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Fresh out of college and in her first professional marketing role, 23-year-old Grace Kerber pulled off something most PR execs only dream about—she made her employer go viral on TikTok.
Taking inspiration from the beloved mockumentary TV series The Office, Kerber created an ongoing series called The Dealership starring herself and her coworkers at Mohawk Chevrolet in upstate New York. They’ve posted short episodes on TikTok since January, but recently began drawing millions of likes and views from around the world.
While the car dealership isn’t the first local business to utilize the social media platform, more traditional American companies like the auto industry have been slow to adapt to TikTok. “To appeal to younger generations, you have to change it up,” Kerber told Forbes.
Let’s get into the headlines,
FIRST UP
As the biggest names in crypto remain embroiled in yearslong legal battles with federal regulators, the Supreme Court recently made three landmark decisions weakening the powers of those same federal agencies. That, plus the possibility of a crypto-friendly second Trump Administration and movement in Congress on pro-crypto legislation, are providing tailwinds for the industry.
Tesla stock faltered after its latest earnings report, which revealed better-than-forecasted sales but continued the EV maker’s fourth consecutive quarter of negative profit growth. Though its shares are up in recent weeks, they’re still down nearly 40% from a late 2021 peak of over $400.
BUSINESS + FINANCE
Women have made strides in the workplace, but there is much more to be done to increase the number of women in leadership roles, close the gender wage gap, and create a workplace that is more equitable overall for women. In our seventh annual America’s Best Employers For Women 2024, Forbes ranked 600 companies prioritizing women’s needs.
General Motors shares dropped over 6% on Tuesday, marking the company’s worst day in nearly a year, after announcing an indefinite delay in the production of an autonomous vehicle from its Cruise unit. The delay follows regulatory scrutiny and production challenges after one of Cruise’s robotaxis struck a pedestrian in a 2023 incident.
In the first half of 2024, luxury goods giant LVMH achieved a 2% increase in organic revenue growth, according to its latest earnings report, but fell short of analyst expectations and last year’s revenue amid a decline in luxury spending. The company reported $45.2 billion in revenue, lower than the forecasted $45.9 billion.
WEALTH + ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The Schuler Scholar Program canceled its $2,500 annual college scholarships, impacting around 1,250 students, due to financial troubles caused by risky investments in volatile healthcare stocks. Former billionaire Jack Schuler’s foundation now has close to zero assets, leaving many first-generation, low-income students scrambling for financial support.
TECH + INNOVATION
Cloverleaf Infrastructure raised $300 million through fundraising last week to help develop sites for hyperscale data centers, essential for AI processing and solving power grid challenges. The U.S. data center market is projected to experience substantial growth, with analysts forecasting a $400 billion investment by 2028.
Google parent Alphabet surpassed Wall Street’s expectations in its second-quarter earnings report, sending shares slightly higher, as the internet giant continues to rake in tens of billions of advertising dollars. Alphabet’s stock has been on a tear amid the AI boom, returning about 50% over the last year.
MONEY + POLITICS
Kimberly Cheatle resigned as Secret Service Director on Tuesday amid criticism of security failures during an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, accepting full responsibility for the breach. Her departure came after a House Oversight Committee hearing and bipartisan calls for her resignation.
Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) will resign after he was convicted of bribery last week, potentially setting up an open seat for a new senator who will be appointed by Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and several other Senate Democrats called for Menendez to resign after the conviction, with some suggesting they favored expelling him if he refused to step down.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign accused the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris of violating campaign finance laws in a complaint with the FEC, calling the transfer of more than $90 million to Harris’ operation from President Joe Biden’s old campaign a “brazen money grab.” Biden turned over his campaign funds after dropping out of the race Sunday, but experts have told Forbes the move is legally sound and any litigation would take so long to play out that it wouldn’t affect the election.
SPORTS + ENTERTAINMENT
After delivering strong Q2 earnings, Spotify’s shares surged 12% on Tuesday, fueled by record subscriber numbers and $532 million in free cash flow, pointing to its first profitable year. The positive results have heightened investor confidence in the streaming giant’s profitability.
SCIENCE + HEALTHCARE
Last month, drugmaker Gilead Science announced promising interim late-stage trial results of its injectable HIV prevention drug, but the potential of a new, long-acting HIV prevention tool could be short-lived as the perennial political football enters the equation: cost. The obvious solution would be a much cheaper vaccine that could provide years of protection, but such a vaccine remains elusive to scientists.
TRAVEL + LIFESTYLE
The FAA launched a safety audit of Southwest Airlines, as regulators investigate a series of flights by the airline in recent months. Among those being scrutinized include a flight that departed from a closed runway while two others descended to low altitudes.
DAILY COVER STORY
The Internet Isn’t Big Enough To Train AI. One Fix? Fake Data.
TOPLINE Artificial intelligence, specifically the large language models that power it, is a voracious consumer of data. But that data is finite and it is running out.
AI companies have mined everything in their efforts to train ever more powerful AIs: YouTube video transcripts and subtitles, public Facebook and Instagram posts, copyrighted books and news articles—sometimes without permission, sometimes with licensing deals. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot that helped mainstream AI, has already been trained on the entire public internet, roughly 300 billion words including all of Wikipedia and Reddit. At some point, there will be nothing left.
Researchers call this “hitting the data wall.” And they say it’s likely to happen as soon as 2026.
That makes creating more AI training data a billion-dollar question—one that an emerging cohort of startups are looking for new ways to answer.
One possibility: creating artificial data. Ali Golshan, CEO of startup Gretel, sees an opportunity to supply data-starved AI companies with fake data made from scratch, which they can use to train their AI models.
Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft and Google have all used synthetic data in some capacity to train their models.
But synthetic data has its limits. It can exaggerate biases in an original dataset and fail to include outliers. That could make AI’s tendency to hallucinate even worse. Or models trained on fake data could simply fail to produce anything new.
Another way around the data wall: people. Some startups are hiring armies of them to clean up and label existing data to make it more useful for AI or create more new data.
WHY IT MATTERS “In a mad sprint to train the most powerful AI models, which gobble up swaths of data to become more capable, companies have almost depleted public data sources,” says Forbes reporter Rashi Shrivastava. “As AI companies face an existential crisis—where will the future training data come from?—a host of startups are hoping to answer that question. As the AI race continues, data will continue to be at the heart of the conversation."
MORE How Alexandr Wang Turned An Army Of Clickworkers Into A $7.3 Billion AI Unicorn
FACTS + COMMENTS
The use of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy for weight loss has increased twofold over the past decade. But fewer people with Type 2 diabetes are using the drugs:
10%: The decrease in the number of new patients prescribed GLP-1s for diabetes between 2011 and 2023
Over 88%: The share of new prescriptions of GLP-1 that Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide—the generic name for Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus—made up in 2023
Seven: The number of approved GLP-1 drugs in the U.S.
STRATEGY + SUCCESS
To tackle the gender pay gap and benefits inequality affecting women, organizations should take a three-pronged approach. First, they should disclose both salary ranges and detailed benefits information to help women negotiate fair compensation. Second, they need to adjust healthcare benefits to equalize costs for women. And third, they should advocate for policy changes that mandate benefits transparency and prohibit discrimination.
QUIZ
Researchers found an unexpected substance in the tissue samples of Brazilian sharpnose sharks swimming near Rio de Janeiro. What was it?
- Caffeine
- Mercury
- Microplastics
- Cocaine
Check your answer.
Thanks for reading! This edition of Forbes Daily was edited by Sarah Whitmire and Chris Dobstaff, with writing contributions by Tavon Thomasson.
