What's on Your Mind?

For the better part of the last half-century, the world has traveled to California to experience Silicon Valley. They’ve heard from Stanford dropouts-turned-unicorn founders, toured dazzling tech campuses, spoken with shrewd venture capitalists, and discussed, ad nauseum, the region’s core DNA. They’ve come to scoop up the secret fertilizer, take it back home, and sprinkle it onto the local soil in the hopes of magically growing “Silicon Prairie,” or “Silicon Heartland,” or Silicon Fill-in-the-Blank. In reality, few places in the United States—almost none outside a handful of big coastal cities—have succeeded. Eventually, hopeful communities have abandoned their “inno…

When OpenAI announced earlier this week that image generation was now directly available within ChatGPT, a lot of the initial examples used advertising to show how it works. Powered by OpenAI’s flagship multimodal model GPT-4o, the updated chatbot can now create visuals straight from its chat interface. Turbo Design founder Shane Devine posted an image of his prompt asking the platform to turn a generic office scene into a McDonald’s ad. His reaction to the results: “We’re cooked.” We are cooked pic.twitter.com/LfWizvSEoh — Shane Levine (@theShaneLevine) March 26, 2025 Other examples floating around in reaction hypothesized how the new tool would replace tradi…

When Michael White struck out on his own after stints at DoorDash and Square, his plan was to help tech employees access the value of their equity while their companies were still private. But as White and his cofounder Gautam Gupta enabled workers to get a line of credit, they found that most people were using it to finance a home purchase. “It makes sense,” White says. “That’s a big reason people seek liquidity—or that’s one of the first things that people do if they have an exit. So it really led us to dive deeper into that and ultimately pivot.” In 2024, White and Gupta relaunched their company Multiply Mortgage as an employee benefit that helps aspiring home…

Over the past three months, in a small print shop in Toronto, a group of people has been hard at work making the impossible possible: a book that can be read only when you pour water over it. The “Dehydrating Book” is the first of its kind. It was printed with a special hydrochromic ink that is invisible to the naked eye and becomes visible only when it’s wet. It is 100% waterproof and ships in a pouch full of water. Why? To raise awareness about the global water crisis. [Photo: The Gas Company Inc.] The project is a close collaboration between Water for People, a global nonprofit that helps bring clean water and sanitation systems to underserved communiti…

When filmmaker Travis Gutiérrez Senger reflects on Asco’s legacy, he quickly notes they were more than an art group; they created a movement, one with remarkable influence on Chicano art history. “That movement continues today, and it’s very expansive,” he says. “There’s a lot of books, films and things that will be written about Asco over a period of time. And this was our contribution in some ways.” He’s referring to Asco: Without Permission, a documentary that chronicles the story of the 1970s art group founded by multidisciplinary artist Patssi Valdez, muralist Willie Herrón III, painter and performance artist Gronk and writer and photographer Harry Gamboa Jr.…

Many schools and colleges are underperforming when it comes to sex education. Going beyond the classroom condoms-and-bananas approach, a group of students have taken it upon themselves to deliver sex ed, TikTok-style. The TikTok account @sexedforguys, which has more than 117,000 followers, started as a school project by four students at Colby College, a private liberal arts school in Maine. Launched in 2022, the account features skits tackling consent, toxic masculinity, and homophobia—essential lessons in a time when manosphere content is flooding For You Pages and Gen Z boys and men are more likely than baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than …

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Hundreds of AI tools emerge every week. I’ve picked five new ones worth exploring. They’re free to try, easy to use, and signal new directions for useful AI. 1. Sesame: Talk with a surprisingly lifelike AI Of all the AI bots I’ve communicated with, this one sounds the most lifelike. Pick either Maya or Miles to talk with for free in Sesame’s conversational demo. Try one of these topics. You can download your conversation afterwards. It’s deleted from the company’s servers within 30 days to protect your privacy. …

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. When I was 12 years old, my parents enrolled me in a kids’ coding class at the YMCA. This was 1983—before the internet—typing code from magazines like Compute! into a computer with a green-on-black screen and seeing what it did. And the experience would go on to shape the course of my life. I’ve been in software for more than 30 years, most of them at Intuit. I started there as a software en…

CoreWeave plans to reduce the size of its U.S. initial public offering and price its shares below the indicated range, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday, dampening expectations that the listing would boost investor appetite for IPOs. The Nvidia-backed cloud services provider is now looking to sell 37.5 million shares, 23.5% less than originally planned, and price them at $40 apiece, well below even the low end of the indicated range, the source added, requesting anonymity discussing confidential information. Nvidia will anchor the CoreWeave IPO at the price with a $250 million order, the source said. The sale would raise about $1.5 billion…

Trading platform Robinhood, best known for introducing a new generation of traders to the stock market, crypto, and ETFs, is growing up alongside its customers, moving one step closer to becoming a full financial service company the likes of Fidelity or Charles Schwab. On Wednesday, the digital brokerage announced plans to launch Robinhood Banking this fall, a one-stop service that provides “traditional checking and savings accounts with luxury benefits,” as well as Robinhood Strategies, a wealth management product. Customers will need a Gold subscription, which runs $5 a month or $50 a year, to open those individual and joint checking accounts, which will allow u…

Shares of GameStop fell more than 15% on Thursday after the company’s plan to finance its bitcoin pivot raised questions about the timing of its move and its strategy to turn around its struggling retail business. The video game retailer’s shares also gave up all their gains from a day earlier and were on track for their biggest one-day fall since last June, after the company said it was offering $1.3 billion in 0% 2030 convertible bonds to amass the cryptocurrency. The company’s announcement that it would buy bitcoin to hold as a treasury reserve asset had created a mini euphoria among retail traders, who keenly track the so-called “meme stock.” However, Game…

X owner Elon Musk was privately messaging with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman while also putting public pressure on the social media company’s content moderation efforts, The Verge reported Thursday. Two months ago, several Reddit subreddits started to block links to X in protest of Musk appearing to give the Nazi salute. Musk called the efforts “insane,” while a Reddit spokesperson at the time clarified that Reddit itself wasn’t imposing a ban on the links. A few days later, Musk claimed that Reddit users who were calling for violence against members of his Department of Government Efficiency were breaking the law. Musk has been a vocal critic of content moderation on…

Smartphones have been around long enough that, to the casual observer, their designs seem to have hit a plateau. And on a functional level, that’s more or less true — we’re all essentially holding the same six-inch-ish rectangle, aside from the occasional foldable exception. But the maturity and ubiquity of smartphones have sparked a new phenomenon: the return of trends in cycles, much like fashion. For example, most phones released in the past few years have flat sides, like the iPhone 4 from 2010. Five years ago, almost all those sides would have been curved. Flat edges aren’t a new invention — they’re just what’s trending again. But this year brings a surprisin…

Beverly Hills’ hottest club is California Pizza Kitchen. At least, that’s what someone unfamiliar with the brand might have taken away from its new “rebrand,” which debuted on Monday. On its website, California Pizza Kitchen replaced its friendly yellow logo and wordmark with a silver chrome logo and the shortened name “CPK.” [Photo: courtesy California Pizza Kitchen] Meanwhile, on socials, the brand posted several videos of its “new identity” that looked more fit for promoting a rave than a family friendly pizza restaurant. Shots of flashing lights, serious models, and slogans like “DEVOUR THE DOUBTERS” and “Fresh. To. Death” were cut with clips of harshly-li…

After a yearlong search, the Sundance Film Festival announced Thursday that its new home will be Boulder, Colorado, keeping Sundance in the mountains but moving it out of Park City, the Utah ski town that had for decades provided the premier independent film gathering its picturesque snowy backdrop. Organizers said that after 40 years in the mountains, the festival had outgrown Park City, and lacked the necessary theaters or affordable housing to continue hosting what has become one of North America’s most sprawling movie events. Sundance had narrowed down the options to Salt Lake City (with a smaller presence in Park City), Cincinnati and Boulder. Boulder, organi…

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 here. AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin offers a blockchain-flavored open-source enablement platform Illia Polosukhin, who coinvented the Transformer architecture at Google in 2017, is now launching a new company called Near AI. The company will offer services through a blockchain-powered platform that functions as a secure marketplace for open-source AI models and agents. Polosukhin is a strong advocate for transparent, open-source AI models, which he believes are the best way to promote responsib…