In 2006, Loren Castle, the CEO of refrigerated cookie dough empire Sweet Loren’s, was a fresh-faced 22-year-old who had just graduated from the University of Southern California. But three months later, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma: a cancer that originates in the lymphatic system. While going through chemotherapy for six months, Castle was wrangling the issue of eating healthier while figuring out what her career would look like. 

“After [recovering], my doctor said, ‘Go be normal and get a real job,’” Castle recalls to Fortune. “I was like, ‘I can’t be normal anymore.’ Life is really precious, I want to make sure I find something that I’m super passionate about. I wasn’t happy working for someone else in a job that I just wasn’t really passionate about.”

Four years after working unfulfilling corporate and restaurant-industry jobs, she finally found that passion—and turned it into a booming million-dollar business. Today, her healthy refrigerated cookie dough brand lines the aisles of 35,000 supermarkets, including chains like Whole Foods, Target, and Costco. 

Sweet Loren’s rolled in $97 million in gross sales in 2024, and is on target to reach a staggering $120 million run rate this year. 

“The goal is to take over the whole refrigerated dough section, and really become the number one player in the space,” Castle continues. “While the big guys are asleep at the wheel, we know how to speak to millennials and Gen Z, the future shopper…I’m just really passionate about this because it started from a personal need.”

Quitting her ‘real job’ to serve health-conscious cookie lovers

New York-based Castle wasn’t inspired to start Sweet Loren’s because of her love for baking—in fact, she did little of it before her diagnosis. While her friends were out partying, her illness had forced her to change the way she lived, including the way she ate. 

Having a big sweet tooth, Castle was disappointed in the lack of wholesome cookie dough brands. So she took cooking classes and studied nutrition on the days she didn’t have cancer treatment, opting for “super-powered” healthy foods, and formulated her own healthy sweet treat.

“I started making my own recipe, practicing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of batches. And finally I [made] these recipes that I was like, ‘Wait a minute, like, this is the best cookie I’ve ever had,’” Castle says. “It turned what was a really scary, negative time in my life into like a superpower.”

Castle started test-running batch after batch of health-conscious cookies while working other jobs on the side. During those years she worked at a boutique PR company, helped manage a restaurant, and had a role at a wine business. She was bouncing between roles that didn’t fulfill her. But surviving cancer—and wanting to turn the nightmare of the illness into something positive—was the push she needed to finally start her own business. 

“Life is short. I don’t want regrets. I was so keenly aware of my feelings. If I wasn’t in love with something, it was really hard to make myself do it,” Castle said. “It got to that point of, ‘I don’t like my boss, I don’t want to be making him money.’”

After three years of trying and failing to find a job she loved and was passionate about, Castle pulled the plug and veered into entrepreneurship at 26. 

Now, what started as a personal necessity has become a game-changer for a much wider audience. Castle has enjoyed massive success by tapping into cravings for healthy sweet treats, especially among consumers with allergies or dietary restrictions. Selling nut-free, dairy-free, and vegan cookie doughs, pie crusts, puff pastry, and pizza doughs, Sweet Loren’s reached a niche that has since blossomed into a bigger movement. 

Propelling Sweet Loren’s to a $120 million success 

Castle had already amassed a hoard of cookie fans from having her friends and families test the batches. But her real big break came in 2011, when she entered a baking contest in New York City: The Next Big Small Brand Contest for Culinary Genius. She swept the competition, winning both the people’s choice award and judge’s award. 

Sweet Loren’s was officially on the map, and suddenly, hundreds of families were emailing the brand weekly asking for new dietary-sensitive options. In addition to the healthy cookie dough she was producing, they wanted nut-free, gluten-free, vegan-friendly sweet treats. 

“Once I launched allergen-free [products], they became our number one SKU overnight,” she says.

Courtesy of Sweet Loren’s

Castle says that her brand is now the number one natural cookie dough brand in the U.S., without private equity backing, VC funding, or glitzy billboard ads. 

“It’s not like we’re pouring $50 million into Super Bowl ads and things like that. I think it’s just that we really solved a problem,” Castle says. “They just love the quality of the product and tell their friends and become advocates for it. Because we’re raising the bar on what packaged food can taste like, and what the ingredients can be like. It’s more of a premium.”

This week, Perplexity, a San Francisco-based startup most recently valued at $14 billion, launched its own AI-enabled web browser for select subscribers. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is also working on an AI web browser of its own, reported Reuters.

These AI web browsers directly aim at Google’s dominance over search, especially through its popular Google Chrome web browser, and have the potential to upend the industry as we know it by reimagining the search experience, said Steve Jang, the founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures, which was an early investor in Perplexity.

“Every tech cycle, everyone questions whether or not a new startup can—how can they possibly defeat or even get significant market share away from these legacy platforms, and they always do,” he told Fortune.

Perplexity’s AI browser, Comet, for instance, comes with Perplexity’s AI chatbot pre-installed to replace searches. It also includes an AI agent called Comet Assistant, which the company claims can automatically book a meeting or send an email, buy something for you, and brief you on what you need to know for the day. 

The entry of these AI products may also be timely and could take advantage of a “window of opportunity,” as Google faces an uncertain future thanks to the impending remedies resulting from its antitrust case, said Ari Paparo, a former director of product management of advertiser products at Google. One such remedy could include spinning off the Chrome web browser that the AI upstarts are trying to compete with. 

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Still, it’s unclear how the search market will ultimately pan out as a result of the new entrants. Google Chrome, for its part, still has an advantage because of its established reach of more than 3 billion users, about 68% of the market, and the massive amount of user data it collects—then there’s the friction involved with switching browsers, a challenge in itself. 

But in terms of AI usage, OpenAI is already competing head-to-head with Google. Twenty-nine percent of consumers say they use OpenAI regularly, versus 30% who say they use Google’s Gemini, according to a recent survey by Wedbush.

But what if AI doesn’t work out?

This isn’t just a hypothetical question. Some signs suggest that AI growth is stalling, or at least slowing down. New models no longer show significant improvements from scaling up size or the amount of training data. Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis recently noted that “we are no longer getting the same progress” on AI development. Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prominent investors in AI, similarly shared concerns that AI model capabilities appeared to be plateauing.

One reason for AI’s slowing performance might be that models have already consumed most available digital data, leaving little left over for further improvement. Developers are instead turning to synthetic data, but it might be less effective—and might even make models worse.

AI development is also enormously capital intensive. Training the most advanced models requires compute clusters costing billions of dollars. Even a single training run can cost tens of millions of dollars. Yet while development costs keep going up, monetary rewards are limited. Aside from AI coding assistants, there are few examples of AI generating returns that justify these immense capital investments.

Some companies are already scaling back their AI infrastructure investment due to cost. Microsoft, for example, is “slowing or pausing some early-stage projects” and has canceled equipment orders for several global data center projects. Meta, AWS and Google have all reportedly cut their GPU orders. Chip bottlenecks, power shortages, and public concerns are also barriers to mass AI adoption.

If the AI boom peters out, that’s bad news for the chip industry, which has used this new technology to avoid a serious slump.

Chips are getting more expensive to make. Developing new manufacturing processes cost billions of dollars; building new plants can cost tens of billions of dollars. These costs are all passed onto consumers but, outside of AI, customers aren’t keen on buying more expensive chips. The fancy technologies in today’s AI processors aren’t that useful for other purposes.

AI delayed an industry reckoning: Manufacturing is getting more expensive, while performance gains are shrinking. The economic promise of AI justifies high chip prices, but if that goes away, the chip industry needs to find something else to persuade people to sustain investment in advanced chip manufacturing. Otherwise, advanced chipmaking will become unsustainable: New technologies will cost more and more, while delivering less and less.

A chip industry slump will upend several geopolitical and economic objectives. Governments have poured billions of dollars into building domestic chip industries. U.S. President Donald Trump routinely threatens to use tariffs to bring semiconductor manufacturing back home.

The U.S.’s supposed lead on chip development may prove to be a mirage, particularly as China dominates legacy chip production. And an AI reversal would shake up the world’s tech sector, forcing Big Tech to rethink its bets.

Given these stakes, policymakers need to encourage further innovation in AI by facilitating easier access to data, chips, power, and cooling. This includes pragmatic policies on copyright and data protection, a balanced approach to onshore and offshore chip manufacturing, and removing regulatory barriers to energy use and generation. Governments shouldn’t necessarily apply the precautionary principle to AI; the benefits are too great to handicap its development, at least at these early stages. Nor should large-scale AI applications, such as autonomous vehicles or home robotics, face unreasonably high requirements for implementation.

Investors should also explore alternate AI approaches that don’t require as much data and infrastructure, potentially unlocking new AI growth. The industry must also explore non-AI applications for chips, if only to manage their risk.

To ensure the chip industry can survive a slowdown, it must reduce the cost of advanced chipmaking. Companies should work together on research and development, as well as working with universities, to lower development costs. More investment is needed in chiplets, advanced packaging, and reconfigurable hardware. The industry must support interoperable standards, open-source tools, and agile hardware development. Shared, subsidized infrastructure for design and fabrication can help smaller companies finalize ideas before manufacturing. But, importantly, the drive to onshore manufacturing may be counterproductive: Doing so carelessly will significantly increase chip costs.  

The future of chips and AI are now deeply intertwined. If chips are to thrive, AI must grow. If not, the entire chip sector may now be in jeopardy.  

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.