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For 50 years Saturday Night Live has been poking fun at popular culture, making audiences laugh, and opening its stage to exceptional music artists. The show was created by Lorne Michaels, and original cast members included the likes of Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and many others performing 90 minutes of sketch comedy that would go on to permeate the zeitgeist. This history was celebrated in February with a three-hour special. But now its time to move on to Season 51, premiering October 4. Heres everything you need to know, including cast changes, hosting duties, and ways to tune in. SNL cast departures SNL has launched the careers of many comedians over the years, including Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, and Eddie Murphy. Naturally, cast members come and go; the show’s schedule is very demanding and the series is just a small part of many performers overall career trajectory. (Kenan Thompson, who has been with the show for 22 years, has earned the title of longest-serving cast member.) After the historic Season 50 wrapped, it was announced that several cast members would not be returning. That’s as Michaels told Puck in August he was facing the pressure to reinvent. Cast members Heidi Gardner, Michael Longfellow, Emil Wakim, and Devon Walker are all out, as well as writers Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker, according to reporting by Rolling Stone. Ego Nwodim was listed as active for Season 51 but announced her decision to leave the show in early September. During her appearance at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, she explained the move.SNL is always meant to be a stepping stone, Nwodim said. There are so many ideas I havent had time to create, and Im looking forward to doing that. Things like directing and writing in a different capacity. Returning SNL cast members Not everyone is leaving. Thompson will continue his long reign, and Michael Che and Colin Jost will continue to anchor the popular Weekend Update segment. They will be joined by familiar faces James Austin Johnson, Chloe Fineman, Sarah Sherman, Andrew Dismukes, Mikey Day, Bowen Yang, Marcello Hernández, Ashley Padilla, and Jane Wickline. SNL cast additions There will be five new faces gracing the screen this season, including Veronika Slowikowska, who is best known for her internet comedy sketches and her appearances on Tires and What We Do in the Shadows, and Kam Patterson, known for her bold stand-up comedy. Also joining the cast are Jeremy Culhane, who is TikTok-famous and has appeared in American Vandal and The Sex Lives of College Girls, as well as Tommy Brennan, who was named Just for Laughs’ New Face of Comedy in 2023 and has also opened for Nikki Glaser and Taylor Tomlinson.Ben Marshall, who was previously in the writers room and part of the video-producing trio “Please Don’t Destroy,” will make a move to join the cast. Please Don’t Destroy will no longer be affiliated with SNL, but the group is staying together. As for the other members of the trio, Martin Herlihy will stay on as a writer for SNL, but John Higgins will leave to pursue other creative avenues. Host and musical guest for the Season 51 premiere The first host of Season 51 is Bad Bunny. He is no stranger to SNLs Studio 8H; he previously hosted during Season 49, and was the final musical guest of Season 50. Its been a big week for the star: It was also announced he will headline next year’s Super Bowl LX halftime show. The first musical guest of this season is Doja Cat. How to tune in SNLs Season 51 premiere airs October 4 at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC. Traditional cable subscribers, and those with an over-the-air antenna with reception, are already all set for the laughs. Cord-cutters can access the show on the Peacock streaming service, as well as a few others. YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, Fubo, and DIRECTV Stream all carry NBC in most cases, but make sure to double-check the services’ regional differences.
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E-Commerce
What are the qualities of a great team? Youve probably been taught that team success requires building trust, fostering psychological safety, and cultivating a unified mindset. Seems logical. You might have learned that consensus is important and hierarchies are bad. Okay. Youve undoubtedly been given that old chestnut, Theres no I in team. A classic. Team building 101. Its conventional wisdom, and yet it completely misses the paradox of teams: While companies often focus on merging everyone into a single homogeneous entity, truly great teams embrace the distinct, diverse roles and talents of their team members. Every high-performing group in an organization will have someone who takes the lead on making decisions (the Director), somebody who produces work and achieves results (the Achiever), another who keeps the group on track and on schedule (the Stabilizer), another who keeps the relationships healthy (the Harmonizer), and someone who challenges the group with ideas outside the norm (the Trailblazer). Whats the ideal mix of roles on a team? To answer that all-important question, we asked thousands of executives and managers to measure their best and worst teams. And we uncovered some fascinating patterns. A whopping 97 percent of the best teams had all five roles filled. On the flip side, only about 21 percent of the worst teams filled every role. Theres a reason why great teams have someone in every role: Its tough to be successful without each of those talents being represented. Youve probably experienced teams with a bunch of Directors, all competing with each other to be the decision-makers, and no Achievers to actually do the work. You might have experienced the opposite: a team with no Directors and a striking inability to make any decisions. Maybe youve seen a group without a Trailblazer, a team where creative ideas go to die. And the list goes on. Of course, not every team is going to contain exactly five members, so where can you have more people and still be wildly successful? The short version is that the best teams in our research were able to easily handle more Harmonizers and Achievers, and too many Trailblazers was rarely a problem. And heres more detail about the distribution of people for all five roles: Harmonizers Having more than a few Harmonizers, a role that focuses on fostering collaboration and resolving conflicts, can help a team with improved communication and teamwork, reducing internal conflicts and enhancing cooperation. As long as all of the other roles are covered, having too many Harmonizers isnt typically a problem. Without coverage of the other roles, however, having a group that prizes interpersonal harmony over achieving results, hitting deadlines, etc., could quickly become a recipe for what former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns called terminal niceness. You might experience a lack of healthy debate, potentially leading to groupthink or a failure to consider diverse perspectives. While cohesion is important, too much emphasis on harmony could hinder the teams ability to innovate or tackle challenging problems effectively. Achievers When it comes to an abundance of Achievers, again assuming that all the other roles are covered, having a bunch of people who want to do great work without needing to be in charge seems like a dream. More people identify as Achievers than any other role, so its likely your team will have more than a few. If youve got a team of Achievers and nothing else, youll likely excel in executing tasks but lack in other areas like decision-making, innovation, or interpersonal dynamics. Theres also a risk of competition rather than collaboration, as multiple Achievers vie to demonstrate their individual productivity, potentially at the cost of overall team cohesion and effectiveness. But when balanced with the other roles, loading up on Achievers wont typically be much of a problem. Trailblazers Its not hard to imagine the problems that would occur with a team replete with Trailblazers and no one else: brilliant, out-of-the-box ideas and absolutely no execution. Such a team might struggle with follow-through, jumping from one innovative concept to another without fully developing or implementing any of them. And an excess of Trailblazers might create an environment thats too chaotic or unpredictable, lacking the stability needed for consistent performance. In reality, however, there just arent that many Trailblazers walking the halls of the typical organization, so youre more likely to struggle finding one than you are to grapple with an overabundance. Stabilizers That brings us to Stabilizers, a role that appears frequently in most organizations, so you do face some risk of overload. The risk you face concerns, well, risk specifically the avoidance of it. A team with too many Stabilizers might become overly rigid, focusing excessively on processes and procedures at the expense of innovation and quick responses to changing circumstances. This could lead to a team thats highly organized but slow to adapt, potentially missing opportunities or failing to address evolving challenges in dynamic environments. Many innovations require some risk- taking and deviating from existing protocols, not something that Stabilizers love, so youll need a Trailblazer to offer some counterweight to the Stabilizers natural risk aversion. Directors This is another role that appears often in organizations. Too many Directors can result in power struggles, conflicting decision-making processes, and a lack of unified direction. This can create an environment where there are too many cooks in the kitchen, leading to constant debates over strategy and leadership, potentially paralyzing the teams ability to move forward effectively. The absence of followers in a Director-heavy team can also mean that decisions, once made, may lack the necessary support for successful implementation. The takeaway here is clear: diversity in roles is key to providing the right balance. You need a mix of skills and perspectives to really make your team shine. All things being equal, on a team of eight people, you might want one Director, one Stabilizer, one Trailblazer, two Harmonizers, and three Achievers. Of course, all things are rarely equal, so if your Director and Stabilizer are a bit meeker, you can have two of each and be fine. The same goes for your Trailblazer. Ultimately, its less about the number of people in each role and more about ensuring that the talents and voices of the Director, Stabilizer, Achiever, Trailblazer, and Harmonizer are well represented. Excerpted from TEAM PLAYERS: The Five Critical Roles You Need to Build a Winning Team. Copyright 2025 by Mark Murphy. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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E-Commerce
The AI boom is driving an explosive surge in computational demands and reshaping the landscape of technology, infrastructure, and innovation. One of the biggest barriers to widespread AI deployment today is access to power. Some estimates suggest AI-driven data centers now consume more electricity than entire nations. The World Economic Forum projects a doubling of energy use by data centers from 2024 to 2027, driven by the energy-intensive nature of AI workloads. This surge in electricity demand is transforming the utilities industry and redefining how and where data centers are builtpower is no longer a given. In the U.S, electricity usage is growing for the first time in over a decade largely because of data center consumption. Meanwhile, big tech is even turning to nuclear power to fuel their long-term AI strategy, while data center builders are searching for land parcels in areas with excess power or resorting to building their own power infrastructure, often relying on natural gas generators. ENTER QUANTUM COMPUTING Quantum computers could be the key to reducing AIs rising energy consumption, offering a more efficient, scalable solution. Unlike traditional computers that evaluate one possibility at a time, quantum computers are designed to explore complex problem landscapes more efficiently, making them well-suited for tackling certain challenges that can be difficult, time-consuming, or costly for classical systems. This enables them to potentially provide solutions faster, at higher quality, and with greater efficiency. While AI excels at uncovering patterns and predictions, quantum computing identifies the most efficient solutions, making these two powerful technologies complementary. Quantum computers address problems that AI and classical methods struggle with, such as factoring large numbers and solving hard optimization challenges like vehicle routing and supply chain structuring. Here are three ways quantum computing could help mitigate the expected disruptive impact of AIs rising computational demands: Optimize data center placement and utility grid management Quantum computing could be used to identify optimal data center locations based on power availability or assist utility companies in streamlining grid planning and management to support both consumer and data center needs. GE Vernova, a global energy company, is using quantum computers today to identify weaknesses in the power grid and optimize responses for potential attacks on the grid. E.ON, a European multinational electric utility company, is now using annealing quantum computing to explore energy grid stability. Unlock opportunities for greater energy efficiency Early research shows the potential for quantum computing to reduce the amount of computational power needed to run AI workflows. A breakthrough published in Science demonstrated that our D-Wave quantum computer solved a magnetic materials simulation problem in minutes using just 12 kilowatts of power. This task would have taken one of the worlds most powerful exascale supercomputers, a massively parallel GPU system, nearly one million years to solve, consuming more electricity than the world uses annually. Applying these quantum computing techniques to blockchain hashing and proof of work could also result in substantial enhancements to security and efficiency, potentially reducing electricity costs by up to a factor of 1,000. Quantum computers are very energy efficient and may soon perform complex computations like those needed for blockchain or AI at a fraction of the power required today.Some of the worlds largest supercomputing facilities are now actively exploring how GPUs and quantum processing units could work together to improve problem solving and reduce energy consumption. In February, Forschungszentrum Jülich, a leading supercomputing center in Germany, purchased an annealing quantum computer to integrate with the Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ). This integration is expected to enable JUNIQ to connect to the JUPITER exascale computer, potentially enabling breakthroughs in AI and quantum optimization. JUPITER is anticipated to surpass one quintillion calculations per second. This will likely be the worlds first pairing of an annealing quantum computer with an exascale supercomputer, providing a unique opportunity to observe the technologys impact on AI computational challenges. Boost model efficiency and performance with quantum AI architectures Early evidence suggests that annealing quantum computers can be integrated into quantum-hybrid AI workflows, which could potentially enhance model efficiency and performance. Japan Tobaccos (JT) pharmaceutical division recently conducted a project that involved using a quantum-hybrid AI workflow to generate new molecules. Using this hybrid approach, JT enhanced the quality of its AI drug development processes, demonstrating that the quantum AI workflow generated more valid molecules with better drug-like qualities compared to classical methods alone.TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator center, recently published a paper in npj quantum information demonstrating the first use of annealing quantum computing and deep generative AI to create novel simulation models for the next big upgrade of CERNs particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Colliderthe worlds largest particle accelerator. Traditional simulations of particle collisions are time-consuming and costly, often running on supercomputers for weeks or months. By merging quantum computing with advanced AI, the team was able to perform complex simulations more quickly, accurately and efficiently. HOW TO ADDRESS AIS POWER DRAIN WITH QUANTUM INNOVATION As AI adoption continues to accelerate, its insatiable demand for computational power is upending industries and straining global power resources. We need a better solution for addressing AIs power demands than simply adding more GPU clusters or building nuclear power plants. From optimizing energy grids and data center placemet to reducing GPU power consumption and enhancing AI model performance, annealing quantum computing offers a promising path forward. Tools like PyTorch plug-ins are even making it easy for developers to incorporate quantum into AI workflows to explore how the technology could address computational challenges. For business leaders navigating the energy-intensive AI era, adopting annealing quantum computing could unlock transformative efficiencies today and tomorrow. Alan Baratz, PhD is CEO of D-Wave.
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