Month: September 2025

• Costco prosecco buyers, beware.
• The retailer is recalling its prosecco sold in some states, saying unopened bottles could shatter.
• Customers in 12 states were directed to dispose of their bottles and get a refund.

Costco is recalling bottles of bubbly in 12 states, saying they could explode unexpectedly.

The retailer issued a letter to customers who purchased the Kirkland Signature Prosecco Valdobbiadene between April 25 and August 26.

The letter said that unopened bottles of the house brand prosecco could shatter, even when not handled or in use.

“If you have an unopened bottle, do not open it,” the letter said. “Dispose of the bottle immediately by wrapping the unopened bottle in paper towels and placing it in a plastic bag before placing it in the garbage to avoid risk from shattered glass.”

It urged customers not to return the bottles to Costco. According to the letter, customers who show the recall letter to their nearest Costco are entitled to a full refund.

The warning for the Italian-made prosecco, with item number 1879870, was issued for customers in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Representatives for Costco did not respond to a query from Business Insider asking how many affected bottles were sold and whether any injuries had been recorded from the faulty product.

Danielle Callas, a Costco customer in Chicago, told The New York Times that she was a fan of the brand, but she had had three bad experiences with the Kirkland prosecco.

While the bottles had never shattered, the corks flew out on their own accord in all three cases. She told the NYT that the cork hit her friend’s eye during a bridal shower last month, and prosecco spilled all over the table.

In November, Costco issued two recall notices, one for eggs that risked being contaminated with Salmonella and one for butter because its labels did not specify that it contained milk.

Costco’s stock is up about 5% in the past year.

• Neel Nanda, 26, leads the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind.
• He said he got into leadership by breaking his perfectionist streak and saying yes to opportunities.
• “One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you can just do things,” he added.

Neel Nanda did not expect to be leading a team at Google DeepMind at the age of 26.

A self-described perfectionist, the lead for Google DeepMind’s mechanistic interpretability team said he often hesitates before starting projects, afraid they might flop.

“I often don’t want to do things. I’m like, ‘This seems risky. This could go wrong,'” Nanda said on an episode of “The 80,000 Hours Podcast” published Tuesday.

To break that perfectionist streak, the senior research scientist said he challenged himself to write one blog post a day for a month.

Nanda said this routine helped him build visibility in the AI community, produce work that shaped the field of mechanistic interpretability, and even meet his partner.

“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you can just do things,” he said. He sees it as part of “maximizing your luck surface area,” saying yes more often and giving luck more chances to show up.

Sometimes that meant doing “things that are kind of a bit weird or unusual,” like posting a three-hour unedited YouTube video of himself reading through a dense AI paper, he said.

It ended up drawing more than 30,000 views.

That same mindset led him into leadership. When Nanda joined DeepMind in 2023, he expected to be an individual researcher, he said. But a few months in, the team’s leader stepped down — and Nanda agreed to take over.

“I did not know if I was going to be good at this,” he said.

“To me, this is both an example of the importance of having luck surface area — being in a situation where opportunities like that can arise — but also that you should just say yes to things, even if they seem kind of scary,” he added.

Nanda did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.