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There is an all-out global race for AI dominance. The largest and most powerful companies in the world are investing billions in unprecedented computing power. The most powerful countries are dedicating vast energy resources to assist them. And the race is centered on one idea: transformer-based architecture with large language models are the key to winning the AI race. What if they are wrong? What we call intelligence evolved in biological life over hundreds of millions of years starting with simple single-celled organisms like bacteria interacting with their environment. Life gradually developed into multi-cell organisms learning to seek what they needed and to avoi…

There’s a line I heard recently from Mel Robbins that’s been echoing in my head ever since: “People do well if they can.” It’s deceptively simple. The kind of phrase you nod at, maybe even repost. But when you sit with it, really sit with it, it starts to challenge a lot of the assumptions we make every day. Especially when it comes to financial health. Not lazy, just locked out Let’s be honest: It’s easy to judge what we don’t understand. We look at people struggling with money and tell ourselves stories. They’re reckless. They don’t care. They should know better. But here’s the thing: Most people do care. They want to pay off debt. They want to build credit. …

As the end of 2025 approaches, a viral TikTok trend is helping people achieve their wellness goals: “The Great Lock In” encourages participants to finish the year strong by fully focusing on their life goals from Sept. 1 through Dec. 31. Many people focus on exercise or eating healthier. But the trend can also help you achieve your financial goals. There are no set rules for “The Great Lock In.” The phrase “lock in” is popular on social media and it means to focus intensely on a task. “Something I like about this particular trend is that it’s like New Year’s resolutions’ little sister,” said Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, financial therapist and founder of Mind Money Balance, a…

Work consumes around a third of our waking hours during the weekday. Yet, according to Gallup, nearly a third of employees are disengaged. 80,000 Hours, a London-based nonprofit that helps people find the best career fit for themselves, reviewed 60 studies on dream jobs and found that a dream job meets six criteria: it’s engaging, it helps others, you’re good at it, you work with supportive colleagues, it doesn’t have major negatives, and it fits with the rest of your life. Dream jobs seem difficult to land—one 2024 survey of 3,000 employees across the U.S. finds only 14% of American adults are working their dream job. The same study found that 38% of adults hat…

Below, Jon Levy shares five key insights from his new book, Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius. Levy is a behavioral scientist. For the last 15 years, he has studied what makes leaders and teams succeed, working with everyone from Nobel laureates to Olympic captains and Fortune 500 executives. He is also the founder of The Influencers, a one-of-a-kind private dining club with thousands of members, many of whom are some of the world’s most respected leaders. What’s the big idea? Success isn’t about raw talent or a single heroic leader. It’s about how we align, focus, and unlock the resources within our teams. Intelligent teams crea…

Starbucks will end the year with fewer stores and fewer employees. But the brand maintains that it’s all part of a greater turnaround still in the mix. Today, the company announced that its North American store locations will be reduced by 1% for fiscal 2025—landing the coffee chain at 18,300 stores total. And it will be eliminating 900 jobs outside of its coffee houses (in other words, corporate and other functions). The company claims it will attempt to place affected baristas into new stores, but Starbucks says, “For those we can’t immediately place, we’re focused on partner care including comprehensive severance packages. We also hope to welcome many of …

What’s one thing most Americans likely don’t know? Demand for donor sperm is increasing. Initially established in the 1970s to help men undergoing vasectomies and facing cancer treatments, sperm banks today support people facing a wide range of challenges on their path to pregnancy. Alongside heterosexual couples dealing with infertility issues like azoospermia and young men facing cancer diagnosis, single mothers by choice, and same-sex couples are frequently turning to sperm banks in hopes of building their family. With approximately 1,500 sperm donors serving the entire United States, a new sperm bank, Premier Sperm Bank, is venturing to address modern family build…

As of yesterday’s market close, Netflix is the only Big Tech company whose stock is trading at four figures, but that will soon change. The TV streaming giant, whose shares closed at $1,089 on Thursday, has announced that it will initiate a stock split next month. That will send the stock’s price per share much lower, though it will not change the company’s fundamental value. Here’s what you need to know about Netflix’s upcoming stock split. What’s a stock split? A stock split is when a company decides to divide the number of its existing shares in order to create new ones—hence the term “split” the shares. A stock can split by any factor a company wan…

The great power competition in the AI Age will probably be between OpenAI and Google, and one of the main battles may be over advertising dollars. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to describe the world in those terms during an appearance on the Big Technology podcast Monday. OpenAI, which is not yet profitable, is reportedly getting set to sell ads within ChatGPT in an effort to monetize the many free users on its platform. ChatGPT now has an impressive 800 million weekly active users, but only 35 million of them buy subscriptions. The ads, which could help pay for OpenAI’s plan to spend $115 billion on infrastructure by 2029, could show up as soon as early 2026. As …

When I was a leader in corporate America at a large regional bank, I held the assumption that once I was promoted, and received my new title and salary, then I would finally feel confident and successful. I was wrong. The allure of a new title and office wore off quickly, and my persistent worries about whether I was cut out for leadership, or even a good leader at all, continued to persist. A decade later, even after I submitted the first draft of my book, Closing the Confidence Gap, I was overwhelmed with self-doubt. I felt completely stuck: Unable to move forward with marketing, I was paralyzed by many of the same old fears of “What if people think I’m no good and this…

In a year defined by companies pouring shocking sums of money into AI, one more deal squeaked in just before 2026. Meta just made a play on Manus, the buzzy Singapore-based company with Chinese roots that turned heads earlier this year when it showed its AI agents executing complex tasks, like hunting for real estate and sorting through resumes. The deal is sure to turn heads too. Manus and its parent company Butterfly Effect are now based in Singapore but were founded in China – a country with a fraught relationship to the U.S tech industry – and maintain operations there. Facebook’s parent company will reportedly pay more than $2 billion to acquire the startup,…

2026 will be a year of architectural showstoppers. Major projects, from corporate headquarters to sports stadiums and museums, will wrap construction and open to the public in 2026, bringing bold, sometimes audacious buildings to cities around the world. Here are nine buildings opening in 2026 to watch for. Arena Milano—opening in February Milan David Chipperfield Architects Built partly to host ice hockey games during the 2026 Winter Olympics, Arena Milano is a 16,000-seat multipurpose arena that’s expected to become a new center for sports and concerts in Milan. Pritzker Prize-winning David Chipperfield Architects’ design, done in conjunction with Arup, is t…

Amazon posted higher fiscal third quarter profit and sales compared with a year ago, fueled by accelerating growth in its cloud computing business and strong spending by its customers looking for low prices at a time when inflation is resurging. The results, announced Thursday, beat Wall Street expectations. The company’s prominent cloud computing arm also surpassed analysts’ expectations, rising 20%. But Amazon issued a cautious sales outlook for the fiscal fourth quarter. Shares, however, soared nearly 13% in after-hours trading. Analysts are analyzing Amazon’s results, along with other retailers’ earnings performances, to get insight into how shoppers are spending h…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk’s weight-loss pill on Monday, giving the Danish drugmaker a leg up in the race to market a potent oral medication for shedding pounds as it looks to regain lost ground from rival Eli Lilly. The pill is 25 milligrams of semaglutide, the same active ingredient in injectable Wegovy and Ozempic, and will be sold under the brand name Wegovy. Novo already sells an oral semaglutide for type 2 diabetes, Rybelsus. The approval could help spur a turnaround for Novo after a rocky year of sliding shares, profit warnings and slowing sales of its injectable Wegovy amid intense competition from Lilly and pressure from c…

This summer, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman became co-owners of Australia’s three-time champion SailGP team. Days earlier, Anne Hathaway joined a female-led consortium purchasing Italy’s team for around $45 million. Kylian Mbappé has bought into France’s squad, while Sebastian Vettel, Deontay Wilder, and DeAndre Hopkins have each acquired stakes in teams. So, what’s drawing A-list celebrities away from traditional sports properties and toward a sailing league that’s only been around for six years? The answer lies in how SailGP has cracked a code that eluded the sport for centuries. What Russell Coutts, the league’s CEO and cofounder, described as once being “white…

Across the country, a growing sentiment suggests the university degree is an artifact of a bygone era, a depreciating asset in an economy obsessed with speed. A recent Gallup poll confirms this shift, revealing that Americans’ confidence in the value of a college education has plummeted to a 15-year low. Nowhere is this skepticism louder than in my own backyard. In Silicon Valley, the “skip college” mantra has evolved from a “hot take” to accepted wisdom. Fueled by the rise of generative AI, the logic is seductive: If artificial intelligence can code, write copy, and analyze data faster than a junior employee, why spend four years and a small fortune on skills a bot w…

I started building Simple in 2019 with a vision that one day, a digital product could help people fix their health as effectively as a human. Five years later, we turned this vision into a company with 160M in ARR, and a team of more than 150 people across multiple countries. If you only look at the highlights, my story can look like a straight line of an entrepreneur’s journey. However, getting there required me to rebuild my own thinking and habits. You see, I have ADHD, and a mind that constantly scans for what can go wrong. For years, I treated that as a bug. It only became my superpower once I learned how to direct it. That isn’t an easy journey, but these lesson…

Most people never change careers, which is remarkable when you consider how little evidence most of us had when we chose our first one. For many professionals, early career decisions are shaped less by talent or long-term fit than by convenience and coincidence. We follow friends into certain degrees, accept the first decent offer, listen to family advice, or pursue interests that feel meaningful at 18 but prove less durable at 38. These choices are understandable, but they are weak predictors of where our strengths will compound over time, or of what will sustain both performance and satisfaction across decades of work. In essence, we follow our own or other people’s…

Even as the costs and challenges of doing business continues rising, there is a growing political effort creating artificial barriers that undermine business growth. Legislation and political directives are tying business leaders’ hands and limiting their choices in an increasingly diverse economy. National political rhetoric and autocratic use of federal and state agency authority preempt business leaders from doing anything with a hint of diversity, equity, or inclusion. This ultimately interferes with smart business decisions, restricts markets, and limits communities from achieving inclusive growth and shared prosperity. Inclusive growth should be practical busin…

We used to argue whether design was about aesthetics or about functionality. But in 2025, those conversations seemed downright quaint. Simpler debates for a simpler time. Now we’re wondering if craft can survive the age of AI, and if we’ll ever escape the politicization of every brand and object again. For the December episode of our podcast By Design, I discussed these trends and more with Fast Company senior editor Liz Stinson. We were joined by some of our brightest friends in the industry who shared their biggest own moments in design for the year, including Paola Antonelli (senior curator at MoMA), Cliff Kuang (FC Design’s first editor and senior staff d…

Ed Zitron peels off his green button-up shirt to reveal the gray tee beneath. Now properly uniformed, two cans of Diet Coke queued up before him, he’s ready to record this week’s episode of his podcast, Better Offline, at audio behemoth iHeartMedia’s midtown Manhattan studio. The topic on this July afternoon, as usual, is artificial intelligence. One of Zitron’s guests, screenwriter, director, and producer Brian Koppelman, talks about paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When Koppelman earnestly asks, “Do you not think AI is mind-bogglingly great at times?” Zitron’s answer—“No!”—comes so quickly it seems to spring directly from his cerebral cortex. It would have b…

Elon Musk‘s lawyers will urge the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday to restore his $56 billion pay package from Tesla, as one of the biggest corporate legal battles enters its final stage nearly two years after a lower court judge rescinded the Tesla CEO’s record compensation. The outcome could have substantial consequences for the state of Delaware, its widely used corporate law, and its Court of Chancery, a once-favored venue for business disputes that has recently been accused of hostility towards powerful entrepreneurs. The January 2024 Court of Chancery ruling striking down Musk’s pay has become a rallying cry for Delaware critics. Chancellor Kathaleen McCo…

When a 7.7-magnitude earthquake hit Myanmar last year, roads buckled and thousands of buildings collapsed. But a group of small, ultra-low-cost homes made from bamboo survived without any damage. Finished just days before the quake, the houses are emergency shelters for some of the millions of people displaced by Myanmar’s ongoing civil war. Myanmar-based architecture studio Blue Temple worked with its spinoff construction company Housing Now to make the simple prefab homes as low-cost as possible while still able to withstand natural disasters. “We built them for the price of a smartphone—about $1,000 U.S. dollars per house,” says architect and Blue Temple founde…

Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84. Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said in a statement. “For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement said. “Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fi…

The term brand entertainment is tough to define. For many people, it’s an oxymoron and these two words should never be in the same room as one another. For many others, though, it’s simply when brands make stuff we actually want to pay attention to. It could be a short ad, or a feature-length film, or a live event. What it isn’t is an annoying waste of time interrupting our attention from actual entertainment like TV, sports, music and movies. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Brand New World podcast looking at different ways different brands are doing this right. From WhatsApp creating a Netflix doc about the Mercedes F1 team, to Dick’s Sporting Goods formally es…