If you listen to the brightest minds in tech right now, you might think human disease is just a software bug waiting for a patch. At the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—drawing on his background in biophysics—predicted that AI could condense a century of biological progress into a single decade, potentially doubling human lifespans. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel laureate behind Google DeepMind, recently floated a similarly audacious timeline, suggesting that AI could help eliminate all diseases within 10 years. Hassabis aims to shrink the decade-long drug design process down to mere months. I’ve spent my…
Author: Staff Writer
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. This week, I’m focusing on OpenAI’s gigantic new funding round and valuation. I also look at a recent leak around Anthropic’s models, and at backlash to ads placed in GitHub Copilot. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me…
I just returned from Canada, where I spoke in Calgary and in Vancouver. I found the support for Alberta separation rising rapidly. There is no doubt that Alberta will separate. The only question is how and when. I explained that while this may be an emotional issue in Canada, it is part of the GLOBAL SEPARATION TREND! This is simply a part of the reality behind the rise and fall of all nation-states. It is primarily driven by the age-old problem that centralized governments, once established, constantly seek to expand their power. Since Marxism, they have gone into socialism under…
Artificial intelligence-generated content is everywhere these days, making it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction, particularly when it comes to breaking news.Look no further than the Iran war. Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, researchers have identified an unprecedented number of false and misleading images that were generated using artificial intelligence and have reached countless people around the world. Among them, fake footage of bombings that never happened, images of soldiers who were supposedly captured and propaganda videos created by Iran that depict President Donald Trump and others as blocky, Lego-like miniatures.Thursday, the 10th annual…
U.S. egg prices have fallen 60% from last year’s record highs, making it easier for consumers to fill their Easter baskets and Passover Seder plates.Bird flu was to blame for elevated retail prices during the first five months of 2025, and the course of the highly contagious disease is a big reason why prices are much lower now. An outbreak forced farmers and commercial producers to slaughter entire broods of egg-laying hens, but ebbing cases in the second half of last year helped restore egg supplies, said Mark Jordan, the executive director of agricultural research firm LEAP Market Analytics.The stubborn…
President Donald Trump said U.S. forces will keep hitting Iran “very hard” in the next two or three weeks and bring the country “back to the Stone Ages,” even as he touted the success of U.S. operations and argued that all of Washington’s objectives have so far been met or exceeded.Trump said Iran would continue to face a barrage of attacks in the short term.“We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”Trump didn’t say anything about negotiations with…
What if you didn’t actually decide to buy that last thing in your cart?A report from Visa released on Thursday suggests that, in some cases, you might not have. According to a survey from the financial services company, artificial intelligence is no longer just helping people shop. In many cases, AI is starting to shape what people buy, and in some cases, even act on their behalf. The research is based on surveys of both U.S. consumers and business decision-makers. It shows that AI systems are moving from assistants to participants in commerce. That influence is already showing up in…
A newsletter about the state of the product job market recently went viral in the design corner of the internet. It’s exposing a widespread debate about whether the role of the designer is narrowing in the age of AI. On March 24, Lenny Rachitsky, a former Airbnb product developer and author of the business Substack Lenny’s Newsletter, published an article featuring exclusive data on the state of tech hiring in early 2026. The data was collected by TrueUp, a tech job marketplace tracker. Overall, it paints a positive picture for the tech job market. But for designers it points to…
“Houston, we have a problem.” The misquoted phrase is so ingrained in popular culture that it has become the standard comeback to any unexpected mishap. It’s also the last phrase NASA’s Artemis II mission control wants to hear in the coming days because, unlike those of us on Earthly terrain, an astronaut midway to the moon won’t be muttering it after they accidentally burn their toast. A four-person crew took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1 for NASA’s first lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972. The organization has done everything it can to ensure the…
The Supreme Court is casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship in a consequential case that was magnified by Trump’s unparalleled presence in the courtroom. Conservative and liberal justices on Wednesday questioned whether Trump’s order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens comports with either the Constitution or federal law. Trump, the first sitting president to attend arguments at the nation’s highest court, spent just over an hour inside the courtroom for arguments made by the Republican administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer. The president departed…