Month: August 2025

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was not invited to the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, but 1,000 Ukrainian refugees in Alaska will be watching with trepidation.

• OpenAI first launched ChatGPT in 2022.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now says the ChatBot boasts some 700 million weekly users.
• Here’s what you need to know about ChatGPT, and how it works.

Every time ChatGPT gets an upgrade, it’s news. But what exactly is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is OpenAI’s flagship AI model. In August 2025, the company unveiled GPT-5, its latest iteration. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says GPT-5 is its most advanced AI model yet, marked by increased general intelligence and enhanced usability, like a “real-time router” that selects the most appropriate model to handle each user request.

Here’s everything you need to know.

What is ChatGPT?

OpenAI is the leading AI startup. Its ultimate mission is to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. AGI is a still-theoretical AI that reasons as well as humans.

The company first released ChatGPT in November 2022. It has yet to achieve AGI-level intelligence. For now, it’s a conversational chatbot that relies on a large language model to generate responses to questions. Some people use it much like they would Google Search. But it can also do deeper research, generate images and reports, write just about anything, code, and solve problems that involve quantitative reasoning.

Since its debut, the chatbot’s user base has exploded. OpenAI said in a blog post in August that its user base had reached 700 million weekly users.

How to use ChatGPT

ChatGPT is available online, and as an app available for both iOS and Android.

Users engage with it through conversation by simply typing in a prompt — an instruction for the chatbot. OpenAI also unveiled an “advanced voice mode” in 2024 — following a legal battle with Scarlett Johansson over the use of a voice that sounded too similar to hers — that lets users engage with the chatbot in natural, real-time conversations with the ability to sense emotions.

Since the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has unveiled several different ChatGPT models — all of which can be used in conjunction with the chatbot. It has rolled out a series of reasoning models, for example, which are designed to think more deeply about problems. It also unveiled GPT-4.5, which Altman described on X as “the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person.”

Until the release of GPT-5, it was up to the user to understand which model was best for their needs. Now, GPT-5 can make that decision for them. That means, in essence, that the model is deciding how long it needs to think about a problem to get to the best answer.

ChatGPT also offers dozens of plug-ins to paying subscribers. An Expedia plug-in can help you book a trip, while one from OpenTable will nab you a dinner reservation. OpenAI has also launched Code Interpreter, a version of ChatGPT that can code and analyze data.

Despite the bot’s impressive capabilities, it remains imperfect. ChatGPT relies on available data for its responses, which means it can sometimes give misinformation. OpenAI has also been accused of stealing personal or copyrighted data to train ChatGPT. It has even encouraged students to cheat and plagiarize on their assignments.

How does ChatGPT work?

Chatbots like ChatGPT are powered by large amounts of data and computing techniques to make predictions and string words together meaningfully. They not only tap into a vast amount of vocabulary and information but also understand words in context. This helps them mimic speech patterns while dispatching encyclopedic knowledge.

When a user prompts a large language model, the query is broken into tokens — the smallest unit of text a model processes. For OpenAI’s models, they can be “as short as a single character or as long as a full word, depending on the language and context. Spaces, punctuation, and partial words all contribute to token counts,” according to OpenAI.

ChatGPT’s growing influence

Users have flocked to ChatGPT to improve their personal lives and boost productivity. The chatbot attracted 100 million users in its first five days on the market, a record at the time.

Some workers have used the AI chatbot to develop code, write real estate listings, and create lesson plans, while others have made teaching the best ways to use ChatGPT a career in itself.

Businesses, including consulting firms, are also scrambling to adopt AI. The popularity of ChatGPT crystallized the value of a conversational tool, McKinsey senior partner Delphine Zurkiya told Business Insider.

“There wasn’t a major shift in our strategy in the sense that we had already been developing a lot of tools internally. It’s just these tools now have become, we’ll say faster, in delivering value thanks to that natural user interface,” she said in regards to the firm’s internal chatbot, Lilli. Many consulting firms are also building similar tools for clients. KPMG, for example, has been collecting data on how its workers prompt AI, and used that information to build new tools — for itself and clients.

AI is also making waves in the legal world. Gibson Dunn is piloting ChatGPT Enterprise for its roughly 500 lawyers and staff. Judges, however, say they’ve seen an increase in fake legal citations due to lawyers relying too much on AI.

There is a slate of ChatGPT competitors that have also come out since its launch. Meta AI, built on its Llama 4 model, offers users an AI assistant that “gets to know” user preferences, remembers context, and is personalized. Anthropic’s Claude has become the leading AI assistant for coding. Elon Musk also built Grok, a chatbot that the company is training in line with Musk’s support for free speech. Google has Gemini, a multimodal model that CEO Sundar Pichai called “one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company.”

For OpenAI, which continues to unveil new models at a healthy clip, the chatbot is an eternal work in progress.

“There is no analogy for what we’re building,” Nick Turley, the company’s head of ChatGPT, said on a podcast in August.

• Infrastructure management startup NetBox Labs has raised $35 million, led by NGP Capital.
• Cofounder and CEO Kris Beevers said AI is fueling fresh demand for its services.
• NetBox Labs is the for-profit steward of the open-source NetBox platform.

NetBox Labs, an infrastructure management startup, raised $35 million in Series B funding in July, led by NGP Capital. It shared its pitch deck with Business Insider.

New York City-based NetBox Labs was cofounded in 2023 by CEO Kris Beevers as the for-profit steward of 10-year-old NetBox, an open-source network and infrastructure platform used by tens of thousands of companies globally.

NetBox Labs offers five products built on top of the open-source software with advanced features to make it easier to run, Beevers said, including additional security and support, automation tools, and an AI assistant.

It makes money by charging subscriptions based on the tools used and the size of a client’s infrastructure.

Sorenson Capital and Headline participated in the round, as did existing investors Flybridge Capital, Notable Capital, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and IBM. The company had previously raised $20 million in Series A funding.

AI is fueling demand for infrastructure services, and NetBox Labs’ revenue is in the single-digit millions, Beevers said. It reinvests a “big chunk” back into the open-source tool.

The company has roughly 200 customers, including AI data center giant CoreWeave, for whom it helps manage data center configurations and design future facilities.

It also works with non-AI-focused companies, whose infrastructure has become more complex and dynamic amid ongoing digitization in recent years, Beevers said.

This includes departments of transportation across the country — managing toll booths, speed cameras, and more— as well as ARM, Cisco, Constant Contact, J.P. Morgan, Kaiser Permanente, and Riot Games.

The investment will be used to hire across engineering and sales. Beevers said the company will surpass 100 employees this year.

Beevers previously served as the cofounder and CEO of NS1, which spun out NetBox Labs after selling the other part of its business to IBM in 2023. Jeremy Stretch, the creator of NetBox, also serves as a cofounder at NetBox Labs.

Here’s a look at the pitch deck the startup used to raise its $35 million Series B. Certain slides have been edited and removed so that the deck can be shared publicly.

• The red-hot healthcare AI startup Abridge is looking for deals.
• Abridge has raised $700 million in the past 18 months and hit a $5.3 billion valuation in June.
• CEO Dr. Shiv Rao said the startup is considering various buys to bulk up its team and tech.

Abridge is on a hot streak. Now, as the healthcare startup competes in the AI talent wars, it’s preparing to go on a shopping spree.

Abridge, which builds AI-powered software to transcribe and summarize patient-doctor conversations, landed a $300 million round in June led by Andreessen Horowitz. It was its second mega-raise in four months; the company had raked in a $250 million round in February.

In 18 months, Abridge has raised $700 million in total and boosted its valuation from $850 million to $5.3 billion.

Abridge CEO and cofounder Dr. Shiv Rao has big plans for all of that capital, he told Business Insider.

“We’ve got a lot of money in the bank, and we want to spend 80% of it just going deeper, and expanding from connecting conversations to clinical notes into claims, clinical decision support, and care management,” he said.

With 80% of its cash reserved for doubling down on its tech, Abridge is earmarking the remaining 20% for potential acquisitions, Rao said.

Those deals are looking increasingly critical in the brutal, competitive landscape of ambient healthcare scribes. Perhaps the most gutting release is set to come from Epic, the electronic health record giant that first partnered with Abridge back in 2023 in a watershed moment for the startup. Epic is now gearing up to launch an AI scribe of its own, Politico reported this month. Abridge declined to comment on the reports. Epic didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Epic’s launch would follow healthcare startup Ambience, Abridge’s biggest direct competitor, raising its own mega-round this summer. Ambience’s $250 million Series C was co-led by Oak HC/FT and A16z, a longtime investor in Ambience that appears to be double-dipping in AI scribing with its growth investment in Abridge.

And, as Abridge works to expand beyond scribing to use AI for tasks like processing medical bills, it’s running up against private equity firms like New Mountain Capital pouring billions into their healthcare AI plays.

Abridge has remained a frontrunner as the pressure builds. It’s now working with over 150 large health systems, Rao said. The startup is also partnering closely with some of those health systems on its new products — Abridge said Tuesday it’s collaborating with Pittsburgh health system Highmark Health on tech to automate prior authorization requests.

And Abridge is focusing squarely on the patient-provider conversation as the starting point for each of its new tools or acquisition targets, Rao said.

“The last thing we want to do is to become a company that’s opening up a trench coat and selling you random things that have no coherence to our mission,” he said. “But if there are things that are absolutely on our road map, it would be smart for us to have open ears.”

Eyeing fresh talent and tech

As San Francisco-based Abridge has landed fundraise after fundraise, many startups hoping to get acquired by Abridge have entered Rao’s inbox.

While Rao said Abridge isn’t “in talks” with any particular company, it’s prepared to notch deals to grow faster. The startup hasn’t made any acquisitions since its 2018 founding.

“It feels like a lot of companies are asking if they can join us in some way. We need to be able to spend on things like that — data plays, ecosystem plays, and partnerships,” Rao said.

Acquiring top talent is Abridge’s biggest priority, Rao said, adding that the startup has been competing with AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic in its recent hiring efforts.

The AI talent wars are raising the stakes for startups like Abridge. As Big Tech companies fight over top AI researchers, including by offering pay packages in the millions or tens of millions, startups are touting their mission-centric approaches to convince engineers to join their teams over tech giants.

Rao thinks Abridge can compete effectively for AI talent by offering hires the rare chance to build tools that matter, tech that actually improves people’s health.

“Finding ways to recruit more world-class talent as fast as possible is really, really important for us,” he said. “If this is the legacy you want to leave, if you want to be a part of a company where every single day you can feel really good that you improved patient care, then we’re going to resonate more than those horizontal technology companies.”

Abridge has about 330 employees, a number Rao is aiming to increase massively, especially in its engineering department, though he says the company won’t rely exclusively on M&A to do that.

Abridge builds its own large-language models that its widening suite of software sits upon. Those models make up its “contextual reasoning engine,” which automates clinical notetaking that can combine ambient scribing with relevant context from the patient’s existing health records and generate actionable outputs like medical orders and suggested billing codes. Rao said Abridge is considering buying data where necessary to continue training its models.

With a combination build-and-buy strategy, Abridge is moving further into revenue cycle management, the hottest ticket item in healthcare AI, since it aims to help health systems capture more revenue while saving time for doctors. Rao said Abridge is also working on areas like risk adjustment, the process of estimating a patient’s expected medical costs, that is critical for value-based care arrangements, and care coordination.

Abridge wants to dig deeper into clinical decision support, too, a field that many healthcare startups have stayed away from, as the tech often walks a thin line to avoid facing FDA regulations. Abridge first stepped into the space in October by partnering with medical insights company UpToDate to surface relevant clinical evidence in Abridge’s generated notes. Rao said he expects Abridge to share more information from the partnership later this year.

As Abridge looks to take over more tasks for doctors, the company is being deliberate about how and when it’ll meet “good friction” like FDA regulation, Rao said.

“As we move into higher-stakes workflows from a patient outcomes perspective, we have to be really, really responsible,” he said. “We try to be as transparent as we possibly can on how our models work and how we evaluate them. We’ll need to continue to be transparent as we get into those new spaces.”

• While I was off traveling and getting an advanced degree, most of my friends were having kids.
• Some of them are dropping kids off at college while I’m still in the grade school pick-up line.
• I started my family in my 30s, which means younger moms have become my allies — and friends.

In my 20s, I watched my friends raise their families.

I sipped a margarita while their kids had bedtime tantrums, and provided moral support as they folded the mounds of dirty cloth diapers and onesies. I watched them parent and juggle the responsibilities of work, meal prep, and taking care of the home.

While I was busy not settling down, most of my friends already had — and they’d been moms for nearly a decade by the time I had my first child.

Life experience and education gave me a lot, but couldn’t prepare me for everything

I became a mom at 31 after spending my 20s doing exactly what I wanted — painting murals, trips to Europe, and earning an advanced degree in philosophy. While those experiences might not sound like traditional prep from motherhood, having time to do all of that helped me feel ready to be a mom. I learned about myself, what I could handle, and what kind of life I wanted.

Were my 20s a crash course in parenting? Not exactly, but they gave me a deeper understanding of the world, one that I hoped to pass on to my own children. I lived a great adventure, so when it came time to settle down, I had no regrets.

However, becoming a mom did knock me off balance at first. I know now, becoming a parent is a shock for everyone, but after a decade of independence, I found it incredibly disorienting. The biggest shock was the slow realization of what “settling down” actually meant.

Instead of talking about politics or traveling, I was plunged into the foreign world of the “mom circle,” where conversations were more about nipple cream, onesies, and parenting methods. These topics weren’t wrong, just different, and it took me time to adjust and realize that these women were giving me exactly what I needed. They were giving me the extraordinary tools of mothering through very ordinary conversations.

I went from being an expert to a beginner

I was used to feeling competent in my career and studies, so starting over as a beginner mom among all my veteran mom friends was intimidating and humbling. Yet I learned quickly and realized the importance of asking for help.

These friends were a wealth of knowledge, and I did my best to draw from it. But there was a catch — these moms were no longer sleep-deprived zombies, and what I also needed besides veteran parenting wisdom was someone who could relate.

Younger moms became my lifeline

I wouldn’t normally reach out to younger people for help and advice, but I needed friends who shared my life stage. And yes, I was self-conscious about my age when I found them, but that quickly dissolved over coffee-fueled, spit-up-intensive playdates.

These moms have since become lifelong friends, and — added benefit — they keep me feeling surprisingly young, as well.

My timeline was right for me

Now, my oldest is entering seventh grade, and being an older mom has stretched me in all the right ways. It taught me humility and to lean on the wisdom of others, while reaching out to broaden my peer group. Everyone’s timeline is different. I’m thankful for all my experiences in life, and as a mom. They were right for me, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

• Adam Pretorius, a real estate agent in Iowa, was nearly scammed into selling a $200,000 lot.
• Pretorius said fewer safeguards are in place to protect vacant lots.
• He’s trying to spread awareness and make sure agents don’t skip steps when verifying sellers.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Adam Pretorius, who’s been a real estate agent in Iowa since 2009. Pretorius was targeted as part of a vacant land scam in which scammers impersonate property owners and solicit agents to fraudulently sell their land. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been practicing real estate since 2009. I focus just on residential, and as a top performer in town, maybe I got complacent.

I’d heard of scammers being out there, but not specifically on land or listings. Maybe it was my own complacent belief that it wasn’t going to happen to me because I’m smarter than my colleagues.

That kind of naivety is what gets you into these situations. These scammers are very smart, very clever, and very disciplined, and they have a pattern that they use again and again.

Land is a very easy scam because there are some different safeguards: You don’t need access to a property — it’s just a raw parcel. It’s not the same value, per se, as a home, but it doesn’t have the transferring of utilities and other little things that would get caught in the way of a transfer.

And apparently, in me looking into this more and talking to more colleagues, I learned scammers actually do have success with it from time to time.

Until this happened to me, I was not aware it was a major issue. After it occurred, I realized how common this actually is — which made me feel a little bit better after feeling so sheepish about the situation, which didn’t just cost me time, but a lot of money.

I’m not the first agent to fall for this scam, and I won’t be the last

Land is our biggest shortage and issue, even in the Midwest, particularly Iowa. Farmers just aren’t selling farms, and when they do, there’s a lot of red tape in getting land developed. Finding raw land or developable land is a rarity.

We do a lot of infills out here. An infill lot is a lot that is in an established neighborhood that, for one reason or the other, wasn’t built on — whether it was an existing lot that maybe the neighbor bought to have a little cushion next to them, or it was just never built on, or maybe it was a piece of land that’s been parceled off over time. But the lot itself is not part of a new subdivision.

An infill is going to carry a premium because you have an established neighborhood.

The land of subject was $200,000. So we’re not talking an insignificant figure. Not as much as, say, a single-family home that might average around $400,000 to $500,000, but enough that it would be a significant return for a scammer.

I was contacted by phone and followed up by email and text in early January. Someone who I thought was the prospective seller contacted me, letting me know that they had a lot that they had not built on. They said they’d now moved out of state and weren’t planning to come back because they live in Illinois. It’s just a piece of land that they had attempted to sell before, and that agent was unsuccessful.

They said they canceled with that agent after a couple of months, and they would like to have me interview both on the price and how I might approach it differently to make sure we can get the lot sold this time.

This isn’t uncommon, so to this point, it sounded valid. I did some checking on the MLS, and in fact, it was listed before and was canceled after two months.

I verified, by public records, that the owner does in fact live in Illinois, worked for a medical occupation, and had lived there for some time.

At this point, things were checking out. The email that was used was an Outlook email with the owner’s first and last name, with a few characters.

I do have an extra verification where I am able to look up phone numbers — I did use that in this case, as the number was listed as unlisted and unregistered, but that’s not uncommon for medical professionals. Though it was a small flag, it wasn’t enough that I was seeking the additional verification that I should have, given hindsight.

I did my typical interview process, sent them a market analysis, recommendations on the price, what I charge, how I get paid.

Then we discussed getting the lot ready for the market. I sent the paperwork, they signed it, and I got a couple of additional details that we needed for the file. I spent almost $1,000 in marketing to get it ready, shot it live in the MLS.

Seven hours later, I got an angry phone call from the apparent actual owner who claimed that this is the third time this has happened to him.

These scammers keep coming back to the same lot that he owns, and the last time it was listed, he notified that agent, hence why it was canceled. That one took a couple months. In this case, it took just a day because he realized he’s being targeted again and again.

I shouldn’t have skipped steps when asking for verification

Much to my surprise, many more agents have been contacted for the exact same lot since this incident.

They haven’t sold it, but there have been enough agents who have been duped, and there’s a lot of time and money that’s been lost in the fraud. The main party, much to their relief, has not been affected.

We’re in a very digital age, and the process moves quickly with online signatures, e-platforms, and e-filing.

It’s very easy now to do these things quickly and maybe not ask for the extra verification that we should ask for. We don’t do things face-to-face; that’s not uncommon.

When you can’t get enough verification, you need to ask for them to provide some form of ID, whether that be a driver’s license or a passport, or something that makes you feel more secure about the individual that you’re talking to.

Since the incident, my process changed: I need to get at least three forms of verification. For me to feel very good, one of them should be either a driver’s license or a passport when I have somebody who’s out of town who I’m unable to verify.

My hope, and why I am telling my story, is that if we go to a place where we’re sharing this and we’re reporting it, rather than feeling guilty about it, our collective information will be our strongest weapon, and we can help fight back on this.

It’s human to make mistakes, and it just shows that no level of experience or diligence is going to make any agent or person immune. The vulnerability exists in high-end and vacant land alike.

It’s easy for myself as a top producer to say, “Well, that’s not going to happen to me,” but that’s complacency at its finest. I made a mistake. Hopefully, others will learn from this, too.