Good morning. It’s Jeremy here, filling in for Andrew, who is now on paternity leave for a bit. So you’ll see a rotating cast of Fortune tech journalists writing this newsletter for a few weeks.
Fortune Brainstorm Tech wrapped yesterday. Here were a few highlights from the final day of the conference:
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Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura, told the audience that while overall wearable sales are flat or even declining, sales of his company’s smart ring have more than doubled in the past year. Particularly popular is an AI-powered health coach that analyzes data from the ring and provides bespoke wellness suggestions.
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Neil Vogel, the CEO of publisher People Inc.—whose titles include People and Food & Wine—said Google is the worst when it comes to compensating publishers for using their content to train and improve AI models. The search giant has refused to license content from news organizations and publishers, while other AI labs have done licensing deals. “Some AI shops are good actors. OpenAI is a good guy,” said Vogel. “The worst guy is Google.”
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Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, said that starting this summer the hiring site saw a distinct shift in the most important qualifications employers were seeking in job candidates. Whereas once they favored deep technical know-how, they are increasingly looking for soft skills and people skills as AI automates some technical work and makes it easier for less technical employees to accomplish technical tasks.
Meanwhile, the tech world is talking about Oracle’s massive market gains, which have boosted Oracle founder, chairman, and chief technology officer Larry Ellison’s net worth, allowing him to surpass Elon Musk to claim the title of world’s richest man. Helping to drive Oracle’s stock was the announcement of a massive $300 billion deal with OpenAI to supply the AI company with data center capacity. (Now we know why OpenAI is telling investors it’s going to burn through $115 billion in cash by 2029.) Of course, the only reason Oracle is in this position is down to Ellison’s courting of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which has allowed his company, previously a distinct back-of-the-pack cloud company, to secure a massive stockpile of top-of-the-line Nvidia GPUs. More on Ellison’s soaring fortunes below.
Buy-now, pay-later fintech Klarna’s IPO went off, with the company’s shares gaining 15% on opening day. (Whether that “opening day pop” is a good thing is a debate for another day. It seems like the finance profs have mostly lost the argument, with bankers convincing companies that the money lost from underpricing the shares is worth its weight in marketing and investor buzz from the opening day jump.)
