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The distance between a world-changing innovation and its funding often comes down to four minutes—the average time a human reviewer tends to spend on an initial grant application. In those four minutes, reviewers must assess alignment, eligibility, innovation potential, and team capacity, all while maintaining consistency across thousands of applications. It’s an impossible ask that leads to an impossible choice: either slow down and review fewer ideas or speed up and risk missing transformative ones. At MIT Solve, we’ve spent a year exploring a third option: teaching AI to handle the repetitive parts of review so humans can invest real time where judgment matters mos…

February 1 was National Change Your Password Day, a well-intentioned reminder that, ironically, highlights everything wrong with how we think about security in 2026. Here’s the truth: if you spent the first day of the month dutifully changing “Summer2025!” to “Winter2026!” across your accounts, you didn’t make yourself safer. In fact, you might have made things worse. Decades of Bad Advice We’ve spent decades teaching people the wrong lessons about password security. Add a number. Throw in a special character. Change it every 90 days. These requirements were etched into our collective consciousness, repeated by IT departments, enforced by login forms, and inter…

Noah Winter brags he’s been to way more Super Bowls than Tom Brady. Brady competed in 10 — more than any other player. But Winter will be part of the Super Bowl spectacle for his 30th straight year this year, not in uniform but as the guy in charge of the celebratory confetti after the game ends. Winter’s company, Artistry in Motion, also makes confetti for rock concerts, movies, political conventions and the Olympics. But the annual blizzard of color falling onto the field at the end of each Super Bowl is probably what he’s best known for. It certainly is what he’s most likely to get asked about at dinner parties. “It’s become an iconic moment,” Winter marvels, sitting…

This weekend, a showdown between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, some star-studded commercials, and a Bad Bunny concert are taking place. Regardless of which part of Super Bowl LX is most important to you, it is all going down on Sunday, February 8, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Here’s a quick recap before kick-off. How did the Seahawks and Patriots get to Super Bowl LX? This isn’t the first time that the Seahawks and Patriots have faced off in the championship game. In 2015, Seattle was defeated by the Patriots 28-24 after an eleventh-hour interception on the one-yard line. New quarterbacks Drake Maye and Sam Darnold m…

One of the first projects Hyun Park spearheaded when he began working for South Korea’s entertainment powerhouse Studio Dragon was a dystopian sci-fi drama—much to the chagrin of his boss. “The CEO said: Koreans don’t do sci-fi,” Park recalls. “It’s a Hollywood thing. The budgets are too big. It doesn’t really make sense. It will never look real.” His boss had a point. Big, splashy science fiction dramas with expansive futuristic worlds and lots of special effects were a rarity in the Korean studio system. “For the past 30–40 years, we’ve done amazing family dramas and romantic comedies,” Park says. “We’ve always failed in sci-fi.” Park believes it’s time to chang…

2025 was defined by reports of a “low-hire, low-fire” environment: the unemployment rate remained fairly low, at just over 4% in December; yet headlines of constant layoffs seemed to dominate the news cycle, and those who are unemployed are taking longer to find work. It’s all been very confusing. And the most recent U.S. jobs report, released today, presents more mixed signals. This week’s report indicated American employers added 130,000 jobs in January, and the Labor Department reported the unemployment rate fell to 4.3%. Everything in the report isn’t good — it also indicated just 181,000 jobs were created last year, which is the lowest number since 2020 — but…

Want to use Discord from next month? You’ll have to hand over a photo of your ID or a scan of your face to verify you’re of age. It’s part of a new process introduced by the chat app aimed at ensuring no one underage is using the platform. All new and existing users, the company says, will be given a “teen-appropriate experience” by default, including content filtering and limited access to spaces that host adult content. To regain the experience they previously had, users will need to prove their age through one of several options, including video selfies or sharing a photo of an identity document. (Discord did not immediately respond to Fast Company’s request for co…

If you live near an AI data center, you may already be seeing higher electricity bills. But if that data center is for Anthropic, the AI company now says it will cover the price hikes consumers face. The data center boom unfolding across the country is driving up electricity costs and adding more stress to the power grid. That added demand means the grid needs serious upgrades, or even new sources of power. In many places, those rising costs are being passed directly onto community members. But more and more legislators and even tech executives are raising the idea that the companies behind the data centers should foot the bill. Anthropic, which created the …

Most managers are using AI the same way they use any productivity tool: to move faster. It summarizes meetings, drafts responses, and clears small tasks off the plate. That helps, but it misses the real shift. The real change begins when AI stops assisting and starts acting. When systems resolve issues, trigger workflows, and make routine decisions without human involvement, the work itself changes. And when the work changes, the job has to change too. Let’s take the example of an airline and lost luggage. Generative AI can explain what steps to take to recover a lost bag. Agentic AI aims to actually find the bag, reroute it, and deliver it. The person that wa…

Since Spencer Rascoff took over as Match Group CEO in early 2025, he has set about trying to revive its portfolio of dating apps, in part by winning back user trust and courting Gen Z. “Trust is the foundation of real connections, and we are committed to rebuilding it with urgency, accountability, and an unwavering focus on the user,” Rascoff said last March in a letter to employees sharing his vision. As part of that turnaround and effort to cultivate trust, Match Group—the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid—has also sought to revamp its internal culture over the last year, in the interest of imbuing the company with greater transparency. A few months into…

Maybe you first bonded over shared workplace frustrations. You gradually started finding each other every lunch break and synchronizing trips to the coffee machine. Eventually they become a confidant for venting about your real life outside of work. They become your work spouse. And if you find yourself strolling the greeting card aisle sometime today, you may even feel compelled to get this person in your life a trinket for celebrating the most romantic day of the year. Turns out, there are options available. “For my work wife on Valentines day,” one option reads from Card Factory. “I’ve finally found someone just as inappropriate as me!” A card to show…

In the United States, it’s one of our annual holidays today, Presidents’ Day, which celebrates the dozens of American presidents we’ve had over the centuries. But on the other side of the world, an even larger holiday is kicking off: Chinese New Year. Here’s what you need to know about the festival and its importance to the millions of Chinese Americans in the United States. What is Chinese New Year? Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year or, in China, the Spring Festival, is an annual holiday that marks the beginning of the new lunar year. Unlike many Western holidays, the lunar new year does not have a fixed date. Instead, it typically falls on the fu…

In today’s AI race, breakthroughs are no longer measured in years—or even months—but in weeks. The release of Opus 4.6 just over two weeks ago was a major moment for its maker, Anthropic, delivering state-of-the-art performance in a number of fields. But within a week, Chinese competitor Z.ai had released its own Opus-like model, GLM-5. (There’s no suggestion that GLM-5 uses or borrows from Opus in any way.) Many on social media called it a cut-price Opus alternative. But Z.ai’s lead didn’t last long, either. Just as Anthropic had been undercut by GLM-5’s release, GLM-5 was quickly downloaded, compressed, and re-released in a version that could run locally w…

Change often fails and that rarely has anything to do with whether the concept is a good one or not. As Howard Aiken famously put it, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throat.” As the creator of the Harvard Mark, one of the very first computers, he was speaking from experience. The truth is that any time you set out to make an impact there’s going to be some who won’t like it. They’ll seek to undermine what you are trying to achieve and they will do it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. It’s a hard truth, but one we all need to accept: resistance is inevitable when you …

If the thought of AI smart glasses annoys you, you’re not alone. This week, the judge presiding over a historic social media addiction trial took a harsh stance on the AI-powered gadgets, which many bystanders find invasive of their privacy: Stop recording or face contempt of court. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in a trial that many industry watchers say could have severe ramifications for social media giants, depending on how it turns out. At the heart of the trial is the question of whether social media companies like Meta, via its Facebook and Instagram platforms, purposely designed sa…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. The AI ‘arms race’ may be more of an ‘arm-twist’ The big AI companies tell us that AI will soon remake every aspect of business in every industry. Many of us are left wondering when that will actually happen in the real world, when the so-called “AI takeoff” will arrive. But because there are so many variables, so many different kinds of organizations, jobs, and workers, there’s no satisfying answer. In the absence of hard evidence, we rely on anecdotes: success stories from founde…

Public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has largely orbited a familiar worry: cheating. Will students use chatbots to write essays? Can instructors tell? Should universities ban the tech? Embrace it? These concerns are understandable. But focusing so much on cheating misses the larger transformation already underway, one that extends far beyond student misconduct and even the classroom. Universities are adopting AI across many areas of institutional life. Some uses are largely invisible, like systems that help allocate resources, flag “at-risk” students, optimize course scheduling, or automate routine administrative decisions. Other uses ar…

In 2001, Antoni was working at a business that was underperforming and facing layoffs. People didn’t know who would be cut or when. You could tell by people’s behavior that anxiety was at an all-time high. Managers were “networking” in the right corridors, colleagues started to crowd meetings to look indispensable, and teams were slowing down because nobody wanted to make the wrong move. One leader chose a different tactic. Every day, at the same time, he stood in the same spot where anyone could walk up to him. He shared what he actually knew (not what he guessed), answered questions without theater, and ended with a concrete direction for “today.” People still didn’…

When looking for an apartment in San Francisco today, artificial intelligence can seem inescapable; and that’s not just because every rental building seems to have an AI bot answering calls. In San Francisco, the technology’s ascendency—and the subsequent skyrocketing job growth— has helped make the apartment market one of the tightest in the nation, with the fastest growing rent in the U.S. Lisa McCarrel, Managing Partner of Move Bay Area, a relocation and rental housing service, has seen the rental market become frenzied in recent months due in part to the increase in AI and AI-adjacent jobs. With units harder to come by, she’s seen some potential tenants offer…

Dark Sky was a rarity in the app world. Universally beloved, the weather app had an uncanny ability to tell you when to expect rain, down to the minute. So when Apple announced plans to buy it six years ago, there was a collective sigh of frustration. The Android version, of course, disappeared almost immediately, while the iOS version was folded into Apple’s native Weather app. (The standalone iPhone app was discontinued.) The integration was never quite the same, though, and it seemed as if the magic of Dark Sky was lost. Now, however, the team behind the app is hoping lightning strikes twice. The developers of Dark Sky have announced a new iPhone app called Acm…

At a time of broken climate pledges and an economy-wide bearhug of automation and artificial intelligence, the dominant themes of the recently announced 2026 National Design Awards—climate action, sustainability, dedication to craft—are a refreshing reset. Rewarding innovation and impact among U.S.-based designers, the awards are both an honor and a pulse check on the state of design. This year’s group of winners represent a diverse group of practitioners and firms exploring ways that work in design and the arts can counteract environmental catastrophe and re-center the human hand in shaping the future. Honorees include the indigenous underpinnings in the textiles…

In early February, the AI world found itself worked up over Moltbook, a social platform for AI agents to communicate and interact. These AI agents allegedly created their own language, their own religion, their own fleets of mini-agents. It’s like The Matrix was happening in front of our eyes. What a boondoggle. I say “allegedly” because it turns out many of these agents were being directed by humans, among other Mechanical Turk-style fakeries. Moltbook is worth a conversation, for sure, but not the one taking place. Here’s how we should really be thinking about it. TOKEN CARNAGE Running AI infrastructure costs are astronomical. Back in 2023, it was est…

During the last decade, digital innovations have produced a range of recruitment and evaluation tools: now, whenever you first apply for a job, you are less likely to be judged by humans and more likely to be assessed by AI. Before you can even get the opportunity to impress a human interviewer, you will first need to impress the algorithm! More recently, AI has also been used to assist current employees in doing their jobs and then to help their employers evaluate how well employees are performing in those jobs. In fact AI adoption is now the norm across knowledge economy jobs, with estimates indicating that at least 70% of people use AI regularly at work (a figure t…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I tested more than 200 educational sites, apps, and services last year. Some were so confusing that I quickly gave up. Others were too costly. A few went out of business. Many were narrowly useful, e.g., for 3D modeling, math, or music. The top-tier tools have consistently been super valuable for me—in my teaching, in my job at the City University of New York, and as a dad of two daughters. To save you the time and effort of sifting through the chaff, I’m sharing the ones I find most useful. Even if you’re not a teacher, these tools m…

Two months ago, a state administrative judge in California determined that Tesla broke the law by misleading consumers. The argument: Tesla led them to believe that its cars had real self-driving capabilities, calling them “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” (commonly known as FSD). The issue is that Teslas can’t really drive by themselves; they still require drivers to remain constantly vigilant to prevent catastrophe. The verdict prompted the California Department of Motor Vehicles to threaten a temporary suspension of Tesla’s manufacturing and sales licenses. Two months after the ruling, on February 13, Tesla’s attorneys filed a complaint alleging the state “wrongf…