Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

When electricity demand is set to surge—say, from a new power-hungry data center—the default response from a utility is often to build a new (and expensive) power plant and other infrastructure. A new report released by a cross-industry coalition called Utilize argues that we can make better use of existing power on the grid instead. Roughly half of the total capacity goes unused most of the time because the grid was built to meet spikes in demand. But as technology has shifted, it’s become easier to unlock that extra power. Smart thermostats, for example, can pre-cool your house when demand is lower. EVs can charge at optimal hours (and, in some cases, send power…

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 cost of AI will surely rise, along with our dependence on it Developing AI models and serving AI apps is a notoriously expensive undertaking. AI labs use massive amounts of computing power, training data, and high-priced talent to create and serve AI models, and the costs are not nearly covered by the chatbot subscription and API fees they bring in. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic, for example, are profitable, and won’t be for some time. The difference, for now, is made up by inve…

Nearly 90,000 bottles of children’s ibuprofen have been recalled across the United States, according to an enforcement report this week from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Strides Pharma Inc. has recalled 89,952 bottles of Children’s Ibuprofen Oral Suspension following customer complaints of a “gel-like mass and black particles” in the medicine. The India-based company had manufactured the ibuprofen for Taro Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc. based in Hawthorne, New York. The recall comes from Strides Pharma’s Bridgewater, New Jersey, subsidiary. Strides Pharma initiated the recall on March 2, with the FDA labeling it a Class II recall on Monday, March 16…

A Planned Parenthood affiliate just settled an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over claims of discrimination against white employees, in a notable example of the agency’s ongoing focus on DEI-related discrimination. The $500,000 settlement will put an end to an EEOC investigation against Planned Parenthood’s Illinois chapter, which was initiated by employee complaints that the organization allegedly “segregated employees by race, subjected white employees to harassment, and engaged in disparate treatment against white employees regarding terms, conditions, and privileges of employment,” according to the agency. The EEOC found that Pl…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand was running so hot—and homes sold so quickly—that listings barely even registered as active inventory. Indeed, in February 2022, there were only 346,511 active homes for sale, according to Realtor.com’s data series. That was a staggering 68.5% below the 1,102,660 active listings in February 2019. At the end of February 2022, not a single one of America’s 200 largest housing markets had more inventory than in pre-pandemic February 2019. Fast-forward to the end of February 2026, and there were 914,86…

It’s still more than two years until the cauldron lights up for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but we now know what the multibillion-dollar global sports spectacle will look like. The design team at LA28, the local organizing committee for the games, has given Fast Company a preview of the concepts and visuals that will guide the look and feel of the 2028 Olympics. The design approach is conceptually based on the superbloom, a natural phenomenon sometimes experienced in Southern California when an unusually wet winter leads to an explosively colorful spring bloom of wildflowers. The LA28 design approach uses bright, almost neon tones and an abstract graphic …

Is leadership dead? Perhaps not, but its branding is definitely on life support. Younger professionals are not chasing titles for prestige or salary alone. In fact, many are actively opting out of traditional leadership tracks because the trade‑offs look misaligned with the life they want. It’s a trend many people and culture leaders I speak with are worried about. For Gen Z and younger millennials, leadership no longer automatically signals status and security; it often looks like stress, fragility, and moral compromise. In Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, only 6% of Gen Z respondents cited reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal, with…

Less than two years ago, Sam Altman described advertising as a “last resort” for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, during a Harvard Business School interview. He said he would pursue it if it were the only way to provide global access to high-quality AI services. At the time, the comment stood out—not because ads seemed unlikely, but because it underscored what was at stake. ChatGPT doesn’t win attention the way social platforms do. It wins trust. That’s why ChatGPT’s recent ad launch matters far beyond just the creation of a new advertising surface. It’s a real-time test of whether a product built almost entirely on trust can monetize without fundamentally changing user behavior. Op…

The K-shaped economy strikes again. A new report from the Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO), creator of the credit score most lenders use, shows that the average American’s FICO score is now down to 714 – a two point decline over the course of the last year. The current slide in U.S. credit scores began in 2023, when the government ended the temporary pandemic-era freeze on student loan collection. Missed mortgage payments have also ticked up some, contributing to the slide in credit scores. Prior to the latest report, the average American’s credit score had already dropped to 715 between 2024 and 2025, which at the time was the most dramatic decline in scores since the Gr…

When a new song attributed to country singer Blaze Foley, “Together,” appeared on his Spotify profile last year, something didn’t seem right. For starters, Foley had been dead for more than two decades, and the cover art featured AI artwork of a man who wasn’t Foley, and the song wasn’t uploaded by Foley’s longtime distributor. Fake tracks have appeared on various artist profiles, including easy-listening act The Sweet Enoughs, and Australian bands Alpha Wolf and Thy Art Is Murder. Smaller artists are not safe either, with musician Catherine Brennan taking to TikTok saying “in the past two weeks I’ve had two albums released under my name that are not mine.” Spoti…

The influential AI researcher François Chollet has long argued that the field measures intelligence incorrectly, that popular benchmarks reward a model’s ability to memorize vast amounts of data rather than navigate novel situations and learn new skills. Only recently, with the rise of autonomous AI agents, have companies begun to take that critique seriously. On Tuesday, the ARC Prize Foundation, which Chollet founded with Zapier cofounder Mike Knoop, released a new and more difficult version of its benchmark. The test, called ARC-AGI-3, may offer the clearest measurement yet of how close today’s AI agents are to human-level intelligence. It consists of more than a t…

Meetings look neutral on the calendar. Everyone’s calendar is stamped with the same blue 30-minute block. Everyone gets a seat at the table, and—supposedly—the same shot to contribute. But the moment you click “Join,” the pecking order kicks in. Meetings are where power is put on display, credit is scooped up, and the rules of who speaks and who doesn’t are enforced. If you want to understand how inequality festers inside an organization, start watching what happens in your meetings. At a time when women’s representation in the workplace has stagnated and their presence in senior leadership positions is slipping, we need to look closer at the everyday behaviors t…

The most impressive move by three-time world surfing champ John Florence in his new video series isn’t riding a wave; it’s flying across open ocean on a catamaran while holding his puking 1-year-old son over a bucket. The new six-part series called Vela, directed by Florence and produced with outdoor gear and apparel company Yeti, embodies a broader shift in how the iconic surfer is approaching both his career and the goal behind his namesake brand, Florence. After winning his third World Surf League title in September 2024, Florence chose to leave the pro surfing tour to sail around the world with his wife, Lauryn, and son, Darwin. They lived off the grid, e…

For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic feels like a distant memory. In reality, the SARS‑CoV‑2 coronavirus is still spreading widely across the globe and continues to evolve into new variants. Sometimes these variants are no more dangerous than the previous ones. Yet each newly discovered variant also has the potential to be more harmful than the last, which is why health organizations worldwide monitor emerging variants. Currently, health officials are tracking a new Covid-19 variant called BA.3.2, also known as “Cicada.” Here’s what you need to know about it. What is BA.3.2 ‘Cicada’? BA.3.2 “Cicada” is an offshoot of a COVID-19 variant that has been circ…

Many people enjoy sleeping with their pets. Who wouldn’t? After a hard day of work, cuddling up with a cute animal that shows you unconditional love is just the thing many people need. But sadly, after digging into a newly released study, they may start to think twice before letting their furry friends into bed at night. The Conversation recently published an article highlighting the major findings of a study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that examined the pros and cons of having pets sleep in bed with them—something that 46% of respondents do. Though the research suggests that sleeping with your pet in bed may have psychological benefits, it may actually …

No language on earth has ever produced the expression “as enjoyable as filing your taxes.” This annual chore is the pits. It’s slow, frustrating work that requires organization, math skills, and the ability to decipher meaning from the U.S. tax code. People will jump on pretty much any solution that makes filing quicker, easier, and less painful–including giving AI a crack at it. Recent survey research from Qlik found that nearly 11% of taxpayers have used or plan to use a consumer AI system (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini) to help them prepare their 2025 tax returns. But how trustworthy are these AI systems when it comes to something as sensitive as your…

During the week of March 23, a truck carrying Nestlé’s new Formula One-themed KitKat bars was making its way from picturesque central Italy to its intended destination of Poland. Somewhere along the way, the truck was intercepted and approximately 12 tons of the bars—or more than 413,793 KitKats—were stolen. The whereabouts of both the bars and the truck are still unknown. Despite all odds, this is shaping up to be a huge win for Nestlé. The Swiss food giant confirmed the chocolate heist to The Athletic on March 28, explaining that the bars in the truck were part of KitKat’s first season as F1’s official chocolate partner. No one was hurt in the process,…

Shares of mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FMCC) saw huge price surges early Monday after hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted about the two stocks on social media. “Some of the highest quality businesses in the world are trading at extremely cheap prices. Ignore the MSM. One of the most one-sided wars in history that will end well for the U.S. and the world. And we have the potential for a large peace dividend. One of the best times in a long time to buy quality. Ignore the bears,” Ackman wrote in a Sunday night post on X. “And Fannie and Freddie are stupidly cheap. Asymmetry at its best. They could be a 10X and it could happen soon.” It was th…

For many tweens of the 2000s, Club Penguin was the place to be. Players created penguin avatars, dressed them up, and roamed a virtual world of igloos, ski lodges, and mini-games. There were puffles, Tamagotchi-like pets to care for, and bustling servers where you could chat with friends, surf through a mine, or lob a virtual snowball at a stranger. At its peak, the game drew hundreds of millions of users and offered an early taste of social media for a generation of kids. Disaster struck in 2017, when Disney, which owned the platform, shut it down, citing declining popularity and falling revenue. The company pointed users to a new game, Club Penguin Island, but that,…

A typical map of temperatures across the planet shows just a snapshot in time, listing the day’s various highs and lows. But temperature isn’t static; it rises and falls, and it’s influenced by all sorts of systems, from ocean currents to solar radiation. An animated map from Maps.com shows those variations, revealing the patterns that swirl around our planet—and even depicting the gradual way Earth heats up from east to west as the sun rises and sets. Maps.com The animated map is part of a new feature called Earth in Action, through which Maps.com (a platform by spatial analytics company Esri) produces daily, near real-time animated maps about Earth’s sy…

Baltimore, known for being a leader in medicine and technology as well as for its fiercely community-driven residents, is one of many cities trying to determine how to grapple with some of AI’s most pressing issues. And recently, the city has been sounding the alarm. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we live and work. In many ways, the tools are wildly helpful—solving business problems, advancing medicine, and even helping solopreneurs thrive without a team. However, the technology comes with some worrisome drawbacks and, given the lack of federal oversight, the risks are beginning to reshape local politics. That seems especially true in Baltimo…

Across the U.S., the realities of healthcare affordability are reaching a breaking point, with premiums and out-of-pocket costs straining household budgets and forcing some families to consider going without coverage or delaying care, simply because they cannot pay. This isn’t just about numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s about everyday decisions: skipping preventive visits, postponing prescriptions, or weighing health needs against rent and groceries. As healthcare costs grow while federal funds and subsidies shift, our systems are under duress, and people are being forced to make impossible choices. In this context, the question for business leaders, in healthcare and b…

For years, companies have assumed that their digital relationship with customers would happen in a place they controlled: their website, their app, their checkout flow, their interface, their carefully optimized funnel. That assumption shaped an enormous amount of corporate behavior. Brands invested fortunes in design systems, SEO, conversion optimization, customer journeys, and digital experiences because the screen was where persuasion happened and where transactions were completed. That assumption is starting to break. The next wave of AI is not just about answering questions better. It is about acting. OpenAI’s Operator is designed to go to the web and perfo…

On the corner of a tree-lined street in northeast Omaha, Nebraska, two modern and minimalist residences are resetting the standard of what a new house should look like. Their bold orange and navy blue exteriors and spare, geometric forms set them apart from the more conventional gabled houses down the street. The biggest difference, though, is their size. At just 802 and 618 square feet, the two houses are significantly smaller than the average new American home, which has a median area of more than 2,100 square feet. The houses are the first two iterations of OurStory, a housing system envisioned as a replicable, accessible, and above all affordable approach to build…

Deere & Co. has agreed to pay $99 million as part of a settlement that would resolve a class action lawsuit accusing the farm equipment giant of monopolizing repair services. The Moline, Illinois-based manufacturer, which does business under the John Deere brand, has faced a handful of “right to repair” complaints over the years. The deal announced Monday — which still needs final approval from the court — would settle a 2022 lawsuit that accused the company of withholding repair software and conspiring with authorized dealers to force farmers to use their services for repairs, when they could otherwise fix tractors and other equipment themselves or use independen…