Shares of Reformation Inc. opened flat on Thursday after making their public debut on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

When Cherien Dabis entered the doors of Fast Company’s lower Manhattan offices, she was the picture of grace: Willowy and effervescent, she greeted me with the air of an old friend, though we had only connected once before.

Situational Awareness—an AI-focused hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner—made headlines on Thursday when it sold off investments and was unwinding trades after suffering massive losses on AI and software stocks, according to CNBC, who spoke with people familiar with the situation.

LinkedIn is pushing back against lengthy, low-quality posts generated with artificial intelligence, also known as “AI slop,” that users have become accustomed to seeing in their feeds. 

The job market may feel more crowded than ever, but how far would candidates go to set themselves apart? One startup put that to the test, challenging hopeful candidates to get a permanent tattoo in exchange for a guaranteed interview.

Your robot vacuum may pose an unacceptable risk to national security—at least, that’s how the U.S. government sees it.

Freelance designers are a vital part of the business ecosystem. They slide into companies’ work streams and make sure that products, apps, websites, logos, and other key deliverables not only function well but look great and attract the right kind of attention.
 
Yet being a freelance designer can be difficult. It’s hard to know exactly what to charge for various projects, what other designers are earning per year, how to stay on top of relentless AI developments (which may actually be hurting quality), and more. 
 
Which is why Fast Company, in collaboration with the American Institute of Graphic Arts, produced  the first ever Design Pricing Transparency Project.  The Fast Company editors behind the project, Jill Bernstein and Liz Stinson, together with AIGA’s Lee-Sean Huang, co-executive director of learning and programs, discuss the project and the insights it yields.
 
If you are a freelance designer, you’ll learn:

On July 29, President Donald Trump and U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revealed major plans to redesign and modernize Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C. Glowing press releases from United Airlines, USDOT, and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) tout the project as a “landmark transformation” that will make it into a “world-class gateway.”

If you can’t connect your work to a meaningful outcome, never hear back after a big push, or keep hitting walls on projects that matter to you, that’s not laziness. Here are five signs your work may be pointless and what to actually do about it. 

It’s been a choppy year for restaurants that lean into lettuce.

For years, premium credit card issuers competed with increasingly generous welcome bonuses, airport lounge access, and travel credits.

Technological progress is usually told as a story of accumulation. We imagine each generation inheriting everything the previous one learned and adding something new.

Flying to a rally at General Motors this week, President Donald Trump declared that “car companies are doing better than they’ve ever done” thanks to his tariffs.

“All because of Trump,” he said.

It was a message the Republican president repeated while touring a collection of new vehicles, predicting that “it’s amazing what tariffs will do for General Motors” before autographing a white Corvette commemorating America’s 250th anniversary. He later told a crowd of cheering supporters that “Michigan is thriving.”

That’s not exactly true, according to many metrics. Tariffs have cost businesses in Michigan and across the country billions of dollars while helping to stoke inflation that has continued to run hot — despite Trump’s assurances his business background would wipe it out.

Many Americans believe tariffs have pushed prices higher and the war in Iran has increased gasoline prices, hurting consumer confidence in the economy while keeping Trump’s approval ratings low.

There are few places where contradictions between the president’s boasts and the economic reality of his tariffs are more likely to collide ahead of November’s midterm elections than in battleground Michigan, which holds its primary on Tuesday. Trump won the state in 2016 and then again in 2024, after it had flipped to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

During Trump’s rally in Milford, northwest of Detroit, the crowd was adoring. But even some of his ardent supporters said prices are too high and tariffs had caused short-term economic pain — even as they still support him overall.

Lisa Scherer, a 64-year-old who used to run a landscaping company and work as a bus driver and union steward, acknowledged high gas prices are “hurting a lot” and it’s “very rough” to afford things.

“But I’m just hoping, if we hang in there,” she said, emphasizing she still thinks the president is doing a good job.

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.

Most Americans say the war in Iran has not been worth fighting, and President Donald Trump’s approval rating on Iran has fallen slightly since last month, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

The results are a stark repudiation of the Republican president’s approach to the conflict, which has dragged on far longer than he originally predicted.

About two-thirds of U.S. adults say the war with Iran, which began Feb. 28, has not been worthwhile, according to the new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That includes the vast majority of Democrats and independents, as well as about 37% of Republicans.

The poll was conducted July 23-27, as the U.S. and Iran paused attacks following a nearly two-week escalation in the war. During the escalation, the U.S. targeted Iranian military and commercial sites while Iran attacked U.S. military facilities in the Middle East, resulting in additional deaths of American service members. Since the war began, 18 U.S. service members have been killed, but the Trump administration has sought to revise those numbers.

The survey reinforces how unpopular the Iran war has become at home, a potential problem for congressional Republicans up for reelection in November who have defended Trump’s military actions. Just 28% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling Iran, a slight decline from 34% last month. Even Republicans appear to be increasingly unhappy with the prolonged conflict. Roughly 61% of Republicans approve of how Trump is handling Iran, an apparent decline from 71% in June. The margin of sampling error for Republicans is 6 points, so the decline is considered slight, but it’s still noteworthy given Republicans’ much higher approval of how Trump is handling the presidency overall.

Trump’s overall approval rating is at 33%, slightly below where he stood at this point in his first term and similar to where former President Joe Biden stood about one and a half years into his presidency, when inflation peaked.

Robert McClary, a 52-year-old Republican from Sugar Grove, Ohio, is skeptical the war could be brought to an easy conclusion and disapproves of Trump’s handling of it. McClary voted for the president once, in 2016, but recalls that during the last election, Trump campaigned on not starting new wars in the Middle East.

“I don’t have any trust in this administration at all and to why they brought us into this war, why they’re putting our soldiers at risk again,” he said.

The findings also indicate that most Americans’ goals for the conflict may not be aligned with Trump, who has repeatedly said the war was launched to keep a nuclear weapon out of Iran’s hands. While about two-thirds of U.S. adults say it’s “extremely” or “very” important to keep Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon — with Republicans especially likely to say this — even more Americans say it’s highly important for the U.S. to keep gasoline prices low or negotiate a permanent ceasefire with Iran.

McClary added: “I really don’t know what you can do now. I mean, you’ve kind of gotten yourself buried into this mess.”

Like many people, I tried ChatGPT shortly after it was released. After marveling at its ability to write silly poems, I quickly moved on. The output was bland, annoying, and, in my opinion, useless.

South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics on Thursday reported a record operating profit of 89.5 trillion won ($62 billion) for the April-June period, a day after crosstown rival SK Hynix also reported record earnings, as the world’s two largest memory chipmakers continue to ride the global artificial intelligence boom.

Despite their soaring profits, the companies’ shares have fallen sharply this week in South Korea’s volatile stock market, where retail investors often drive sharp swings in share prices, as concerns grow over their plans to spend massively on increasing manufacturing capacity and the prospects of intensifying competition from China.
Samsung’s second-quarter operating profit was a more than 19-fold increase from a year earlier, and nearly all of it came from its semiconductor business, which benefited from rising chip prices driven by demand for AI servers and increased shipments of advanced high-bandwidth memory chips used to power AI applications. That outweighed an operating loss in its mobile, TV and home appliances division, partly due to higher component costs.

Samsung’s quarterly revenue of 171.5 trillion won ($119 billion) was also an all-time high. The company said it expects demand for its memory products to remain strong in the second half of the year, driven by continued expansion of AI infrastructure and broader adoption of agentic AI. Demand for server chips is expected to accelerate further, keeping the market undersupplied, it said in a statement.

Samsung’s report came a day after SK Hynix also reported a record second-quarter revenue of 60.5 trillion won ($42 billion). However, SK Hynx’s profit was still below the loftier market expectations and the company’s shares declined by more than 9% on Wednesday. Samsung’s share prices have also declined this week.

Kim Jaejune, an executive of Samsung’s memory chip division, said the company expects the gap between chip supply and demand to widen further in 2027. He said Samsung plans to begin construction of its second semiconductor fab in Taylor, Texas, before the end of this year, with the goal of starting production by 2030.

Kim said Samsung has secured long-term chip supply contracts with what he called the “five major global data center clients” — a possible reference to Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta, Oracle and Microsoft –- and is in talks with other major technology companies as demand for AI infrastructure surges.

“Despite our efforts to increase production, demand growth is outpacing our efforts,” he said in a conference call.

Samsung and SK Hynix together produce about two-thirds of the world’s memory chips. While the companies have embarked on major investments in semiconductor manufacturing facilities and data centers as South Korea expands its AI ambitions, some analysts say there are growing concerns about whether such massive spending will ultimately generate sufficient returns.

Shares of South Korean chipmakers have also been pressured by concerns over intensifying competition from China, with reports that a state-owned Chinese company had begun mass-producing domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines, a key technology for advanced chipmaking. Investor concerns were also heightened by the strong stock market debut of Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies, some analysts say.

Samsung and SK Hynix last month announced plans to invest a combined 800 trillion won ($554 billion) in a new chipmaking hub in the country’s southwest to capitalize on surging AI-driven demand.

The chiefs of Samsung, SK and South Korean automaker Hyundai joined President Lee Jae Myung on his San Francisco trip last week, where they announced hundreds of billions of dollars in planned cooperation with major U.S. technology companies, including AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic and chip designers Nvidia and Broadcom. The agreements span chip technologies, data centers and other AI infrastructure.

In a roundtable with foreign media last week, Kim Yong-beom, Lee’s chief policy adviser, said the initiatives reflect how global technology companies are rushing to secure long-term partnerships with South Korean chipmakers as they seek reliable supplies of memory chips for AI.

However, the volatility of the companies’ stock prices, along with those of other global tech firms, shows that investors are shifting their focus from short-term earnings to long-term sustainability, Son In-joon, a semiconductor analyst at South Korea’s Eugene Securities, said in a report this week.

In late 2023, two computer science graduates in Germantown, Wisconsin, started selling a gray square about the size of a teabag. Called the Brick, it was 3D-printed in a basement. Tap your phone against it, and the apps you’ve chosen become blocked until you tap it again. The product works because of where you leave it. Stick the Brick to your fridge, and opening Instagram now involves standing up, walking to the kitchen, and holding your phone against the device—by which point you’ve usually remembered that you didn’t actually want to.

Yahoo just redesigned its weather app for the first time in 13 years, and it might make you want to delete your default app.