Good morning. Last year, Fortune brought you the AIQ 50, the inaugural ranking of the Fortune 500 companies making the most headway in integrating AI into their operations. The list was such a success, and the pace of AI is moving so fast within the enterprise, that we decided to expand the list this year.
Meet the Fortune AIQ 75.
The ranking draws on ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index, an annual framework that benchmarks how prepared organizations are to adopt and scale AI across the public and private sectors—from governance and data foundations to automation and workflows. To ground the list in comparable, real‑world evidence, Fortune partnered with Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) to evaluate how Fortune 500 companies are actually deploying AI, and how technology leaders value those investments relative to industry peers. Check it out, and let us know what you think.
More tech news below.—Alexei Oreskovic
Thoughts? Suggestions? Hot tip? Drop me a line.
THE BIG STORY
AMD acquires "godmother of AI's" startup for $8.2 billion
Chipmaker AMD is acquiring World Labs, a two-year-old startup focused on physical AI that was cofounded by industry pioneer Fei-Fei Li. The $8.2 billion, all-stock deal will give AMD important technology in an emerging branch of AI that could power a new generation of autonomous machines such as robots and self-driving cars.
THE BLIND BOX
“You’ve got to convey your wishes to the robot.”
THE RUNDOWN
—Meta hired MongoDB's CEO to launch an enterprise business. Let's hope it works out better than Meta's last attempt to crack the enterprise market with Workspace.
—Florida AG tries to stop ChatGPT. Asks court to freeze OpenAI's work, claiming it has no ability to control the models.
—Please scrutinize us! AI industry insiders ask government to look at how their own labs are automating AI development in order to prevent an "intelligence explosion."
—Your 401(k) is funding the AI boom. Here’s what that means for your retirement
—Nvidia's massive stock buyback. How does $150 billion strike you?
—U.K. government’s AI lead has a message on frontier risks—it’s time to ‘harden and build defenses’
THE PARTING SHOT
A triumph in orbit and a fiery homecoming. SpaceX's Starship—the massive spacecraft that Elon Musk hopes will one day take us to Mars—made its first ever voyage into the Earth's orbit on Monday. Starship did two laps around the Earth, but decided not to go for the planned six laps due to engine problems.
SpaceX Mission Control brought the Starship back into the Earth's atmosphere for a splashdown in the North Pacific. The rocket is designed to land vertically on the ocean using its thrusters, and appeared to be doing exactly that. But the "soft landing" proved bumpier than expected, and the (uncrewed) Starship suddenly erupted into a giant ball of fire.