In a world where millions of people wrestle with anxiety, stress, and uncertainty, finding effective ways to manage these feelings is more important than ever. Mental fear causes physical reactions that are difficult to live with—tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, and an uneasy feeling in the stomach. These sensations signal that something is out of alignment in your life, but traditional approaches to managing stress often don’t address the root cause of these emotions.
Zen Cryar DeBrücke offers a transformative approach to navigating these feelings through her Internal Guidance SystemⓇ (IGS). IGS is an intuitive tool designed to help people identify and correct the thought patterns that fuel these uncomfortable physical experiences. It provides a powerful way to reconnect with your authentic self and regain control.
Understanding Mental Fear and Anxiety
Mental fear is more than just feeling stressed. It is caused by what you think is out of alignment with your true life purpose. Old habitual thinking patterns that reinforce negativity and undermine your confidence in yourself. Some of these patterns aren’t even your own. Many forms of anxiety are inherited from parents or caregivers, passed down through generations as learned responses to stress.
As Zen explains, “The closing sensation is uncomfortable. It shows up like a lump in the throat, a tight feeling in the chest area, or a rock in the pit of the stomach.”
Recognizing and acting on the sensations allows you to shift from fear to clarity.
How IGS Helps Reframe Thought Patterns
IGS encourages individuals to change their thinking, tune in to the uncomfortable, “closing” sensations , and use them as cues to reframe their thinking. Once they recognize these cues, they can engage with the “opening” sensations of peace and clarity.
Zen shares that “Depression is almost always when you’ve been talked out of your life’s purpose.” Using IGS prompts, you can tap into your internal guidance, realign with your thinking with your true path, and begin to replace negative thoughts with thoughts that will lead to living your true purpose.
The IGS approach doesn’t just shift your thinking; it shifts your life. Over time, it can permanently reprogram the mind away from stress and anxious thought patterns by replacing them with new, aligned ways of thinking. It’s about “teaching people how to think differently and get outside of their box into new thoughts that get them back on track with their true purpose,” Zen explains. Embracing this process eliminates anxiety and unlocks guidance that you can follow to then accomplish that purpose.
Real-World Applications of IGS
The power of IGS lies in its simplicity and practicality. Danielle, who moved to a new city, began experiencing severe panic attacks after the transition. The stress of the move, combined with the loss of a close-knit community, triggered her anxiety.
Danielle struggled with indecision and an overwhelming fear that something was always going wrong. She felt dizzy and experienced chest pain, leading to her not wanting to even leave her home. Traditional therapy didn’t provide lasting relief, but after exploring Zen’s teachings through videos and podcasts, Danielle began using IGS techniques to manage her anxiety.
“Zen’s process helped pull me out of a hole and move me back into my life,” Danielle says.
Recognizing that her thoughts weren’t aligned with her true path, Danielle shifted her mindset toward understanding that her mind was deceiving her. The danger that her mind believed was about to happen was false. Over time, her panic attacks became less frequent and eventually disappeared altogether.
As Zen explains, “Your life changes, the lives of the people in relationship to you change.”
The Bigger Picture: IGS for Life and Leadership
IGS is more than just a tool for reducing anxiety. It’s a framework for decision-making, leadership, and personal growth. In high-pressure environments, such as corporate settings, IGS helps individuals make clear, calm decisions and regain alignment with their core values.
Whether managing stress at work or making major life decisions, Zen provides the mental tools to move forward with confidence and peace.
A Path to a Fear-Free Life
Over 40,000 people have already used Zen’s techniques on how to use their IGS to transform their anxiety and stress into a more peaceful and empowered existence. Zen invites you to experience the transformative power of IGS with a 14-day trial of the Fear Free Human Collective, where you’ll receive 14 mental prompts to release daily worries and anxieties and lectures on how your IGS works.
As Zen says, “You just need to know how to use it. It’s already installed and working. You were just never taught how to follow it.” By tuning into your Internal Guidance SystemⓇ, you can embrace a new way of thinking and unlock a future of peace and personal growth.
A professional writer with over a decade of incessant writing skills. Her topics of interest and expertise range from health, nutrition and psychology.
David J. Gunkel is the Presidential Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University and associate professor of applied ethics at Łazarski University in Warsaw, Poland. His most recent book is “Communicative AI: A Critical Introduction to Large Language Models” (Polity, 2025).
In response to any written document, like the one you are reading right now, it is reasonable to ask who wrote it and can therefore authorize its content. To resolve this, you will probably try to learn a bit about the author, for their identity can help determine the truthfulness of what is in the document. Given, for instance, that my bio tells you I’m a professor of communication studies at an American university, you may assume I’m well-placed to write on the disruption caused by large language models (as I intend to here) — even, perhaps, that what I say is more or less to be trusted. After all, you’ve identified the author and found him to hold some authority on the subject.
But when a text is written or generated by a large language model like ChatGPT, Claude or DeepSeek, the view of the author becomes clouded. Technically speaking, an algorithm wrote the text, but a human had to prompt the algorithm. So who or what is the author? Is it the algorithm, or the human, or a joint venture involving both? Why does it even matter?
Since ChatGPT was launched in 2022, much commentary has been dedicated to bemoaning the end of the human writer. Either LLMs will overtake the act of writing entirely, or humans will cede too many of their own creative powers to them. The advance of this technology will “render us wordless, thoughtless, self-less,” one journalist lamented last year. But, he emphasised, it is not only writers who will be impacted. “If AI does indeed supplant human writing, what will humans — both readers and writers — lose? The stakes feel tremendous, dwarfing any previous wave of automation.”
I hold a different view. LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”
“The death of the author is the birth of the critical reader.”
If you were to ask someone what an author is, they would most probably answer that it is someone who writes a book or some other text and is therefore responsible for what it says. They could reel off the names of people we identify as such: William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, maybe even this guy David Gunkel. But this understanding of an author is not some kind of universal truth that has existed from the beginning of time. Rather, it is a modern conception. The “author” as we now know it comes from somewhere in the not-so-distant past; it has a history.
The French literary critic Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of The Author,” traced the roots of this now-commonplace idea to the modern period in Europe, beginning around the mid-16th century. Before then, people did of course write texts — but the idea of vesting responsibility and authority in a singular person was not common practice. In fact, many of the great and influential works of literature — the folklore, myth and religious scripture that we still read today — have circulated in human culture without needing or assigning them to an author.
The modern period, however, spawned a number of related intellectual and cultural developments in Europe that centered around what Michel Foucault later called a “privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas.” In rejecting subservience to the papacy, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century birthed an individualized faith. Then, in the following century, philosopher René Descartes built his rationalist philosophy on the statement “I think, therefore I am,” making all knowledge dependent on the certainty of self-conscious thought. Accompanying these innovations was the concept of personal property as an individual right, ensured and protected by the state.
The concept of the author, as both Barthes and Foucault demonstrate, emerges from the confluence of these historically important innovations. But this does not mean that the author as the locus of literary authority is just a subject for theory — it also evolved to be a practical matter of law. In 18th-century England and its breakaway North American colonies, the author became the responsible party in a new kind of property law: copyright. The idea of an author being the legitimate owner of a literary work was first introduced in London not out of some idealistic dedication to the concept of artistic integrity, but in response to an earlier technological disruption that permitted the free circulation and proliferation of textual documents: the printing press.
As Sven Birkerts explains in the book “The Gutenberg Elegies”: “The idea of individual authorship — that one person would create an original work and have historical title to it — did not really become entrenched in the public mind until print superseded orality as the basis of cultural communication.” Once mechanically generated copies of text became easily accessible, and it became possible to make money from them, it was important to identify the author — or, rather, to be identified as the author. Thus, the proper name of the author is not only critical in terms of the origin of a text and its significance and attribution — it’s necessary for commercial transactions and cutting checks.
“The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing.”
The advent of what we now understand as “an author” had several important consequences for modern literary theory. As Barthes wrote: “When the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained.’” Authority came to be seen not in the material of the writing — i.e., in the words themselves — but in the original thoughts, intentions and character of the individual who wrote it.
Because of this, the primary task of the reader became one of penetrating the surface of the writing, finding the authorial voice behind it, and then comprehending what they originally intended with it. Following this formulation, modern critics and philosophers agreed with Descartes that “the reading of good books” meant “having a conversation with the most distinguished men of past ages.” (The use of the gender-exclusive “men” in this context is not insignificant — the author, like so many of the other authority figures during this period, was usually a white guy.)
This conceptualization of writing as a medium of expression or communication has a deep intellectual reach and a well-established historical foothold. In Aristotle’s doctrine of signs and their meanings, the written word was characterized as a symbol of mental experiences — in other words, what you write represents or expresses what’s on your mind. This was further theorized in the science of communication, formalized by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in the mid-20th century, who gave us a unidirectional model that is taught in every introductory course on the subject: source, transmitter, channel, receiver, message,
Thus, or so the argument goes, the best writings are those that speak clearly and directly so a reader can access, understand and comprehend what the author had in mind. The writing should become virtually transparent and permit the unimpeded flow of information from the mind of the author to the mind of the reader.
If the author as the principal figure of literary authority and accountability came into existence at a particular time and place, there could conceivably also be a point at which it ceased to fulfill this role. That is what Barthes signaled in his now-famous essay. The “death of the author” does not mean the end of the life of any particular individual or even the end of human writing, but the termination and closure of the author as the authorizing agent of what is said in and by writing. Though Barthes never experienced an LLM, his essay nevertheless accurately anticipated our current situation. LLMs produce written content without a living voice to animate and authorize their words. Text produced by LLMs is literally unauthorized — a point emphasized by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which recently upheld a decision denying authorship to AI.
Criticism of tools like ChatGPT tends to follow on from this. They have been described as “stochastic parrots” for the way they simply mimic human speech or repeat word patterns without understanding meaning. The ways in which they more generally disrupt the standard understanding of authorship, authority and the means and meaning of writing have clearly disturbed a great many people. But the story of how “the author” came into being shows us that the critics miss a key point: The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing.
After the “death of the author,” therefore, everything gets turned around. Specifically, the meaning of a piece of writing is not something that can be guaranteed a priori by the authentic character or voice of the person who is said to have written it. Instead, meaning transpires in and from the experience of reading. It is through that process that readers discover (or better, “fabricate”) what they assume the author had wanted to say.
This flipping of the script on literary theory alters the location of meaning-making in ways that overturn our standard operating presumptions. Previously, it had lain with the author who, it was assumed, had “something to say”; now, it is with the reader. When we read “Hamlet,” we are not able to access Shakespeare’s true intentions for writing it, so we find meaning by interpreting it (and then we project our interpretations back onto Shakespeare). In the process of our doing so, the authority that had been vested in the author is not just questioned, but overthrown. “Text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,” wrote Barthes, “but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader. … A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” The death of the author, in other words, is the birth of the critical reader.
This fundamental shift in the location of meaning-making also explains how LLM-generated content comes to have meaning. The critics are correct when they point out, for instance, that LLMs generate seemingly intelligible sequences of words but do not “truly comprehend the meaning behind” them because they “have no access to real-world, embodied referents.” But it would be impetuous to conclude that LLMs simply generate bullshit.
Their writings are and can be meaningful. What they mean is something that comes about through the process of our reading them and then interpreting and evaluating them. But this is not specific to LLMs; instead, as Barthes already demonstrated, it is a defining characteristic of all writing — this essay included, since it is you, the reader, who has had to determine what it means. LLMs simply render all of this legible and obvious.
“What we now have are things that write without speaking, a proliferation of texts that do not have, nor are beholden to, the authoritative voice of an author, and statements whose truth cannot be anchored in and assured by a prior intention to say something.”
But there’s something bigger at play here. The advent of LLM AI also brings into question the concept of meaning itself. When I write the words “large language model,” it is assumed that those words stand for and refer to some real thing out there in the world, like the ChatGPT application. Words have meaning because someone, like an author, who we assume is an embodied human person with access to the real world, uses words to refer to and say something about things. This, after all, is what Aristotle was getting at when he said that language consists of signs that refer and defer to things. And the big problem with LLMs is that they lack this ability: They manipulate words without knowing (or caring) what those words refer to.
But this seemingly common-sense view of how language works has been directly challenged by 20th-century innovations in structural linguistics, which considers language and meaning-making as a matter of difference situated within language itself. The dictionary provides perhaps the best illustration of this basic semiotic principle. In a dictionary, words come to have meaning by way of their relationship to other words. When you look up the word “tree,” you do not get a tree; you get other words — “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk,” and so forth.
Words, therefore, do not exclusively come to have meaning by direct reference to things; words refer to other words. This is the meaning (or at least one of the meanings) of that famous statement associated with the notoriously difficult French theorist Jacques Derrida: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” or “There is nothing outside the text.” And this fact is especially true for LLMs as there is, quite literally, nothing outside the texts on which they have been trained and that they are prompted to generate. For LLMs, it’s words all the way down.
Consequently, what has been offered as a criticism of LLM technology — that these algorithms only circulate different words without access to the real-world embodied referents — might not be the indictment critics think it is. LLMs are structuralist machines — they are practical actualizations of structural linguistic theory, where words have meaning not by reference to things but by referring and deferring to other words — and they thereby disrupt the standard operating presumptions of classical (Aristotelian) semiotics.
We should be critical of the promise and peril that LLMs present. After all, they and other forms of generative AI are powerful technologies whose impact on the world will be enormous. ChatGPT is not even three years old and already boasts half a billion weekly users; DeepSeek is one of the fastest-growing platforms worldwide. More will surely follow.
But in responding to the ways in which these systems challenge how humans access, interpret and convey knowledge, linguists, philosophers and AI experts tend to simply reassert concepts of authorship and authority that have long since been undermined. And the problem is not that these traditional ways of thinking about writing have somehow failed to work in the face of recent innovations with LLMs. It’s quite the opposite. The problem is they work all too well, exerting their influence and authority over our thinking as if they were somehow normal, natural and beyond question.
A large part of the reason for our misunderstanding of the significance of these machines is the way “artificial intelligence” is understood. Because of its nominal focus on “intelligence,” AI’s outputs are taken to either signify the actual presence of intelligent thought or, in cases where the device spits out nonsense or hallucinates, the lack thereof. Taking the generation of written content as a sign or symptom of intelligence has been the definition of AI since the time of Alan Turing’s imitation game. LLMs, however, produce intelligible textual content without intelligence (or without us knowing for sure whether there is intelligence inside the black box or not, which is actually worse). In doing so, they destabilize the rules of the game.
All this throws up something that has been missed in the frenzy over the technological significance of LLMs: They are philosophically significant. What we now have are things that write without speaking, a proliferation of texts that do not have, nor are beholden to, the authoritative voice of an author, and statements whose truth cannot be anchored in and assured by a prior intention to say something.
“Large language models open an opportunity to think and write differently.”
From one perspective — a perspective that remains bound to the usual ways of thinking — this can only be seen as a threat and crisis, for it challenges our very understanding of what writing is, the state of literature and the meaning of truth or the means of speaking the truth. But from another, it is an opportunity to think beyond the limitations of Western metaphysics and its hegemony.
LLMs do not threaten writing, the figure of the author, or the concept of truth. They only threaten a particular and limited understanding of what these ideas represent — one that is itself not some naturally occurring phenomenon but the product of a particular culture and philosophical tradition. Instead of being (mis)understood as signs of the apocalypse or the end of writing, LLMs reveal the terminal limits of the author function, participate in a deconstruction of its organizing principles, and open the opportunity to think and write differently.
But don’t take my word for it. Who or what am I? What authorizes me to assert and exercise this kind of authority over a text? How can you be certain that everything you just read is the product of a human author and not something generated by an LLM or some human-machine hybrid?
You have no way of knowing for sure. And everything that could be done to resolve this suspicion, like pointing to my name, listing the details of my biography or even having me add a statement asserting that everything you have just read is “100% genuine human-generated content,” will ultimately be ineffectual. It will be so mainly because an LLM can generate exactly the same. No matter the assurances, there will always be room for reasonable doubt.
And that’s the point. The difficulty that has been assumed to be unique to LLM-generated content — that we have words without knowing for sure who or what authorizes what is being said through them — is already a defining condition of all forms of writing, this essay included. The LLM form of artificial intelligence is disturbing and disruptive, but not because it is a deviation or exception to that condition; instead, it exposes how it was always a fiction.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups, unpacked by the writers who know best. Produced by Theresa Loconsolo. Edited by Kell.
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Each week, StrictlyVC’s host and TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos, with Alex Gove, former journalist, VC and operating exec, review the top stories in StrictlyVC and interview a mover and shaker in the world of tech.
HR tech startup Deel filed an amended complaint on Tuesday in its ongoing legal battle against its archrival Rippling that offers surprising new details about its own corporate spying allegations.
Rippling sued Deel in March after a Rippling employee testified in an Irish court that he was spying on his employer for the rival in an affidavit that reads like a Hollywood movie. Rippling’s lawsuit alleges misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition, and more, largely based on the spying allegations.
Deel has since countersued, attempting to get the suit dismissed for technical reasons, but also making its own allegations, like that Rippling has also been spying. This amended complaint offers more details on what Deel means by that.
Specifically, it alleges that one of Rippling’s employees, who holds the job title of Competitive Intelligence, “spent six months impersonating a legitimate Deel customer to gain unauthorized access to Deel’s systems to meticulously analyze, record, and copy Deel’s global products and the way Deel does business for Rippling’s own benefit and use.”
The lawsuit is also full of insults hurled at Rippling’s CEO, Parker Conrad, and mentions his troubles at his previous company, Zenefits. At times, the complaint ventures into psychoanalysis territory. “To understand Conrad is to understand Rippling,” the suit claims.
It then goes on to speculate that Rippling has targeted Deel because Conrad is angry at Zenefits’ VC backer, Andreessen Horowitz: “Sadly, it is now apparent that Conrad has made it his life’s goal to exact misguided and petty revenge on those connected with Andreessen, including Deel, in which Andreessen owns a 20% share.”
And the complaint alleges that “Rippling has planted false and misleading claims about Deel in the press and with regulators across the country.”
This appears to stem from 2023, when U.S. Senator Adam Schiff posted a public letter asking the U.S. Department of Labor to look into how Deel was classifying workers. This after Business Insider published an investigation on the matter. Deel denied wrongdoing at the time and said a discussion with Schiff put the matter to bed.
The amended complaint also provides at least one financial tidbit; Deel says it has been profitable for years and is generating over $1 billion in annual revenue.
A spokesperson for Rippling says that the company is looking into the specific allegations of how the employee gathered product intelligence as described in the complaint. The spokesperson tells us that “Rippling is unwavering in our commitment to fair competition and the highest ethical standards. We expect full compliance as described clearly in our written policies.”
The spokesperson also alleges that the revised complaint “backtracks” from some of the assertions in the original, including removing wording that implied Rippling had somehow obtained access to Deel’s board-level information.
While the lawsuit is an entertaining read (here’s a link to it), about the level of a typical Bravo network reality TV show, Deel appears to be attempting to make a tit-for-tat case about corporate spying. But the two sets of allegations are not about the same thing.
Rippling is accusing Deel of paying an employee to gather information from Rippling’s internal network. The employee, who confessed to spying, has testified that he gave Deel information that included sales leads, product roadmaps, customer accounts, names of superstar employees, and whatever else was asked for.
Deel is accusing Rippling of unfairly learning about its product and features from the product itself as well as the information it gives to its customers. Competitors have been buying each other’s products as a way to keep tabs, one-up, and sell against each other since the beginning of time. So it will be interesting to see how the courts handle Deel’s lawsuit — if they rule that such tactics can go too far.
In the meantime, Rippling’s alleged catching of the corporate spy — which involved a trap, a smashed phone, and a honeypot — has already slipped into the tech industry’s cultural lexicon.
When Y Combinator grad Cotool launched an agentic security platform last month that, among other things, sets up honeypots, its ad was a spoof on how Rippling’s corporate spy said he was caught.
Windsurf, the popular vibe coding startup that’s reportedly being acquired by OpenAI, says Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to its Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI models.
Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in a post on X Tuesday that Anthropic gave Windsurf little notice for this change, and the startup now has to find other third-party compute providers to run several of Anthropic’s most popular AI models on its platform.
“We have been very clear to Anthropic that this is not our desire – we wanted to pay them for the full capacity,” said Mohan on X. “We are disappointed by this decision and short notice.”
In a blog post, Windsurf said it has some capacity with third-party inference providers, but not enough, so this change may create short-term availability issues for Windsurf users trying to access Claude.
With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models. Given the short notice, we may see some short-term Claude 3.x model availability issues as we have very quickly ramped up capacity on other inference…
The decision comes just a few weeks after Anthropic seemed to pass over Windsurf during the launch of Claude 4, the company’s new family of models, which offer industry leading performance on software engineering tasks.
On launch day, Windsurf said it did not receive direct access from Anthropic to run Claude 4 on its platform, and still hasn’t. This forced the company to rely on a workaround that’s more expensive and complicated for developers to access Claude 4. Meanwhile, other popular AI coding tools — including Anysphere’s Cursor, Cognition’s Devin, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot — seemed to have direct access to Claude 4 models at launch.
The AI-assisted coding sector, also know as vibe coding, has heated up in recent months. OpenAI reportedly closed on a deal to acquire Windsurf in April. At the same time, Anthropic — whose AI models are a favorite among developers — has invested more in its own AI-coding applications. In February, Anthropic launched its own AI coding application, Claude Code, and in May, the startup held its first Code with Claude developer conference.
“We’re prioritizing capacity for sustainable partnerships that allow us to effectively serve the broader developer community,” said Anthropic spokesperson Steve Mnich in an email to TechCrunch on Tuesday, noting that it’s still possible to access Claude 4 on Windsurf via an API key. “Developers can also access Claude through our direct API integration, our partner ecosystem, and other development tools.”
Windsurf has grown quickly this year, reaching $100 million ARR in April, in an attempt to catch up with more popular AI coding tools such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot. However, Windsurf’s limited access to Anthropic’s models may be stunting its growth.
Several Windsurf users who spoke with TechCrunch were frustrated by the lack of direct access to Anthropic’s best AI coding models.
Ronald Mannak, a startup founder that specializes in Apple’s programming language, Swift, told TechCrunch that Claude 4 represented a significant jump in capabilities for his workloads. While Mannak has been a Windsurf customer since late 2024, he’s switched to using Cursor in recent weeks so that he can vibe code more easily with Claude 4.
As a short-term solution to support Claude 4, Windsurf allows users to connect their Anthropic API keys to their Windsurf accounts. However, developers have noted that this “bring your own key” solution is more expensive and complicated than if Windsurf provided the models itself.
When it comes to vibe coders, optionality is the name of the game. Every few months, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic release new AI models that seem to outperform the industry on coding tasks. Because of that, it benefits vibe coding startups to support AI models from all the leading developers.
Windsurf spokesperson Payal Patel tells TechCrunch via email that the company has always believed in providing optionality for users. In this case, it seems Anthropic has made that a bit more challenging.
Maxwell Zeff is a senior reporter at TechCrunch specializing in AI and emerging technologies. Previously with Gizmodo, Bloomberg, and MSNBC, Zeff has covered the rise of AI and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. He is based in San Francisco. When not reporting, he can be found hiking, biking, and exploring the Bay Area’s food scene.
A film that will portray the chaotic time at OpenAI, when co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was fired and rehired within a span of just five days, is reportedly in the works.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie is titled “Artificial,” and it’s in development at Amazon MGM Studios.
While details aren’t finalized, sources told THR that Luca Guadagnino, known for “Call Me by Your Name” and “Challengers,” is in talks to direct. The studio is considering Andrew Garfield to portray Altman, Monica Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown) as former CTO Mira Murati, and Yura Borisov (“Anora”) for the part of Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder who urged for Altman’s removal.
Additionally, “Saturday Night Live” writer Simon Rich reportedly wrote the screenplay, suggesting the film will likely incorporate comedic aspects. An OpenAI comedy movie feels fitting since the realm of AI has its own ridiculousness, and the events that took place two years ago were nothing short of absurd.
In November 2023, Sam Altman was dismissed from the AI company and resigned from both his position as CEO and his role on the board. The rationale was that the board no longer trusted Altman to lead effectively. However, just five days later, after numerous discussions and negotiations, an agreement was reached, resulting in Altman’s reinstatement.
No matter who is cast in this movie, it’ll be fascinating to see how “Artificial” portrays the drama and what the overall reception will be among general audiences, especially considering the increasing prevalence of AI tools like ChatGPT.
Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch.
Shares of Waaree Energies Ltd. gained nearly 7% on Thursday May 29, after the company said its wholly-owned subsidiary Waaree Solar Americas received an order from $176 million for the supply of 586 MW solar modules.
It said it received the order from a renowned customer who is a developer and owner-operator of utility scale solar and energy storage projects across the United States.
The supply of 586 MW solar modules is expected is scheduled to begin from the financial year 2027.
Last week, the company’s board approved the acquisition of Kamath Transformers Pvt. Ltd. for ₹293 crore.
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The acquisition is part of Waaree Energies’ business expansion activity and will be completed in the ongoing fiscal year. The company will acquire 100% shareholding in Kamath Transformers on a cash consideration basis.
Waaree Energies said Kamath Transformers is a well-established and progressive company in transformer manufacturing. It was incorporated on May 23, 1996. The company reported a turnover of ₹25.73 crore in financial year 2022, ₹54.41 crore in financial year 2023 and ₹122.68 crore in financial year 2024.
Additionally, the company’s board also approved the acquisition of newly-incorporated non-operating company Green New Delhi Forever Energy Pvt Ltd by Waaree Forever Energies Pvt Ltd, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company. The acquisition is solely for facilitating and holding specific power projects under the independent power producer (IPP) framework.
Shares of Waaree Energies gained 6.97% to hit an intraday high of ₹2992.3 apiece on Thursday, May 29. The stock has gained 11.6% in the past month.
He made the remarks in the 9th Renewable Energy Conference and Exhibition of Iran (IRAN REC 2025) held at Milad Tower in Tehran.
Emphasizing the necessity of replacing electricity with gas in the field of heating, he stated: “In all aspects, including the production and import of solar panels, equipping power plants, modifying production lines for cooling and heating equipment, and construction engineering, precise and executive planning is being carried out with the aim of increasing energy efficiency.”
Addressing the same conference, Energy Minister Abbas Ali-Abadi said that the capacity of Iran’s solar farms capacity has been almost doubled over the past seven months.
He announced efforts to facilitate activities in the development of renewables, and in this regard, improving the business environment for those active in this field is on the agenda.
The minister also considered the goal of the government and the Ministry of Energy to facilitate the activities of the private sector in the development of renewables.
In early March, the Iranian parliament (Majlis) approved the country’s membership in the International Solar Energy Society (ISES).
Founded in 1954, ISES is an UN-accredited membership organization promoting and envisioning a world with 100 percent renewable energy for everyone used wisely and efficiently.
The ISES Headquarters are based in Germany. ISES is the largest international solar organization, with extensive membership worldwide. It has members in more than 110 countries, and Global contacts and partners in over 50 countries with thousands of associate members, and almost 100 company and institutional members throughout the world.
ISES has a track record of strongly supporting the solar industry, helping shape public opinion through education and outreach activities, and providing informed comment on global issues.
€98M raised to transition Solveo Energies from development to project commissioning, targeting 800 MW by 2030.
Mirova-led investment validates Solveo’s full value-chain model and regional energy strategy.
Funding supports €875M in total investments toward France’s carbon neutrality goals.
Solveo Energies, a French independent renewable energy producer, has raised €98 million in a major financing round led by Mirova, a responsible investment affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers. The funding will fast-track the commissioning of renewable projects and support Solveo’s long-term ambition of deploying 800 MW in installed capacity by 2030.
“We are very proud to welcome Mirova into our entrepreneurial adventure,” said Jean-Marc Mateos, President of Solveo Energies. “This transaction strengthens our model as an independent and territorially anchored player. Thanks to this long-term strategic partnership, we have the means to accelerate our development, solidify our portfolio, and remain true to our convictions: producing sustainable, local energy that respects the regions.”
Jocelyn Dioux, Investment Director at Mirova, noted: “We were particularly convinced by the quality of the teams, the relevance of the asset portfolio, the rigor of the processes, and the clear strategic vision of the company.”
The round was supported by Natixis Partners (M&A), Jeantet (legal), Syneria (technical), KPMG (financial), and De Gaulle Fleurance (legal/tax) on Solveo’s side, while Mirova was advised by Gottengreen, White & Case, and PwC.
This strategic capital infusion positions Solveo to play a leading role in France’s decarbonization efforts, while delivering scalable, regionally aligned energy infrastructure.
TotalEnergies signed an investment agreement with the Government of Kazakhstan for the giant Mirny onshore wind project in response to the dual challenge of reducing carbon emissions and electrifying isolated rural areas. Developed in partnership with the National Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the National Company KazMunayGas, the wind farm will be capable of supplying one million people with electricity from renewable sources, thereby helping decarbonize the country’s energy mix.
In the Zhambyl region in southeast Kazakhstan, we are developing the Mirny onshore wind project with our partners. It will harness the winds that sweep across the region’s semi-arid expanses (averaging 8.9 meters per second per year) and transform them into low-carbon electricity. Featuring a total capacity of one gigawatt (GW), this onshore wind farm’s 140 wind turbines will be combined with a 600 megawatt-hours (MWh) battery-based ESS for a reliable and sustainable power supply.
Contributing to Kazakhstan’s energy transition
In a country where our Company has been active since 1992, especially through our hydrocarbon production activities, the Mirny project perfectly illustrates the multi-energy strategy that we are implementing in oil and gas countries. Historically focused on oil and gas, and experiencing sustained growth in its energy demand, Kazakhstan has set itself the target of increasing the proportion of renewable energies in its electricity production to 15% by 2030(1).
According to a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) signed in June 2023, all the electricity produced by the Mirny project will be sold to the Financial Settlement Center of Renewable Energy, a public entity owned by the Government of Kazakhstan, for the supply of the national grid. The Mirny facilities will deliver 4 TWh a year of renewable electricity, covering the needs of one million inhabitants, i.e. 4% of the country’s production. Mirny will reinforce the solar power plants that we already operate in the country and will help avoid 3.5 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.
Meeting the technical challenges of a wind farm in the heart of Kazakhstan
The Mirny wind farm is currently the largest wind farm project ever undertaken in Kazakhstan. It represents a real technical challenge, not least because of its sheer size (it is almost 10 times bigger than the country’s largest solar power plant), the region’s extreme weather conditions (a summer-winter temperature difference of 70°C), and its distance from the electricity grid, requiring the construction of more than 200 km of power lines. Construction is due to start in the fall of 2025, with the first electricity injected into the grid in 2028.
