When Federal Emergency Management Agency first responders raced to western North Carolina in the days after Hurricane Helene, they expected much of the devastation they found in its wake: totaled cars, crumbling roads, homes filled with mud or ruined by floodwaters or washed away entirely. What they didn’t expect was an alarming number of people
It’s been seven months since Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt entered stealth mode. Last March, he left his CCO perch at the online brokerage valued at $23 billion to quietly shift gears.
This week, he announced his new venture—the Silicon Valley space startup Aetherflux, which aims to beam solar power from space to remote regions where delivering power is expensive, challenging, or dangerous. The long-term goal is a kind of Starlink f
Some 30 million Americans across the country will have a new way to file their taxes next spring: Direct File, a tool developed by the Internal Revenue Service that allows users to prepare their taxes and file online completely free of charge and without the need for any third-party provider. The to
Marriott International has agreed to pay $52 million and make changes to bolster its data security to resolve state and federal claims related to major data breaches that affected more than 300 million of its customers worl
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
What Ben Horowitz’s flip-flopping presidential support says about the Valley
The award this week of Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics to a small number of artificial intelligence pioneers affiliated with Google has stirred debate over the compa
Ten years ago, streaming stick maker Roku released its first smart TVs in partnership with Hisense and TCL, two Chinese TV manufacturers that few had heard of in the U.S. at that time. In the years since, Roku has become the domestic smart TV market leader. Its hardware partners have become household names, and sold millions of uni
Mental health app Headspace has launched a generative AI-powered chatbot called Ebb for users to get instant, personalized support through life’s ebbs and flows, the company exclusively told Fast Company.
Ebb was specifically trained by clinical psychologists and data scientists in motivational interviewing, an evidence-based methodology that works to help people make positive behavioral changes. The chatbot has two paths: having users reflect on certain events (and then s
As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t often repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” We are fortunate that it does, because it means we can use lessons from the past at least as a rough guide to the present. The lessons can be lifesaving—literally—when we apply them to existential risks, of which the three biggest ones in our present time are climate change, weapons of mass destruction, and
