Pure Tech

Fast Company

Earlier this year, I had coffee with the chief investment officer of a large public pension fund. His fund doesn’t invest directly into venture (they have a fund of funds position instead), so my new CIO friend doesn’t usually get pitched...

Fast Company

QR codes have become a convenience of modern life. Just scan the black and white mosaic with your phone’s camera and you can do everything from connect to your hotel room Wi-Fi to pay for that public parking space to pull up a restaurant...

Fast Company

A race among the top AI companies to sell powerful models to the U.S. Defense Department is hotter than ever. No matter how the feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon ultimately plays out, the Pentagon is now more incentivized to contract...

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Hopefully you never find yourself left behind by a partner while hiking a mountain or abandoned in the woods. If you do, you might be a victim of an “alpine divorce.” The phrase has gained traction on social media in recent weeks following...

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Benson Lu’s life revolves around Pokémon. The 26-year-old has played the mobile game Pokémon Go every day for a decade, watches the animated show every week, goes to the local card shop in his Los Angeles suburb to play the brand’s trading...

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A public showdown between the Trump administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business. Anthropic CEO Dario...

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Shares in the financial technology company Block soared more than 20% in premarket trading Friday after its CEO announced it was laying off more than 4,000 of its 10,000 plus employees, reconfiguring to capitalize on its use of artificial...

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OpenAI’s Codex AI coding assistant is having a growth spurt. OpenAI tells Fast Company that its weekly active users have tripled since the start of the year, while overall usage (measured in tokens) has increased fivefold. The surge is...

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Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. In a remarkably influential 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen declared that software was...

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If you don’t want to be left behind by the AI revolution, you really need to start paying for it. At least that’s become the common refrain among some AI enthusiasts, who seem intent on instilling FOMO in less technical users. The free...

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It’s the last week of Black History Month (BHM) and it’s clear Americans are over performative values. Trite BHM-inspired merchandise sits on retailer shelves untouched while media is abuzz covering the artistry, activism, and symbolism of...

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Recently, Grok AI faced criticism after users found it was creating explicit images of real people, including women and children. Although xAI has now implemented some restrictions, this incident revealed a serious weakness. Without...

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What began as a race to build better AI models has escalated into a competition for compute, talent, and control. Foundation models—large-scale systems trained on vast datasets to generate text, images, code, and decisions—now underpin...

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For the first time in history, podcasts have overtaken talk radio as the most-listened-to medium for spoken-word audio in the United States. Podcasts, including video podcasts, eclipsed AM/FM talk radio (which notably doesn’t include...

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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...

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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...

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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. ...

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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...

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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...

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Communicating on group chats has quickly become a way of life, but what are the rules? We used to use email, the phone or talk in person. Now we use platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp or Slack to coordinate a night out with friends, a kids’...

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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...

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The hottest AI tool on the market today isn’t a powerful frontier model from the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic. Rather, it’s a kludgey, wildly complex, open-source platform that’s already provoked a trademark dispute, multiple corporate...

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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. More than 600,000 podcasts released 27 million episodes in 2025. Keeping up with even a tiny fraction...

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A new hotline is inviting Americans to congratulate the U.S. women’s hockey team after its historic Olympic gold medal win—and it’s already flooded with messages. Launched yesterday by the PR firm Jennifer Bett Communications in...

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Gen Z still believes in true love, even if the pursuit looks a little different from their parents’ generation. That’s according to a new Tinder x Harris Poll white paper shared exclusively with Fast Company. The survey was conducted...

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Discord, the popular platform for gamers to communicate online, is postponing its controversial age verification policy after receiving swift backlash from users with concerns about their privacy. The global rollout of the system...

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Early drivers steered cars by pushing a lever left and right. That was fine at slow speeds, but disastrous when you accelerated. It took years before the steering wheel arrived. Granola CEO Chris Pedregal says AI interfaces are still in...

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After a fairly significant hardware upgrade in 2025, it’s sounding like things will be quieter for the iPhone this year. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in his newsletter this week that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will “represent...

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Generative AI may be both the most useful and the most mystifying tool of our modern-tech era. The problem—aside from all the endlessly documented issues around accuracy—is that generative AI generally seems to function in a DOS-like blank...

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The Epstein Files are dominating nightly news broadcasts and newspaper front pages. But in the media ecosystem there’s another format that’s proving a massive draw to news consumers: a podcast run by a non-journalist and entirely generated...

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Dark Sky was a rarity in the app world. Universally beloved, the weather app had an uncanny ability to tell you when to expect rain, down to the minute. So when Apple announced plans to buy it six years ago, there was a collective sigh of...

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San Francisco restaurant Mister Jiu’s is kicking off its 10th anniversary celebration next month with a three-part dinner series in its Chinatown kitchen. The restaurant will host 10 celebrated Chinese chefs from around the world,...

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U.S. Army personnel may be training for cyberwar, but their own web browsing is quietly feeding the surveillance economy. According to a recent study by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, corporate surveillance has deeply infiltrated...

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A year ago at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of using “ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” to justify restricting dissent, and warned that its speech rules posed a greater...

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A new word has entered the business headline writer’s lexicon over the last month: the “SaaSpocalypse.” Between mid-January and mid-February 2026, around a trillion dollars was wiped from the value of software stocks. The S&P North...

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When a new general-purpose technology emerges—be it railroads, electricity, computers, etc.—companies react in predictable ways. A small minority tries to reinvent themselves around it; the majority looks first for ways to cut costs. ...

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IBM stock was down 10% on Monday afternoon after Anthropic published a blog post about how its Claude Code tool can be used to modernize software written in the COBOL language, which handles large-scale batch transactions. Many of the...

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Friday’s news of a major shakeup at Microsoft’s Xbox division caught the gaming world by surprise. Phil Spencer, who has run Xbox for almost 12 years, announced his retirement, effective immediately—just months after Microsoft insisted he...

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Boom Supersonic wants to build the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner. Founded in 2014, the company set out to make air travel dramatically faster — up to twice the speed of today’s passenger jets — while also aiming for a...

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A turf war has broken out between the fandoms of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones over the highest-rated episode spot on IMDb. Released last month, the Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, set a century before the...

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The Ford Mustang Mach-E cruises down a London road choked with traffic, using its onboard AI system to avoid jaywalkers and cyclists, and navigate roadwork as it drives to its destination. The autonomous vehicle from British startup Wayve...

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After officials released millions of pages of documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, revelations in his emails and other files have led to the resignations of multiple corporate executives, new investigations into...

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If you walk into a grocery store in the Netherlands or Germany, you might not realize you’re being steered toward plant-based protein, from vegan tortellini to plant-based yogurt. But across Europe and the UK, major retailers are quietly...

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You’re interested in AI but you’re human: You’ve got emails to answer, deadlines to meet, and you don’t have 40 hours a week to sift through academic papers on large language models. You just want to know what’s happening, why it matters,...

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Public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has largely orbited a familiar worry: cheating. Will students use chatbots to write essays? Can instructors tell? Should universities ban the tech? Embrace it? These concerns...

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I’ve been using ChatGPT and other AI tools recently for quite a few things. A few examples: Working on strategy and operations for my latest business venture, Life Story Magic. Planning how to get the most value out of the...

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Biometric authentication—the ability to unlock your devices by using just your face or fingerprint—is one of the few smartphone features that, even today, leave me feeling like we’re living in the future. When I was a kid, technology like...

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The Class of 2020 still aren’t over the COVID-19 pandemic cancelling their graduation. Apparently they never stop bringing it up, according to TikTok. Now their complaints are being used as a punchline. Being robbed? “Did you know that I...

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OpenAI, the maker of the most popular AI chatbot, used to say it aimed to build artificial intelligence that “safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” mission statement. But the ChatGPT maker seems...

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It’s hard to tell AI news from AI hype at the best of times, but the most recent surge around agents, triggered by many developers embracing Claude Code a couple of months ago, feels like something different. With the viral freakout over...