#Artificial Intelligence

#Artificial Intelligence

With venture capital pouring into artificial intelligence, retail startups are struggling to compete for funding. PitchBook has tracked $396 million worth of VC deals in retail through December 19 of this year, down from a recent peak of $7.6 billion in 2021. In the age of AI, new companies are under more pressure to prove their value to VCs. Founders are saying that the enormous fundraising seen during the pandemic has subsided in 2025.

The City Council signed off on a $3.5 million, six-year agreement with Ladris Technologies to purchase a system its creators said can distill vast quantities of data to determine which route will most quickly lead evacuees to safety. The purchase comes just in time for the technology to aid in emergency preparations for a series of major sports events expected to bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to San Jose next year.

Boxing Day sales are expected to deliver a £3.6 billion boost to UK retailers this year, around £1 billion less than in 2024, as cost-of-living pressures continue to weigh on household spending. The forecast comes from Barclays, which tracks nearly half of all credit and debit card transactions across the UK. The anticipated decline represents a blow to retailers during their all-important "golden quarter", traditionally the most lucrative period of the year.

Shares of Meta Platforms have advanced 13% year to date, bringing its market value to $1.6 trillion. Meanwhile, shares of Google parent Alphabet have advanced 64%, bringing the company's market value to $3.7 trillion. Three top hedge fund managers bought both stocks in the third quarter. Israel Englander of Millennium Management added 793,500 shares of Meta Platforms and 2.2 million shares of Alphabet. Both stocks rank among his top 10 holdings.

At the close of 2024, I wrote that Elon Musk's support of Donald Trump had made him the world's most powerful unelected man. In 2025, his reign turned out to be short-lived. He rose fast and haphazardly, like a whizzing firework, only to explode spectacularly in June when he claimed in a post on X that the president of the United States was named in the government's files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Proponents of artificial intelligence (AI), and especially individuals with a personal incentive to promote investments in the field, often talk about creating and selling AI products that clients can trust. In so doing, however, they reveal a deep misunderstanding of the nature of trust and what it takes to become trustworthy. To gain truly profound insight into trust, we should look not to Silicon Valley's marketing but to cultural resources that have stood the test of time.

Nowhere is this skepticism louder than in my own backyard. In Silicon Valley, the "skip college" mantra has evolved from a "hot take" to accepted wisdom. Fueled by the rise of generative AI, the logic is seductive: If artificial intelligence can code, write copy, and analyze data faster than a junior employee, why spend four years and a small fortune on skills a bot will master before you graduate?

My typical morning starts around 3 a.m. I'm instantly met with Messenger notifications from web developers in California, GitHub pings from Florida, and a running document of research papers to read sent from Michigan. By 7:50 a.m. I'm off to class to live my life as an 18-year-old high school senior in Seoul. This solitary ritual has become my strange normal after I founded an AI research and development startup with people all around the world, whom I've never met in person.

2025 saw a welcome surge in healthcare venture funding as investors rushed to back top AI startups. Last December, VCs predicted huge funding rounds for AI scribe startups like Abridge and Ambience Healthcare; indeed, both Abridge and Ambience landed hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding this year. Investors also said in December 2024 that they anticipated a race for those startups to expand beyond AI health scribing into other product lines, like medical coding and billing.

As a result, GDP with grow at a robust rate of 2.5% in both 2026 and 2027, even after accounting for a weaker job market that will slow consumption. "With core inflation remaining above the 2% target for some considerable time, we think the Fed will cut its policy rate by only 25bp in 2026, putting the new Fed Chair and President Trump at loggerheads almost immediately," Capital Economics predicted.

Never before has the CMO position been more complex-or more essential to driving business results. The mark of success for any chief marketing officer is their impact on the long-term trajectory of a beloved brand. So, what does that look like in a year as chaotic as 2025, where there's been on-again, off-again tariffs, massive holding company mergers, and the continued rise of AI across the board?

With the rapid advances in cloud and artificial intelligence, the strategic role of technology in business is fundamentally shifting from being merely a business enabler to becoming the core transformation agent for growth-and, increasingly, survival. Yet as organizations adopt or expand their enterprise cloud platforms to stay competitive and solve new business problems, they face critical challenges: how to understand the scope of the financial, skills, and labor investments they need;

Stocks rose in morning trading on Wall Street Friday and further trimmed losses from earlier in the week for several major indexes.The S&P 500 jumped 0.8%, adding to gains made on Thursday.The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 283 points, or 0.6%, as of 10:05 a.m. Eastern. The Nasdaq jumped 1% and is now on track for a weekly gain.Technology stocks with an focus on artificial intelligence once again led the market. Nvidia jumped 3.4% and Broadcom rose 2.4%.

In 2025, the architectural field has been marked by a dense calendar of exhibitions, a measured slowdown in construction across multiple regions, and a period of reflection that scrutinizes the impact of intelligence (artificial and natural)-both on professional practice and workplace culture, as well as its use as a pedagogical tool. Over this calendar year, ArchDaily has published more than 30 interviews in a range of formats-Q&As, in-person conversations, video features, and more.

Alphabet is best known for Google, which is the most dominant search engine on the planet. Google commands an approximate 90% market share in search, in large part due to the distribution advantages it has. The company owns both the world's leading web browser in Chrome and the No. 1 smartphone operating system in Android. Alphabet also has a search revenue-sharing deal with Apple to be the default search on all its devices.

There's been no dearth of sell signals for Tesla Inc. It's facing a potential sales halt in California, an electric vehicle slowdown across the US and is losing market share in China and Europe. But all that hasn't deterred investors excited about its work with artificial intelligence and autonomous-driving development efforts. The carmaker's shares have rallied 25% since a low on Nov. 21, notching a record for the first time this year.

Alphabet's third-quarter results showed that this shift is underway. The company's total revenue in the period rose 16% year over year to $102.3 billion. But Google Cloud revenue jumped 34% to $15.2 billion, and the segment's operating income surged 85% to $3.6 billion. Additionally, Alphabet's cloud backlog climbed 46% year over year to $155 billion, reflecting multi-year commitments as customers reserve capacity for AI workloads.

The U.S. job market is sluggish and confusing this fall. American companies are mostly holding onto the employees they have. But they're reluctant to hire new ones as they struggle to assess how to use artificial intelligence and how to adjust to President Donald Trump's unpredictable policies, especially his double-digit taxes on imports from around the world. The uncertainty leaves jobseekers struggling to find work or even land interviews.

Senior partners at the global management consulting firm, which has been steadily cutting its worldwide workforce over the past few years, are understood to have held initial talks with the heads of non-client-facing departments about shrinking their teams by as much as 10 per cent. A McKinsey spokesman would not confirm how many roles were at risk, but Bloomberg, which first reported the plans, estimated that there could be "a few thousand" layoffs staggered over the next 18 to 24 months.

But the new year is also a chance to look back at recent turmoil and instability in federally funded scientific research, the wholesale dismissal of evidence in policymaking, andin spite of these thingsthe perseverance of people working in the scientific enterprise. We celebrate the fact-checkers in the field of knowledge and you, our readers, who continue to trust us to bring you what's real, what's factual and what's amazing in our world.