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How a 2020 Rolex Collection Changed the Face of Watch Design

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How a 2020 Rolex Collection Changed the Face of Watch Design


As the company that either invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the first water-resistant watch, the first automatic watches, and much more besides, you could hardly downplay Rolex’s influence on watchmaking history. But while its iconic sports watches, like the Submariner, Daytona and GMT-Master are endlessly imitated, Rolex is not seen as a trendsetter, preferring to ignore passing horological fashions. It does its own thing, iterating carefully and minimally on its age-old templates.

Five years ago, however, Rolex introduced a collection so avant-garde that is still influencing creative decisions across the entire watch industry, and it did so in one of its least-heralded models: the Oyster Perpetual. The idea was so simple that we’ve barely noticed it become the industry norm: Instead of slowly rolling out new dial colours one at a time over a period of years—which was standard watch world behavior until that point—Rolex launched a whole set of colored dials in a complementary palette all at once.

The 2020 multi-color Oyster Perpetual collection that started the wave of watch-world bright dials.

COURTESY OF ROLEX

They were bright, bold and almost childlike in their purity: coral red, green, turquoise, pink and yellow. Rolex-watchers immediately hailed them as a tribute to the so-called Stella dial Day-Date watches of the late 1970s and 1980s—equally bright and unexpected, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. But there was something more basic, more essential and, at least theoretically, more attainable about the Oyster Perpetual collection.

It sparked imitators left, right and center—and still does. At last week’s Geneva Watch Days 2025, Zenith’s collaboration with Swiss furniture-maker USM would qualify as a textbook example: a full set of bold, block-colour dials in otherwise traditional stainless steel sports watches.

Earlier this year, Oris’s Big Crown Pointer Date hit a similar note. In 2023, arch-rival Omega debuted a collection of Seamaster Aqua Terra models with similar hues to Rolex’s opening salvo; other mid-level brands including Breitling and TAG Heuer have all created multi-colored families of stainless steel, time-only round watches in a similar mold.



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Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI’s Products in Latest Shakeup

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Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI’s Products in Latest Shakeup


OpenAI told staff on Friday that it would reorganize the company as part of an ongoing effort to unify its product offerings, WIRED has learned. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman will now lead the company’s product strategy, in addition to his work on AI infrastructure, OpenAI confirms to WIRED. Brockman was previously assigned to oversee OpenAI products on an interim basis while CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, was on medical leave; the change is now official.

“We’re consolidating our product efforts to execute with maximum focus toward the agentic future, to win across both consumer and enterprise,” Brockman said in a memo to staff seen by WIRED. Brockman added that OpenAI’s products are naturally converging, and that the company has decided to merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified experience.

OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perform digital tasks autonomously on behalf of users.

Two other OpenAI leaders are also taking on larger roles at the company as part of the changes. OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, has been tapped to lead the core product and platform across consumer, enterprise, and developer surfaces. Sottiaux was a key leader in building Codex into one of the company’s fastest-growing products of all time. OpenAI’s longtime head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, is moving to a new role at the company that aims to revamp enterprise products. OpenAI says Turley will continue his work on ChatGPT, which he has helped grow to more than 900 million weekly active users since he took over in 2022.

The changes are the latest shakeup for OpenAI as leadership aims to refocus the company on a few key product areas, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its forthcoming “everything app.” Last month, OpenAI announced many executive changes, including that CEO of AGI dDeployment, Fidji Simo, was taking a medical leave to focus on her health. OpenAI previously said Brockman would oversee product strategy in her absence. The company tells WIRED that Simo remains on medical leave, and worked directly with Brockman on these organizational changes and product strategy.

In the last year, OpenAI has faced increasing pressure from competitors, including Anthropic in coding domains and Google in consumer chatbots. OpenAI leaders are hoping to simplify product offerings ahead of its plan to file for an IPO, which could happen later this year.

Other OpenAI executives left the company entirely last month, including the head of its AI workspace for scientists, Kevin Weil; head of Sora, Bill Peebles; and its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, Srinivas Narayanan.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.



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Companies Keep Slashing Employees’ Benefits for the Worst Reasons

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Companies Keep Slashing Employees’ Benefits for the Worst Reasons


Employee benefits are in the spotlight this week, and that’s because of three recent stories about US companies cutting back on non-wage compensations for workers.

A Texas tech consulting firm with a forgettable name—TTEC—suddenly became a lot more memorable when it suspended its discretionary 401(k) match program for 16,000 employees through at least the end of 2026. According to Business Insider, which viewed an internal TTEC memo, the company plans to invest in AI certifications, AI tools and training, and automation, among other things.

The auditing and consulting giant Deloitte is also reportedly slashing benefits for some workers starting next year. This includes reducing PTO, halving parental leave, and eliminating a $50,000 reimbursement for family planning services such as adoption, surrogacy, and IVF. San Francisco-based Zoom, meanwhile, has made a smaller-scale change and reduced its parental leave for employees from 22 weeks to 18 weeks for birthing parents.

So what’s the driving force behind this? And are there more cuts to come? The latter is impossible to answer, and the former is unfortunately more complicated than “corporate ghouls go AI.”

First off, “what Deloitte did is completely unconscionable,’” says Joan C. Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, the author of several books on work culture and class dynamics, and an oft-cited scholar on these topics. The consulting firm is cutting the benefits of a specific class of internal workers—in admin, IT support, and finance—while leaving intact benefits for people in client-facing roles. An affected worker will see their parental leave cut from 16 weeks to just eight weeks.

“It treats people differently based on the type of job they’re in, and cutting any mother down to eight weeks of paid leave is just outlandish,” Williams says. “When labor is tight, employers are more generous. But once the power shifts, the benefits contract.”

AI certainly is a convenient excuse these days for any corporate decision that harms workers. But the impetus here is also the cost of the benefits themselves. Earlier this year subsidies from the Affordable Care Act lapsed, and people began dropping out of health care plans entirely. Insurers have cited this as one reason they’ve raised premiums.

Sarahjane Sacchetti, a former top executive at benefits administration companies Cleo and Collective Health, who is working on a new health care initiative, told me that the costs of employer-sponsored health plans have increased significantly over the past five years. A survey last year of over 1,700 US employers by the Mercer health care consulting group found that the health care cost per worker was expected to rise on average 6.5 percent in 2026, the highest since 2010. And this was after factoring in cost-reduction measures; otherwise, the cost of a plan would go up by nearly 9 percent.

“This just starts to eat into how you think about total compensation as an employer,” Sacchetti says. That doesn’t mean the corporation is the ‘good guy,’ she says, but the poor state of American health care policy and lack of safety net are responsible for a lot of the stress that plagues undercompensated or laid-off workers.

Williams points out that the US is one of the few countries that doesn’t offer a federal paid maternal leave—putting it in league with Papua New Guinea and Suriname. “This just shows how crazy it is to provide employee basics like pension and paid parental leave through private employers rather than how other industrialized countries do it,” Williams says. Her proposed solution? “The US needs to join the rest of the universe.”

The irony, of course, is that the US government professes to be obsessed with women having more babies. If women in the US are—as celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz put it this week in the Oval Office—“underbabied,” a comprehensive paid federal leave policy would be the obvious place to start. (Oz also said that “making babies” is “the most creative thing the universe knows.” Don’t tell the AI CEOs.)



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Gantri’s 3D-Printed Lamps Are Going Wireless

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Gantri’s 3D-Printed Lamps Are Going Wireless


Gantri, a San Francisco-based company known for making soft, stylized 3D-printed lamps, is going wireless. That’s thanks to a new partnership with the design firm Ammunition.

Gantri 3D-prints its lamps using plastics made from corn-based polylactic acid (PLA) in its Bay Area facilities. The result is a collection of carefully designed light fixtures with gentle curves that aim to make luxury-style lighting feel somewhat affordable. (Prices range from $200 to $500.)

Last year, the company introduced a program called Gantri Made, which allows shoppers to customize their lights and gives third-party designers the ability to build their own designs using Gantri’s foundational pieces.

Courtesy of Gantri

Gantri first partnered with Ammunition in 2020, developing a line of stylish lamps aiming to highlight what premium light pieces could look like. You’ve almost certainly seen something built with Ammunition’s flair. The firm designed Beats by Dre headphones, the Square point-of-sale tablets you see in shops everywhere, and many other projects, from robot coffee machines to Jay-Z’s failed weed vape cartridges.

This Gantri new collab is a range of lamps that include floor lamps, table lamps, and ones small enough to hold in your hand. (Those are rectangular, with designs inspired by piers around San Francisco.) All the lights are wireless and can be removed from charging ports to run for what Gantri says is 10 or more hours of battery life. Gantri is also developing an app to control the lights. They will work with Matter, the connectivity standard that aims to make smart home tech from different companies work together, but that compatibility isn’t expected until next year.

Gantri CEO Ian Yang points out that for most of human history, light sources were something people carried with them—torches, candles, lanterns. Lights staying in fixed places has become the norm, but he wants these wireless lamps to show there’s another way.

“I really think this product is going to change the way that people think about lighting, but also think about the power of digital manufacturing, about this new material that’s plant-based,” Yang says.

The lamps have a custom charging port, which allows them to stand upright and face any direction while still receiving a charge. They also require a custom charger and cannot be charged via USB-C or another cord in a different room. That may inhibit the mobility the lamp promises, as you won’t be able to move them from room to room and plug them in with any USB-C cord lying around—you’d have to bring that proprietary cable with you. But Yang says this was a deliberate choice, even though it was much more difficult than finding a spot for a USB-C connection. He wanted the lamps to feel portable while also having a place for them to become a fixture in a home.



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