Lost in the wedding algorithm sauce, "clean rooms" for AI, and founders obsessed with "tokenmaxxing" in this week's 404 Media Podcast.

Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in "Fight Club." 20th Century Fox Former Fox studio head Bill Mechanic battled behind the scenes with boss Rupert Murdoch over "Fight Club." He told Business Insider that Murdoch wasn't a fan of the 1999 David Fincher film. Mechanic asked Fincher to add one detail to the movie's ending as his "tribute" to Murdoch. David Fincher's classic film, "Fight Club," is regarded as one of the best and most daring studio movies of the late 1990s. But when 20th Century Fox released it in 1999, it didn't have many fans — least of all the studio's then-owner, Rupert Murdoch. Bill Mechanic, who was the head of 20th Century Fox at the time, likened his boss' movie tastes to what showed up in the gossip column of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. "I always thought what Rupert wanted was Page Six," Mechanic told Business Insider. "He didn't think movies were there to challenge." Mechanic knew he was in trouble when he greenlit "Fight Club," which follows a nameless narrator (played by Edward Norton) and his imaginary friend Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who start an underground brawling club that morphs into a cult hell-bent on social disorder. Bill Mechanic. Joe Scarnici/Getty The film's sharp consumerist satire, complex plot, and violent material were already a tough sell — then came the Columbine High School shooting, which complicated its marketing campaign in the months leading up to its release. Soon, scathing editorials were cropping up in the trades. Mechanic knew he'd hear from Murdoch at some point, and it wouldn't be good. That moment came a few weeks before "Fight Club" premiered. Mechanic was attending a meeting where Murdoch was present when the movie came up. "He starts attacking, and he said, 'What kind of sick fucking human being would make a movie like this?'" Mechanic recalled Murdoch saying. "I said, 'Me. David Fincher. We're not embarrassed.'" Rupert Murdoch. Susan Walsh/AP At the time, Mechanic said he felt his days were numbered at Fox, so he decided to make one small suggestion to Fincher. At the end of "Fight Club," the narrator realizes his best friend, Tyler Durden, is his alter ego. After shooting himself in the face to rid himself of Durden, he watches as Project Mayhem's final act is accomplished: the skyscrapers that house credit card companies are blown up to erase all debt records. One of the buildings that explodes is the famed Fox Plaza Tower. Many speculated at the time that this detail was Fincher's doing as a middle finger to the studio, but actually, it was Mechanic's suggestion. The Fox Plaza Tower, left, exploding in "Fight Club." 20th Century Fox "David took me through the sequence. I think I was up in the actual building talking to him, and I asked David if he would put the Fox building in there for my tribute to Rupert," Mechanic said. "I just realized I went to work for the wrong person," Mechanic added of Murdoch. "I think I got movies made that wouldn't have been made, and there's a price to pay." Murdoch didn't respond to a request for comment. Following the poor box office performance for "Fight Club" and a couple other duds, Mechanic left Fox in 2000. He's since produced the beloved 2009 stop-motion movie "Coraline" and earned a best picture Oscar nomination in 2016 for Mel Gibson's "Hacksaw Ridge." But "Fight Club," he says, remains close to his heart. "It's the movie I get asked the most about," he said. "It's one of the best experiences I had." "Fight Club" is being rereleased in 4K in theaters for one night, on April 22. Digital and Blu-ray 4K versions will be available May 12. Read the original article on Business Insider

The generative AI vendor continues to improve its top imaging model.

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now What actually matters in AI right now? It’s getting harder to tell amid the constant launches, hype, and warnings. To cut through…

Tom Puthiymadam, managing partner of advisory services at Grant Thornton. Brad Barket/Getty Images for Fast Company Grant Thornton hired Tom Puthiyamadam, an ex-PwC leader, last year to head its advisory division. He's introduced new performance goals for the firm's partners, tied to AI adoption. Partners' year-end bonuses are aligned with how well they deliver against the new goals, Puthiyamadam said. At the mid-market consulting and accounting firm Grant Thornton, partners' bonuses now depend on how well they use AI. The strategy comes from Tom Puthiyamadam, the recently appointed US head of advisory at Grant Thornton, which last year had global revenues of $8.5 billion. After a 28-year career at PwC, Puthiyamadam joined Grant Thornton in April 2025. He's exuberant about building a "real breakaway firm" that dominates the middle market, and sees AI as crucial for getting there. One year into the job, he has set new annual performance goals to ensure his ambitious plans spread throughout the entire organization. But it's not the rank-and-file workers that Puthiyamadam's new performance metrics target — it's the firm's most senior staff. Grant Thornton is tying partners' year-end bonuses to how well they deliver against the four new strategic goals now added to annual review scorecards, Puthiyamadam said. He introduced the system in January this year, the start of his first full financial year since joining Grant Thornton. The four strategic goals for partners are: Commercial performance: Who are the clients you will make successful? How they're delivering AI solutions in the market and bringing new AI solutions to help clients How are they elevating & developing talent How they're leveraging AI in delivery and day-to-day work The scorecard is evaluated holistically — partners must still meet standard financial goals and quality delivery expectations as baseline responsibilities — but there's no opting out of AI, he said. If a partner achieves partial success in AI adoption while doubling their revenue, that balance will be taken into consideration, but if they do zero work on AI adoption, that will be a problem, said Puthiyamadam. "I am aligning up an incentive, as in your year-end bonus, on whether or not you were able to clearly demonstrate how you adopted the AI tools we provided you in your delivery, in your sales process, and whether you're becoming a proponent for it versus being a lag," said Puthiyamadam. When asked by Business Insider, Grant Thornton declined to provide specifics on how much of the partners' year-end bonuses would depend on their performance against the strategic goals. Grant Thornton is a global accounting and consulting firm. J. David Ake/Getty Images AI is transforming the consulting industry, putting pressure on pricing models and talent strategies, but creating new growth opportunities and ways of working. Firms are actively pushing AI adoption internally; for example, the Big Four firm KPMG has also turned to incentives to encourage workers to adopt AI, offering cash prizes to consultants who demonstrate "an incredible thing that they've done" with the technology. Puthiyamadam's strategic goals are intentionally being rolled out to partners first. Junior staff are AI native when they join the team and expect the technology to be used, he said. The problem is what Puthiyamadam calls the "frozen middle," midlevel managers who might otherwise resist adopting new technologies. He's hoping that by incentivizing partners to execute the strategy, the rest of the business will follow suit. "If I put the compression and the heat on the partners in the business, trust me, it's going to just seep right down pretty quickly," he told Business Insider. "If you're not on the boat, choose a different boat." Building a 'breakaway firm' Puthiyamadam told Business Insider that he left PwC to do something different before retiring. His move mirrors a broader industry shift, with senior leaders leaving top consulting firms for midsize players and startups that offer faster growth and greater influence over strategy. "I came to GT for a reason, to move with speed and move with accountability," said Puthiyamadam. He hopes to outperform the market and transform Grant Thornton into "the most dominant player" in the middle market, serving clients with revenues between $500 million and $10 billion. In Puhtiyamadam's first year at the firm, the advisory business has grown from a $680 million domestic business to a $1.5 billion multinational advisory practice, the firm told Business Insider. Grant Thornton ranks among the top 10 global accounting firms, but its consulting arm operates in a highly competitive landscape dominated by MBB and the Big Four, alongside rivals like Alvarez & Marsal, Lek Consulting, BDO, and Baker Tilly. Puthiyamadam said he wants Grant Thornton to be seen as a standout in its segment, much like McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte are in theirs. That strategy rests on two core pillars: technology and deals. Grant Thornton is investing heavily in AI capabilities while expanding its presence in transactions and transformation work, including recent acquisitions aimed at strengthening its commercial and financial due diligence capabilities, he said. The firm is also reshaping its talent base and tools, and has recently hired nearly 40 partners from competitors, including Deloitte, KPMG, Accenture, and AlixPartners, all with "a digital backbone," Puthiyamadam said. At the same time, it is aligning its global network to drive more collaboration, he added. Underpinning it all is a "far more aggressive commercial model," said Puthiyamadam. AI may reduce unit costs, but the tooling will also dramatically increase the volume of clients that his team can serve, he said. "When I have a better mousetrap, I will take market share," Puthiyamadam added. Read the original article on Business Insider

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Bloomberg/Getty Images Google is for the first time splitting its AI chips into two lines. The AI battleground is shifting from training to inference. Google's new TPUs are a response. It could help Google chip away at Nvidia's dominance. Google on Wednesday unveiled the latest generation of its AI chip, and for the first time, it's splitting the line into two focus areas: training and inference. Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) have been growing into a credible rival to Nvidia's chips, which are still the dominant silicon across the AI industry. Anthropic is a big TPU customer, and Apple has used the chips to train its AI models. As the AI battleground shifts to inference — the process of actually running the models once they're deployed — Google is responding accordingly. Google's new TPU 8t is designed for training the largest frontier AI models, while its TPU 8i is built for inference. Google says both chips will be available later this year. The split signals a shift happening across the industry. As the quality of models has improved and leading labs have closed the gap between each other, focus is turning to agents and applications that run on top of the models and require more computing power. That's shifting the economic center of AI up the stack to the inference layer. Nvidia has also been preparing for the inference explosion. It struck a $20 billion licensing deal with inference chipmaker Groq late last year, and last month debuted a new chip designed for faster inference. Google says both its new chips are a leap ahead of its seventh-generation Ironwood TPU, which it launched last year. Its new 8i inference chip is making a big jump in high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Google says this solves the "memory wall" — the gap between how fast a processor can make calculations and how fast it can access the data it needs. For running agents, that's important. From answering questions to taking actions Speaking to reporters on Monday, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian called the decision to create two new chips a "natural evolution." Kurian also said the new chips were designed to be efficient in how much power they use "because we felt that power efficiency would become a constraint as people continue to scale both training and inference." This is also Google betting that agents are going to be the next big AI leap. "AI is evolving from answering questions to reasoning and taking action," said Google infrastructure chiefs Amin Vahdat and Mark Lohmeyer in a blog post announcing the new chips. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all been racing to build custom silicon that could reduce their dependence on Nvidia. At the same time, these companies rely on Nvidia either to train their models or to lease Nvidia's chips to customers through their data centers. Google has trained its Gemini models using its own TPU chips, but it sells access to Nvidia's chips through Google Cloud. Google said it will give customers access to Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs later this year. Google has spent more than a decade developing its own silicon but has ramped up those efforts internally over the past couple of years as it tries to court new customers. For example, it has opened up support for tools such as PyTorch that make it easier for companies to adopt TPUs. That could help Google chip away at Nvidia's dominance while giving a nice bump to its bottom line. Morgan Stanley said in a December note that 500,000 TPU chips sold could add around $13 billion in revenue to Google's balance sheet in 2027. Have something to share? Contact this reporter via email at hlangley@businessinsider.com or Signal at 628-228-1836. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read the original article on Business Insider

FastAPI has become one of the most popular ways to serve machine learning models because it is lightweight, fast, and easy to use.

Google wants AI startups on its cloud and has showcased a long list of them at its annual conference.

Duolingo is opening up its advanced language learning content offering to free users, allowing them to acquire skills that were previously reserved to paid subscribers.

Run OpenClaw assistant through alternative LLMs The post How to Run OpenClaw with Open-Source Models appeared first on Towards Data Science.

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Learning app Duolingo has 17 million followers on TikTok, where its owl mascot plays a starring role. Duolingo is rethinking its TikTok strategy after seeing declines in organic reach. Isa Foltin/TikTok via Getty Images A version of this post appears in the CMO Insider newsletter. You can sign up for Business Insider's weekly marketing newsletter here. Duolingo's "unhinged" marketing strategy is getting a reset. Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud helped build the learning app's brand with absurdist marketing that leaned into TikTok trends and wasn't afraid to get sassy in the comment section. Now, Duolingo and its rotund Duo bird mascot, who famously ripped out a fart in a five-second Super Bowl ad, are growing up. What does that mean? For one, fewer "butt jokes," Orssaud told me in an interview. While crass humor gets eyeballs, there's a risk in getting more and more risqué to maintain the shock factor. Orssaud wants to recalibrate Duolingo's marketing output from "80% unhinged, 20% wholesome" toward a more balanced approach. Plus, while going viral on TikTok helped make Duolingo famous, it's now harder for organic content to land there, despite the brand's 17 million followers to its main English-language account, Orssaud said. "There isn't that much room to grow in terms of audience and impressions we can drive from our own account," Orssaud said. It gave me flashbacks to — checks watch — 2012 when marketers grumbled about declines in organic reach on Facebook after investing heavily in building their pages and followings. Orssaud said TikTok wants brands to pay for reach through ads, but he'd rather invest those dollars in creators. Duolingo is about to experiment with what it's calling a "creator army." It's begun outreach to creators, big and small, to encourage them to become paid ambassadors and make new TikTok burner accounts for fun content about the Duolingo brand. User-generated content is where the reach happens, Orssaud said. That's why you're seeing the Duo mascot out and about in the real world more often: from being styled as Bad Bunny for an NYC subway train takeover to rocking up at a Charli XCX concert. It's the kind of surprise that encourages people to whip out their phones and share the moment online. Shifting focus to Reddit, WhatsApp, and good-old-fashioned blogging 2026 is all about user acquisition for Duolingo. The app reached 50 million daily active users in 2025, though its growth has been decelerating. It's looked to boost growth by improving its product and introducing new courses, such as advanced "B2" language learning, music, and chess. The company also spent around $126 million on sales and marketing expenses in 2025, up 39% from the prior year. As AI becomes central to marketers' brand awareness strategies, Duolingo recently staffed its first team dedicated to Reddit, which is frequently ranked one of the top-cited sources for AI answers. It's fast becoming Duolingo's go-to platform for sharing new product updates and gathering feedback, Orssaud said. It's also doubling down on PR and producing content for the Duolingo blog. Beyond these generative engine optimization tactics, Duolingo has also found WhatsApp to be a useful new broadcast channel. The company began testing a WhatsApp channel in Brazil, which it has grown to a community of 1.7 million Portuguese speakers. More recently, Duolingo launched an English-speaking channel, which it uses as an extension of its blog. It has grown to 236,000 followers in about a month. Read the original article on Business Insider

Apple's incoming CEO pick is a bet on going back to its hardware roots, but that could be less of a moat in the AI era. Bloomberg/Getty Images A version of this post appears in the CMO Insider newsletter. You can sign up for Business Insider's weekly marketing newsletter here. Apple's incoming CEO, John Ternus, is set to inherit an intriguing marketing challenge from his predecessor, Tim Cook. By most metrics, Cook is leaving the company's longtime hardware chief with a brand in top shape. Data from the brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance, shared exclusively with CMO Insider, pegs Apple's brand value at $607.6 billion, its highest ever. This represents the value a company would be willing to pay to license Apple's brand. The business fundamentals are solid, too. The dilemma for Ternus: Is Apple at a peak? US data captured by Lippincott's Brand Aperture research-based measurement system in 2025 found that Apple's "momentum" score (53%) — a measure of whether consumers think a brand's best days are ahead or behind it — was lower than Samsung's (64%) and OpenAI's (77%). Apple's lack of a killer AI feature, the underwhelming Vision Pro launch, and criticism of its "Liquid Glass" iOS may have shaken some consumer faith in its design dominance. If AI plays more of a role in why consumers choose a particular brand moving forward, then hardware — Ternus' specialty — "becomes less strong as the moat," Lippincott's Dave Mayer said. One edge Apple has is privacy. Under Cook, Apple went to great lengths to position privacy as "a fundamental human right" in its marketing. The trust it has built could help its brand remain strong in the AI era. However, a focus on privacy could be bad news for marketers who had hoped Apple would be more open with its data and bring ads across more of its services, like Apple TV. "Ternus comes from hardware, not services or advertising, and has likely been part of the decision-making framework that prioritized a controlled, tightly integrated user experience over monetization through ads," analysts at Madison and Wall wrote in a Monday note. Apple's marketing has set a high bar by ad industry standards under Cook. In 2025, Apple was awarded the Cannes Lions "Creative Marketer of the Year Award," which the festival said reflected "a culture that prioritizes creativity and innovation" and connected with people emotionally. Recently awarded work included its long-running "Shot on iPhone" campaign and its "Ted Lasso: Fake Team. Real Partners" push. Sure, these ads might not have been as renowned as earlier campaigns like its "1984" Super Bowl Macintosh commercial or the "Silhouette" iPod spot. Still, Apple has "been consistently delivering on the brand promise for years and years," said Richard Haigh, Brand Finance managing director. As Apple branches into new revenue streams, Ternus may want to step up its advertising. The company might look to produce a "really innovative, eye-catching, and iconic advertising campaign to put them back at the forefront of whatever it is that they decide is their next big thing," Haigh said. Ken Segall, a veteran ad executive who worked on Apple's account, is hoping for a return to the Steve Jobs brand of Apple product announcements, once seen as a kind of Super Bowl event for tech fans. Under Cook, those presentations "did not have that raw passion thing that Steve brought," Segall said Tuesday on BBC Radio. "We'll see if that returns with John." Read the original article on Business Insider

A missed forecast. An AI initiative that stalls because nobody trusts the data. A BI dashboard … The Best Data Platform Development Companies for High-Growth TeamsRead more The post The Best Data Platform Development Companies for High-Growth Teams appeared first on .

Tesla driving Dai Aochen/VCG via Getty Images This post originally appeared in the Business Insider Today newsletter. You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here. Elon Musk's other company reports earnings today. That's a funny way to describe a $1.2 trillion company, but Tesla's increasingly feeling like it's playing second fiddle to SpaceX. Musk's space company, which houses his AI startup, xAI, is eyeing a historic IPO that could value it at up to $2 trillion. (He's also got a court case against Sam Altman to worry about, but that's another story entirely.) Meanwhile, the excitement around Tesla, which reports earnings this afternoon, is considerably less. The stock is down nearly 12% this year as Musk keeps pitching the world's most valuable car company as anything but a car company. From robots to robotaxis, Musk's vision for Tesla's future is very AI-focused. And it's discontinuing some car models to make room for those bets. Some progress is being made — robotaxi service just came to Dallas — but it's not yet bringing in meaningful revenue. Tesla's pivot is difficult to execute in the best of circumstances, let alone when your boss has an even bigger company he's preparing to take public. Musk's attention isn't the only thing Tesla is vying for. The bigger risk: investors jumping ship from Tesla to SpaceX. After all, a good chunk of Tesla investors (potentially even the majority) are more interested in backing Musk than the actual company. SpaceX represents a new way to do this, with the added benefit of being a company not in the middle of a major transformation. That doesn't mean SpaceX is a safe bet. Shooting rockets into space is a risky, expensive, and unforgiving business. And xAI's organizational structure has been in a constant state of flux, with all of Musk's cofounders having now departed. Recently, Tesla has also seen renewed interest from retail investors, according to data from Vanda Research, which is Musk's bread and butter. As crazy as this sounds, Tesla could be viewed as more of a value play (compared to SpaceX) for investors looking to invest in the Muskonomy. Still, investors love a good story. And it doesn't get much better than a space company with its eye on Mars that's on the cusp of one of the biggest IPOs. That is … unless they decide to team up. Read the original article on Business Insider

A Bluetooth suction-cup rack and a palm-sized tow rope were among our most practical finds.

Los Angeles-based SimpleClosure has launched Asset Hub, a marketplace aimed at helping founders sell assets such as source code, data and equipment during the wind-down process. Crunchbase News spoke with founder Dori Yona about the new offering as closures rise and investors place greater value on “clean” shutdowns.

For startup founders, the opportunity today is to solve real problems by building vertical, AI-driven solutions in specific industries. MGV's Marc Schröder shares tips on successfully building a startup with an eye toward acquisition.

If Dems take Congress, Trump may face reckoning for “pay-to-play” memecoin galas.