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Rivian’s CEO said there’s a ‘shocking lack of choice’ for EVs in the US

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Rivian’s CEO and founder, RJ Scaringe, said the US needs a lot more cheap electric vehicles.

Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Scaringe said a lack of choices was the reason for low EV penetration in the US.

He said that electric vehicle adoption in the US, at 8%, is significantly lower than in the rest of the world.

“I really think the constraint isn’t the demand side, I think it’s the supply side,” Scaringe said. “I think there’s a shocking lack of choice, that there are much better choices in Europe. And by far, there’s the most choice in China.”

He said that for consumers interested in EVs, there were “well under five great choices” at a price point close to the average price of a new car in the US.

He added that, within a price range of $50,000, there was only one compelling choice of EV: a Tesla. In October, Tesla unveiled its most affordable models to date: the $36,990 Model 3 Standard and the $39,990 Model Y Standard.

“And that’s not a reflection of a healthy market with lots of choice,” Scaringe said. “If you think of it as a consumer, you have 300 different internal combustion engine choices at that price or lower, and you have maybe one highly compelling EV choice.”

Rivian is working to provide cheaper EV alternatives. It is gearing up to start production on its cheapest EV to date, the R2 model, a $45,000 SUV.

In the interview, Scaringe also said he agrees with the Trump administration’s push to bring manufacturing back to the US.

“I think the push to industrialize in the United States is appropriate, and it’s something we’re very aligned with the administration on,” he said.

The US EV industry comprises Rivian, Tesla, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, BMW, and Kia, among others.

Brands like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesla dominate the EV market in Europe. Chinese brands like BYD, NIO, and MG also sell on the continent.

Meanwhile, the EV industry in China is seeing fierce competition. BYD, Tesla’s biggest global rival, saw its sales fall 12% in October compared to the same period a year earlier, as it faces a tough fight from local EV startups Xpeng, Nio, and Leapmotor.

Other players, such as smartphone manufacturer-turned EV maker Xiaomi, are also seeing success in the country with strong sales.




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AT&T CEO says he made a mistake in how he went about fixing company culture — but the viral memo wasn’t it

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CEO John Stankey said he made some missteps in addressing company culture at AT&T — and shed some new light on his internal memo that went viral.

The lengthy memo, which was first reported by Business Insider in August, described how the company was moving to a “more market-based culture,” setting off discourse about the state of workplace loyalty.

Stankey gave some insight into the goal behind the memo during a conversation at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit on Tuesday.

When asked to name a mistake he’s made, Stankey said he was too slow to tackle the “culture evolution” that was needed. He said he put it among several areas of focus for the company and that instead he should’ve put it at the forefront and forced specific actions to make it happen.

Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute, suggested that was why Stanley sent that memo this year, rather than sooner.

“The memo shouldn’t be over-rotated on. It’s one of a series of steps in trying to put a framework out there and remove excuses for leaders to lead,” Stankey said, adding the memo gave context on the framework he was building for the business.

“That memo outlined my point of view on it, and it gives leaders that want to lead all the air cover in the world they need to go and execute around that framework,” he said.

AT&T has undergone a number of changes as a company in the past year, including a return-to-office mandate of five days a week.

In the memo to employees, Stankey effectively said they should get on board with changes to the company culture, or get out.

“We run a dynamic, customer-facing business, tackling large-scale, challenging initiatives,” Stankey said in the memo. “If the requirements dictated by this dynamic do not align to your personal desires, you have every right to find a career opportunity that is suitable to your aspirations and needs.”

At the event on Tuesday, Stankey also outlined how AT&T is pushing employees to adopt AI. He said the company has tutorials and other educational tools for employees to upskill with AI, and that he’s paying attention to who is using them.

“I want to see who’s building their skill set, where they’re building, and this is just the next set of skills that people are going to have to have,” he said.




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Kalshi’s CEO compared his company’s ‘net positive’ rivalry with Polymarket to Tom Brady and Eli Manning

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Kalshi’s CEO says his company’s rivalry with Polymarket has parallels to two sets of sporting legends.

In an episode of the “20VC” podcast released on Monday, Tarek Mansour explained how prediction market rival Polymarket has encouraged his company to work harder.

“What I’m learning over time is that an industry truly becomes an industry when there’s a rivalry, because that rivalry will push you beyond the limits of what you thought you could get to,” Mansour said.

He compared the companies to National Football League quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning.

“When Tom Brady kind of reflected on that back in the day, he’s like, ‘You know, we were like the most ferocious on the field, and we fought each other,'” Mansour said. “But then over time, he became grateful for that because he realized that without Manning being in there and vice versa, he would have never achieved what he achieved.”

“I think that’s happening in prediction markets,” he added.

Kalshi, founded in 2018, lets users bet on the outcome of events such as elections, sports matches, and economic indicators. Last week, it announced partnerships with media giants CNN and CNBC, and said that it raised $1 billion at a valuation of $11 billion.

Polymarket, its blockchain-enabled competitor, was founded in 2020 and offers similar services. It was last valued at $13.5 billion in November, per PitchBook.

The popularity of prediction platforms has exploded since a legal victory for Kalshi in the US last fall. Now, users can bet on questions ranging from the popularity of Labubu dolls to Elon Musk’s net worth.

Last year, Mansour said in an interview that his employees asked social media influencers to promote memes about an FBI raid on the home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan. On Monday’s podcast, Mansour called the move a “mistake” and said he “made clear to the team: ‘Don’t ever do this again.'”

Mansour also compared the two companies to soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and said that it was not a coincidence that the two “greatest” players exist in the same era.

“Without Polymarket, we wouldn’t have pushed our marketing and pushed our product as hard,” he said. “That sort of infighting is going to push both of us to scale this industry and reach heights that we honestly wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, which long-term is actually net positive for the customer.”

Polymarket did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment about Mansour’s comparisons.




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Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says AI scaling ‘must be pushed to the maximum’

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There’s a debate rippling through Silicon Valley: How far can scaling laws take the technology?

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, whose company just released Gemini 3 to widespread acclaim, has made it clear where he stands on the issue.

“The scaling of the current systems, we must push that to the maximum, because at the minimum, it will be a key component of the final AGI system,” he said at the Axios’ AI+ Summit in San Francisco last week. “It could be the entirety of the AGI system.”

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as well as humans. It’s the goal all the leading AI companies are competing to reach, fueling huge amounts of spending on infrastructure and talent.

AI scaling laws suggest that the more data and compute an AI model is given, the smarter it will get.

Hassabis said that scaling alone will likely get the industry to AGI, but that he suspects there will need to be”one or two” other breakthroughs as well.

The problem with scaling alone is that there is a limit to publicly available data, and adding compute means building data centers, which is expensive and taxing on the environment.

Some AI watchers are also concerned that the AI companies behind the leading large-language models are beginning to show diminishing returns on their massive investments in scaling.

Researchers like Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta who recently announced he was leaving to run his own startup, believe the industry needs to consider another way.

“Most interesting problems scale extremely badly,” he said at the National University of Singapore in April. “You cannot just assume that more data and more compute means smarter AI.”

LeCun is leaving Meta to work on building world models, an alternative to large-language models that rely on collecting spatial data rather than language-based data.

“The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences,” he wrote on LinkedIn in November.




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Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says AI isn’t overhyped — the biggest gains from automating corporate work are still ahead

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If AI feels overhyped now, Eric Schmidt suggests that businesses should brace themselves — the real disruption hasn’t even begun yet.

In an interview with Professor Graham Allison at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University on Monday, the former Google CEO pushed back on the idea that AI’s rapid growth is a speculative bubble, saying that the technology is actually under-hyped.

“If anything, it’s under-hyped because you are fundamentally automating businesses,” he said.

The real transformation, he said, is happening deep inside companies, where AI systems are beginning to take over the “boring” tasks that quietly consume billions in corporate spending.

The biggest gains, he suggested, will come from automating the backbone of corporate work: the repeatable, time-consuming processes buried deep inside every organization.

The former Google chief listed billing, accounting, product design, delivery, and inventory management as examples of this.

“There’s an awful lot there — it’s extraordinary,” he said, pointing to areas like medicine, climate solutions, and engineering as sectors where automation could accelerate breakthroughs.

Schmidt, who helped steer Google’s early investments in AI and later co-authored a book on AI with Henry Kissinger, implied the technology’s economic impact will be far larger than markets or executives appreciate.

Still, not everyone agrees with that perspective. Some economists are sounding alarm bells that the AI boom is overheated.

In an interview this week, renowned economist Ruchir Sharma said the AI surge displays all four traits of a classic bubble and could unravel if interest rates rise, while tech leaders such as Sam Altman and Bill Gates have cautioned that parts of the market resemble the dot-com era.

Far beyond coding

To illustrate how quickly AI capabilities are advancing, Schmidt described watching an AI system generate an entire software program.

“Holy crap. The end of me,” he said.

“I’ve been doing programming for 55 years. To see something start and end in front of your own life is really profound,” he added.

However, he said that AI’s long-term upside extends far beyond coding.

From back-office workflows to logistics and scientific discovery, Schmidt believes the automation curve is still in its early stages of scaling and that Wall Street is underestimating the magnitude of the shift.

“The reason people are spending this amount of money,” he said, “is to automate the boring parts of their business.”




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The US is taking a stake in a chip startup led by Intel’s ousted CEO

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The US government is poised to become a shareholder in a semiconductor startup chaired by Pat Gelsinger, who ran Intel until his resignation last year.

The Commerce Department said on Monday that the Trump administration signed a nonbinding letter of intent to invest up to $150 million in xLight, a startup trying to build a more advanced and cost-effective way to manufacture chips.

The investment would come from the CHIPS and Science Act and would be structured as equity, giving the federal government direct ownership in the company.

The deal — a first from the Trump administration’s CHIPS Research and Development Office — signals Washington’s effort to regain leadership in chipmaking. Most advanced semiconductors are manufactured outside the US, led by TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea — areas where China’s influence looms large.

Intel warned in July that it may halt development of its next-generation chip, 14A, due to financial reasons. If Intel gives up on 14A, this could be a death blow to US chip manufacturing, Business Insider’s Alistair Barr wrote in a July report.

“For far too long, America ceded the frontier of advanced lithography to others. Under President Trump, those days are over,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Monday’s press release.

“This partnership would back a technology that can fundamentally rewrite the limits of chipmaking. Best of all, we would be doing it here at home,” Lutnick added.

The Palo Alto-based startup, founded in 2021, is developing free-electron laser technology, “an alternative light source” for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that power cutting-edge chip production, the press release said.

xLight said on its website that its systems would enhance Dutch firm ASML’s machines, “the undisputed global leader in EUV lithography systems.” EUV systems are only produced by ASML. xLight’s technology will “transform semiconductor fab capabilities and dramatically reduce capital and operating expenses,” it added.

Pat Gelsinger, who was pushed out as Intel CEO late last year after the company struggled with weak earnings and fell behind in the AI chip race, became xLight’s executive chairman in March. He is also a general partner at Playground Global, the venture firm that led xLight’s $40 million Series B round in July.

Gelsinger, who was CEO of Intel from 2021 to 2024, said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October that Intel “made a set of bad decisions over 15 years” and that technical leadership wasn’t “led by technologists for many years.”

“We were late on AI as well,” he added.

Gelsinger spent decades rising through the ranks at Intel and became one of the most influential voices behind the 2022 CHIPS Act, a landmark manufacturing legislation that reshaped America’s chip strategy.

xLight has the potential to “drive the next era of Moore’s Law, accelerating fab productivity, while developing a critical domestic capability,” said Gelsinger in a Monday press release.




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