GoKawiil
Tech News
Santander told CNBC its AI initiatives produced €194 million ($216 million) in business value across the first nine months of 2026, with CFO José García Cantera saying the technology is now cutting costs and boosting revenue simultaneously. Novartis and Standard Chartered also cited AI contributions to third-quarter results, though Novartis did not break out a specific figure from its $6.04 billion core operating income.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Stanford Graduate School of Business interview, as reported by Fortune, that AI will replace huge numbers of tasks people currently perform and that this upheaval is actually a career opportunity for young people willing to adapt. He also criticized MBA students for chasing trends that were popular years ago instead of pursuing newer opportunities. When an interviewer noted that AI itself may already be the established 'cool thing,' the comment drew laughter from the audience.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke to prospective startup founders at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, expressing what he called 'chronic disappointment' with MBA students. He offered advice to young job seekers based on his experience founding Loopt and OpenAI and leading Y Combinator.
Netflix has produced a six-episode series recreating Philip Zimbardo's controversial 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which college students were assigned roles as guards or inmates. The Washington Post's Monica Hesse reviewed the show, noting it avoids the original study's most extreme abuses but still depicts participants behaving punitively without clear justification.
A federal judge ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic that the AI company illegally pirated books from more than 10 Stanford professors, including Tobias Wolff and Chang-rae Lee, to train Claude. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement covering nearly 500,000 works, but Wolff and Lee opted out and filed a separate suit, Cruz v. Anthropic, seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work through a jury trial.
Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute released its 2026 AI Index Report, finding that generative AI reached 53% global adoption within three years of introduction, faster than earlier technologies like the personal computer or internet took to reach similar levels. The report also found 88% of organizations have adopted AI in some form, and 80% of university students currently use generative AI tools.
An Entrepreneur contributor writing for Vida argues businesses should treat AI agents, or 'digital employees,' with the same hiring rigor given to human staff before deployment. The piece cites Stanford's 2026 AI Index finding 88% of organizations used AI in some business function in 2025, while autonomous agent deployment remains in the single digits. It recommends defining measurable outcomes, assigning ownership, ensuring visibility into agent actions, and setting escalation paths.
Filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spent time documenting Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans at home with their children, beginning around a month before she started serving her prison sentence in May 2023. The resulting film reportedly features extensive close-up footage of Holmes interacting with Fielder and her family, revisiting the Theranos founder's story after her 2022 fraud conviction.
A commentary piece contrasts Steve Jobs' Stanford advice to 'follow your passion' with Mark Cuban's advice to 'follow your effort,' arguing both reflect each man's personal temperament rather than universal truth. It extends the point to other contradictory maxims, such as 'say yes to everything' versus 'say no to almost everything,' and to engineering debates over microservices versus monolith architectures.
Researchers led by Josef Parvizi at Stanford University have produced a detailed map of the insular cortex, a deep brain region long difficult to study. Published in Nature, the study identifies distinct zones handling pain signals from the body, sensations like nausea from internal organs, and a frontal region that connects to areas involved in cognition and emotion.
Stanford researchers found that bleached coral placed in contact with healthy coral colonies recovered within about eight weeks. The study suggests physical proximity to healthy tissue can accelerate recovery compared to bleached coral left isolated.
Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom told Business Insider that remote work has been associated with a 5% increase in fertility rates across the United States and Northern Europe. Bloom's comments come amid broader concern over declining birth rates in many developed countries.