Hertz recently announced that it was partnering with AI startup UVeye to install more than 100 AI-powered damage scanning systems. An “MRI for cars”? What could go wrong?

Now, we’re beginning to get the answer as customers report huge charges for barely visible dings and small scuffs. And those who want to fight the AI scan’s finding have to, of course, engage with an AI chatbot to even begin disputing the fees.

Risk appetite is back as Middle East tensions look to be getting farther and farther away in the rearview mirror of your robotaxi. The Nasdaq 100 closed up 1.5% to hit a fresh closing high for the first time since February, the S&P 500 rose 1.1%, and the Russell 2000 gained 1.3% on the day.

Tuesday saw two bits of news showing that the future of hospitality may very well be at sea. 

The first was Carnival, jumping 8% after the world’s biggest cruise operator posted a record second quarter and raised its full-year outlook.

The second story was perhaps even more interesting, with Hilton International announcing it would make its first foray into the cruise business, following the likes of Marriott and Four Seasons.

This doesn’t mean that Hilton is getting into the cruise business a whole — the company said the new experience was less about keeping up with the competition as much as revisiting its Egyptian “floating hotel” concept from the 1960s — but it is a sign that one of the most robust businesses in hospitality is now capable of floating hotels.

Go Deeper: How the cruise industry converted its aging fleets into floating money factories

You may have seen the headlines: the tech IPO market is finally showing signs of life. Chime just went public, following strong IPOs from Circle and eToro.¹

And that could be great news, not just for Wall Street, but for accredited investors.

Why? StartEngine. 

This alternative investing platform doesn't just offer exposure to pre-IPO companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Databricks.² StartEngine (and its investors) can potentially benefit when these companies succeed.

Investors are paying attention. StartEngine pulled off $30M in revenue in Q1 2025, its biggest quarter ever (based on unaudited financials).³

Now StartEngine is preparing to close its current fundraise this week. If you want to tap into pre-IPO value while supporting the future of fintech, join more than 5K+ investors who have already committed $13.8M in this round.

View opportunity.⁴

When AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta were racing to build and train new large language models, they scrambled to find enough text to train their systems on. Countless web pages, photos, YouTube videos, Disney movies, and book texts were slurped up to feed the models, adding billions and billions of tokens.

Then the lawsuits began. Even before companies like Reddit lawyered up, the legality of the process was on the minds of some AI company employees, like Meta researchers who raised concerns while training its Llama model, only to be told that the use of a corpus of pirated texts was approved by “MZ.”

On Monday, a California court decided a case partially in favor of AI firms, with far-reaching consequences for all the companies that were sucking copyrighted material into their models. But it wasn’t a total win.

The case is the first of its kind in the US and lays out a potentially legal way for AI companies to safely train their models using copyrighted works — as long as they purchase them. That said, there are still many other cases pending and many factors at play before the industry has clear rules on whether that cool Darth Vader pic you made used the dark side of the force.

The US and China control a huge majority of the AI data center compute power, while the entire continents of South America and Africa have almost none at all. The US, which tops the list, also has another advantage in its chips.

AI data centers country by country