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Lou Gerstner, the former IBM chief credited with turning the company around, has died at 83

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Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM who led the company through one of the most consequential turnarounds in corporate history, died on Saturday at the age of 83, the company said.

Gerstner ran IBM from 1993 to 2002, arriving at a time when the company was under severe pressure, and its future was in doubt. IBM was losing money, the tech industry was shifting rapidly, and there was widespread expectation that the company would be broken up.

Instead, Gerstner chose to keep IBM together. He pushed the company to organize around customer needs rather than internal divisions, helping reposition IBM as a provider of integrated technology and services for large enterprises. That decision became central to IBM’s recovery and renewed relevance.

Gerstner also drove cultural change inside the company. He emphasized direct decision-making, accountability, and execution, while insisting that innovation mattered only if it translated into real value for clients. The approach marked a sharp break from IBM’s inward-looking habits that had taken hold before his arrival, IBM said in its announcement of Gerstner’s death.

His tenure included painful restructuring. IBM abandoned long-standing traditions, including its decades-long “cradle to grave” no-layoff policy, as it sought to stabilize its finances and compete more aggressively. Many credit those moves, along with Gerstner’s strategic focus, with saving the company from collapse.

Before joining IBM, Gerstner built a high-profile career in corporate America. He was a partner at McKinsey & Company, later served as president of American Express, and was CEO of RJR Nabisco. After leaving IBM, he chaired the Carlyle Group and focused on philanthropy, particularly in education and biomedical research.

A native of Long Island, New York, Gerstner earned a degree from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard. IBM said it plans to hold a celebration of his legacy in the new year.

This story was written using Business Insider’s AI tools and edited by a Business Insider editor.




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Rivian’s autonomy chief says lidar is ‘very affordable’ and a ‘no-brainer’ decision

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For Rivian’s chief of autonomy, the decision to put in lidar for the EV company’s coming R2 SUV was obvious.

James Philbin, Rivian’s VP of autonomy and AI, told Business Insider that the price of lidar has decreased significantly enough in recent years to be able to put the sensor inside a personally-owned, mass-production vehicle.

“It’s been on this incredible cost curve, where 10 years ago, it would be just unimaginable that you could put a lidar on a consumer vehicle. And now it’s getting into that price point, kind of in the range of a radar,” Philbin said. Radar, a sensor that uses radio waves, is commonly seen in modern cars that have an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) or blind spot detection.

Lidar is a sensor that uses laser light to measure depth. While it’s historically been used for topography, the sensor has gained more visibility in the automotive world with the advent of self-driving cars.

Most notably, Waymo’s robotaxis have multiple lidar sensors, including the spinning lidar on the roof of the vehicle. Waymo has said that lidar provides additional safety to the vehicle’s AI driver.

On Thursday, Rivian announced a road map to fully autonomous driving, which includes building an in-house chip and installing a lidar sensor in the company’s coming SUV, the R2.

Philbin, who previously worked at Zoox and Waymo, told Business Insider that lidar makes an autonomous system “more robust” and can help the company get to its self-driving goal “faster.”

“It’s very affordable,” he said. “The performance it gives you for that cost is really amazing. And so to me, it’s kind of a no-brainer that you would want more sensors and more modalities for something that’s so safety critical.”

Using lidar diverges from the strategy of Rivian’s main EV competitor, Tesla, which has taken a strong stance on pursuing self-driving with cameras only.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk once called lidar an expensive “crutch.”

In the late 2000s, during the days of the Google Self-Driving Car Project, a single lidar unit could come with a five-figure price tag. Today, industry leaders say a similar unit could cost a few hundred dollars.

Rivian employees, including Philbin, did not disclose the cost of the lidar unit in the R2 when asked by Business Insider.

R2 will first be launched without the sensor in early 2026. It’s slated to be Rivian’s cheapest car to date, with a starting price of $45,000. The company aims to launch an R2 with lidar in late 2026.

When asked what the cost difference was to put a lidar in the R2, Philbin declined to comment but said that it was “not a significant consideration.”




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OpenAI’s chief researcher says Mark Zuckerberg ‘hand-delivered soup’ to an employee in a recruiting effort

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It’s been said that the way to one’s heart is through their stomach. It sounds like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to see if the AI talent war, or at least one skirmish, could be won the same way.

Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, recently said that Zuckerberg personally delivered homemade soup to an OpenAI employee as part of a campaign to recruit the unnamed worker to Meta.

“It’s been kind of interesting and fun to see it escalate over time. You know, some interesting stories here are Zuck actually went and hand-delivered soup to people that he was trying to recruit from us,” Chen told Ashlee Vance on the author’s “Core Memory” podcast.

Chen said Zuckerberg’s move was “shocking to me at the time” but since then, he said he’s returned the favor.

“I’ve also delivered soup to people we’ve been recruiting from Meta,” Chen said, laughing.

The poaching efforts focused on OpenAI’s researchers and engineers underscores the company’s position in the AI race, Chen said.

“We’re always under attack,” Chen told Vance. “This is how I know we’re in the lead, right? Any company starts, where do they try to recruit from? It’s OpenAI. They want the expertise, they want our vision, our philosophy of the world. And we’ve made so many star researchers, right? I think OpenAI, more than anywhere else, has been a place that makes names in AI today.”

Arguably, no other rival tech company has been as aggressive in the so-called AI talent wars against OpenAI as Zuckerberg’s Meta.

In June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta tried to lure some of his engineers with $100 million signing bonuses. The CEO said at the time that none of his top talent was poached, but ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao later joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.

Chen said that Meta tried to recruit “half” of Chen’s direct reports unsuccessfully, but that OpenAI has been “fairly good” at retaining top talent. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.

Top AI researchers have become a hot commodity in the AI race, as it’s generally believed that there is a relatively small number of researchers and engineers capable of achieving breakthroughs or building new LLMs from the ground up.

“It’s like looking for LeBron James,” Databricks’ vice president of AI, Naveen Rao, told The Verge’s Command Line newsletter last year. “There are just not very many humans who are capable of that.”




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John Giannandrea

Apple’s AI chief is leaving and being replaced by a former Microsoft exec

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John Giannandrea, senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy at Apple, is stepping down from his role, the company announced Monday.

Amar Subramanya, an AI researcher who most recently served as a corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft, is now Apple’s vice president of AI, the company said. Prior to his time at Microsoft, Subramanya was at Google.

Giannandrea will serve as an advisor before retiring in the spring.

This story is breaking. Check back for updates.




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3 things homebuyers should do to hack the unaffordable housing market, according to Fannie Mae’s chief economist

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Doug Duncan, chief economist of the government-sponsored mortgage finance giant, noted the challenging environment for first-time homebuyers, with mortgage rates hovering near 20-year highs and a dearth of inventory keeping home prices elevated.

The 30-year fixed mortgage rate has been stuck around 7% all year. Single-family home prices, meanwhile, climbed 7.4% in the first quarter.

“Supply-constrained,” Duncan said of the housing market, speaking to Yahoo Finance on Thursday. “That’s been a theme for several years, it’s kind of repeating the story, but it’s the story.”

Duncan outlined his top tips for homebuyers in today’s market:

1. Have a good credit score

Mortgage rates are elevated, and having a poor credit score makes borrowing costs even steeper, Duncan said.

“No matter who you talk to, there’s different kinds of lenders. All of them are going to look, first of all, at what’s your credit? Do you have a good credit score?” he said. “They want to know, what’s your risk profile?”

Real estate economists say mortgage rates likely won’t come down significantly anytime soon. Mortgage rates are influenced by real interest rates in the economy, and Fed officials aren’t in a rush to cut rates while inflation remains above their target and the economy remains strong.

2. Shop around with multiple lenders

Homebuyers should talk to multiple lenders before locking in their mortgage. Buyers who shop around tend to score better deals and more affordable rates, Duncan said.

“Make them compete. They don’t make money if they don’t make a loan to you, so they have an interest in satisfying you, just like you have an interest in getting a good deal. So shop around for sure,” he added.

3. Don’t try to time the market

You be in the market for a home because you can afford it at the moment — not because you’re waiting for prices or mortgage rates to come down, Duncan said.

“What I always give people as advice when they ask, ‘Is now a good time to buy a house?’ is if you have a family budget or a household budget. That’s the most important clause, because any lender is going to ask you things that’s going to come out of that budget, and if you can budget it all out, you know how to immediately answer those questions and you’ll get a better deal at the end of the day,” Duncan said.

People betting that mortgage rates or home prices will come down soon are taking a gamble. Some homebuyers can afford to speculate on the market, but most first-time homebuyers cannot, Duncan noted.

“You want to take a well-educated financial management approach to that decision because you’d like to be able to sustain it,” he said.

First-time homebuyers accounted for 32% of all home sales in 2023, well below the historical average of 38%, according to data from the National Association of Realtors.

The good news is that some real estate experts see a recovery slowly forming for the housing market. Supply is expanding and home prices are starting to fall in key metros, Charles Schwab said in a recent note.


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