Judge reluctantly approves $1.5M settlement with SEC over Twitter stock violation.

News publishers say OpenAI hid tools and datasets that could identify copyrighted journalism in ChatGPT outputs, escalating their lawsuit with a new motion for sanctions.

OpenAI may be sanctioned for hiding, deleting ChatGPT logs in NYT copyright fight.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Bloomberg/Getty Images OpenAI integrates Codex into its ChatGPT app, creating a hub for work and AI tools. OpenAI's new GPT-5.6 models are designed to meet varying user needs with different price points. The wave of models and product releases comes amid fierce competition in both areas. OpenAI has built a super app for work. On Thursday, the company announced it is now merging its popular Codex AI coding tool into its ChatGPT desktop app, a move to turn the flagship AI app into a one-stop shop for engineers and other professionals. OpenAI also revealed a Work setting for the ChatGPT app and a batch of state-of-the-art AI models in its new GPT-5.6 family. The latest wave of releases encapsulates OpenAI's ambitious strategy: train uber-powerful AI models, deliver them to ChatGPT's massive user base, and become an indispensable part of life for millions of workers. ChatGPT has almost 1 billion users, OpenAI engineer Thibault Sottiaux said on a Thursday livestream. OpenAI, which had an early lead in the industry, is fighting to stay at the forefront of AI capabilities, duking it out release by release with rival Anthropic and trying to stay ahead of Google, Meta, SpaceXAI, and cheaper Chinese AI models. Meta also announced its first paid AI model on Thursday. OpenAI originally launched Codex as a software engineering tool and has since expanded its reach to a broader market. In June, the company released a report that said areas like data analysis and research were growing faster than traditional coding uses on Codex and that 5 million people use the tool each week. Codex leader Andrew Ambrosino called Thursday's merger of Codex into ChatGPT "only the first" step: "We're working to unify the experience across web, mobile, and desktop—but we want to do it thoughtfully, not smash two things together with a toggle and call it a day." On OpenAI's Thursday livestream, Sottiaux and other colleagues showcased the desktop app's new Work feature, which will incorporate popular aspects of Codex, such as the ability to modify a computer's files and to operate autonomously in a browser. OpenAI has filed the confidential paperwork to go public. The AI competition, government involvement, and research progress could affect the timing of the company's initial public offering. When asked by CNBC on Thursday if OpenAI would go public this year, CEO Sam Altman said, "I don't know." Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read the original article on Business Insider

Claude subscribers must soon pay usage-based fees to access Anthropic’s best consumer AI model—a sign that the golden era of AI subscriptions is ending.

I went on a road trip to four national parks in six days. Daniel Lu With three friends, I embarked on a whirlwind road trip to four national parks in six days. Limited time at parks led to rushed visits, especially at Yellowstone and Glacier National Park. Weather impacted the experience, but overall, the trip was considered a success despite challenges. In June, three of my friends and I embarked on a long, ambitious, and, at times, tiring road trip from Wyoming to Seattle. We had planned to stop at four national parks in six days, spending a few hours in each. We knew from the start that we wouldn't be able to see everything in any of the parks, and we were fine with that. When else were we going to fly to Montana or Wyoming? We wanted our trip to include a mix of national parks, state parks, urban exploration, and open roads. When we went to Yosemite National Park last October, we wished we could have stayed forever, but we had no regrets about spending one night there, so we assumed the same would be fine this time around. Seeing four of the most stunning national parks in one week — Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, and Mount Rainier — was hard to put into words. However, I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to see and knew I would likely have to return to get the full experience. We didn't have enough time to explore each place There was so much to see with so little time. Daniel Lu We spent the most time in Grand Teton National Park, staying two nights in Jackson, Wyoming, at a motel. We spent plenty of time at Jenny Lake, went horseback riding with the mountains in the background, and viewed Grand Teton's snowy peak for hours. When it came time to go to Yellowstone, though, we calculated we could spend only five hours there, since we had to drive another hour north to Livingston, Montana, to reach our hotel. As soon as we arrived, we headed straight for Thumb Geyser. It was less crowded than but not as stunning as Old Faithful, which we rushed to 15 minutes later. Then, we bolted to Grand Prismatic Spring. By then, we were hungry and knew we had to find an open restaurant on the Montana side of the park, so we drove out and stopped for a few pictures along the border. The weather wasn't perfect some days. Noah Sheidlower I was so enamored by Grand Teton that I definitely did not give Yellowstone enough of my enthusiasm and time. For the next two days, we drove through Montana's major cities, stopping in Bozeman, Helena, Butte, Missoula, and Kalispell en route to Glacier National Park. Given our tight schedule and an added delay from getting lunch at a restaurant with very slow service, Glacier somehow felt more rushed. We had time for about an hour of kayaking on Lake McDonald before heading up Going-to-the-Sun Road to Avalanche Lake, where the road had closed due to ice. I left wishing I could have done much more in what many consider America's prettiest national park. Though we only spent about three hours in Mount Rainier, I was more satisfied with what we saw. The mountain was stunning from every angle, and I didn't feel the longer hikes would have been as fulfilling as staring at Mount Rainier's reflection on the lake. As the trip progressed, all of the nature seemed to blend together The parks are so beautiful, but some views began to feel repetitive. Daniel Lu Every park had its unique beauty, and the mind-bending geysers of Yellowstone complemented the tranquil, deer-filled trails of Glacier. By the time we got to Mount Rainier, though, I had felt natured-out. We had seen so many waterfalls, valleys, mountains, and wildlife that I almost felt numb to the views at the latter two parks. On one occasion, we passed by an overlook that I was convinced we had seen before, only to realize it was an entirely different viewpoint. By the time we got to Old Faithful, we were quite tired. Noah Sheidlower Aside from the major distinguishing sites, many of the trails and roads in the latter parks felt like repeats of those in the earlier ones we visited, which I'm confident would not have been the case if I had visited them on separate trips. I know I missed much of the nuance in each park; every moose or bison I saw on the side of the road was just "another bison." Since our schedule was so tight, we were stuck with whatever weather we got Some days, the weather was excellent. Noah Sheidlower Given that we only had a few hours in each park except Grand Teton, we had to deal with whatever the weather turned out to be. We were lucky overall, with mostly clear skies, though we got stuck in a storm at Grand Teton that prevented us from doing more ambitious hikes. The mountains disappeared behind heavy clouds, and visibility was low. This was also the case in part at Mount Rainier, where clouds blocked most of the mountain at a few viewpoints. Of course, if we had stayed longer at any of these parks during a rainy week, the outcome could have been worse. Still, our tight schedule left too little of a cushion for adverse weather. I have no regrets, but I wouldn't do this trip again The stunning beauty of the natural parks was overwhelming. Noah Sheidlower After a few weeks of reflection, I have no regrets about how we planned this trip. Every park visit worked out, the road trip was smooth, and everywhere we went was beautiful. My friends and I paid only $80 combined to get into the parks because we had America the Beautiful annual passes that covered parking, plus entrance and standard-amenity fees. It felt like a great deal, and we can still use our passes until they expire to visit other parks and federal recreational lands around the US. As much as I wish we'd spent more time at each stop, the reality is we all have limited vacation days, travel budgets, and so much else we want to see in the world. We probably wouldn't have been able to see all four of these parks in the next few years if we had broken the trip into two or three parts. Still, I likely would have been able to enjoy the national parks more if I divided the trip into Grand Teton and Yellowstone, then a separate trip doing Glacier, Mount Rainier, and Olympic National Park outside Seattle. To get the full experience of most of these places, though, I do feel I need to plan some return trips. Read the original article on Business Insider

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC On Thursday, Meta launched a new model, Muse Spark 1.1, for coding and AI agents. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said pricing will be "very aggressive," calling out other labs for high costs. The move comes as companies throttle their employees' AI spending due to huge bills. Meta could spark a price war in the booming AI coding market. The tech giant announced its latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.1, on Thursday, saying it performs well on industry tests for coding and AI agents. It's Meta's first AI model that it charges users for. In comments on X, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the model has a "very low price." Zuckerberg called out other AI companies for pricing their chatbots at "very extreme" levels in comments to Bloomberg. He told Bloomberg that the model outperformed Google's Gemini in several categories, including agents, coding, and other capabilities. "We think that there's a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost," Zuckerberg told the outlet. The model, which isn't fully available to developers yet, marks the latest milestone for Meta's AI efforts — and shows the company intends to compete on price. If Meta's new AI models can compete with widely-used coding tools from rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor, that could represent a huge new source of revenue. Meta's stock was up nearly 2% on Thursday. Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, told CNBC that the company will charge $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens — lower than the pricing for Google and OpenAI's flagship models. The cost of using AI has become a growing concern for companies as employees incorporate the technology into more of their day-to-day work. Companies have been throttling their employees' use of AI in recent months as vibe coding takes off. Coinbase, for example, now limits its engineers' weekly AI spending to $500 to $5,000 a week. Meta quoted one of its customers, AI coding startup Cline, saying that the new AI model's price point makes it easy to run heavy AI coding tasks at scale. "That combination is rare, and it's exactly why we wanted Cline developers to have access early," Saoud Rizwan, the Cline CEO, said on Meta's website. Meta is spending massive amounts of cash on AI, raising its capital expenditure guidance for this year to $125-$145 billion, up from a previous estimate of $115-$135 billion. Meta remains highly dependent on its ads business, which accounts for about 98% of its total revenue, according to its first-quarter earnings results. "We believe Meta is well positioned to generate ample revenue to support its spending, driven by monetization of its own AI initiatives, advertising share gains, incremental subscription revenue, an optionality of cloud offering, and fees for external use of its AI models," BNP Paribas Equity Research senior analyst Nick Jones wrote in a note to investors on Thursday. Joe Tigay, Equity Armor Investments portfolio manager, said that undercutting prices signals that Meta's AI lags behind Anthropic's and OpenAI's. "They are forced to compete on price and raw computing real estate rather than model superiority," he told Business Insider. Meta is also working on a coming AI model codenamed "Watermelon," which Wang said has caught up to one of the latest versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT. The model uses "an order of magnitude" more computing power than Meta's previous model, Wang told staff last week, Business Insider reported earlier. Meta didn't respond to a request for comment. Correction: July 9, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misspelled an analyst's name. It should be Nick Jones. This story has also been updated to include Wang's comments to CNBC on the model's pricing. Have a tip? Contact Charles via email at crollet@businessinsider.com or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read the original article on Business Insider

The updates amount to a significant expansion of the platform.

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The model release is the first since SpaceX went public in June and will help SpaceXAI compete with other frontier model providers, particularly in coding.

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Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are among the most demanding workloads in computational science. Using them, researchers can observe atomic behavior in... Source

The author got to go to a World Cup game in Houston, TX, with her son and daughter. Courtesy of Jamie Davis Smith My son, 11, is a huge soccer fan — so much so that he's gotten me into the sport. I wanted so badly to get tickets to the World Cup for us, but it started to seem impossible. I wrote about my quest and got an email from Sugar Land, TX, that I worried was fake. It wasn't. My son, 11, is a die-hard soccer fan who did the impossible: He got me to love soccer and soccer culture. Long before the World Cup began, he begged me to go to a match. He typically plays soccer five days a week, often following a skills class with travel team practice. He almost exclusively wears soccer jerseys and knows minute facts about soccer players and teams. I assumed getting tickets to the World Cup would be difficult but possible. I entered every ticket lottery and opened a credit card that promised priority access, but struck out at every turn. Because I am a storyteller, I wrote about our quest to see a match. When getting tickets proved far harder than I anticipated, my son was despondent but still hopeful. The author flew to Texas with her daughter and son to see a match between Brazil and Japan. Courtesy of Jamie Davis Smith We still planned a great World Cup experience — until a concussion thwarted our plans Even though we didn't have tickets to the World Cup, we decided to make the best of the tournament. We planned to attend watch parties and tune in to as many games as possible. My son, a graduating 5th grader, was looking forward to an all-day World Cup-themed extravaganza at school to celebrate. However, the night before the World Cup started, an angry teammate threw a soccer ball directly at my son's head, leaving him with a concussion. Instead of a joyful World Cup opener and the end of elementary school, my son was coping with a raging headache, nausea, and fatigue. He missed celebrating the World Cup's first match with his friends. Because he had to significantly limit screen time and loud noises hurt his head, we couldn't go to watch parties or view more than a few highlights of early games. My son also missed playing with his soccer team for the last match of the season and spent much of his graduation ceremony with a splitting headache. We spent my son's time convalescing, sorting through Panini World Cup stickers, and swapping with other soccer fans so he could fill in his World Cup book with all 980 stickers. We built Legos, including a new Ronaldo set released for the World Cup. My son's grace in handling the loss of so much he had been looking forward to made me even more determined to get him to a World Cup match. However, sky-high ticket prices, combined with loss of income from having to take off work and medical expenses, meant a match was more out of reach than ever. At first, the author thought the email from Sugar Land, TX, was too good to be true. Courtesy of Jamie Davis Smith A too-good-to-be-true email landed in my inbox In the midst of World Cup excitement that seemed out of reach, an unexpected email landed in my inbox. A representative from Sugar Land, TX, just outside the World Cup host city of Houston, read about our determination to see a World Cup game. "Would my son and I like to attend a game in Houston and visit Sugar Land?" they asked. My response was an immediate and enthusiastic yes, although I didn't tell my son about the offer right away because it seemed not just improbable but impossible. If I could get my son to Texas, Visit Sugar Land, an official supporter of the World Cup in Houston, would provide us with tickets to a match, and I could bring my daughter too. I spent several hours wondering if the offer was real. However, after a few days of ironing out logistics and no odd requests for our Social Security numbers or my mother's maiden name, I bought our plane tickets. We started counting down the days until the match. The author's son thoroughly enjoyed the match. Courtesy of Jamie Davis Smith The match was so much better than we expected When it was time to fly to Sugar Land, my son wasn't completely recovered, but his doctor cleared him to travel. He boarded the plane in complete shock that he was actually headed to see Brazil face off against Japan in a knockout match. My son barely slept the night before the game. When the hour to head to the match finally arrived, he wore a customized Brazil jersey that a friend brought for him straight from Rio de Janeiro a few years ago. The jersey was a little too big then, but it fits perfectly now, perhaps a sign that this was meant to be. My son insisted that we get to our seats over an hour early so that we didn't miss a second of the pre-game ceremonies. He screamed when the countdown clock hit zero, and the kickoff began. The energy in the stadium was electrifying. After about 30 seconds of play, my son turned to me and said, "This is a thousand times better than I was expecting," a bold statement since he had impossibly high expectations to begin with. At half-time, my son told me that our trip to Sugar Land was the best one he had ever taken. That night, drifting off to sleep, he said "the whole match" was his favorite part of the day. Our World Cup trip turned into an unexpected getaway The author and her kids also enjoyed a minor league baseball game while in Texas. Courtesy of Jamie Davis Smith Although our trip to Sugar Land started as a pilgrimage to the most storied soccer tournament of all time, it turned into a fun family trip to a place we might not otherwise have visited. We saw the Sugar Land Space Cowboys win a minor league baseball game, explored the city's natural history museum, and enjoyed a ropes course in a forest. We ate delicious food, from Thai to Tex-Mex, that reflects the Houston metro area's reputation as one of the most diverse parts of the country. Throughout it all, my son and I were on a high that lasted well past the match, almost erasing everything we had to cancel during the worst of his concussion. This is truly the spirit of the World Cup: learning about new places and bringing people together. Thanks to the kindness of strangers, my family had a World Cup experience we will never forget — and I fell even deeper into my love of everything soccer. Read the original article on Business Insider

Brown University professor Roberto Serrano told Business Insider that the "cost of cheating has basically gone down to zero." Roberto Serrano Brown University professor Roberto Serrano saw scores drop between a take-home midterm and an in-person final. He suspects the students cheated with AI. "It's certainly a wake-up call to the professors," he told Business Insider. Serrano shared the exam scores. Some dropped from perfect scores on the midterm to below 20% on the final. Roberto Serrano's class scored curiously well on the take-home midterm exam. When he suspected widespread AI cheating and made their final exam in-person, their grades tanked. The Brown University professor teaches welfare economics and social choice theory. The midterm was administered from home after a shooter killed two students in December. "The problem with this technology is that the cost of cheating has basically gone down to zero," he told Business Insider. "It's very easy for students to succumb to the temptation." When he told students that the final exam would be in person, many previously high-scoring students dropped out. Others who scored in the high 90s on the midterm scored in the 50s on the final. A chart of the data, which was first publicized by Inside Higher Ed, shows each student's grades: Brian E. Clark, Brown's VP for news and strategic campus communications, wrote to Business Insider that Serrano shared details with the university's standing committee on the academic code on July 8. The committee "move forward according to its procedures." "Brown treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness," Clark wrote. The scandal has drawn interest across the internet, and particularly among those who work in tech. Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham posted on X about it; two Google DeepMind staffers also shared their thoughts. Serrano wasn't shocked that the score changes drew interest — but he was surprised by the scale. "I'm a little overwhelmed," he said. He said he's received "hundreds of emails," many from Brown alums. His colleagues, who are off campus for summer break, have also been texting him about it. Some of those commenting online applauded the student who was consistently high-scoring: first a 95.5, then a 95. Serrano said this was an "excellent student" that he knew "very well." Others shouted out the consistently low-performing student: first a 55, then a 59. "I admire that person," Serrano said. Glass AI founder Tom Henke's commentary on the scoring chart. X.com/@TomGlassAI More debated the merits of this generation coming into the workforce. Can students who cheat on exams with AI be trusted to do hard work? Some argued that the consistent scorers are the ones who'd make the best workers. Serrano agreed. "Since I'm a big defender of integrity, yes, I would hire that person," he said. University professors continue to debate how to rebuff AI-driven cheating. Last year, teachers told Business Insider that they were crafting assignments that were more difficult to complete with a chatbot. Serrano's grade distribution isn't a perfect study, of course. There are other reasons there could be variance in test scores, like the final being harder than the midterm, and it hasn't been definitively proven that there was mass cheating with AI, though the university is investigating. But the incident does demonstrate just how much of a headache concerns of AI cheating have become for instructors. Serrano himself said he plans never to administer a take-home exam again and will also eliminate the homework portion of his students' grades. He advised other educators to think critically about their own AI policies, too. "It's certainly a wake-up call to the professors," he said. "We need to pay attention to this." Read the original article on Business Insider

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Prakash Singh—Bloomberg via Getty Images/Reuters Cloudflare tracks AI web crawl requests and referrals from these bots. The data is a proxy for whether AI giants take more from the web than they give back. There's one top AI company that's far worse than others, according to Cloudflare data. At the start of every quarter, I check in with Cloudflare to see how the biggest AI companies are treating the web. The latest data tells a familiar story: Strip-mining continues apace. For the week of July 1 through 7, the latest "crawl-to-refer" data shows Anthropic remains the biggest outlier. The AI company's bots crawled webpages about 2,800 times for every one referral sent back. OpenAI was far behind, followed by Perplexity in third. Then, there's another big drop to Microsoft, followed by Google. DuckDuckGo is one of the only players that comes close to offering a fair balance between taking from the web and giving back, with three scrapes for every one referral, according to Cloudflare data. A chart showing crawl-to-refer ratios Cloudflare For Anthropic, there was an improvement from roughly 8,800-to-1 in early April. A quick check of other recent seven-day periods, though, shows Anthropic is still scraping like crazy. During the first seven days of May, for instance, the company's bots scraped sites 24,700 times for every one referral. (Maybe some of its bots went on summer break in early July?) Cloudflare's metric measures how often AI company bots ask to crawl webpages compared with how often their services send users back to those sites. The figures are an important proxy for whether AI giants are sustaining, or undermining, the economic bargain that historically powered the web, where sites allowed free crawling in exchange for traffic. In the new generative AI world, this deal is breaking down. Now, AI answer engines and chatbots give users direct answers, making people less likely to visit the websites that created the content in the first place. That reduces the financial incentive to put high quality content on the web. Anthropic promotes itself as the most ethical AI company, but this data is a reminder that what's ethical or not is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. I'll leave you to decide. In recent months, Anthropic has criticized rivals for using its AI model outputs to develop and improve their own models. It calls these techniques "distillation attacks" and says this is against its terms of service. Step back a bit, and this begins to look a lot like what Anthropic has been doing to websites: Collecting their content, often against content owners' wishes, and using it to develop or improve its own products. Welcome to the modern web, Anthropic. You may have to get used to your outputs being used in ways you don't like. Note: Anthropic has previously disputed Cloudflare's methodology, saying it could not verify the company's calculations and arguing that new search features are increasing referrals. Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com. Read the original article on Business Insider

As agentic AI accelerates enterprise transformation, data sovereignty is crystallizing from a compliance checkbox into a foundational strategic imperative — one that determines not just where data lives, but who captures the economic value it generates. The debate is particularly acute in Europe, where nations are pressing to retain both data residency and the commercial […] The post Data sovereignty emerges as the defining moat in the agentic AI era appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

Beatrice Nolan / Fortune: Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI “regulation without transparent or complete rules” and “businesses can't plan” without rules  —  Microsoft President Brad Smith has weighed in on U.S. policy on AI, saying that the Trump administration's current …

A measured look at distributed training, from DDP and FSDP to the ZeRO stages in between, and why the wiring between your GPUs matters as much as the strategy you choose The post Behind the Scenes of Distributed Training and Why Your GPU Wiring Matters as Much as Your Strategy appeared first on Towards Data Science.

I drove across the country for my dream job. Roshelle Patterson I took a $15,000 pay cut and a $12,000 loan to chase a gaming career in California. My dream job became a source of stress, and I missed my long-distance partner. I left the role after less than a year, and now I'm living a life I love on the East Coast. I've loved video games for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I fought my brother for turns on his Game Boy so I could play "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3." I spent hours playing Neopets games to earn Neopoints for my virtual pets. I remember peeking over my mom's shoulder while she played endless rounds of solitaire on our family computer, impatiently waiting for my turn to load up "Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge." Although I loved games, I never saw them as a realistic career path. Instead, I pursued a stable career in military intelligence that left little room for creativity — but seven years into that job, I realized I missed writing, art, and connecting with people through work. Around that time, I became interested in UX design and decided to earn a master's degree. I started participating in game jams and collaborating with indie developers. The more I worked on games, the more things started to click. I realized the gaming industry needed UX researchers, people whose job was to understand players and advocate for their experience. For the first time, I could see a path that connected the things I loved with the kind of work I wanted to do. I thought I had landed my dream role I started freelancing with an indie studio and slowly built experience through contract roles and side projects. For nearly three years, I worked toward one goal: landing a UX research role at a major gaming studio. Eventually, I got the interview I had been waiting for. The job-application process spanned months and included roughly six interviews, assignments, and many emails. When I finally received the offer, it felt like everything had changed overnight. There was just one problem: The job was in Southern California, and my life — including my boyfriend of over a year — was nearly 3,000 miles away on the East Coast. The company did not cover my relocation costs, so I took out a $12,000 personal loan to fund the move. I also accepted a roughly $15,000 annual pay cut because I believed this was my dream job. Looking back, there were clear warning signs that this wasn't the best choice, but I convinced myself that the job would be worth it. The move felt exciting until I arrived The drive to California was fun, but I started missing my partner immediately. Roshelle Patterson A friend helped me make the drive from Maryland to California in a vintage RV. The trip itself was stressful, but exciting: We ate breakfast at Cracker Barrel in the morning, listened to romantasy audiobooks during the day, and spent the nights talking about the future. For a brief stretch, it felt like an adventure I hadn't experienced in years, but underneath that was grief. The hardest part was leaving my partner behind. I had gone into the move believing that the distance would be manageable, but even knowing that we were committed to each other, leaving still hurt in ways I hadn't fully prepared for. When I finally arrived in California, reality set in almost immediately. Pushing through the dry air, I lugged my cats and everything I could fit into my car across the parking lot, shaded by tall palm trees, and into the luxury apartment I had rented sight unseen just one month earlier. My apartment, which cost about $1,000 more a month than my last place, was mostly empty, with boxes still in storage back on the East Coast. The loneliness was immediate, but there was no time to sit with it. Work started almost right away. My dream job became a source of anxiety At first, I was thrilled just to be at my job, but the pace became challenging. LB Studios/Getty Images On paper, the job felt like exactly what I had been working toward: a full-time job in my dream industry. The pace felt stressful, though — I was still learning, but I often felt like I was already behind. At the same time, there was a wider sense of instability in the industry. Layoffs at other major studios were part of everyday conversation, and security anywhere felt nonexistent. Long workdays became my new normal. Still, I couldn't keep up — it felt like there was always more to do than time to do it in. On some nights, late calls with my partner were the only thing keeping me grounded long enough to make it through the next day. One night in fall 2024, after almost a year into my role, everything finally clicked. I was sitting in my apartment, exhausted and afraid of layoffs. Around that time, wildfires were burning in the distance, and the mountains outside my balcony were lit with a faint orange glow under a sky filled with smoke. I was alone, burned out, and deeply unhappy, while the world outside my window was burning. I remember looking around my apartment and realizing I had built an entire life around a dream that no longer felt like mine. That night, I decided to leave, and I submitted my resignation soon after. Leaving California helped me find the life I actually wanted Once I returned to the East Coast, I moved less than an hour away from my partner so we could see each other more often. After almost a year of seeing each other only twice, being together regularly again changed everything. Not long after I moved back, we got married, and about a year later, we welcomed our first baby. I still love video games. I still work in the gaming industry through freelance projects, but now I do it on my own terms, with more space for the parts of my life that exist outside work. As it turns out, my real dream was building a life with the person I loved. Read the original article on Business Insider