What's on Your Mind?

Gold has been having a very good year. That sentiment couldn’t have been clearer on Tuesday, October 7, as the precious metal hit a new milestone: $4,000 an ounce. As of early Wednesday, gold was up over 53% year to date. That’s significantly higher than the growth seen by major stock indexes over the same period The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 9.93% this year, the S&P 500 is up 14.42%, and the Nasdaq Composite is up 18.19% as of the market close on Tuesday. As a so-called safe-haven asset, gold has benefited from a few things this year, including a weakened dollar and an unpredictable economy. The latter has been especially true since the…

The Golden State Warriors are known for their electrifying plays and superstar Stephen Curry, but now the team is pioneering a fresh gameplan: blending sports and entertainment in a way no NBA franchise has before. As the first and only NBA team with its own record label, Golden State Entertainment, the Warriors are expanding their reach with “For the Soil,” a new album released this week. The project featuring the Bay Area’s top music artists — from E-40, Too Short, Saweetie, G-Eazy, Goapele, LaRussell and Larry June — arrives just in time for the league’s All-Star Game weekend in San Francisco. “A basketball team with a record label is unheard of until now, whic…

For the past 99 years at Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, spectators have craned their necks to watch giant balloons and larger-than-life floats pass through the streets of New York City. But a word to the wise this year: Don’t forget to look down. You might just catch a glimpse of the tiniest float in the parade’s history. The float—which is 49 times smaller than the average display—comes courtesy of Goldfish, which is returning to the parade for the first time in more than a decade. The float’s design features a wintery snowscape covered with frolicking Goldfish crackers towed by an equally tiny Ram truck. According to Brendan Kennedy, director of creative pr…

Emma Grede is the powerhouse entrepreneur behind size-inclusive fashion brand Good American and shapewear line Skims—some of the Kardashian family’s most successful business ventures. (Grede co-founded the brands with Khloé and Kim, respectively.) In a recent Bloomberg podcast, Grede shared her staunch take on the pitfalls of remote work. “Working from home is career suicide,” Grede said. “We only talk about the upside of working from home.” Not only does she believe the workplace perk is “career suicide,” but she sees the damage of remote work having wider, lasting societal implications. “Think about what’s happening in the world,” Grede said. “Declining bir…

Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi’s credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We’d found a startup with a disruptive payments platform—one that became the forerunner of what has become a new payment type used by millions of consumers today. The deal: strategic investment in exchange for access to the startup’s codebase as a sandbox for innovation pilots. No more waiting in the legacy systems queue. Just rapid prototyping with leading-edge developers. We built the entire partnership in a silo of supporters, treating resistance as something to avoid until absolutely nece…

Five years ago, a retired police officer spotted a 7-year-old girl walking alone in her New Jersey neighborhood. The stranger stopped her, questioned her about where she lived and whether she was alone, then called the police. When officers arrived, the girl gave them her address which was just a few blocks away. They walked her home and met her parents. But instead of leaving, the officer demanded ID. When the parents refused, arguing they’d done nothing wrong by letting their daughter go for a walk in the neighborhood, the officer called for backup and threatened to take their daughter into protective custody. The father tried to comfort his crying daughter. Police…

Summoning a robotaxi from your phone is not a futuristic fantasy since Waymo achieved full commercial deployment. View the full article

When you type a question into an AI search engine like ChatGPT or Google AI Mode and it comes up with an answer, that information comes from somewhere. Scouring the web for content that’s contextually relevant to the asker, it typically assembles an answer based on several different sources, interpreted through the lens of its training data and system prompt. The fight over being one of those sources is the new game of online discovery that’s replacing SEO. Typically called GEO or AEO for generative/answer engine optimization, the field is nascent, and the rules, best practices, and even the benefits aren’t entirely clear. There’s one thing everyone agrees on, though:…

The last big breakthrough in aviation when it comes to boarding your flight came in the early 2000s, with the arrival of eTicketing. But a new proposed overhaul of how you get on planes could shake things up in a much larger way. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations agency that oversees international airline policy, has revealed plans for a digital travel credential (DTC), which will do away with boarding passes and current check-in procedures and instead rely on technology like facial recognition. (Some 193 countries, including the U.S., are members of the ICAO.) A pilot program testing the DTC has been underway in Finland for al…

Fortnite maker Epic Games and Google just agreed on a “comprehensive settlement” that could be the final chapter in Epic’s long battle over app store rules. In a joint filing in a San Francisco federal court, both companies proposed a resolution to Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, which the game publisher filed in 2020 along with a parallel lawsuit against Apple. In a post on X, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called the proposed settlement “awesome” and expressed hope that the courts would agree. “It genuinely doubles down on Android’s original vision as an open platform to streamline competing store installs globally, reduce service fees for developers on Goog…

Creativity has always been governed by time—not just how long it takes to bring an idea to life, but how long a creator can stay “in flow.” Every designer knows the frustration of an idea hanging in digital limbo. But those pauses, once accepted as inevitable, are now starting to vanish. Figma, the cloud-based interface design tool, and Google Cloud, the computing and storage platform, have announced the integration of Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash directly into Figma’s design platform. The collaboration aims to let designers generate visuals and make edits almost instantly, eliminating the lag between an idea and its execution. For users, that means faster collabor…

Tuesday’s news that Google would acquire the Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion was remarkable on several fronts. The deal, assuming it closes, will be the largest acquisition in Google’s history. And it’s the biggest exit in Israeli history. “Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs,” Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in a blog post. “[I]t will accelerate our rate of innovation faster than what we could achieve as a stand-alone company.” It also marks the close of a fast-paced, five-year chapter for the company. Founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak, Wiz grew quickly, as …

From software engineers to non-technical staff, Google has urged its employees to fully embrace AI. And it seems like the push to use the tech has resulted in a major productivity leap. In a Wednesday blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that three-quarters of the company’s new code is AI-generated. “We’ve been using AI to generate code internally at Google for a while,” Pichai said. “Today, 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% last fall.” “We’re now shifting to truly agentic workflows,” the tech giant CEO continued in the blog post. “Our engineers are orchestrating fully autonomous digital task forces, f…

Sundar Pichai was blindsided by ChatGPT. Soon after being named Google CEO in 2015, he’d declared that the world was entering an AI-first era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn’t prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epoch-shifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google’s research labs in the first place. Pichai remembers his instinctive response to ChatGPT: “Wow, this technology …

Let’s be honest: The web browser is the modern-day operating system for everything from managing spreadsheets to pretending to work while reading tech blogs. Google knows this. That’s why the Chrome team announced a trio of new productivity features designed for people who basically live inside their browsers. Best of all? They’re actually quite useful. Here’s what you need to know to get your tab-hoarding, PDF-losing life back in order. Split View You know the drill. You’re trying to reference a document while writing an email, or maybe you’re watching a tutorial while trying to write code. You end up clicking back and forth between two tabs until your eye…

When Sergey Brin spoke at Stanford University’s school of engineering centennial celebration recently, the Google co-founder was open about his career mistakes. “When you have your cool new wearable device idea, really fully bake it before you have a cool stunt involving skydiving and airships,” he joked, referring to the infamous Google Glass flop. But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5. “I actually retired like a month before Covid hit, and it was the worst decision,” Brin said. He was such a failure at retirement that he has since returned to everyday work at Google, spearheading its effort…

In 1988, a London pre-teen with a penchant for programming and gaming wrote a version of the classic board game Othello—also known as Reversi—for his Amiga 500 home computer. Teaching a piece of software to play the game was an ambitious coding project for someone so young. And with that, Demis Hassabis notched his first achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The Othello-playing app “beat my kid brother, who was only five at the time,” Hassabis remembers. “It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me, because I just thought, ‘Wow, it’s incredible that you can make a program that’s inanimate and it can go off and do something on your behalf.'” That proved to be a fatefu…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on the research and product approach behind Google’s array of new AI products and features, announced this week. I also look at a major recruiting coup at Anthropic, and at some new numbers about small business’s adoption of artificial intelligence. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follo…

In the world of business, we tend to believe that success is a direct result of talent, resources, and a “great idea.” We expect that if a company has a track record of dominance, like Google, Amazon, or Apple, they are a sure bet for the next big thing. Yet, the history of innovation is littered with the wreckage of unexpected flops launched by industry giants. From the futuristic promise of the Segway to the early dominance of MySpace, these failures prove that even a massive war chest and a visionary concept cannot guarantee market survival. Here are some of the traps that companies fall into. The ‘Solution in Search of a Problem’ Trap One of the most common…