Today, Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) became the first company to cross the $5 trillion valuationin premarket trading, at least.
It marks a major milestone in stock market history and suggests that once other unthinkable valuations are within reach.
But Nvidia isnt the only company breaking a trillion-dollar threshold. Fellow tech giants like Apple, Meta, and Broadcom are close to bursting their own thirteen-figure barriers, too.
Heres what you need to know about Nvidias approach to $5 trillion as companies climb toward the most exclusive club on the planet.
Nvidia hits $5 trillion market cap in premarket trading
As of this writing, Nvidia has become the first company to cross the $5 trillion valuation threshold. In premarket trading, NVDA shares are currently up 3.65% to $208.37 per share.
With about 24.3 billion shares outstanding, that gives Nvidia a current premarket valuation of just over $5 trillion. If Nvidias stock price levels hold once the opening bell rings, it will cement its place in the record books.
The companys current premarket jump follows the stocks nearly 5% rise yesterday. These gains have been primarily driven by recent announcements from the company that are lifting investors’ expectations.
As CNBC notes, Nvidia announced plans yesterday to build seven new supercomputers for the U.S. government, including at Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Separately, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed that the companys all-important Blackwell GPUs are now in full production in the U.S. state of Arizona. This allows Nvidia to manufacture more of its AI chips, which can help meet the incessant demand for its processors.
But theres another factor that may be motivating Nvidia investors. As Reuters reports, President Trump is in Asia this week, meeting with regional leaders. He is due to meet with Xi Jinping, Chinas President, tomorrow.
Today, Trump revealed that he will speak to the Chinese president about Nvidias Blackwell chips, which are currently banned in the country. A lifting of this ban could greatly boost Nvidias bottom line if the company can once again sell its Chips inside China.
Investors seem to feel that this trio of positive news has the chance to materially benefit the company, hence, the $5 trillion barrier falling.
Other companies are close to breaking trillion-dollar milestones
Nvidias $5 trillion milestone isn’t the only thirteen-figure barrier that is being broken this week.
Yesterday, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) officially crossed the $4 trillion barrier for the first time, before closing the day with a market valuation of $3.99 trillion.
Apples accession into the $4 trillion club made it just the third company in history to cross that barrier, after Nvidia and Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT).
While nothing is certain, its possible Apple could cross back over the $4 trillion threshold again today.
And Apple and Nvidia arent the only companies within reach of crossing trillion-dollar thresholds. Two other companies are within range, too.
Facebook owner Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) had a market cap of $1.88 trillion as of yesterdays close. That means it’s less than $120 billion from crossing the $2 trillion barrier, which would be a first for the company.
Semiconductor and internet infrastructure company Broadcom Inc. (Nasdaq: AVGO) is also relatively close to crossing a trillion-dollar barrier.
As of yesterdays market close, Broadcom had a market cap of $1.76 trillion. That puts it at less than $250 billion from the $2 trillion club.
Of course, while these companies are closest to their next trillion-dollar barriers, theres no guarantee that their stocks will continue to go higher, or, if they do, how long it will take.
But their ascent up the ranks is another example of how once unthinkable trillion-dollar market caps are becoming more common.
A full list of the worlds trillion-dollar public companies
For those keeping track, there are now 11 trillion-dollar publicly traded companies, based on yesterdays share prices at market close, according to data compiled by CompaniesMarketCap.com. Those companies are:
Nvidia ($4.89T)
Microsoft ($4.02T)
Apple ($3.99T)
Alphabet ($3.23T)
Amazon ($2.44T)
Meta ($1.88T)
Broadcom ($1.76T)
Saudi Aramco ($1.66T)
TSMC ($1.56T)
Tesla ($1.53T)
Berkshire Hathaway ($1.03T)
Big Tech earnings could impact the trajectory
It will be interesting to see how the current tech earnings season will impact the market caps of many of these companies.
Investors will particularly be interested in how the artificial intelligence boom is affecting the bottom lines of companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, all three of which are expected to report their financial results after the closing bell today (Wednesday, October 29).
Wall Street will also be watching for any updates from these companies about their capital expenditure plans, as the AI boom has required huge investments from the world’s largest tech giants.
If investors are satisfied that AI investments are worth the costsand if they don’t see signs of a slowdownshare prices could spike, sending them further up the ranks into the trillion-dollar club.
But if investors begin to worry that we are, as many have speculated, in an AI-fueled bubble, many of the companies in the trillion-dollar club could see their rankings slip fast as their share prices fall.
The life of a junior associate at a prestigious law firm involves hours of research and analyzing contracts. Three years ago, Winston Weinberg found himself buried in these kinds of tasks as a first-year antitrust and litigation associate at OMelveny & Myers in Los Angeles.
And there Weinberg might have remained, diligently climbing the BigLaw ranks from associate to partner, logging thousands of hours of drudgery along the way. Instead, hes cofounder and CEO of Harvey, the high-flying legal AI platform thats raised more than $800 million by promising to handle much of this work.
A lot of the tasks junior [associates] do are going to get automated, Weinberg says. That doesn’t mean their job’s going to get automated. It’s just going to be a different job.
Built atop language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Harveys platform streamlines legal workflows by helping lawyers with drafting, contract analysis, legal research, due diligence, regulatory compliance, and case law review. In addition, the technology cuts down on reading time by summarizing complex legal documents and combining databases to research and summarize legal issues.
Harvey, which is used by some 250 law firmsincluding 42% of The American Lawyers list of biggest 100 firms in the U.S.announced in June that it raised a $300 million series D led by Sequoia, bringing its total haul to more than $800 million and driving its valuation to $5 billion. Its now the highest valued startup in a growing field of AI companies that are all focused on overhauling how the legal profession works.
The companys annualized revenue run rate hit $100 million in August, up from $50 million earlier this year, propelled by an aggressive sales strategy targeting big law firms. Harvey now has 460 employees, 20% of whom are lawyers. The company is also hiring dozens of engineers, sales leads, and account executives as it seeks to increase the moat between itself and its competitors.
Whether Harvey ultimately upends the legal procession or winds up burning a lot of cash, time, and effort could reveal that fates of industries as far afield as finance, music, and film. All these sectorsand moreare on a similar curve: exploring whether AI tools can be truly transformative and seeing just how many jobs they’ll reimagineor disappear altogether.
Despite its sizable moat, Harvey’s success is far from assured. Investors are pouring money into firms working on rival legal AI agents: Canada-based Clio raised $900 million last summer; Swedens Legora raised an $80 million Series B led by ICONIQ Venture & Growth and General Catalyst in September; London-based Luminance took in $75 million in January.
Meanwhile, a growing chorus of criticssounding off on Reddit and elsewherequestion how original Harveys offerings are. “ChatGPT wrapper” is the most common dig thrown by these disaffected apparent users, who note the similarities between the information retrieval capabilities of Harvey and ChatGPT (made by Harveys early investor, OpenAI).
Even Harveys cofounders have called OpenAI an indirect competitor. But critics also say the company could be steamrolled by OpenAI, pointing out that the LLM could simply build its own legal-focused model.
Im hearing from more and more attorneys that OpenAIs Deep Research is the single best research product on the market, and its what most attorneys use (even when its not a firm approved tool), former lawyer and legaltech investor Zack Abramowitz wrote on his popular substack Legally Disrupted in June.
OpenAI itself has begun testing the waters of legal technology. In September, the company published a blog post about creating an internal database to review its own contractsthe feature is not available to consumers.
One Redditor, who claimed to be a former employee, recently went even further, drawing a direct comparison to Silicon Valleys most notorious startup: think of theranos and overinflated claims of what a product can do, the person posted in a thread that reached more than 300 of comments within a day.
The post generated enough attention to prompt an indirect reply from Weinberg himself: On LinkedIn, he stated that the companys Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) is at 98% and its Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is at 167signs that Harvey is both retaining and growing revenue from its customers.
The Redditor has since deleted their post, though comments agreeing with it remain on the page. (When Fast Company reached out to verify the persons employment at Harvey, a spokesperson said: There was nothing in the post to suggest that the author was a recent employee at the company.)
Harveys customers, in the meantime, seem satisfied. [Harvey is] totally embedded in the workday of our lawyers. It’s really become embedded throughout their daily workflows, says Gina Lynch, chief knowledge and innovation officer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the white-shoe law firm with more than a thousand lawyers.
From D&D to r/legaladvice
Weinbergs sliding doors moment from junior law associate to AI entrepreneur came via his roommate after law school: Gabe Pereyra, who was a machine learning engineer at Meta and a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that. (Pereyra is now president of Harvey.)
In the spring of 2022, while Weinberg was working as a lawyer, Pereyra was focused on finding real-world, assistant-like applications for large language models. It didnt take long before he and Weinberg started testing out Weinbergs legal workflows on language models, most notably OpenAIs GPT-3, which was publicly available. (The pair had initially started running GPT-3 to augment their Dungeons and Dragons games, but quickly realized the potential of its chain of thought prompting abilities.)
They began using GPT-3 to solve problems on the r/legaladvice subreddit. We found a hundred landlord-tenant questions and we were able to answer [them], Weinberg says.
To further test the models accuracy, they fed it legal materials about California regulations and local statutes, then got it to answer questions. We showed [the answers] to three California-based lawyers working on landlord-tenant issues. We just said, Would you send this to a client? For 86 out of 200 questions, at least two attorneys answered thumbs up, Weinberg says.
Their timing was auspicious. It was still months before the launch of ChatGPT would make GPT-3s capabilities clear to everyone. In July 2022 Weinberg and Pereyra cold-emailed OpenAIs general counsel at the ime, Jason Kwon, and shared their ideas for how AI could change legal work (Kwon is now OpenAIs chief strategy officer).
In November of that year, the company raised $5 million from the LLMs startup fund, along with venture capitalists Elad Gil and Sarah Guo (all three also participated in the companys most recent round). Within five months, blue chip venture capital firms, including Sequoia, also invested.
Signing on Big Law
Almost as soon as it launched, Harvey aggressively began pursuing enterprise contracts with big law firms. In December 2022, A&O Shearman, which has nearly 4,000 lawyers across 48 offices, started testing Harveys technology in its Markets Innovation Group.
Paul Weiss followed in January 2023 and began testing the technology throughout its practice. Both firms have since signed longer contracts. Using those clients reputations, Harvey has signed big contracts with other prominent U.S. firms, including Vinson & Elkins and Macfarlanes. The company now has 700 customers in 58 countries.
Other clients include general counsel offices at private equity firms and hedge funds like KKR and Bridgewater and accounting giant PwC. For bigger clients, Harvey embeds staff members within the company to personalize its services and features for their workflows. It also offers an off-the-shelf general application product for smaller companies.
Harveys close association with OpenAI has, in some ways, been a blessing and a curse. The AI giant gave Harvey a first-mover advantage, but has heightened the comparisons between ChatGPT and Harvey. After all, according to a March survey from Law360, ChatGPT is the tool most lawyers use for workeven if its not approved by their firm.
But although Harvey could still introduce hallucinations into its work (an issue that has bedeviled lawyers who rely too heavily on ChatGPT), its less likely to do so, says Weinberg, because its trained on legal data and purpose-built for corporate law firms. The company says that its 2024 version of Assistant, Harveys most popular product, reduces hallucinations by 60% and improves the accuracy of cited sources by 23% compared to other chatbots.
Harvey has also deepened its product by incorporating models from Anthropic and Google alongside OpenAIs GPT. It also recently signed a key deal with LexisNexis that enables users to ask complex legal questions and get citation-backed answers.
Harvey, however, could find itself in a similar situation to Bloombergs ill-fated BloombergGPT as technology evolves. In 2023, the financial information giant Bloomberg spent more than $10 million training an LLM on its own financial data before finding out that an off-the-shelf GPT-4 provided more accurate answers to users.
As Ethan Mollick, a professor and codirector of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton, wrote on Linkedin, There was a moment that we thought proprietary data would let organizations train specialized AIs that could compete with frontier models. It turns out that probably isn’t going to happen. The largest frontier models are just much better at most complex tasks than smaller models.
Another concern is how long Harvey can maintain its lead, given the cost of its product. Harveys bespoke services cost $1,200 per seat, per month, with contracts stipulating that large companies need to purchase the service for at least 100 employees and for at least a year. The company justifies its prices by touting the productivity gains it passes onto employees.
You can arm lawyers with tools that make them enormously productive, says Harveys chief business officer John Haddock, who has a law degree from Stanford. And $100,000 a month is still less expensive than the salaries of an army of paralegals and junior associates.
Even so, Harvey will have to convince its customers to sign back up, even as more affordable productsaimed especially at smaller or midsized firmsenter the market. And it has to keep delivering for them amid an AI hype cycle where disappointment in enterprise AI products is growing.
After the recent flare-up on Reddit involving the apparent former employee, Maarten Truyens, founder and CEO of ClauseBase, a Belgium startup also working on an AI platform for legal drafting, took to LinkedIn to weigh in. He said the main problem is the hype and expectations around these AI platforms.
GenAI is too good to ignore, yet simply not good enough for many legal use cases, he wrote. What’s really needed is vendors to be transparent about the limitations, and the legal community to learn what’s possible with GenAI, and where other technologies are a better fit. Both sides need to become much more realistic.
AI associates
Though Harveys work needs to be checkedwhich can be a time-consuming process for paralegals and junior lawyersthe company aims to cut down their workload. A widely cited 2023 Thomson Reuters report estimated that AI technology could save lawyers on average 200 hours a year. That number has likely increased as AI becomes more sophisticated. Left unsaid: It could also cut down the number of lawyers and paralegals firms and companies need to hire.
Investors and Harvey employees argue that legal tech is unlikely to take jobs away because the demand for legal services is likely to increase. There’s a huge undelivered need for legal services. The right way to think about it is that if you can arm lawyers with tools that make them enormously productive, that will just expand the access to the types of services they can provide, Haddock says.
Venture capitalist Sarah Guo, whose firm Conviction invested in Harvey in 2022, makes a similar argument: People will not want less practice of the law. They will want more if it is more affordable, and the quality will go up.
Employment for law school graduates hit a record high in 2024, according to the American Bar Association. But the incentive structure for law firms is complicated. Most big firms bill hourly, and when a task that typically took a law associate hours of research can be condensed into three or four minutes, they face the prospect of losing money. One way to save: hiring fewer associates.
Weinberg acknowledges that Harvey could change hiring. Are there some firms that will change their business model and structure? Yes. I do think there are some firms that might explore [charging] fixed fees [rather than hourly billing] or having a leaner team, he says.
Corporate legal teams could see the most impact from Harvey. Allison Zoellner, general counsel at advertising giant Dentsu, which started working with Harvey last year, says that while the companys AI tools havent led to a workforce reduction, she hasnt had to hire as much. We’re being asked to do more with fewer resources. What Harvey does is allow us to keep our heads above water while not adding people.
Weinberg, Haddock, and Guo all say that b eliminating rote tasks, tools like Harvey will free up time for junior lawyers to attend meetings, shadow senior leaders, and start doing more strategic work.
So much of what an associate does today is the types of things that [are] not what they went to law school for. If we are able to give associates faster, thicker, deeper, higher-order thinking problems, that is great for everybody. It’s great for partners who can get more from their teams. It’s great for junior lawyers because it makes practice of law more intellectually satisfying sooner, Haddock says. While that may be true, without billable hours to subsidize training opportunities like shadowing, firms may have trouble justifying the cost of so many associates.
The legal industry has weathered technological shifts before. When I started as a lawyer in the ’90s, it was the time of transition from manual review of documents in litigation to computer-assisted review of documents. [That created] a bump in productivity, NYU Law School professor Christopher Sprigman says. How many more people would’ve been hired at those firms absent the introduction of that technology? There’s always an unknowable counterfactual, but I get the strong idea that its fewer than [if the technology hadnt been adopted].
These days, Sprigman says lawyers are having similar conversations. A friend of mine who runs a law firm said to me that at this point, maybe 10 to 20% of what junior associates do can be automated through AI. But in 18 months it could be 30%, he says. The winners will be people who know how to use AI in their practice and also people who have deep expertise that allows them to exercise judgment. It is too early to say how the technology will impact roles at the Paul, Weiss. Lynch expects that while it will not reduce positions at the company, it will bring change to certain roles. She has already seen wider acceptance by senior leadership than anticipated. Partners very much gravitated towards AI because they were comfortable that they knew whether the output was good or bad. More junior employees with less experience may not be able to make those distinctions early on in their careers.
Already, Paul Weiss is using its AI savvy as a sales pitch to prospective clients. We want [clients] to know were using it and we are really earnest about the efficiency gains, Lynch says.
Lynch and Sprigman see a new role emerging within law schools and firms that specializes in AI adoption. Youre going to see more of a legal technologist role, Lynch says, adding that, like many firms, Paul Weiss has invested heavily in training to get lawyers to use AI tools, and in building their own closed LLM to work alongside Harvey.
Sprigman says that senior lawyers may start to look for AI savvy in their juniors, and that means law schools may also have to change. Law schools obviously want their students to be prepared. [That could be] teaching people how to prompt engineer. Maybe that’s something you hire an adjunct for. I’m sure school schools will be looking for expertise from the outside, he says.
To gain an edge and get students used to its platform, Harvey has started partnering with law schools including the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania to offer students, professors, and administrators access to its tools.
A sizable moat
The moat of capital Harvey has raised, its aggressive and successful pursuit of leading law firms, and its relationship with OpenAI have made it a dominant player in the legal AI race. But the companys valuation may limit its exit possibilities.
We’re voting that the company has the opportunity to be a tens of billions of dollars public company, Guo says. The companys success may ultimately hinge on how many big law firms decide to renew their contracts with Harvey once the mandatory year or two minimum expires, and whether the company can stay ahead of competitors from rivals like Legora to off-the-shelf LLMs.
Weinberg and Pereyra settled on the name Harvey because it sounds a little bit like Harvard and because of its associations with Suits superlawyer Harvey Specter. Ultimately though, Harvey acts more like the shows other main character, Mike Ross, a college dropout with a photographic memory. Though he is unlicensed, Ross proves to be more useful to Specter than any other paralegal or associate at the fictional big law firm.
It’s 2 p.m. on a Monday, and the Starbucks on 23rd Street and Park Avenue in New York Citys Flatiron neighborhood is packed. Not that it would take much. The small shoproughly 265 square feet of front-of-house spaceis big enough for a short line to form before it would bust through the door and out onto the sidewalk.
This location is the company’s very first “espresso bar” format storea new, small-store design that will serve as the cornerstone of Starbucks’s future expansion plans.
[Photo: Starbucks]
It’s also a symbol of a Starbucks in flux. Until recently, the store was for mobile orders and pickup-only; then in September, it reopened after a speedy uplift (Starbucks speak for a small-scale renovation) in a new espresso bar format complete with seats. Starbucks leadership hopes the design will help propel the coffee chain into a cozier, more profitable era.
When I visited, the store was indeed cozier than the average New York City Starbucks, which can often feel industrial and cave-like. A cushy green leather banquette spanned one wall with enough room to fit three laptop-sized round tables. Two seating nooks with built-in desks and stools looked out onto the street.
[Photo: Starbucks]
All told, about 10 butts could sit down comfortably in the space. But thats 10 more butts than beforeand butts in seats is the reason Starbucks renovated the space in the first place.
The espresso bar format is part of CEO Brian Niccols Back to Starbucks plan, which reimagines Starbucks as a coffee shop you might actually want to spend time in. In the grand scheme of things, Niccol would still like to more than double Starbucks’s global footprint, and expand the brand to more than 100,000 locations worldwide. And he’s said the small, espresso bar format would be key in this growth.
But in the more immediate future, Niccol’s turnaround strategy requires updating aging locations into something more comfortable. Starbucks expects to uplift 1,000 stores over the next year, often transforming the stores bit by bit at night and during off hours to avoid losing operation hours. Each uplift will cost around $150,000a small investment for a company that had an annual revenue of $36 billion in fiscal year 2024.
[Photo: Starbucks]
Out with pick up, in with sit down
The espresso bar format, specifically, is an area of opportunity for the company. Over the summer, Starbucks announced that it would close or renovate many of its mobile order-only locations, which totaled more than 80 locations. It was a notable pivot away from Starbucks as a streamlined caffeine factory, towards something more akin to a traditional coffeehouse.
Starbucks began experimenting with pick up-only shops as early as 2015, just as mobile ordering began reshaping the landscape of American quick service restaurants. Customers quickly adapted to the convenience of tapping a button on their phone to order their daily drink. Today, mobile ordering accounts for 31% of Starbucks orders.
But for all its revenue-generating success, the pick-up only format wasn’t without its issues. Instead of alleviating wait times and bottlenecks, it increased them in some instances, largely due to a menu that ballooned in size and a lack of operational sophistication that couldn’t keep pace with customers’ expectations of speedier service.
More troubling was the effect it had on people’s perception of Starbucks as a brand. When Niccol arrived at Starbucks, he zeroed in on pick-up only stores as an obvious problem to solve. We found this format to be overly transactional and lacking the warmth and human connection that defines our brand, Niccol said on an earnings call in July 2025.
Now, dozens of these spaces are being reimagined as coffee bars where the emphasis is on fast service, sure, but with a bigger shot of hospitality. What this looks like in practice will vary from location to location since all of the small-format stores have unique quirks that designers will need to work with during renovations.
[Photo: Starbucks]
Materiality matters
The Park Ave location is filled with little details meant to give the space a softer, more upscale appearance. Theres a new tile-clad, wood-trimmed ordering counter that sits lower than average to encourage more connection with the barista. Minimalist pendant lighting hangs above, to give the space a warm glow at night. Wood-encased speakers hang in the corners of the room, and a vintage-looking credenza sits against a wall filled with bags of coffee beans that customers can grab.
[Photo: Starbucks]
I appreciated the materiality of the spacethe leather and wood, the live plants in the corner, the soft curve of the green wall panels. The Starbucks team is clearly trying to up its game after years of creating spaces that, in my experience, do little to invite you in.
Starbucks says it’s measuring the success of these spaces in terms of how long customers stay, how often they return, and (of course) sales. It’s too soon to say if these revamps will be enough to lure in the kind of customers they’re afterthe kind who see Starbucks as a home away from home.
For what it’s worth, I didnt see anyone drinking out of a ceramic mug (a feature Niccol brought back in his quest for coziness). In fact, the only person I saw lingering for any length of time was a college-age student with a laptop who was nursing her to-go cup of coffee. But that, just maybe, is exactly the signs of life Starbucks is hoping to see more of.
Imagine a Yelp-style user-review site that lets users generate and post AI video reviews of local businesses. Say one of these videos presents a business in a bad light, and the business owner sues for defamation. Can the business sue the reviewer and the review site that hosted the video?
In the near-to-immediate future, company websites will be infused with AI tools. A home decor brand might use a bot to handle customer service messages. A health provider might use AI to summarize notes from a patient exam. A fintech app might use personalized AI-generated video to onboard new customers. But what happens when someone claims they’ve been defamed or otherwise harmed by some AI-generated content? Or, say, claims harm after a piece of their own AI-generated content is taken down?
The fact is, websites hosting AI-generated content may face more legal jeopardy than ones that host human-created content. That’s because existing defamation laws don’t apply neatly to claims arising from generated content, and how future court cases settle this could limit or expand the kinds of AI content a website operator can safely generate and display. And while the legal landscape is in flux, knowing how the battle is being fought in courtrooms can help companies plan ahead for a world in which AI content is everywhereand its veracity unclear.
In 1996, at the dawn of the internet, forward-thinking lawmakersOregon Senator Ron Wyden and then-California Representative Chris Coxfeared that libel lawsuits and aggressive regulation by Washington, D.C., could overwhelm budding internet companies, which could operate forums, social networks, or search engines, stifling growth and slowing investment.
Wyden and Cox proposed Section 230, a statute in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 ensuring that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. In other words, if a website had a hand in creating the content, its legal immunity would vanish.
Since then, Section 230 has proved surprisingly durable, surviving relatively unscathed through the internet boom, the social media craze, and the mobile revolution. At the same time, it has become something of a political lightning rod in recent years as policymakers have explored ways of regulating social media.
But the next revolution in techgenerative AImay not enjoy any of Section 230s protections. Our current AI models do something like co-create content alongside the user, who prompts the model to generate what they want. Based on that, tools like ChatGPT and Sora would seem to be excluded from Section 230 legal immunity.
Alas, it may not be that simple.
The duality of Sora
Generative AI companies have been sued several times for libelous output, but none have lost, and none have yet resorted to Section 230 in their defense. In one of the more widely known cases, syndicated radio host Mark Walters sued OpenAI for defamation after ChatGPT falsely claimed that Walters had been accused of embezzling funds from a gun rights group. OpenAI won the case without having to claim Section 230 protection. The chatbot had generated the false information after warning that the accusation had occurred after its training data cutoff date. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on whether the company has used Section 230 as part of a legal defense.
It gets even trickier with OpenAIs new Sora app, which lets users generate AI videos and then share them on its TikTok-style social feed. (The Meta AI app does essentially the same.) Using the language of Section 230, Sora is both an information content provider (a speaker or creator) and a provider of an interactive computer service (a host).
Sora, and hybrid apps like it, may raise the stakes on the question of when Section 230 should be applied. Chatbots can defame with words, but Sora quickly generates alarmingly realistic video, which can convey a message more believably by showing, rather than telling. Combine that with Soras seamless distribution of the video and, in the wrong hands, you have an all-in-one tool for defamation.
A borderline case
At some point, AI companies are likely to reach for Section 230, possibly as a last resort, if sued, according to some legal experts, including Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA and a leading thinker on AI and libel. Thorny questions about how the provision applies to their technology (whether they can use its protections to mount a defense) may well arise. And despite the fact that the language of 230 would seem to preclude it, its conceivable that a court could, in certain circumstances, accept it as a valid defense.
Suppose a Sora user generates a video showing a public official taking a bribe, triggering a libel suit. This, Volokh argues, would amount to something of a borderline case: Sora creates the video itself (meaning the content is provided by itself). On the other hand, Volokh says, it’s generating the video based on a query or based on a prompt submitted by a user. So you might say the defamatory elements of that stem from what the user is contributing, not Sora.
OpenAIs lawyers would likely point out that the platform itself doesnt decide on the content of the videos it produces, only that its implementing its users wishes, Volokh says. That is to say, without specific prompts from the user, the AI would never have acted to create the offending video in the first place.
Yet a court may still hew to the letter of Section 230, which states that if at least part of the creation of the video happened during its generation, it isnt covered.
The fact that OpenAIs Sora provides both a mechanism for creating and distributing a video may weaken its case for 230 protection. Libel law, Volokh says, would require a generated video to be published in order to be considered defamatory information. In theory, a court could argue that OpenAI should reasonably foresee that a video created on its platform would, then, be distributed, Volokh says. And therefore it is basically aiding and abetting this defamation through its own actions of generating the video, he adds.
The shield and the sword
Yet theres a case to be made that generative AI platforms do deserve the legal protections afforded by Section 230, even if they help both create and distribute the content, says Jess Miers, a law rofessor at the University of Akron. Like social media companies, these services face constant challenges from users who generate problematic content, and they need incentives to both allow expressive activity and build guardrails against harmful or infringing outputs.
Indeed, that was the original intent of Section 230, as Wyden told me in 2018. Section 230 provides both a shield and a sword to internet companies. The shield protects them from liability for harmful content posted on their platforms by users. The sword is the laws good samaritan clause, which provides legal cover for actively removing harmful content from their platform. Before Section 230, tech companies were hesitant to moderate content for fear of being branded publishers and, thus, liable for toxic user content.
With generative apps like Sora, OpenAIs developers effectively co-create content with the user, Miers says. The developers choose the training data, train the models, and do the fine-tuning that shapes the output. The user contributes the prompts. Congress may need to craft a new kind of protection that captures this co-creative dynamic to preserve expression, safety, and competition in this evolving new market, Miers says.
Congress might try to rewrite Section 230 (or construct a new law) that distinguishes between defamatory intent on the users part versus the AIs. This would involve digging into the details of how AI models work.
Lawmakers might start by studying how users could misuse models to create harmful content, such as bypassing safety guardrails or eliminating made by AI labels. If thats a recurring problem, then a 230-style framework shielding AI companies from liability for users misuse could make sense, Miers says.
As many Sora app users have noticed, OpenAI is playing it very safe with the kinds of videos it allows. Its already taken down many, many videos, and has agreed to restrict the use of images of public or historical figures (such as Martin Luther King Jr.) upon request. This suggests that while a Section 230 might protect AI companies from libel suits in some circumstances, OpenAI isnt eager to test the theory.
Some seven million Americans are now on GLP-1 weight loss drugs, a figure expected to rise to 24 million by 2035. These medications curb users’ appetites for fatty, ultra-processed foods, and grocery stores are noticing: total sold units of doughnuts, cakes, and cookies are down by 10%, 19%, and 13%, respectively, compared to five years ago. With this drop in revenue from junk food, grocery stores need to think about how to make more money from other categories. For Whole Foods, there’s one aisle that brims with potential: supplements.
Today, Whole Foods is introducing a new line of Japanese-inspired supplements called Apothékary onto its aisles. The brand is known for its distinct form factor factor: While many supplements are sold as gummies, capsules, or powders, Apothékary sells tinctures, which can be dropped under the tongue, or incorporated into drinks.
Apothékary is part of the booming supplements industry, currently valued at $192 billion, and projected to grow to $415 by 2033. The brand has been growing rapidly thanks to its recent expansion into all 350 of Ulta Beauty stores and 400 Sprouts grocery stores. But the move into Whole Foods is its biggest one yet, and offers insight into how consumers are spending their grocery dollars as their food spending goes down.
[Photo: Carl Ostberg/Apothékary]
Modernizing tradition
Shizu Okusa launched Apothékary in 2020. She had previously founded a cold-pressed juice brand called Jrink, which had 14 retail locations and was sold at Whole Foods. In 2019, Okusa sold Jrink to Puree Juice Bar, and began plotting out her next business. This time, she wanted to launch a company that was more deeply connected to her own roots.
Okusa’s father grew up in Japan. After dropping out of high school, he decided to take a boat to Canada, where he got a job as a laborer on a dairy farm. Eventually, he decided to start his own farm, one where he could use traditional Japanese techniques, such as space-saving vertical farming. As Okusa grew up in this farming community, she learned about the Japanese approach to health and medicine, which is intimately connected with the land, herbs, and plants.
“In Japanese culture, we often talk about nature as medicine,” she says. “I didn’t grow up with a lot of pills. Instead, my family relied on plant-based remedies.”
In Japan, there is a herbal medicine tradition called Kampo. It goes back to the Sixth century, when the Empress of Japan sent a group of doctors to China to learn about the medical practices that had evolved there. These doctors brought back the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine to their homeland, then localized them to the ingredients that are abundant in Japan, like seaweed.
Today, Kampo continues to be practiced in Japan. Doctors and researchers are now modernizing Kampo practices and performing clinical studies on formulations. There are also hospitals in Japan, such as Tohoku University Hospital and Okayama University Hospital, which integrate both traditional and Western medicine into their treatments. (This is similar to what is happening in China, with traditional Chinese medicine.)
Okusa believed that there was an opportunity to bring traditional Kampo formulations to the Western market, particularly as many Americans are embracing other Japanese wellness practices. And she relies on ingredients that are backed by peer-reviewed studies. “There is growing awareness about meditation and even the matcha tea ceremony, which are both Japanese,” she points out.
[Photo: Apothékary]
The Evolving Supplement Landscape
Okusa launched Apothékary with a collection of herbal formulas designed to improve sleep, digestion, and energy. Apothékary’s original formulas came in powders, but Okusa realized that to stand out in the market, she needed to innovate. She had the idea of changing their form factor to tinctures, so she began to make liquid supplements that could be taken under the tongue or in beverages.
“The tincture form has been around for a long time, particularly in Eastern medicine traditions, but it wasn’t very common in the U.S.,” she says. “It added novelty and also convenience, because you can just put it directly into your mouth.”
This new format was key to driving the brand’s growth. During the pandemic, many people realized they were drinking too much and wanted to curb their alcohol consumption. Apothékary launched a collection of alcohol alternatives, like Wine Down, Take The Edge Off, and Rose-Tinted Glasses, which were tinctures that could be consumed in a mocktail. As little jars of liquid, they looked much more like spirits and they were designed to provide many of the benefits people are looking for in an alcoholic cocktail, like relaxation and better sleep.
Apothékary’s unusual approach to delivering the supplement was partly what made Whole Foods bring the brand into its stores. “Whether you take [the tincture] directly or mixed into mocktails, it provides an engaging format,” says Abbey Appel, a Whole Foods merchant who specializes in functional foods and supplements.
[Photo: Apothékary]
As the pandemic was waning, the next big trend was the rise in GLP-1 drugs, which the FDA approved for weight loss. As adoption of these drugs spiked, people began consuming less junk food and alcohol. Okusa saw a spike in Apothékary’s sales, as people seemed to turn to these tinctures, which are tasty despite being calorie- and sugar-free.
“We could not have predicted how GLP-1s would change people’s consumption patterns, but our brand has benefited from this new reality,” she says. “We’re creating an alternative for people who have stopped buying as many chips and cookies, and are more focused on their health.”
As GLP-1s increase in popularity and Americans continue to seek out products that promote wellness, grocery stores are introducing new brands into their mix. Whole Foods has been actively seeking out interesting new supplements to bring into their aisles. Appel says that the brand’s non-Western approach to wellness was intriguing. “The founder’s genuine connection to Japanese heritage resonates with our customers,” says Appel.
While demand for wellness products continues to grow, the market is also getting more crowded, as new brands pop up. Okusa believes that the key to the brand’s success so far has been it’s ability to be agile and innovative. “Consumer behavior is constantly evolving,” she says. “It’s important to keep evolving too.”
My first time plopping down on my therapists couch, I tried to breeze through the basics. Yes, upbringing, romance, family, social lifeall important. But I entered that softly lit space to vent about the place that eats up a third of my waking life. I was there to talk about the office.
The physical location wasnt the issue; the office snacks were elite. The problem was the people: the supervisor with no respect for work-life balance, the snooty coworker firing off slick emails, the boys club that would always look out for its own. Being the only Black employee there wore me out in ways I couldnt always name. And talking it out with a licensed professional who looked like meincense smoke in the airhelped me locate my peace from 9 to 5.
Im thankful those healing sessions a few years ago kept me from crashing out on Brayden in sales. But I never anticipated theyd also make me a better manager once I had a team of my own to lead.
My most recent job had its share of team drama when I arrived. Morale was in the gutter, but workplace woes seemed to weigh heaviest on Gina, one of my direct reports. She was checked out like bell hooks books at the library. The go-getter energy she had when she started had devolved into bare-minimum effortand a creative interpretation of the companys unlimited vacation policy.
The 1.0 version of me mightve addressed the situation by mirroring the coldness I experienced early in my career, parroting those icy conversations, questioning whether I had what it takes to be successful in a place like this. Corporate America can be cutthroat, especially when deliverables are regularly behind schedule and quotas are missed. But I felt an obligation to help my team shine, which meant pulling from the lessons I internalized back on my therapists cozy black upholstery.
I sat with Gina in a 1:1 meeting to remind her that the companys PTO policy is at managements discretion. But then I got curious about her apathy. Turns out, she said shed been slept on more than Tempur-Pedic during promotion considerations. Even worse, before my arrival, she had been pushed into a role that was vastly different from the one she initially signed up for.
I let her know I understood her frustration, like, for real. After all, Id previously been in her New Balances as I tried to climb the corporate ladder. I cut her a deal: If she stepped up on the nonnegotiables, Id give her a chance to prove herself as the point person on more challenging projects.
The results didnt show themselves overnight. Shed been burned before, so it took some time and patience for her to fully buy in. But she took our handshake agreement and ran with it. Within a few weeks, she was hitting deadlines, contributing valuable ideas during brainstorming meetings, and even turning on her camera during Zoom calls. I gave her verbal flowers in her next performance review and got props from my boss, who was impressed at how I became an even better motivator than Jeezy.
The thing people dont discuss enough is the way therapy teaches you the art of real talkthat is, effective, empathetic communication. You learn to listen actively, validate peoples feelings, and respond constructively. At first, it took conscious effort, but eventually it became second nature.
That doesnt mean I turned into some kumbaya caricature of a manager. Accountability still mattered. I developed a knack for delivering (and receiving) tough feedback. I understood how to make people feel seen. The value of talking through interpersonal challengeseven the unsolvable ones. And because my team rocked with me, they wanted to kill it to make us all look good, I think. (Although in my self-conscious moments, I can only imagine what theyre telling their therapists about me. None of my business. Boundaries!)
I can trace so many of my management wins back to my therapists office, a safe space where I was challenged to pause before reacting, to see the bigger picture, to regulate before responding. So, no, I dont recommend therapy just to survive toxic workplaces. I recommend it because it helps you build healthier ones.
The Only Black Guy in the Office is copublished with Levelman.com.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.Claude feels like a genie to me. With its Artifacts feature I can turn any idea I have into an interactive application, visualization, or graphic. Yesterday I created a Flashcard maker and a breathing app. No coding. Just a short AI chat conversation. No complexity. I dream up an idea, and Claude makes it instantly real. I iterate with chat to make it better. Read on for a guide to making the most of Artifacts with examples and ideas you can build yourself.
How to turn ideas into apps (no coding)
Create a free Claude.ai account or log in if you already have one.
Navigate to the Artifacts tab.
Pick one of the existing templates in the Inspiration gallery to customize.
If you dont want to use a template, click New Artifact in the top right corner of the Artifacts landing page. Pick a category of interest (e.g. Games, Quizzes, etc). Chat with Claude to iteratively design an artifact.
Customize your Artifact by pasting or uploading specific content you want it to use, or by defining a particular color palette or design style. Explain how you want it to work or ask Claude to guide you with questions.
Test out the Artifact. Click Publish when youre ready to get a shareable link and optional embed code.
Return to the Artifact later to update or change it.
Repeat to make as many Artifacts as you want. Free users may run into rate limits.
Try these: Apps you can make right now
Master any subject (Study tools you can make)
Create a resource to help you learn whatever you want. Use specific facts, diagrams, documents, or other materials to seed the assistant, or ask Claude to suggest relevant info. The flashcard maker I created lets me paste in some text, upload a PDF, or just describe a topic of interest. It instantly generates 10 questions for me. [See my prior post on using AI for Learning].
My Example: Instant Flashcard Maker
Visualize Your Data
In addition to summarizing documents or transforming files, you can use AI to make sense of data. Ask Claude to analyze or visualize info in specific formats or with your preferred design sensibility. You can upload reference images or your style guide, or just specify style or tone.
My Example: Visualize CSV Data
Design custom quizzes
Its now easy to make your own version of Which Harry Potter House Are You? quizzes. Pick a subject and supply some questions. Or ask Claude to propose questions and you can act as the editor. These can be just silly or they can help students or colleagues figure out where they stand on an issue.
My example: Whats Your AI Personality?
Make Content Interactive
Include a link to an Artifact in your next piece of writing or presentation to add an interactive element. Invite readers or viewers to try it for themselves.
Ideas: a visual story summary, a quiz, infographic, dashboard, or a customized cost calculator
How to get started: Upload or paste content youve createdor a transcript, if its audio or videoand chat with Claude about interactive supplements that might be useful for your reader.
Examples
– WT Conference Toolkit Guide– Note-Taking Devices Interactive Summary Table
Test Your Knowledge
Testing yourself helps identify knowledge gaps. You can upload specific material youre aiming to master or just ask Claude to design a quiz Artifact for you on any subject. Give it context about your level and the kinds of questions youll find most useful, as well as your preferred quiz length.
My example: Liquidation preference quiz
Build a Decision Helper
Figure out which of multiple options works for you. This kind of interactive poses a series of preference questions to determine a result based on your answers. It guides decisions based onwhatever criteria and grounding info you provide. To customize my own matching tools, I use my own writing, analysis and research to serve as the basis for the Claude Artifact. I based the following examples on my own research on AI learning modes and note-taking tools.
Examples
– Find your preferred AI learning mode– Find Your Perfect Note-Taking Tool
Create Calm (Meditation & timer apps)
Claude Artifacts can employ timers and graphics. To make a simple breathing app, I gave Claude instructions about the 4-7-8 breathing pattern.
4 seconds of breathing in; 7 seconds holding; 8 seconds of exhalation.
I included a link to the source article from which I drew the information, and instructed Claude to run four cycles of the breathing timer for an activity that would last about a minute.
Example: My 60-second breathing relaxation app
Make a game
Its simple to make puzzles, simple arcade-style games, or word games. Describe the game you have in mind or ask Claude to give you some ideas to work with. Create your own version of something you loved to play as a kid, or a brain teaser to give yourself a playful mental break at work.
Example: Word Morph
Other ideas for what to make:
A specialized assistant for single-purpose tasks lik generating a QR code, cleaning up messy notes, translating phrases, or assessing headline ideas
A banner image like the one above I made for this post
A prototype site like this mood canvas to share an idea with a colleague
A document or template like this PRD maker (for product requirements) to reformat your own content
Visualizations for creativity or quick prototyping
Campaign dashboards for sharing performance metrics
Sales pipeline forecasts or other interactive charts
Limitations to consider
Sometimes Claude leaves out a detail or a button doesnt work. Other times, what youve envisioned doesnt look quite right. Solution: You often have to prompt the model to make corrections, which it does well.
Artifacts dont have built-in databases to store information. So if you create a habit tracker or content calendar, what you type in during one session wont be stored for later. You can ask it to add an export capability, but if you need the tool to store data you can return to, youre better off with a more sophisticated AI coding tool (for so-called vibe coding) like Windsurf, Bolt, or Lovable.
While powerful, these Artifacts arent agents that can go out to the Web and interact with multiple data sources to update an app.
Similar tools worth trying
Gemini Canvas | Googles Gemini also excels at creating great interactives and tools. I made this little alt-text generator for Wonder Tools with a short prompt that took less than a minute. I asked it to handle multiple images and offer two alt-text options for each. Canvas is free for all users; a pro subscription gets you access to a more powerful model.
Perplexity Labs lets you generate detailed reports with infographics, create visual dashboards with business or economic data, or make other interactive graphics. Heres an example of a family museum itinerary planner, and a coffee shops financial dashboard.
Additional examples: Check out Perplexitys Project Gallery for inspiring ideas. Caveat: Unlike Claude Artifacts and Geminis Canvas, which can be used for free, Perplexity Labs requires a $20/month subscription.
During his two terms from 1953 to 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly spent hours tucked away inside the teal-and-gold movie theater in the White Houses East Wing, watching more than 200 Western films. Years later, Bill Clinton used the theaterthen decked out in a very 90s combination of red and tanto view Schindlers List and Naked Gun. Even President Trump himself used the theater, now with an art-deco-inspired red-and-gold look, for a screening of Finding Dory back in 2017.
Now, the historic landmark is just another part of the rubble that was once the East Wing.
Since its construction more than 80 years ago, the White House theater has served as a kind of miniature window into the real lives of U.S. presidents, offering the American people a rare glimpse into moments of rest and personal time. According to Matt Lambros, a photographer whos spent years researching historic theaters and written three books on the topic, even the interior design of the theater itselfwhich was renovated multiple times over the yearsgives fresh insights both into each presidents taste and the historical context of theater aesthetics more generally.
Now that the theater has been demolished by the Trump administration along with the rest of the East Wing, Lambros says a piece of theater history has been permanently lost. Here, we take a walk back through the theater’s various design eras.
The theater prior to the Truman renovation, circa 1948 [Photo: Abbie Rowe/National Park Service/Harry S. Truman Library & Museum]
FDR converts the Hat Box
The White House theater, located in the buildings East Terrace, was created in 1942 when Franklin Roosevelt converted what was then a cloakroom, known colloquially as the Hat Box, into a viewing area. Given its history as essentially a glorified closet, the theater could seat just 40 guests.
The earliest photos of the theater are exclusively black-and-white, so its difficult to get a full picture of what the room looked like in person. Two details are clear, though: Unlike the movie theater seating of today, Roosevelts guests were sitting in small, wooden seats; and, along the walls, large curtains hung from the ceiling to the floor.
The curtains were likely added to block light from the domed windows that lined the original room, Lambros says. But, he notes, curtained walls were actually a trend in theaters around the time. As the stylized, ornate plasterwork and paneling inside historic theaters went out of style, the curtains became an easy way to modernize interiors.
That is actually what happened in a lot of movie theaters across the country, Lambros says. You had these big ornate theaters, and instead of like, Oh, let’s paint them a different color, during the fifties and sixties, they were like, Let’s just put curtains up over it.
The theater during the Truman renovation, 1950 [Photo: Abbie Rowe/National Park Service/Harry S. Truman Library & Museum]
Trumans rococo revival refresh
Harry Trumans presidency appears to be the first time the theater was renovated. The old carpeting was removed, revealing tiled flooring; gold sconces with candlestick lighting were added to the walls; and a row of plush, wide chairs lined the front of the theater. The whole space used an almost rococo-esque palette of gold and blue, including gold curtains, which remained lining the walls.
This look would stay in place for several decades. According to logs kept by White House projectionist Paul Fisher, who held the post for seven different presidents, it was in this version of the room where Eisenhower watched Gary Coopers High Noon on repeat, and where John F. Kennedy viewed the film From Russia With Love the day before he was assassinated in 1963. This iteration of the theater also played host to hundreds of screenings held by Jimmy Carter, who watched more than 400 movies during his terma presidential record.
[Photo: Jack E. Boucher/United States Library of Congress]
Clintons 90-era living room
In the early 90s, the theater got a renovation that traded its former color scheme for a combination of orange carpet, tan seating, and red accented curtains. The total effect was something akin to a grandmas living room.
President Bill Clinton in 1994 [Photo: Dirck Halstead/Getty Images]
It was really ugly, Lambros says. But that kind of humanizes it. Thats one thing I really like about the history of this theater, is that you really get insight into each president.
Bushs historic theater homage
The theaters final renovation came courtesy of First Lady Laura Bush in the early 2000s, who used the opportunity to pay homage to historic theater aesthetics.
Her version of the screening room was completely decked out in red and gold, from the carpet to the chairs and walls. The curtains were finally removed and replaced with a repeated, golden art deco motifsimilar to the kind of decorations that wouldve been covered up in local theaters throughout the mid-20th century.
From top: President George W. Bush in the theater in 2002 and 2006 [Photos: Eric Draper/White House/Getty Images]
According to Lambros, the modern association of a red and gold palette with movie theaters actually traces all the way back to an interior designer named Anne Dornan, whose work in the 1920s helped establish theater design.
She had very specific ideas of what certain color palettes should be used in certain theaters depending on their locations, Lambros says. She thought that major metropolitan downtown area theaters were reds and golds, and she came up with something called the Theater Decorator’s Color Chart.
Laura Bushs design nods to that history, he says, while adding art-deco-style touches that werent there before, more in line with theaters like the Paramount in Oakland than the original design ever was.
President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan in 1986 [Photo: Reagan Library]
A piece of history no more
For Lambros, the White House theater was one of the reasons that he developed an early interest in historic theaters in general. As a kid, he remembers, he was fascinated by the idea that the president might be watching the same film as him from inside the White House.
First lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama in 2009 [Photo: Pete Souza/White House Flickr]
It was a connection point between the president and the American people, Lambros says. There are photos of the presidents and their children and grandchildren sitting in the theater watching TV or watching movies, and we all can relate to that. It’s a piece of history that humanized the president, and it was erased.
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The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate sits at 6.19%, down from 6.54% a year ago. While that decline represents some welcome relief for homebuyers, economists at Fannie Mae and the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) believe most of the short-term mortgage rate relief is already behind us.
Both Fannie Mae and the MBA released 2026 forecasts this month showing not much change from here. Fannie Mae expects the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate will fall to 5.9% by the fourth quarter of 2026a decline of just 0.3 percentage points from todays levels.
The MBAs forecast is even more conservative, calling for an average 6.4% rate by late 2026, which would actually mark a slight uptick.
Their shared view underscores a growing consensus among economists: The easy phase of mortgage rate relief has passed, unless something material changes in the economy.
Both organizations do anticipate a mild shift in the broader economy/labor market. The U.S. unemployment rate, currently 4.3%, is expected to soften a tad, with Fannie Mae projecting 4.4% by the end of 2026 and the MBA expecting 4.6%. While that would mark further labor market softening, itd hardly be a full-blown break in the labor market.
Lets say theyre wrong and mortgage rates fall more than expected. What happens?
Theres a potential wildcardan economic slowdown. If joblessness were to climb faster than anticipated or if the economy were to meaningfully deteriorate, that could put additional downward pressure on both Treasury yields and mortgage rates. In that scenario, mortgage rates could dip more than the baseline forecasts suggest.
The mortgage spread represents the difference between the 10-year Treasury yield and the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate. Last week, the spread stood at 218 basis points. If the spreadwhich widened when mortgage rates spiked in 2022continues to compress/normalize toward its long-term average since 1972 (176 basis points), it could help push mortgage rates lower, even if Treasury yields hold steady.
One last thing: Mortgage rate forecasts should always be taken with a grain of salt, at least to some degree. Predicting long-term yields depends on accurately anticipating inflation, Federal Reserve policy, and the broader trajectory of the U.S. and global economiesall of which are notoriously hard to get right.
Over just the past five years, forecasters have been caught off guard by a pandemic, a historic inflation spike, and one of the fastest rate-hiking cycles in modern history. The lesson? Even the best models cant account for every shock. Mortgage rate forecasts are useful guideposts but not guarantees.
Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist.
He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong.
Today, we are at a similar juncture, and there are worrying parallels to the 1920s, including paradigm-shifting technologies, a revolt against immigration, globalism, income inequality, and even a global pandemic. Now, like then, the choices we make will shape our future for decades to come. We need those who create the future to be rooted in the world we live in. Theyre not.
Building for a rational universe
In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, much like many of the Silicon Valley digerati today, became enamored with the engineering mindset. By this time, the technologies like the ones that Morgan invested in had begun to reshape the world. Much like Descartes, three centuries before, they thought that logic and rationality should rule human affairs.
Their patron saint was Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their bible was his Tractatus, which described a world made up of atomic facts that could be combined to create states of affairs. He concluded, famously, that Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent, meaning that whatever could not be expressed in a logical form must be disregarded.
The intellectuals branded their movement logical positivism and based it on the verification principle. Only verifiable propositions would be taken as meaningful. All other statements would be treated as silly talk and gobbledygook. Essentially, if it didnt fit in an algorithm, for all practical purposes, it didnt exist.
Unfortunately, and again much like Silicon Valley denizens of today, the exuberant confidence of the logical positivists belied serious trouble beneath the surface. In fact, while the intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put the social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a foundational crisis that threatened the entire positivist project.
At the root of the crisis was something called Russells Paradox, which created strange, self-contradictory statements, such as The barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself. Assume such a barber exists and youre tied in a knot. It seemed like a small technical wrinkle, but it was a crack in the foundation that demanded repair.
Broken logic
David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians of the day, proposed a program to solve the foundational crisis. It rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that every statement could be shown to be true or false. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer.
Hilbert and his colleagues received an answer sooner than most had expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert laid out his program, 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. The result shocked the mathematical world. Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both.
Put more simply, Gödel proved that every formal system will eventually break down. It will contain true statements that cannot be proved within the system itself. Logic would remain permanently limited, and the positivists hopes were dashed. You cant engineer a society based on a logical system that is itself inherently incomplete. For better or worse, the world would remain a messy place.
Yet the implications of the downfall of logic turned out to be far different, and far more strange, than anyone had expected. In 1936, building on Gödels proof, Alan Turing published his own paper on Hilberts computability problem. Much like the Austrian, he found that all problems are not computable, but with a silver lining. As part of his proof, he included a description of a simple machine that could compute every computable number.
Ironically, Turings machine would usher in a new era of digital computing. These machines, constructed on the basis that they would all eventually crash, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they areflawed machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to discard our illusions first.
Building dwelling thinking
Underlying the positivist project was the rationalist assumption that we could overcome the flaws of human nature with pristine, faultless logic. Yet just the opposite happened. The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of ideologies that claimed to be more scientific, only to see the world descend into an abyss of war and genocide.
In the aftermath, amidst the rubble and horror, the world needed to be rebuilt. That, in turn, demanded some thought about how and in what image. It was in this period that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, in which he argued that to build for the world you need to know what it means to live in it:
Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both building and thinking belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.
There is a fundamental difference between something designed for the way people actually live and dwell, and something designed to serve an abstract ideal. You feel it when trying to navigate an AI-powered customer service experience, or a self-service menu at an airport bar. When I lived in Moscow in 2003 and 2004, I was struck by the constant reminders that the city wasnt designed for living, but for something else.
Theres just something dehumanizing about a world built solely for thinking and detached from dwelling. Thats probably why companies like Apple, Pixar, and Patagonia, that are able to harmonize building, dwelling, and thinking so deeply and consistently, win such devotion, because something that feels built for us validates us in a profound human way.
Careless people
In Careless People, former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams describes the Silicon Valley executives she worked with as so wealthy and powerful that they had grown out of touch with many of the worlds realities. At one point, during discussion about how much to charge for internet service for refugees, she describes a senior leaders surprise with the realization that the inhabitants of refugee camps dont have jobs.
Today, we increasingly live in the world of the visceral abstract, where the technologies that shape our lives are deeply rooted in concepts, such as quantum mechanics and natural selection, that cant be experienced directly. This is especially true for the next generation of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing.
When you design for the physical world by, say, building a bridge, there is natural feedback if the building and thinking are out of harmony with dwelling. People can get to where they want to go or they cant. The path is smooth or bumpy. The view is beautiful, or it is ugly. We notice flaws, if not immediately, then eventually. But they come to light and can be corrected.
But in the world of the visceral abstract, things arent so concrete. Nation states can manipulate us on social media, our chatbots can shift our psychology and our genomes can be engineered to interact with our environment in new and different ways, without us being aware of it. As technologies grow more powerful, the potential for good and evil multiply.
This requires us to be not only careful, but connectedto not only think and build, but to dwell. We need to be suspicious of those who sell us visions of flawless logic; those visions are not only incomplete, they are inhuman. At some point, something has got to break.
