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eBay is laying off about 800 employees, or 6% of its full-time workforce, saying the move is a push to align with its “strategic priorities.” It comes a week after the company announced it was acquiring second-hand clothing app Depop from rival Etsy for $1.2 billion. Depop is popular with millennials and Gen Z, and is part of eBay’s bid for younger consumers, who are gravitating to second-hand shopping online for sustainability and financial reasons. eBay Inc. (EBAY) was trading up 3.3% in midday trading at the time of this writing. This is eBay’s third round of layoffs since 2023. The online second-hand retailer cut 1,000 jobs in 2024 (9% of its workforce), a…

AI has not changed the importance of judgment in product leadership. What it has changed is the cost of getting it wrong. Early in my career, I learned a principle that still guides how I think about building products: The strongest decisions rarely start with perfect data. They start with conviction, a hypothesis shaped by experience, customer insight, and pattern recognition. What ultimately separates high-performing product organizations from average ones is how quickly and confidently instinct is validated. That validation is the true role of product analytics, and increasingly, it is where AI amplifies its value. Analytics tests whether what you believed woul…

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. Anthropic’s stance on autonomous weapons may not survive the future Much of the AI world is watching closely as Anthropic tangles with the Pentagon over how the government can use the Claude models. Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon, but the contract says the military can’t use the AI company’s models as the brains for autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists, after the fact, that the military should be a…

Time capsules are designed to be resilient by nature. But no time capsule has survived as long as designers hope “America’s Time Capsule” will. The time capsule, designed for the semiquincentennial of the U.S. founding, is being created by America250, the nonpartisan, congressionally mandated group organizing commemorations for this year. The plan is to bury the time capsule underground in Philadelphia at Independence National Historical Park on July 4, and for it to be opened in another 250 years, in 2276. The problem is time capsules, which are typically buried underground, and exposed to the elements, don’t really last that long. “We’ve unburied some time …

When Dr. Wendy Ross logged on for a Zoom meeting in early 2024, she wasn’t sure who to expect on the other side of the call. It was a digital writers’ room, Ross tells Fast Company, “and in the upper left-hand corner—I’ll never forget it—was Noah Wyle.” Ross, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician and the director of Jefferson Center for Autism & Neurodiversity in Philadelphia, had received a request to lend her expertise to the writers of a new medical series—but they told her only that it was set in an emergency room and would potentially feature an autistic doctor. “I had no idea what was going to happen, but I thought it sounded kind of cool,” she say…

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on Wednesday announced another quarter of astounding quarterly growth as investors try to decipher whether technology’s latest craze is overblown hyperbole or a springboard into a new era of prosperity and productivity. The results for the November-January period blew past the analyst projections that shape investors’ perceptions, as has been the case since Nvidia’s high-end chips emerged as AI’s best building blocks three years ago. Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue surged 73% from the previous year to $68.1 billion while its profit nearly doubled to roughly $43 billion, or $1.76 per share. “No quarter has had more riding …

There are few things that unite the world like animal videos. There are also few things that are so readily commoditized. Both have occurred in the case of Punch, a baby monkey at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan. Punch captured hearts around the world after a viral post showed him hugging a stuffed orangutan toy after being rejected by other monkeys. E-commerce sellers act quickly with monkey merch Now, the young Japanese macaque and his stuffed friend are available as everything from toys on Etsy to a—decide for yourself if it’s AI—children’s book on Amazon. There’s also an “official” Punch Monkey store with products like stickers, shirts, and mugs. S…

Yet another powerful person has stepped down after being named in the Epstein files. Børge Brende, president and CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), best known for hosting an annual summit of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, has stepped down after an internal investigation into his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement released Thursday, Brende announced that after eight years in his role, he’d be resigning in the wake of the latest batch of files released from the federal investigation into Epstein. “I am grateful for the incredible collaboration with my colleagues, partners, and constituents, and I believe now is the right mo…

Everyone who has tried to code with Anthropic’s Claude Code AI agents runs into the same usability problem: If you run two or three concurrent artificial intelligence sessions—say, one rewriting your server code, another generating tests, a third doing background research—you are forced to manually hunt through separate terminal tabs, each one generating a relentless stream of machine-readable log entries, just to figure out what each program is actually doing at any given moment. Not only is it hard to follow what’s really going on, but not checking constantly can also lead to problems, as agents might stop to ask you something and you won’t notice it for minutes or hou…

OpenAI has emerged as one of the government’s leading providers of artificial intelligence. According to the company, 37 federal agencies now have access to its tech, and about 80,000 government employees are now using it regularly. This makes OpenAI a frontrunner in the race between the top AI companies to get their tech in front of government users. These workers are just a small fraction of these frontier labs’ total customer bases, but they’re symbolically valuable. Wooing the U.S. government is important enough to these companies that they’re offering their technology at a steep discount. And, in another bid to speed up the administration’s use of the tech, seve…

As snow piled up in front of bus stops and fire hydrants during New York City’s second winter storm of the year, city workers have tried to move fast to remove it before snow hardened into ice. A new internal tool makes that job easier to track. The city’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) now tags infrastructure that’s been plowed in a mobile mapping tool that employees can update on the go. “We have started the work of geotagging every single bus shelter and crosswalk,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday, and overnight, he said the city cleared more than 1,600 crosswalks, 419 fire hydrants, and nearly 900 bus stops. DSNY handles trash collection, but it’s al…

If you’ve been paying attention to AI at all lately, you’ve certainly seen the “Something Big Is Happening” essay by Matt Shumer, or at least some of the reaction to it. In it, Shumer describes how coding, for him, has completely transitioned from manually writing code to simply prompting and approving the near-flawless work done by AI. The piece was meant as a warning to all knowledge workers, essentially saying: AI has taken over my job, and it’s coming for yours next. There have been countless thought pieces on the merits and flaws of Shumer’s argument, and I have no intention of adding to the pile. But journalism is knowledge work, too, and the field had its own, …

For decades, a legal degree felt like a golden ticket, a safe career choice because a robot could never take a lawyer’s job. Today consumers are increasingly turning to new technologies like generative artificial intelligence for answers to their legal questions without the assistance of a lawyer. No wonder: The high cost of legal services places them beyond the reach of most Americans. Some outside the profession see this market failure as an opportunity. Legal technology startups armed with AI agents are securing billion-dollar evaluations, and after recent leaps in AI models and new features—including one from Anthropic that can help automate legal tasks—some lega…

The stock prices of the so-called Quantum Four are back on the rise today, after already accruing significant gains yesterday as well. The upward trend is a reversal for IonQ, D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantum Computing Inc., which have all seen their shares decline since the beginning of the year. Why are they on the rise again? Here’s what you need to know: What’s happened? Yesterday, the stock prices of America’s four largest publicly traded quantum computing companies all rose significantly. As of yesterday’s close, here’s where the quantum computing companies’ stock prices stood: IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ): up 6.23% to $33.59 D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NY…

For most of modern business history, accounting has been something leaders looked at periodically. Numbers were reviewed and reports arrived on a schedule (often monthly, quarterly, or at tax time). Accounting happened when there was time, not necessarily when insight was needed. Across industries, a new model is taking shape: always-on accounting. These are systems that capture financial activity continuously, organize it automatically, and surface insights in real time. While this shift is relevant everywhere, it’s especially visible in the rental housing market where millions of small, independently run businesses (often managed by individuals or families who b…

For decades, digital transformation raised hopes of simpler work. And while many companies found complexity instead of clarity, the story isn’t over. AI brings a new wave of hope and energy, and with that, a new kind of tension. Whenever I connect with business leaders, I can feel their deep optimism and sincere sense of responsibility to deliver on AI transformation. Leaders want to boost productivity and stand by their people. They’re guiding teams through uncertainty while inspiring them to embrace change. That’s why AI transformation is a people challenge as much as a tech challenge. Org charts are shifting. Roles are evolving. And the new priority for leaders…

Below, Tom Griffiths shares five key insights from his new book, The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind. Griffiths is a professor of psychology and computer science at Princeton University and director of the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence. What’s the big idea? How can we study something we can’t see or touch? Mathematics allows us to develop rigorous theories about how minds work. It also lets us use those theories to build artificial intelligence systems. Just as physicists seek to identify Laws of Nature, cognitive scientists hope to discover the Laws of Thought. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bit…

There are a few odors from adolescence that are seared into the brains of most Americans who grew up after the 1980s: the aroma of freshly baked brick pizza in the school cafeteria, the acrid stink of a locker room, and the unmistakable scent of teen boys wearing an unforgivable amount of Axe body spray. The phenomenon of teens dousing themselves in Axe has become so ubiquitous since the brand’s founding in 1983 that over the past few years it’s inspired its own subgenre of memes (see this one and this one, for example). Now Axe has its sights set on a new generation of consumers with a redesigned spray mechanism for its signature product. To mark the occas…

Your colleagues decide in less than a minute whether your email is worth replying to. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Report shows that the average employee receives 117 emails a day, and most are skimmed in under 60 seconds. In other words, if your email takes someone more than a minute to understand, there’s a strong chance you won’t be getting a timely response. Well-written emails don’t just make you sound smarter; studies show that they also reduce misunderstandings and speed up responses. Here are five simple ways to get faster email responses, while also helping your recipient preserve mental energy and time. BREAK UP WITH THE EMAIL BRICK Long bloc…

The devil might’ve worn Prada in 2006, but two decades later, the fashion elite are wearing books. Case in point: Coach’s hot new accessory is a keychain made out of literal hardcovers. Coach revealed the new “book charms” in a series of social posts on February 25. Created in collaboration with the publisher Penguin Random House, the charms include adorably teeny, fully readable versions of classics like Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, alongside more recent titles like Untamed by Glennon Doyle and A Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita. The book bag charms will be available for $95 on the Coach website …

What do you envision when you think of meekness? You probably see a mousy doormat, someone sheepishly acquiescing to the will of the stronger. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” you might think that those wimps will hand it over without a whimper or word of objection to stronger, more ambitious people. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called meekness “craven baseness.” Indeed, one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions is “inclined to submit tamely to oppression or injury, easily imposed upon or cowed, timid.” Meekness, then, is a weakness. Why would you ever want to be meek? The same goes for docility, often …

Generational conflict has become one of the most overused explanations for workplace tension, with plenty of stereotypical blame to go around: Baby Boomers resist change. Millennials lack loyalty. Gen Z is lazy. But after more than three decades working inside founder-led and multi-generational companies—from first-generation startups to fourth-generation enterprises—I’ve learned something counterintuitive: Generational conflict usually isn’t about age. It’s about clarity. Family-owned businesses offer a powerful lens on this issue. In the U.S., approximately 87% of businesses are family-owned, collectively employing millions of people and contributing signifi…