Day: November 8, 2025

• Alexis Ohanian, a cofounder of Reddit, has his eye on the “next wave” of social networking apps.
• Ohanian’s VC firm, Seven Seven Six, recently announced it backed social music app Airbuds.
• Business Insider spoke with Ohanian about where he thinks the internet is headed.

What’s the future of the internet going to look like?

Alexis Ohanian, one of the cofounders of Reddit, thinks there’s an opportunity for a new generation of apps to shake up how we’re connecting online.

“The most potent form of social today is basically in group chats, which is obviously not new technology, but what it’s highlighting is the fact that that’s a trusted group of people who you actually know, who are verifiably human,” Ohanian told Business Insider in a recent interview. “This next wave of apps — Airbuds is a great example — is going to be about that.”

Airbuds, a social music app gaining traction with teens, recently announced that Ohanian’s venture capital firm, Seven Seven Six, led its latest $5 million investment round.

How younger generations are using social apps is “one of the best bellwethers” for understanding internet trends, Ohanian said.

“This generation coming up has learned, and has a preference for, a less gamified version of life,” he said, opting out of the chase for followers or likes. “They’re choosing a healthier type of paradigm for social.”

Earlier this year, Ohanian also revived the social network Digg with its original founder, Kevin Rose.

It’s not just younger users who are yearning for a new social media experience, Ohanian said.

“Everyone, especially if you’re a geriatric millennial like me, you’re kind of tapped out,” Ohanian said. “You’re looking for that next wave. There’s a real hunger there.”

The next wave of social companies

Some new social media startups are challenging the attention economy with technology designed to get us out into the real world. Others are building platforms that evoke nostalgia for older versions of the internet, or are focused on connecting people with their closest friends rather than millions of people.

“We just have a chance to do it better, to build more thoughtfully, and to really build something that ultimately has us feeling better when we get off of it,” Ohanian said.

In an era when artificial intelligence is infiltrating nearly every social media feed — yes, I’m talking about AI slop — true human connection online is starting to feel more scarce.

It’s why some tech executives like Ohanian and even OpenAI’s Sam Altman are talking about the “dead internet theory,” which attempts to explain what would happen in a scenario in which the internet is more AI than human.

“I think you are seeing increased value in these more closed networks,” Ohanian said. “I’m not saying we’re going back to AOL walled internet garden, but my hunch is it’s going to be less about how do you get to growth and billions of users … and more about: How do you really build a tool that allows communities to emerge and drive tremendous engagement?”

New internet companies will be able to monetize this experience, too, he added.

“It’s not about needing to get to billions of users and just selling them ads,” Ohanian said. “There’s going to be much more creative and constructive ways to monetize that’s sustainable, and hopefully actually ends up aligning the goals of the userbase with the goals of the platform, which is something that we’ve seen at odds in all the predecessors.”

• Overwhelmed mothers are increasingly using ChatGPT to help with parenting tasks.
• Lilian Schmidt and her fiancé balance full-time work with raising two kids together.
• She said ChatGPT helps with organizational tasks like meal planning and creating to-do lists.

For the first few years of her daughter’s life, Lilian Schmidt remembers bedtime as a daily battle.

She and her fiancé spent about three hours every night trying to create a calm environment before bed, leading to power struggles and tears.

Then, Schmidt got some parenting advice from an unlikely source: ChatGPT. It suggested the opposite: letting her daughter jump around and exert energy before bed. The first night Schmidt tried it, she said her daughter fell asleep in five minutes.

Since then, she started using ChatGPT to help with everything from organizing to-do lists to tweaking meal-prep recipes. “I’m definitely feeling so much calmer,” Schmidt, 33, told Business Insider. “My brain has finally stopped running.”

Schmidt, who makes TikToks about using ChatGPT prompts and sells a “vault” of pre-made ones for other parents to use, said she uses her spare time to exercise, read, or just enjoy moments with her daughter and stepson without worrying about parenting logistics.

Schmidt isn’t alone. Parents have been using AI tools for everything, from homework help to activity ideas.

“Parents are being pulled in a lot of different directions with sometimes 10, 15 emails from the school per day, job stressors, just keeping those different tasks organized, ” Lorain Moorehead, a licensed therapist and Arizona State University professor, told Business Insider. She said she’s seen more parents use AI tools as a “great support” for tasks like maintaining schedules for their kids.

As more parents use AI for help, it can be a handy tool — when used correctly.

The tightrope of working and parenting

For many parents, balancing childcare with a full-time job feels untenable. They also don’t feel like they have any other choice.

Schmidt and her family live in Zurich, the 5th most expensive city in the world. In addition to a very high cost of living, daycare for her 4-year-old daughter is about 30,000 Swiss francs a year — over $37,000.

“Almost everyone I know works,” Schmidt said, while moms also feel pressure to be more present at home. “It’s like ‘You need to work, but actually, it would also be really nice if you stayed home.'”

This lifestyle brings up logistical challenges. Like many parents in the US, Schmidt and her partner live hours away from both sets of grandparents. Outside of daycare and school, they are solely responsible for their daughter and Schmidt’s 14-year-old stepson.

Moorehead, who said a lot of her clients use AI tools for co-parenting, said a common prompt is asking for scheduling help. One example is: “Create a sample schedule for a child who has 30-45 minutes of homework, is home at 3:30 pm, and is in bed at 8 pm. Bath time takes 20 minutes, and they need to rinse the dishes after dinner.”

She recommends the prompt to parents because “as soon as they’ve executed it, there might be a change in the schedule.”

Schmidt said that ChatGPT is especially helpful for families like hers, where her kids have a huge age gap and require completely different schedules and care. “They’re in different universes, basically,” she said.

Tools like ChatGPT can quickly tweak the schedule to accommodate baseball practice starting later, rather than a frustrated parent doing it on their own — and burning out in the process.

An on-demand parenting coach

Moorehead said she generally recommends prompts like these that “are clear, stick to the facts, and don’t use phrases like ‘what do you think?'” or seek reassurance. The best use is to look at examples and options when you’re stuck as a parent.

“As a busy mom, I find meal planning to often be a mental drain, especially when trying to cater to selective eater,” Ijeoma Nwaogu, a mother of three, wrote in an essay for Business Insider. An example of a prompt she uses is “I have picky eaters that don’t like spicy foods. Meal needs to be delicious for kids. I have chicken, rice, seasoning, oil. Create a recipe.”

For example, Schmidt said she uses ChatGPT for to-do lists or meal-planning — running an inventory of everything she has at home, to generate lists of cheaper ingredient swaps or factor in discounts from a nearby grocery store, and to tweak existing recipes to accommodate every family member’s dietary preferences.

Moorehead said these kinds of prompts are generally OK. She advised against asking ChatGPT to weigh in on a parenting scenario, because AI tools are likely to be very biased. She also recommended looking into AI platforms like Perplexity, which are known for citing their sources.

Of course, AI is not a substitute for a real-life pediatrician or mental health professional.

“De-identifying the kid or the school seems like a good safety practice, just as we’re learning more about these models,” Moorehead said, adding that a good rule of thumb is never to include information that would make your child trackable if it appeared on another platform.

Freed up for more quality time

Prior to using ChatGPT, Nwaogu felt like she was being a good-enough mother.

“I found myself trapped in a cycle of questioning whether I was doing things right, whether I was doing enough,” she said.

Schmidt felt she couldn’t give her kids as much attention as she wanted to. “I’m the kind of mom who wants to make their childhood feel magical, and that they remember me in a very positive way,” she said. “But for the first three and a half years, I was stuck in survival mode.”

Schmidt felt that instead of spending time with her daughter, her priority was managing the household and her job. She said she often gets similar feedback from other parents, most of whom have very young children.

“I hear ‘I’m trying to be a good wife, I’m giving it my all, and I still feel like a complete failure,'” Schmidt said. She feels like parents just don’t have enough support, and that AI isn’t just a productivity tool: it’s a permission slip to do less, so that parents can focus on fully showing up for their kids.

Moorehead said that when parents are trying a routine or parenting technique, it often takes a few tries and reconfigurations to get into the groove. But they might give up quickly when it doesn’t work out. AI can be great for making real-time adjustments or offering quick alternatives.

“If we can eliminate some of that fatigue with AI, then that can have a really positive outcome,” Moorehead said.

Schmidt said days with her kids feel more special, now that she’s not simultaneously thinking of her to-do lists. She recently took her daughter horseback riding, with Schmidt holding the horse. Before bedtime, she asked ChatGPT to write an age-appropriate story in the voice of a published author, recounting the day. It included her daughter’s first name and the emotions she felt, like pride or courage.

“When you’re old and your kids are all grown up, what will they remember you for?” Schmidt said. “Probably not for writing the perfect grocery list. They will remember you if you were present with them.”

• AI expert Ethan Mollick said the technology can help young job seekers with “task distribution.”
• The skills people gain to work with AI can quickly become irrelevant since the technology evolves.
• Mollick said AI can help with tasks that employees struggle with, freeing up time for other duties.

If you’re a young person trying to land a job in the age of AI, one expert says you should focus on mastering tasks, not skills.

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, a prominent figure in the AI revolution and author of “Co-Intelligence,” said that a lot of the skills people learn related to AI aren’t all that useful, because the technology evolves and quickly makes the skill somewhat irrelevant.

“It would be helpful for young people to think more about what tasks they’re actually really good at, because that’s where they stay ahead of machines,” Mollick told Business Insider. “And then you can find a job where the machine helps you with the other pieces of your task.”

Every job, he said, requires many tasks, and it’s unlikely that a single applicant will excel at all of them. AI can help with “task distribution” and help in the areas where applicants struggle. Knowing how to provide clear instructions is crucial for maximizing the benefits of AI as it completes tasks.

“Being able to be an expert enough in something to know whether it’s good or bad turns out to be really important,” Mollick said about judging AI’s output.

He also advised that young people should focus on gaining broad knowledge and developing expertise in specific topics. Since AI machines are trained on such a wide array of information, having a strong base in the humanities is useful, he said.

AI is threatening entry-level jobs across industries, making it especially hard for Gen Zers to find work. Mollick — who has consulted with JPMorgan, Google, and the White House on AI usage — told Business Insider that he’s most concerned about whether we’re tackling the question of how to restructure jobs with enough urgency.

As AI automates some technical abilities, soft skills are newly crucial for job applicants. Communication, leadership, and organizational prowess were among the top skills identified by Indeed’s Hiring Lab. Some leaders who celebrate the promise of AI worry that employees could lose the ability to complete certain tasks.

• The Department of Education resumed processing student-loan forgiveness for borrowers on income-based repayment.
• Student-loan borrowers said they were unsure whether the relief would ever arrive.
• One borrower who received forgiveness said she can now put more money toward retirement.

A vacation might finally be on the horizon for Tammy Stinson.

That’s because after nearly 25 years of payments, Stinson’s $70,000 student-loan balance has finally been wiped out.

“I feel like I might be free now,” Stinson, 52, told Business Insider. “I can actually live my life and hopefully retire before I’m 90.”

Stinson’s student-loan forgiveness is a result of meeting her qualifying payments on an income-based repayment plan. IBR plans offer borrowers monthly payments based on their income, with forgiveness after 20 or 25 years, depending on when they first took out the loan.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Education paused IBR processing over the summer, citing ongoing litigation regarding repayment plans, which delayed relief for borrowers. In late September, however, borrowers who met the payment threshold began receiving emails from the department notifying them that they qualified for relief, and servicers began zeroing out borrowers’ balances in mid-October.

Stinson, who now works in consulting in Pennsylvania, said that after graduating with her bachelor’s degree in economics in 2001 from St. Ambrose University, she struggled to find a well-paying job while raising her children. Her income fluctuated, and while she made her student-loan payments, they largely went toward the accumulating interest on her balance. She postponed buying a house with her husband until two years ago because she did not want to take on more debt.

“Having kids when I was younger, and then finishing school, and then just starting out feeling like I was so in debt, I just felt like it was hopeless at some points,” Stinson said.

Not only is the loan forgiveness long-awaited for Stinson — it came at a critical time. A 2021 provision of the American Rescue Plan that made student-debt relief tax-free is set to expire in January 2026, and Stinson said she’s relieved that she won’t face a big tax bill. The Department of Education also said that it considers the “effective” date of the relief as the day that a borrower reaches their final payment. So even if their relief is not processed until next year, borrowers would not face taxes because of the 2025 effective dates.

The first version of the IBR plan was created by Congress in 2007 and took effect in 2009. An updated version of the plan took effect in 2014. The plans were intended to make student-loan payments affordable; borrowers who enrolled in IBR before July 1, 2014, had payments that were 15% of their discretionary income with forgiveness after 25 years, while those who enrolled after July 1, 2014, had payments that were 10% of their discretionary income with forgiveness after 20 years.

Stinson said she can now put more money into her retirement accounts without having to worry about her student-loan payments.

“This has been the best week of my life,” she said.

‘It was immense relief’

Brad Hill, 55, was expecting student-loan forgiveness — he just wasn’t sure when it would arrive. He has been making nearly $400 payments on student loans he used to finance his 1993 undergraduate and 2004 graduate degrees in business and engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. He now works in the energy sector. While he said he was able to make his payments consistently, he felt there was no end in sight — especially after he thought he had reached his payment threshold in 2024.

He said he started feeling more hopeful once advocacy groups filed lawsuits against the Department of Education over stalled repayment plan processing, which could result in borrowers facing larger tax bills next year.

“There were a bunch of us in this category, frustrated and out of our minds with anxiety, whether what we were eligible for was actually going to wind up being a taxable event,” said Hill, who’s based in California.

Hill said he started with about $86,000 in student debt, and despite making qualifying payments on the IBR plan, he said it was “very, very frustrating” that the relief was stalled.

“I can’t imagine a more unsettling experience in terms of watching the wheels of federal policy turn and grind and seize up and leave millions and millions of people in an extraordinarily frustrating lurch,” Hill said.

At the time Hill took out his student loans, the interest rate was around 3%, and he said he viewed it as “a pretty fair deal economically” and has been able to use both of his degrees in his career. Still, both Hill and Stinson said that there should be better education on the impact of taking out student loans, especially since forgiveness is not guaranteed. Undergraduate students who took out federal loans for this school year would face an interest rate of 6.39%.

Stinson, for example, said that her son decided to go to trade school instead of college, and she’s happy he made the decision because he can avoid student loans.

“I really felt like I needed to go to college to get a better job, but then it didn’t seem like it was worth it until the last maybe 10 years because it just seemed like it was so slow for me to get better jobs and get better income overall,” Stinson said.

The Department of Education said it could take several months for servicers to process relief, so more borrowers might see their balances zero out as the year comes to a close.

Student-loan forgiveness could also be harder to achieve in the coming years. The department is working to implement a repayment overhaul that Trump codified in his “big beautiful” spending bill, which includes the creation of two income-driven repayment plans with less-generous terms than the existing ones, including forgiveness after 30 years.

Hill is glad the saga is finally over.

“It was immense relief that this suddenly kicked in,” Hill said.