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U.S. job openings fell to the lowest level in more than five years, another sign that the American labor market remains sluggish. The Labor Department reported Thursday that vacancies fell to 6.5 million in December — from 6.9 million in November and the fewest since September 2020. Layoffs rose slightly. The number of people quitting their jobs — which shows confidence in their prospects — was basically unchanged at 3.2 million. December openings came in lower than economists had forecast. The economy is in a puzzling place. Growth is strong: Gross domestic product — the nation’s output of goods and services — advanced from July through September at the faste…

Novo Nordisk’s stock dove 7% on Thursday just after an announcement from a key competitor. The drop came just after telehealth company Hims & Hers announced it will offer a new version of the treatment, made from the same active ingredient, semaglutide, for a fraction of Novo Nordisk’s price. The telehealth site will offer the treatment at an introductory price of $49, the announcement said. After the introductory offer ends, patients with a 5-month subscription will pay $99 monthly for the treatment. Novo Nordisk sells the weight-loss drug for $149. Hims & Hers had already been offering the treatment in an injectable form, but the oral version is new for…

In certain corners of corporate America, a generous parental leave policy has become a crucial tool for recruiting and retention. Many of the biggest tech employers have been leaders on this front, offering 16 to 20 weeks of leave, or even close to six months at companies like Google. But even as companies have expanded their parental leave benefits, few of them have sought to address the unique challenges many parents—and especially mothers—face when they actually return to work. A handful of companies, among them Apple and Amazon, offer a grace period that enables employees to ease back into work part-time or work flexible hours for a few weeks. Despite all th…

Bob Iger doesn’t understand generative AI. He thinks it is good for the quarterly bottom line. He believes a corporation can control it, and that lawyers and agreements can bind it. He is clueless. Generative AI is here to kill Hollywood—including the company he’s now leaving to Josh D’Amaro, the new heir to Disney’s throne. This became painfully clear to me during Disney’s recent first-quarter financial call. Taking a victory lap for his “modernization” efforts, he briefly laid out the roadmap for the company’s partnership with OpenAI, announced in December 2025. Under the agreement, Disney would invest $1 billion in the AI company and let it tap Disney’s IP crow…

For many women in the U.S. and around the world, motherhood comes with career costs. Raising children tends to lead to lower wages and fewer work hours for mothers—but not fathers—in the United States and around the world. As a sociologist, I study how family relationships can shape your economic circumstances. In the past, I’ve studied how motherhood tends to depress women’s wages, something social scientists call the “motherhood penalty.” I wondered: Can government programs that provide financial support to parents offset the motherhood penalty in earnings? A ‘motherhood penalty’ I set out with Therese Christensen, a Danish sociologist, to answer this…

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 uses the Super Bowl to land some zingers about the future of AI Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads are bangers. The spots, which Anthropic posted on X on Wednesday, seize on rival OpenAI’s plans to begin injecting ads into its ChatGPT chatbot for free-tier users as soon as this month. The 30-second ads dramatize what the real effects of that decision might look like for users. They never mention OpenAI or ChatGPT by name. In one ad, a human fitness instructor playing the role…

Elon Musk just created the world’s most valuable private company. And he didn’t do it through rapid growth or a new product launch — at least not directly, anyway. Instead, as reported this week, Musk merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI into his wildly successful rocket company, SpaceX. Combined together, the two companies are now valued at an estimated $1.25 trillion. It’s the biggest merger in history. And because Musk controls both companies, he calls most of the shots when it comes to the deal. …

For the past two years, artificial intelligence strategy has largely meant the same thing everywhere: pick a large language model, plug it into your workflows, and start experimenting with prompts. That phase is coming to an end. Not because language models aren’t useful, with their obvious limitations they are, but because they are rapidly becoming commodities. When everyone has access to roughly the same models, trained on roughly the same data, the real question stops being who has the best AI and becomes who understands their world best. That’s where world models come in. From rented intelligence to owned understanding Large language models look powerf…

Rewind to 2025. The National Football League is fresh off an unbelievable, yet controversial, Super Bowl halftime performance by the superstar hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar. The country has just been introduced to a diversity-hostile administration, which has practically squashed any zeal toward diversity, equity, or inclusion that corporate America once seemingly held. As the NFL’s leadership team explores talent considerations for next year’s performance in the midst of this cultural backdrop, someone recommends Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican-born megastar whose songs are performed almost entirely in Spanish, and, surprisingly, the league acquiesces. The public blowback is…

We’ve been sold a myth about entrepreneurial success: sharpen your skills, tighten your systems, hustle harder. But after years of working with independent professionals across industries, I’ve noticed that the highest performers share something that rarely makes the productivity lists: they’ve intentionally built communities of colleagues, clients, and partners who expand how they think, create, and deliver impact. Community isn’t a “nice to have” for the self-employed. It’s strategic infrastructure. And this is especially important for solopreneurs, entrepreneurs who work primarily solo. The stakes are higher than most solopreneurs realize. According to research…

Known as the self-help guru whose tagline “let them” has encouraged millions to stop worrying what others are doing or saying, and focus on their own personal growth, has another significant lesson: don’t be afraid to keep moving forward to goals. During an interview with Norah O’Donnell on CBS Sunday Morning this week, Robbins said, “If you feel stuck in your life, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means that what’s missing in your life is growth. And if I can get you to grow and learn in any area of your life, you start to change.” The 57-year-old mother and former lawyer—who, at one time in her 40s, was unemployed and over a million in debt—shares her motivati…

Another round of Epstein files—approximately three million documents—was released January 30, and this batch included a lot of prominent names. That list included philanthropist and business magnate Bill Gates, entrepreneur Elon Musk, and author, doctor and longevity influencer Peter Attia. They were all allegedly connected to Epstein in different ways, and as a result, their mentions in the documents are varied. But it’s their responses that offer lessons to others in the business world about how to respond when faced with a crisis. Dealing with one of this magnitude is no easy feat, and it requires absolute trust between a client and a crisis manager, Beverly Hills …

Last week, Google released Project Genie, a powerful new AI-powered platform for videogame design. Project Genie, which is currently only available for Google’s AI Ultra subscribers, uses AI to build virtual worlds. That sounds interesting, if not necessarily revolutionary. Videogame developers already model and build virtual worlds all the time. Project Genie’s simple concept, though, belies the tech’s potential impact. The new system, and the Genie 3 model behind it, have the potential to forever change how videogames are built and played. Model the World Most videogames today rely on a handful of game engines to render their virtual worlds so th…

The 2026 Winter Olympic Games kick off in Italy on Friday, with top athletes from across the world competing for not just any prize, but for the most expensive medals in Olympics history. The Milano Cortina-based games come as the value of precious metals have skyrocketed, most notably gold and silver. Gold was worth about $2,500 per ounce when the Paris Summer Olympics took place in 2024. Now, less than two years later, gold sits at just over $4,800 per ounce—and even that’s a significant drop from its recent record-high of about $5,600 per ounce just last week. Silver averaged around $28 per ounce during the last Olympic games, but is now valued at about $7…

Large-language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm, but they’re only one type of underlying AI model. An under-the-radar company, Fundamental, is set to bring a new type of enterprise AI model to the masses: large tabular models, or LTMs—which could have an even bigger impact for businesses. What are LTMs? A major difference between LLMs and LTMs is the type of data they’re able to synthesize and use. LLMs use unstructured data—think text, social media posts, emails, etc. LTMs, on the other hand, can extract information or insights from structured data, which could be contained in tables, for instance. Since many enterprises rely on structured data,…

Work has a way of waking up parts of us we thought we’d outgrown. You can move forward professionally, take on more visible roles, and be widely regarded as capable—and still find yourself unsettled by moments that seem, on the surface, fairly ordinary. A comment lingers longer than expected. A meeting leaves you tense for days. A role you worked hard to earn suddenly feels exposing rather than energizing. When that happens, it’s tempting to assume something is wrong now: that you’re underprepared, out of your depth, or simply not built for this level of responsibility. But often, what’s being stirred up has less to do with the present moment than with experiences…

Bob’s Discount Furniture, a Connecticut-based furniture retailer backed by Bain Capital, is putting it all on the table. The company is going public, with shares expected to begin trading on Thursday, February 5, after being priced at $17. The retailer raised $331 million in its initial public offering (IPO). Shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol BOBS. The IPO was originally announced last month. The company’s retail operations are expansive—it has more than 200 locations in 26 states as of September of last year, but the East Coast is its stronghold. Data from Renaissance Capital shows that 61% of its revenue came…

AI coding agents are suddenly everywhere, the latest thing Silicon Valley cannot stop talking about. From venture-backed startups to splashy big tech keynotes, the promise sounds the same: just describe what you want, and the AI will build it for you. It is a seductive idea, especially in a world where software projects are notorious for moving slowly. But inside large companies, that vision is already starting to unravel. What looks impressive in a demo often falls apart in the real world. As soon as AI-generated code runs into actual enterprise data, the problems show up. Schemas clash, governance breaks down, and a supposed breakthrough can quickly turn into a liab…

What can viewers expect from Bad Bunny’s highly anticipated Super Bowl halftime performance? So far, all we know is that he’s expected to perform solely in Spanish, bringing Latin identity at the center of America’s most-watched television event. But Bad Bunny could reveal more details Thursday in San Francisco when the Grammy winner speaks ahead of Sunday’s game. Apple Music’s Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden will interview Bad Bunny and pregame performers beginning at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Thursday. The Puerto Rican superstar has become one of the world’s most streamed artists with albums such as “Un Verano Sin Ti” and “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which won album of year at Gra…

Chevrolet’s latest splashy ad has all the hallmarks of a campaign strategically tied to America’s 250th anniversary. There’s the modern interpretation of a 75-year-old jingle that’s sung by an up-and-coming country singer. A bird’s-eye view of a pickup truck atop a natural landmark in Utah. A television debut on February 6 during the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics. In every choice, Chevrolet is carving out friendly, apolitical terrain at a moment when Americans have mixed feelings about such patriotism. A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American, according to a Gallup survey from last year. That’s down 9 percentag…

The Super Bowl is mere days away and chances are you’ve seen most of the ads already. Right? Let’s rewind for a 10-second Super Bowl ad history lesson that goes like this: In 2011, Volkswagen decided to drop its full ad—called “The Force”—online the Wednesday before the Super Bowl. This was brand marketer blasphemy! But it worked. Ever since, more and more brands began dropping ads earlier and earlier, which then evolved into creating teasers for the ads to run even earlier. If you’re confused as to why this happens, don’t sweat it, even Christopher Walken wasn’t sure in BMW’s 2024 Super Bowl teaser. Super Bowl commercials are no longer just Super Bow…