Adoption of artificial intelligence seems to be happening at, well, the speed of AI. Instant everything doesn’t always translate to instant return on investment. Jumping on the AI bandwagon without knowing what outcomes you want and how you plan to measure them makes for much noise without any real traction.

Years ago, when I was the director of a strategic design MBA program, I would invite business leaders to join our graduate students over dinner and conversation. Inevitably, there was a moment in the recounting of their origin story when these successful leaders would reference a significant crossroads that required some major decision making. But they didn’t reference rationale and logic. Instead, they mused that “something told me not to do the deal” or “something told me to work with Lucy instead of Jim, even though Lucy didn’t have as impressive a pedigree.” 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back hard against recent “doomsday” warnings about artificial intelligence on Sunday, telling CBS there is a “0% chance” of an AI doomsday scenario by 2030 and calling AI leaders “irresponsible” for frightening people unnecessarily.

From what wool coat to buy ahead of the winter season, to what home appliance is a must-have, consumers have increasingly become reliant on influencers on their social media feeds recommending them their latest purchases. That is, until AI entered the room.

Required minimum distributions are unwelcome for many high-income retirees because of the implications for their tax bills. RMDs are taxed as ordinary income and can have knock-on tax effects, leading to more tax on Social Security benefits and higher Medicare costs.

The good news is that the RMD starting age has been sliding upward. It was stuck at 70.5 through 2019, but the original Secure Act moved it to 72 in 2020. Secure 2.0 extended the starting RMD age to 73 in 2023, and the RMD age will move up to 75 starting in 2033.

Here’s what RMD-subject investors should have on their radars now.

Yesterday, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMD) became the latest member of one of the world’s most exclusive clubs: companies worth $1 trillion or more.

Typically, the fall season smells like cinnamon sticks and fire pits. But this year, it’s about to smell like one of the most divisive holiday treats in existence: candy corn. 

Bill Gates told his foundation’s Goalkeepers gathering that “increased generosity” and “the smart use of AI” together could accelerate the fight against inequality, urging the world’s richest countries to expand international aid and apply artificial intelligence toward what he considers “lifesaving innovations.”

“We failed to build in the right human values and ways of keeping our moral code controlling what these AIs do,” Gates, the foundation’s chair, said during a Monday conversation with political commentator Van Jones at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

The Gates Foundation’s annual event, usually hosted the week of the United Nations’ high-level meetings, opened with a reminder: 26 of the world’s 34 wealthiest nations decreased development aid to poorer countries last year. Meanwhile, the U.N. has warned that progress on its sustainable development goals—lofty targets to reduce poverty, improve health and protect the environment by 2030—is “slow and uneven.”

The contraction comes at a time when Gates suggested “we have some of the best innovations ever to improve people’s lives.” His foundation spent much of its two-hour event elevating educators, farmers and health workers who are using AI to identify students’ learning gaps, combat pest infestations and better recall patients’ medical records.

The Gates Foundation also touted its new coalition of Anthropic, Google, OpenAI Foundation and dozens of other organizations working to make AI more accessible in underrepresented languages.

The partners—60 in total, according to Monday’s announcement—include frontier AI labs, corporations, philanthropies and others already working to expand the number of languages available in AI tools that the Gates Foundation believes could combat global inequality. The coalition aims to reach more than 3 billion people over five years by better coordinating existing efforts.

It’s work that must continue “full speed ahead,” according to Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, even as some of the largest AI companies urge their industry to slow down development of advanced models. Governments must regulate the impacts on cybersecurity or children’s development, he said, while they extend AI’s humanitarian applications to poor communities currently “shut out” from the technology.

“Even if AI was frozen right now—which I don’t expect and I am not calling for—we would want to be building these language sets and making them usable with the tools that we have available right now,” Suzman told The Associated Press.

The collaboration follows last week’s Goalkeepers report, where the foundation committed $1 billion toward AI-focused efforts to improve health outcomes, upgrade educational tools and inform small farmers’ practices around the world. Unrepresentative language data could lead a model to mistranslate a pregnant Malawi woman saying her “water has broken” into the direct English that she’d “thrown away water,” the report warned.

The “original sin” is that many AI tools were trained on language data scraped from the internet, according to Mozilla Data Collective CEO E.M. Lewis-Jong, whose company was incubated by the Mozilla Foundation and is now a subsidiary of the not-for-profit Mozilla.org. The data-sharing platform seeks to help communities upload cultural and linguistic data sets on their own terms rather than have that data taken from the web without their explicit consent.

“The internet is not a representative space,” she said. “Why would you think that you were going to get a culturally diverse and representative system out of something that was predominantly trained on Reddit?”

Details such as the coalition’s governance are still getting hammered out, according to Suzman. A secretariat will track each signatory’s commitments and the Gates Foundation may nudge partners to fill larger gaps when necessary.

Google, a member of the coalition, has been funding an effort to collect more than 150,000 hours of audio across every district in India. Known as Project Vaani, the push underscores the need to gather speech data on dialects within languages, according to Google senior vice president James Manyika. To get there, he said, Google is working with local partners to record speech in the field.

Anthropic, whose CEO published an essay calling for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements, was already working with the foundation to speed up vaccine developments and bolster its chatbot’s data set of local crops. Elizabeth Kelly, the head of beneficial deployments at Anthropic, acknowledged the company’s products “lag in many African languages in particular.”

“We’re acutely aware that we can’t achieve any of the benefits we want to see in terms of improving patient outcomes or improving literacy and numeracy for students across the globe unless we actually get this language piece right,” she told AP.

TGI Fridays has continued to see its physical U.S. store footprint shrink since it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late 2024.

This session celebrates a new Fast Company recognition program: Fast Company Pacesetters. These are executives who are innovating at the intersection of AI, technology, and the customer experience. How can companies use AI to remove friction without sacrificing trust? What does it mean to design experiences that are not only smarter, but truly natural? If you have customers, you won’t want to miss the insights these leaders will deliver. Pacesetters is presented by TCS.

While many parts of the country are still experiencing hot weather, it’s comforting to know cooler temperatures could be on the way with the changing times.

Jeff Bezos has repeated the same mantra for three decades: two words he credits with Amazon’s astonishing growth from a Seattle garage to the world’s largest company.

You probably know friends or family members who didn’t vote in the last election. Patagonia wants to offer you $100 to nudge three of them to vote in November.

Caraway spent years designing pretty pans without the toxic coatings. Next, it’s coming for the coffee maker. 

Damaged communications lines at a key air traffic control facility in Philadelphia had been repaired, allowing airports across the U.S. Northeast to resume operations after hours of disruptions, the nation’s transportation secretary said Monday evening.

Hundreds of flights were canceled, including more than 600 into and out of Newark Liberty International Airport, as the outage hit every major airport in the New York City area. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also said in an online post that “it will take some time to clear all existing delays” despite the repairs.

The primary communications line at the Federal Aviation Administration facility in Philadelphia had failed earlier Monday, while the backup fiber optic line was inadvertently severed by railroad construction workers. The failures left controllers without radar or communications for hours.

The outage brought commercial air traffic to a near-standstill at Newark for much of the day, with no commercial flights landing at the airport from about 9:40 a.m. to just after 5:20 p.m. local time, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.

More than 200 flights into and out of Philadelphia International Airport were also canceled, while disruptions hit LaGuardia and Kennedy airports in New York. By Monday evening, flights were resuming at those airports.

Some airlines were allowing customers to change flights without charge. The FAA advised travelers to check the status of their flights before heading to the airport.

The outage occurred just as President Donald Trump and numerous foreign leaders were flying into New York City for the U.N. General Assembly. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney missed an event Monday on the sidelines of the General Assembly because of the flight disruptions but his office said he had arrived in New York by Monday night.

Cindy Phan said her morning flight from Newark to Minneapolis was repeatedly delayed before she learned around 3 p.m. that it had been canceled and rescheduled for Tuesday, requiring her to find and pay for another night at a hotel.

“We could have had a whole day in New York,” Phan said, adding that she wanted to get home to her “two little Chihuahua babies.”

Shannon Franke and her husband took a connecting flight from Nashville to Chicago when they found out their final Southwest leg home to Philadelphia was canceled. They had gone to Nashville to see the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Tennessee Titans 24-20 on a touchdown in the last seconds Sunday.

Stuck in Chicago, Franke said, they lucked out finding a hotel room and decided to enjoy some deep-dish pizza.

“We’re just making the best of it,” Franke said. “If the Eagles would have lost … it would have been so much worse.”

The technical problems stem from the same FAA facility in Philadelphia that caused numerous disruptions at the Newark airport last spring.

Regional control centers like these have two lines that carry radar and communications data in and out: the primary and the backup. The FAA said a circuit on the primary failed Monday morning, and when the system tried to switch to the backup, workers discovered that the fiber optic line had been cut.

Earlier in the day, Duffy said an Amtrak construction crew was to blame. Amtrak, however, pointed to a New Jersey Transit construction crew that was working in the area between Newark and New Brunswick, New Jersey.

FAA administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters earlier the agency had focused on fixing the primary connection as soon as possible by installing a new circuit on the primary line, while also working to repair the backup fiber optic line. Verizon said at the time that its technicians were also working to restore service.

Bedford earlier described the fiber break as “massive,” saying it would take several hours to repair, according to a video posted online by a CBS reporter.

The primary circuit that failed is due to be replaced as part of a massive overhaul of the nation’s air traffic control system.

Also Monday, the FAA began testing a new computer system that uses AI to help predict schedule conflicts and weather issues to help air traffic controllers reroute traffic. But that system is initially being tested only in the Washington, D.C., area, so it did not appear to be linked to the outages.

PepsiCo may be known for beverages, but it is also one of the world’s largest food companies. Ensuring a sustainable, resilient supply of agricultural ingredients is a business priority—and transformation starts in the fields. Perry Farms in Southern Alberta, Canada, has grown potatoes for Lay’s for more than four decades. Here, the family farmers demonstrate how they use regenerative practices and technology to strengthening soil health and crop resilience.

Forty-five billion. That’s how many potatoes are used every year to make Lay’s, Ruffles, and other snacks produced by food and beverage giant PepsiCo. These potatoes are a crucial link in PepsiCo’s global supply chain, so it’s in the company’s best interest to make sure every farmer’s annual harvest is dependably strong.

Shares in both Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery have received a significant boost over the past 24 hours after multiple states agreed to settle a lawsuit seeking to block the merger between the two Hollywood giants.