who used to work for LinkedIn, revelatory posting is a balancing act. "I think it is important to engage, and at least be relevant and know that you are checking in and that you're commenting and it's a quote-unquote a 'live profile,' right?" he said. "It helps for, A, for people to remember who you are. Two, it also helps for you to understand what the ecosystem is looking at."
On the flipside, the wrong content can be off-putting: "On LinkedIn people will still be looking at it going: This is how I want to present myself as a professional to the outside world."
Xavier Lalanne-Tauzia for Insider
Exactly what is and isn't acceptable on LinkedIn depends on the norms of your industry; tech sales representatives may have very different ideas of professionalism compared with arbitration lawyers. Played right, it can help you stand out and get ahead — as long as you don't push it too far. And opting out of the rat race entirely by not having a LinkedIn account may also be viewed as a red flag, Yeh warned.
LinkedIn does not want to be a place where posts go viral. That's the message from Daniel Roth, the site's editor in chief who has been with the company since 2011, after a previous stint as Fortune magazine's managing editor.
Over the past year or so, the site's algorithm has been tweaked to prioritize what Roth calls "knowledge" content — posts that will actually help people get ahead in their jobs — rather than self-promotional diatribes.
Since the COVID-propelled boom in personal sharing, Roth says, the pendulum has swung back — but not all the way back to how things were before the pandemic. "The new normal is that you do talk in the office, you are more willing to show who you are as a person as well as how you operate as a professional," he said. "That kind of vulnerability I think is a permanent part of how people are posting on LinkedIn. So it's knowledge first, but it's knowledge plus humanity."
Hickey and Sciannella's imbroglio may be telling of which way the wind is blowing.
Sciannella didn't actually know his boss Franko had called Hickey's employer until days after the fact. He had just flagged the @BestOfLinkedIn post in a company Slack channel, and Franko decided to take matters into his own hands. Nothing more came of Franko's demands, and he subsequently wrote about the episode on LinkedIn: "I simply hope this is a reminder for all of us to play nice on LinkedIn. Because if we don't, we can be seconds away from the unemployment line and burning all of the bridges we've worked so hard to build."
Hickey and Sciannella did not, ultimately, fight. Instead, Hickey kept working at the firm for roughly another year before becoming an associate creative director, working with top-tier clients including Salesforce, Jameson, and the New York Mets. Two years on, he rarely checks LinkedIn, now posting to his meme account only about once a month, down from his daily peak a year or so ago.
"Those lightning-rod moments on LinkedIn, well, I can't not say something about these," he said. "But kind of going through the daily — 'Let's make fun of this stay-at-home-mom who's putting up on LinkedIn that her 6-year-old told her that she's Superwoman' — it just feels like I'm punching down a little bit at this point."
Sciannella, meanwhile, is in a good place. "I was very, very angry at that moment. It was obviously a very turbulent time in my life," he said. "I think I have a little bit more peace of mind about it. And I think foundationally, I'm a lot more happy." He's had a few promotions and job changes. And he's still active on the social network, where he now has about 6,000 followers, sharing updates on his work and career.
Earlier in 2023, he remarried. He posted about it on LinkedIn.
Rob Price is a senior correspondent for Insider and writes features and investigations about the technology industry. His Signal number is +1 650-636-6268, and his email is rprice@insider.com.
