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Former President Bill Clinton opened the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative Wednesday with a list of things that worry him. It would be irresponsible, almost jarring, for us to take off and not acknowledge the traumatic rise in political violence that weve seen in our country, Clinton said about the shooting deaths of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark. Were pulling further and further away from one another. Clinton said he worried about the dismantling of domestic and foreign assistance programs, the war on science and public health, cuts to education, trade wars, and being at risk of losing our freedom of speech. Were trying to do everything we can to provide a counterweight to a lot of the negative things that have taken place in the last several months, Clinton said of the two-day conference, which shifted its format to create working groups to tackle many of the issues he outlined. The conferences biggest announcement on Wednesday was a partnership between the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Dr. Reddys Laboratories, Unitaid, and Wits RHI that will provide Gilead Sciences HIV prevention drug lenacapavir in 120 low- and middle-income countries for $40 a person each year, starting in 2027. The Gates Foundation announced a similar agreement with the Indian manufacturer Hetero Labs. Clinton said the move was partially in response to foreign aid cuts from President Donald Trumps administration, which he said could lead to more than 6 million more HIV cases and potentially 4 million more deaths in Africa. In July, GOP leaders stopped an additional cut of $400 million to PEPFAR, a program combating HIV/AIDS credited with saving millions of lives since its creation under then-President George W. Bush. Points of Light Chairman Neil Bush said PEPFAR and the way it has helped so many in Africa has always been a point of family pride. And though he hasnt talked to his brother, former President George W. Bush, about the new program announced at the Clinton Global Initiative, Neil Bush said he sees it as a way philanthropy can help fill in gaps. It seems like Americas withdrawal from the world is having terrible ramifications, in my personal view, he said, adding that Points of Light hopes to increase the help it provides through its ambitious plan to double the number of volunteers in America in the next 10 years. Activist and philanthropist Abigail Disney urged Clinton Global Initiative attendees to be more aggressive in their giving and encouraged them to support cultural movements instead of programs. I dont care where you are on the political spectrum there is mistrust, theres fear and there is anger, and we should all be very alarmed, Disney said. And I hang around big philanthropies these days and I dont see any alarm. I dont think thats because theyre not alarmed. I think thats because theyre afraid. Everybodys afraid. However, President Clinton said that the Clinton Global Initiative, which launched in 2005, has always looked to create solutions. If we hold our heads high, keep our eyes and ears open and deal with others with an outstretched hand and not a clenched fist, weve got a chance to keep hope alive, he said. We have the chance to make a meaningful difference in other peoples lives. _____ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Glen Gamboa, AP business writer
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Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of summer, which means many entrepreneurs minds are turning towards beach getaways, lakeside camping trips, or lazy days at the pool with the kids. These kinds of water-based activities are a great way to relax and stay cool. But according to fascinating research in neuroscience, swimming isnt just a fun vacation activity. It actually has special brain benefits that other forms of exercise just cant match. Not just another form of exercise It will surprise exactly no one that exercise is good for your brain. (If this is news to you, here are some studies for you to get up to speed.) Swimming is, obviously, a form of exercise, so therefore its good for your brain too. And thats the end of it, right? Not exactly. Swimming is a perfectly excellent way to get the generalized benefits of more movement in your life if thats your preferred way to work out. But psychologists and neuroscientists have uncovered a variety of unique benefits that swimming seems to provide. 1. Swimming reduces stress. In fact, the benefits of swimming start before you even stick a toe in the water. Psychologists have discovered that even just looking at a beach seems to help us calm down and let go of stress. Recent experiments show that after just two minutes of viewing water outdoors, blood pressure and heart rate drop. Its more calming to look at a lake, pool, or stream than trees or grass. And wider bodies of water bring more tranquility, explained star psychologist Adam Grant in a recent edition of his newsletter, Granted. Evolutionary psychologists suggest this may be because marine environments offered our hunter gatherer ancestors a rich source of food and a clear view of incoming predators. Whatever the reason though, the effect is clear. The human brain seems wired to love the beach. 2. Swimming makes your brain work better. You might spend time by the pool or lake in order to forget the stresses of your working life. But while youre leaving your stresses behind, youre actually also boosting your memory in general. For one study, neuroscientists forced rats to do daily laps in a mini rat pool and then tested their memories. After just seven days of swim training, researchers saw improvements in both short- and long-term memories, based on a reduction in the errors rats made each day, reports neuroscientist Seena Mathew. And its not just rats. Studies on whether humans see the same cognitive benefits are ongoing but initial results are promising. One showed kids recalled a list of words much more accurately after swimming, compared to when they colored or did CrossFit-like exercise. Another study of older adults concluded that swimmers had improved mental speed and attention compared with non-swimmers, Mathew says. 3. Swimming boosts mental health. If your holiday involves swimming outdoors under the sky, you can expect to see additional benefits. A large recent global survey of wild swimmersi.e., those who take their dips in open air pools or natural environmentsfound that mixing swimming and nature delivered a particularly large boost to peoples well-being. Experiment after experiment shows nature just seems to make humans happier. But the researchers behind the study think something else is driving much of the increase in mental health experienced by wild swimmers. Our study suggests that the key to this effect lies in experiencing feelings of autonomy and competencefreedom and mastery over the swimmers environmenttwo factors that are strongly linked to well-being, explained Lewis Elliot, one of the researchers behind the findings. Swimming outdoors makes us feel free and confident. And freedom and confidence make us happier. Time to hit the beach or pool? All of which adds up to a simple message for entrepreneurs: If youre daydreaming of the beach, pool, or lake this Memorial Day weekend, maybe you should follow your impulse to plan that trip. You already know swimming is a great way to unwind. New neuroscience reveals it is also apparently a form of exercise with special brain benefits. Spending some time in the water this summer is likely to make you calmer, smarter, happier, and more confident. So maybe its time to dig out that bathing suit.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on the terms of Nvidias investment in OpenAI, in which the GPU maker gets guaranteed chip sales, an equity stake, and likely a product road map for years to come. I also look at the industrys fixation on huge models and the quiet appeal of small ones. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. Nvidia cements its power as AI infrastructure race begins Now its all about data centers and electricity. Big Tech companies are promising that AI models and apps are about to revolutionize business, and executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say the greatest barrier to that happening is a dearth of data centers to run the models that businesses will soon need to operate. Big Tech companies are also challenged to find enough new energy sources to power and cool the massive data centers. Collectively, OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft plan to spend more than $325 billion on data centers by the end of 2025, The New York Times reports. Anthropic said last year that it expects to spend $100 billion on these massive facilities over the next decade. The tech companies are now racing to plan and finance the new data centers. And this is creating some unique arrangements. Nvidia announced Monday it will invest $100 billion in OpenAI, which will buy about 2% equity in the company. But OpenAI will likely use most of that money to buy Nvidia GPUs, or graphics processing units, the chips that represent the greatest single capital expenditure of building a data center. [T]hese investments might be circular and raise related party concerns, as Nvidia may own shares in a customer that will likely use such funds to buy more Nvidia gear, writes Morningstar equity analyst Brian Colello in a research brief. (OpenAI struck a similar agreement with Microsoft when it took a $10 billion investment from the software giant, then used the money to buy its Azure cloud computing services.) Notably, the Nvidia investment will time the release of the funds according to the pace at which OpenAI buys the chips: Nvidia gets guaranteed chip sales and a 2% share of OpenAI. (As Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, told CNBC: Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia.). But it may be even better than that. Pitchbook AI and cybersecurity analyst Dimitri Zabelin believes Nvidia intends to plan the design of its future AI chips according to what it learns from OpenAIs infrastructure scale-up. That could be an invaluable feedback loop if all of the big AI companies follow OpenAIs lead in scaling up its infrastructure and developing compute-intensive AI products. Nvidia is consolidating control over the AI stack and reinforcing its position as the indispensable enabler of the sectors next phase, Zabelin says. OpenAI will likely buy between 4 and 5 million of Nvidias new Vera Rubin GPUs, which will require 10 gigawatts of power to run. They will likely be installed within the five new data centers the company just announced as part of its Stargate Project (revealed at the White House with partners SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX). OpenAI now expects that Stargate will secure the full $500 billion in planned investment to build new data centers, and do so by the end of this year, ahead of schedule. Betting big on big modelsnot smaller, safer ones Right now, a huge portion of the total value of the stock market is held up by AI hope, the promise that AI will bring dramatic new efficiencies to the way business is done. Maybe businesses will grow more profitable by moving faster, or maybe theyll do so by sloughing off human workers. Most likely both. The massive infrastructure investments of the Big Tech companies are all about supporting that transformation. The companies building the gigantic data centers are frontier model companies; their products are huge, generalist models, like OpenAIs GPT-5 and Googles Gemini, that have trillions of parameters and are very expensive to train and operate. Generalist models are built to possess a wide array of knowledgeeven a modicum of common sense about how the world worksthat can be leveraged for all kinds of tasks. Theyre trained with massive amounts of diverse data and web content. Its these frontier models that the AI companies hope will evolve to possess artificial general intelligence (AGI), or as much intelligence as most humans bring to most tasks, and then superintelligence, in which the model is far smarter than humans at almost any task. But many of the analysts and researchers Ive spoken to say that businesses usually need smaller models trained with a narrower set of (often proprietary) data that automate a specific set of tasks. They dont need to power their apps with a gigantic (and expensive) model that knows about 15th-century gold coins and can write poetry. Small models often dont need to run inside a dedicated data center, but are small enough to run on on-premise computers (in some cases, laptops or phones) or within a private cloud. With less exposure to wider networks, models that run on the edge devices are far less exposed to would-be hackers that might try to steal or poison corporate or personal data. But OpenAI and Google arent selling that. They offer access to frontier models via application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers and corporations. And its the massive frontier models that carry the greatest risks for society-level harms such as aiding in the building of a bioweapon or crashing economic systems. Some have worried that putting so much intelligence and computing power together in one place could create a supercomputer smart enough to crack open every cryptocurrency wallet on the blockchainwhich would cause economic chaos. Reducing the number of large frontier models (and tightly controlling their use) may be the only rational approach to protecting against the large-scale harms they might, in theory, inflict. Currently, as the big AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta quickly and dramatically scale up their data centers and models, we are trusting them to keep the models from being used for harm. Can private, profit-driven companiessome of which are under great pressure to get to profitabilitycontrol intelligences far greater than our own? Lets hope so. More AI coverage from Fast Company: AI tools arent making much of a difference for companies Are companies calling themselves AI-first helping or hurting their own brands? This is how Gen Zers are AI-proofing their careers I gave ChatGPT $500 of real money to invest in stocks. Its picks surprised me Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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