What's on Your Mind?

For the past 30 years, the web browser has been the primary way humans navigate the internet. It makes sense, then, that as artificial intelligence becomes more humanlike in its capabilities, it would use the same tool. That’s basically the idea behind AI-powered browsers, which are definitely having an “it” moment now that OpenAI has launched Atlas, its own web browser that incorporates ChatGPT as an ever-present helper. Atlas follows Perplexity’s Comet, which arrived in the summer to quickly capture the imagination of what an AI browser could do. In both cases, the user can, at any time, call up an AI assistant (aka agent), able to perform multistep tasks—such as na…

OpenAI’s announcements at its third annual developer conference told a lot about where the company is in its evolution. In the past, the company’s executives talked mainly about new models that were smarter, cheaper, or more efficient. At the event in San Francisco on October 6, the company’s leaders said relatively little about their latest models, and nothing about AGI or superintelligence. Instead, they discussed new ways to make the AI do real work that matters. Building functional agents One of the keys to enterprise customers realizing a return on their investment in AI is the creation of intelligent agents capable of completing complex business tasks. …

A young couple is casually hanging out in an apartment. The girl takes a fork full of food off a plate, as the young man asks, “Good?” She nods, furrowing her brow in a way that signals slight surprise that she’s impressed. “Really good.” As “Fool” by Perfume Genius fades in, the white text of a ChatGPT prompt overlays on the frame: “I need a recipe that says, ‘I like you, but want to play it cool.'” ChatGPT’s answer? Lemon Garlic Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes. This is one of a series of new ads in OpenAI’s first major brand campaign for ChatGPT. The spots depict everyday uses of ChatGPT, from finding recipes, to sourcing exercise tips, to road-trip plannin…

On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, a new model that extends its Codex coding agent beyond writing and reviewing code to performing a much wider range of work tasks. The release comes as competition continues to heat up among AI companies vying for market share in the AI-powered coding tools space. OpenAI says GPT-5.3 combines the coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional-knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2, while running 25% faster. This allows GPT-5.3-Codex to handle long-running tasks that involve research, tool use such as web search or database calls, and complex execution and planning across both general work tasks and softwar…

Last year, OpenAI decided it had to pay more attention to its power users, the ones with a knack for discovering new uses for AI: doctors, scientists, and coders, along with companies building their own software around OpenAI’s API. And so the company turned to post-training research lead Michelle Pokrass to spin up a team to better understand them. “The AI field is moving so quickly, the power-user use cases of today are really the median-user use cases a year from now, or two years from now,” Pokrass says. “It’s really important for us to stay on the leading edge and build to where capabilities are emerging, rather than just focusing on what people are using the models…

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a mission to build safe artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. For a while, that structure made sense. But in 2019, the company made a discovery that changed everything: scaling up AI models—with more data, compute, and parameters—led to predictably stronger results. The insight was formalized in a 2020 paper titled “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models,” and it reshaped OpenAI’s trajectory. That same year, the company released GPT-3, a model 100 times larger than GPT-2. Microsoft invested. Venture capitalists piled in. Inside the company, employees began to see Sam Altman as the one who could turn a nonp…

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. Familiar tensions around Sam Altman OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced his support for Anthropic in its dispute with the Pentagon over the use of its AI for targeting autonomous weapons and in domestic mass surveillance. He did so in a company meeting and during a CNBC Squawk Box appearance last Friday, the day Anthropic was effectively blacklisted by the The President administration. But two days earlier, on Wednesday, Altman had reportedly already begun talking to the Pentagon abou…

When you think about ChatGPT, what do you see? A box. A prompt. A lot of text. OpenAI’s flagship product is defined by typography—it’s the way users communicate their queries, and the way the model responds in kind. Typography is “the first thing people interact with when meeting AI for the first time,” says OpenAI design director Shannon Jager. [Image: OpenAI]Which is why for its first rebrand ever, OpenAI put typography squarely at the center of its new look. OpenAI’s refreshed brand includes a tweaked “blossom” logo with lines that are thicker and all the same width, a new “point” mark, and a fresh wordmark set in its new typeface OpenAI Sans. [Image: OpenAI]Designed …

OpenAI’s new video generation app Sora is barely a week old, but CEO Sam Altman is already dropping updates to address some major potential issues with the app. In the days since Sora launched, the app has soared to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store as users flocked to try it—even though it is still invite-only. And just as its popularity has skyrocketed, experts increasingly sounded the alarm over the likelihood that OpenAI may face legal action over Sora’s ability to generate copyrighted characters, logos, and other intellectual property. That’s what the new updates appear geared to address. In a Friday blog post, Altman said Sora will undergo two major chang…

Hello there, and welcome once again to Fast Company’s Plugged In. For something that continues to suck up so much of the world’s attention, social networking has not exactly been a font of wild innovation in recent years. Its big names are all up there in years and showing their age: Facebook is 21, Twitter is 19. Instagram is 15, Snapchat is 14. Newer entrants, such as BeReal, rarely live up to their early great expectations. Even Bluesky, where many of us have found a home after fleeing the Elon Muskified version of Twitter, isn’t growing at its old clip. So I was intrigued when two new social networking experiences debuted in rapid succession in late September:…

Family members of dead celebrities including Robin Willians and George Carlin are calling foul over AI-generated videos of their loved ones appearing on OpenAI’s new app, Sora. OpenAI’s new video generation app is just a few weeks old, but it rapidly rocketed to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store within days of its release. And perhaps as rapidly, experts and creators raised copyright concerns around Sora, as the app appeared to let users create content of well-known cartoon characters and deepfakes of public figures. OpenAI has since curbed those kinds of videos, but The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that family members of dead celebrities do…

OpenAI never wanted to build a chatbot. As an early beta tester for OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, I can vouch for the fact that the company was caught totally off guard by ChatGPT’s runaway success. An email that OpenAI sent me on November 28, 2022—just two days before ChatGPT came to market and kicked off a trillion-dollar, multiyear, economy-distending AI scramble—didn’t even mention the new interface. Rather, it bragged about the company’s then-revolutionary “DaVinci” model and how it could “deliver clearer, more engaging, and more compelling content” and allow developers to “take on tasks that would have previously been too difficult to achieve.” From th…

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered roughly 1,000 unprotected gateways to OpenClaw, an open-source and proactive AI agent that can be controlled through text conversations with apps like WhatsApp or Telegram. The gateways were found on the open internet, allowing anyone to access users’ personal information. One white hat hacker also reportedly gamed OpenClaw’s skills system, which lets users add plugins for tasks like web automation or system control, to reach the top of the rankings and be downloaded by users around the world. The skill itself was innocuous, but it exploited a security vulnerability that someone more nefarious could have used to cause serious harm…

Most professionals spend their days focused on performance, deadlines, deliverables, and doing good work that gets noticed. That’s normal. But there’s an overlooked truth about work (and life, really) that doesn’t show up in job descriptions or KPIs. Work feels better, and often goes better, when it’s shared. Shared in the human sense: letting someone in, acknowledging others, and enjoying progress together instead of alone. That idea comes through clearly in a story Oprah Winfrey often tells about growing up in Mississippi and learning an early lesson from a candy bar. “I’m telling you, if you do something to make someone else happier, it’s almost like it co…

Oracle shares fell 2% Monday following the company’s announcement it planned to raise upwards to $50 billion in 2026. Funding rounds of that size are no longer unusual. The surge in AI investment and the growing need for cloud capacity and data centers have pushed many companies to seek massive financing. But Oracle’s recent run has been unusually volatile. Just a few months ago, its shares jumped 40% in a single day, briefly making CEO Larry Ellison the world’s richest person (ahead of Elon Musk). That spike came after Oracle reported a 359% increase in its remaining performance obligation (RPO, which are expected revenues based on customer commitments). That was…

Today, investors are waking up to red on their screens as many tech and AI stocks are dropping in premarket trading. But why are shares in these companies falling? Much of it has to do with the cloud infrastructure company Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and its latest quarterly earnings results. Here’s what you need to know. Oracle’s Q2 2026 results send ORCL plunging Yesterday, Oracle reported financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2026. To say investors were disappointed in the results is an understatement, given how poorly ORCL shares are performing in premarket trading this morning. As of the time of this writing, ORCL shares are down over 12% as inve…

Snack maker Mondelez is using a new generative AI tool to cut costs for the production of marketing content by 30% to 50%, a senior executive told Reuters. The packaged food manufacturer began developing the tool last year with IT firm Accenture and expects that it will be capable of making short TV ads that would be ready to air as soon as next year’s holiday season, and potentially for the 2027 Super Bowl, said Jon Halvorson, Mondelez’s global senior vice president of consumer experience. The Cadbury chocolate producer has invested more than $40 million in the tool, Halvorson said, adding that savings would grow if the tool is able to make more elaborate videos.…

In recent conversations with customers and peers, I’m not hearing “Which AI model or tool should we pick?” I’m hearing “How do we operationalize AI across our critical workflows?” People are starting to understand real digital transformation doesn’t come from a bolt-on solution. It happens when we treat AI as a foundational force and an engine for lasting change. The shift toward an AI-powered workplace requires leaders to enable organizational intelligence across the enterprise. WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE? At Wrike, we define organizational intelligence as the seamless integration of human insight and AI capabilities to drive measurable outcomes a…

A beloved Christmas tree tradition is returning to Manhattan for the holiday season next week. No, it’s not the towering spruce at Rockefeller Center, which is lit in early December. The comparatively smaller Origami Holiday Tree that’s delighted crowds for decades at the American Museum of Natural History opens to the public on Monday. The colorful, richly decorated 13-foot (4-meter) tree is adorned with thousands of hand-folded paper ornaments created by origami artists from around the world. This year’s tree is inspired by the museum’s new exhibition, “Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs,” which chronicles how an asteroid crash some 66 million years ago res…

The Wienermobiles are coming back for a bite at the Brickyard in May, giving them another chance to relish the spotlight of racing’s biggest weekend. Oscar Mayer announced Sunday all six of its famed street-ready vehicles will compete for the second straight year on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s historic 2.5-mile oval. The Wienie 500 is scheduled for May 22 during the track’s annual Carburation Day festivities. Last year’s race was such a hit, organizers wanted to give fans a second round to savor the flavor of a light-hearted competition just two days before IndyCar’s marquis race — the Indianapolis 500. The presentation will have a familiar look for fans who…