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Have you noticed that in the current discourse around artificial intelligence, the narrative often slips into one of two extremes? There is either a techno-utopian dream of total automation or a dystopian nightmare where human agency is erased. But there are other options! As we navigate this inflection point in civilization, I invite you to consider a third path: pragmatic optimism. And that’s because we are currently in the midst of a human revolution, not a tech revolution. The most successful organizations of 2026 and beyond will not be those that simply use AI to do more things faster. Instead, they will be the ones that use AI as a creativity accelerator, fr…

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. Is the Altman firebomb just the start of extreme doomer violence? On April 10, someone threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, didn’t stop there. He then went to OpenAI’s headquarters and told the security guards there that he intended to burn down the building and everyone inside. Two days later, someone allegedly fired two shots from a car driving past Altman’s house, but OpenAI said that…

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps. Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline…

Warren Buffett is seldom wrong, especially regarding investment and innovation. As most of us know, the Oracle of Omaha offers wisdom that goes beyond industries, generations, and cultures. And that wisdom, even if it seems obvious (ever catch yourself saying, “Wait, I could’ve said that myself!”), is usually right on the mark. Like this piercing bit of truth-telling: If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s what Buffett once shared with a group of students at Georgia Tech when they asked him about his idea of success. He explained that success isn’t just about weal…

According to Wells Fargo’s recent Money Study, 64% of parents with Gen Z children say their 18- to 28-year-old kids still rely on them for financial support—whether it’s for housing or other expenses. Of the 3,773 U.S. adults surveyed at the end of last year, more than half who are parents (56%) said the monetary support they’re extending to their adult children adds a strain on their own finances. “It’s not surprising that young adults are leaning on both family and nontraditional sources for support, but these dynamics are also putting pressure on parents,” Emily Irwin, Wells Fargo’s head of private wealth planning, said in a press release. “Open communication,…

Madonna announced her new album Confessions on a Dance Floor II with sans-serif typography from the same creative agency behind Charli XCX’s brat. On wheat paste posters and short-form video posted to social media, Madonna teased her forthcoming album, out July 3, and its first song, “I Feel So Free,” in words. “Madonna Confessions II” is written on the album cover in Helvetica, a workhorse sans-serif font that’s one of the most popular fonts in the world because its minimalist form looks simple and perpetually modern. Typography was used throughout Madonna’s announcement to spell out “Confessions II,” “COADF 2,” and other promotional copy in all-caps, sans-serif …

Sixty years after it invented sports drinks, Gatorade is making a surprising pivot: It’s no longer focusing primarily on athletes. PepsiCo, Gatorade’s parent company, said Thursday that the brand wants to broaden its reach to non-athletes who are looking for ways to hydrate, whether they’re on a long flight, going for a walk or nursing a hangover. New packaging highlights the specific ways Gatorade’s various drinks and powders work and the research behind them. The change reflects U.S. consumers’ booming interest in beverages with perceived health benefits. Jack Doggett, a food and drink analyst with the consulting firm Mintel, said his research indicates 60% of consume…

It seems that change and volatility are the only things that are certain when it comes to the labor market. Jobs and professions that once seemed ‘stable’ are not immune to the forces of artificial intelligence and other technological advancements. At the very least, AI is changing the nature of what jobs look like and will likely continue to do so at a fast rate. All of this can make it difficult to know what to do to foolproof your career. Liz Tran is a leadership coach to CEOs and founders and the author of AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. After two years of conversations with founders, CEOs, and leaders, Tran found that those who …

It was long assumed that boys were more likely to have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But recent research suggests girls have been widely underdiagnosed—with sometimes devastating consequences. Now, many women who have long suffered from mental health conditions and everyday challenges are identifying ADHD as the underlying cause. “Women are much more likely to have what’s called ‘inattentive ADHD,’ versus ‘hyperactive ADHD,’” says Dr. Sarah Greenberg, a licensed psychotherapist and the vice president of expertise and strategic design for neurodivergence nonprofit Understood.org. “The hyperactivity is really visible to others in the room, whereas…

Music lovers who have complained for years about Ticketmaster fees for concert tickets are surely reveling in a jury verdict Wednesday that found its parent company Live Nation has been running a harmful monopoly over large venues across the U.S. But they will have to wait to see if the verdict leads to changes that make concerts more affordable. Here are some things to know about the verdict in the closely-watched antitrust battle: No immediate relief for concertgoers The lawsuit, initially led by the U.S. government under former President Joe Biden, accused Live Nation of smothering competition and blocking venues from using multiple ticket sellers. Days into t…

Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) could stay at 2.8% in 2027, the same as its rate for this year. That’s the latest prediction from The Senior Citizens League (TSCL) and mirrors 2026’s COLA. If enacted in October, it would increase the average benefits check from $2,024.77 to $2,081.46—a $56.69 increase. The TSCL finds the 2.8% increase concerning due to high costs of living, such as rents and mortgages. “The fact is that most senior households already get by on only about 58% as much income as their working-age counterparts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a middle-class or working-class American who thinks the economy is doing well right…

Canva built its 265-million-person audience by being the easy-to-use, template-friendly design tool for everyone. And when generative AI arrived, it quickly integrated the technology. Now, Canva is amongst the leading spenders on compute from platforms like ChatGPT, it’s building its own models and acquiring its own AI companies, and it’s launching even more AI design features as part of its Canva AI 2.0 release that it’s announcing today. But the headline marks a deeper, philosophical shift within Canva: From being “a design platform with AI tools” to becoming an “AI platform with design tools.” Connecting with Canva’s CEO, Mel Perkins, I asked about the …

After rising by more than 580% in a single trading session yesterday, shares of Allbirds Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) fell this morning in premarket trading, at one point more than 30%. The steep rise and now potential fall in the stock price followed the company’s unexpected announcement that it intends to transition from a sustainable shoemaker to an AI compute infrastructure provider. But while AI-obsessed investors initially cheered the odd move, history suggests the pivot may be a challenging one to pull off in the long run. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, San Francisco-based Allbirds, whose wool footwear had been popular with Silicon …

In 1988, a London pre-teen with a penchant for programming and gaming wrote a version of the classic board game Othello—also known as Reversi—for his Amiga 500 home computer. Teaching a piece of software to play the game was an ambitious coding project for someone so young. And with that, Demis Hassabis notched his first achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The Othello-playing app “beat my kid brother, who was only five at the time,” Hassabis remembers. “It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me, because I just thought, ‘Wow, it’s incredible that you can make a program that’s inanimate and it can go off and do something on your behalf.'” That proved to be a fatefu…

In 2020, as people began to realize they would be spending significantly more time at home than they had planned in January, a lot of people splurged on a new TV. Approximately 315.6 million new sets found their way to households around the world that year, a 6% increase from the year before. Those sets still have some life in them. The average TV will run for 10 years or more without issue, but many homeowners are starting to feel like their sets are getting a bit long in the tooth. And over the next year or two, the industry could see a big rush in customers. Circana, which monitors consumer purchases, says the average TV is replaced every 6.6 years. That figure…

Elon Musk wants to execute the largest initial public offering in history, chasing a staggering $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation for SpaceX. To justify this unprecedented price tag, he is aggressively hyping a cosmic vision: launching 1 million artificial intelligence servers into orbit to create a 100-gigawatt space data center in the next decade. He plans to one day build a factory on the moon to catapult these servers to Earth’s orbit. If that sounds like the background plot of a boring space movie, it’s because it is science fiction. The TL;DR: here is that Musk’s blueprint is fundamentally broken, according to experts in physics, aerospace engineering…

Egyptian coder Assem Sabry has long wanted an AI model that represents his culture. The problem is he hasn’t been able to find one. “The AI industry in Egypt . . . doesn’t exist,” Sabry says. So he built his own: Horus, named after the ancient Egyptian god of the sky. Sabry says the goal was to stop “relying on other models, like the American or Chinese models,” and instead ask what a more Egyptian-focused model might look like. To make Horus work, he trained it using GPUs from Google Colab and other cloud providers, alongside open-source datasets. The model, released in early April, drew more than 800 downloads in its first week on Hugging Face. Sabry is one of a…

In this episode of “It’s all in the typeface,” Fast Company’s creative director Mike Schnaidt chose Kyoto for its handmade, human feel, blending Japanese calligraphy with classic Latin forms. Inspired by a process of exploration, its design reflects the human touch behind every page of this issue. View the full article

At SXSW this year, artificial intelligence was everywhere. Every panel. Every hallway conversation. Every prediction about the future of work seemed to revolve around the same question: How do we keep up? But the moment that stayed with me wasn’t about AI at all; it was reconnecting with the world of Jack Johnson. He took the stage not just as a “musician,” but as something far more compelling: a fully integrated human being. Before his success in music, Johnson was a professional surfer, then a filmmaker, and then a globally recognized musician. And in his recent documentary SURFILMUSIC, what becomes clear is that he didn’t abandon one identity to become another. He …

A silent productivity killer is operating in every enterprise without detection, causing harm unnoticed: the 100-page slide deck, which I call the “Frankendeck.” It is a bloated, decentralized collection of charts, bullet points, and appendices emailed to the C-suite 48 hours before a critical meeting. As a presentation strategist working with Fortune 500s and scaling startups to improve executive communication, I see this pattern everywhere. Corporate teams tirelessly gather data, create graphs, charts, and tables, only to paste them into slides and call it a board meeting deck. But we confuse “data-dumping” with “strategic storytelling.” In doing so, we impose a mas…

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” That’s a quote from Apple’s famous “Think Different” advertising campaign, which ran from 1997 to 2002. It embodies the bullish idealism that has long permeated the technology industry. Tech leaders espouse this thinking in pitch decks, on earnings calls, and in the mission statements defining their companies. Look no further than OpenAI’s introductory post from 2015: “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole” You could argue that—in addition to making money—“changing the world” is the driving aspiration of eve…

The world can’t seem to escape the Brooklyn-based Gen Z band Geese. Some call them “America’s Most Thrilling Young Rock Band,” while the band and their frontman, Cameron Winter, are drawing endless comparisons to their predecessors the Strokes and Julian Casablancas. Just last week, the band took the stage at Coachella as they gear up for an already sold-out tour. But as Geese finds their footing in the limelight, suspicion is mounting over their relatively quick rise to fame—and now some are saying the seemingly indie artists might have fallen into our laps on purpose all along. In a now viral story by Wired, the publication reveals that Geese hired digital marke…

After introducing a new strategy for performance reviews to include evaluations of how effectively workers use AI, Duolingo founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said employees started questioning the decision: “For a while,” von Ahn said, AI usage was a metric of company performance reviews. But it won’t be anymore, once employees pushed back. Now, Duolingo has backtracked on using AI use as a performance metric. Employees had asked if they were simply using AI for AI’s sake. “At the end, we backtracked, and we said, ‘No, look. The most important thing in your performance is you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible,’” von Ahn said in a recent episode of the…