Financial Mindset

In 1912, the French physicist Conrad Schlumberger could be found kneeling on the ground of his family’s estate in Normandy, strategically placing wired electrodes in the soil. He was performing conductivity tests to detect the buried ruins of a medieval abbey destroyed there during the French Revolution. But the experiment had a broader purpose: proving that electric instruments could be used to reveal and map underground structures from the surface. Schlumberger’s approach worked, and it turned out to be a remarkably effective tool for a more lucrative enterprise: finding oil. Conrad and his brother Marcel Schlumberger went on to create the first well logs—using electric cables for subsurface readings, producing outputs that resembled EKG heart monitor readings. The method became the backbone of modern geophysical prospecting, and supercharged the growth of a burgeoning oil and gas exploration industry worldwide. In 1926 the brothers founded the Société de Prospection Électrique ...

Matthew Rogers remembers Apple’s scrappy days when, as an engineer fresh out of college, he could debate ideas directly with Steve Jobs. Rogers was part of a team of only a few dozen who worked on the original iPhone—which they initially developed as a derivative of the iPod Nano, with a click wheel. But that mechanism wasn’t good enough for Jobs. He aimed for something close to perfection. “I was 23, 24 years old, and I interacted with Steve Jobs. That’s crazy, right? But that’s the organization he ran,” Rogers told Fortune from his Silicon Valley office (he now runs food-recycling startup Mill). Back then, Apple’s hierarchy was much flatter. What made Apple special, he said, is that Jobs surrounded himself with consumer-minded product leaders who were expected to argue. The mandate was to build “the best thing out there” and take real risks. Some of Apple’s most iconic products came out of a skunkworks team across the street from the main office. That much-mythologized ...

Without warning, the dapper French gentleman groaned like a bullfrog and collapsed on the Bendor Island boat pier in the South of France. Every season of HBO’s highbrow whodunit The White Lotus begins with a murder. So it somehow felt appropriate that this dockside kerfuffle coincided with the next season of the show being filmed nearby in St.-Tropez and Cannes, for likely release in 2027. The show’s tragicomic plot, it seemed, had spilled down the coast to this rosé-and-retirees village, Bandol. Thankfully, the man soon sat up, recovered from the episode—but by then I had already conjured elaborate schemes in an alternate narrative universe: a scalpel-tipped parasol! Arsenic in his afternoon pastis! My boat to the White Lotus –esque island resort Zannier Île de Bendor scooted out of the marina as the crimson flash of ambulances inflamed the blue-and-peach palette of the Côte d’Azur. What character in this story was I playing? I wondered as the coast shrunk away. A snott...

It was, perhaps, the worst-kept secret in the AI community. In mid-July, online sleuths who obsessively track the internet for signs of new AI models started to whisper about the latest offering from Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi large language model: Something big was coming . Moonshot AI’s latest model didn’t just live up to the hype—it raised the stakes. On July 16, Moonshot debuted Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever released, and promised it could perform close to the level of Anthropic’s Fable 5—perhaps the most powerful publicly available model on the market today—at a fraction of the cost. Moonshot’s official benchmarks consistently rank K3 among the top three AI models; one independent benchmark from Arena.AI even pegged K3 as the best model currently available, ahead of Anthropic. The launch was a triumph for the lab and its founder Yang Zhilin, a 34-year-old Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon alumnus—and Pin...

Investors were bullish on Sunday evening as the U.S. and Iran continued to halt their attacks on each other, providing space for negotiations that could reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Wall Street is also looking ahead to a busy week of tech earnings and the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting. Futures tied to the Dow Jones industrial average surged 337 points, or 0.65%. S&P 500 futures jumped 0.80%, but Nasdaq futures shot up 1.28%. South Korea’s Kospi index, which has been a bellwether for global stocks lately, climbed 74 points, or 1.1%, as chip heavyweights SK Hynix and Samsung reached new deals. U.S. oil prices tumbled 5.44% to $84.45 a barrel, and Brent crude dived 5.25% to $91.70. Gold rose 1.15% to $4,118 per ounce. President Donald Trump and Iranian officials have said both sides are actively engaged in diplomacy after nearly two weeks of daily bombardment. Separately, Iran and Oman are also in talks, with a potential deal coming ...

A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that in nearly half of U.S. states halted President Donald Trump’s  executive order  to create a federal list of eligible voters and limit delivery of mail ballots only to people on that list. The ruling Saturday by judges of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with the mail-in voting restrictions in 23 U.S. states  that sued  ahead of November’s midterm elections. Trump issued an executive order in March for the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters. It also ordered the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on that list. While Trump touted the proposed changes as safeguards to keep non-U.S. citizens from voting, state election officials argued they were ripe for abuse and could cause...

It was, perhaps, the worst-kept secret in the AI community. In mid-July, online sleuths who obsessively track the internet for signs of new AI models started to whisper about the latest offering from Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi large language model: Something big was coming . Moonshot AI’s latest model didn’t just live up to the hype—it raised the stakes. On July 16, Moonshot debuted Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever released, and promised it could perform close to the level of Anthropic’s Fable 5—perhaps the most powerful publicly available model on the market today—at a fraction of the cost. Moonshot’s official benchmarks consistently rank K3 among the top three AI models; one independent benchmark from Arena.AI even pegged K3 as the best model currently available, ahead of Anthropic. The launch was a triumph for the lab and its founder Yang Zhilin, a 34-year-old Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon alumnus—and Pin...