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Just a handful of years ago, the idea of one person creating a company worth over a billion dollars seemed like a pipe dream. Thanks to rapid advancements in AI, the possibility of a “solopreneur unicorn” is less a matter of “if” and more a matter of “when.” Earlier this year, OpenAI founder Sam Altman told Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian that his group chat of tech CEO friends have a betting pool for when the world will see a one-person billion-dollar company. Ten months later, some experts suggest that the company could be founded in 2026, if it hasn’t been already, due to rapid advancements in agentic AI. “The ability of a person to scale themselves, to automat…

AI is rapidly changing the world around us, from the way we engage online to how we work. But while the technology is able to complete an astonishing number of tasks, humans are far from obsolete. A new report from McKinsey is shining light on why humans are still essential. According to the report, roughly 57% of work hours can be automated. Meanwhile, 70% of the skills employers look for can be used for both automated work and nonautomated work. This means over the next five years, humans will have to adjust their work habits to make room for automation. McKinsey designed an index to assess how automation will impact each skill used in the workplace today. Acc…

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But these dreams hinge on one critical challenge: propulsion—the methods used to push rockets and spacecraft forward. To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI called machine learning in particular…

The day after Thanksgiving is a holiday in itself for retailers. Historically, Black Friday has been a time when shoppers wake up early and head to stores for the best deals of the year. More recently, though, more and more consumers have been opting out of the mad rush in stores and turning to online deals, many of which started a week ago and now extend all weekend long till Cyber Monday, December 1. For those who like to be there when doors open, this is for you. Here’s everything you need to know. What time do Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and Walmart open? Many major big-box retailers open their doors nice and early for Black Friday, starting with Kohl’s a…

What does it mean to be a courageous leader in 2025? Stanley McChrystal, retired four-star general in the U.S. Army, joins futurist and culture critic Baratunde Thurston to discuss McChrystal’s new book, On Character, the responsibility of leaders today, and the weight of being an active citizen in democracy. Considering President The President’s deployment of the National Guard, McChrystal explores the role of the military in civil society. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversatio…

After Thanksgiving, brands will bombard you with Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. It can be overwhelming to know what to buy. After all, some deals aren’t actually all that good. And besides, you don’t want to make impulse buys that you’ll regret later and that will end up in a landfill in the near future. To help cut through the noise, we’ve picked out the best deals from design-forward brands. They create beautiful products that are thoughtfully designed to last for years. We’ve even picked out some of our favorite classic products that you will enjoy using for a long time. All the prices below are before discounts. MoMA Design Store 20% off sit…

It’s that time of year again. My mailbox is stuffed with catalogs. Targeted seasonal ads from Amazon, Walmart, and Target are following me around the internet. And every other email in my overflowing inbox offers me the go-to 2025 gift guide for everyone on my list! Anyone else out there starting to dread gift-giving? Sometime in the past 30 years, cheaply made stuff became easily available at the click of a button on our phones, and that took a lot of the shine off of gifts. Not only did online shopping make it much easier to buy things for ourselves (whether we needed them or not), but also it was much easier to buy things for other people. And that influx o…

Social media has become inexorably intertwined with our daily lives, but not all platforms are equally popular. For every cultural phenomenon like TikTok, there’s a Mastodon. It would be easy, based on the news media’s borderline obsession with TikTok and X, to assume that those platforms are, if not the most used social media tools in America today, then very close to the top. They’re not. In fact, they’re squarely in the middle, according to a new study from Pew Research. Instead, it’s YouTube that is the most commonly used social media platform in the U.S.—by a landslide. Pew reports that 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube. (The platform is also the most widely use…

As the midterm election primaries inch closer, some candidates are focusing their campaigns on how they’ll regulate artificial intelligence. On the right, populist Republicans are warning that the AI industry stands to undermine the Make America Great Again movement. On the left, there’s worry about the sector’s growing political and social power. Across the spectrum, there’s near-universal concern about what the technology might be doing to children. The donor class is now getting involved: A super PAC called Leading the Future backed by OpenAI executive Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz plans to spend as much as $100 million in the midterms to support its prefe…

Hello once again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. I didn’t buy a new phone this year. Or a new laptop, tablet, or smartwatch. That hasn’t been a hardship. I’ve just been perfectly content with the gear I already own—both a satisfying feeling and a boon to my pocketbook. Instead of being splashy budget busters, the new products that made me happiest in 2025 have been relatively inexpensive items that bring clever twists to seemingly mundane categories. This week, I’m going to tell you about three I’ve found especially rewarding. (I’m citing their list prices, but—this being Black Friday week—all are widely available at steep discounts as I write this…

I’ve worked for myself for nearly a decade, and in all but one of those years I’ve earned more than the U.K. average salary. Some years it’s been a little more. I’m naturally frugal, and even during the rockiest stretches, there’s always been enough to cover the basics—plus a safety net if I ever truly needed it. Yet I worry about money constantly, gnawed by the sense that I’m only one missed invoice from financial collapse. Although I’m generally wary of self-diagnosis, the term “money dysmorphia”—a disconnect between how we feel about our finances and the reality—fits me like a glove. From the rise of HENRYs (“high earners, not rich yet”) to the boom in “income …

If you loved the Lego Game Boy but couldn’t get yourself to buy it because it was only a display piece that couldn’t play actual Game Boy games, I’ve got great news for you: It’s no longer merely a clever block of bricks. Substance Labs, a merry band of Lego and gaming lovers based in Switzerland, have created a kit that retrofits the official brick-perfect Lego set into an unofficial pixel-perfect playable Game Boy. The name of this wündertronics is BrickBoy. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter project, so the usual “may not deliver” caveats apply. Substance Labs calls itself “a team of creators and engineers who grew up building with Lego and gaming on the classics [who hav…

As we near the final weeks of the year, platforms of all stripes will soon begin rolling out their annual recap features, which let users see the content they have interacted with most. While numerous tech giants release these recaps, music streamer Spotify is usually the most anticipated. Known as Spotify Wrapped, this look-back lets you see which songs you interacted with most over the past 12 months. So when will Spotify Wrapped 2025 be available? Here’s what you need to know. What is Spotify Wrapped 2025? Spotify Wrapped is the music streamer’s annual year-in-review compilation that allows Spotify users to see which songs, albums, and artists the…

Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the The President era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions. “The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary,” says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, who’s also designed book covers like Ezra Klein’s all-type cover Why We’re Polarized and Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History. Nuzz…

If your sofa was made between 1970 and 2014, its foam is likely loaded with flame retardants—chemicals that can escape into dust and end up in the air you breathe. A new study led by the California Department of Public Health shows the payoff of swapping it out: people who replaced their old, chemical-filled sofas or chairs with new, flame-retardant-free models saw levels of one common chemical, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), drop by half in just over a year. The chemicals became ubiquitous in upholstered furniture thanks to older regulations in California. The state’s large market meant that flame retardants were used in furniture nationwide. The tob…

From return-to-office mandates, anxiety about AI taking (or reshaping) jobs, and a highly competitive atmosphere for recent graduates and other job seekers, 2025 has been a year of change. It’s also been a big year of change for women in the workplace, with a record number exiting the workforce. And, according to a new report, women are now also less inclined to seek promotions. LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co. just released their 2025 Women in the Workplace report based on a survey of 124 organizations employing around 3 million people. The survey research found that while companies overwhelmingly say that diversity (67%) and inclusion (84%) are top priorities, just…

For most leaders these last five years have been ones of great volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Political dynamics, economic shifts, massive layoffs, strategy pivots, technology disruptions, and more are shaping how we lead and what we can accomplish together. Leading through uncertainty is no longer a mere possibility, it’s core to the job description. Times of uncertainty call for fast executive decision-making with limited information, “good enough” risk assessment, and repeated pivots. I know this because I led a global philanthropy network while the world shut down in 2020. During those initial months, I relied less on staff input to determine…

A majority of those expecting a holiday bonus this year are planning to check out once the check clears. According to a recent survey of 2,000 American workers by AI job application assistant JobHire AI, 59% are “maybe” or “definitely” expecting a bonus this year. Among them, 48% are already job hunting or planning to quit after their bonus is paid, and another 20% are considering leaving in the new year. The job market often sees a lot of activity following the holiday lull, as many spend the break reflecting on the previous year and setting goals for the next. This year, however, may see even more aggressive job -hopping, as many workers have become more f…

The hype train on corporate purpose keeps steaming down the tracks. I have written about it before and tried to be positive. But I feel the need to be more constructively critical. If everyone has been convinced that they need to have a corporate purpose, let’s at least have it be a useful one. I try to contribute to that goal in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. The hype train The articles and books on corporate purpose just keep coming. For example, in the past month alone, Harvard Business Review published four pieces on purpose (one, two, three, four). And the books keep coming, w…

Below, Jane Marie Chen shares five key insights from her new book, Like a Wave We Break: A Memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself. Jane is a leadership coach, public speaker, and cofounder of Embrace Global, a social enterprise that developed a low-cost infant incubator. She has been a TED Fellow, an Echoing Green Fellow, and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Her many honors include being recognized as a Forbes Impact 30 and receiving The Economist’s Innovation Award. What’s the big idea? Like a Wave We Break is a story of self-discovery. When achievements define us or serve as an escape from hidden scars of trauma, we do ourselves and othe…

Large language models have started creating their own terms and mixing them into everyday speech. Experts call it ‘lexical seepage.’ View the full article

Rare earth minerals are so ubiquitous and critical to much of today’s technology, that tonight’s dinner might not have made it to the table without them. And according to USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton, for decades, the world has sat back and let China become the sole supplier of these minerals, even as the country has used its dominance in this market as a geopolitical game piece. “We believe it’s time to take the game piece off the board,” Humpton said at last month’s World Changing Ideas Summit, cohosted by Fast Company and Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. USA Rare Earth is wholly dedicated to bringing rare earth metals mining to the U.S., and c…

Enterprises have often dreamed about AI systems that can reason across their most sensitive data, execute multistep tasks, and explain their logic while remaining inside a highly governed environment. Snowflake and Anthropic are betting they can finally crack the code. Through a multiyear, $200-million expansion of their agentic AI partnership, the companies plan to deliver an operational “control plane” that uses Anthropic’s latest Claude models, such as Sonnet and Opus 4.5, to power enterprise intelligence. The announcement landed alongside Snowflake’s Q3 earnings for fiscal year 2025, which showed the company maintaining strong momentum. Snowflake reported $1.21…

The smartest financial move I ever made was to stop contributing to retirement savings. It may sound counterintuitive, even reckless. Dave Ramsey would have stress dreams about this article, but it may be time to get a divorce from your 401(k). Here’s the truth: You actually don’t need millions to retire. Those retirement calculators love to spit out impossible numbers: $3 million, $5 million, sometimes more. Numbers so big they make financial freedom feel like a five-decade slog. Here’s the part they leave out. Most people following the “save for 40 years” script never hit those numbers. They keep working and waiting, but they’re aiming for a moving goalpost.…

Like many American cities, the streetscape in downtown Brooklyn was for a long time very heavy on the street: a great place to park a car or drive through. But over the past 20 years, the area itself has gone from being a 9-to-5 shopping and business district to one where a growing number of people live 24-7. Since 2004, more than 22,000 housing units have been added to the neighborhood, changing its character so much that its old streetscape just wasn’t cutting it. “There was a real evolution of the neighborhood,” says Regina Myer, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP), a business improvement district representing the area’s business owners, shopkee…