Fast Company

As the real estate industry struggles with rising interest rates and ballooning material costs—thanks in part to tariffs—innovation is becoming more and more important. New technologies and construction methods are boosting margins for builders and helping to compensate for labor shortages. And in some instances, they’re dramatically reducing building times without sacrificing safety standards.

Augmenta
For reducing waste and augmenting bottom lines
Since late 2025, Augmenta’s AI engine has generated 3D building designs for electrical systems. That dramatically speeds up the design process, as it can take engineers hundreds of hours to manually model those systems. And it’s not just theoretical: Around 100 buildings have taken advantage of the technology so far, with the first, an elementary school, reducing material waste by 15% and cutting design time by 25%, the company says. Those real-world results are saving builders money and letting them automatically adjust plans as design needs change—a frequent occurrence in construction. Up next for the company is the inclusion of mechanical and plumbing system designs, which should further reduce costs for builders.

LightTable
For spotlighting ways to dramatically speed up construction timetables
It normally takes three to six weeks to analyze an architect’s or engineer’s construction drawings for potential errors. Using LightTable’s AI platform, it takes just three to five days. To date, the company says it has reviewed more than 20 million square feet’s worth of documents, representing $10 billion in project costs. As real estate projects get more complicated, this is a technology that could streamline the building process before the first shovel breaks ground.

TerraFirma
For bypassing labor shortages through autonomy
Founded by former SpaceX engineers, TerraFirma sees similarities between building rocket ships and building infrastructure. The company uses autonomous technology that lets a single worker operate multiple excavators, bulldozers, loaders, and other vehicles simultaneously. That doesn’t require designing new construction equipment: Retrofit kits can be installed on existing machines in under five hours to automate them. It’s a technology the company hopes to use off-world as humanity looks to build a presence on Mars, and the idea is catching on fast. TerraFirma has already seen commercial demand from data centers, industrial sites, and residential developments. And the company has generated more revenue year-to-date than it raised across all seed financing.

Willow
For spotting problems before they happen—and saving millions in the process
Equipment failures can be a major cash drain for building operators. Willow’s technology uses AI to detect and anticipate building equipment failures before they happen, proactively alerting management systems to the problem. And it’s generating big savings for its commercial clients. To date, the company says it has saved Walmart $1.4 million by preventing more than 800 failures and Georgia Southern University more than $1 million. Its technology is already being used in 38 countries, putting it on a strong growth trajectory. The real-world effect is that infrastructure such as airports, hospitals, and other facilities can anticipate and repair problems ahead of time rather than reacting to breakdowns.

The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2026. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.

The metaverse hype bubble may have burst, but that doesn’t mean immersive computing is yesterday’s news. Technologies such as spatial computing and VR are changing how products are designed, where entertainment can happen, and what kind of medical care is available in remote maritime situations.

Dassault Systèmes
For putting Apple Vision Pro to work
Organizations of all kinds are eager to create digital twins of their most crucial real-world products, processes, and spaces. 3D-design software giant Dassault Systèmes’ 3DLive turns Apple’s Vision Pro headset into an intuitive, precise way to engage with these simulations. Customers have adopted it for applications ranging from engineering new EVs to testing surgical instruments. An aerospace company used the platform to bring participants on three continents together to review an aircraft’s interior, cutting approval time in half and saving $450,000 in travel costs.

Excurio
For breaking through VR’s boundaries
Shared VR experiences in public spaces have been held back by challenges such as scaling up the number of people supported by an environment and allowing different participants to explore varying worlds. Paris-based Excurio’s LBXR Pulse lets museums, cultural institutions, entertainment venues, and other organizations deploy VR to up to 130 users simultaneously in multiple concurrent experiences. It’s in use at 25 venues in 17 countries, with big-name content partners such as the Musée d’Orsay and Harvard University’s Giza Project.

Veyond Metaverse
For using XR to bring healthcare to the sea
More than 2 million people are seafarers or work on offshore rigs. Veyond Metaverse’s OceanMD lets them receive telehealth services from onshore medical professionals wearing mixed-reality headsets. Unlike most mixed-reality platforms, which assume the availability of high-speed internet, OceanMD is designed to operate at just 100 kbps, allowing it to run over the slow satellite access available at sea. Pilot programs are underway in West Africa and Brazil offshore operations, and in May 2026, international SOS company Medaire secured a five-year exclusive agreement to use the technology for global civilian aviation.

The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2026. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.

2026 may have been the year when AI stopped getting brownie points simply for being amazing. What’s impressive now is AI that performs useful tasks. All the better if it does it quietly, cleverly, and in areas that help humans focus on the work that we still do best. These honorees check off all those boxes, in areas ranging from workplace productivity to medical safety.

Alembic
For proving how decisions turn into outcomes
Alembic’s “causal engine” uses a proprietary AI system to help enterprises understand the real effects of actions they take. The platform can analyze thousands of variables simultaneously–everything from broadcast and digital advertising spend to macroeconomic shifts to executive public appearances–and map them to specific outcomes, or to the lack of an outcome. Nvidia was Alembic’s first enterprise customer, and its CEO Jensen Huang has publicly praised the platform, whose other big customers include Mars and Delta Airlines. In November 2025, Alembic closed a $145 million Series B led by Accenture (which now offers Alembic’s causal-AI analysis to its consulting clients) and Prysm Capital, valuing the company at approximately $645 million.

Canva
For giving us AI-powered design that doesn’t suck
We all have that design in our heads that we can’t quite generate ourselves. Canva’s AI 2.0, released earlier this year, allows you to turn ideas into reality without really needing to know your way around design software. The tool is powered by the company’s Canva Design Model, and might allow you to whip up a campaign with just a few instructions and then refine it with ease—something that’s notoriously hard to accomplish with general-purpose AIs such as ChatGPT. More than 400 designs are created in Canva AI every second.

Credo AI
For helping enterprises jump-start AI governance
Credo AI’s popular AI governance platform now offers the Govern AI Assistant (GAIA), which helps enterprises more easily manage AI models and tools. (A Credo AI study found that while 60% of organizations now deploy AI across multiple departments or company-wide, only 4% are governing those deployments across the organization.) The assistant is pre-loaded with Credo AI’s governance libraries, years of enterprise deployment experience, and global regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF. Users upload a product brief or project plan, and GAIA generates use case descriptions, recommends metadata, drafts questionnaire responses, identifies risk scenarios, and maps controls to those risks.

DeepL
For overcoming language barriers in real time
In April 2026, DeepL unveiled real-time voice-to-voice translation as part of its DeepL Voice translation product. A user can now speak naturally in their own language, while another user immediately hears the meaning spoken aloud in theirs, enabling live conversation across languages without waiting for captions or interpreters. Pioneer, Aramark, Avendra International, and the European consultancy Inetum have all begun using DeepL Voice, DeepL says. The company doubled down on real-time voice this year when it completed its acquisition of Mixhalo, which specializes in ultra-low latency audio that’s been used to power live events for thousands of simultaneous participants. DeepL aims to leverage the technology to enable real-time translation for larger groups such as conferences with thousands of attendees and hundreds of speakers. 

Genspark
For giving productivity an agentic edge
Once an AI search engine, Genspark has become an AI agent platform. Its AI Workspace offers a wide array of tools, including a full AI office suite, an image generator, and specialized AI agents. Under the hood, an orchestration engine that calls on about 70 AI models, depending on the nature and requirements of the task at hand. A persistent AI assistant, Genspark Claw, can complete long-running multi-step workflows asynchronously, accessing browsers, files, and enterprise tools such as Microsoft Office 365. With more than 5,000 enterprises now using the platform, the company says its business raced to $250 million in annualized revenue in the spring of 2026.

Hanwha
For operating data centers with more autonomy
Data centers use an enormous amount of power, so much that they’ve now become politically polarizing. To help mitigate that problem, Hanwha, the South Korean conglomerate, has developed an Energy Management System that acts as an uber-smart manager of all the electricity that runs through one of these facilities. Using a cadre of large language models and other machine learning systems, it can monitor a data center’s telemetry, alarms, and fault detection systems. Then it studies what might be causing an issue, and how to respond. In April 2026, Prime Group, one of the largest private real estate investors, adopted the technology for a nationwide deployment of edge data centers.

Odyssey
For making simulated physics interactive
Language models ignited the generative AI revolution, but the real world runs on physics, not text. Odyssey’s world models learn from visual observation of real-world activity and generate video that responds to a user’s actions, making them useful in simulations, gaming, and robotics. The company’s latest model, Odyssey-2 Max, advances the interactivity, stability, and fidelity of its earlier models; the company says it earned the highest physics score among publicly evaluated world models on the VBench 2 benchmark (58.52, up from 49.67 in the prior generation). Perhaps the best proof of the company’s potential is its list of backers, which include AI luminaries Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, and Garry Tan. It’s also backed by NVIDIA’s venture arm.

Replit
For taking on the heavy lifting of vibe coding
Unlike many AI coding platforms, Replit has kept its focus on enabling users to vibe-code their way through whole software development projects. The company’s newest assistant, Agent 4, allows non-coders to direct the AI in plain language to design, build, and ship software. Replit handles the hosting, databases, authentication, and monitoring, and offers more than 100 integrations with services from companies such as Databricks, Stripe, Slack, and Microsoft. A user can produce a web app, a mobile app for iOS and Android, a slide deck for an investor pitch, and a launch video—all from a single project. More than 50 million people use Replit, and 85% of Fortune 500 companies now build with it, the company says.

SAS
For developing simulation that powers sterilization
SAS, the global data company, is designing high-fidelity digital twins of environments such as operating rooms. Using Epic Games’s Unreal Engine, the same technology that powers immersive video games, SAS can simulate essential details such as the specialized sterilization procedures that need to go exactly right to keep patients safe. Today, the system is used to help refine the work at Sterilcentral, a facility in Denmark charged with cleaning thousands of instruments used in surgeries.

Tensor Auto
For self-driving cars that belong to . . . you
Unlike Waymo and other autonomous-vehicle companies focused on the robotaxi business, Tensor Auto is building a self-driving car that you can actually own, armed with powerful lidar sensing systems and an onboard supercomputer that can listen to verbal commands. The core of the system is the Tensor World Model, which uses prompts to simulate all sorts of physical conditions that a car might encounter. These kinds of simulations form the basis of Tensor’s brains, but they could be applied to other physical AI, too. The company has already won a Level 4 DMV testing certification in California.

Vexcel
For teaching AI to understand the world from above
Vexcel, an aerial imagery company, is training AI to understand everything on the ground from a bird’s-eye view. Its Vexcel Intelligence system can scan satellite imagery for complex descriptions, such as a set-back Victorian house or farmland growing a specific type of crop. The company is working with Google Maps and helping with disaster-response assessment, including after a tornado in Oklahoma and a fire in Georgia.

Within
For building organizational brainpower
Many enterprise AI deployments fail to pay for themselves because they automate workflows that are inconsequential or that the company doesn’t really use. Within (formerly Klarity) focuses on helping businesses understand how their people actually work, creating an operational context graph (aka “Company Brain”) and tapping that knowledge to design, build, and manage context-rich agents. The company says it saved its 93 customers (which include OpenAI, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Uber) $53.9 million in consulting fees during 2025. Within has raised more than $91 million in total funding from investors such as NFDG, Elad Gil, and Y Combinator.

Yutori
For teaching AI to surf the web like a pro
Yutori develops web-using AI agents. The company trained its Navigator n1.5 model on both simulated and real site interactions to reliably handle a broad set of web tasks. More recently, the company released Navigator n2, a 27-billion-parameter computer-use model designed for operating full desktop environments. Yutori says that its customers (such as Meta) are now making more than 100 million API calls to its models every month, and that its agents are interacting with “several hundred thousand” merchant websites daily. The company’s cofounders, Dhruv Batra and Devi Parikh, led high-profile AI development teams at Meta, while other Yutori researchers came from leadership roles at Google DeepMind, Tesla, and Apple.

The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2026. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.

You’ve heard of Mailchimp, TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Quickbooks; and chances are good you might even be able to picture their logos or recall a memorable ad. But what do you know about their parent company, Intuit?

The most likely answer to that question (not much) is one of the main reasons that Intuit approached the branding agency Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) a year and a half ago to rethink its identity. The brand has spent nearly a decade expanding into a broad financial tech platform. It acquired Credit Karma and Mailchimp in 2020 and 2021, respectively. It’s building new tools for accountants and small businesses. And it’s investing in both AI-powered and human experts to help users get more out of their product suite. 

[Image: JKR/Intuit]

Today, Intuit wants to become “one connected, AI-driven expert platform” rather than a collection of sub-brands. According to Tosh Hall, JKR’s chief creative officer, the problem ahead of the rebrand was that Intuit had no real identity of its own. One key question he remembers his team asking was, in the world of digital transformations for tech companies, Why is it all streamlined in a wind tunnel? Why is it all functional, neutral, frictionless, boring, invisible?

“In some ways, Intuit fell into that trap, not only in the digital technology space, but also in the brand space,” Hall says. “I mean, no one had heard of Intuit.”

Hall’s task, on paper, was simple: to take “something that’s invisible, and make people care about it.” His team’s solution boiled down to a single letter of the alphabet that’s designed to turn Intuit from a featureless corporation into a brand with a personality.

[Image: JKR/Intuit] The remit: Making Intuit into a memorable brand

Intuit’s specific brand conundrum is unique, but it’s facing a broad problem that many other SaaS companies are tackling in the AI era. As these software-as-a-service companies race to incorporate new AI-powered features and functions, their capabilities are outpacing how consumers perceive them. 

Notion, for example, has transformed from a website builder to a broad AI-powered workspace; the grammar-fixer Grammarly has ballooned into an AI agent-driven productivity tool called Superhuman; and Calendly has transitioned from a simple scheduling software to an AI end-to-end meeting service. As Fast Company has reported, each of these companies has recently used design to help users acclimate to the shift. 

[Image: JKR/Intuit]

Like Notion, Superhuman, and Calendly, Intuit needed to use design as a lever to change consumer perceptions; in this case, to help users view the company as one connected AI platform rather than an amorphous collection of sub-brands.

[Image: JKR/Intuit]

“There’s been seven years of growth and change at the Intuit level, where they’re investing so much in new technologies and new unifications behind all the cornerstone brands—a lot of times from an AI and human intelligence perspective,” says Michael Ciancio, JKR’s executive creative director. “But that technology and investment had become incredibly invisible, and therefore these unique pieces of technology across all four were getting hidden.”

To bring those changes to the surface, Hall’s rebrand team needed a visual north star—and they found it staring them in the face. 

[Image: JKR/Intuit] The solution: all-in on ‘i’

The thread holding Intuit’s new brand together is the letter “i.”

While in the early brainstorming phases of the rebrand, recalls Ciancio, the team was experimenting with ways to make Intuit feel less corporate and more connected with the actual in-product experience. One initial step was to reimagine the wordmark by converting it from an ultra-techy uppercase sans serif to a lowercase, “conversational” serif. In that process, the team created a lowercase “i” with a flag serif sticking out to the left—a quirk that, when animated, makes the letter look like a little person giving a friendly wave. 

[Image: JKR/Intuit]

That small animated “i” turned into the navigational tool that leads users through Intuit’s new brand. When the user’s eyes need to be guided across a page, for example, or the brand is differentiating between platforms like Mailchimp and Turbotax, the “i” breaks out into color-coded dots called “doers.”  

[Image: JKR/Intuit]

The “i” also introduces users to Intuit Intelligence—JKR’s term for Intuit’s system that connects users with both AI-powered chatbots and human experts to help navigate their finances. Intuit Intelligence shows up across the brand’s platforms, and because it incorporates elements of both AI and human intelligence, it needed a unified design to help customers instantly recognize its two arms. 

[Image: JKR/Intuit]

When users are interacting with Intuit’s AI chatbot, the “i” spins and multiplies into a minipropeller icon. And when they’re chatting with a human expert, the “i” is placed inside a blue speech bubble and animated to give a miniwave. No matter where it shows up, the “i” stays in motion to tell the user how to understand a given interaction.

“We began exploring motion early in the design process to define how the ‘i’ could express different behaviors, because static design couldn’t always carry the idea,” says Stubbs Johnson, JKR’S creative director of motion. “For the ‘i,’ we used traditional animation techniques like squash and stretch to make it feel like a character, especially in its cheerful little wave. A seamless link between human intelligence and AI was key to this digital transformation; in a space that leans overly slick, we pushed the motion to feel tactile and human.”

[Image: JKR/Intuit]

The “i” also gives Intuit more of a human brand voice. Hall says the key question that the brand asks now is, “How can i help you?” In fact, it’s the first thing that users will see when they log onto Intuit’s new landing page, designed by JKR from the ground up. 

Right now, Intuit has rolled out its new brand on its landing page and across its social media. In the coming months, elements of the core brand will begin to appear across the sub-brands to pull everything together. 

Eighteen months after the deal closed, the new chief executive of a midmarket software business told me about his real problem. His executive team were listening to someone else. The founder had stayed on as chair and was exerting what the CEO saw as unhelpful influence: slowing, distracting, and sometimes outright blocking the change investors had brought him in to deliver.

In private equity deals involving founder-led firms, the founder is routinely kept on as chair or partner, alongside a professional chief executive who is brought in to deliver the value creation plan. Three things make the arrangement popular. Founders want to stay involved. Investors want to be seen as founder friendly. And nearly everyone believes that keeping the founder close buys continuity and, therefore, insurance against failure. Which is fine, except that all the evidence points the other way.

In one study of nearly 200 CEO successions, researchers found that when the departing boss stayed on as board chair, the new CEO achieved less strategic change. And while founder retention did provide some stability, it wasn’t in the way hoped. In fact, retention was more effective at impeding large performance gains than at preventing large drops. So, the arrangement so often adopted as downside protection is actually more effective at removing upside.

Another study found that while replacing a founder tended to improve the odds of a strong exit, it improved them much more when the founder left the business than when they stayed. So, the evidence is clear. Results are better when founders leave. The question is why.

Why it goes wrong

The usual explanation is personality clash. Two strong people, bruised egos, a failure to communicate. That sort of thing. It’s certainly a credible-sounding explanation. But it’s also often wrong, because the real causes of founder-CEO tensions are usually structural, and likely to affect even the most reasonable people.

The first issue is ownership. Founders develop psychological ownership of the business, in which the company becomes an extension of themselves. Hence the research showing that they tend to describe delegation as difficult, uncomfortable, and even frightening. A transaction changes legal ownership. It doesn’t touch the psychology of it.

Authority comes second, and everyone anticipates this one. A team with two credible sources of authority routes around whichever is slower, and the founder is often faster because they’re operating from experience.

The third is informal reporting and communication lines. Formal reporting may move to the new CEO on day one, but informal relationships don’t. People who joined for the founder may still tell the founder things first and may be more likely to be open with them, too. So the founder may hear things the new CEO never gets a chance to.

Finally, a new CEO can all too easily get caught up in managing the founder and their impact, and every moment they do so distracts from their core mission.

What private equity amplifies

These mechanisms exist in any founder-succession scenario, but PE involvement turns everything up to 11.

To begin with, the hold period compresses everything. Three to five years doesn’t allow for the handover period that much succession advice assumes. Then there is huge pressure on the incoming CEO to drive growth and change, and drive them fast—certainly before either party has learned how the other operates. And the CEO is often left to deal with any tensions alone, as most PE firms have an interest in keeping founders happy, or at least maintaining a reputation for doing so.

So, what can leaders do about this?

What to do instead

If you are the incoming chief executive, you did not choose the arrangement, and in most cases, you cannot end it.

The standard advice is to secure the founder’s blessing. Move slowly and ask what to preserve before you look at what to change. There is certainly sense to that. But it also has limits. Invest too much in keeping founders happy, and it can slow change, distract from objectives, and undermine your authority.

There are, however, things you can try. What works will depend on the specifics of your situation and the personalities you’re dealing with.

• In firms that have been used to flat structures and informal decision-making processes, it’s important to introduce management team structures that report to you as soon as possible. This may sound basic, but founder-led startups often have informal structures and management processes. That can be fine, but it also enables informal decision-making where a new CEO can be bypassed.
• Assume informal networks still run through the founder and mitigate for this by investing heavily in building your own information channels. Skip-levels, premortems, and an audit of which subjects reach investors through the founder have all been shown to help. If you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t act on it.
• Make sure the founder feels they have a clearly defined role, because if they don’t, they may create one. Even if they are on the board, you can ask them to lead a project or take responsibility for supporting something. Give them a sandbox and don’t let them roam freely.
• Try putting what you want the founder to do as requests for their help. By asking them for their help, they may be more likely to do it as—again—it may help them feel as though they have more of a role.
• Finally, have a conversation with them about how it feels to step back. Make them feel heard and understood. There may be useful data in there that will help you adjust your approach with them.

The emblem for the 2032 Olympic Games in Brisbane, Australia, is updating a well-known Olympic and Paralympic symbol to give it new meaning.

Organizers accidentally leaked their own branding after inadvertently posting a video explaining the 2032 Games’ logo to its YouTube page. The emblem consists of shapes suggesting a five-flame Olympic torch and referencing several other meanings, chiefly the crest of a cockatoo and the location and year of the Games.

[Images: Brisbane 2032, Eric Isselée/Adobe Stock]

Brisbane organizers introduced the emblems in a promotional video by explaining that they chose to depict a cockatoo, a bird native to the region, because of its cheeky, playful spirit and the fact that it’s “iconically Australian” and significant to First Nations.

[Images: Brisbane 2032, Ryan/Adobe Stock]

Designers snuck in other details, too. The five feathers in the crest are grouped in bunches of three and two, to stand for ’32, the year the Games will be held, and the crest is shaped to fit inside the map of Queensland, the Australian state of which Brisbane is the capital.

[Images: Brisbane 2032, magr80/Adobe Stock]

The emblem comes in two colorways, pink with orange accents to represent the pink cockatoo for the Olympics, and yellow to pink to represent the sulphur-crested cockatoo for the Paralympics. The Games will be the third held in Australia after Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000.

Andrew Liveris, president of Brisbane 2032, said in a statement that Olympic and Paralympic Games emblems are “an opportunity to promote the unique character” of a specific Games, so for Brisbane, “multiple elements have been subtly woven together.”

The identity was designed by a consortium announced last year that includes the VML and Landor agencies, the social research firm Kantar Public, and BlackCard, a First Nations consultancy. Still to come is a mascot reveal.

The Brisbane Games’ use of vivid colors follows in the footsteps of the vibrant branding for the 2028 Los Angeles Games unveiled earlier this year. Inspired by the California superbloom, an occasional, massive bloom of desert wildflowers, and the bird of paradise, the official flower of L.A., the L.A. Games color palette proved Olympic branding can embrace bright color. Now Brisbane is doing the same.

Modern Olympic visual identities are released years ahead of the actual Games. A logo for the Utah 2034 Games, for example, was unveiled late last year, nine years before they’ll be held, while the mark for the 2030 Games in the French Alps came out this past June. That lag time presents a challenge for designers who must make their work hold up for years without knowing what future design trends might come. A mark that looks fresh and forward today might look dated in nearly a decade’s time.

Local people who spoke to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation like the new design for Brisbane. “I love the hidden messages of it,” Arisa Trew, a gold medalist skateboarder, said at a press conference for its unveiling. By packing their emblems with multiple meanings, designers behind the Brisbane Games branding give residents and fans a bigger story to tell about what the logo stands for.

On a sunny Friday afternoon in June, I walk down London’s affluent King’s Road to a two-block stretch that features four athleisure stores.

At Alo, racks of sleek matching sets seem designed for women who post their Pilates workouts on Instagram. At Nike, posters feature life-size photos of its sponsored athletes at the World Cup and Wimbledon. At Lululemon, under a heavily sloganed gray wall (“Friends are more important than money”), there’s a giant sales rack featuring a mishmash of athletic wear in clashing colors and, bizarrely, a gold lamé midi skirt made of technical fabric.

Despite their differences, all three stores are decorated in black, white, and gray, with silver metal racks, boxy shelving, and unflattering overhead lighting. And in a coincidence that makes me feel like I’m stuck in some sort of sci-fi loop, the EDM song “10:35” by DJ Tiësto and Tate McRae is playing in all three.

The new kid on the block is different. A Vuori boutique, next to Nike, two doors down from Alo, and facing Lululemon, opened last year. The store has no sharp edges or harsh lighting, just warm walnut wood walls that are smooth and undulating, punctuated by photos of people working out on the beach. The staff is playing Weezer, the early-2000s alt-rock band. And the clothes—outrageously soft to the touch and bearing no visible logo—come in colors so sophisticated that it’s not immediately apparent they are designed for sport.

The 11-year-old company isn’t trendy per se. Vuori’s clothes are only debatably stylish. But they are well designed, inoffensive, and comfy. In 2025, the privately owned, roughly 3,000-person company, with more than 135 stores worldwide and 15 more due by year’s end, generated close to a billion dollars in revenue. Lululemon, a publicly traded company that has been around since 1998 and has eight times as many stores worldwide, generated $11.1 billion in 2025.

Vuori’s hero product, the ultrasoft Kore shorts, is the sort of garment a coastal dad working in tech might wear to a light workout before hitting a coffee shop and jumping on a Zoom call. “Effortless performance” is how Joe Kudla—a 48-year-old former model and accountant who started the company in 2015 out of his garage in Encinitas, California—describes Vuori’s ethos. “We’re from Southern California, where people come to start a tech company or chase their dreams” while never wanting to seem like they’re “trying too hard,” he tells me over a Zoom call in July, wearing a dark blue T-shirt made from the company’s signature DreamKnit fabric.

Now, nearly two years after raising $1.27 billion across four rounds, bringing Vuori’s valuation to $5.5 billion, CEO Kudla is considering taking the company public—and investors will want to see that it is growing. Kudla’s approach is to draw in three new types of customers: elite athletes, younger shoppers, and international consumers. In each case, the company is leaning into its distinct advantage: its plush fabrics, which lead to a relaxed but tailored fit. If Vuori succeeds, it will take market share away from its competitors on King’s Road and in the more than 25 countries where it already has a presence.

Vuori chief product officer Heather Archibald [Photo: Katie Thompson]

Other athleisure brands have tried to broaden their audience—to mixed results. To succeed where others stumbled, Vuori will have to be as adaptable as its clothing.

Fabric first

The secret behind Vuori’s success has always been its fabrics. DreamKnit is both velvety and moisture-wicking. BlissBlend, used in its yoga collection, is made from Lycra fiber that goes through a unique brushing technique, giving it a second-skin feel.

While other brands might start with a design and work backward to find the right materials to bring it to life, Kudla inverts the process. “We’re a textile-oriented company,” he says. He spends a lot of time visiting fabric makers in China and remains the fit model for men’s clothing. Vuori’s first-ever chief product officer, Heather Archibald, who joined the company in April after stints at Rothy’s and Gap, says that she’s been especially inspired by some of the fabric innovation in menswear. “We have some nostalgic hand-feels that are a little drier, which take color really well,” she says.

Vuori has another edge, too. Unlike most athleisure brands, it started as a menswear company, introducing women’s wear three years later. As a result, its customers are roughly evenly split between men and women (64% of Lululemon’s customers are female, and 70% of Alo’s).

Typically, brands tend to be “really strong in one gender and fight to be relevant in the other gender, whereas Vuori has done a really good job of releasing great products for both women and men,” says Andrew Ferrer, a managing director at the growth equity firm General Atlantic, an investor. Vuori products are also priced at the higher end of the athleisure market, comparable to Alo but above Nike: A pair of its signature men’s Kore shorts retails for $68.

Vuori is concentrating its efforts on China as it prioritizes international growth. It’s a smart move: China accounted for 16% of Lululemon’s sales in 2025, up from 10% in 2023. “Western brands that have a distinct brand personality and premium position tend to do well in the Chinese and Asian markets,” says Matthew Tingler, a managing director in Baird’s global consumer investment banking group.

[Photo: Katie Thompson]

Vuori entered China in 2022, via the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform Tmall. It has since launched eight stand-alone stores in the country, and has plans to open 20 more by 2027. The company is adjusting the sizing of some of its designs to better suit the Asian consumer, and it’s counting on increased sales as more shoppers are able to feel the fabric in person.

“Having a fabric-first mentality is like an insurance policy for protecting quality,” Archibald says.

Given Vuori’s focus on materials innovation and its large male consumer base, the least risky element of its expansion may be its overture to professional athletes. In fact, the company is already notching wins.

From Kore to HardKore

In February, Vuori launched HardKore shorts, a $98 variation of its hero product made from a more durable yet still soft four-way stretch fabric, featuring a premium grid mesh liner. The rising tennis star Jack Draper, who signed on as a spokesperson in August 2025, has been wearing them on the professional circuit. The company had hoped that its regular Kore shorts customers would level up to the HardKore shorts rather than shopping for elite performance gear elsewhere, and that’s been happening: “We see a lot of customers cross-shopping both of those products,” Kudla says.

Cooper Flagg, a forward for the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, and Arch Manning, the University of Texas quarterback, have come on board as spokespeople. So has Tom Holland, the Spider-Man star (and Prada ambassador), who joined this year. Kudla says choosing Holland, a passionate amateur golfer, to front the golf collection campaign simply made sense. “Tom Holland is an incredible gymnast. Look at what he does to train for his films, like Spider-Man. He’s a world-class athlete. He also is an incredible golfer. He’s a multidimensional human, and we’ve always been intrigued by this idea that we aren’t just one thing.” A more straightforward argument for the partnership might be that when Holland stopped by Vuori’s L.A. pop-up in 2024, posts on fan TikTok accounts racked up 3 billion views.

Golf could be particularly fertile territory for the company, as Tingler at Baird’s notes. “It distinguishes them from other athleisure brands,” such as Alo and Lululemon, which don’t carry golf-specific products.

[Photo: Katie Thompson]

The partnership with Holland builds on Vuori’s brand strength with men. Reaching younger women may prove trickier. Kudla says that while Vuori has a healthy presence on college campuses, it has always skewed male there, even after a 2021 endorsement arrangement with the influencer Livvy Dunne, who at the time was a gymnast at Louisiana State University.

Expanding its influence

In April 2025, Vuori partnered with the runway fashion model Kaia Gerber to design clothing and curate drops. She came as a package deal with her high-profile family; her social-media-famous trainer, Kirsty Godso, a former global fitness spokesperson at Nike for nearly 14 years, signed on five months later. Bringing on Gerber—who had been photographed wearing Alo during the pandemic by the likes of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire—is a clear shot across the bow.

Ads for Vuori’s “For Kaia” line—formfitting matching sets geared to the kind of fitness-focused young consumers that Spotify has categorized as “Pilates princesses”—quickly began appearing on social media billboards. Some of the photos have an on-trend ’90s aesthetic. One shows Gerber on a minimalist metal folding chair against a white seamless background, wearing chunky white scrunched socks. It looks incongruous next to the one of a muscular man doing jump push-ups on a beach that’s displayed a bit farther down the wall in Vuori’s King’s Road store.

If technicolor workout wear for influencers and fitness girlies seems incompatible with Vuori’s long-standing aesthetic, denim is even further afield. The company released men’s jeans in September 2025 made from denim, lyocell, and elastane. They’re softer than traditional rigid cotton denim, but still definitively jeans—taking the athletic component out of the Vuori equation almost entirely. (You’re not likely to see someone playing pickleball in them.) Women’s denim followed, along with cashmere sweaters. This new merchandise “rounds out our positioning around this modern coastal California lifestyle, but it’s not going to be a massive growth driver for the brand,” Kudla admits.

Venturing so far from its core proposition could prove perilous, as other athleisure brands have found. In a May letter to Lululemon shareholders, Chip Wilson, the founder, blamed the company’s 45% stock slump this year partly on a lack of focus. “Losing a deep understanding of who you are designing your key products for leads to brand drift,” he said. “We’ve seen this lack of focus through a number of unsuccessful ventures Lululemon has embraced [such as] the launch of products such as footwear and small accessories.” Vuori’s new products, and its embrace of celebrities and nonathletes, could similarly alienate consumers attracted to its if-you-know-you-know cachet.

If the growing efforts to spread out Vuori’s bets aren’t clear enough signals that it might soon go public, Kudla acknowledges that he’s looking for an opening. “I’d be lying if I said we aren’t keeping an eye on the market to see if it proves to be a viable path for us,” he says. To jump in successfully, the company will need to maintain its athleticism and its signature composure.

In 1987, the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow famously observed, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Nearly four decades later, AI has produced a version of its own. Call it the abundance paradox.

At the level of the individual worker, the evidence of AI-driven abundance is easy to see. Researchers found that AI typically raises productivity on specific tasks 15% to 30% in real-world work settings, and 20% to 60% in controlled studies. Meanwhile, 8 in 10 professionals say AI has made them more productive at work, according to McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey of more than 1,700 respondents in 97 countries.

At the level of the company, however, the picture looks very different. Only 37% of McKinsey’s respondents can link AI to any impact on their organization’s earnings before interest and taxes, or EBIT—essentially unchanged from a year earlier.

Relatedly, the National Bureau of Economic Research reports that although 69% of firms were using AI, 89% of executives reported no impact on productivity over the previous three years. And PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey of more than 4,400 chief executives in 95 countries found that 56% had seen AI deliver neither higher revenue nor lower costs in the past year.

The gains individuals get from AI are not adding up to gains for the companies they work for. Closing this gap is now one of the most important tasks facing business leaders. Here’s how to do it.

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From tools to systems

Companies expect abundance to arrive with the tools. But while tools can indeed raise individual productivity, collective, company-level abundance comes not just from the tools themselves but also from the system a company builds around the technology.

History offers a clear precedent. In a classic paper written in response to Solow’s paradox, economic historian Paul David argued that electricity had gone through the same thing. When older factories first electrified, owners typically bolted electric motors onto the existing system of shafts and belts, often keeping the old steam engines in place. The layout of the factory stayed the same, and the effect on measured manufacturing productivity growth remained small.

The breakthrough came when manufacturers redesigned the factory itself, giving each machine its own motor. That freed them to build lighter, single-story plants laid out around the flow of work. By David’s estimate, the spread of factory electric motors was associated with roughly half of the sharp acceleration in manufacturing productivity growth in the 1920s.

Most companies adopting AI today are still at the bolt-on stage. To truly benefit from the possibilities that AI unlocks, companies need systems. An abundance system has three parts.

1. Focus on what AI makes possible

Most companies aim AI at what it can save. In Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise survey of more than 3,200 leaders in 24 countries, 66% reported efficiency and productivity gains, but only 20% said AI was helping them improve products and services or innovate.

Those savings are worth having. But savings have a ceiling: You can only cut what you already spend. The bigger prize is the work that was never viable in the first place.

I recently experienced this with my own team. Over a six-month period, we built a suite of apps that would have cost roughly five times as much and would have taken around two years longer without AI—economics that would have made the product nonviable from day one.

Now, this doesn’t mean that it was free to build those apps; they still cost a lot in terms of both time and money. But the point is that without AI we wouldn’t have been able to pursue such an ambitious project.

That is the key to unlocking abundance—moving from the scarcity mindset of savings to the abundance mindset of possibility.

The Abundance Principle: Don’t just ask how AI can cut costs. Also ask what it makes possible.

2. Build reusable components

Good software engineering means never writing the same code twice. Efficient approaches are inevitably modular—build a component once and reuse it across every product that needs it. New products can then be assembled from parts that already exist. I was an early adopter of this principle, building an early software company around it long before it became standard practice.

AI pulls most organizations in the opposite direction. Because generating something new is now so cheap, people start from scratch every time: a new draft or a new deck, used once and thrown away; a newly coded solution to the same problem someone else was tackling in the office next door last week. That produces enormous volume, but nothing compounds.

Unilever offers a glimpse of the alternative. The company has created digital twins of its products: AI-driven 3D replicas that hold every variant, label, packaging format, and language version in a single file. Each twin is built once, then used to generate imagery for every sales and marketing channel, serving as a reusable asset that multiplies value. That’s what an abundance system looks like in practice.

The Abundance Principle: Think modular—build assets that can be easily repurposed for different products and for different purposes.

3. Orchestrate resources for the AI workflow

When production multiplies, the pressure shifts downstream, to reviewing, testing, approving, and fitting the pieces together. Organizations that don’t redesign for this shift end up with more work piling up unfinished.

Software development shows this clearly. After GitHub Copilot’s launch, a study of open-source projects found that output rose, but so did rework, and the burden fell on the most experienced developers: They reviewed 6.5% more code while their own coding output fell 19%.

Google’s DORA research program has found the same pattern at scale, with time saved writing code often spent again checking it.

These findings do not suggest a problem with AI. In fact, AI was doing its job. The problem was that the system around it couldn’t absorb the extra output. The fix is to build systems that ensure extra oversight capacity is available to deal with the increased flow of work driven by AI tools.

The Abundance Principle: When output multiplies at one layer, the capacity challenge moves to the new bottleneck.

Four things to do now

Here are four things you can do immediately to start reaping the returns of AI-powered abundance.

1. Revisit earlier ideas. List the projects you killed over the past three years because they cost too much or would take too long. Re-scope them with AI to see if the calculations have changed.
2. Start a component library. Choose one function and inventory what’s worth reusing: frameworks, research, approved language, templates, code. Make it easy to find. Then set a simple rule: no one builds something new without checking the library first.
3. Find the queue. Trace one AI-accelerated workflow from start to finish and look for where finished work sits waiting—for review, approval, or testing. Then move people there.
4. Change the scoreboard. Alongside cost savings, track at least one metric for what’s newly possible, such as new products launched or projects attempted.

The system is the advantage

It took roughly four decades for the potential unlocked by electricity to show up in the productivity statistics, because that’s how long it took factories to be rebuilt around it. No one yet knows quite what the economic model of an age of abundance will look like, or who will capture the value when anyone can produce almost anything. But the growth in capacity is already real, and for companies to succeed, they need to design systems that can turn that extra capacity into real growth.

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When Brian Daniel, the founder of a Los Angeles-based staffing agency, recently posted what he describes as a “high-paying remote job,” he saw firsthand just how tough the labor market had become for job seekers.

“We get between 500 and 1,000 applicants for every open position,” he says. But this job—an executive assistant position that pays $150 per hour—seemed particularly appealing. Within a few days, more than 2,000 people had applied. “The ‘low-hire, low-fire’ labor market is nothing to scoff at,” Daniel says.

Daniel is referring to the unusual state of the current labor market described by then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at a press conference in April: “[This] doesn’t feel like a good labor market to some who don’t have jobs because quits are really low, hires are really low,” Powell said. “It’s an unusual and uncomfortable kind of a balance where people who don’t have jobs will have a hard time breaking in.”

In the months since Powell made that assessment, the picture has remained bleak for those looking for work.

U.S.-based employers announced 43,281 job cuts in September, down 18% from August and the lowest monthly total since 2022, according to a report from the executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas that was released last week. 

But the corresponding uptick in hiring that job seekers are hoping for has not materialized. Employers announced plans to hire 90,787 workers in September, 23% fewer than a year earlier and the lowest September total since 2011.

On October 2, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate had risen to 4.2% in September, and that the number of jobs added was lower than economists had expected. 

Faced with hundreds—even thousands—of other applicants competing for the same roles, job seekers might reasonably conclude that their best chance of success is to send out as many applications as possible.

But labor market economists and career experts say that approach might actually be counterproductive. In a market in which employers are inundated with candidates and increasingly using AI to help sift through them, standing out may require job seekers to be more targeted, more creative, and—perhaps obviously—more human.

Not a Numbers Game

Interviews with labor market experts and career coaches reveal a broad consensus: When it comes to applications, more is not necessarily better.

“Spray-and-pray tactics may feel productive, but are more likely to lead to you feeling drained and hopeless,” says Brian Pulliam, a career coach based in the Seattle area.

Pulliam recommends “looking for the side door” through networking and personal referrals, particularly by reaching out to former managers and colleagues who already know your work.

Daniel agrees. “Less is more,” he says. “It’s better to make 20 targeted and customized submissions than 100 generic ones.”

Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, recommends diversifying. An IT professional struggling to find work in tech, for example, might look to industries such as healthcare, where growth has been more consistent.

Give Employers What AI Can’t

This advice is useful in any labor market, but it’s especially true in 2026, when AI continues to change the equation on both sides of the hiring process.

“AI has changed screening more than anything else,” says Curtis Serna, founder of Noticeable Inc., an Edmonton, Alberta-based firm that develops AI tools for job seekers.

An applicant tracking system (ATS) can parse the language used in applications with increasing precision, Serna says, making it important to mirror the terminology used in a job posting. “If the ad says ‘vendor management,’ do not write ‘supplier relationships,’” he advises. 

Gaming the ATS has been a tactic job seekers have used for a while now. But today? “Matching matters more than it used to,” Serna says.

And getting through an initial screening is only part of the challenge. With candidates increasingly using AI to polish résumés and cover letters, demonstrating what you can actually do has become more important, too.

“If hundreds of candidates are applying for the same role, another polished CV may not be enough,” says Reese Wong, a London-based strategy consultant at Accenture who focuses on the future of work.

Instead, he recommends offering “proof of work”: a portfolio, piece of writing, or even a short video showing how you would approach the role. “Give the employer something concrete that shows initiative and ability,” he says.

Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, says candidates should also emphasize the human skills that AI cannot easily replicate.

“Soft, human-centered skills, like critical thinking and leadership, are in demand now more than ever,” she says. Corroborating this, research done by PwC earlier this year found that as AI takes over more routine tasks, employers are placing a growing premium on distinctly human capabilities like creativity, judgment, and innovation.

And human connections still matter immensely. Wong says a recommendation or conversation with someone inside a company can convey information that even a polished application cannot.

Wong also acknowledges that AI can be useful for research and preparation, but he cautions against simply using it to apply for more jobs. “I’d use AI to improve the quality of the search, not just increase the number of applications,” he says.

You might, for example, use AI to research the person who’s interviewing you or potential solutions to a particularly vexing challenge the employer is facing. In other words, Wong says, use it in ways that show you’re able to take the initiative.

Don’t Slow Down

Finally, while hiring tends to slow toward the end of the year, experts say job seekers shouldn’t assume opportunities have dried up or wait until January to restart their search.

“Don’t shut down your search during the holidays. There will be less competition from candidates who do,” says Jan Hunter, a former recruiter and career coach based in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. “Some companies also need to use budgets or risk losing them. Use November and December to build relationships and position yourself for January.”

Laura Browne, a Phoenix-based career coach and coauthor of a book on how to interview successfully for jobs, agrees. “While it’s true that some companies will put hiring on hold, many are still looking to fill positions,” she says. “Don’t assume that all companies will delay hiring until next year.”

Or as Daniel Zhao of Glassdoor puts it: “Time in the market is better than timing the market.” There’s no reliable way to optimize for the ideal time of year to look for work, he notes, “so it’s better not to worry about that. Just focus on what you can control.”

Not so many years ago, leaving college felt electric. I remember it as a moment charged with promise, rich with possibility, and alive with the feeling that a dozen doors had swung open at once. Graduates’ ambitions or enthusiasm haven’t changed today. But the job market they’re entering is unrecognizable. 

Tasks that once defined a junior’s role—analyzing data, drafting reports, and taking meeting notes—are being automated, changing the shape and availability of early-career work.

The Pew Research Center reports that 73% of people under 30 now believe artificial intelligence will lead to fewer jobs, up from 61% two years ago. Their anxiety isn’t misplaced; entry-level vacancies are shrinking. 

For those who do make it through the door, the nature of the work is shifting, too. The “seniorization” of junior roles means that in AI-exposed fields, junior hires are now seven times as likely to require midcareer capabilities as hires into roles less connected with AI. And rather than “learning by doing,” many are “learning by reviewing,” spending time tinkering with AI-generated outputs, rather than developing hard-won skills like judgment, pattern recognition, and critical thinking. 

Against this backdrop, a problem emerges. Working effectively with AI demands a degree of experience many juniors might lack, new to the workforce as they are. Experience is what helps us distinguish helpful AI outputs from bad. While the risks aren’t solely associated with those in entry-level jobs—senior colleagues can also be guilty of overrelying on AI to crunch through an ever-expanding list of tasks—it’s reasonable to assume that junior colleagues are the most exposed to AI-enhanced errors and authoritative slop. 

That isn’t to say we should limit or fear AI use. Far from it. The right tools offer measurable impact by transforming workflows, removing administrative frictions, and boosting efficiency. In a future of work that will be shaped and defined by AI, ensuring colleagues at all levels are developing AI literacy is critical.

But the core issue—and irony—remains: Judging AI’s output effectively often requires skills we now expect juniors to exhibit, even while limiting the opportunities for them to develop them. This state of affairs risks contributing to a growing early-career soft skills gap. Leaders who are serious about closing this gap and setting graduates up for future success should focus on three things.

1. Create deliberate critical thinking opportunities 

Regularly giving new hires projects that require them to weigh options, make recommendations, and get feedback is one of the surest ways to build practical judgment. One approach is to give new hires projects to own. Have them present progress live to colleagues who can probe their reasoning, ask targeted questions, and understand their approach. This shouldn’t be treated as a test, but as a means for junior colleagues to develop and defend effective reasoning. It takes work offline and off models and into the real world, while exposing juniors to opportunities for critical thinking and constructive feedback from peers. 

2. Make AI use visible and low-risk

Beyond setting explicit AI guidelines, leaders must keep AI use visible and low-risk, so mistakes surface early and stay contained. In practice that might mean encouraging juniors to automate only a predefined set of simple tasks—such as summarizing an internal call or condensing a data set—while logging each step in a shared document. Or asking colleagues to flag when content is created with the support of AI, so this is clear when it moves along the chain for implementation or review. The log becomes an accountability trail, giving managers visibility over AI-generated content and the opportunity to provide feedback if juniors miss where AI outputs fall short.

3. Start training in AI fluency early—and keep it going

Robust AI fluency is about knowing when AI should and shouldn’t be used, which tools fit which tasks, and having the skills and vocabulary to use the right prompts and assess AI outputs critically. These are skills that need to be learned. This might look like sharing real organizational use cases that show where AI workflows worked and where they didn’t. Organizations must also ensure juniors aren’t overrelying on AI tools for tasks where judgment, style, and creativity are critical. Once individuals know what good looks like and how to get there, they’ll be in a better position to use AI as a tool to reach that endpoint more quickly. 

Crucially, every individual at every level of an organization must also learn that AI isn’t a shortcut for thinking. Nor is it a substitute for effort. As the guardians of future talent, businesses that make this clear and empower new hires to build both technical and soft skills early in their careers will see that talent soar.

For graduates, too, my message is clear: Nurture AI fluency, be curious and active in exploring new tools. But don’t do so at the expense of challenging yourself to solve problems and form opinions independently. In an AI-enhanced future of work, it’s those who can strike this balance successfully who will become the leaders of the future.

A recent address to the military by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is drawing attention on social media, with users saying the event’s backdrop resembled iconography from the Third Reich.

In an October 3 address at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Hegseth stood before a crowd of cadets in front of a monochromatic backdrop featuring a redesigned logo for the Department of War (DOW)—a secondary title for the Department of Defense (DOD)—which many on social media have likened to imagery from Nazi Germany.

Featuring a simplified version of the DOD’s traditional seal, the image has drawn comparisons to Nazi Germany’s eagle symbol, which positions the bird’s wings horizontally—just like the logo behind Hegseth—contrasting with other agency seals that feature the bald eagle’s wings opened in a V shape, such as the presidential seal.

Pete Hegseth reveals the new Department of War branding. pic.twitter.com/tTrxLH21s1

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) October 5, 2026

It’s worth noting that the seal’s eagle has remained in the horizontal position since 1949, when the DOD was first created, with an approval last year to change the seal’s title to reflect the proposed DOW name.

The seal’s design is officially outlined in Appendix VI Joint Army and Air Force Bulletin No. 23.

But the eagle’s position aside, a series of changes to the official seal, which appear to run afoul of the department’s own brand guide, may be contributing to the negative reactions.

The redesigned logo is missing features from the official DOD seal, like the contrasting encircling band around the eagle, and a wreath of laurel and olives beneath it. Additionally, the redesigned logo decreased the number of stars surrounding the eagle, from 13 to just 5.

[Logo: war.gov] What a picture is worth

Still, for some users, it wasn’t just the logo but the entire monochromatic setup that contributed to the perceived fascist inspiration, with one user saying on X, “There’s no such thing as ‘accidental Nazi.’”

Accusations aside, the redesign seems to be in line with larger efforts to create a more comprehensive design identity for the federal government—whether or not it aligns with a specific department’s own guidelines.

Right when President Donald Trump took office last year, his administration introduced a new White House logo, and that was just the beginning.

In recent months, the administration has rolled out a series of websites and platforms with modernized design identities. Just last week Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a new U.S. passport design featuring a more prominent seal that is “more gold.”

“An icon for our country”

While it’s unclear whether the DOW redesign is permanent, government officials have pushed back on the Nazi comparisons.

“The American bald eagle is an icon of our country and used on many state and federal seals, including the seal of the Department of War,” Joel Valdez, deputy Pentagon press secretary, told Fast Company when asked if the new logo is part of a new brand identity for the department or an oversight, given the guide’s clear specifications.

“If for some reason you see imagery of a bald eagle and begin having delusions about Nazi Germany,” Valdez added, “then you may need to get your head checked for serious brain damage.”

Last week, the Trump administration began sending $500 checks to roughly 1 million Obamacare enrollees in 30 states—a “refund” for what the administration calls “high costs imposed by the Biden administration’s gross mismanagement of Obamacare.”

In a video posted to X on September 10, President Trump said that his “administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off,” adding that “in many cases, these refunds will cover the entire cost of your insurance caused by Democrats.”

The administration’s strategy, it appears to its critics, is to sway voters ahead of the midterm elections next month, as Republicans risk losing their majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate. 

“This announcement is less about health policy and much more about the 2026 Congressional elections,” Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy and political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told CNBC about the plan.

With high costs and inflation top of mind for many voters, the onetime payments may be a gambit to gain some ground back in the polls, similar to Trump’s separate promise to send $5,000 to Americans in the event that Republicans win in November. 

Brad Woodhouse, a Democratic activist and executive director of Protect Our Care, an advocacy group, called the plan “an absolute joke” in a statement.

“At a time when people are scraping by to keep up with the high cost of groceries, rent, and healthcare, this $500 gimmick won’t even begin to dig them out of the hole that Trump and Republicans created,” Woodhouse said.

Trump also has a history of attempting to repeal or undermine Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was one of President Obama’s crowning achievements when it was signed into law in 2010.

Will onetime checks move the needle?

A big question is whether $500 is enough to offset the increases in healthcare costs due to Trump administration and Republican policies—a range of changes that includes cuts to Medicaid and health-related federal agencies, as well as allowing for the expiration of ACA-related tax credits.

On an individual basis, it’s difficult to say. But broadly, the answer is probably no, particularly for the people who are eligible to receive Trump’s refunds: ACA enrollees who pay full price for their health insurance and do not receive federal subsidies.

Worth noting, too, is that the payments are only being sent to states that utilize the Healthcare.gov marketplace—which tend to lean Republican—rather than those running their own state exchanges.

Where is the money coming from?

“There is always a fund with the ACA exchanges that can be used for various things,” says Matt McGough, a policy analyst at KFF for the Program on the ACA and the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. “This is a pool of money that different administrations can use to put toward different things, but the pool is coming from user fees for people who enroll through healthcare.gov and pay the full premium,” he said.

Notably, these are people who would not have been affected by the expiration of the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credits, which were phased out at the end of 2025. 

The phasing out of credits caused out-of-pocket healthcare premium costs to increase (and enrollment to decline)—but again, the people eligible for Trump’s refunds were not seeing any subsidies anyway.

Still, that doesn’t mean their costs didn’t increase, as average premium costs have risen substantially over the past couple of years.

“Premiums grew in 2026 by an average of 18%, and are expected to grow by double digits in 2027,” McGough says. “These are people seeing their premiums increase 30% to 40% in two years.” 

Depending on several factors, those premiums now cost upward of $1,000 more per year than they did before, and McGough says that “the average benchmark premium, the second-lowest-cost plan, last year was $625 per month.” 

Ultimately, he says, the $500 refund “doesn’t even cover, on average, a month’s premium.”

Cats are having a moment. In American homes, cats have long played second fiddle to dogs. More U.S. households own dogs, but the balance is starting to tip.

In 2025, the number of U.S. homes with a dog under a year old was basically equal to the number of homes with a cat under the same age, according to recent data from market research group Packaged Facts. In 2026, the ratio tipped to 0.94 puppies for every kitten. Compare that to 2014, when there were 1.8 puppies for every kitten, and it certainly looks like feline friends are on the upswing.

Also in 2025, 95 million American households owned a pet. Of those households, 71 million owned a dog and 53 million owned a cat. Pet ownership grew across the board for both cats and dogs between 2024 and 2025, but cat ownership increased 5% during that interval while dog ownership only grew by 2%. That follows a record year for Americans adding cats to their homes in 2024, when cat ownership exploded by 23%. Many homes added a litter box over the last few years, but existing cat owners also added more cats into the mix.

Two major demographics are driving the increase in cat ownership, according to recent data from the American Pet Products Association: Gen Z and cat dads. Gen Z made up 22% of cat owners in the U.S. in 2025, up from 12% the year prior. Meanwhile, cat ownership is surging among men, who now make up 43% of cat owners. Younger men in particular are behind the trend, with cat ownership among Gen Z men rising 27% year over year. Men are also adopting more cats: Since 2018, the number of cat dads who owned three or more cats rose 117%. Cat ladies are officially on notice.

“What’s particularly exciting is that growth isn’t coming from just one place,” APPA president and CEO Pete Scott observed in the report. “New households are entering the category, existing owners are expanding their homes to multiple cats, and younger generations and male owners are helping shape new expectations around care, nutrition, and companionship.”

Treating cats to a fancy feast

Demographic shifts among cat owners come with changes to shopping habits. Male cat owners are buying more food mixers and toppers—the enticing stuff that goes on top of the dull lump of pâté or the pile of kibble. Cat dads also spend a larger share of their pet budget on products than female owners do, showing a particular enthusiasm for high-end and specialty food options. On the whole, Gen Z is more budget-minded, but shows strong spending across categories like treats, food, and general cat products. 

Dog food sales are dropping, but sales of cat food, cat toys, and other feline products are on the rise. The pet brands Chewy, General Mills, and Petco all gave a shout-out to cats in recent earnings calls for boosting their sales. General Mills, which owns pet food brands Blue Buffalo and Tiki Cat, saw double-digit percentage growth in cat food sales in the last quarter—growth that stabilized its pet segment, even as dog food sales dropped significantly.

All pet owners enjoy the perks of a furry friend (or three), but cats tend to be more apartment-friendly, happier in smaller spaces, and generally much more content when left alone. “Cats continue to resonate with consumers because they fit a wide range of lifestyles while delivering meaningful companionship,” Scott said in the APPA report. “As ownership grows and emerging audiences become more influential, we’re seeing a category that continues to evolve through stronger emotional bonds, greater personalization, and increased investment in everyday care.” 

Any cat owner probably doesn’t need a scientist to tell them this, but cats are associated with happiness, too. A new international study found that countries with a “greater density of cats” also reported a higher sense of well-being, with Finland leading the way on happiness, backed by an above-average number of cats per capita.

Capcom saw tremendous success with the launch of Resident Evil Requiem earlier this year. The survival horror game has already sold more than 8.5 million copies, bringing in revenue topping $500 million and reigniting interest in the 30-year-old franchise.

Resident Evil Requiem, like any AAA game, took a long time to make, with a development cycle spanning six years and including a reboot midway through production. To maintain momentum, Capcom has revealed plans to incorporate artificial intelligence into its game development process.

The project is called REX, programmer Satoshi Ishida revealed at a tech conference over the weekend. At its core, six separate programs will help integrate AI and machine learning into the RE Engine, the increasingly long-in-the-tooth proprietary game engine that powers Capcom’s biggest titles.

The goal, Ishida said, is to create a “game engine of the AI generation.”

To be clear, Capcom isn’t planning to have AI develop creative elements for its games, such as game assets. Instead, the project reflects a broader problem facing the industry: Game development cycles are getting longer, and Capcom hopes AI can streamline parts of the process. That includes elements like quality assurance testing and other development efficiencies.

Capcom is hardly alone in incorporating AI into its workflow. Several other publishers have done so in recent years. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said in April that AI technology has augmented jobs at the company rather than replaced them.

“I saw some data recently, I think, now almost all—like 85%—of our quality assurance [work] is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm,” he said.

And Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive Software, said his company is exploring what advantages AI can offer.

“Anything that allows us to do a better job—quicker and cheaper—we’re interested,” he told Fast Company at the Entertainment Software Association’s Interactive Innovation Conference earlier this year. “What we are beginning to see is mundane work that can easily be replaced by technology is indeed being replaced [and] people turn their attention to higher-value tasks.”

Capcom’s AI tools will do much the same. One system, for instance, could animate groups of objects or characters together rather than having those animations run individually in real time. Another, according to Capcom’s presentation, would convert game-mechanics ideas into a standardized programming language. Since RE Engine is used by developers in several countries, that common language could also help speed up development.

Capcom did not respond to a request for further comment about the REX project, but it addressed its stance on AI during a shareholders meeting in March, making clear it was interested in the technology but did not plan to use it to replace the human creative force behind its games.

“We will not implement assets generated by AI into our games,” the company said. “However, we plan to proactively use it as a contributing technology to improve the efficiency and productivity of the game development process. To this end, we are currently exploring ways to implement it in various areas, including graphics, sound, and programming.”

This isn’t Capcom’s first experiment with AI. In January 2025, it created a prototype “idea generation” system alongside Google that used generative AI to help brainstorm ideas.

“One of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive aspects of game development is brainstorming ideas to create the game’s world,” Kazuki Abe, technical director at Capcom, said at the time. “For example, if there’s a television in the game’s environment, we can’t just use an existing product. We need to come up with the shape, manufacturer’s logo, and other details ourselves.”

The companies said the system lowered the cost of brainstorming, helping improve margins. But as the video game industry continues to undergo a painful contraction, with many studios cutting staff, almost any use of AI is likely to create tension among game makers.

As AI advances and becomes capable of doing more, executives may eventually reconsider whether some positions are necessary. Zelnick acknowledges that possibility, though he argues that properly implementing the technology can instead eliminate low-value work.

“I have an obligation to run an efficient enterprise,” Zelnick said. “We have not seen any opportunity to reduce head count because of AI. What we have seen is an opportunity to stop wasting time on things that don’t create value.”

“No more AI. SI, it’s better,” said Elon Musk after announcing that he is rebranding his newly branded artificial intelligence division. SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, replacing the initialism “AI” with “SI,” which stands for “super intelligence.” Musk’s post on X came after a follower asked him whether he would follow President Donald Trump’s suggestion to Silicon Valley moguls and start using the term “super intelligence.”

“Artificial intelligence sounds fake,” Trump said after a September 24 dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping. According to Trump, Xi “seemed” to like the term.

Musk’s shift closely follows a federal order signed on September 29 by Trump. Titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” the president directed government agencies to change all mentions of AI to “SI.”

Superintelligence is not a new concept for Musk. He first spoke about it back in 2014, when he referenced a book titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom. The book talked about AI being a “recursive digital intelligence” that will surpass humans. “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable,” Musk said on Twitter (which he purchased in 2022 and renamed X in 2023). Bostrom had spoken with Musk for the book and even thanked him in the acknowledgments.

This latest rebrand comes barely three months after Musk folded his startup xAI into SpaceX, debuting the SpaceXAI rebrand in July 2026. That restructuring absorbed xAI as a subsidiary, resulting in a train crash of a composite wordmark that grafted a condensed, slanted “AI” appendage underneath the rocket trail of the primary SpaceX logo. (Even Grok hated that logo.)

Trump’s observation that “artificial” sounds “fake” might be overly simplistic, but it hits on a marketing truth that Silicon Valley has been slow to acknowledge. To many people, the initials “AI” have accumulated massive, toxic brand baggage. Job theft, energy-guzzling, water-wasting, creative strip-mining, and an endless flood of digital slop.

It’s unlikely that a “super intelligence” switcheroo could wholesale launder the technology’s reputation, though it’s true that “artificial” connotes counterfeit and hollow, while “super” suggests limitless capability. Tech leaders know the public is sick of AI, so why not sell them SI instead? 

The pivot offers one obvious possible win for Musk: A swift mercy killing to that atrocious SpaceXAI Frankenlogo. Whether squeezing an “SI” under the rocket trail turns out any better remains to be seen, but I have a hard time imagining it can look worse.

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter.

Nationally aggregated inventory is up 5.6% on a year-over-year basis from September 30, 2025, to September 30, 2026.

That marks three straight months when the year-over-year growth in active inventory for sale has accelerated. However, it’s only a tad acceleration from the low of 1.9% year-over-year inventory growth in June.

If you go back 12 months, the year-over-year national inventory growth rate was higher (+16.9%). Nonetheless, the continued growth in nationally aggregated inventory suggests a nationally aggregated housing market that’s soft, with buyers in many markets gaining some additional leverage over the past year.

And with long-term yields and mortgage rates back at a two-year high, we’ll be watching to see how much momentum the national softening regains as we head deeper into the seasonally slow period. We’re already starting to see it regain some momentum.

Nationally, we’re just shy of returning to pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (5.2% below September 2019).

September inventory/active listings total, according to Realtor.com:

• September 2017 -> 1,308,607
• September 2018 -> 1,301,922
• September 2019 -> 1,224,868
• September 2020 -> 749,395 (pandemic housing boom overheating)
• September 2021 -> 578,070 (pandemic housing boom overheating)
• September 2022 -> 731,496
• September 2023 -> 702,430
• September 2024 -> 940,980
• September 2025 -> 1,100,407
• September 2026 -> 1,161,615

From September 2024 to September 2025, U.S. active inventory across the country rose by 159,427 homes for sale.

From September 2025 to September 2026, U.S. active inventory across the country rose by 61,208 homes for sale.

Below is the year-over-year active inventory percentage change by state.

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While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, the pace of growth is more mild than a year ago (see the side-by-side maps below). In fact, Florida—home to many of the weakest regional housing markets over the past two years—is seeing active inventory edge down a little year over year (-10%).

Below left: Year-over-year active inventory shift from September 2024 to September 2025

Below right: Year-over-year active inventory shift from September 2025 to September 2026

And while active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish (just barely) even as they also soften.

As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across certain parts of the Midwest and Northeast. That’s where home sellers over the past four years were more likely, relatively speaking, to have more power than their peers in many Southern markets.

In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sunbelt and Mountain West, including metro-area housing markets such as Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin, Texas.

Many of these areas saw major price surges during the pandemic housing boom, with home prices getting stretched compared to local incomes. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Punta Gorda and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices.

This softening trend was accelerated further by an abundance of new-home supply in the Sunbelt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives (if they have the margins to do so) to maintain sales in a shifted market, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market: Some buyers, who would have previously considered existing homes, opted for new homes with more favorable deals over the past couple of years—which put some additional upward pressure on resale inventory.

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At the end of September 2026, 19 states were above pre-pandemic 2018-2019 active inventory levels: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbia is also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels.)

To gauge inventory recovery, ResiClub previously compared active inventory with inventory in the same month in 2019. However, because household counts gradually shift over time, we now adjust for those changes by calculating active inventory per 1,000 households. In addition, to reduce one-off noise in 2019, we use the average of the same month in 2018 and 2019 as the pre-pandemic baseline. Those latter two adjustments don’t materially change the picture; however, enough time has passed that we believe they’re now necessary.

At the end of September 2026, 10 states were above pre-pandemic 2018-2019 active inventory levels when adjusting for household count: Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington (plus the District of Columbia). This cut (i.e., adjusting for per capita households) is the one we used in the map above.

Click here to view an interactive of the chart below (best done on desktop).

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Big picture

The pandemic housing boom saw a sharp overheating in U.S. home prices and a stretching of underlying fundamentals (i.e., compared to incomes)—especially once long-term yields and mortgage rates normalized after the zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) era.

That strained affordability has put upward pressure on national inventory. As inventory has built and nationally aggregated U.S. resale home price growth has fallen below the rate of U.S. income growth (i.e., falling “real” inflation-adjusted prices), we’re slowly seeing those underlying fundamentals improve.

In the boomtown markets—and new-construction categories—that have seen outright nominal home price declines over the past four years, underlying fundamentals have improved faster. It just takes time for this post–pandemic housing boom cyclical cooling window, and the recalibration of fundamentals, to play out. We’re still in that window.

Click here for an interactive version of the table below.

Below is another version of the table above—but this one includes every month since January 2017.

Click here to view an interactive version of the chart below.

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If you’d like to further examine the monthly state inventory figures, use the interactive below.

As ResiClub has been closely documenting, Florida—which has been one of the epicenters of housing market weakness over the past three years, particularly in the southwest of the state—is no longer seeing the same upward burst in inventory.

Indeed, the intensity of Florida’s housing market correction is easing across many pockets of the state. There are still pockets of weakness, particularly in Southwest Florida, but the softening has let up. Some builders have also reported that their affordability adjustments have helped them better meet the market in Florida. To really get a sense of the Zip code nuances, I recommend that ResiClub clients use the ResiClub Terminal.

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For the past month, slowing the development of artificial intelligence has been at the forefront of AI discourse. After a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee left the industry in September, citing that “neither company is acting responsibly,” AI leaders and everyday citizens alike sounded off on the potential of an AI-powered doomsday.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded with an essay about the importance of “pacing the frontier,” or slowing AI development to prioritize safety. At the time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed with Amodei, writing in a social media post that AI development “should be slower than it otherwise could be.” 

But in a new interview, Altman seems to have changed his tune, saying OpenAI’s looser stance on AI safety is what sets the company apart from Anthropic—and some “bad things” that could happen as a result are a necessary evil.

On Politico’s podcast Decoded, host Brendan Bordelon asked Altman where OpenAI diverged from Anthropic and its “pro-regulation CEO” on AI policy.

“One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” Altman replied.

“I do think the lighter-touch regulatory stance we advocate for comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience,” he continued. “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, or all the other bad things that will happen, because I think that people will do tremendously—orders of magnitude—more good stuff than bad stuff.”

“We believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”

In a conversation for the first edition of Decoded, a new daily newsletter and podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked with POLITICO’s @BrendanBordelon about trade-offs, AI safety,… pic.twitter.com/5y5sVpd9ZM

— POLITICO (@politico) October 4, 2026 “Why are people not revolting?”: Social media sounds off

Altman’s comments immediately went viral, with post after post criticizing the CEO for seemingly valuing AI advancement over human safety.

“Why does this person have any authority over us? Why are people not revolting?” one user wrote on X, garnering more than 445,000 views.

“Why are we just letting these tech bros make these decisions for us? When did we all decide we don’t have any agency?” questioned another poster. “It’s easy to say the world needs to ‘accept some bad things happening’ when you aren’t the one the bad things are going to happen to!”

“Imagine Boeing’s CEO saying the world should accept a few plane crashes to get faster innovation in aviation,” a third person wrote. “He’d be gone by lunch.”

Why does this person have any authority over us?
Why are people not revolting? https://t.co/q2gl88GNEf

— Young⚡Zoomer (@_youngzoomer) October 5, 2026

Politicians from both sides of the aisle weighed in as well. On the Republican front, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned Altman’s authority on AI policy: “And a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision for the rest of us? No dice,” he wrote.

Democrats, such as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, criticized Altman’s stance, too. “Sam Altman shouldn’t be making any decisions about what ‘bad things’ we have to accept on all of our behalf,” Pritzker wrote. “I am not comfortable with that. None of us should be, especially when it comes to AI.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also chimed in, calling Altman’s statement “absurd.”

“We should reject AI bots doing ‘bad things’ so that some of the richest corporations in the world can get even richer,” she wrote. “It’s time to enforce the laws already on the books, regulate AI, and protect people from serious harm.”

This is absurd.

We should reject AI bots doing "bad things" so that some of the richest corporations in the world can get even richer.

It's time to enforce the laws already on the books, regulate AI, and protect people from serious harm. https://t.co/D4G6rNKohU

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 5, 2026

The spookiest holiday is right around the corner, and seasoned trick-or-treaters know that not all streets are created equal when it comes to Halloween.

As October 31 approaches, the Hershey’s-owned brand Reese’s found the country’s top 150 streets for trick-or-treating.

The team at Reese’s analyzed data ranging from costume and candy purchasing trends to community participation, decorations, and walkability to determine “haul” and “haunt” scores for each chosen street. The final list, which is available online via the Hershey website, organizes the list by regions, with streets spanning from the Northeast to Alaska and Hawaii.

For instance, Kingwood Road in Little Rock, Arkansas, made the list with 80.3 and 75.3 haul and haunt scores, respectively, with Reese’s citing close-set homes and walkability as standout factors for the street. Miles away in Massachusetts, Beals Street in Brookline earned scores in the upper 90s due to high participation rates among neighbors as well as their inventive decorations.

“As a leader in the Halloween candy space, Reese’s has had a front-row seat to what makes the holiday special for generations, “Melissa Blette, Reese’s senior brand manager at The Hershey Co., said in a press release. 

After identifying the 150 streets, Reese’s formed a “Halloween Council” tasked with reviewing the data to determine the country’s top spot. Council members include actresses Christina Ricci and Kathy Najimy, as well as digital content creators Rachel Iwanyszyn, Zaire Alford, and Macy Blackwell.

“The best Halloween streets aren’t just the ones that decorate or have the biggest budgets,” Ricci said in a press statement. “Instead, they are the ones that create an atmosphere where trick-or-treaters keep coming back, and the entire community becomes part of the experience.”

The top street is set to be announced on October 21 by the Halloween Council. In addition to bragging rights, the chosen street will receive a block party sponsored by Reese’s in partnership with Zillow, which will be stocked with treats like Reese’s Pumpkins and Peanut Butter Cups.

Apple’s Vision Pro was never going to be a big success right out of the gate. It wasn’t just the eye-watering $3,499 price—it was the headset’s reliance on highly advanced, low-yield OLED display panels from Sony, which could reportedly only be produced in quantities of under a million a year.

There was never a scenario in which the Vision Pro could have turned into the next iPhone—or even the next Apple Watch—overnight. Apple knew this when it released the product, but thought it was worth getting the platform out into the wild anyway.

That said, the company can’t be too pleased with the Vision Pro’s reception. Content for the headset has slowed to a trickle, and at no point since launch has it been difficult to find one in stock. A niche product designed to stoke excitement among early adopters and developers is one thing, but there’s little evidence that it’s succeeded even on that level.

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That’s not to say anything bad about the Vision Pro’s quality—visionOS is a thoughtfully designed operating system, and the hardware remains class-leading in many ways. But if Apple’s vision for spatial computing is ever going to take off, a few things need to happen. The headset needs to get smaller, it needs to be more comfortable to wear, and it needs to be much cheaper.

The Meta alternative

Enter Meta, which last week announced a product that would seem to tick all three boxes. The Meta VR Glasses are designed to do many of the same things as the Vision Pro, but in a lighter, more glasses-like form factor that costs only about a third of the price of Apple’s device—they’ll go on sale for $1,299 next year, while the Vision Pro starts at $3,699.

How did Meta do it? One cost-cutting measure is the VR Glasses’ OLED panels.

The Vision Pro’s dual 4K displays were expensive even by the standards of the rest of the hardware, which was as high-end as you’d expect of Apple. One Omdia estimate put the two internal Sony micro-OLED panels at $228 each. Add the much-ridiculed external OLED screen, which shows a low-resolution representation of the wearer’s eyes, and the estimated display bill came to around $530—or 35% of the total component cost. 

It’s important to remember that a bill of materials doesn’t tell you everything that goes into the sticker price you see on shelves. But in this case, it could well indicate how much Apple was spending on its display panels before accounting for chips, sensors, or anything else.

Meta says the VR Glasses have 2,412 x 2,288 pixels per eye, which is about half as much as the Vision Pro—it’s a total of around 11 million pixels versus 23 million. But in terms of sharpness, the two headsets are closer than you might think. Meta is quoting a figure of 37 pixels per degree, which is actually higher than the Vision Pro’s.

The catch here is that the field of view is smaller, at around 70 degrees horizontally compared with roughly 100 degrees for the Vision Pro. These figures can be fuzzy and differ between users, but the difference between the two is pretty stark.

In my experience with various augmented reality glasses, however, the field of view is not quite as critical in that form factor as it would be in a VR headset designed to immerse you in a virtual world. I often use the Xreal One glasses, for example, which have an even smaller 50-degree field of view, and the picture stretches out close to the edge of the glasses themselves. It’s not really something you think about when you’re watching a movie.

Meta does say that it will offer an optional accessory to block out peripheral vision, and in that configuration, the VR Glasses are likely to be less immersive than the Quest 3 or Vision Pro. But as a way to achieve the same kind of AR experience as the Vision Pro, while letting you see the world around you in a radically smaller and lighter design that weighs just 100 grams, it feels like a worthy trade-off—especially since the panels are so much cheaper and likely available in greater volume. Impressions I’ve heard from early testers have been universally positive.

Other advantages

Another way Meta has reduced the size and weight is by moving computing components to the tethered “puck,” which in the Vision Pro solely houses the battery. That felt like an odd decision by Apple even at the time of the Vision Pro’s release—after all, the majority of space inside an iPhone is already taken up by its battery. If you’re going to have a cable running down to a separate breakout box anyway, it would surely be prudent to make the most of it and lighten the load on the user’s head. 

Apple also didn’t want to compromise when it came to the Vision Pro’s controllers, or lack thereof. The operating system is entirely built around intuitive gesture controls, in a typically Apple move. But it did mean that the Vision Pro was on the back foot when it came to gaming support, and the later addition of support for the controllers from the PlayStation VR2—itself not exactly a roaring success of a device—hasn’t really moved the needle.

The Meta VR Glasses also won’t ship with controllers in the box, but they have two key advantages: compatibility with the huge library of Quest games and with Quest 3 controllers. That means anyone who buys the glasses and does want to play games on them won’t be short of things to do on launch day.

Of course, even the Quest 3—by some distance the most popular VR headset to date—is still far from a mass-market success, and there’s no guarantee that Meta will fare any better with the VR Glasses. But from a design and technology perspective, it’s shocking just how more viable of a product they already appear to be than the Vision Pro. 

Apple is going to have to go back to the drawing board with visionOS, and Meta may well have just shown the way forward.

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U.S. investigators are closely monitoring reports that dozens of people are in quarantine after the death of a Russian laboratory worker studying the plague in Siberia.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the State Department, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, and other U.S. government agencies are trying to determine what happened after a 28-year-old female lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East died after being diagnosed with pneumonia of “unknown” origin, per Russia’s infection disease agency Rospotrebnadzor, as reported by CNN.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Russian officials said other workers could be affected. “We’re watching and monitoring it closely,” he said. “I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it.”

The lab technician’s cause of death remains unclear. One Russian news outlet reported that she “allegedly broke a test tube containing the pneumonic plague pathogen” on Friday, September 25, and died at a hospital soon after.

In the meantime, nearly 200 people who may have come in contact with the researcher are now under medical observation, NBC News reported.

Rospotrebnadzor announced that the mayor of Shelekhov, the town at the epicenter of the potential outbreak, has enacted a “comprehensive set of anti-epidemic measures,” The Washington Post reported. The district is located in far eastern Siberia, near the Mongolian border.

“Plague is a potentially life-threatening disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis” and “is spread to people through bites from infected rodent fleas or, less often, direct contact with an infected animal,” according to the CDC. “It can be cured with antibiotics, but treatment must be given quickly,” the CDC adds.

The most common forms of plague are bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. The “Black Death,” as it is known, was a pandemic said to be caused by the plague, which swept across Europe in the 14th century, killing tens of millions of people.

Pneumonic plague develops when bacteria spreads to the lungs of a patient with untreated bubonic or septicemic plague. It’s the most serious form of the disease and is the only type that can spread between people, often through respiratory droplets. According to the CDC, its incubation period can be as short as one day.