Nvidia Just Bet $5 Billion on an AI Startup Most People Have Never Heard Of. Here’s Why

Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chipmaker, just announced it’s investing $5 billion dollars—a giant chunk of money by any reasonable measure—into a smallish AI startup that most people probably haven’t heard of. It’s an outfit called Safe Superintelligence, SSI for short, based in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. The investment could nevertheless be hugely important for a number of reasons relating to the future of AI tech. Here’s what’s going on. What is Safe Superintelligence? SSI was founded only in mid-2024, and its co-founder and CEO is Ilya Sutskever, formerly OpenAI’s chief technology officer. Sutskever created a fuss when he left OpenAI because he’d been intimately involved in bringing ChatGPT to the world, and was leading the AI’s alignment team. This part of OpenAI was critical, especially at the time, because it had one main job: making sure that as OpenAI’s products got more sophisticated they aligned with humankind’s needs, rather than evolving into a threat. Sutskever’s departure led to some serious questions about OpenAI’s good intentions when developing future AI models—a debate that’s still bubbling away today, as OpenAI’s Sam Altman stirs the pot by announcing he feels we’re already in a powerful singularity moment. Safe Superintelligence is actually about more than just building AI chatbots like Siri or ChatGPT. The clue’s in the name: it’s not just about intelligence—it’s trying to make “superintelligence.” This, experts have long suggested, is an AI capable of out-thinking even the most agile human mind, in pretty much any area you can imagine. The company’s own website says this may be “the most important technical problem of our time” and it “is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus.” Rather than developing ever-smarter AIs and then bolting on safety and security, SSI is developing AI and safety “in tandem, as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs.” News like the recent international ban of Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model by the U.S. government for national security reasons, and the fact that an OpenAI model went rogue, escaped and then attacked a rival’s AI systems with a hack, show how important safe AI development is becoming. For superintelligent AIs, safety is clearly going to be even more important. SSI has been in and out of the headlines since its founding because although it’s raised sizable investments (topping $3 billion in total by late 2025,) it has yet to release any kind of meaningful product. The new $5 billion from Nvidia, its biggest financial injection yet, has resurfaced many questions about the company. Why does the investment matter? The mammoth investment is a sign that Nvidia, which by many accounts makes the world’s leading AI chips, is interested in a safe future for AI, and that it’s thinking beyond the current AI chatbot paradigm and has an eye on the next generation of superintelligent systems. As part of the deal, SSI will also gain access to Nvidia’s Vera ​Rubin chips. These are next-generation chips that are even more sophisticated than the company’s Blackwell chips, which stirred plenty of media attention when they were revealed in 2024. For certain key processes needed to make AI calculations, the new chips may be between two and five times faster than the Blackwell chips. This kind of raw power should speed the development of SSI’s AI systems significantly. In a press release, Nvidia also revealed the investment and technology deal goes both ways. It noted that the “two companies will also collaborate on the technical advancement of NVIDIA’s current and future compute platforms, leveraging SSI’s unique insights into the future of AI.” This implies that SSI has made powerful and useful progress that Nvidia executives have seen, and they want to make the most of SSI’s developments to keep their own company at the cutting edge of AI. The release quotes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who praised Sutsever’s expertise and “fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI.” He went on to say he was “excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform.” Why should you care about this? The news won’t directly impact the way you use AI in your own company. But it may remind you that current-generation AI tech isn’t inherently safe or trustworthy. Use these tools in the wrong way, and you could make a disastrous financial decision because of false information an AI told you, for example; or, a third party AI company may leak sensitive data your own staff have shared with an AI tool (as just happened with Anthropic’s Claude model). But the idea of superintelligent AI tools should be a part of your long term business plans. If you’re finding today’s AI tools helpful in building your business, you shouldn’t sleep on the innovative AI models that the future promises. Constantly checking to see if AI matches your needs could become a new business norm. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

AI Has Freed Interns From Grunt Work. Now Companies Have a New Problem

Internships have long been considered a valuable steppingstone toward future full-time jobs, often because many companies hire people they previously mentored. But a number of recent workplace trends—notably increasing business deployment of AI tools—are creating new challenges for many younger apprentices as they seek to effectively learn the corporate ropes. Frequently, those changes are leaving interns with little or even none of the administrative grunt work they’d been traditionally given, and which AI applications have now automated. Even if that sounds like a good thing, it can strand many trainees in what business consultancy Korn Ferry called “a new kind of boredom.” In an effort to respond, companies are now assigning novice workers weightier workplace responsibilities they haven’t been trained to assume and are often terrified to take on. Consider it a feast-or-famine scenario for post-AI workplace apprenticeships. Under it, the workflow management and decision-making skills interns previously learned through repetitive and boring administrative tasks are being swapped for far more consequential roles usually reserved for more seasoned employees. “Thanks to AI, the drudgery that typically accompanies an internship—data entry, report drafting, meeting tracking—is being replaced by a different kind of cognitive burden that requires more fact-checking than judgment or critical-thinking,” a Korn Ferry blog post on the change said. “Companies expect [interns] to arrive fully proficient in AI so that they can spend more time developing their problem-solving and other human skills.” Unmentored interns The problem with this shift isn’t merely the bigger risks and higher costs of trainees stumbling while making decisions previously reserved for experienced staff. Interns may also lack the ongoing supervision they’d previously benefitted from, in part because of the effects of now common remote working arrangements or the manager-depleting effects of hierarchy “flattening” strategies. Indeed, a survey by the National Associations of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found nearly 20 percent of 2025 interns said they didn’t have a mentor, “which is a key anchor point to and sounding board for an organization.” Having a mentor is also critical in preventing trainees from being too terrified to make the decisions they’ve been assigned, or making costly errors after plucking up that courage. Alternatively, in many cases where workplace mentors were either never or infrequently present, novice workers were told to carry out work using the same AI bots that had already automated the administrative tasks earlier generations fulfilled. A far duller form of that came with younger trainees being instructed to monitor output of those apps—essentially an updated form of earlier grunt work that now keeps watch for slop the tech produces. Why should the shifting skills and experiences interns are learning be of concern to employers? According to Korn Ferry, a big reason is that companies frequently recruit the same young people they’ve helped train. Its post said last year that fully 63 percent of former interns received a full-time job offer from either employers they apprenticed with, or other companies that appreciated those training efforts. Fully 89 percent of businesses say they rely those programs on to identify future full-time employees, with NACE data showing nearly half of internship veterans received at least one employment offer before graduating from college this year. Internship programs need a big AI update Meanwhile, the size of the talent pipeline is huge, with an estimated 3 to 4 million people interning for U.S. companies each year. That flow of trainees is becoming an even bigger recruitment focus for businesses, now that AI has eliminated many traditional entry-level jobs for college graduates don’t have similar hands-on experience. But as important as internship programs have become, employers need to revise and refocus them in order for both youthful participants, and the employers themselves, to continue getting maximum benefits from them. With apps and AI replacing the administrative tasks trainees previously performed, businesses must find a middle ground between the contrasting alternatives many have adopted in the post-AI era. That means enriching roles situated somewhere between vetting chatbot output for slop, and the often terrifying responsibility of making decisions typically reserved for managers. “Firms are going to have to be more deliberate about teaching and coaching the skills they actually want interns to develop,” Mark Royal, a Korn Ferry senior client partner who specializes in employee engagement, said in the blog post. That means employers should focus less on the immediate, pragmatic concerns about assigning interns whatever work remains available that AI hasn’t taken over yet. Instead, they need to aim for the longer, strategic objective of identifying the tasks, experiences, and roles that will shape the kind of young workers they’d be eager to hire as employees. “Internships aren’t really about the output,” said Jerry Collier, leader of Korn Ferry’s EMEA assessment and succession practice. “They’re supposed to be about developing people.” BY BRUCE CRUMLEY @BRUCEC_INC

Apple Finally Fixed Siri—and It May Be Your New Favorite AI Tool

Apple’s Siri is the OG personal AI assistant. It debuted so long ago that the entire class of these voice-activated systems has been renamed “chatbots.” Siri, which launched as an integrated service on Apple devices in 2011, was useful for basic hands-free stuff—it could set timers, add calendar entries for business meetings, tell you awful jokes, even play music on request. But despite being improved gradually through the years, it remained limited. When ChatGPT arrived in 2022, Siri looked outdated overnight. Apple promised a dramatic revamp of Siri in 2024, but blundered through the process, earning Apple some rare media bruises when it was slammed for its failure to deliver. But now the new Siri—also known as Siri AI—has finally arrived, ready for public consumption. And boy, was it worth the wait. For many tech-wary execs, it may even become the AI that you interact with most often. What can Siri AI do? Available on newer iPhones, Macs, and even Apple Watches, Siri is now a true chatbot like many others, but it makes the most of being integrated into Apple’s devices in ways that rivals like ChatGPT or Claude can’t beat. Apple’s own blurb explains that new Siri will be a “truly helpful AI that’s centered around you and your needs” because it’s “integrated into your apps, grounded in your context, and private at every step.” It works across lots of different aspects of your phone or computer, so you can ask Siri to show you photos from a finance meeting in Berlin in one request, text your partner in the next, and finally ask it to create a summary of a document so you can quickly give your PR team some guidance. There’s no need to leap between apps manually—you can just activate Siri and make these kinds of requests whenever you need. Reviewers have pointed out that though Siri is now comparable to market-leading AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it has some quirks. It may come across as a little more serious-sounding than ChatGPT, and you can’t interrupt its replies in the way that you may be used to with OpenAI’s product. You probably won’t rely on this general-purpose chatbot to write lots of high-end code for you either. Specialized AIs are still going to be better for developers. Why should you use Siri more now? Because Siri can now process natural language requests, you can task it with more sophisticated duties, including useful prompts like “set up a regular Monday meeting with Miriam and add it to the calendar.” You should also be able to ask it the kind of “why does X work the way it does?” questions that you may have asked of other AIs if you need to quickly learn something new. And because it’s built into Apple’s devices, you don’t even have to touch the keyboard or screen to get the chatbot’s attention—the classic “hey, Siri” request still works. That means the AI is just a second away anytime you need an answer or a quick digital task completed. Essentially, Apple’s made Siri a hundred times more useful than it was before, both for home tasks and many workplace-centric duties. Siri and privacy This is where Apple’s devotion to user privacy may pay off. We’ve all read reports of how chatbots can leak sensitive information that users type into it, and noted the horrifying percentage of workers who blithely share confidential company secrets like financial reports with these third-party companies, not caring a bit about the legal ramifications. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic also use your prompts to train their future models, and you may have let them do this without even being aware. Apple promises Siri won’t do any of that. Much of the new Siri service works on your devices, so nothing gets sent off to a distant digital cloud. And when your AI queries do need this extra compute power, Apple handles it so that the cloud data isn’t kept or associated with you. Siri is “aware of your personal information without collecting your personal information,” Apple promises. For many executives, this will be a key selling point. And for some companies, Apple’s privacy rules may allow use of Siri AI on company hardware in ways that have been banned or restricted for employees until now. The reviews are good Because Apple also places a premium on making its services simple and easy to use, MacWorld suggested that the new Siri is like “ChatGPT for people who hate AI.” The reviewer noted it was “dependable for quick questions, digging up personal data, and controlling your iPhone,” remarking that it was a little more simplified than more established chatbots. A reviewer on tech news site The Verge explained that “Siri AI is already changing the way I use my iPhone,” noting that “it’s practically stopped me from opening my browser for most things, since it’s easier, faster, and more enjoyable” to engage with Siri, either by voice or by swiping down on the phone’s screen and typing in a query. Even many commenters on Reddit, often a critical and snarky bunch, have been largely positive in a thread about the new Siri. One said: “It’s amazing. For everyday queries I haven’t touched the ChatGPT app in days.” Another wryly referenced some of the supply, trust, and pricing woes affecting rival chatbot makers by remarking: “Apple is the only company not in an AI crisis.” Important things to remember about the new Siri While Siri is now publicly available, it’s only as part of a beta OS release for Apple’s devices—and not all older devices can power the advanced services the new iOS and Mac software offers. You’ll also have to put up with the occasional bug while it’s still in testing. And while Siri AI is free, to access some of the more powerful cloud compute features you’ll need to subscribe to Apple’s services. There’s also a waiting list to activate Siri AI, but in my case, the waiting period was less than half an hour. Interested in trying out the beta release on one of your devices? Go to Settings on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, then General, and under the “Software Update” heading, find the options list and select “iOS 27 Public Beta” for your iPhone, “iPadOS 27 Public Beta” for your iPad, and “MacOS 27 Golden Gate Public Beta” for your Mac. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

A New Harvard Study Reveals Why Some Young Workers Turn AI Into Results—and Others Don’t

When people talk about AI and entry-level jobs, they usually fret about the threat the tech embodies to workers just starting to climb the career ladder. But while these youngsters are noted for being tech-savvy, and are often relied on for their skills as the first “digitally native” generation, many are reportedly deeply skeptical about AI. When you look around your workplace, you’ll see some who are excelling at leveraging it to make their job faster or better, while plenty more are struggling. New research in the Harvard Business Review may help you get a handle on this and bring all your young workers up to the same speed. The new study centered on why some junior staff seem to do so well when using AI to further a company’s goals, and yet others don’t. It turns out the best differentiator between young workers who excel at using AI and those who don’t isn’t the individual AI skills the workers have. Instead it’s more about how each worker tackles their tasks that matters. This runs counter to all sorts of narratives about AI literacy levels and what specialties young workers bring from their higher education. Some young workers, for example, have the AI skills but fail to use them in a way that delivers value for their employer. Others can appear competent, because they know how to rely on AI’s core systems to get to a deliverable answer, but they’re actually hiding their foundational business knowledge weaknesses. Meanwhile, here’s what sets successful young AI users apart: According to the study, the best users combine their “strong domain knowledge, critical thinking, and AI literacy” into every step of using AI to complete a task, including initial queries, shaping the outputs, and then delivering the required product. It’s a holistic skill, rather than a collection of shallow abilities. The business researchers note that it makes perfect sense for business leaders to prioritize hiring entry-level workers for their critical thinking skills and AI literacy. But because their study found “employees with similar levels of foundational skills and knowledge can generate dramatically different outcomes when working with the same AI agent,” savvy companies may rethink this policy. The problem is that being AI-savvy isn’t the same as knowing how to use an AI tool to solve a tricky business problem. Here’s what you can do The study suggests that company leaders keen to get all their young staff using AI in the most productive way possible should worry less about what their workers know, and instead train them in a way that emphasizes “how employees frame problems, interrogate AI outputs, refine results, and integrate insights into decisions.” Essentially, instead of taking it on trust that your Gen-Z and Millennial staff know what they’re doing, you need to actually teach them best practices. This involves leading them step-by-step through prompting an AI with first thoughts, evaluating its replies, tweaking what they’ve asked it, and incorporating the output into meaningful products. Then, when you give them an AI tool to use, it should translate into more meaningful impacts for your company. There’s another piece of advice: The researchers say companies should treat AI learning as “an ongoing development model rather than a one-time training intervention.” This probably holds for training older employees, too. Personalizing this training to plug up an individual’s skills gaps is an even better idea. And to really nail the solution, companies could actually embed AI learning into the tasks and decisions that workers face each day. Why all this matters AI boosters promote AI as being able to save companies time, effort and money—no matter what individual AI tools are designed to do, they all have this overall goal. These promises are why this tech is ubiquitous. But you can’t just “fire and forget” AI, nor can you assume that Gen-Z workers will just immediately master the tech, in the same way you wouldn’t trust them to run your PR office just because they’re already proficient with using TikTok or Instagram for fun. You need to train your young workers on an ongoing basis, ensuring that you work out where they’re strong and weak on knowing how to use AI in an impactful way, and plugging gaps through learning. The same goes for older staff too, especially if you’re hoping that the young Gen-Z whippersnappers will help drag your Gen-X workers into the AI era. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON