Category: Semafor

India’s government will likely quell the student-led Cockroach protests, but it will have a harder time suppressing the underlying frustration fueling them, prominent Indian commentators argued. The movement, which began as a satirical campaign after a judge derided India’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches,” has transcended grievances about the education system’s ...

The US tech industry is divided over how Washington should handle the rise of open-source AI from China. OpenAI and Anthropic, the two leading AI startups that both make “closed” models, have in recent weeks sounded the alarm on what they see as the risks stemming from their cheaper Chinese ...

Chinese nationals were awarded the prestigious Fields Medal for the first time, in the latest sign of the country’s growing academic prowess. Hong Wang and Yu Deng, both Peking University grads, were among the four winners of the prize, a Nobel-like honor for the world’s top mathematicians under 40. The ...

US regulators on Thursday said they plan to develop rules to address the safety risks linked to the hidden electric car door handles popularized by Tesla. Investigations from Bloomberg have uncovered more than a dozen deaths from crashes in which people became trapped inside a Tesla because the doors wouldn’t ...

by Cate Hall with Sasha Chapin. A couple of years ago, we highlighted Hall’s Substack on how to be “agentic,” the master of one’s own destiny. She now has a book out on the same subject — we’d like to think we were the agents of destiny there — on ...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s uneasy truce with New York’s business elite was tested again Wednesday when he appointed antitrust crusader Lina Khan to a formal post in his administration. Khan will chair the city’s economic development board, which oversees the leasing and use of huge chunks of city property, including Hudson ...

Sports betting is degrading the financial health of the most vulnerable households, according to a new study that tees up an emerging political issue. The study, which draws on transaction data from more than 180,000 households, found that sports betting doesn’t replace shopping or other gambling, like lottery tickets or ...

IBM’s earnings whiff could give the Trump administration more ammunition to rethink the quarterly earnings treadmill, which a top company executive called “outdated.” “It forces companies to do irrational things” like offering steep end-of-quarter discounts, IBM Vice Chair Gary Cohn said in an interview. (IBM chose not to do those ...

Alphabet is spending like there’s no tomorrow, and it’s freaking shareholders out. Its shares dropped 7% after it raised its AI spending for the third time this year to $205 billion. Its free cash flow turned negative for the first time in its 22 years as a public company, and ...

The News Delta Air Lines will launch direct flights to Saudi Arabia in October, the first by a US carrier in 25 years, the airline’s president told Semafor. Flights will begin just ahead of Saudi Arabia’s flagship annual conference, the Future Investment Initiative. Ticket sales have so far been “softer ...