• A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion over how it handled its users' data.
• It could be the largest penalty against Meta in history.
• Meta recently agreed to an $18 billion settlement over the impact of its tech on kids.

A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading users about how it handled their data and for failing to prevent misinformation on Facebook.

The ruling could be the largest penalty in Meta's history. Last month, Meta settled a child-safety lawsuit brought by a group of US states for $18 billion.

The New Mexico case focused on Meta's handling of user records that Cambridge Analytica used for campaign purposes during the 2016 election. New Mexico alleged that Facebook misrepresented the extent of users' control over their data on the app.

"Facebook's wrongdoing—over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public—goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote in the ruling. "It relates to the way in which Facebook induces people onto the platform and ultimately keeps them there."

In a statement, Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the penalty "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico."

"At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online," Mahoney said. "We are confident we will prevail on appeal."

A jury ruled against Meta last month, finding the company committed nearly 50 million violations of a New Mexico law prohibiting deceptive trade practices. Each violation carries a penalty of up to $5,000.

Some Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were deposed in the case. New Mexico first sued the company in 2021, and the case went to trial last month.

In internal Meta communications presented at the trial, Zuckerberg appeared to obfuscate methods for users to hide their data.

"Give them a chance to change their privacy settings but obviously don't encourage it," Zuckerberg wrote in one internal message.

Meta's next move remains unclear. The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

This is a breaking news story. It will be updated.

• The internet is ablaze after cybersecurity researchers using AI found a bug in the PHP programming language.
• Greg Brockman said bad actors could use the exploit to steal private user data.
• The FBI and NSA have advised people to either take down websites or update their software.

OpenAI said that 70% of the world's websites could be in peril after cybersecurity researchers using its AI models found exploits in a popular programming language.

The National Security Administration's cyber division advised all web providers that use PHP, a widely used open-source language, to take their systems offline or update their software after OpenAI said one of its models found two "critical" flaws in the language's infrastructure.

Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, said in an X post that hackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal private user data or modify websites.

"We consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory," OpenAI said in a blog post.

While OpenAI said the vulnerabilities appear to have been identified before any attackers discovered them, the public disclosure set off a race for companies and governments to update their websites and apply fixes before hackers could exploit the bugs.

"We are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up," Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's chief technology officer, said in a post on X.

Numerous websites, including those belonging to governments and the media, went offline on Wednesday to address the issue.

PHP is a popular programming language that often handles the behind-the-scenes work powering websites that require user logins and online orders.

The critical flaw was first identified by Calif, a cybersecurity research company using GPT-5.6 Sol. Wiz, another cybersecurity company, independently uncovered the issues, OpenAI said. The companies are part of an OpenAI-led initiative called "Patch the Planet," which aims to make the world's digital infrastructure more secure.

OpenAI has also warned that as cybersecurity researchers continue to probe software vulnerabilities using its ever-advancing frontier models, more security failures will emerge.

An engineer at Microsoft pointed out that the PHP vulnerability was discovered with an older model.

"I don't think the world is prepared for the sheer number of vulnerabilities newer models will uncover," the engineer, Nicolas Bustamante, said on X.

The public disclosure on Wednesday by OpenAI and others of the existence of the exploits triggered urgent messages from leaders worldwide, including the Japanese Prime Minister.

"We have an urgent request for everyone to take action tonight," said Sanae Takaichi.

• Terence Tao, now a UCLA professor, earned his doctorate in mathematics at 20.
• The prodigy said his work is changing in the age of AI.
• With AI tools doing the legwork, math is no longer "heroic," Tao said.

AI is upending mathematics. For one top professor, the issue is just as spiritual as it is practical.

Terence Tao, a renowned professor at UCLA, said in a recent podcast appearance that the "romantic era" of math is over, thanks to AI tools capable of solving hundreds of problems with some simple prompting.

Now, he said, even leading scholars like him are reduced to sorting through reams of AI-generated proofs, instead of doing the "heroic" solving themselves.

"We are moving to an industrial era where math will become much more large-scale," Tao said in an interview this week on Numberphile, a YouTube channel dedicated to math.

"We are entering an era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost," he added.

OpenAI began its brusque push into the field by solving the Navier-Stokes equation in early September, one of math's millennium problems.

The revelation that AI had cracked it caused consternation from many a math geek. Some mathematicians also expressed frustration that while the AI model might have solved the problem, it didn't show its work, leaving them with the less celebratory task of verifying it.

Then, earlier this month, OpenAI said it cracked another 700 outstanding problems. A math professor at New York University told CNBC that the company's release had derailed work by early-career mathematicians.

"We've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday by their dump," the professor, Tristan Buckmaster, said at the time.

In a separate brouhaha in September, OpenAI backed out of a sponsorship for a so-called AI "mathathon" — an event organized by undergraduates at Caltech, where participants were encouraged to use AI to solve equations — after complaints from a group of more senior academics.

Event organizers told Business Insider at the time that their professors were sorely out of touch with the field's trajectory.

"We look to the future, and we don't even know if there's going to be grad school open positions by the time we get to Ph.D," one organizer, Caiman Moreno-Earle, said.

Though OpenAI has said it is taking steps to ensure human academics retain their role in this new era, some researchers and professors are already forecasting their possible obsolescence.

Tao isn't as much of a doomer as some of his colleagues in the field. However, he did say in the interview that the stories math nerds tell themselves may not mean so much in the future.

"We have these sort of mythological stories," he said in reference to the tale of Sir Andrew Wiles, who famously spent seven years isolated in his attic solving a single difficult equation.

"There was something romantic about sort of the heroic age," Tao said.

• France wasn't alone this weekend.
• Civil unrest occurred in several European cities this weekend.
• Protests over the high cost of living devolved into riots.

Demonstrators took to the streets across multiple European cities and capitals this weekend to protest the high cost of living in their countries.

Though the violence in Paris and other French cities claimed the headlines, thousands also showed up in Portugal, Italy, and Belgium. Demonstrators were arrested in large numbers — many people were seen in photos and videos clashing violently with police and looting local businesses.

Energy price hikes, caused at least in part by the US-Israeli war with Iran and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, have contributed to the rising prices. Other demonstrations in Belgium and France were begun by students and have since snowballed into larger-scale demonstrations, involving union workers and other organizations.

Here's a look at the chaos that unfolded across the Atlantic this weekend, where peaceful protests eventually devolved into riots and looting.

Lisbon

In Lisbon, Portugal's capital, people took to the streets on October 17 to protest the cost-of-living crisis, low wages, and unaffordable housing.

The demonstration, which was organized by the CGTP, Portugal's largest trade union federation, was also held in Porto and Coimbra. In all, the union said "thousands of workers" took part.

About 12.7% of the population in Portugal lives in overcrowded households.

Housing prices in Portugal recorded the largest annual increase of any EU member state in the second quarter of 2026, rising 16.5%. In Lisbon, the average rent is equivalent to 116% of the average salary, meaning it exceeds a typical monthly income by 16%.

Earlier this week, police removed a tent camp that activists had set up in Praça D. João I, a central public square in Porto, to draw attention to rising housing costs.

Brussels

In Belgium, students have held demonstrations in recent weeks over rising education costs, some of which turned violent over the weekend.

Video footage showed police using water cannons and tear gas during clashes with protesters in Brussels.

Belgian interior minister Bernard Quintin said in a post on X on Saturday that "what is unfolding in Brussels is no longer mere protest" and "all necessary means will be used to restore order in the face of the rioters."

Clashes also took place in Liège. Police arrested 195 people across the two cities during Saturday's protests, per The Brussels Times.

Milan

In Milan, a demonstration over the weekend against wars and the rising cost of living also descended into clashes between protesters and police.

Photos showed chaotic scenes around Piazza del Duomo, the landmark central square outside the Milan Cathedral and one of the city's busiest tourist areas, with looters damaging shop fronts and setting objects on fire.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the violence in a post on X on Sunday.

"Thugs who exploit demonstrations to sow chaos, attack those who ensure security, and hold entire cities hostage," she wrote. "Demonstrating is a right. Setting our cities ablaze is not."

The demonstrations were also held in other cities across northern Italy. Police estimates reported by Rai News, Italy's public broadcaster put turnout at about 5,000 in Milan, 3,000 in Turin, 2,000 in Bologna, 600 in Brescia, and 800 in Bergamo.

Italy's annual inflation rate jumped to 4.1% in September, up from 3.2% in August.

In Milan, home prices have also climbed: residential asking prices were 49% higher in September than in 2018, according to the property portal Immobiliare.it.

• Anthropic said it wants to create a new LLC with the company's stock as its sole asset.
• The new LLC, a charitable organization, would receive larger stakes as the company grows.
• An initial 5% stock funding is "subject to stockholder approval," Anthropic said.

Anthropic said on Sunday that it would set aside large portions of its wealth to support initiatives it believes are in the public interest.

In a blog post, the AI colossus said it aims to establish a separate LLC that would use Anthropic shares to make donations to nonprofits or "direct distributions to specific populations."

The new LLC, called the "Anthropic Public Benefit Fund," would receive larger stakes as the company grows. The company said an initial funding round of 5% of Anthropic's shares is still subject to stockholder approval.

"The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways," the company said.

A 5% stake in Anthropic is worth about $48 billion, according to the company's most recent valuation in May.

In 2025, rival frontier AI company OpenAI established a similar nonprofit foundation with a multibillion-dollar stake in the company to fund public-benefit initiatives.

• Nathan Fielder's documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is a bona fide hit.
• The film, "You Can See Everything," grossed $15 million in its opening weekend in the US and Canada.
• It offers a revealing portrait of Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors.

Nathan Fielder's nearly three-hour documentary about disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes is running up numbers at the box office.

The film, "You Can See Everything," grossed $15 million in the US and Canada during its opening weekend, according to A24, the film's distributor.

That's the best opening weekend for a documentary this year. "Melania" had the second-biggest opening weekend for a documentary after its release in January. It grossed $7.1 million.

The film's financial success is matched by viewer reception, too. It scored a whopping 99% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie-rating site, and a 98% among regular audiences.

Directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the picture offers a remarkably revealing portrait of Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors with her blood-testing company, Theranos.

Theranos was at one point valued at $9 billion. It said its product could run hundreds of medical tests using just a pinprick of blood from a finger, but investigations revealed the company was using expensive lab equipment to surreptitiously run the tests.

Holmes, as the company's CEO, was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison after journalist John Carreyrou published a withering investigative report in The Wall Street Journal, sparking what eventually became criminal charges.

Business Insider's Henry Chandonnet has seen the film twice so far. He called it "one of the most shocking, revelatory, and oddly funny films" he'd ever witnessed.

"It was twisty and worthy of seeing with fresh eyes," Henry reported.

• It's a dangerous time to own a brick-and-mortar storefront in France.
• Violence erupted across the country on Saturday, as black-clad rioters ransacked stores.
• Around 1,500 storefronts were targeted, one corporate heavyweight said.

Business owners in France are speaking out after cost-of-living protests turned into widespread rioting and looting across the country over the weekend.

Alexandre Bompard, the CEO of Carrefour, one of France's largest supermarket chains, said that about 1,500 businesses were targeted in the unrest.

Bompard and several other corporate heavyweights condemned the rioting and called on French authorities to restore order.

Photos and video from Paris and other French cities showed black-clad rioters smashing storefronts and leaving laden with armfuls of pilfered goods.

"We cannot allow violence to destroy what generations have put so much energy into building," Thierry Guibert, the CEO of Lacoste, said on X.

Here's what business owners are saying.

Thierry Guibert, CEO of Lacoste and Aigle.

Guibert, who heads the luxury French clothing brand Lacoste and the outdoor clothing brand Aigle, issued a forceful statement on social media. He said the looting is antithetical to the entrepreneurial spirit.

"When our Lacoste and Aigle stores are looted, like so many other businesses across France, it is not only shop windows that are being smashed," he said in French. "It is jobs, years of work, know-how, and the commitment of thousands of women and men that are being put at risk."

Guibert said his concerns were shared by other entrepreneurs and smaller shop owners across France. He portrayed the riots as a degradation of French industry.

Lacoste operates about 150 storefronts across France.

Fabien Devide, CEO of Team Vitality

The head of one of France's biggest professional esports organizations said that a part of him "went up in smoke" after his gaming café and club was looted on Saturday.

"The right to demonstrate is a fundamental freedom that I will defend all my life," Devide said on social media. "But looting and destruction should never have a place in these fights."

The esports organization operates a 4,300-square-foot gaming center, merchandise store, and café in central Paris. Vitality's X account posted on Saturday that "the premises of our club were looted."

"Fortunately, none of our staff members nor any fans were injured," Vitality said. "On the other hand, our display windows were destroyed, and our trophies and computer equipment were stolen."

Alexandre Bompard, CEO of Carrefour

Bompard, the CEO of the French supermarket and retail chain Carrefour, said that 50 of its stores were targeted by rioters on Saturday.

"Nothing can justify such violence," Bompard said on X in French. "Those who attack the work tools of courageous entrepreneurs and their teams in this way must face an uncompromising response."

"The Republic must protect its shopkeepers!" he added.

He attached four photos to his X post showing the ruined aisles of one Carrefour store. In the pictures, items litter the ground, and the shelves are empty.

Thierry Cotillard, chairman of Les Mousquetaires

Thierry Cotillard, chairman of Les Mousquetaires, a French retail group that owns the Intermarché supermarket brand, called the looting "unacceptable" in a LinkedIn post.

"We cannot trivialize these scenes," he said. "We cannot accept that violence becomes a response, that destruction becomes a mode of expression and that those who work honestly become the collateral victims of the anger of others."

Cotillard said at least two of his franchises in Paris and Rennes were "ransacked by thugs" during the riots on Saturday. He said his thoughts were with "all the shopkeepers who are paying the price."

"To our members, to our teams who are victims of this damage: you are not alone," he said. "We are at your side."

Dominique Schelcher, CEO of Coopérative U

Schelcher, CEO of supermarket and hypermarket retail collective Coopérative U, said some of the group's stores had been looted or attacked in several city centers, including Paris.

The collective comprises some 1,900 grocery stores and supermarkets owned by independent business owners.

"In the face of the shock, the solidarity of our network will be total," Schelcher wrote in a LinkedIn post on Sunday.

Schelcher later made a separate post calling on French leaders and politicians to "pursue calm, mutual respect, and the urgent development of a collective vision."

"There must not be another October 17," he added.

Catherine Spindler and Guillaume Motte, chief execs at Sephora

Catherine Spindler, president of Sephora's business in Europe and the Middle East, said several of the beauty retailer's stores had been "ransacked."

"Even more serious, women and men in our teams have been confronted with situations of violence, fear, and great tension," she wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Sephora closed all its stores on Saturday at 5 p.m. and kept most of them shuttered on Sunday, Spindler wrote.

"Anger can be expressed. Convictions can be opposed. But nothing should justify women and men becoming the victims of this violence," she added.

Guillaume Motte, global CEO of Sephora, chimed in with support for Spindler on LinkedIn.

"We stand together!" he wrote.

Nicolas Houzé, executive chairman of Galeries Lafayette

Nicolas Houzé, executive chairman of Galeries Lafayette, mourned France's global reputation in a post on LinkedIn, saying the riots produced "scenes of unprecedented violence throughout France."

"No demand can legitimize violence in France," wrote Houzé on LinkedIn, saying that almost all of his firm's points of sale had been affected by the attacks.

Galeries Lafayette, an upscale department store chain, runs about 50 outlets in France.

"Beyond the destruction and major economic losses for all those involved in trade, it is also the image of our country, its attractiveness, and its ability to welcome its visitors in the best conditions that are deeply affected," he added.

Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi, cofounders of Qonto

Fintech firm Qonto's founders, Steve Anavi and Alexandre Prot, said a fire had been started at their company's offices in Paris.

Anavi wrote on LinkedIn that the office fire was intentional, calling it an "arson attack."

"Violence and vandalism have no place in our society. Nothing can justify such acts," he added.

In a separate post, Prot said no one was injured in the fire.

"We'll repair the damage as soon as possible. In the meantime, Qonto's operations continue as normal," he wrote.

The company offers payment, bookkeeping, and other business management software, primarily targeting small- to medium-sized enterprises and startups.

Alain Di Crescenzo, President of CCI France

Alain Di Crescenzo, president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in France, called for affected merchants to receive support amid the "inexcusable" violence.

"This violence is UNACCEPTABLE," Di Crescenzo wrote on LinkedIn.

"Breaking up a business is breaking up a neighborhood. It is to scare away customers, to discourage those who wanted to set up, to damage for a long time what years have built," he added.

Di Crescenzo said his organization, which represents roughly 2 million private businesses in France, is mapping the damage across affected cities and is creating "support units" to help its members.

• Alexandre Bompard condemned the riots in France on Sunday.
• The Carrefour CEO said that rioters targeted about 50 of his stores.
• Bompard said that the cost of repairs will exceed $11 million.

The CEO of one of France's largest supermarket chains, and one of the world's largest retailers, said that 50 of its stores were targeted by rioters on Saturday.

Alexandre Bompard, who leads Carrefour, France's version of Walmart, took to X on Sunday to condemn the riots and commend his employees as France reels from widespread civil unrest and looting.

"Nothing can justify such violence," Bompard said on X in French. "Those who attack the work tools of courageous entrepreneurs and their teams in this way must face an uncompromising response."

"The Republic must protect its shopkeepers!" he added.

Riots swept across France on Saturday after initially peaceful demonstrations against the high cost of living and deteriorating school conditions turned violent. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on X that 600 police officers were injured in the fracas and more than 2,000 people were arrested.

Photos and videos from Paris and other French cities show massive demonstrations, burning cars, and wrecked storefronts.

In his X post, Bompard called the violence "unacceptable." He said that, in addition to Carrefour's stores, about 1,500 other shops were damaged in the riots.

"The cost of the repairs will amount to more than 10 million euros, and our shopkeepers need an acceleration of compensation procedures, as in the case of natural disasters," he said.

• There was only one thing on the minds of the founders at this reality-show-style startup incubator.
• It wasn't sex.
• Founder teams had two weeks to become profitable, and potent social media was paramount.

At 9 p.m. on a recent Friday night, Max Harding had just returned from a barefoot run in the woods.

The eccentric 20-year-old Californian was back in a large barn in rural Pennsylvania — still barefoot — alternatively working on his startup and asking me about the point of life.

Though not an especially adept programmer, Harding possesses a more adroit, perhaps unteachable skill that has never been more valuable in the current landscape of founder culture.

"Max captures the attention of the camera, keeps us center stage," said his cofounder, Skyler Ji, who added that Harding's role includes "spreading our philosophy" while he runs the operation behind the scenes.

"Max brings some of the grander things," Ji told me. The pair's startup, Hivemind Research, aims to build "digital brains" in the form of social media.

Harding and Ji were among 66 mostly young, mostly imaginative startup founders taking part in a two-week "incubator" workshop called Launchpad.

The novel event was hosted by Stan, the company behind a moderately successful platform for independent creators to advertise and sell their services. At the last meetup Stan organized, startup founders jet-skied the East River at golden hour.

At the incubator event, the entirety of which was filmed for use in a reality show that Stan plans to release sometime soon (though it is uploading Instagram clips daily), magnetic personalities were among the most valuable commodities.

Stan cofounder Vitalii Dodonov told me that the 30 participating teams were chosen from a pool of 700 applicants, primarily for their existing social media followings and their ability to grow them.

"It's not the building that gets you to revenue, it's the distribution," he said of today's startup culture.

Of the many metrics competing teams were required to meet daily (10 sales calls, for example), social media videos were among the most heavily weighted.

Everywhere I looked, people were talking about their companies into phones attached to tripods. Their products ran the gamut of usefulness — ranging from an AI facial scanner that tracks acne to an AI app that connects parents with babysitters.

Dodonov and John Hu, Stan's other cofounder, were trailed at all times by multi-person film crews, who glared should you emit an ill-timed sound while the cameras rolled. (The Velcro rip of my messenger bag earned me some leers.)

Even outfits were choreographed. On the advice of the camera crews, Hu wore a "cream" colored getup while Dodonov donned a "charcoal" number to emphasize what was described to me as the "yin and yang" paradigm between the two.

I spent about 16 cumulative hours at the event over two days earlier this month, at Stan's invitation. I ate meals with the founders, did a 7:30 a.m. cold plunge in the on-site lake alongside a Danish guy selling an AI to-do list, and commiserated with the startup founders who routinely pulled all-nighters to hit their metrics.

Here's what I learned from the experience.

Reality TV meets hackathon

The event was billed as a sort of reality-TV-style game show-slash-incubator in the vein of hits like "Love Island" and "Squid Game."

As in those shows, founder teams at Launchpad were subject to firepit eliminations, discreet alliances, and competitive drama under the ever-watchful lenses of dozens of expensive cameras.

Except instead of a bunch of promiscuous co-eds doing risque challenges on a tropical island somewhere, contestants at Launchpad were mostly tech geeks with an unhealthy number of hours notched building software on their MacBooks.

"There's no sex," laughed Jacob Snarr, a 24-year-old from Philadelphia. "Nobody here is thinking about that."

Snarr and his cofounder, RJ McLaughlin, built a web browser game that lets friends debate their tastes and preferences, from their favorite foods to other everyday questions. The pair enlisted me as a product tester one morning, and we debated the merits of empanadas in the chilly barn.

McLaughlin and Snarr were in second place on the leaderboard when I talked to them on Saturday morning — saving them from elimination.

Rey Mendoza, who at 41 was one of the oldest founders in the competition, had already been eliminated. When I spoke with him, he was fighting for a chance at redemption. He showed me his sleep tracker for the six days. He hadn't slept more than six hours a night.

"Here, you're just fucking building, like 24/7," Mendoza, fatigued, said reverently.

Event organizers added a number of less-intense, more fun-oriented events to the schedule, which were largely ignored by teams scrambling to upload more videos to social media.

A "Mario Kart" meetup in a room adjoining the cafeteria was attended by precisely nobody. Two TVs showed the game's start screen, while maybe a dozen people sat at tables squinting at laptops.

It's hard to imagine binge-watching some 60 sweatshirt-clad nerds drearily prompting chatbots to refine source code for yet another quirky AI startup. After all, everyone and their cousin is vibe coding their way into progressively nicher business models these days.

In 2025, a record number of business applications — about 5.7 million — were submitted by Americans, according to census data. However, the number of businesses the government estimates will be successful enough to require employees actually declined.

Those kinds of numbers mean it takes more to stand out. In our interview, Hu pointed at my phone and said I could use AI tools to start three or four businesses today — but, of course, they likely wouldn't be profitable.

That, Hu said, is where the founders' personalities are supposed to come in, together with a bit of manufactured drama and endless streams of social media content.

In the first challenge of the event, held on the first day, for example, teams were required to submit one social media video for public review around the firepit. Then, in front of everyone, Hu tore into them.

"I was very honest," he said of one particular "roast" that produced tears from the submitters. "I was like, 'Guys, would anyone ever watch this? No. The answer is no, because of the quality — you never have a shot."

The moment would certainly make for good television. It also, Hu told me, mimicked the real-life struggle inherent in starting a company in a saturated market.

"They're going through the true ups and downs of a true cofounder relationship and a startup experience," he said of the team that was subjected to his roast, who were initially so dejected they discussed "breaking up."

Overall, most of the teams I talked to said they enjoyed the ramshackle experience of trying to make a company profitable in two weeks. At the very least, it was all happening in a picturesque setting.

A $3 million investment

Stan spared no expense to pull off the event.

It was held at a luxury, 400-acre villa two hours north of New York City that has in the past hosted retreats for high-flying companies like J.P. Morgan, whose executives, according to one staff member at the retreat at least, are keen for employees to embrace buzzwords like "team-building" and "company culture" among the illusion of rustic calm far from Manhattan.

We were in the sticks of eastern Pennsylvania — so deep in the woods, in fact, that cell service was nonexistent. There was fiber-optic internet, however, and the setting, though far-flung, could hardly be called rustic.

A squadron of golf carts staffed by the venue's seasonal workforce, many of whom were from Ireland or Australia, patrolled the grounds.

I was personally given the cellphone number of one such seasonal worker and encouraged to notify her anytime I wanted to go anywhere, at which point she would materialize with the golf cart.

Dodonov told me that Stan spent a combined $3 million renting the place for two weeks, booking camera crews, and making other necessary arrangements to host the founders, some of whom had traveled from as far away as Spain and Denmark.

For a company whose cofounder told Business Insider this year that it has an annual recurring revenue of "nearly $41 million," that's a significant sum.

"It's a very expensive experiment," Dodonov said. He said that, in his view, the return on investment is to see if "the playbook works" — the playbook being his and Hu's belief that building a successful company requires, perhaps above all, promoting yourself on social media.

"Anyone can systematically establish and build support through the power of content," Dodonov said.

• Elon Musk is giving reams of cash to Republicans.
• Most of that dough is ending up in Texas, according to financial disclosure forms.
• In Texas, Ken Paxton is running a tight race against James Talarico.

Elon Musk is forking over generational wealth to Republicans facing tough midterm elections this cycle.

Over two donations in September, Musk gave a combined $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans, which has, in turn, given reams of cash to funds supporting the Republican candidate in Texas.

The money, shown in new federal disclosure forms, cements Musk as a major player in Republican politics over a year after he publicly split with President Donald Trump over the latter's handling of the Epstein files (though the two have since reconciled).

Republicans are facing serious headwinds over the Iran war, rising inflation, and sky-high gas prices. Polls show that American voters are largely dissatisfied with Trump's leadership and handling of the economy.

All told, Musk has given about $276 million since July. Much of Musk's political donations have ended up in Texas, according to federal disclosure forms, where embattled Attorney General Ken Paxton is engaged in a mudslinging battle for the Senate with state representative James Talarico.

One day after Musk notched a $75 million donation to the Senate Leadership Fund, the Super PAC gave a $75 million donation to the Texas PAC, a group aligned with Paxton.

Then, also in September, another $83 million donation by Musk was matched the next day by an identical donation to the Texas PAC, according to federal disclosure forms.

Talarico's campaign, meanwhile, has raised about $129 million.

Musk's companies are already investing billions in the Lone Star State, as the business magnate builds SpaceX's terafab semiconductor facility outside Houston.

In 2024, Musk announced that he was moving SpaceX's headquarters from California to Texas in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom's policies on gender identity.

Representatives for Paxton and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, said last year that he had probably "done enough" political spending, though he left the door open.

"Well, if I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I'll do it. I don't currently see a reason," he told Bloomberg at the time.

• AI researchers don't really know how the models they are building "think."
• They know what goes into them and what comes out, but that's about it.
• A new theory may change that, allowing safety researchers to prevent them from going off the rails.

How AI models think may be easier to decipher than we thought.

An independent researcher who formerly worked at OpenAI published a report on Thursday that some in the AI world are describing as a bombshell. It could have implications as safety researchers scramble to get the jump on AI models that may not have humanity's best interests in mind.

Previously, the prevailing wisdom was that AI "neurons," which, like those in a human brain, light up when an AI model encounters specific stimuli, were ultimately uninterpretable — meaning, basically, that there was no way to guess why a specific neuron would fire when an AI model was exposed to, say, a picture of a cat.

Those building AI models at places like OpenAI and Anthropic don't write instructions for everything a model does. Instead, they train neurons to respond to information and influence one another. As the AI learns, it develops its own ways of processing that information, and humans have not yet cracked the code of how it works.

That means those building AI models know what goes into the AI and what comes out, but not necessarily what happens in between. So if an AI goes rogue, they don't always know why.

The author of the new report, however, says he may have discovered patterns in how the neurons react to stimuli that make sense. Nick Cammarata, who said he left OpenAI in 2023, said AI neural networks are knowable, so long as you look carefully.

In one example, he says that a single AI neuron might react to both a cat and the front of a car. Humans would see those as two very different things, and different neurons would fire as a result. The AI, however, sees something related, perhaps the triangle shape of the two, and a single neuron fires for both.

For years, AI researchers had assumed that AI models packed unrelated things into a single neuron to save space.

"Almost the entire network is interpretable if we look closely enough," Cammarata wrote.

The findings, though undeniably dense, couched in polysyllabic jargon, and still theoretical, could have real-world implications for researchers trying to ensure humans maintain control over AI models.

Understanding how AI thinks is a principal concern for the best and brightest at frontier AI companies. Until recently, they've largely done this by tracking an AI's self-reported "thinking," called chain-of-thought reasoning.

Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, however, warned in a blog post last month that AI agents could now obfuscate their visible reasoning, leaving open the possibility that an agent could lie to its human minders and the minders wouldn't be able to tell.

"With improved pretraining performance, we also see the models become much smarter even without using verbalized reasoning at all," Pachocki said.

Now, Cammarata's research could give human engineers a new understanding of the AI's internal world — and that's exciting for those worried AI could kill us all.

"I had long since given up on reaching any real level of interpretability before superintelligence arrived," Andrew Curran, a prominent AI analyst, said on X. "I stopped writing about it because of how demoralizing it was. Hard to overstate how big this may be."