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Technology tycoons Elon Musk and Sam Altman are poised to face off in a high-stakes trial revolving around the alleged betrayal, deceit and unbridled ambition that blurred the bickering billionaires’ once-shared vision for the development of artificial intelligence. The trial, which is scheduled to begin Monday with jury selection, centers on the 2015 birth of ChatGPT maker OpenAI as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk before evolving into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852 billion. The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI — breakthrough technology that is increasingly being feared as a potential job killer and an existential threat to h…

For years, leaders have treated transformation as a question of strategy and technology. Do we have the right plan? The right tools? The right talent? Most leadership teams think they have a speed problem. They don’t. They have a friction problem. Not the obvious kinds, like failed systems or bad strategy. Friction is quieter, far more pervasive, and seems innocuous. But friction, the invisible drag embedded in how organizations structure work, make decisions, and align teams, is becoming a material leadership risk. And as organizations push harder for agility, that friction comes with serious costs. WHERE WORK SLOWS DOWN Friction rarely shows up as a drama…

Hundreds of millions of people consult artificial intelligence chatbots on a daily basis for everything from product recommendations to romance, making them a tempting audience to target with potentially below-the-radar advertising. Indeed, our research suggests AI chatbots could easily be used for covert advertising to manipulate their human users. We are computer scientists who have been tracking AI safety and privacy for several years. In a study we published in an Association for Computing Machinery journal, we found that chatbots trained to embed personalized product ads in replies to queries influenced people’s choices about products. And most participants didn’…

Shares of Bed Bath & Beyond Inc (NYSE: BBBY) are surging this morning, a day after the company reported its Q1 2026 results. Despite the company reporting a loss for the quarter, BBBY stock is significantly higher, as many investors see evidence that the once-iconic home goods retailer’s turnaround efforts are finally showing results. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Bed Bath & Beyond reported first-quarter results for its fiscal year 2026. While many will recognize the company due to its “Bed Bath & Beyond” name, the firm actually owns several businesses under its corporate umbrella, including Bed Bath & Beyond, O…

Another cautionary tale about AI has hit social media. This time, a software company’s founder is claiming that a Claude-powered version of AI coding tool Cursor deleted his entire production database in just nine seconds. Jer Crane is the founder of PocketOS, a company that develops software primarily for car rental companies. In a post that’s garnered 6.5 million views on X, Crane alleged that a perfect storm of Cursor acting without permission and Railway, his company’s infrastructure provider, improperly storing backups led to massive data loss. Where things went wrong According to Crane, Cursor was working on a routine task when “it encountered a credenti…

Mark Breitbard began his career in retail and returned to it at the top, crediting authenticity as the key to his leadership journey View the full article

You graduated, moved back home, submitted dozens, maybe hundreds, of job applications and finally landed one—that you’re probably overqualified for. Welcome to the life of a recent college graduate. According to ZipRecruiter’s recent graduate report—which surveyed 1,500 college grads from 2025 and 1,500 rising graduates—the current job market is changing how a new wave of young adults are studying, working and living. And despite obstacles, they remain hopeful about reaching their professional goals in the near future. New grads face intense competition today than in past years, as entry-level opportunities shrink and artificial intelligence reshapes the job …

As summer approaches, cities across the United States, Mexico, and Canada are readying to host the highly awaited 2026 FIFA World Cup kickoff. But with exorbitant prices and disruptions ahead, local officials are battling to tame discontent as fans try to keep their eye on the ball. On Monday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York City, which is serving as a cohost to a series of World Cup soccer matches with New Jersey, will host free fan zones across the five boroughs. The free programming aims to offset the high ticket prices that may gatekeep fans from attending the event. For instance, some tickets to the final m…

The Miami Grand Prix, hosted at the Hard Rock Stadium’s 3.3-mile Miami International Autodrome, will look and feel different this year. In its fifth year, the race will spotlight the city with new experiences, activations like the MSC Yacht Club, and new sight lines for spectators. While relatively new to Formula 1’s 24 Grand Prix race season, the Miami GP’s agreement to serve as a host city until 2041 is an indicator that F1 is focused on investing in the U.S. market. It’s a big departure from F1’s history. “ We used to turn up in the U.S., race, and [then] expect everyone in the U.S. to continue to stay in love with us, engage with us, and that was probably ar…

I joined IBM Research in the early 1990s wanting to be a networking specialist. I spent time in grad school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) working on algebraic coding theory—specifically cyclic codes—for my master’s thesis. Cyclic codes are mathematical patterns that prevent signals from interfering with each other. Think of them as a way to let hundreds of conversations happen in the same room without anyone talking over each other. At the time, I thought that knowledge might never be useful again. But about six months into my job at IBM, serendipity struck. People started asking: is it possible to build a wireless network? Until then, wired…

Whatever you think about the charitable gifts of MacKenzie Scott, no one would describe them as small. The novelist and philanthropist gave away $7 billion in 2025. That’s more than her ex-husband Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has given away in his entire lifetime. But when Scott penned her end-of-year essay reflecting on her efforts, she wasn’t focused on eye-popping numbers or dramatic gestures. Instead, she wanted to spotlight the impact of small, everyday acts of kindness. America the generous “It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts,…

Lots of people claim that writing poetry is something only humans can do. It requires emotion, wordcraft, and the unique body of painful, jubilant lived experience that only a person can accumulate. To which I say, “phooey.” Poems are words. And today’s Large Language Models are incredibly good at manipulating words. An AI should be able to beat the Poes and Frosts of the world at their own game. To put that theory into practice, I teamed up with my friend Jared Bauman, built an AI-powered poem generator, and released it into the world for anyone to discover and use. I never expected what people would do with it. Here’s what happened. Powerful calc…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While softness—and even outright weakness—remains in parts of Florida’s housing market, the intensity of the downturn in Florida has eased somewhat in recent months. While the ResiClub team is huge fans of looking at year-over-year shifts in home prices—especially when using an index that helps account for mix shift—the truth is that year-over-year changes are also slightly lagging. One way to get ahead of year-over-year home price shifts is by looking at seasonally adjusted month-over-month home price shifts as measured by the Zillow Home Value …

Uber Technologies is doing everything it can to save its customers’ time, but for CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company’s sixth annual GO-GET event in New York City was something of a trip through time. On Wednesday, Khosrowshahi and other members of Uber’s leadership unveiled a slew of new features, and also announced Hotels on Uber, a new hotel-booking feature, working in concert with Expedia, a company for which Khosrowshahi previously served as CEO. The feature allows users to book hotel rooms directly in the Uber app, similar to how they’d hail a ride or order food through Uber Eats. Khosrowshahi said that travel was Uber’s “next frontier,” and that “taking all …

San Francisco may have a reputation for being AI-obsessed and chock-full of antisocial tech nerds, but those are only stereotypes—right? A viral post from a San Francisco tech worker brought all the city’s clichés into focus, after he visited New York City and was seemingly amazed by people interested in anything other than AI. Parv Sondhi, a San Francisco-based project manager with experience at Apple, eBay, and UC Berkeley, took to social media to share his observations after spending a week in New York City. In his post, he remarked on seeing “very few AI ads or billboards around” and coming across “way more artists.” Sondhi seemed especially wowed by how s…

Ask most leaders to describe a high performer, and you’ll hear some version of the same profile: sharp, resilient, and relentless. Ask those same leaders what they mean by resilient, and the answer almost always collapses into two dimensions: mental toughness and physical stamina. We have built entire leadership development industries around cognitive acuity and physical wellness. What we have largely ignored is the third pillar: emotional recovery. This is not a soft argument. It is a structural one. And the science, along with a growing body of evidence from the workplace, suggests that overlooking emotional recovery is not just a wellness gap; it is a strategic one…

We are living through the most rapid and sweeping digitalization in history. The average adult touches their phone hundreds if not thousands of times a day. And yet, at this moment of peak digital saturation, a countermovement is taking shape in schools, governments, and research institutions. More and more people have reached the conclusion that for human beings to think well, learn deeply, and stay mentally healthy, we may need significantly less technology. Consider what’s happening in education. Australia passed legislation banning children under 16 from social media entirely. Sweden, having spent a decade rolling tablets into every classroom and replacing textboo…

In the music video for “Runway,” Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Doechii for The Devil Wears Prada 2 soundtrack, the wardrobes are high fashion and the musicians and their dancers serve, pose, and vogue. Colorful and camp, it’s everything you’d expect considering the subject matter of the song is about turning dance floors into runways. For some viewers, though, it just looks like a Target commercial. The post activity for Popcrave’s tweet about the “Runway” music video is filled with commenters pejoratively comparing the clip to a Target ad. It’s not hard to see why. Swap out the black-and-white lines on the video’s main set with red-and-white circles, and i…

One of the hardest parts of being a homeowner is knowing whom to call when something goes wrong with your house—a process that starts with figuring out what’s actually wrong in the first place. “What if you wake up, you’ve got a wet spot on the ceiling, and you’re like, Oh crap, I’ve got a problem, but I don’t actually know what it is or who to hire?” says Marco Zappacosta, cofounder and CEO of the home-services marketplace Thumbtack. The 18-year-old platform has made a robust business of helping homeowners navigate the sometimes bewildering process of home improvements and repairs by connecting them with all sorts of service pros—handymen, roofers, electricians…

In a previous piece, I argued that large language models are not enterprise architecture. The response was clear: that argument is hard to dismiss. The harder question is what comes next: “if not this, then what?” It’s the right question. Because the problem was never that AI doesn’t work. It clearly does. The problem is that we tried to place it in the wrong layer. We didn’t fail at AI. We failed at where we put it. Over the last two years, companies have invested tens of billions into generative AI. The result is not ambiguity. It’s clarity. A growing body of research, including a widely cited MIT study, shows that around 95% of enterprise generative…

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. Are the biggest AI labs betting on the wrong horse? Big AI companies are betting nearly all of their R&D and capital expenditure on the idea that pre-trained transformer models can deliver AI with human-level general intelligence. This approach relies heavily on backpropagation, the standard algorithm used to train deep neural networks. Ben Goertzel, who coined the term “AGI” with his 2005 book Artificial General Intelligence (co-written with DeepMind founder Shane Legg), i…

When browsing social media it is sometimes hard to discern reality from AI. Is a video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline at night real-life? Probably not. But while some of us are stuck trying to figure out the authenticity of visual content, Spotify is jumping ahead to help users know if who they are listening to is actually human. The streaming giant’s newest feature, Verified by Spotify, gives artists who have been reviewed by Spotify a mint-green check beside their profile. The company evaluates robust criteria to determine a profile’s authenticity and trust, including data related to listener activity, engagement over time, and an identifiable artist presence in…

Change, whether personal or professional, can be challenging. But it can also create opportunities to make a meaningful impact. But navigating the uncertainty is tricky. Art Markman, a leading cognitive scientist and Fast Company contributor, joined Fast Company executive digital director Maia McCann in a recent conversation to share strategies on how to stay grounded, optimistic, and purposeful during times of change. Drawing on his expertise in well-being, Art offers tools to help you influence outcomes you care about and show up with clarity and confidence, no matter what the year brings. View the full article