What's on Your Mind?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday vetoed landmark legislation that would have restricted children’s access to AI chatbots. The bill would have banned companies from making AI chatbots available to anyone under 18 years old unless the businesses could ensure the technology couldn’t engage in sexual conversations or encourage self-harm. “While I strongly support the author’s goal of establishing necessary safeguards for the safe use of AI by minors, (the bill) imposes such broad restrictions on the use of conversational AI tools that it may unintentionally lead to a total ban on the use of these products by minors,” Newsom said. The veto came hours after he signed a…

Hooboy, here we go again. Chevrolet has once more rolled out a tearjerker ad for the holidays. Created by ad agency Anomaly, “Memory Lane” follows an older couple on their annual holiday drive to the family cottage in their well-loved 1987 Suburban. The trip takes them back to holiday memories and moments of years past that helped build their family. We see the kids go from babies and toddlers to bickering back-seat siblings to near-silent teens, all on the way to meeting them again as adults. For just about any parent, this is an absolute field-goal kick to the cryballs. It’s a story that is specific to this fictional group, but a sentiment that will touch …

May often brings not only flowers, but also a highly anticipated—and in some cases, dreaded—event for college seniors: graduation. On their final day as students, they will walk across the stage to applause from peers, receive their diplomas, and start their lives as adults. Some of them will already have jobs lined up, while others may still be looking. A recently updated report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that how employable those graduating seniors are could well be influenced by which college majors they chose in their freshman and sophomore years. What do those choices say about a student’s future job prospects? The report offers a number o…

Whenever we have a free afternoon, my nine-year-old and I visit our favorite bookshop. By now, we have a routine. Ella makes a beeline to the graphic novels. Her favorite books—such as Smile, Roller Girl, and The New Girl—are part of a new genre of graphic novels that has emerged over the past decade-and-a-half specifically targeted at eight-12-year-olds. The books’ illustrations are colorful and fun, but the stories tackle serious issues: Mending broken relationships; confronting social anxiety; dealing with siblings and parents. Unlike prose, which takes her days to read, Ella will binge these graphic novels in less than an hour. But she’ll come back again and a…

In the short time since Graza’s 2022 launch, the wunderkind olive oil slinger has become a standout in a crowded market with its dynamic duo of extra-virgin olive oils: Sizzle for cooking and Drizzle for finishing—cleverly packaged in matte-green squeeze bottles. On Tuesday, Graza introduced its third product to the lineup, the high-heat cooking oil Frizzle. It’s being sold online as well as in select Whole Foods locations nationwide in squeeze bottles and a company-first nonaerosol spray bottle. Made from the remaining pressed olives from Graza’s flagship oils, Frizzle is extracted and refined without the use of chemicals or solvents. The natural refinement proc…

Businesses still spend billions each year on management training programs, but here we are in 2025—with a growing leadership gap and executives scrambling for answers. And if I can get honest for a moment: We’re still approaching the problem backward. Senior leaders keep promoting high-performing individual contributors into leadership roles and expecting them to figure it out on the fly. Many don’t have the time, support, or temperament to lead people well. Then we’re surprised when the results are uneven or the team burns out. Before companies invest in another round of training, they need to start with a more fundamental question: Are we choosing the right …

As the global climate and environmental crisis accelerates, the urgency for sustainable alternatives to fossil fuel-based products has never been greater. Today, biobased products—derived from renewable agricultural, marine, and forestry materials—are gaining momentum as critical tools in reducing our reliance on non-renewable resources and mitigating environmental harm. From everyday household goods to advanced industrial materials, biobased alternatives are transforming entire industries and creating pathways toward a lower-carbon, more resilient future. Biobased products offer a broad range of applications, including lubricants, detergents, inks, fertilizers, and b…

MANDAN, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota jury on Wednesday found Greenpeace liable for defamation and other claims brought by a pipeline company in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline. The nine-person jury awarded Dallas-based Energy Transfer and its subsidiary Dakota Access hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The lawsuit had accused Netherlands-based Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA, and funding arm Greenpeace Fund Inc. of defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy, and other acts. When asked if Greenpeace plans to appeal, Senior Legal Adviser Deepa Padmanabha said, “We know that this fight is not over” and said the…

An attorney for a Texas pipeline company said Wednesday at trial that he will prove various Greenpeace entities coordinated delays and disruptions of a controversial oil pipeline’s construction in North Dakota, and defamed the company to its lenders. Attorneys for the Greenpeace defendants told a jury there is no evidence to back up the claims by Dallas-based Energy Transfer, which seeks potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Greenpeace. The case is tied to protests in 2016 and 2017 of the Dakota Access Pipeline and its controversial Missouri River crossing upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation. The tribe has long opposed the pipel…

Grocery Outlet is joining the ranks of retailers planning to shutter storefronts this year. The discount grocery store chain announced its fourth-quarter and full 2025 fiscal year results on Wednesday, along with a plan to close 36 stores. This move to close stores follows a previous restructuring plan concluded in the second quarter of fiscal 2025, another attempt to “improve long-term profitability” and optimize growth. The company reported an increase in net sales, but an operating loss of $234.8 million and a net loss of $218.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. The optimization plan, which is expected to be largely completed during fiscal year 20…

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. Inside the new Grok 3 model In just two years, Elon Musk’s xAI has become one of a dozen or so labs capable of developing state-of-the-art AI models. Now xAI is out with its Grok 3 large language model, which beats state-of-the-art frontier models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and DeepSeek’s V3, in common mathematics, science, and coding benchmarks by a wide margin. Meanwhile, the smaller Grok 3-mini performs at par with the larger competing models. The new Grok model reportedly was trained …

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok won’t be able to edit photos to portray real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal, according to a statement posted on X. The announcement late Wednesday followed a global backlash over sexualized images of women and children, including bans and warnings by some governments. The pushback included an investigation announced Wednesday by the state of California, the U.S.’s most populous, into the proliferation of nonconsensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok that it said was harassing women and girls. Initially, media queries about the problem drew only the response, “legacy media lies.” Musk’…

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok will join Google’s generative AI engine in operating inside the Pentagon network, as part of a broader push to feed as much of the military’s data as possible into the developing technology. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said in a speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas. The announcement comes just days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global outcry and scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deep…

Whether you call him groundhog, woodchuck, or whistle-pig, or use the full genus and species name, Marmota monax, the nation’s premier animal weather forecaster has been making headlines as Punxsutawney Phil for decades. The largest ground squirrel in its range, groundhogs like Phil are found throughout the midwestern United States, most of Canada, and into southern Alaska. M. monax is the most widespread marmot, while the Vancouver Island marmot (M. vancouverensis) is found only on one island in British Columbia. In total, there are 15 species in the genus Marmota, found around the world from as far south as the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico and the Pyrenees Moun…

My friend turned to me the other day with a sly smirk and whispered, “Are you also part of Group 7?” I shook my head, unsure of what she meant—feeling left out of whatever secret club she was referring to. It didn’t take long for the algorithm to catch up with me. Within a few hours, my For You Page on TikTok was flooded, and before I knew it, I, too, was officially part of the internet’s newest inside joke. “Group 7” began as a simple experiment by musician Sophia James, who wanted to promote her new song So Unfair—and experiment with the quirky nature of TikTok’s algorithm. TikTok’s For You Page, or FYP, described by the Guardian as “uncannily good at predi…

As the founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance, I am fortunate to be surrounded by extraordinary female business leaders. Our purpose is to empower each other through peer mentorship that provides personal and professional fulfillment within this unique sisterhood. This month, I’m pleased to introduce Sammie Dabbs. Sammie is passionate about building and scaling high-performing commercial organizations. As chief commercial officer, she oversees revenue strategy, sales, and marketing alignment—driving growth through a combination of operational rigor and customer-centric innovation. With a proven track record of leading teams, entering new markets, an…