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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. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on the terms of Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI, in which the GPU maker gets guaranteed chip sales, an equity stake, and likely a product road map for years to come. I also look at the industry’s fixation on huge models and the quiet appeal of small ones. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and f…

The cost of Valentine’s Day may be a lot higher this year compared to last year. You’ve probably heard the price of eggs has skyrocketed, but if you haven’t already started shopping for your Valentine, be prepared for some sticker shock, especially for perennial favorites like roses and chocolates. Here’s why. How much will I pay for roses this year? Depending on where you live, you might be paying a hefty price. This Valentine’s Day, the average price for a dozen long-stemmed roses (red or white) is a staggering $90.50, 2% more than last year, according to FinanceBuzz as reported by CBS News. Yet a 2% hike would be getting off easy, considering that if you liv…

When the Eaton Fire burned through Altadena in January, Patricia Lopez-Gutierrez and her children had to flee from the house they’d been renting for a decade. Lopez-Gutierrez also lost work: She’s a housecleaner, and her clients lost their own homes in the fire. “I’ve been here for 18 years, and I really don’t want to leave this area,” she said through a translator. “My children and their schools are here. I’m trying to get more work so I don’t have to leave.” As she struggles to pay her bills—including at her rental house, which ended up surviving the fire but was so heavily damaged by smoke that she’s desperate to find a new place to live—she turned to St. Vince…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. As ResiClub has closely documented, Florida has been the epicenter of U.S. housing market weakness in 2025. However, KB Home executives now believe the worst may be behind them—at least for their business—in the Sunshine State. While giant homebuilder KB Home—which has a $4.3 billion market capitalization—isn’t ready to call it an inflection point for the entire state, it believes its price cuts in Florida were more than sufficient to stabilize demand for its business. In fact, it may have cut too deeply in Florida and could now need to raise pri…

California’s top insurance regulator said Tuesday that State Farm can soon start raising premiums by 17% for all of its home insurance customers in the state to help the insurer rebuild its capital following the Los Angeles wildfires. State Farm has argued the emergency rate hikes are necessary to help the company avoid a “dire” financial crisis that could force them to drop more California policies. The state’s largest home insurer said it was already struggling financially before this year but the LA fires, which destroyed more than 16,000 buildings in January, have made things worse. The increase will apply to all of the roughly one million homeowners State Farm insu…

SharkNinja has announced the voluntary recall of more than 1.8 million units of Foodi multi-function pressure cookers after more than 100 reports of burn injuries—many of them serious. Here’s what you need to know about the SharkNinja pressure cooker recall. What’s happened? On May 1, home appliance company SharkNinja issued a recall for some of its SharkNinja pressure cookers, according to a notice posted on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) website. The recall covers more than 1.8 million units of SharkNinja’s Foodi OP300 Series Multi-Function Pressure Cookers. The recall was issued after the company received 106 reports of burn injuries from…

It’s time to reckon with the reality that nonstop doomscrolling has delivered us: a hard-to-ignore erosion of our cognitive skills. We’ve lost the ability to focus on words for long stretches of time . . . er, read books. Years of turning everything worth consuming into “content” that’s been “optimized” for attention has turned our brains into mush, shoved our mental health into free fall, and reduced our ability to pay attention to anything for more than five seconds at a time. (In fact, I clicked away from completing this sentence to check Facebook Marketplace for credenzas on sale.) While we’re still in the early days of what the long-term impact of artificia…

From boardrooms to startup garages, leaders need ideas that work in the real world. These 10 books offer a broader perspective on business, helping us see the patterns behind the day-to-day grind. Learn something new every day with “Book Bites,” 15-minute audio summaries of the latest and greatest nonfiction. Get started by downloading the Next Big Idea App today! Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously) By Bree Groff When we wish away the workweek, we wish away our lives. What would it take for us to look forward to Monday? Find out in this refreshing and unconventional take on the world of work. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Bree…

As 2026 takes shape, the most successful leaders will adopt new tools with responsibility and vision while keeping the human side of shopping alive. These 10 tech trends in retail tech and AI are evolving, transforming how brands design, distribute, and deliver experiences. These are not distant forecasts, but happening in real time across retailers, marketplaces, and consumer ecosystems. 1. Predictive intent engines Reactive personalization is being replaced by predictive intent engines. Instead of waiting for a customer to browse, AI anticipates the customer’s next wants based on contextual data like weather, life events, and even local cultural moments. For …

There’s a lot of chatter right now about an AI bubble, fueled in part by a perception that productivity gains from AI are largely illusory. I can’t speak to the market, and whether AI is broadly overvalued or undervalued, but I can tell you that in the past year alone, AI has completely transformed how I work. Looking at the tools today that didn’t exist a year ago—deep research, browser agents, the big leaps in performance for all the latest models—there’s a host of ways AI can speed up or enhance many tasks of knowledge workers, especially journalists. As an independent journalist, I’m perhaps a little less constrained than most (my AI policy is whatever I want it t…

Even managers with the best intentions can sometimes compromise team morale without realizing it. The art of team management involves balancing professional competence with genuine interpersonal connection. We consulted with 10 experienced industry professionals who shared the common pitfalls that can zap a team’s spirit as well as practical tips to help you avoid missteps and lead a motivated, high-performing group. Shift from micromanagement to autonomy One specific way managers unknowingly harm team morale is through micromanagement. We noticed a roughly 20% drop in employee satisfaction scores and a decline in on-time project delivery whenever team leads checke…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I recently talked with Lance Eaton, Senior Associate Director of AI and Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University and writer of AI + Education = Simplified. We traded ideas about what’s actually working. We came up with 10 specific, practical ways anyone who teaches, coaches, or leads can put AI to work. 1. Spark Richer Student Reflection Lance: Ask students to reflect through a conversation with AI rather than staring at a blank page. A well-prompted AI will keep asking follow-up questions, pushing students past “I didn’t…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just +0.2% year-over-year between January 2025 and January 2026. That marks a deceleration from the +2.6% growth rate a year earlier—though national price growth has recently stabilized, ticking a tad higher from a low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since pretty much stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 10% of …

Pretend you and 99 peers had to duke it out against a gorilla. Would your squad emerge victorious? That debate has been dividing the internet over the past few days. The conversation originally surfaced on Reddit back in 2020, when a user posed the question in the r/whowouldwin subreddit. It recently reignited after the question was put to X users last week. The viral post—now with over 288 million views—suggests that 100 men could defeat a single gorilla if everyone was “dedicated” to the task. Since then, arguments have raged across social media. MrBeast even joined the discussion: “Need 100 men to test this, any volunteers?” he wrote, alongside a fake thumbnail…

Nearly 100 years ago, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Harland Bartholomew designed a master plan for the city of Los Angeles, drawing a ring around the river at its heart. The plan addressed their concern about the rapid urbanization of cities in the West, which was frequently pushing nature to the outskirts. By centering the river and allowing it to move freely amid fields and wetlands, the planners envisioned a public green space where distant neighborhoods could come together as one. But the plan was quickly dismissed as out of step with the industrialist vision of the 1920s and ’30s. Then, in 1938, after a devastating flood, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began t…

The Great Gatsby, Maintaining relevance after 100 years in the public consciousness is no small feat, but that’s exactly what the American novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald has managed to do. First published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on April 10, 1925, it initially received mixed reviews and was a commercial failure. As this now-beloved novel celebrates its centennial, how did it finally find an audience and what are its most-enduring themes? Also, here’s to maybe catch a bit of the bash. From failure to required reading Fitzgerald died in 1940 from a heart attack thinking he had failed as a writer. What he didn’t know was that Gatsby had been chose…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just 0.1% year over year from December 2024 to December 2025. That marks a deceleration from the +2.6% growth rate a year earlier—though national price growth has recently stabilized, ticking slightly higher from a low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro-area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since pretty much stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (10% of market…

When a friend and I began investing in thoroughbreds in 2018, it wasn’t fantasies of running in the Kentucky Derby or the Preakness Stakes that excited us most. It was naming the racehorses. We’d seen California Chrome and American Pharoah etch their names in the sports lexicon. And while producing a horse of that caliber was a longshot, just the prospect of the announcer yelling, “Here comes [name we chose] down the stretch!” was unexpectedly thrilling. This weekend’s Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the Triple Crown, features some elite thoroughbreds, and even some better names. Journalism, the favorite, has arguably the best name in the field. American Promise h…

Hiring professionals who see countless job applications every year begin to notice patterns of red flags that can instantly disqualify a candidate. Here, experts share their thoughts on the most commonly made mistakes. Avoid the White Fonting Trick Surprisingly, many candidates still use the “white fonting” tactic on their résumés. This practice stems from an outdated piece of advice that has spread over time: include extra keywords or copy the entire job description, reduce the font size, and change the color to white. The intention is to make the text invisible to the eye but still detectable by applicant tracking systems. It’s essentially an attempt to game the …

The best leaders share a few predictable habits: They’re curious, self-aware, and genuinely invested in their team’s growth. But there’s a big difference between simply having these traits, and developing new leaders to embody these traits as well. A 2022 study published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that when leaders visibly act with curiosity—by questioning, learning, and exploring—they signal to team members that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. In turn, employees feel more confident speaking up, sharing ideas, and contributing meaningfully. In a new book, The Power of the Learning Mindset, autho…