Financial Mindset

More than 20 years after it redefined fast shipping, Amazon is preparing to raise the bar on consumer expectations again by offering to fulfill customers’ most urgent product needs in a half-hour or less for an extra fee. The company , which revolutionized online shopping in 2005 with two-day deliveries for Prime members, is rapidly opening small order-processing hubs in dozens of U.S. and foreign cities to cater to shoppers who can’t or don’t want to wait for cough medicine to relieve flu symptoms or tomatoes for tonight’s dinner salad. The ultrafast service, called Amazon Now, first launched in India last June. Amazon says 30-minute deliveries now are also available in urban areas of Brazil, Mexico, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. The mini-warehouses devoted to Amazon Now are about the size of a CVS drugstore. They stock about 3,500 products for expedited delivery, including beer, diapers, pet food, meat,...

One evening in late 2024, Denis Shilov was watching a crime thriller when he had an idea for a prompt that would break through the safety filters of every leading AI model. The prompt was what researchers call a universal jailbreak, meaning it could be reused to get any model to bypass their own guardrails and produce dangerous or prohibited outputs, like instructions on how to make drugs or build weapons. To do so, Shilov simply told the AI models to stop acting like a chatbot with safety rules and instead behave like an API endpoint, a software tool that automatically takes in a request and sends back a response. The prompt reframed the model’s job as simply answering, rather than deciding whether a request should be rejected, and made every leading AI model comply with dangerous questions it was supposed to refuse. Shilov posted about it on X and, by the next morning, it had gone viral. The social media success brought with it an invitation from companies Anthropic to ...

Just like generations before, Gen Z is looking to role models for career success. But instead of aspiring to be their white-collar parents, they’re clued into the growing industry of influencers. And as the creator economy continues to grow in reach and profitability, content creators like Logan Walter are fundamentally proving its value. Walter has already hit millionaire-status at 21 years old, just two years after he started selling lifestyle products on TikTok Shop, and six years after he posted his first video on the platform. What started out as a creative outlet for a 15-year-old later transformed into a lucrative success story; the massively popular short-form video app, used by 150 million Americans, is as much a hotbed for economic opportunity as it is an entertainment platform. And with just a camera phone and decent internet connection, it’s easier than ever to get in on the creator boom. “The second the pandemic hit, I downloaded TikTok, because I needed somethi...

The US Navy said it plans to buy at least 15 new battleships endorsed by President Donald Trump over the next 30 years, according to its new shipbuilding plan, marking a deeper commitment than previously revealed to what could be the costliest warship ever produced.  The Navy had previously said it would purchase three of the so-called Trump-class battleships, with the first arriving in 2036. But the Navy now projects buying more than a dozen of the vessels through 2055, the service said in a congressionally mandated, long-range plan released on Monday. The new Trump battleships — unveiled and personally approved by the president — could cost at least $14.5 billion apiece given a five-year Navy budget plan requests $43.5 billion for the first three vessels. That would make them even costlier than the $13 billion USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, the most expensive US warship. The lead vessel of a new class of warships has historically cost much more than planned. While...

A year after followers of President Donald Trump put down $100 deposits for a Trump-branded gold phone, not one has shipped, and a recent change in the fine print has some worried they may never arrive. Last month, the company behind Trump Mobile, T1 Mobile LLC, quietly updated its preorder terms and conditions to clarify that it “does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.” “A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale,” the most recent terms, dated April 6, read . Purchasers like tech content creator Carter Ryan, who goes by CarterPCs online, were quick to call out the company’s vague language. “I’m paying $100 for the chance to maybe give you more money in the future, if you decide to make the product that I’m paying for in the first place?” he said in a post on TikTok. T1 Mobile an...

I used to think I’d never fall for a phishing scam. Now I’m not so sure. A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine received a text from our editor, or so they thought. It turned out to be completely fake. Scams like this, apparently, are becoming the new normal.  That’s the bet behind Frame Security, a New York and Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup. The company launched publicly Monday with $50 million in funding, led by Index Ventures, Team8, and Picture Capital, Fortune learned exclusively. Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Elad Gil also participated. Frame is trying to make “security awareness training” sound less like a mandatory HR video, and more like a real cybersecurity category that the company calls “human risk security.” Translation: Employees are still the easiest way into a company, and AI has made tricking them cheaper, faster—and much more convincing. “The world of poorly written phishing emails is pretty much gone,” CEO Tal Shlomo told Fort...

The laid-off factory worker from Youngstown, Ohio, became the defining figure of American politics for the past two decades. The jobless financial professional from Philadelphia’s suburbs could be the defining figure of the future, and their demands may be harder to ignore. That’s the warning from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. The American AI Jobs Risk Index —an analysis mapping the economic and geographic impact of AI job risk across 784 occupations—shows exactly where the white-collar workers most threatened by AI displacement live.  Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and the study’s lead researcher, said that with the proper organization, these workers will become a stronger political force than any the U.S. has seen in recent decades. This geographical concentration, which he terms the “Wired Belt,” includes the suburban rings surrounding America’s biggest metros, many of which exist in swing st...