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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 here. AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin offers a blockchain-flavored open-source enablement platform Illia Polosukhin, who coinvented the Transformer architecture at Google in 2017, is now launching a new company called Near AI. The company will offer services through a blockchain-powered platform that functions as a secure marketplace for open-source AI models and agents. Polosukhin is a strong advocate for transparent, open-source AI models, which he believes are the best way to promote responsib…

Every January, leaders are told to do the same thing: set ambitious goals, map out the year, and commit to executing harder than before. We frame this as discipline or vision, but more often than not, it is a ritual of pressure. The assumption is that success comes from wanting more and pushing faster. After years of leading teams, building companies, and advising executives at the intersection of AI, work, and leadership, I realized something uncomfortable. Most people are not failing because their goals are unclear. They are failing because their capacity is already exhausted before the year even begins. That realization fundamentally changed how I approach the …

An artificial intelligence watchdog is accusing OpenAI of training its default ChatGPT model on copyrighted book content without permission. In a new paper published this week, the AI Disclosures Project alleges that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model using non-public material from O’Reilly Media. The researchers used a legally obtained dataset of 34 copyrighted O’Reilly books and found that GPT-4o showed “strong recognition” of the company’s paywalled content. By contrast, GPT-3.5 Turbo appeared more familiar with publicly accessible O’Reilly book samples. “These results highlight the urgent need for increased corporate transparency regarding pre-training dat…

As we head into the holiday season, toys with generative AI chatbots in them may start appearing on Christmas lists. A concerning report found one innocent-looking AI teddy bear gave instructions on how to light matches, where to find knives, and even explained sexual kinks to children. Consumer watchdogs at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) tested some AI toys for its 40th annual Trouble in Toyland report and found them to exhibit extremely disturbing behaviors. With only minimal prompting, the AI toys waded into subjects many parents would find unsettling, from religion to sex. One toy in particular stood out as the most concerning. FoloToy’s AI te…

El Niño is “likely to emerge soon,” with an 82% chance of it forming between May and July, and with a 96% chance it will continue from December into February 2027, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center. The report, out Thursday, says while there is “still substantial uncertainty about El Niño’s peak strength” this hurricane season—and it’s too early to tell—the summer outlook does seem ripe for the possibility of creating “very strong” conditions later, as “the strongest El Niño events in the historical record are characterized by significant ocean-atmosphere coupling through the summer.” In addition, N…

The family of a man killed in a 2021 road rage incident in Arizona used artificial intelligence to portray the victim delivering his own impact statement during his killer’s sentencing hearing, according to local news reports. Christopher Pelkey’s sister, brother-in-law, and their friend used AI technology to recreate his likeness, reportedly drawing from video clips recorded while he was alive. It is believed to be one of the first—if not the very first—instances of an AI-generated victim impact statement being used in court. “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me: it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the artificial 37-ye…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In early October, a post on X by FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller caught my attention: Speaking with a home builder last night (Chattanooga, TN): High-demand in the low-end of the market (<$300k), as people are looking to upgrade from renting. Can't build enough. Almost no demand in middle market ($300k-700k), as it tends to be the upgrade market and the buyers… — Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🚂⚓️ (@FreightAlley) October 4, 2025 While Fuller’s narrative rings true in some pockets of the country, it isn’t the case everywhere. The dynamics he des…

Painted Tree Boutiques, a nationwide retail chain that gave independent small business owners a brick-and-mortar platform to sell gifts, clothing, and home decor products, abruptly announced that it would cease all business operations on Tuesday, April 14. Vendors were given a 10-day window to collect their inventory during limited daytime hours. The Arkansas-based company was founded in 2015 and later expanded to over 60 locations across more than a dozen states. Painted Tree described itself as “An Etsy marketplace and Pinterest catalog come to life.” Many locations were housed in former Bed Bath & Beyond stores. The chain operated as a marketplac…

America’s next great riverfront park has just opened in Detroit. Covering 22 acres along the Detroit River, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park is the latest high-profile project to open in a troubled city now on a much-touted rebound. With an $80 million budget buying world class design from two highly regarded firms, it’s a major investment in the city’s public realm. And though a massive embezzlement scandal nearly derailed the project in 2024, the park is now open to the public. Designed by the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Detroit’s new riverfront park is a multidimensional destination intended to draw people from across the reg…

The first thing anyone will notice about the new electric pickup from Telo Trucks is its compact form. Snubnosed and sporty, the five-seater has a bed the size of a typical pickup but an overall footprint the size of a Mini Cooper. When it goes into production next year, it will offer a radical counterpoint to the gargantuan trucks that dominate the U.S. automobile market. Today, Telo is unveiling the first drivable preproduction model of its new truck, the MT1, and Fast Company has an exclusive look at the innovations inside the truck that make its seemingly impossible size possible. [Image: Telo]The key to the Telo truck’s interior design efficiency is its focus on what…

‘Fast Company’ global design editor Mark Wilson goes behind the scenes with the band in Budapest to decode the disciplined chaos of their genre-defying visual experiments. View the full article

After years of “career experiments,” two clear life paths stand out to me. Just two choices people make, sometimes without realising it. Decisions that define almost every area of our lives. The most successful people pick one of these paths early. And stick around long enough for it to work. Everything that follows grows from those two decisions. The work you do. The skills you build. And the doors that open for you. I’ve seen both work. Different roads. But they can all help you build the life you want. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You can’t. No one can. But once you understand these two choices, you start aiming for what you want. Choice one: Be the b…

In April 2000, Elsevier published an article in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, which claimed that the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) from the Monsanto Company didn’t pose a risk of cancer or other health issues for humans. Twenty-five years later, the publisher has retracted that paper, citing litigation that revealed it was based solely on unpublished studies by Monsanto itself. Furthermore, Elsevier states that the article (titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans) appears to have been co-written with Monsanto employees, despite no explicit accreditation. Mo…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In the second half of 2025, there was a notable jump in delistings, as some home sellers—particularly in the Sun Belt—who couldn’t get their desired price decided to pull their homes off the market. Indeed, U.S. delistings as a share of inventory ticked up to 5.5% in fall 2025—a decade-high reading for that time of year. In December 2025, ResiClub noted to readers: “Looking ahead, in markets seeing the biggest jumps in delistings right now, many of those listings will likely return to the resale market in spring 2026—or test out the rental market.” …

When athletes arrive in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics, they’ll find themselves living on top of what was once a bustling 19th-century rail yard. The newly revealed athletes village is located in the city’s historic Scalo di Porta Romana district—and when the Games are over, it’ll be converted into Italy’s largest-ever affordable student housing development. The Olympic Village design was led by the global architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). It includes six mass-timber residential buildings, two former train repair sheds that have been renovated into communal spaces, and 40,000 square meters of green space. After the Winter Olympics take place,…

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 here. OpenAI says it will release an open-source model–but why now? OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Monday that his company intends to release a “powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning” in the next few months. That would mark a major shift for a company that has kept its models proprietary and secret since 2019. The announcement wasn’t a total surprise: After the groundbreaking Chinese open-source model DeepSeek-R1 showed up in January, Altman said during a Reddit AMA that he realized…

Like other famous structures of similar dimensions, the 48-story Transamerica Pyramid, a revolutionary ‘70s modernist skyscraper and San Francisco icon, has a bit of history buried beneath its ground floor. Unsplash A recently unearthed time capsule, buried in 1974 and discovered during a recent round of renovations, offers a picture of San Francisco’s past. The site of the structure—then a parking lot—was initially part of the original shoreline of the city that reeked of historical significance, from the city’s growth as a shipping and banking capital. The capsule even contains a recipe for Pisco Punch, a cocktail that was invented at the nearby Bank Exchange Sal…

One of the most effective factors in containing the spread of HIV has been the widespread availability of preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP). A PrEP regimen—which has grown to include daily pills or injections every few months—can decrease the chances of HIV infection by up to 99%. To build on those gains, in 2021, the federal government, under the Affordable Care Act, mandated that health insurers fully cover PrEP, as well as clinical visits and the labs required every three months. But an upcoming hearing before the Supreme Court could upend that mandate. The case—brought by six individuals and two companies—is focused on whether mandating coverage of PrEP violates the …

AI integration remains a top priority across enterprises worldwide, yet success remains elusive despite widespread enthusiasm and significant investment. An October 2024 study by Boston Consulting Group found that only 26% of companies have derived measurable business value from their AI initiatives. As a result, CEOs face mounting pressure to deliver tangible ROI, shifting focus from experimentation to real-world outcomes. Modern AI development increasingly relies on open-source foundations, enabling rapid iteration and innovation. Many transformative breakthroughs have emerged from community-driven development—primarily in Python, the dominant language in data scien…

The Oscars don’t have a Best Poster category. (Or even a Best Title Sequence category, which they did sort of have for the very first Academy Awards in 1929 before—for shame—dropping it in 1930.) So this year, as in the past, we asked some of our favorite poster designers which Best Picture nominee should win Best Poster. Like book cover designers, key art creators are tasked with the unwieldy ask of distilling an entire universe of story into a single visual. It’s another standard of excellence in cinema—and we’d argue that there’s indeed correlation between great posters and great films. Consider: In our (admittedly wildly unscientific!) 2023 best poster poll, all …

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, …