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After a viral disappearance and rumors of his demise, Duo the owl is alive—and he’s finally ready to speak: “I said, ‘It’s either Spanish or vanish.’” Watch the full tell-all interview and hear from the bird behind the chaos. View the full article

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. Blade Runner wasn’t so far-fetched after all In Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling’s Officer K has a live-in girlfriend named Joi, played by Ana de Armas. The two interact like a real couple—they share familiar banter and seem to have a history together. But Joi is a hologram, projected from ceiling-mounted emitters in K’s apartment. She’s not human; she’s an advanced form of spatial computing—a future-facing concept we’re already seeing the early stages of today. The “AI girlfriend” (or bo…

The Prada Group announced a deal Thursday to buy Italy’s Versace from the U.S. luxury group Capri Holdings under terms that value the fashion house at 1.25 billion euros ($1.4 billion). Prada said the addition of Versace’s “highly recognizable aesthetic . . . constitutes a strongly complementary addition” to its portfolio, which includes the Prada and Miu Miu fashion brands. It said Milan-based Versace offered “significant untapped growth potential.” The final value of the deal will be adjusted at closing, expected in the second half of the year. It will be funded by 1.5 billion euros in new debt and has been approved by the Prada and Capri Holdings board of directors. …

One recent rainy afternoon, I found myself in an unexpected role—philosophy teacher to a machine. I was explaining the story of the Bhagavad Gita to a leading large language model, curious to see if it could grasp the lessons at the heart of one of the world’s most profound philosophical texts. The LLM’s responses were impressively structured and fluent. They even sounded reflective at times, giving a sense that the AI model knew that it was itself part of this millennia-long conversation. Yet there was something fundamental that was missing from all the answers the machine gave me—the lived experience that gives wisdom its true weight. AI can analyze the Gita, but i…

Jason Momoa is a tough act to follow. Especially if you’re a Guinness marketer. Last year, the brand partnered with Momoa to direct and star in a U.S. spot for his favorite beer that ended up getting 13 billion impressions. So this year, Guinness decided to celebrate an even more valuable partner—its actual customers and fans. For the newest iteration of the long-running “Lovely Day for a Guinness” tagline—first rolled out in a 1935 ad campaign—the brand collected stories from customers across all 50 states. Among the stories is the Treme Brass Brand in New Orleans, who share pints of Guinness before taking the stage. The Chicago Plumbers Union are in ther…

The CEO’s role is evolving. Private equity is playing an increasingly influential role in shaping the expectations, performance, and tenure of CEOs. The financial environment is also changing, with influence increasingly moving from public markets to private capital. As private equity grows in importance as the dominant form of value creation, executives who excel at driving EBITDA and delivering outsize returns have become the winners. In this landscape, CEOs are increasingly being measured by their ability to generate financial returns. But true leadership requires hitting more than financial targets. The most effective leaders understand that long-term success dep…

The commercial starts with an actor sitting in front of a TV, remote in hand. Suddenly the world around her changes, and she changes, too, as makeup artists transform her from a couch potato to a Victorian-era lady to a skeleton buried in dirt. The time-lapse filming looks like AI, but it’s exactly the opposite. In fact, the 90-second commercial—shot for BritBox’s first ever brand campaign—is the product of a single, continuous shot that took 14 hours, 45 minutes, and 31 seconds, and was filmed with 11 different sets, at one frame per second using a precision motion control unit. The British streaming service is aiming to woo potential subscribers with its attention to de…

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby conjures up images of gilded Art Deco opulence: cloche hats and shimmering flapper dresses; a freeflow of French 75s and festivities. And that’s thanks, in part, to kaleidoscopic films like Baz Lurhmann’s 2013 adaptation of the novel. But when you read Gatsby, you discover a less glamorous narrative that has perhaps been overshadowed by contemporary Jazz Age visual clichés—one that is essentially a dark portrait of its times with a bit of rot at its core, thanks to the titular swindling bootlegger Jay Gatsby. And that’s what luxe publisher The Folio Society sought to reflect in its brilliant limited-edition illustrat…

It took Duolingo more than a decade to grow its owl mascot, Duo, from a cute cartoon character into a social media star with tens of millions of followers. Then Duolingo’s marketing team did the unthinkable: It killed him off. The decision turned out to be the company’s most successful social media play ever—and likely one of the widest-reaching social campaigns of all time, by any brand. Duo was originally created as logo in 2011, the year that Duolingo was founded. In the years since, the friendly (if occasionally menacing) green owl has grown into a layered character with friends, enemies, motivations, even a potential lover, and legions of fans. But on February 11, D…

Camb.ai is on a mission to disrupt the dominance of English in global media. Founded in 2022, the AI-powered platform specializes in real-time translation that retains a speaker’s emotional resonance—processing content up to 20 times faster than traditional dubbing services. Major League Soccer now uses Camb.ai’s technology for live broadcasts. But the company has also found unexpected demand in markets like video advertising and the localization of interactive smart toys. To power its growth, Camb.ai has raised $15.5 million to date. The platform now supports translations in more than 150 languages—including Maleku, spoken by just 500 people. CEO Avneesh Prak…

Le Creuset turned 100, and to celebrate, it released a new cookware collection in a hue inspired by its original color, Flame. Named Flamme Dorée, French for “golden flame,” the set includes round and oval dutch ovens, a braiser, and a saucepan in a rich orange gradient with a shimmering gold finish. Prices for the Flamme Dorée pieces range from $310 to $860, which is more expensive than its standard lines—especially premium prices for what the company is positioning as a special occasion product. The French cookware brand was first known for its orange enameled cast iron cocottes, and it now sells products in a range of more than 200 colors. Last year it par…

When Anirudh Rao was 4 years old and living in Nashville, his friend’s house was destroyed by a tornado. A year later—yes, as a kindergartner—Rao started sketching a potential solution for better tornado warnings. Now 12 years old and living in Colorado, Rao is pursuing a more advanced version of his concept: a network of drones that could theoretically sense infrasound, a wave phenomenon emitted before and during tornadoes with frequencies below the threshold of human hearing. “On the outskirts of the city, there’ll be a base station and a network of autonomous drones that fly in all directions,” says Rao. He envisions sensors detecting infrasound along with temp…

The Minecraft movie is crass, dumb, and barely coherent. It also just made almost $163 million at the domestic box office over its opening weekend. Video game adaptations have been on a hot streak in recent years. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie crossed the billion-dollar mark, nearly unseating Barbie as the year’s top-grossing film. Amazon’s Fallout shattered records with 2.5 billion viewing minutes in its debut week. And now, A Minecraft Movie stands as the highest-grossing film since Deadpool & Wolverine. Hollywood’s obsession with intellectual property—from comic book heroes to kids’ toys—is nothing new. But for decades, video games were the outliers…

Is doomscrolling on your phone unhealthy for your brain? Oxford University Press’s word of the year, “brain rot,” seems to suggest so. It defines the condition as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” The key word, though, is “supposed,” as there is there is no such thing as mindless scrolling, says Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, the author of The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience and a Harvard physician who specializes in stress. “’Brain rot’ is not a word or phras…