Mattel Taps OpenAI to Help it Design Toys, Other Products
Mattel Inc., the maker of Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars, has signed a deal with OpenAI to use its artificial intelligence tools to design and in some cases power toys and other products based on its brands.
The collaboration is at an early stage, and its first release won't be announced until later this year, Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer, and Josh Silverman, Mattel's chief franchise officer, said in a joint interview. The technology could ultimately result in the creation of digital assistants based on Mattel characters, or be used to make toys and games like the Magic 8 Ball or Uno even more interactive.
'We plan to announce something towards the tail end of this year, and it's really across the spectrum of physical products and some experiences,' Silverman said, declining to comment further on the first product. 'Leveraging this incredible technology is going to allow us to really reimagine the future of play.'
Mattel isn't licensing its intellectual property to OpenAI as part of the deal, Silverman said, and remains in full control of the products being created. Introductory talks between the two companies began late last year, he said.
Mattel Chief Executive Officer Ynon Kreiz has been looking to evolve the company from just a toy manufacturer into a producer of films, TV shows and mobile games based on its popular characters. OpenAI, meanwhile, has been courting companies with valuable intellectual property to aid them in developing new products based on iconic brands.
'The idea exploration phase of creative design for companies like Mattel and many others, that's a critical part of the workflow,' Lightcap said. 'As we think about how AI builds tools that extend that capability, I think we're very lucky to have partners like Mattel that we can work with to better understand that problem.'
On Tuesday, OpenAI released its newest model — o3-pro — which can analyze files, search online and complete other tasks that made it score especially well with reviewers on 'comprehensiveness, instruction-following and accuracy,' the company said.
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The Founder Of Shake Shack Is Now A Billionaire
for Airbnb D anny Meyer made his name opening up a string of successful upscale restaurants in Manhattan. First came Union Square Cafe in 1985 when he was just 27. That was followed by Gramercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park. These restaurants made him famous, but it was a hot dog stand he opened in 2001 to raise funds for a public park that led to Shake Shack, Meyer's super successful twist on hamburgers and frozen custards. Now with 585 locations and $1.3 billion in revenue, Shake Shack is a fast food giant Meyer is the latest restaurant billionaire. Forbes estimates the 67-year old St Louis native's net worth is at least $1 billion, thanks mainly to Shake Shack's soaring stock price. The chain's shares are trading near record highs, up 73% over the past year, due to strong financial performance and an aggressive expansion strategy. Meyer, who did not respond to a request for comment on Forbes ' estimates, owns around 3.5 million shares, currently worth about half a billion dollars. He's got hundreds of millions more from selling down his stake in Shake Shack over the past decade. He also still owns his collection of restaurants under Union Square Hospitality Group, in addition to a wide investment portfolio filled with winners like Goldbelly and coffee chain Joe. Meyer joins a growing list of American billionaires who made their fortunes in fast food, including Jersey Mike's Peter Cancro, Panda Express' Andrew and Peggy Cherng, and, recently, Chipotle founder Steve Ells. Like Ells, Meyer got his start in fine dining before going global in fast food. The son of a consultant for Pan American airlines, he grew up enjoying global cuisine thanks to $44 roundtrip plane tickets handwritten by his father. 'Throughout my college years I could not afford not to fly…to Italy for any long weekend,' he writes in his book Setting the Table . After studying political science at Trinity College, he planned to go to law school. The night before his scheduled LSAT exam, Meyer, who had moved to New York City after college, went out for dinner with his uncle Elio on the Upper East Side. He wasn't feeling too enthusiastic about his future career, and Elio noticed his gloomy mood, Meyer recalled in an interview with Forbes last Spring. 'Why on earth would you pursue something you're not interested in doing?' his uncle asked. Meyer realized he had no idea what he truly wanted to do. Luckily, his uncle did: 'All I've ever heard you talk about your entire life has been restaurants and food,' he told him, 'Open a restaurant, for God's sake.' In 1985, at the age of 27, Meyer opened his first business: Union Square Cafe, a modern American restaurant which blends upscale dining with unpretentious warmth and hospitality. The cafe quickly became a staple of Manhattan dining and is still open today. Despite his first restaurant's success, Meyer did not replicate the concept into additional locations as he would later do with Shake Shack. Instead, he expanded his culinary portfolio with a series of diversified restaurant offerings: In 1994, he opened Gramercy Tavern, a dimly-lit spot with a more rustic aesthetic that quickly earned him his first Michelin star. Then came Eleven Madison Park in the late nineties, which marked a further push into high-end dining and earned three Michelin stars and global recognition. By the early 2000s, Meyer had a growing portfolio of six renowned restaurants spread out across New York City. He certainly didn't need to open a hot dog cart in the middle of a public square to stay afloat. But that's exactly what he did. Madison Square Park wasn't as safe in 2001 as it is today, and the city had asked Meyer for help keeping it busy. 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Today, Shake Shack owns and operates about 380 stores within the United States, and has an additional 210 global locations under a franchise model spread across more than 15 countries. Last year, the chain did $1.3 billion in revenue, a 15% increase from 2023. Shack Shack has plans to expand to 1,500 company-operated stores in the long term. Meyer owned more than 20% of the company at the time of the IPO, but has whittled his stake down to about 4% today through regular stock sales, presumably to diversify his portfolio. He positioned Shake Shack as a "fine-casual" chain with more premium burgers than its competitors. In addition, Meyer has invested in a diversified portfolio of hospitality businesses through Enlightened Hospitality Investments, a strategic growth equity fund affiliated with Union Square Hospitality Group. He was an early investor in New York City coffee chain Joe, which today operates 23 locations, and reservation app Resy, which was acquired by American Express in 2019. In 2022, he transitioned from CEO to executive chairman of Union Square Hospitality Group, and is still active in its management. He continues to serve as Shake Shack's chairman, a position he's held since 2010. 'All my learning came from trattorias and bistros. What I loved more than anything was a sense of place…that made a big impact on me,' Meyer explained in a 2015 TED talk. As he told Forbes last year, 'It was never a dream to have more than one [Shake Shack].'
Forbes
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The Best Brokers For Saving On Capital Gains Taxes
Y ou make money in the market but tell the IRS you're losing money. Yes, this works—for a while . Direct indexing with loss harvesting looks like a bonanza, for both providers and customers. Is it? Short answer: Yes, but. Yes, you can do nicely with this scheme, more than covering the fees charged. The two buts: (1) Before getting in, think about what's going to happen on the way out. Below I will present a cautionary tale about the resulting mess. (2) Take any vendor's projection of tax savings with a grain of salt. Providers evidently see gold here. In recent years Vanguard, BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan, Stanley have bought their way into the business. Wealthfront, a Palo Alto, California robo-adviser, has made a great success democratizing automated loss harvesting and aims to go public in the near future. Frec, a newer San Francisco firm and something of a Wealthfront knock-off, has shaken up the business with an insanely low-cost offering. Direct indexing means owning the S&P 500 or another index not via a fund but via individual stock positions. Instead of putting $100,000 into the Vanguard S&P 500 exchange-traded fund you buy 42.4 shares of Nvidia, 13.7 shares of Microsoft, 0.33 shares of Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies and so on. Or rather, a computer does the buying. Periodically the computer plucks out losers to sell for a capital loss, replacing them temporarily with substitute stocks that behave similarly (Merck for Pfizer, perhaps). After 30 days have passed, the original position can be restored without creating a loss-killing wash sale. You sit on the winners for as long as you can. We are, of course, talking about money in taxable accounts. There is no point to direct indexing inside an IRA or 401(k). A direct indexing account typically has between 200 and 400 stocks. You don't need more than that to do a decent job of tracking an index with 500 stocks in it. Parametric Portfolio Associates was a pioneer in this business, originally offering the tax dodge to wealthy clients paying for custom portfolio management. Its direct-indexing skills (and the large footprint of Morgan Stanley, which picked up the company when it acquired Eaton Vance) explain Parametric's $400 billion of assets under management. The prevalence of fractional shares and the automation of financial advice mean that little people can now get in on the action, with as little $5,000. What kind of capital losses do you get? That will depend on the direction and the volatility of the market. Over a decade, Wealthfront reports, capital losses have averaged 2.6% to 3.3% per year for its clients, but there is a great deal of year-to-year variation. People who put money in at the beginning of 2022 got a gusher of losses in the ensuing crash, but then they would have been better off waiting for a year and doing without the tax goodie. Remember that your aim with loss harvesting is not to have losses. It's to have gains but report losses. Suppose you have a plump capital loss to put onto your tax return. How much good does that do you? This is a function of your tax bracket and your other investing activity. Capital losses can absorb any amount of capital gains and, beyond that, can be written off against up to $3,000 a year of ordinary income like salaries. Unused losses can be carried forward indefinitely but expire with the taxpayer's death. It is reasonable to expect that the tax benefits will, in the early years of a direct indexing account, more than pay for the fees, which are usually in the range of 0.1% to 0.4% a year. But at some point, perhaps after five years of a mostly bullish market, or later if stocks go sideways, you will have nothing but gain positions. Note that someone who bought in 2015 would not have derived much tax benefit from the crash of 2022 because even at its low point that year the market was twice as high as in 2015. This matter of loss exhaustion brings me to the first caveat about fancified indexing. What are you planning to do when it's time to move on? To illustrate, I will cite the case of a Forbes reader that I will identify as Mr. X. X signed up for a separately managed account with a financial advisor who was using direct-indexing software. Recently, with most of the potential losses captured, he quit the advisor and deposited the stock at a discount broker. He asked me: Now what should I do? X is sitting on an interesting pile of shares. He owns Nvidia at a $12 entry point, and should let that position ride. So, too, with gains in Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom and Microsoft. But he's got 140 positions that are now underwater or showing small gains. It would be nice to declutter. Some of these clunkers will be easy to dispose of. Pepsico, Nike, Pfizer—no problem. But what about PT Bank Raykat or Airports of Thailand? These American Depositary Receipts trade over the counter, which is to say, not on Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange. On Yahoo Finance I recently saw the airport ADR with an average daily trading volume of 993 shares and a frightful bid/ask spread of $9.52 to $12. X could sell all the cats and dogs, but would probably get hosed on the OTC shares. Apart from their sometimes larcenous bid/ask spreads, unlisted shares may not qualify for commission-free trading. Another problem: Odd lots (less than 100 shares), of which X has more than 400, are sometimes hard to trade. This junkpile cries out for all-or-none orders (you don't want a trade to turn an odd lot into an odder one). But combining that restriction with a price limit increases the chance that an order simply won't be executed. X did walk away with a fat loss carryforward, which may come in handy some day, but is likely to spend many hours cleaning up. Here's someone commenting anonymously online on direct indexing: 'I made a big mistake doing it in a Wealthfront account and when I wanted to consolidate holdings with another firm, I had to manually sell 195 securities. Stick to broad index ETFs!' I don't entirely agree with that sentiment. Direct indexing makes sense if you have plans for the end game and if you stick to large U.S. companies. I'll go this far with the Wealthfront critic: You should get your small-stock and foreign exposures via ETFs. Now let's look at the second caveat, which is to understand the value of a capital loss. Wealthfront says that, over the past decade, it has captured $3.5 billion of losses for its customers, 91% of them short-term. (These figures include earlier versions of tax-wise automated investing as well as the more recent direct indexing product.) The losses, it declares, have saved people an estimated $1 billion in taxes. Fine print: The estimate assumes that all of the short-term losses went to use, immediately, against short-term gains. This is unrealistic. Someone with a $100,000 account generating $3,000 of capital losses, and with no capital gains to report, can indeed use the $3,000 against ordinary (that is, high-taxed) income. But someone with a $1 million account generating $30,000 of capital losses is unlikely to be using all that against high-bracket income. It would require having at least $27,000 of short-term capital gains. People do not have short-term capital gains unless they engage in foolish behavior, such as investing in a hedge fund. Rational investors do, however, have long-term gains to report. They get them from employer stock, sales of homes, all-cash takeovers and unwanted capital gain distributions from mutual funds. Realistic assumptions for big-ticket investors: You will be using most of your capital losses, whether short or long, to absorb long-term gains. You may find yourself using a loss long after you harvested it. The top rate on long gains is 23.8% plus whatever your state grabs. Conclusion: Losses are valuable but not as valuable as advertised. Now here are some product reviews. Wealthfront This one is my favorite. It offers a direct-indexed S&P 500 account at a bargain-basement 0.09% annual fee, with a $5,000 minimum. Frec In a price war with Wealthfront, this outfit has the same 0.09% fee for the S&P 500 direct deal, with a $20,000 minimum. It gets a runner-up status because it's newer and smaller. It oversees $350 million to Wealthfront's $80 billion. Frec has some interesting variations on the theme, including a Sharia-compliant index portfolio at 0.35%. Fidelity Its direct-indexing product uses 250 or so stocks to mimic the Fidelity Large-Cap Index (similar but not identical to the S&P 500). The annual fee is 0.4%, with a $5,000 minimum. When the harvesting wears out you can transfer the collection of stocks to a no-fee brokerage account. Forty basis points is a lot. But using this service could make sense if you have other money at Fidelity, which oversees (in custody or management) $15 trillion. It has a powerful brokerage platform and the oldest and biggest broker-affiliated donor-advised charity fund. Exit plan: Offload your long-term winners onto the charity, which will take them, fractional shares included, with a few mouse clicks. Schwab Charles Schwab has a 0.4% direct indexing product (minimum, $100,000) and a charity fund similar to Fidelity's. Vanguard This firm invented retail-level indexing and is known for its low costs. Four years ago it spent an undisclosed sum of money (your money, if you are a Vanguard customer; it's a mutual corporation) to acquire direct indexer Just Invest Systems. So, what's on offer? I can't find an answer on the Vanguard website, which has only a vague description of direct indexing aimed at financial advisors. The company did not respond to a press inquiry. A few weeks ago former shareholders of Just Invest sued Vanguard, claiming they were double-crossed on a performance payout. Could be a while before we see a competitive offering from the indexing king. More from Forbes Forbes Is Your Broker Gouging You? Use This Guide To The Best Buys In Money Markets By William Baldwin Forbes How To Boost Your Cash Yield At Fidelity, Vanguard, Chase And Schwab By William Baldwin Forbes How To Use Gold And Other Hard Assets To Hedge Against Inflation By William Baldwin Forbes Inside Private Equity's $29 Trillion Retirement Savings Grab By Hank Tucker
Forbes
2 minutes ago
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Microsoft's Critical Password Warning — Users Have 5 Days To Act
Unsaved Microsoft Authenticator passwords will be deletd on August 1. Passwords: You can't live without them, despite the advance of passkey technology, but unless you act before August 1, the passwords you have generated using Microsoft's Authenticator app will be deleted. Yes, deleted. This should not come as a surprise, not least as Microsoft has been warning users for the longest time of the password changes to come: In June no new passwords could be added to the app, during July the autofill feature ceased to work and, in just five days time on August 1, your saved passwords won't be accessible via the app anymore. All of this, seemingly in the name of better security, and with password hacking such a cyber-epidemic, that might not be a bad thing. Or at least it wouldn't be if I actually believed that to be the case. Here's what you need to know and do. Microsoft Passwords Deadline — What You Need To Know The whole password deletion and usage debate revolves around one simple act: Microsoft has decided to discontinue the autofill function of the Microsoft Authenticator app as part of an update to streamline the process 'so you can use saved passwords easily across devices.' The reasoning behind this seems, dare I say, a little spurious to me. After all, Microsoft readily admits that 'autofill in Microsoft Authenticator has been a way to securely store and autofill passwords on apps and websites you visit on your phone,' and that hasn't changed. What has changed is the desire to get users to move to the more secure passkey technology and, perhaps more pertinently, to move to the Microsoft Edge web browser. There's nothing wrong with the password management functionality of the Edge browser, nor the Chrome browser, nor most any browser. From my perspective, however, a dedicated password manager app is a much better option when it comes to password security and management. Removing that option, unless you have set up passkeys for your Microsoft Account as Authenticator will still support these and disabling Authenticator in these circumstances will disable your passkeys, just serves to complicate matters. As the whole passkeys thing I've just mentioned goes to prove. How convoluted is it all? Here's what Microsoft said: 'Your saved passwords (but not your generated password history) and addresses are securely synced to your Microsoft account, and you can continue to access them and enjoy seamless autofill functionality with Microsoft Edge.' Microsoft Passwords Deadline — What You Need To Do Before August 1 Let's start with the Edge browser requirement, which Microsoft has stated you are welcome to ignore and use a different provider, such as Google Password Manager, iCloud Keychain, or any other password management app. Microsoft said that once you set Microsoft as your default autofill provider on your phone, you will need to export passwords from Microsoft Authenticator and then import them into the new service. 'For security reasons, you will need to manually recreate your payment info,' Microsoft added. However, your time is fast running out to do this if you haven't already. Although your passwords that have already been saved in Microsoft Authenticator will be visible to Microsoft Edge, from August 1 they will no longer be accessible in the app and, therefore, you won't be able to export them anywhere. And, of course, any generated passwords that have not been saved from the app generator history into the saved passwords category will be deleted. If you are happy to use Edge as your password autofill provider, then Microsoft has easy-to-follow instructions on its support pages.
