Philippa Kaur

Northvolt had all the trappings of an industrial champion. Capital had poured in from Wall Street titans such as Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. Assorted governments had blessed its plans with generous grants and big customers had vouched for its technology. But on September 23rd the seven-year-old Swedish battery-maker announced that it would suspend work on one of its new manufacturing plants, slow the expansion of its research and development (R&D) unit and lay off a fifth of its workforce. It was the second round of cutbacks in a month. More

A few weeks ago people within OpenAI were keen to assure your correspondent that the maker of ChatGPT had matured, following the coup almost a year ago against Sam Altman and the counter-coup shortly afterwards that reinstated him as CEO. But on September 25th not even Mr Altman could sustain the fiction. “We are not a normal company,” he tweeted, admitting he was caught out by the abrupt decision to quit by Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer (pictured with Mr Altman last year). More

Intel has spent two decades missing the next big thing. The chipmaker’s dominant PC business blinded it to the opportunity from mobile phones in the 2000s. More recently, the firm was slow to adopt extreme-ultraviolet lithography, an expensive chipmaking process that was originally funded by Intel itself. Now Nvidia dominates the white-hot market for designing artificial-intelligence (AI) chips, becoming the world’s most valuable semiconductor company. Investors in Intel have voted with their feet (see chart). More

The twelve new restaurants added to the New York Michelin Guide this month, serving up cuisine ranging from “haute French” to “eco-chic”, will be toasting their success. Being featured in the handbook of the tyre-maker-turned-restaurant-critic is the first step towards receiving a Michelin star, the most coveted award in fine dining. Yet according to research recently published in the Strategic Management Journal, an improbable source of culinary intelligence, restaurants might be better off remaining starless. More

FIVE MILLION DOLLARS were on offer to contestants in “Beast Games”, a new game show being made for Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service. Instead, some participants received physical injuries, emotional distress and sexual harassment, according to a complaint filed in a Los Angeles court on September 16th. Amazon and the show’s creator, Jimmy Donaldson, a 26-year-old YouTuber known as MrBeast, have not commented on the lawsuit. But the fiasco has reassured some Hollywood executives that they have little to fear from social-media upstarts. More

Kindness is in the air. Publishers produce business books with titles like “The Power of Nice” or, simply, “Kind”. LinkedIn, which is ostensibly a networking site for career-minded professionals, is overrun with sickly videos showing people being improbably generous to the homeless. Firms publicly embrace the values of compassion: one manufacturer of safety-gear talks of “offering grace internally”, which sounds terribly intrusive. More

A new football season will begin on September 27th: not the Premier League or La Liga, but the annual update of the world’s favourite football video-game. “FIFA”, as the franchise was known from its pixelated debut in 1993, sells nearly 30m copies a year. In-game spending pushes its annual revenue above $3bn, estimates MoffettNathanson, a firm of analysts, which calculates that the title contributes nearly two-thirds of the profit of its publisher, Electronic Arts (EA). Gaming has few bigger names than “FIFA”. More

A rare beast may soon lumber across the hills of Silicon Valley: not a $1bn unicorn, nor a $10bn decacorn, but a hectocorn—a startup valued at more than $100bn. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is understood to be in talks to raise $6.5bn from investors to fund the expansion dreams of its co-founder, Sam Altman. If it pulls off the deal, OpenAI’s valuation will be about $150bn, making it only the second ever $100bn-plus startup in America after SpaceX, a rocketry giant led by Elon Musk (who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and is now Mr Altman’s nemesis). More