When we were younger, talking to an imaginary friend was the best way to pass the time.

But for today’s kids, make-believe is getting revamped. AI-powered toys are flooding the market to chat with children while they play, per Forbes.

Today’s AI toys are pricey, but promise personalized education and entertainment:

• Moxie is a $799 robot designed to help kids ages 5-10 hit developmental milestones through conversation. It can support up to four profiles individually adapted to each child.
• AI plush rocket toy Grok costs $99 and can answer children’s questions. It’s not related to Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, but it is voiced by his ex Grimes.
• Fawn ($199) and Snorble ($299) are both taking preorders, promising parents help with everything from emotional development to building healthy habits.

And the $99 Miko Mini is a smiley robot loaded with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 as well as proprietary AI models. It can answer kids’ homework questions, conversate, and play games.

The company, last valued at $290m, says it has sold ~500k devices to date and estimates it will surpass $50m in revenue for the fiscal year ending in March 2024.

Miko is trained on books and school curriculums from the likes of Oxford University Press and has partnerships with companies like Disney and Paramount.

AI toys…

… have the potential to do more than just keep kids busy. Some companies are already programming their bots to offer mental health support.

• Moxie, valued at $135m, helps kids unpack stressful situations using cognitive behavioral therapy tactics and by analyzing facial expressions. It hopes to one day serve as a replacement for expensive talk therapy.
• Miko has a screen for video calls, and plans to eventually offer telehealth therapy via the bot.

For now, the bots are not advanced enough to fully replace human therapists, but they might help some kids feel a little less alone.

Plus, anytime we write about AI, we have to consider data privacy concerns — particularly when it comes to minors.

The biggest downside? If we thought Furbies were scary, imagine what little sentient robots could do.

Sure, being a billionaire seems fun — hydrofoiling, bow hunting, casually building airships — but there’s a dark side: extreme peer pressure to buy up private islands.

Google co-founder Larry Page is routinely upping that pressure.

When Business Insider outed him as the secretive buyer of Cayo Norte, a $32m floating gem off Puerto Rico, it noted that Page is now known to own five private islands.

• In addition to his latest purchase, Page owns one in Fiji, two in the US Virgin Islands, and to complete the set, one in the British Virgin Islands.
• That’s at least five — given the way billionaires use LLCs, it’s possible he could own many more we don’t know about.

Why?

As the world’s 8th-richest person, with a $132B net worth, perhaps the better question for Page is: Why not?

It’s unclear what Page intends to do with the properties — he’s previously said technologists should have “safe places” to “try out some new things” — but there’s something to be said about complete ownership.

• Just ask Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison: he owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, yet he still got pulled over and ticketed for driving without a license last year.

Total control is often a particular focus of American entrepreneurs, according to leading private island broker Chris Krolow. “They don’t want to lease… they don’t want a piece… they want the whole island,” he told The Daily Beast.

It’s not all big bucks and glamour

Though the uber-wealthy are quick to snap up bigger tropical islands, there remain tens of thousands of private islands across the world, and Page can’t own them all.

Enter Charlotte Gale, a massage therapist from New Jersey who bought 1.5-acre Ducks Ledges Island off Maine last year.

Per The Daily Beast, she joined the exclusive club of private island owners after she “literally just Googled cottages under $400,000 anywhere.”

The billionaire-level luxury is missing, though — Gale must leave the island’s one-bedroom cabin, which has no running water, during the winter.

65%: YoY increase in cocoa prices due to intense rains and black pod disease in West Africa, where 70% of all cocoa is produced. Rising costs may lead to a decline in chocolate sales, but that’s yet to occur. It is chocolate, after all. Prices are expected to stabilize after a new crop comes to market.

80%+: Share of startup pitches that now involve AI, according to VCs Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman. “To be fair, if you were building a company in 1996 and you didn’t mention the internet, you’d be out of your mind, right?” Hamid said in a conversation with TechCrunch. “In the same vein, not mentioning AI or utilizing it would be a missed opportunity.” He noted AI’s power to boost productivity across numerous fields, allowing people to do more, faster.

$80k: The list price of a formerly classified coroner’s report detailing the death of President William McKinley in 1901. McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition, but was expected to survive. When McKinley died eight days later, Dr. Herman Matzinger set out to determine why.

118: New emoji coming this spring via the Unicode Consortium’s latest recommendations. Many of these are existing emoji in new variations, but there are also six brand-new emoji, including a lime wedge, phoenix, and broken chain.