What's on Your Mind?

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…

Last night’s surprise announcement from Netflix that it was abandoning its Warner Bros. takeover bid in the wake of a “superior” offer from Paramount Skydance has sent shockwaves through both Hollywood and Wall Street. And investors in all three companies have reacted strongly. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Warner Bros. Discovery said it has determined that a revised bid for its cinema and television properties from Paramount Skydance was a “superior proposal” to Netflix’s long-standing offer of $82.7 billion. Paramount, which has been in a hostile bidding war with Netflix over the movie studio, issued a new proposal to Warner Br…

Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. In a remarkably influential 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen declared that software was “eating the world.” From entertainment to commerce to transportation, he argued, startups that were about code at their core were disrupting many of the world’s most deeply entrenched businesses. That was just the beginning, he warned: “Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.“ Fifteen years later, we know that some of the disruptors Andreessen cited—such as Zynga, Groupon, and Skype (RIP)—did …

When the email pinged in my inbox, I didn’t even bother to open it immediately. I already knew what it was. One glance at the subject line told me everything. After enough time on the job hunt, you develop a sixth sense for HR language. The preview text—“Thank you for taking the time…”—said it all. It’s the standard soft intro to bad news: Your application was amazing . . . but not amazing enough. The blow softens once you’ve received a few of these. But the emotions that follow resemble the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually, acceptance. I ran the gamut of these feels when I got my latest rejection for a role that seemed p…

Since taking over the coffee chain in 2024, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol has been on a mission to go “back to Starbucks” and rekindle the feeling of warmth inside the coffee giant. That’s led to new store designs, new employee training, new uniforms, new menu items, and new staffing—which have helped the company break out of a two-year sales rut. But as part of this deep strategic exploration, Niccol made two specific asks for Starbucks’s cross-discipline design team that are being revealed today: an iconic new cup and a new plush chair. As the literal touchpoints between the consumer and the company, “they are the biggest signals we have of warmth, comfort, an…

OpenAI’s Codex AI coding assistant is having a growth spurt. OpenAI tells Fast Company that its weekly active users have tripled since the start of the year, while overall usage (measured in tokens) has increased fivefold. The surge is likely driven by the release of new models—GPT-5.2 last December and GPT-5.3-Codex in early February—as well as the launch of Codex’s app version a few weeks ago. OpenAI says the app has been downloaded more than a million times. Across all access points—including the cloud, app, and command line—more than a million developers and other users now rely on Codex at least once a week, according to the company. Generating computer code has …

It’s the last week of Black History Month (BHM) and it’s clear Americans are over performative values. Trite BHM-inspired merchandise sits on retailer shelves untouched while media is abuzz covering the artistry, activism, and symbolism of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. The signal is clear: consumers are looking to brands for real solutions to real problems, not products that commodify culture. Most companies build everything from advertising to AI for the “average user,” but in doing so, they react to rather than lead markets. Strategic leaders look to growth audiences—underserved groups who are the fastest-growing demographics—as lead users. They are the “can…

If you don’t want to be left behind by the AI revolution, you really need to start paying for it. At least that’s become the common refrain among some AI enthusiasts, who seem intent on instilling FOMO in less technical users. The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, they say, are woefully inadequate if you want to understand where things are headed—so stop being a cheapskate and hand over your $20 (or $200) a month like the rest of us. “Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone,” HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer recently wrote in a widely shared essay on AI’s impact. “The people paying for the best tools, an…

As a young child, interior designer Jeremiah Brent and his mother visited open houses and model homes in his hometown of Modesto, California, as a form of daydreaming. Brent walked through the houses, imagining the people who might live there, building a fantasy around what these homes could be. Since then, Brent has turned his childhood design obsession into a sprawling career: He runs a 50-person design firm, moonlights on Queer Eye, and recently brokered his first bedding deal with Target. Having come up in the industry through a series of audacious bets on himself, Brent has developed a sense of humor and pragmatism around his relationship with creativity and his…

It’s sometime in the future, and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman have joined forces on a new venture called Energym. The global chain of gyms is designed to harness the energy of the unemployed as they exercise on machines. The generated electricity feeds the AI servers that put them out of a job. Think Planet Fitness meets the Matrix, but without living in a simulation. Energym’s mission is to feed the AI machines with human sweat, and it’s a great business model. By 2030, almost 80% of people have lost their jobs. If you have no money and no purpose, you may as well use all your free time to work out and feed AI server fans with some kilowatts. “It solves our …

What began as a race to build better AI models has escalated into a competition for compute, talent, and control. Foundation models—large-scale systems trained on vast datasets to generate text, images, code, and decisions—now underpin everything from enterprise software and cloud infrastructure to national digital strategies. The industry’s language around AI has grown more ambitious—and more elastic. Agentic AI has leapt from research papers to Davos billboards, while artificial general intelligence, or AGI, now appears routinely in investor decks and earnings calls. Definitions have begun to blur. Some companies quietly lower the bar for what qualifies as general, …

Recently, Grok AI faced criticism after users found it was creating explicit images of real people, including women and children. Although xAI has now implemented some restrictions, this incident revealed a serious weakness. Without safeguards and diverse perspectives, girls and women are put at greater risk. The dangers artificial intelligence poses to women and girls are real and happening now, affecting their mental health, safety, healthcare, and economic opportunities. Last fall, a mother discovered why her teenage daughter’s mental health had been deteriorating: It was a result of conversations with a Character.AI chatbot. She’s not alone. Aura’s State of Youth …

At hundreds of Burger King restaurants across the U.S., there’s a new invisible worker who’s tracking which ingredients are in stock, analyzing daily sales data, and checking in on whether employees are saying “Thank you” and “You’re welcome.” It’s an AI assistant named Patty. According to Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, the voice-activated chatbot is designed to help employees and managers handle tasks that might usually require pulling out a computer or consulting with an instruction guide. Patty began showing up at select locations about a year ago, and is now in a pilot phase at approximately 500 Burger Kings. It’s expected to roll out to the …

Being a middle manager often feels like living in two worlds at once. On one side, executives cascade big goals and sweeping strategies. On the other, teams look to you for clarity, advocacy, and daily guidance. You’re constantly reconciling top-down demands with bottom-up realities, often with too little time and too few resources to satisfy either side. The paradox of the role is stark: Middle managers carry enormous responsibility for execution but don’t always have the authority to make critical decisions. You’re expected to deliver results on budgets you don’t control, within structures you didn’t design, and through policies you didn’t write. This tension is one…

Early in my career, a colleague and I made a shared commitment one summer to eat healthier. Salads. Smoothies. The full routine. Like many well-intentioned plans, our discipline began to fade after a few weeks. Eventually, we introduced what we jokingly called Grease Wednesdays, a weekly cheat day as a reward for all our good behavior. Every Wednesday, one of us would head out to grab fast food, and we’d hide away in a small boardroom to indulge in our shared lack of nutritional discipline. At first, it was just the two of us, chatting with laptops closed and fries on the table. And then coworkers began peeking into whatever boardroom we were in, curious about the…

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Source NM. The first thing Andy Barrientes noticed when he showed up for his shift at RMS Foods on Valentine’s Day in 2005 was the cloud of black smoke emanating from the building. A fire had started in the factory around 4:20 p.m., not long before Barrientes was scheduled to clock in as maintenance manager at the food manufacturing plant in southeastern New Mexico. The blaze had caught his coworkers coming off the day shift by surprise; they reported smelling the smoke before seeing the flames. When Barrientes arrived, he saw the staff huddled together at the park across the street. “Everyone was holding han…

I have what I consider a healthy skepticism toward authority. I’ve always considered leaders—despite what titles they hold—as fallible people who don’t necessarily deserve blind adulation or deference. That skepticism has made it hard for me to adopt the “company man persona,” which might explain how little of the proverbial corporate ladder I’ve climbed. And rather than take responsibility for that, I’m going to “blame” my dad: The instinct to question rather than comply, to think critically instead of playing yes-man, came from him. We never had a formal conversation about it. I just watched how he moved through the world—confident, grounded, with little to prove—a…

We’ve been sold a lie. Somewhere between “go to school” and “get a job,” work became the central node of our lives—the very thing that defines us. We measure our worth by our output, our identity by our title, and our health by how much we can endure. The hours. The travel. The back-to-back meetings. The busyness. That’s not the picture we painted for ourselves when we chose our major in college and envisioned what we thought would be a fulfilling career; that’s conditioning. The result of which has shaped our meaning of work and how we see ourselves in it. But meaning isn’t found in the busyness of the grind—rather, it’s found in alignment. And when our work has gre…

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday pitched India as a central player in the global artificial intelligence ecosystem, saying the country aims to build technology at home while deploying it worldwide. “Design and develop in India. Deliver to the world. Deliver to humanity,” Modi told a gathering of some world leaders, technology executives and policymakers at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. Modi’s remarks came as India — one of the fastest-growing digital markets — seeks to leverage its experience in building large-scale digital public infrastructure and to present itself as a cost-effective hub for AI innovation. The summit was also addressed by F…

As national Democrats search for a unifying theme ahead of the fall’s midterm elections, a California proposal to levy a hefty tax on billionaires is turning some of the party’s leading figures into adversaries just when Democrats can least afford division from within. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders traveled to Los Angeles on Wednesday to campaign for the tax proposal, which has Silicon Valley in an uproar, with tech titans threatening to leave the state. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is among its outspoken opponents, warning that it could leave government finances in crisis and put the state at a competitive disadvantage nationally. At an evening rally near downtown, Sande…

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…

From afar, Lego’s new set inspired by Claude Monet’s painting Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies looks like a slightly more vivid version of the original. Step a bit closer, though, and you’ll find that its intricate brushstrokes are composed of Lego bananas, katana swords, and carrot tops. The new 3,179-piece set was created in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Monet’s original 1899 artwork, inspired by his idyllic garden in Giverny, is on display. Lego’s designers spent more than a year working in tandem with the museum’s curators to faithfully re-create the original painting’s iconic Impressionist scene. The set will be available to the publi…

Baby care brand Frida is facing online backlash after screenshots of sexual innuendos in its marketing materials began circulating on social media. Frida, which describes itself as “the brand that gets parents,” sells a range of baby care, fertility, and postpartum products through major retailers, including Target. Last week, an X user shared images of several products’ packaging, writing: “sexual jokes to market baby products is actually sick and twisted @fridababy this is absolutely appalling and disgusting.” The post has since gained almost five million views on X. Among the examples highlighted is a social media graphic promoting the company’s 3-in-1 Tru…

The annual NFL tradition of firing the head coach as the season ends continues. This year, 10 top coaches got the axe, a staggering 31% of all NFL coaches. And they include football legends like John Harbaugh, after 18 seasons with the Baltimore Ravens, and Sean McDermott, who took the Buffalo Bills to the playoffs in eight out of nine seasons. Firing the head coach—just like firing the CEO in the business world—is the easy answer, and it looks good in the media: decisive, forward-looking, taking action. But, most times, this act alone falls short of fixing the problems that contributed to an organization’s failures. PART OF A SYSTEM In reality, the CEO is part…