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The generative AI revolution has seen more leaps forward than missteps—but one clear stumble was the sycophantic smothering of OpenAI’s 4o large language model (LLM), which the ChatGPT maker eventually had to withdraw after users began worrying it was too unfailingly flattering. The model became so eager to please, it lost authenticity. In their blog post explaining what went wrong, OpenAI described “ChatGPT’s default personality” and its “behavior”—terms typically reserved for humans, suggesting a degree of anthropomorphization. OpenAI isn’t alone in this: humans often describe AI as “understanding” or “knowing” things, largely because media coverage has consistently…

In the past decade, AI’s success has led to uncurbed enthusiasm and bold claims—even though users frequently experience errors that AI makes. An AI-powered digital assistant can misunderstand someone’s speech in embarrassing ways, a chatbot could hallucinate facts, or, as I experienced, an AI-based navigation tool might even guide drivers through a corn field—all without registering the errors. People tolerate these mistakes because the technology makes certain tasks more efficient. Increasingly, however, proponents are advocating the use of AI—sometimes with limited human supervision—in fields where mistakes have high cost, such as health care. For example, a bill in…

The narrative is familiar: Revolutionary technology arrives, promising to liberate women from domestic drudgery and professional constraints. The electric oven would free housewives from coal-burning stoves. The washing machine would eliminate laundry day. The microwave would make meal preparation effortless. Yet as historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in her landmark book, More Work for Mother, these innovations didn’t reduce women’s workload. They simply shifted expectations, creating new standards of cleanliness and convenience that often meant more work, not less. So when we speak of AI as the solution to professional and personal burdens, skepticism is warranted.…

Black, unassuming, about the size of a pack of chewing gum: On the surface, the Fire TV 4K Select stick released in mid-October looks just like any other streaming device made by Amazon. Plug it into your TV, and you’ll be greeted by Amazon’s tried-and-true living room interface, complete with icons for popular streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video. And yet, the Select streaming stick is unlike any of its predecessors. That’s because the device is running Vega – a new, Linux-based operating system Amazon has quietly been building over the past couple of years as a replacement for its legacy, Android-based Fire OS. The company plans to eventually la…

Amazon is betting big on movie theaters—even if it isn’t counting on mega profits. The Silicon Valley giant told The New York Times last week that it is planning to release about 14 movies annually in theaters across the United States, an untraditional move for a company that has for years focused on streaming. Instead of simply dropping films directly onto Prime Video, its streaming service, Amazon wants audiences to see its movies on the big screen first—typically for 45 days—before they’re available for streaming. Three years after Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion, the tech giant is signaling that it is ready to compete more directly with Hollywood’s biggest …

Amazon’s new Echo Dot Max is a $99 ball. Its Echo Studio is a $199 ball. Its Echo Show is a tablet (starting at $179), attached to a ball. For its grand refresh of its Alexa-powered line of speakers and tablets, Amazon spent three years rethinking the foundations of its audio engineering to conquer the home theater market in the most spherical manner possible. “Legitimately—they sound really good,” says our senior editor Liz Stinson, after a listening test. But from my own discussions with the design team, it’s clear that what Amazon has created are not just new voice assistants, or even mix-and-matachable speakers capable of creating a 3D soundscape for movies an…

Throughout Harvard Square, there are many bookshop brimming with the latest literary fiction and intellectual memoirs, patronized by scholarly types. But in January, a new bookshop popped up in the neighborhood that is nothing like the others. Lovestruck Books is a romance bookstore. It’s Instagrammable entrance is adorned with pink and purple flowers. There’s a coffee shop that transforms into a wine bar for evening events. Besides an enormous selection of romance novels, you can also purchase sex toys and tote bags emblazoned with “I read smut.” “We want to toe the lie a little bit with being provocative and edgy,” says Rachel Kanter, the store’s founder. “But the …

In his February 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson dubbed our current era “the anti-social century.” He isn’t wrong. According to our recent research, the U.S. is becoming a nation of homebodies. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we studied how people in the U.S. spent their time before, during, and after the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic did spur more Americans to stay home. But this trend didn’t start or end with the pandemic. We found that Americans were already spending more and more time at home and less and less time engaged in activities away from home stretching all the way back to at least 2003. And if you t…

If you’re in charge of selecting a leadership development solution for your organization, your budget might feel dwarfed by the goals and needs the program must address. And while the money you have to spend is limited, the options you have to choose from—coaching, learning platforms, content libraries and more—are not.  All of those factors can make it difficult to identify the option that will deliver the best ROI. An “affordable” subscription to a vast digital library of leadership videos and courses is no bargain if it doesn’t deliver the results you need. On the other hand, premium coaching for a few key executives might feel extravagant at first but ultimat…

Research shows employees who engage in unethical behavior—surprisingly—are not new to their organizations. They have been there for a considerable amount of time, typically at least six years, and have risen through their companies. Worse, the longer they have been with their organizations, the greater the financial and reputational damage when unethical behavior occurs. And though we might think of corporate misconduct as C-suite malfeasance, unethical behavior can occur at all levels—and many offenders have a steady career path. It begs the question: could an ethical assessment have been designed during their career progression to have detected someone being more s…

Anthropic’s Claude Code tool is having a moment: It’s recently become popular among software developers for its use of agents to write code, run tests, call tools, and multitask. In recent months the company has begun to stress that Claude Code isn’t just for developers, but can let other kinds of workers build websites, create presentations, and do research—and stories about non-coders completing interesting projects have filled social media. The latest offering, called Cowork, is a new version (and a rebranding) of Claude Code for work beyond coding, and it could dramatically widen the audience for Anthropic’s tools within the enterprise. Cowork is in “research prev…

Apple and Google would like to see your identification, please. With the former’s “Digital ID” launch last week, both companies now let you scan a digital version of your passport at more than 250 Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, using an iPhone or Android phone. A growing number of U.S. states already support digital driver’s licenses for the same purpose. But the push for these digital IDs isn’t merely about airport security (which still requires you to carry a physical license or passport anyway). It’s really part of a broader effort to verify who you are online, one that can finally start in earnest with passport-based digital IDs that are a…

Six hours after OpenAI’s launch of GPT-4.1, Sam Altman was already apologizing. This time, it wasn’t about hallucinations or bias or Scarlett Johansson. No, it was about the model name. GPT-4.1 seemed nonsensical to many, difficult to parse from their already launched models like GPT-4o and GPT-4.5. “How about we fix our model naming by this summer and everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us (which we very much deserve) until then?” Altman wrote. Streamers take the brunt of the internet’s name-mocking: Are you a Hulu, Tubi, or Fubo subscriber? But AI companies are just as bad, if not worse. Their model names are often incoherent and unmemorable. From S…

Neri Karra Sillaman is an adviser and speaker who was recently recognized on the Thinkers50 “Radar” list for 2024 as one of the top 30 emerging management thinkers. She is an adjunct professor and entrepreneurship expert at the University of Oxford, and founder of Neri Karra, a global luxury leather goods brand that has been manufacturing for leading Italian labels for over 25 years. A former child refugee, she brings a powerful perspective on resilience, cultural innovation, and ethical business to her work. Her insights have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Fortune. What’s the big idea? It’s no coincidence that immigrant-led bus…

Some words are far too mild for the violence of what they describe. Migraine is one of them. For many people, it evokes a simple headache—an inconvenience solved with an aspirin (or Tylenol) and a glass of water. For those who’ve never experienced it, migraine is almost a cliché: a lame excuse to stay in bed or avoid a meeting. But for millions of people—and I’m one of them—migraine is anything but benign. It is a debilitating neurological disease that can force life to grind to a halt for days at a time. It is an invisible disability that millions are expected to simply “push through.” The Mild Version Everyone Sees—and the Severe One No One Understands I ofte…

Trust is the essence of collaboration: as Yuval Harari eloquently noted, we as a species would not exist if it weren’t for our superior ability to collaborate so effectively—and it’s largely down to trust. In the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, decisions on trust were relatively straightforward, even when it came to appointing leaders. Indeed, our ancestors lived in small groups of closely related individuals and spent all of their time together. Furthermore, the key attributes they were interested in evaluating or judging were easy to observe: courage, practical knowledge, hunting and fishing dexterity, and physical strength. There was no need then for psychom…

A shooting last weekend at a children’s birthday party in California that left four dead was the 17th mass killing this year—the lowest number recorded since 2006, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. Experts warn that the drop doesn’t necessarily mean safer days are here to stay and that it could simply represent a return to average levels. “Sir Isaac Newton never studied crime, but he says ‘What goes up must come down,'” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. The current drop in numbers is more likely what statisticians call a “regression to the mean,” he said, r…

Below, Jodi-Ann Burey shares five key insights from her new book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work. Jodi-Ann is a writer and critic on race, culture, and health equity. Her essays appear in various arts, business, and literary publications. She created and hosts the prose and poetry salon Lit Lounge: The People’s Art, as well as the Black Cancer podcast. What’s the big idea? Authentic is more than a critique of the empty promise of being authentic at work. It is an invitation to question the structural realities of what it takes to be a person at work. To begin, we must take seriously the health and wellbeing of workers most impacted by ha…

Batteries are powering a significant shift in how we go about our daily lives, ranging from the devices we carry to electric vehicles and energy storage systems. Batteries play a critical role across key sectors from data center infrastructure, military, and microgrid applications to consumer electronics and more. But as demand surges, so does end-of-life material that needs to be managed. Beyond serving as compact energy sources, batteries also represent a domestic source of essential critical minerals. To fully realize their value, it is crucial to close the loop at end-of-life by recovering these minerals and strengthening the supply needed to support a rapidly exp…

We all know the people pleaser in the office—the one who takes on extra work, stays late without being asked, and is at the full disposal of the department manager. They also may agree with whatever the majority says and will dodge conflict, even though they are in the right. But does this mentality pay off? Likely not, say experts. Who exactly is a people pleaser? A people pleaser is someone who abandons their own needs and values to try and make someone else happy, explains Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. While on the surface, you may think this selfless approach will fast-track you at work, however, this…

Dive into the exhilarating world of innovation with FC Explains, a video series that spotlights the game changers and visionaries from Fast Company’s prestigious Most Innovative Companies list. This annual ranking celebrates the trailblazers who are reshaping industries and cultures, pushing boundaries, and transforming the world. First up is Bluesky. View the full article

Dead cartoon owls, brain-rot cookie content, fake rebrands, and library thirst traps. Welcome to the era of DGAF branding. In this episode of FC Explains, Grace Snelling breaks down why major brands and public institutions are ditching polished ads for chaotic content and seeing massive results. From Nutter Butter’s unsettling TikToks and California Pizza Kitchen’s fake midlife crisis to Duolingo “killing” its iconic owl and libraries going viral with memes, this episode explores how being weird online has become a serious marketing strategy. We look at the numbers behind these stunts, the cultural forces driving them, and why leaning into chaos can sometimes …