Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025/2026 i Fast Company

NO, YOU'RE NOT HALLUCINATING: THIS ISSUE IS packed with fresh reporting about AI. Artificial intelligence is the most exhaustively covered technology since the dawn of the internet. As any tech editor will tell you, it can be challenging to find stories that are not merely new but big. So when our editorial director, Jill Bernstein, forwarded me a pitch from journalist John Pavlus, who wanted to write about a “mad scientist” attempting to “stomp out hallucinations and other gen-AI nonsense from Amazon's cloud security/chatbots/robots/agents,” I said yes in seconds. (He actually used a more pungent term than “nonsense,” but for decorum's sake, I'm keeping that to myself.) And then I braced myself. The pitch promised to explain the “abstruse formal mathematics” behind “neuro-symbolic AI,” a totally different kind of AI…

Sitting on a coffee table in his Chelsea office in New York City and surrounded by framed wedding invitations on the walls, Justin McLeod is worrying about AI. Specifically, the cofounder and CEO of dating app Hinge is concerned that his users — many of whom have asked him to their weddings over the years —might fall in love with it instead of one another. MCLEOD HAS SPENT THE GREATER part of the past 15 years studying the dynamics of human relationships, including what makes one person fall for another, and he sees that chatbots offer exactly what many people crave. “Why would I invest in these hard human relationships with people that are not always available or might reject me when I can talk to this thing that is right…

30-Second Bio Name: Matthew Prince Title: Cofounder and CEO, Cloudflare Education: Bachelor's degree in English and computer science, Trinity College; JD, University of Chicago Law School; MBA, Harvard Business School CV Highlights: Ski instructor, Park City Mountain Resort; adjunct professor, John Marshall Law School; cofounder and chairman, Unspam Technologies; co-creator, Project Honey Pot Cloudflare has often been described as some version of “the most important internet company you've never heard of.” But for the better part of 2025, cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has been trying to change that. THE COMPANY'S CORE BUSINESS is to improve the performance and enhance the security of websites and online applications, protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its data centers to optimize performance. “Six billion people pass through our network every…

WHEN LEVI'S CEO MICHELLE GASS WAS IN JAPAN last summer, she and chief product officer Karyn Hillman wandered down the street from the brand's store in Tokyo's trendy Harajuku neighborhood to a small, unassuming vintage shop called BerBerJin. They took the stairs down into its cavernous basement, where it keeps racks and racks of its best denim finds, and began the slow, laborious task of searching for treasure. A couple of hours later, Gass walked out with a pair of 1947 vintage 501s and an even rarer 1952 trucker jacket. “We tried on so many, many pairs of jeans,” Gass tells me over coffee in her San Francisco office in September. “You appreciate the nuances and beauty of denim, how it ages and how it's worn. There are these incredible…

For the past year, for the first time in Dr Pepper's 140-year history, the brand has been the second-most-popular soda in America. As of October 2025, it commanded a 12.2% volume share of soft-drink sales, per Circana. It has held onto second place largely by appealing to Gen Z— launching flavors conducive to the growing “dirty soda” trend—and expanding its college football sponsorships. With its limited-edition Dr Pepper Creamy Coconut, the brand capitalized on the TikTok trend of people making “dirty soda” with Dr Pepper by mixing it with cream and flavored syrups. The coconut-flavored soda—introduced in summer 2024 and resurrected in summer 2025—is Dr Pepper's most successful limited-time variety to date. The flavor, and buzz from dirty soda's prominence in Hulu's popular show Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, helped…

IN SEPTEMBER, UNIVERSITY OF Colorado Boulder freshman Julian “Juju” Lewis took the field for the first time as a Buffaloes quarterback. But his journey to Boulder started almost a year earlier, when he committed to the university in December 2024, live on ESPN's Pat McAfee Show. During a six-minute segment, the Carrollton, Georgia, native talked about his decision to play under the head coach, longtime NFL player Deion Sanders, while wearing a pair of white headphones around his neck. They weren't Apple or Beats or Sony or Bose. They were JLab, a 20year-old electronics brand that has quietly become a fixture on TikTok. Some 1,500 active users, largely millennial and Gen Z, consistently crank out content about the brand's wireless audio products, which include over-ear headphones, retro-inspired on-ear models, wireless…

FOR A WEEKEND IN LAS VEGAS this past summer, the Kingpin Suite at the Palms Casino was decked out to resemble an exclusive club, with colorful felted tables, bespoke cocktails, and even a private bowling alley. It was all created around an unexpected card game for Sin City: Uno. The suite was an Uno Social Club—the first of a multicity campaign throughout 2025 to highlight two crucial aspects of the game: that it's best played in real life, and that it's a highly social affair (up to 10 people can play with a single deck). “We've lost the art of connecting in real life,” says Ray Adler, VP and global head of games at Mattel, which has sold the 54-year-old card game since acquiring it in 1992. “We thought, How…

IN FLORIDA, FAMILIES HAVE A lot of options to choose—and pay for—the right education for their kids. In addition to public schools, Floridians can use taxpayer funds to pay for private schools or to cover homeschooling, tutoring, and even school supplies for their students in pre-K through 12th grade. The nonprofit organization Step Up for Students is responsible for administering scholarships for these families. In the past three years, the organization has grown by more than 200% and currently serves more than half a million students. Managing that kind of rapid growth can be difficult for any organization. At Step Up for Students, it meant rethinking how decisions were made and how problems could be solved across the organization. It also meant encouraging employees to unleash their creativity. “We believe…

RACHEL TAYLOR BEGAN HER CAREER AS A CREATIVE director in the advertising business, a job that gave her plenty of opportunity to micromanage the final product. “I had control of the script,” she remembers. “I could think about the intonation, and I could give the actor notes.” That was before she pivoted to helping AI companies shape the personality of their assistants. Rather than handing a digital helper a script, the best she can do is point it in the right direction: The technology “sometimes feels like a toddler that you give a permanent marker to and see what it writes on the wall,” she says. After joining DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman's startup Inflection AI in 2023, Taylor was one of dozens of staffers who followed Suleyman to Microsoft, where…

BEFORE MOST PEOPLE STARTED THINKING ABOUT GENERATIVE AI, IMBUE cofounder and CEO Kanjun Qiu was worrying about its future. Qiu had established a co-living community in San Francisco called the Archive, where she counted among her housemates several working in AI, providing her with an early sense of how AI might further consolidate power among the big tech companies. “There's this growing sense that both digital technology and AI are happening to people, they're not necessarily happening with us or for us,” she says. Imbue, which emerged from stealth in late 2022, aims to help people create their own AI tools. It's working on an AI-assisted software development tool called Sculptor, which became open to public preview in late September. “What we're trying to do is create a tool that…

IN WASHINGTON'S SCRAMBLE TO govern artificial intelligence, few have had as much influence as Dean Ball. A former research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, Ball was the principal author of the AI Action Plan, which the White House released in July. Depending on whom you ask, the document will either secure the United States’ lead in AI or unleash reckless proliferation. The plan focuses on accelerating innovation through deregulation, streamlining the construction of data centers, and driving the adoption of American-made AI tools abroad. It includes popular provisions like embracing open-source AI, along with divisive ones such as requiring federal agencies to work only with LLM developers whose AI models are “free from top-down ideological bias” and withholding AI funding from states that pass AI laws…

AI DATA CENTERS CONSUME MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF POWER. SO why aren't more AI processors designed to use less? SambaNova hopes to solve this problem with its Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs), which provide an alternative to traditional graphics processors for AI inference—the application of trained models to new data that happens when we use AI apps. Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova's cofounder and CEO, compares traditional GPUs to a cook that prepares each dish individually. SambaNova's RDUs, in contrast, operate like an assembly line that processes each part of an AI request in sequence. The goal: to slash power requirements for AI inference, while also reducing latency. Customers with strict privacy requirements can run servers with SambaNova's RDUs on site, or they can have the company manage them in the cloud. “We found…

FROM MOUNTAINTOP PERCHES across 13 states, Pano AI's cameras scan the horizon, searching for wisps of smoke that humans might overlook for hours. “Today's fires are spreading much more quickly,” says CEO Sonia Kastner, who cofounded Pano AI in 2020. “You don't have time for slow detection, slow assessment, slow buildup of resources.” Pano's system detects wildfires in a median of 3.5 minutes—revolutionary compared with traditional 911 alert times. It triangulates fire locations within hundreds of meters and alerts multiple agencies at once. Kastner's eight-person AI team has spent five years training models to spot fires and distinguish smoke from dust or clouds. “Quietly, computer vision has gotten really, really good,” she says. While enterprises (and more and more states) have embraced the system—the company has secured more than $140…

UP IN THE CASCADE MOUNTAINS, 90 miles east of Seattle, a group of high-ranking Amazon engineers gather for a private off-site. They hail from the company's North America Stores division, and they're here at this Hyatt resort on a crisp September morning to brainstorm new ways to power Amazon's retail experiences. Passing the hotel lobby's IMAX-like mountain views, they filter into windowless meeting rooms. Down the hall, the off-site's keynote speaker—Byron Cook, vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon—slips into an empty conference room to have some breakfast before his presentation. Cook is 6-foot-6, but with sloping shoulders that make his otherwise imposing frame appear disarmingly concave. He's wearing a rumpled version of his typical uniform: a thick black hoodie and loose black pants hanging slightly high at the ankles.…

FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, global laundry brand Dirt Is Good has built its identity around a bold idea: Stains are proof of a life well lived. This message has helped the brand cut through the noise in the highly competitive and commoditized laundry market by focusing on meaning, not just performance. “The act of getting dirty can benefit people in an emotional, psychological, and even physiological way,” says Tati Lindenberg, chief marketing officer for home care at Unilever, the brand's parent company. “Consider how kids play and explore through hands-on experience. They inevitably get dirty, but they learn in the process, and that is something to be celebrated, not avoided.” This philosophy has fueled two decades of brand messaging that reframes laundry as a symbol of growth, connection, and…

1 STOCKPILING AND SUNSETTING INVENTORY On the Q2 earnings call in July, Levi's CFO Harmit Singh referenced a 15% rise in inventory costs. Those are all the expenses associated with acquiring or making products to sell, such as materials, labor, freight, and storage. CEO Michelle Gass cited “a massive effort” by the company to move products to the markets where they'd be most likely to sell (and eliminate products less likely to sell). These moves helped Levi's sustain 7% revenue growth through its third quarter. 2 DIVERSIFYING SUPPLY CHAIN Gass explained in the company's Q3 earnings call on October 9 how Levi's is reducing orders from countries with high tariffs, like China, and turning instead to lower-tariff countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Pakistan. “This diversification allows us to better manage…

While some fandoms embrace cosplay and conventions, when it comes to BBC-owned video streamer BritBox, “We don't have that same type of demographic,” says Robert Schildhouse, BritBox president of North America and general manager of international. Its 4 million–plus subscribers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and several Nordic countries may be of a subtler stripe, but they are passionate about British productions, which tend to have highly trained crew members and star actors funneled through prestigious drama schools. It's a sensibility American viewers have been increasingly willing to seek out, with the service reporting 20% year-over-year revenue growth as of March 2025. In April, BritBox rolled out its most extensive brand campaign yet. The single-shot, time-lapse ad opens on a woman sitting on her sofa. Makeup artists and costumers transform…

AS AI MODELS BECOME BIGGER AND MORE SOPHISTATED, THEY require more and more memory to store ever-growing amounts of data. While the technology that has traditionally been used for AI data storage—called dynamic random access memory (DRAM) has long advanced computing performance, today's AI models are growing so rapidly that memory is reaching what's called the “memory wall”—a gap between processing power and the capacity required to feed it. Earlier this year, Sandisk, a California-based tech company that designs and manufactures flash memory products, unveiled a solution: High Bandwidth Flash (HBF). HBF's innovation is to stack flash memory in a completely new way, delivering significantly greater capacity than traditional High Bandwidth Memory and potentially enabling wide-scale AI usage at less cost and energy expenditure. “It's a very different technology that…

YOU HEAR THE BLURPS AND BLOOPS AFTER YOU PASS the food court in the Mall of Georgia on a fall Sunday afternoon, the unmistakable sound of points being scored and players eliminated. Then you see him: Standing in an oversize vitrine is a 6-foot animatronic rodent. He's grinning and waving, but frozen in place, preserved like a museum piece. This isn't an outpost of Chuck E. Cheese, the 48-year-old family pizza chain with more than 460 restaurants in 45 states and another 88 abroad. It's Chuck's Arcade, a fledgling new enterprise launched this past summer by parent company CEC Entertainment in an effort to expand the brand's reach to Gen Xers, nostalgic millennials, and teens who have outgrown the flagship. These 13-and-counting old-school arcades are crammed with a dizzying mix…

AI'S THREAT TO ACTORS BECAME very real in 2025 with the rise of Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated actress that, according to her creators, may soon compete with humans for gigs. Hollywood is indeed beginning a process of integrating generative AI into productions, which could displace actors and others. But AI could also be used to expand a filmmaker's creative vision by generating ambitious scenes or effects that would be too expensive to shoot, says Naeem Talukdar, CEO of the video-generation model developer Moonvalley. “Every project you see on the big screen is a result of an endless amount of creative compromises from the directors and the filmmakers,” he says. Moonvalley, which has raised $154 million, works with four of Hollywood's biggest studios, advising them on how to integrate AI into…

A CARDIOLOGIST AT THE UNIVERsity of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Shiv Rao is the cofounder of Abridge, an AI-driven platform that records doctor-patient conversations in real time. The AI works across more than 100 languages and can distinguish when a doctor, patient, or translator is speaking to make the most accurate records. Abridge is also integrated into medical platforms such as Athenahealth and Wolters Kluwer, where it can fill out forms and expedite tasks like insurance pre-authorization or writing prescriptions. Rao, who has experience as a tech investor with UPMC, developed the idea while making his rounds. His hospital's proximity to Carnegie Mellon, a tech hub, gave him a firsthand look at machine learning. That led him to found his company in 2018, long before ChatGPT came around. Abridge, which…

BEFORE PAUL A GOLDMAN BECAME Salesforce's first in-house ethicist in 2019, she earned a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. That training remains central to her work, which now includes helping product teams set guardrails for AI behavior, testing tools for safety, and engaging policymakers on trustworthy AI. Goldman had already been immersed in these questions at eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's impact investment firm, where she evaluated the social consequences of emerging technology. Goldman is now helping refine Salesforce's ethical principles around the deployment and testing of generative AI and agentic tools. Her team has helped develop systems to ensure AI follows instructions, avoids toxic behavior, and stays within established ethical guidelines. “Those types of tools are increasingly important as AI takes on more autonomy,” she says. “You want to make…

AFTER DECADES OF AI RESEARCH, WAABI CEO Raquel Urtasun believes she has found what it takes to build a better self-driving truck. Urtasun began her career in academia about 25 years ago, focusing much of her research on autonomous-driving technologies like object detection and semantic segmentation. “There was a lot of innovation that needed to happen in order to enable the revolution that we see today,” she says. Following a stint as chief scientist at Uber's self-driving car unit, Urtasun launched Waabi in 2021 to build a verifiable, human-interpretable AI model for autonomous driving. Waabi-enabled big rigs have been on public roads since 2023 and are slated for driverless operation by the end of 2025. Though many autonomous truck systems are limited to highways and depots, Waabi's technology is designed…

BEFORE DAVID KOSSNICK WORKED AT FIGMA, HE WAS ONE OF THE WILDLY popular web-based design platform's millions of users, and full of ideas for improving it. In March 2024, he was named to oversee the company's AI products—a critical element of its growth strategy after its August 2025 IPO— offering him the opportunity to do more than daydream about its future. The fruits of Kossnick's labor are more and more apparent. AI features now span Figma's portfolio, from its flagship Design app to the new Make vibe coding tool to features for creating slideshows, websites, and marketing assets. Given Figma's inherently multidisciplinary nature—two-thirds of its users work in areas outside design—the technology can knock down some of creativity's traditional boundaries, he asserts: “It's easier with the help of AI to…

IN EARLY 2023, JONATHAN SIDDHARTH ANTICIPATED THE COMing AI arms race. He quickly expanded the mission of his company, Turing, from a high-tech recruiting platform that matches companies with skilled remote-work technologists to become a source of large language model training data as well. “Basically, we went from finding smart software engineers to finding smart humans in every field and building a platform that could extract that human knowledge and skills and distill it into an LLM,” Siddharth says. Today, Turing supplies training data for eight of the nine companies developing the largest general-purpose AI models. The shift has also turned Turing into a quiet but central player in the artificial intelligence ecosystem, shaping what the next generation of AI systems will know. Turing is profitable and valued at roughly…

SHOPPING Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant, is powered by LLMs but uses automated reasoning to increase the accuracy and relevance of its responses. SECURITY Amazon's first application of automated reasoning finds bugs that human experts miss, providing AWS clients who have highly sensitive data an extra layer of security based on mathematical proof. WAREHOUSES Formal logic helps thousands of warehouse robots optimize routes and coordinate actions in close proximity. HALLUCINATION PREVENTION Automated Reasoning Checks, part of Amazon's Bedrock Guardrails toolkit (which provides safeguards for AI applications built on AWS), catches and corrects inaccurate responses from generative AI apps by converting them into formal logic. AI CODING Auto, a coding agent currently being built into Amazon's AI-powered programming tool Kiro, will use formal logic to ensure that synthetic code matches the…

ED ZITRON PEELS OFF HIS GREEN BUTTON-UP SHIRT TO REVEAL THE GRAY TEE BENEATH. NOW PROPERLY UNIFORMED, TWO CANS OF DIET COKE QUEUED UP BEFORE HIM, HE'S READY TO RECORD THIS WEEK'S EPISODE OF HIS PODCAST, BETTER OFFLINE, AT AUDIO BEHEMOTH IHEARTMEDIA'S MIDTOWN MANHATTAN STUDIO. THE TOPIC, AS USUAL, IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. One of Zitron's guests, screenwriter, director, and producer Brian Koppelman, talks about paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When Koppelman earnestly asks, “Do you not think AI is mind-bogglingly great at times?” Zitron's answer—“No!”—comes so quickly it seems to spring directly from his cerebral cortex. It would have been startling if he'd responded any other way. As AI has become the tech industry's principal obsession, Zitron—who runs a public relations firm that represents technology companies—has developed an…

IN TWO YEARS, THERE COULD BE A SPACE STATION orbiting the moon. NASA's Gateway Lunar Space Station, set to launch as early as 2027, will support the Artemis IV and V moon missions and, eventually, be a jumping-off point for missions to Mars. And maybe, one day, a colony. But before any of that can happen, the Gateway will need a power source—a powerful one, at that. The challenge is getting that energy supply into orbit the way anything reaches space: in the nose cone of a rocket. Gateway's power will come from a pair of blankets of photovoltaic cells, known as Roll-Out Solar Arrays (ROSAs). Each is roughly the size of a football end zone, and together they'll provide 60 kilowatts for 24 hours a day—enough energy to power roughly…

DEPENDING ON your perspective, data analytics company Palantir is saving Western civilization or is a Big Brother surveillance machine. Some view the company as a life-changing investment— Palantir's stock is up 314% in the last year and 1,750% since its 2020 IPO —others as exhibit A of an irrationally inflated bubble. The enterprise and government AI company is polarizing. But one thing is undeniable: Palantir is an unparalleled talent magnet. Former employees have founded hundreds of companies, forging one of the most powerful and underappreciated diasporas in business. “There are 360 companies we're tracking,” says Luba Lesiva, a Palantir alum who started Palumni VC to invest solely in startups founded or led by fellow Palantirians. “Another 30 to 40 have exited.” To understand the company's impact, we studied more than…

IN AN ICONIC SECOND-SEASON EPisode of The Office, beleaguered secretary Pam, drunk off a few too many Chili's margaritas, receives an award (for “whitest shoes”) and concludes her acceptance speech by declaring: “I feel God in this Chili's tonight.” The moment has been quoted, GIF'd, and clipped countless times since the episode aired in 2005—but the show's setting of Scranton, Pennsylvania, didn't have a local Chili's until April 2025. Opening a restaurant there, CMO George Felix says, was an opportunity to pull off what he calls a “culture pop”—a moment that inserts Chili's into the cultural conversation in an authentic way. Despite a modern exterior, the Scranton Chili's has a sign and decor straight out of 2005, plus a replica booth from the episode for photo ops. Chili's made TikToks…

“FANDOM DOESN'T TURN OFF AFTER you've binged a show,” says Netflix CMO Marian Lee. “When you engage so deeply in a story or feel so connected to a character, you want to be immersed in the universe.” She knows attachment like this is both personal and cultural. That's why, when Netflix released the second and third seasons of Squid Game—the global hit out of South Korea—within six months of each other, she had the company's Korean team lead the overall creative strategy. “It would be very American for us to say, ‘Okay, well, now that it's the biggest show, we're going to have our largest marketing and publicity teams in L.A. run the campaign,’” Lee says. The Korean team's efforts—for both seasons—were clear across global markets, where the series showed…

DIANA FROST IS KEEPING 156-YEAR-OLD HEINZ AT the center of cultural conversations. The Kraft Heinz global chief growth officer and her North America marketing team moved fast to build on an existing relationship with DJ Mustard (real name Dijon McFarlane) and the buzz from his extended name-check in Kendrick Lamar's “TV Off” and name him chief mustard officer in February. The same month, during the Grammy Awards telecast, Heinz aired an ad teasing a collaboration with McFarlane called Mustard x Mustard. The result—unveiled in June via Buffalo Wild Wings, then retail—was Mustaaaaaard, a chipotle honey mustard that marked the brand's first new mustard product in almost 10 years. The Mustard effort launched amid Kraft Heinz announcing the Heinz brand's 6% compound annual growth between 2022 and 2024. Part of Heinz's…

Afropunk The music festival found new global audiences for its programming. Amtrak The train line's “Retrain Travel” campaign got riders on the rails. Atlassian A Silicon Valley star got the software brand's users excited about Jira. Bobbie Meghan Trainor helped the formula brand destigmatize postpartum stress disorder. Bogg Bag Retailer-exclusive bags and college sports made the tote brand a beach staple. Brawny The paper towel brand refreshed the Brawny man to launch three-ply rolls. Bubble Skincare The Gen Z/Alpha fave's 100K+ ambassadors took TikTok by storm. Califia Farms The plant-based brand and 818 Tequila brought coconut-milk cocktails to Coachella. California Pizza Kitchen The pizza chain marked 40 years with former employee Busy Philipps. Calvin Klein The label's Bad Bunny ads boosted its sales and social following. Cargill The ag giant's…

AUGUSTUS DORICKO, FOUNDER AND CEO OF CLOUD-seeding startup Rainmaker, surveys the sky from a sun-baked hillside 5 miles from Utah's Great Salt Lake. On this balmy Sunday afternoon in late September, the lake is calm, but its serenity belies a potentially catastrophic problem: The Great Salt Lake is shrinking—and at risk of disappearing altogether. At its peak 40 years ago, the lake covered 2,300 square miles; today, more than 800 square miles of lake bed are exposed. As more of the lake dries, scientists warn that dust storms made up of toxic heavy metals could plague the Salt Lake Valley, home to 1.2 million people, and beyond. Rainmaker's futuristic technology could solve the state's water woes by harnessing nature. The startup flies drones into the troposphere, where they probe for…

LAST YEAR, OpenAI decided it had to pay more attention to its power users, the ones with a knack for discovering new uses for AI: doctors, scientists, and coders, along with companies building their own software around OpenAI's API. And so the company turned to post-training research lead Michelle Pokrass to spin up a team to better understand them. “The AI field is moving so quickly, the power-user use cases of today are really the median-user use cases a year from now, or two years from now,” Pokrass says. “It's really important for us to stay on the leading edge and build to where capabilities are emerging, rather than just focusing on what people are using the models for now.” Pokrass, a former software engineer for Coinbase and Clubhouse, came…

YOU MIGHT NOT SPEND A LOT OF TIME THINKING ABOUT YOUR web browser, whether it's Safari, Chrome, or something else. But the decades-old piece of software remains a pretty important canvas for getting things done. That's why Tara Feener, who spent years developing creative tools with companies such as Adobe, WeTransfer, and Vimeo, decided to join the Browser Company and within two years became head of engineering, overseeing its AI-forward Dia browser. “This is more ambitious than any of the other things I've done, because it's where you live your life, and where you create within,” she says. Whereas a conventional browser presents you with a search box on its home screen, Dia will either answer your query with AI or route it to a traditional search based on what…

FOR YEARS, THE FEEDS ON FACEBOOK, Instagram, and TikTok have devoured our attention. Mediated by opaque algorithms, they reduce users to passive consumers of content whose likes and shares tell the platform how to keep them scrolling and viewing ads. Karrie Karahalios is well-known for her research on the fairness of these social algorithms, studying their inputs and outputs. Since joining the MIT Media Lab in September, she has been expanding her research into ways of empowering individuals and communities to fight back against algorithmic overreach. This has led her to focus on “contestable systems,” which let human users “talk back” to algorithms, perhaps to contest a content moderation decision that may at first seem final. This could be through a set of preference settings to control the content of…

BRINGING A new drug to market usually requires a decade-long, multibillion-dollar journey, with a high failure rate in the clinical trial phase. Nvidia's Kimberly Powell is at the center of a major industry effort to apply AI to the challenge. “If you look at the history of drug discovery, we've been kind of circling around the same targets for a long time, and we've largely exhausted the drugs for those targets,” she says. A “target” is a biological molecule, often a protein, that's causing a disease. But human biology is extraordinarily complex, and many diseases are likely caused by multiple targets. “That's why cancer is so hard,” says Powell. “Because it's many things going wrong in concert that actually cause cancer and cause different people to respond to cancer differently.”…

TO FUEL STRATEGIES, COMPANIES, TEAMS, AND careers, thousands of leaders, innovators, and impact executives came together in September in New York City for Fast Company's 11th annual Innovation Festival. Onstage and off, leaders and changemakers showcased the transformational forces shaping our future and offered valued insights into how to leverage and manage those forces for positive impact. The speaker lineup featured thinkers and doers including author and professor Jonathan Haidt; actress and Pattern Beauty CEO Tracee Ellis Ross; Allison Ellsworth, cofounder of Poppi; Bozoma Saint John, CMO and mentor, On Brand With Jimmy Fallon; Starbucks’ CEO Brian Niccol; Luis von Ahn, cofounder and CEO, Duolingo; and more. At the Taste of Innovation dinners, guests savored curated dining experiences at some of New York's top restaurants: Naks, the Bazaar by José…

GOLD ZONE, NBC SPORTS’ WHIP-AROUND COVERAGE of the Olympics, didn't debut with the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. As far back as the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, the network had experimented with the format— using multiple screens to cover simultaneous live events, a technique that had been popularized since 2005 by RedZone coverage of the NFL. But Paris did mark the first time that Gold Zone had run on NBCUniversal's streaming service Peacock, providing real-time coverage of all 39 sports with zero embargoes. Gold Zone will return on Peacock for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games in February. MOLLY SOLOMON Executive producer and president, NBC Olympics & Paralympics Production AMY ROSENFELD Senior vice president, Olympics & Paralympics Production at NBC Sports SCOTT HANSON Host, Gold Zone; host, NFL RedZone…