Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Custom AI models are not just for the AI giants anymore. Because the 37-person startup Krea is releasing its first generative AI model as the design tools startup repositions itself as a full-fledged AI research lab. The move is significant for Krea, but it also seems to tease an almost inevitable moment in the rapidly evolving AI market, where smaller players in the industry can make more disruptive bets. On one hand, Krea can hardly call itself a bootstrapped startup anymore. It’s now raised $83 million through its Series B at a $500 million valuation. On the other, it’s tiny compared to the leading frontier model companies, which constantly raise more money t…

Wendy’s is feeling blue. Light blue, to be exact. In April, a new design concept accompanied the opening of the burger chain’s 100th store in the Philippines. In addition to its digital-first layout, the new Wendy’s boasts a light blue facade instead of a red one. The refreshed restaurants are now available to franchisees across the company’s international markets. Wendy’s tells Fast Company that locations are also open in Chile, England, and Scotland, but there are currently none in the U.S. The blue color scheme is part of an initiative Wendy’s is calling “Future Fresh” that could make one of the brand’s secondary colors more primary if adopted widely. On the co…

For most of the last century, we believed human potential could be measured through intelligence, and we built whole institutions around that belief. IQ was the metric. If you were analytical enough, technically proficient enough, quick enough on your feet, doors opened, schools rewarded it, employers screened for it, and entire industries grew up around identifying and elevating it. Then we noticed what intelligence alone couldn’t do. Technical brilliance without humanity tended to create distance rather than trust, and a generation of leaders who were brilliant on paper proved unable to inspire the people around them. So we elevated a second form of intelligence, em…

Layoffs used to be something that made a company’s stock tank. But after Block announced layoffs recently, its stock went up. And they weren’t the only ones: Snap did the same thing a few months earlier, as did Meta and Amazon. The common thread? They all cited AI as their reason for cuts. For CEOs staring down investor pressure, the playbook has become clear: invoke AI, slash headcount, and watch the ticker go up. I’m a CEO, and I’ve been laid off before. I now advise HR and benefits leaders at Fortune 500 companies as they plan, execute, and move forward after making workforce cuts. Here’s why I’m cautioning fellow executives against jumping on the “AI” layoffs …

Tor Myhren is going to kind of hate this article. Because it’s about him, not his entire team. Because I want to talk about his shift from agency chief creative officer to leading marketing for the most pristine marketer on the planet, not to mention one of the world’s most valuable companies. Because I want to talk about how he’s been doing it for 10 years in an industry where brands change senior marketing executives as frequently as their socks. And because I want to start with the worst moment of his decade at Apple. At the time, Myhren had a singular focus. In early 2024, Apple’s VP of marketing communications was sitting with his team, thinki…

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a headache for human resources. More and more, corporate legal teams are becoming entangled in the technology’s mistakes. Generative AI-related lawsuits in the United States grew 978% from 2021 to 2025, according to a report from the reinsurance broker Gallagher Re. But a growing number of insurance companies are removing AI liability coverage. Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, and Travelers have all won approval to largely drop the protection in recent months. Technically, the companies have added “AI exclusion clauses” to their standard commercial liability policies. Those clauses cover a wide range of issues, including employees alle…

According to a new report from Realtor.com, buying a new home could save you a ton of money in your first decade of homeownership. But those savings depend on where you live. On average, U.S. buyers who choose a new home end up with $25,335 in savings over the course of 10 years. That chunk of change could offset the higher price tag of a newly built home, even if it doesn’t show up as up-front savings. The hidden savings tied to buying a newer home can mostly be attributed to two major factors: energy costs and new systems that don’t require maintenance or upgrades out of the gate. New homes might lack the aesthetic charm of their classic counterparts, but they …

Below, Dan Pontefract shares five key insights from his new book, The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce. Pontefract is a six-time award-winning author and a leadership and corporate culture strategist. He has spent more than 20 years in senior leadership roles at TELUS, SAP, and BCIT, serving as a chief learning officer and chief envisioner. In 2018, he founded his own firm, the Pontefract Group, to help leaders and organizations improve leadership and corporate culture. What’s the big idea? Organizations are overlooking a major, unavoidable shift—the aging workforce—and those that learn to value and integrate people of all ages…

For decades, the conversation around gender equality at work has been dominated by one glittering metaphor: the glass ceiling. We count women in boardrooms, track female CEOs, and debate the glass cliff awaiting women promoted during crises. But for millions of women over 45, the problem isn’t getting to the top. It’s getting unstuck from the bottom. While elite professional careers dominate headlines, the reality for much of the female workforce is the sticky floor: a structural trap that keeps women concentrated in low-paid, low-mobility jobs America depends on but refuses to properly value. And with age, the glue hardens. The intersection of sexism, ageism, and unp…

Imagine hiring every all-star on the market, paying top dollar, and then finishing sixth in your division. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happened to Sinan Aral’s beloved Liverpool F.C. last season, and it’s also, he argues, an almost perfect metaphor for how most organizations are deploying AI right now. Aral is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and one of the leading researchers on human-AI collaboration. His lab has spent the last several years running large-scale, real-world experiments on what actually happens when humans and AI work together… and the results should give every leader pause. “In about 85% of the studies we’ve seen,” he told…

All writing is autobiographical. Even if you’re not explicitly writing about your own experience, it shows up in the topics you choose, the details you focus on, even the things you leave out. Key example from my trove of nearly 3,000 articles here on Inc. over the years: a study I latched onto a decade ago about the single thing wealthy families do to give their kids a leg up on the world. The answer, drawn from University of Southern California research, was straightforward: They buy the neighborhood. The insight wasn’t so much about money as it was about what money makes possible. Stable schools, stable peer groups, and stable environments. The specific …

As the weather gets warmer, 7-Eleven is readying for the summer with discounted prices, cold drinks, and loyalty rewards. Leading up to Slurpee day on July 11 (or 7/11), the convenience store chain will roll out a “Slurpee Drink Happy Hour,” offering large Slurpees for just a dollar. The catch? The program is only open to those enrolled in 7-Eleven’s loyalty programs, 7Rewards and Speedy Rewards. First introduced in 1966 by 7-Eleven, the Slurpee is one of the company’s hero products, offering buyers a frozen and colorful carbonated drink. For those wishing to cash in on the summer promotion, it will be offered at select 7-Eleven, Speedway, and Stripes location…

On prediction markets, users can bet on anything and everything. But for those swinging big wins, is it just luck? Some users don’t seem to think so. In one recent event contract on Polymarket, users are wagering on the final storylines for the characters in the latest season of Euphoria, creator Sam Levinson’s HBO series about the messy lives of young people. The market, titled “Who will die in Euphoria: Season 3?,” ranks Nate Jacobs (played by Jacob Elordi) and Rue Bennett (the lead character, played by Zendaya) as the characters with the highest likelihood of dying this season, at 82% and 61%, respectively. Set to resolve by May 31, the same day as the seas…

LinkedIn on Wednesday joined what’s become a near-daily drumbeat of layoff announcements among tech companies. The Microsoft-owned company will reportedly eliminate about 5% of its headcount, which might total roughly 875 employees based on the latest headcount estimate. The cuts are part of a broader reorganization, as LinkedIn CEO Daniel Shapero detailed in an internal memo to staff. As has been true among several other tech companies recently, Shapero didn’t specifically mention AI as a reason for the layoffs in his missive sent at 7 a.m. Pacific. Rather, he emphasized a shifting landscape, according to the text of his memo obtained by Business Insider. “…

Threads is rolling out Meta AI, which will provide real-time context when mentioned in a post or reply. Connor Hayes, head of Threads, posted on the app Tuesday about the thinking behind Meta AI’s new feature. “We’re starting to test a way to get context on a Threads conversation by mentioning Meta AI in a post or reply. This will start in a handful of countries today and expand over time,” Hayes posted. “Conversations here move fast. A lot of people want to look things up before jumping in. We want to make that easier. Ask Meta AI to get real-time context about a trend, breaking story, or get recommendations right in the conversation.” The new Meta AI Threads…

In Seattle, the average price of a gallon of gas is now $5.96, a 30-cent increase from only a month ago and a $1.50 increase from a year ago. The United States and Israel’s conflict in Iran, and the constricted flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, has caused gas prices across the country to soar. That’s made workplace commutes more costly for Americans already facing an affordability crisis. For students, staff, and faculty at the University of Washington, though, they have a new way to get to work if they want to ditch their cars. The university recently set up a partnership with Ridepanda, which allows companies to offer e-bike and scooter subscriptio…

In 2011, Palantir created a combined role for their solutions engineers and integration engineers. The company called this new role “forward-deployed engineers,” or FDEs, for short. An Andreessen Horowitz blog post dubbed the recasting “title arbitrage,” arguing that Palantir had created this new title to signify the important, new capabilities and powers evolving at the company. Put simply: FDEs are people who can sell AI products to businesses while also teaching AI models how to work for said businesses. More than a decade after Palantir popularized the title, tech CEOs are betting that FDEs are the next big thing in the industry. “Forward deployed engineers, o…

According to Amazon employees, the company is pushing them to incorporate more and more AI in their workflows. What exactly they should be using it for is less clear—leaving the door open for employees to waste AI resources on unnecessary tasks. As detailed in a new report by The Financial Times, Amazon employees are reportedly using the company’s new internal AI tool MeshClaw to create extraneous AI agents, not to increase productivity, but to drive up AI activity. The employees say Amazon is tracking their consumption of AI tokens, incentivizing some of their colleagues to prioritize quantity over quality when it comes to the technology. Amazon employees sou…

China’s Alibaba said that growth accelerated for both its artificial intelligence and cloud businesses in the latest quarter, driven by the AI boom, even though overall revenue rose just 3% to 243 billion yuan ($36 billion). Revenue from its Cloud Intelligence Group, which focuses on cloud computing and AI developments, jumped 38% in the January-March quarter from a year ago to 41.6 billion yuan ($6.1 billion). That was faster than the 36% and 34% growth in the previous two quarters, respectively. However, Alibaba recorded an overall of 848 million yuan ($125 million) loss from operations for the quarter, a key measure of profitability of its core operating busine…

Cinemark is giving customers a break at the box office this summer. The movie chain that operates over 300 theaters in the U.S. just announced it’s offering a major deal on tickets as part of its Summer Movie Clubhouse program. The program, which kicks off on May 13, will bring a series of family-friendly films to 285 Cinemark theaters across the country. Showings will run from June 1 through August 6, but tickets are already available on Cinemark.com, in the app, and at participating box offices. The price for tickets? Just $1.75. “We continue to see that younger audiences treasure the shared, immersive experience of going to the movies, and Cinemark is thr…

You won’t want to miss a chance to look up tonight into the sky, in the early morning hours on Thursday, May 14. Before dawn, skywatchers are in for a treat with a rare sighting of the moon, Saturn, and Mars as they a form a gorgeous, cosmic triangle in May’s dark sky. Here’s everything to know about this unique skywatching event. What’s happening? The moon, Saturn, and Mars will form a cosmic triangle as the sun rises before dawn in the early hours of Thursday morning. The razor-thin moon will be in its waning crescent phase (day 27 of its 29.5 day cycle), and appear as a mere sliver in the sky, as only 8% will be lit up by the sun, according to Space.com.…

In early 2000, with their company on the brink of failure, Netflix founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph flew to Dallas to meet with Blockbuster executives. As the story is told, they offered to sell their company for $50 million and got laughed out of the room. Humiliated, but determined, they built a business that toppled the industry giant. That version is almost certainly not true, but it remains popular with pundits who like to tell it at fancy conferences. It gets told and retold because it reinforces how we like to imagine things. Everybody loves a good “David vs. Goliath” story, and the idea of wily young entrepreneurs outsmarting big corporate fat cats fi…

Multiple reports this week revealed that General Motors is cutting hundreds of jobs in its IT department—but not with the intent to replace them outright with AI. The layoffs are reportedly impacting about 600 employees, or about 10% of the IT team, and the job cuts are partly designed to allow the company to bring on new employees with specific AI skills. General Motors has confirmed the layoffs and suggested they were part of a broader change to its IT operations. “GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “As part of that work, we have made the difficult de…

Does the high price of gas have you considering a hybrid for your next vehicle? We don’t blame you, especially if you drive a lot. Fortunately, there are lots of hybrids to choose from, and many don’t cost much more than their non-hybrid counterparts. But to recoup the extra cost of a hybrid the quickest and start saving money, we don’t recommend purchasing just any hybrid. The car experts at Edmunds outline four tips that will give you the tools you need to find a hybrid that will maximize your savings. Aim for hybrids with the shortest payback periods New hybrids typically cost more than similar gas-only vehicles, so aim for a hybrid that doesn’t cost much more t…