What's on Your Mind?

As built-in AI pops up in more aspects of everyday life, laymen are counting on the experts to keep technology safe to use. But one Meta employee’s misadventure with AI has social media users fearful for the future of AI alignment. Summer Yue is the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s AI research and development division. Her LinkedIn bio states that she’s “passionate about ensuring powerful AIs are aligned with human values and guided by a deep understanding of their risks.” If anyone would have a handle on keeping AI in check, it’s Yue—and yet, on February 22, she posted about losing control of AI on her own computer. In a pos…

The Epstein Files are dominating nightly news broadcasts and newspaper front pages. But in the media ecosystem there’s another format that’s proving a massive draw to news consumers: a podcast run by a non-journalist and entirely generated by AI. The Epstein Files is an investigative documentary podcast that, at the time of writing, has published 97 episodes—new episodes get uploaded twice daily—and notched up more than 700,000 downloads in a matter of days. That puts it in the top 10 rankings of podcast series on Apple Podcasts, and in the top 30 on Spotify. But it’s created by Adam Levy, an entrepreneur with a background in building data products and content creatio…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Just 10 days ago, on February 10, Japan-based Sumitomo Forestry announced that it had agreed to acquire Tri Pointe Homes—a large U.S. homebuilder ranked No. 715 on the Fortune 1000—for $4.5 billion, signaling that Japanese builders were further accelerating their buying spree of U.S. homebuilders. Fast-forward to today, and Stanley Martin Homes—which has been owned by Japan-based Daiwa House since 2017—announced that it has agreed to buy United Homes Group, which has a strong presence in the Carolinas, for $221 million—further accelerating Japanese b…

Unlocking the power of genetics to provide meaningful answers to patients when they matter most is at the crux of precision diagnostics. As technologies advance, costs fall, and evidence builds, genomic sequencing has great potential to transform the trajectory of patient care. It will do so by shortening the diagnostic odyssey. It will guide and speed up more personalized and effective treatment decisions. And it will improve patient outcomes more than ever before. For innovation to truly scale, it will require deep collaboration and seamless integration across the healthcare ecosystem. BUILD A STRONGER PARTNERSHIP ECOSYSTEM Making genomic sequencing a standard pr…

Medical equipment maker Stryker was allegedly hit with an Iran-linked cyber attack on Wednesday right after midnight ET, causing a global outage across its system, with staff and contractors saying a logo of an Iran-linked group appeared on the login page, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Shares of the Michigan-based global medical technology company (SYK) were down nearly 4% in early afternoon trading on Wednesday at the time of this writing. What happened? According to the report, staff said cellphones, laptops, and other devices that run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system to connect ​to Stryker’s ​technology ⁠systems …

The hits keep coming for fans of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. According to a new court filing from a major franchisee, three additional Popeyes restaurants have permanently shut their doors, bringing the total number of store closures associated with the franchisee’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings to at least 20. The franchisee, Sailormen Inc. of Miami, Florida, sought Chapter 11 protection earlier this year, citing diminished foot traffic and high inflation. In January, it closed 17 Popeyes restaurants in Florida and Georgia as part of the bankruptcy process, Fast Company previously reported. The additional three restaurants disclosed this week are all based…

Calling all pizza lovers—so, yes, everyone—your dream job awaits. Pizza Hut is hiring someone to eat free pizza for an entire year. Not only that, but the company will pay you $31,415.92 to do so. Math aficionados might notice that the Pizza Hut salary is actually the first seven digits of pi. Pizza Hut’s hiring of a “Hut Crust Connoisseur” comes ahead of Pi Day on March 14. The $31,415.92 is a significant jump from the £5,000 ($6,700) that Pizza Hut Delivery offered for a UK-based Chief Crust Taster in 2021. But then it pales in comparison to Wendy’s $100,000 offer for a similar job last week. Still, it’s not a bad deal. Here’s everything you need to k…

In 1960, 72% of adults were married, and over 90% would go on to marry. HR policies and management practices back then catered to nuclear families with a lone, male breadwinner. Today, dual-career couples and working mothers are common, largely due to the growth of women in the workforce in the second half of the 20th century. To recruit and retain talent, businesses have expanded family-friendly policies by offering flexible work hours, paid parental leave and subsidized child care. These are much-needed improvements, though many employers still lag in offering them. Today, another demographic shift also demands employers’ attention: the growing share of the …

The dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense is quickly becoming a broader test of how far the government can go in policing AI companies’ policies—and how much support those companies can rally from the wider research community. A fair showing of top AI researchers had already signed a public letter backing Anthropic. Now 37 of them have taken a more formal step, signing an amicus brief filed with the court Monday. The filing underscores how the clash is evolving from a narrow contract dispute into something bigger: a test of whether the government can effectively blacklist an American AI company for setting limits on how its technology is used. Th…

For years, B2B marketers have chased a familiar formula: more leads equal more opportunities. Build the list, blast the message, and chase the pipeline. Yet despite better data, smarter tools, and growing investment in performance marketing, many organizations are still challenged when it comes to driving measurable revenue impact. The problem isn’t reach—it’s relevance. Most performance strategies were built for individuals, not buying groups. Modern B2B decisions are made by large, diverse groups of stakeholders spanning departments, seniority levels, priorities, and generations. And while most marketers now acknowledge this reality in theory, their engageme…

High-level information about the private work of students and staff using ChatGPT Edu at several universities can be viewed by thousands of colleagues across their institutions due to a misunderstanding of what is being shared, according to a University of Oxford researcher who identified the issue. The problem affects Codex Cloud Environments in ChatGPT Edu and exposes the names and some metadata associated with the public and private GitHub repositories that users within a university have connected to their ChatGPT Edu accounts. No private code or repository data was exposed to unauthorized users. Nevertheless, the metadata that is visible can still reveal a mea…

Drive an older Buick Regal? You may need to drive it to your nearest dealer. General Motors is recalling certain 2012 and 2013 Buick Regal models because of an issue with the rear suspension toe links that could increase the likelihood of a crash. The recall affects 17,050 Buick passenger cars that were sold or registered in 22 “high corrosion” states and Washington, D.C., according to the recall notice filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The recall, submitted on Tuesday, expands on two others that the Detroit-based automaker has filed since late February related to the same issue. Only about 1% of the 17,000-plus vehicles identified may…

AI promises massive productivity gains—that is if employees are willing to use it and can figure out how to integrate it into their workflows. In the rush to reap the benefits of AI, KPMG one of the “big four” accounting firms, headquartered in London, just launched a new incentive program for its US advisory division. Per a new Business Insider report, the program, called “AI Spark Innovation”, is offering cash prizes for consultants who excel in AI innovation. The payouts will be hefty. US Vice Chair Rob Fisher told BI that the “outsize” cash awards will be “materially larger than an end-of-year compensation award.” Fisher continued, “It’s really intended to b…

Retail has always evolved around a central promise. First it was price and scale. Then convenience and speed. More recently, brand and experience took the lead. Now another shift is underway, one that many companies still treat as secondary. The next competitive advantage in retail is designing for real life. That means designing for the full range of human ability, attention, mobility, and circumstance. Not as a compliance exercise. Not as a niche offering. But as a smarter, more complete version of customer experience. Accessibility is often misunderstood as a feature aimed at a small group of people. In reality, it is a systems-level discipline. It asks a simpl…

Dieticians are warning that GLP-1 use can lead to extreme malnutrition, manifesting in diseases like scurvy, amid findings that the vast majority of studies fail to consider patients’ eating habits. While GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy have surged in popularity in recent years—and are now available through injections and in pill form—leading dieticians in Australia have discovered that existing research hasn’t considered what patients are eating, and how much. Nutritional Deficiencies While the drugs work by suppressing appetite, eating too little or making poor dietary choices can lead to further issues. “A reduction in body weight does not automatically …

A client once described to me what happened after they had lived through a traumatic assault. For a long time, life stayed busy enough that they rarely had to think about it. Work, obligations, and everyday distractions filled the hours. Whether intentionally or not, staying occupied kept the past at a distance. Then one day things slowed down. There was a rare stretch of quiet. And in that quiet the memory returned all at once, like a tsunami. We might not have lived through trauma of that magnitude, but the example reveals something about distraction itself. When our attention is constantly absorbed elsewhere, we can avoid more than a painful memory. We can avoid o…

We’ve grown to despise meeting culture, and I understand why. Think about the last few meetings you’ve attended. How many of them felt clear, succinct, like a truly effective use of your time? I’ve sat through more meetings than I can count—many of them with half the participants multitasking, cameras on but minds elsewhere. As a certified facilitator who has designed everything from executive offsites to weekly team stand-ups, I’ve learned that most meetings fail not because people don’t care, but because leaders treat meetings as a necessary evil instead of the expensive, high-stakes collaboration moments they actually are. “But what can we do about it?” you m…

It’s little surprise that a gold-medal-winning Olympic skier comes from a family that loves the snow, but slopestyle champion Alex Hall’s mom and dad might love it more than most. The pair met on the slopes, Hall told Fast Company, and essentially raised him and his brother on skis. That didn’t necessarily mean he’d be good at it. But luckily, Hall—who took home silver last month at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics and gold in Beijing in 2022—is better than good. And that’s a fortunate thing, because the amateur-to-professional athlete pipeline is already narrow, and most pro careers dry up as athletes move into their 30s. Hall isn’t too sure what his future in the s…

Few media brands scream “straight” quite like Playboy. Since the 1950s, the men’s lifestyle magazine has been best known for its photos of nude and scantily clad women (aka Playmates)—and, of course, for its iconic bunny mascot. But those who’ve been paying attention, Playboy has quietly undergone an editorial transformation. Since November, the magazine has relaunched its print edition (previously halted in 2020), started a Substack newsletter blending archival material with original writing, and introduced new Playmates to the world. It’s all been under the advice of Phillip Picardi, who was announced on March 11 as Playboy’s new chief brand officer and editor-in-ch…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to enable personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from some of the thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring. This month I introduce to youKarlyn Mattson, an award-winning retail C-suite executive and founder of The Leadership Advisors.She has decades of experience delivering profitable growth, transformative consumer and product experiences, omni-channel and digital transformation, and consumer centric value creation for brands such as Macy’s, Target, a…