What's on Your Mind?

From changing the daily workflow to the way we order food at a kiosk, AI is showing up in just about everything we do. But according to a new report, the way people use AI differs based on generation. And some of those ways are downright weird. The new insights come from a survey by AI-powered study aid Edubrain of 3,000 Americans ages 18 to 60. (Boomers weren’t included in the survey, but according to other recent research, they’re the least likely to use AI). It found that when it comes to who is using AI the most regularly, it’s not the youngest tech-savvy group. It’s actually millennials: 37% of the group uses it daily, while only 25% of Gen Zers, and 19% of …

Grating coworkers, tone-deaf bosses, a ninth ask for revisions on a PowerPoint deck—as the workday annoyances pile up, it’s only a matter of time before every worker hits a boiling point. And when they do, they often hit up a trusted colleague to vent to in a direct message on a platform like Slack or Teams. “So often you’re sitting in a meeting, you’re hearing something, and you’re like, ‘Am I crazy, or are they contradicting themselves? Did they change the strategy again? Can you believe they just said this thing?’” says one former employee at a consulting firm, who agreed to speak to Fast Company anonymously. Sounding off to coworkers in DMs feels like both an out…

If the 1990 classic movie Ghost is any indication, the dead love a good tune. We all remember when the recently deceased Sam (Patrick Swayze) had his infamous pottery session with his very alive partner Molly (Demi Moore). Now, Liquid Death and Spotify are aiming to use music in a similar way, by giving a few hundred of the recently deceased the opportunity to hear their favorite music for all of eternity. The two brands have collaborated on what they claim to be the first-ever Bluetooth-enabled speaker urn. The tasteful white urn has a top outfitted with a Bluetooth speaker. Spotify is also introducing the “Eternal Playlist Generator” in the U.S., where you can…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Since the 2008 housing bust and subsequent Great Financial Crisis (GFC), mortgage lending has steadily shifted away from big banks. In the years that followed—amid tighter regulations, higher capital requirements, and elevated litigation risk—many large banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, reduced their mortgage footprint. In that void, nonbank lenders, also known as independent mortgage banks (IMBs), such as Rocket Mortgage, United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), and loanDepot, gained market share. Now, a top Federal Reserve …

AI has not changed the importance of judgment in product leadership. What it has changed is the cost of getting it wrong. Early in my career, I learned a principle that still guides how I think about building products: The strongest decisions rarely start with perfect data. They start with conviction, a hypothesis shaped by experience, customer insight, and pattern recognition. What ultimately separates high-performing product organizations from average ones is how quickly and confidently instinct is validated. That validation is the true role of product analytics, and increasingly, it is where AI amplifies its value. Analytics tests whether what you believed woul…

eBay is laying off about 800 employees, or 6% of its full-time workforce, saying the move is a push to align with its “strategic priorities.” It comes a week after the company announced it was acquiring second-hand clothing app Depop from rival Etsy for $1.2 billion. Depop is popular with millennials and Gen Z, and is part of eBay’s bid for younger consumers, who are gravitating to second-hand shopping online for sustainability and financial reasons. eBay Inc. (EBAY) was trading up 3.3% in midday trading at the time of this writing. This is eBay’s third round of layoffs since 2023. The online second-hand retailer cut 1,000 jobs in 2024 (9% of its workforce), a…

For the first time in history, podcasts have overtaken talk radio as the most-listened-to medium for spoken-word audio in the United States. Podcasts, including video podcasts, eclipsed AM/FM talk radio (which notably doesn’t include listening to music on the radio), with 40% of listening time, as opposed to 39% for radio, according to Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey. Researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade. In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent listening to spoken-word audio. At the time, podcasts accounted for just 10%. Year over year, that gap has slowly closed, as podcasts boomed in popularity, incr…

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on Wednesday announced another quarter of astounding quarterly growth as investors try to decipher whether technology’s latest craze is overblown hyperbole or a springboard into a new era of prosperity and productivity. The results for the November-January period blew past the analyst projections that shape investors’ perceptions, as has been the case since Nvidia’s high-end chips emerged as AI’s best building blocks three years ago. Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue surged 73% from the previous year to $68.1 billion while its profit nearly doubled to roughly $43 billion, or $1.76 per share. “No quarter has had more riding …

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. Anthropic’s stance on autonomous weapons may not survive the future Much of the AI world is watching closely as Anthropic tangles with the Pentagon over how the government can use the Claude models. Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon, but the contract says the military can’t use the AI company’s models as the brains for autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists, after the fact, that the military should be a…

Time capsules are designed to be resilient by nature. But no time capsule has survived as long as designers hope “America’s Time Capsule” will. The time capsule, designed for the semiquincentennial of the U.S. founding, is being created by America250, the nonpartisan, congressionally mandated group organizing commemorations for this year. The plan is to bury the time capsule underground in Philadelphia at Independence National Historical Park on July 4, and for it to be opened in another 250 years, in 2276. The problem is time capsules, which are typically buried underground, and exposed to the elements, don’t really last that long. “We’ve unburied some time …

When Dr. Wendy Ross logged on for a Zoom meeting in early 2024, she wasn’t sure who to expect on the other side of the call. It was a digital writers’ room, Ross tells Fast Company, “and in the upper left-hand corner—I’ll never forget it—was Noah Wyle.” Ross, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician and the director of Jefferson Center for Autism & Neurodiversity in Philadelphia, had received a request to lend her expertise to the writers of a new medical series—but they told her only that it was set in an emergency room and would potentially feature an autistic doctor. “I had no idea what was going to happen, but I thought it sounded kind of cool,” she say…

Yet another powerful person has stepped down after being named in the Epstein files. Børge Brende, president and CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), best known for hosting an annual summit of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, has stepped down after an internal investigation into his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement released Thursday, Brende announced that after eight years in his role, he’d be resigning in the wake of the latest batch of files released from the federal investigation into Epstein. “I am grateful for the incredible collaboration with my colleagues, partners, and constituents, and I believe now is the right mo…

There are few things that unite the world like animal videos. There are also few things that are so readily commoditized. Both have occurred in the case of Punch, a baby monkey at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan. Punch captured hearts around the world after a viral post showed him hugging a stuffed orangutan toy after being rejected by other monkeys. E-commerce sellers act quickly with monkey merch Now, the young Japanese macaque and his stuffed friend are available as everything from toys on Etsy to a—decide for yourself if it’s AI—children’s book on Amazon. There’s also an “official” Punch Monkey store with products like stickers, shirts, and mugs. S…

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand Wednesday to defend his company’s practices in a landmark trial that could determine whether social media companies can be held liable for alleged harms to children. But if the defendants lose, the implications could extend far beyond social media. The case centers on Meta and Google, with plaintiffs alleging that services like Instagram and YouTube are intentionally designed to keep users, especially kids, engaged—a dynamic they say can lead to harmful mental health effects, including addiction. The trial is widely viewed as a test case for roughly 1,500 similar lawsuits waiting in the wings. Meta and Google deny th…

You can put a lot of different things in fried rice, but certainly not glass. Unfortunately, that might be an ingredient in certain packages of Trader Joe’s chicken fried rice. Frozen food manufacturer Ajinomoto Foods North America is recalling more than 3 million pounds of chicken fried rice products due to potential glass contamination. The recall includes products with both Ajinomoto and Trader Joe’s branding. The manufacturer, based in Portland, Oregon, notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) after it received four customer complaints of glass in the rice. As of Thursday, February 19, no related inju…

Hello again, welcome to Fast Company’s Plugged In, and a quick note: A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a game I was vibe-coding using Claude Code, and said I would share it once I finished it. Here it is, along with more thoughts on the uncanny experience of collaborating with AI on a programming project. Late Show host Stephen Colbert and his network, CBS, are still at odds over why his planned interview with James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for a Texas U.S. Senate seat, didn’t air last Monday. In Colbert’s account, CBS lawyers forbid the broadcast after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr said talk show interviews might trigger the FCC’s …

As the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games unfold, something is unmistakable: Women are driving the moment. They’re leading highlight reels. Headlining broadcasts. Powering the storylines fans are sharing and following in real time. From figure skating to freestyle skiing to hockey, women athletes aren’t a side stage to the Games—they are the main event. And the data backs up what we’re all seeing. In new international research from Parity and SurveyMonkey surveying nearly 12,000 adults across the U.S., Canada, the UK/Ireland, and Australia, women’s events are as popular as—or more popular than—men’s events in the majority of Winter Olympic sports. High-profil…

The retail platform eBay is set to acquire fashion resale app Depop from Etsy in a $1.2 billion transaction. Ostensibly, the deal will help eBay to cultivate a new audience of Gen Z and Gen Alpha shoppers. But I think there’s a deeper reason that eBay might want to lock Depop down: it’s simply the best looking resale interface out there right now. The deal was announced on February 18 in a press release from Etsy. It’s expected to close some time in the second quarter of 2026, and, per an email sent to Depop’s customers, after the merger Depop will remain a stand-alone brand within eBay and retain its name, brand, and platform. For eBay, acquiring Depop makes a …

“I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space,” Elon Musk said last week when he announced his plan to go to the moon. “It’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.” He’s right. I want to see it too, although probably we will both be dead before his vision is realized. The lunar mass driver—essentially a cannon that uses magnetic power to accelerate an object—is a key component to launch the million satellites Musk wants to put in orbit around the Earth. But Musk wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea. Smarter people than him thought about this in the 1970s as the solution to a key problem for human …

Even if you barely use AI, pretty soon you’ll be paying the price for it. Due to the demands of AI data centers, memory supplies are drying up for all kinds of devices, from phones and laptops to desktop PCs and game consoles. Three companies control nearly all the world’s DRAM production—Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix—and they’ve shifted production toward the type of RAM that those data centers run on. This comes at the expense of RAM for consumer electronics, resulting in a shortage that could last into 2028. It’s early days for the fallout, but what sounded like an abstract concern in 2025 is quickly becoming real, as electronics makers ra…