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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 Big AI’s biggest sales pitch—the quest for AGI—and the idea that the industry should focus on more modest and achievable tasks for AI. I also look at Databricks’s new $4 billion-plus funding raise, and at Google’s new Gemini 3 Flash model. 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 follow me on…

A few years back, Deanna Conley had just moved to Newport, Rhode Island with a 3-month-old and 3-year-old. She soon joined a focus group for a new type of club forming in her area. This club—part daycare, part adult coworking space, and a little bit gym—would fulfill Conley’s post-moving needs: It offered community in a town where she knew no one, a space to work as a small business owner without an office, and affordable childcare. “The cost of a nanny was really prohibitive for us,” Conley says. Her older son had been in traditional daycare prior to the family’s move, but Conley thought this club might be a bit different. “I was really interested in and excite…

For a generation of young Americans, choosing where to go to college — or whether to go at all — has become a complex calculation of costs and benefits that often revolves around a single question: Is the degree worth its price? Public confidence in higher education has plummeted in recent years amid high tuition prices, skyrocketing student loans and a dismal job market — plus ideological concerns from conservatives. Now, colleges are scrambling to prove their value to students. Borrowed from the business world, the term “return on investment” has been plastered on college advertisements across the U.S. A battery of new rankings grade campuses on the financial benefits…

If you’re a millennial or simply a fan of sci-fi, you likely remember 2010’s smash hit Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The story follows Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a professional thief who specializes in stealing privileged secrets from people’s minds while they dream. He uses advanced technology to enter another person’s subconscious while they’re asleep and take whatever information he wants. The problem DiCaprio’s character faces is that the line between reality and dreams become blurred, making it increasingly difficult to tell what’s real. In many ways, especially for retail investors, that’s a picture of the modern market. A pl…

If you’ve followed Apple for any length of time, you’ve no doubt come across the notion that the company doesn’t rush into adopting cutting-edge technology; instead, it waits until it can do it right. “We don’t feel an impatience to be first,” CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg in 2017. “Our thing is to be the best and to give the user something that really makes a difference in their lives.” But I’m starting to wonder if something else is going on. Sure, a lot of Apple’s Android competitors have sometimes been accused of throwing features at the wall. These days, though, I think their hardware is often just markedly better—and it hits the market earlier. There hav…

Matcha drinks continue to challenge coffee’s dominance as the caffeinated beverage of choice. In the U.S., retail sales of matcha are up 86% from three years ago, according to market research firm NIQ. The drink’s increasing popularity, particularly among Gen Z consumers, has resulted in shortages and supply-chain issues. But when a recent Instagram reel that went viral suggested consuming Matcha might be contributing to hair loss, panic ensued. “Can I unsee this post?” one wrote. “WHY DOES THE INTERNET HAVE TO RUIN EVERYTHING,” another protested. Soon, others were sharing similar alleged experiences. “When you realise that the matcha you’ve been drinking every …

Only a week after experiencing a dreaded “death cross,” and subsequently seeing its value fall to less than $81,000, Bitcoin is showing some signs of recovering. On Monday, BTC’s price topped $89,000, and as of early Tuesday, are hovering around $87,500. To be clear, the slump is far from over—the coin saw its price top $124,000 just last month—and no one can predict what will happen next, but it’s a clear upswing in momentum. All told, when Bitcoin bottomed out at $81,000, it had fallen around 35% off its high. There were several reasons for the selloff, including outflows from large institutional investors and broader economic uncertainty, among other thin…

A few months ago, I was scrolling through TikTok when I came across a video that stopped me in my tracks. It starred an animated frog, dressed in a wizard hat, robe, and pink nail polish, superimposed over a psychedelic background and speaking in a hypnotizing, ethereal voice. “It’s time to stop doing nothing, and start doing something,” he crooned. “I cast . . . motivation!” I’d stumbled across the Pine Wizard Frog—a recurring character on the official TikTok account of household cleaning fluid Pine-Sol. Pine-Sol’s page, with its surrealist visuals and hypnotizing songs, is an example of what I call “brain-rot-brand TikTok”: It’s a subgenre of digital marketing that …

Crypto is here to stay—and you can take that to the bank. Citibank, perhaps. On Monday morning, CNBC reported that Citi is looking to launch crypto custody services next year. Biswarup Chatterjee, the global head of partnerships and innovation in the services business at Citi, told CNBC that the company is “hoping that in the next few quarters, we can come to market with a credible custody solution that we can offer to our asset managers and other clients.” While banks have, traditionally, kept cryptocurrency at arm’s length, primarily concerned about regulatory changes, the The President administration’s embrace of crypto—exemplified by the passage of new laws li…

CoreWeave stock dropped 8% Monday after the AI cloud computing company announced plans to raise another $2 billion, this time through convertible debt, to finance its rapid build-out of new data centers. On Tuesday, the company said it would increase the total offering to $2.25 billion. CoreWeave, which sells access to powerful Nvidia GPUs to run AI models, may be a bellwether in an industry placing unprecedented bets on an AI boom they believe is around the corner. CoreWeave is a “pick-and-shovel” infrastructure company in AI (like Nvidia) whose fortunes may test the narrative that tech companies — and their stock values — are riding the long wave of the next techno…

The federal government is expected to again accept new applications for a program that grants some people without legal immigration status the ability to live and work in the United States. Lawyers for the federal government and immigrant advocates have presented plans before a federal judge that would open the door again to accepting applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, otherwise known as DACA. One state — Texas, where the case is being heard — however, would be exempted from providing work permits. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of people could be eligible to be enrolled in DACA, once a federal judge issues an order to formalize…

Fast Company explores the complicated truth about the effect social media has on this generation’s teen population. View the full article

The fiercest space race is not about getting back to the moon—it’s about allowing you to post a TikTok or watch Netflix on your phone anywhere around the globe, from the Atacama Salt Flats to the Khongor sand dunes in the Gobi Desert. To make this happen, two distinct design philosophies are at war, as companies build out the infrastructure needed to ensure every phone on the planet is permanently connected to the internet. On one side is Elon Musk’s SpaceX/Starlink and the copycat companies that have followed in Starlink’s wake. Their approach is to invade space with tens of thousands of small satellites, creating a network of objects that blanket low Earth orbit. O…

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, billionaire and The President megadonor Elon Musk offered his thoughts about what motivates political progressives to support immigration. In his view, the culprit was empathy, which he called “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” As shocking as Musk’s views are, however, they are far from unique. On the one hand, there is the familiar and widespread conservative critique of “bleeding heart” liberals as naive or overly emotional. But there is also a broader philosophical critique that raises worries about empathy on quite different and less political grounds, including findings in social science. Empathy can …

Forever 21 is facing another bankruptcy. The company that operates the fast-fashion retail brand, called F21 OpCo, LLC, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a Delaware court. And while it plans to close its U.S. stores and hold going-out-of-business sales, there is still a chance for a sale that could keep some operations running. For now, Forever 21 stores and its website will stay open as the company sells off inventory and looks for buyers. The move mirrors a similar one made recently by Joann, the beloved arts and fabric chain, which had initially hoped to keep its stores operating before ultimately deciding to liquidate and shut its doors for …

Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her previous books include the award-winning title Common Sense: A Political History. Her writing has appeared in scholarly journals, such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of Modern History, as well as in media publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation. What’s the big idea? There is such a thing as too many options. Nowhere is freedom-as-choice and choice-as-freedom more evident than in the United States. As important as the right to choose has been in various emancipation movem…

Across cultures, people often wrestle with whether having lots of money is a blessing, a burden, or a moral problem. According to our new research, how someone views billionaires isn’t just about economics. Judgment also hinges on certain cultural and moral instincts, which help explain why opinions about wealth are so polarized. The study, which my colleague Mohammad Atari and I published in the research journal PNAS Nexus in June 2025, examined survey data from more than 4,300 people across 20 countries. We found that while most people around the world do not strongly condemn having “too much money,” there are striking cultural differences. In wealthy, more econ…

Researchers on the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) and leaders of many of the major platforms—from Jeffrey Hinton to Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk—have voiced concerns that AI could lead to the destruction of humanity itself. Even the stated odds from some of these AI experts, with an end-days scenario as high as 25%, are still “wildly optimistic,” according to Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and coauthor of the recent best-selling book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. That’s because, as he argues in the book, the track we’re on with AI is headed for disaster—unless…

Office dress code has been trending more casual for years, and the pandemic helped turn athleisure and sweatpants into business casual. And now, there’s a growing debate around one practice long thought to be standard for anyone wishing to look presentable and professional: ironing. In fact, many people on social media are saying they never iron anything—whether it’s work clothes or otherwise. “For science, how many of you still own an iron—the one for taking wrinkles out of clothing—AND know how to use it?” one Threads user recently asked. It’s a sentiment others have shared online from TikTok to Facebook. Naturally, the replies were divided. “I use min…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists have developed an economic model called Zillow’s Market Heat Index, which measures the competitiveness of housing markets across the U.S. This model analyzes factors such as home price changes, inventory levels, days on market, and buyer demand to generate a score indicating whether a market is hot (favoring sellers) or cool (favoring buyers). A higher score indicates a hotter metro-level housing market where sellers have more power. A lower score indicates a colder metro-level housing market where buyers have more power. Accord…

Maybe you’re meeting a coworker you’ve only known on Zoom in person for the first time. Maybe you’re greeting a group of coworkers at a conference, or saying goodbye after a team happy hour. Maybe a coworker has experienced a sudden loss. Or maybe you’re simply more of a hug person than a handshake person. Is embracing a colleague a faux pas—or worse? Cultural moments like the #MeToo movement, as well as the hands-off norms established during the pandemic, have shaped opinions about when it’s okay to touch someone else. Although most people don’t greet their office mates with literal open arms each day, colleagues who’ve developed close bonds may feel inclined to…