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.
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.
When Marjorie Prime premiered a decade ago, its technology felt abstract and futuristic. Today, it feels incremental. Artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty; it is fluent, responsive, and embedded in daily life. What once played as a cautionary what if now lands as a question of habit: not whether we would use such technology, but why we already do.
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;
And they don't seem to be leaving any time soon. Trump has ordered his advisers to ensure that the nation is "the unrivaled world leader" in AI and quantum information. The subjects are listed first and second on the administration's list of research and development priorities. And on 11 December, Trump signed an executive order preventing US states from regulating AI, with the goal of speeding the technology's development.
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.
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.
Artificial intelligence has, to use another ubiquitous word, made cognition precariously abundant. Answers arrive instantly and patterns surface with little to no effort. Judgment is technologically packaged and delivered with a confidence that increasingly rivals, if not often exceeds our own. My central point here is that this isn't simply another technological advance but marks the first time human cognition itself appears to be on the obsolescence curve.
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.
Shoshana Zuboff (New England, U.S., 1951) joins the video call from her home in Maine, in the northeastern United States, on the border with Canada, where the cold is relentless at this time of year. She sips tea to warm her throat and apologizes for being late; her schedule is so packed these days that it was impossible to find an opportunity to do this interview in person.
Britain is caught in a space between peace and war complicated by the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies dominated by powerful individuals and corporations, according to the new head of MI6. Blaise Metreweli, giving her first speech in the job, also accused Russia of being insincere about Ukraine peace negotiations but made minimal reference to China as the prime minister, Keir Starmer, seeks to arrange a visit to Beijing.
Every device, system, or application we touch at work and home is designed and enabled around standards. Who comes up with these standards? They are formulated by technology or domain specialists, many either working on a volunteer basis or through their companies, committed to advancing the capabilities of their chosen technology areas in an ever-changing economy. Many of the standards bodies that coalesce and hammer out common standards are always looking for interested professionals willing to contribute their time and insights.
To navigate is to read the world in order to move through it, whether it means scanning a crowd to find a familiar face, deciphering the logic of a bookstore's layout, or following the stars at sea. This ability has always been mediated by tools (many of them disruptive and transformative). Still, the rise of artificial intelligence presents us with a radical promise: a world where we no longer need maps, because the information or the product 'comes to us.'
While the artificial intelligence-fueled tech rally sputtered when tariff concerns grew, it seems to have resumed. Companies that can diversify to address the many demands the industry faces ultimately are poised to profit. Supermicro is one of those companies. The San Jose-based tech firm specializes in high-performance and high-efficiency servers, but it also provides software solutions as well as storage systems for data centers and enterprises focused on cloud computing, AI, 5G, and edge computing.
