We don't think Gretchen Wieners' father, the inventor of Toaster Strudel, would be too pleased to hear that it's been a full 20 years since Mean Girls first entered our lives and the cultural lexicon. And yet, here we are.
While real ones celebrate the teen comedy on October 3—signifying the moment Jonathan Bennett's Aaron Samuels and his side-swept bangs turned around and asked Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) what day it was—Tina Fey's adaption of self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes actually came out in theaters on April 30, 2004. And we've all been trying to make fetch happen ever since.
Providing a peek inside girl world—i.e. the halls of suburban Chicago's fictional North Shore High—the comedy turned Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert into young Hollywood icons and had the rest of us muttering phrases like "You go, Glen Coco!" as we updated the pages of our burn book.
Yet, while the limit does not exist for how obsessed we are with the flick, there's still much to learn. It's not like we have ESPN or something. Like, did you know Lohan was initially interested in playing a different Plastic? Or that there was more than a 30 percent chance that Seyfried was going to play Regina?
So get in losers, because we're going reminiscing and revealing all the secrets that are hiding in Gretchen Wieners' hair.
Zen Educate, an online marketplace that connects schools with teachers, has raised $37 million in a Series B round of funding. Founded out of London in 2017, Zen Educate replaces traditional third-party recruitment agencies that often use analog workflows and charge exorbitant fees. Zen Educate digitizes everything through a self-serve platform, removing pricey intermediaries from the equation in the process.
A new self-driving truck — manufactured by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle tech developed by Aurora Innovation — could be on public highways as early as this summer. The Volvo VNL Autonomous truck, which was revealed Monday evening at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas, is the product of a partnership between Aurora and Volvo Autonomous Solutions. Aurora plans to start hauling freight using these Volvo self-driving trucks in the next several months.
OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT. Users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday, and Johansson herself released a statement saying she hired legal council to inquire about the Sky voice and get exact details about how it was developed. "We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice—Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," the company wrote in a blog post.
While many climate investors focus their efforts on breakthrough, deep-tech solutions, Patrick Sheehan at ETF Partners has other ideas. “I’ve actually got nothing against carbon capture and storage, apart from the fact it’s probably going to be commercialized too late,” he told TechCrunch. Instead, Sheehan and his colleagues are diving into more software-centric companies that promise to still move the needle.
Microsoft wants to bring generative AI to the forefront of Windows — and the PCs running it. At a keynote ahead of its annual Build developer conference this week, the company unveiled a new lineup of Windows machines it's calling Copilot+ PCs, plus generative AI-powered features like Recall, which helps users find apps, files and other content they've viewed in the past. Copilot, Microsoft's brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.
Actor Scarlett Johansson has accused OpenAI of copying her voice for one of the voice assisstants in ChatGPT despite denying the company permission to do so.