Companies have spent the past several weeks trying to reassure investors that Muse and other AI agents pose more of an opportunity than a threat. Meta's Muse was among the hottest topics on corporate earnings calls in recent weeks. Meta has claimed that the agentic AI tool, which lets users automate various online tasks, is becoming a major force in shopping, with millions of people using it to make purchases of more than $200 on average. Wall Street fears that proactive shopping assistants like Muse will erode brand loyalty, ignite price wars, and squeeze corporate profits. Yet on the earnings calls and in conversations with WIRED, executives across roughly 50 companies--spanning travel, internet providers, food, and self-storage--shrugged off immediate disruption.

Wall Street has projected Tesla to report $27.9bn in revenues. Wall Street has projected Tesla to report $27.9bn in revenues. Musk says'there's a lot of merit' to potential merger that would require approval of 50% of all Tesla shareholders, but he declined to elaborate Investors were paying close attention to Tesla's third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday afternoon, after chief executive Elon Musk floated the idea of merging the car company with his rocket and AI company, SpaceX. But they didn't glean further information after the company announced there would be no questions on the matter. "With regard to a potential merger with SpaceX, I think I said everything that should be said yesterday," Musk, the CEO of both companies, said on Tesla's earnings call.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts that AI adoption has happened faster than expected. Apple CEO Tim Cook said on the company's earnings call on Thursday that it could take "several months" to meet skyrocketing demand for the Mac Mini, the company's compact but mighty, screen-free desktop computer. Cook's remarks come after coders determined in recent months that the Mac Mini was the perfect machine for agentic AI tasks. "On the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools," Cook said on the earnings call, in response to analyst questions. "And customer adoption of that is happening faster than we expected." The news comes amid another record-setting quarter for the company.

After the rise (and fall) of reservation scalping, DoorDash and a host of apps are fighting to book you a seat at the country's most exclusive restaurants. At The Eighty-Six in Manhattan, exclusivity is the point. The luxe, 11-table steakhouse is the sort of place that lavishes caviar and aged mimolette cheese on its potatoes, and crows that your market-price duck was raised by one Dr. Taylor Swift has reportedly dined there in a Miu Miu skirt. Reservations are a scarce commodity that the restaurant, and New York law forbids you from selling one. "Access is the main asset," wrote food writer Helen Rosner in a recent New Yorker review of The Eighty-Six. "The product is the door, and what a door!

AI'slop' is transforming social media - and a backlash is brewing Théodore remembers the AI slop that tipped him over the edge. The image was of two emaciated, impoverished South Asian children. For some reason, despite their boyish features they have thick beards. One of them had no hands and only one foot. The other was holding a sign saying it's his birthday and asking for likes.

'We excel at every phase of AI': Nvidia CEO quells Wall Street fears of AI bubble amid market selloff Global share markets rose after Nvidia posted third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street estimates, assuaging for now concerns about whether the high-flying valuations of AI firms had peaked. On Wednesday, all eyes were on Nvidia, the bellwether for the AI industry and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with analysts and investors hoping the chipmaker's third-quarter earnings would dampen fears that a bubble was forming in the sector. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, opened the earnings call with an attempt to dispel those concerns, saying that there was a major transformation happening in AI, and Nvidia was foundational to that transformation. "There's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble," said Huang. "From our vantage point, we see something very different. As a reminder, Nvidia is unlike any other accelerator. We excel at every phase of AI from pre-training to post-training to inference."

Trump's Investment in Intel Is Paying Off The chipmaker reported higher than expected revenue on Thursday, and its stock price has risen over 90 percent since August. The Trump administration's investment in Intel appears to be paying off so far, but the once-mighty chipmaker still has a long way to climb back to industry dominance. In August, the US government announced it was converting about $9 billion in federal grants that Intel had been issued during the Biden administration into a roughly 10 percent equity stake in the company. During its third-quarter earnings on Thursday--its first financial update since Trump's surprise investment--Intel reported that it earned $13.7 billion in revenue over the past three months, a three percent increase year-over-year. It's the fourth consecutive quarter that Intel has beat revenue guidance.

We introduce FinDebate, a multi-agent framework for financial analysis, integrating collaborative debate with domain-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Five specialized agents, covering earnings, market, sentiment, valuation, and risk, run in parallel to synthesize evidence into multi-dimensional insights. To mitigate overconfidence and improve reliability, we introduce a safe debate protocol that enables agents to challenge and refine initial conclusions while preserving coherent recommendations. Experimental results, based on both LLM-based and human evaluations, demonstrate the framework's efficacy in producing high-quality analysis with calibrated confidence levels and actionable investment strategies across multiple time horizons.

Earnings calls represent a uniquely rich and semi-structured source of financial communication, blending scripted managerial commentary with unscripted analyst dialogue. Although recent advances in financial sentiment analysis have integrated multi-modal signals, such as textual content and vocal tone, most systems rely on flat document-level or sentence-level models, failing to capture the layered discourse structure of these interactions. This paper introduces a novel multi-modal framework designed to generate semantically rich and structurally aware embeddings of earnings calls, by encoding them as hierarchical discourse trees. Each node, comprising either a monologue or a question-answer pair, is enriched with emotional signals derived from text, audio, and video, as well as structured metadata including coherence scores, topic labels, and answer coverage assessments. A two-stage transformer architecture is proposed: the first encodes multi-modal content and discourse metadata at the node level using contrastive learning, while the second synthesizes a global embedding for the entire conference. Experimental results reveal that the resulting embeddings form stable, semantically meaningful representations that reflect affective tone, structural logic, and thematic alignment. Beyond financial reporting, the proposed system generalizes to other high-stakes unscripted communicative domains such as tele-medicine, education, and political discourse, offering a robust and explainable approach to multi-modal discourse representation. This approach offers practical utility for downstream tasks such as financial forecasting and discourse evaluation, while also providing a generalizable method applicable to other domains involving high-stakes communication.