With ever-shrinking attention spans, film students today are struggling to make it to the end of a feature-length movie without getting distracted by their phones.
Thats according to a recent article by The Atlantics Rose Horowitch. In a snippet that has since circulated on X, gaining nearly 2 million views since it was posted last week, one of the film studies professors interviewed by Horowitch recalled asking his students about the ending of the 1962 François Truffaut film Jules and Jim.
The attention crisis is so dire at schools right now that film professors can't even get their students to finish movies, and the kids don't even look up the plots of the movies they skip, so students fail basic in-class quizzes like "what happened at the end of the movie?" pic.twitter.com/e09bN5ia8J— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) January 30, 2026
More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie), the screenshot read. The film has a run time of 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Naturally, much hand-wringing ensued online. Im so confused. You kind of have to go out of your way to take a film studies course, right?, one X user asked. Imagine not doing the homework, and the homework is watching a movie. Thats crazy, a Reddit user wrote.
Im so confused. You kind of have to go out of your way to take a film studies course, right?— Joseph Guarino (@RoninJoey) January 30, 2026
Others called it a crisis of attention. This bleeds into everything. Can’t pay attention to or finish a novel. Need cues to watch a movie because they are on second screens, another X user wrote.
The rise of second-screening and the resulting genre of casual, background-friendly TV shows and movies has been well documented. Many, myself included, will admit to putting on a film only to scroll TikTok with one hand and place an online order on a laptop with the other.
In a recent n+1 magazine article, Will Tavlin reports that screenwriters are now being told to have their protagonists announce what theyre doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.
Film studies professors interviewed by The Atlantics Horowitch say they have even resorted to assigning students only portions of films. One compares his students to nicotine addicts going through withdrawal.
Short-form content on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have rewired the brain to expect a dopamine hit every few seconds. The closest thing we had to doomscrolling back then was channel surfing, one Reddit user pointed out. Could they play the movies on 2x with Minecraft footage? one X user suggested.
could they play the movies on 2x with minecraft footage?— halogen (@halogen1048576) January 30, 2026
Long films arent the problem here. If anything, they might be the solution. Im actively trying to break my phone addiction, and a big part of that has been using movies as a guaranteed two hours a night off my phone, one Reddit user admitted. Its therapeutic, and Id encourage anyone trying to click less screen time to give it a try.
Homework assignment: Sit and watch The Brutalist without once touching your phone, and see how difficult it can be.
As Valentines Day approaches, finding the perfect words to express your feelings for that special someone can seem like a daunting taskso much so that you may feel tempted to ask ChatGPT for an assist.
After all, within seconds, it can dash off a well-written, romantic message. Even a short, personalized limerick or poem is no sweat.
But before you copy and paste that AI-generated love note, you might want to consider how it could make you feel about yourself.
We research the intersection of consumer behavior and technology, and weve been studying how people feel after using generative AI to write heartfelt messages. It turns out that theres a psychological cost to using the technology as your personal ghostwriter.
The rise of the AI ghostwriter
Generative AI has transformed how many people communicate. From drafting work emails to composing social media posts, these tools have become everyday writing assistants. So its no wonder some people are turning to them for more personal matters, too.
Wedding vows, birthday wishes, thank-you notes, and even Valentines Day messages are increasingly being outsourced to algorithms.
The technology is certainly capable. Chatbots can craft emotionally resonant responses that sound genuinely heartfelt.
But theres a catch: When you present these words as your own, something doesnt sit right.
When convenience breeds guilt
We conducted five experiments with hundreds of participants, asking them to imagine using generative AI to write various emotional messages to loved ones. Across every scenario we testedfrom appreciation emails to birthday cards to love letterswe found the same pattern: People felt guilty when they used generative AI to write these messages compared to when they wrote the messages themselves.
When you copy an AI-generated message and sign your name to it, youre essentially taking credit for words you didnt write.
This creates what we call a source-credit discrepancy, which is a gap between who actually created the message and who appears to have created it. You can see these discrepancies in other contexts, whether its celebrity social media posts written by public relations teams or political speeches composed by professional speechwriters.
When you use AI, even though you might tell yourself youre just being efficient, you can probably recognize, deep down, that youre misleading the recipient about the personal effort and thought that went into the message.
The transparency test
To better understand this guilt, we compared AI-generated messages to other scenarios. When people bought greeting cards with preprinted messages, they felt no guilt at all. This is because greeting cards are transparently not written by you. Greeting cards carry no deception: Everyone understands you selected the card and that you didnt write it yourself.
We also tested another scenario: having a friend secretly write the message for you. This produced just as much guilt as using generative AI. Whether the ghostwriter is human or an artificial intelligence tool doesnt matter. What matters most is the dishonesty.
There were some boundaries, however. We found that guilt decreased when messages were never delivered and when recipients were mere acquaintances rather than close friends.
These findings confirm that the guilt stems from violating expectations of honesty in relationships where emotional authenticity matters most.
Somewhat relatedly, research has found that people react more negatively when they learn a company used AI instead of a human to write a message to them.
But the backlash was strongest when audiences expected personal efforta boss expressing sympathy after a tragedy, or a note sent to all staff members celebrating a colleagues recovery from a health scare. It was far weaker for purely factual or instructional notes, such as announcing routine personnel changes or providing basic business updates.
What this means for your Valentines Day
So, what should you do about that looming Valentines Day message? Our research suggests that the human hand behind a meaningful message can help both the writer and the recipient feel better.
This doesnt mean you cant use generative AI as a brainstorming partner rather than a ghostwriter. Let it help you overcome writers block or suggest ideas, but make the final message truly yours. Edit, personalize, and add details that only you would know. The key is co-creation, not complete delegation.
Generative AI is a powerful tool, but its also created a raft of ethical dilemmas, whether its in the classroom or in romantic relationships. As these technologies become more integrated into everyday life, people will need to decide where to draw the line between helpful assistance and emotional outsourcing.
This Valentines Day, your heart and your conscience might thank you for keeping your message genuinely your own.
Julian Givi is an assistant professor of marketing at West Virginia University.
Colleen P. Kirk is an assistant professor of marketing at New York Institute of Technology.
Danielle Hass is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at West Virginia University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question youd like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.
Is the whole universe just a simulation? Moumita B., age 13, Dhaka, Bangladesh
How do you know anything is real? Some things you can see directly, like your fingers. Other things, like your chin, you need a mirror or a camera to see. Other things cant be seen, but you believe in them because a parent or a teacher told you, or you read it in a book.
As a physicist, I use sensitive scientific instruments and complicated math to try to figure out whats real and whats not. But none of these sources of information is entirely reliable: Scientific measurements can be wrong, my calculations can have errors, and even your eyes can deceive you, like the dress that broke the internet because nobody could agree on what colors it was.
Because every source of informationeven your teacherscan trick you some of the time, some people have always wondered whether we can ever trust any information.
If you cant trust anything, are you sure youre awake? Thousands of years ago, Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and realized that he might actually be a butterfly dreaming he was a human. Plato wondered whether all we see could just be shadows of true objects. Maybe the world we live in our whole lives inside isnt the real one; maybe its more like a big video game, or the movie The Matrix.
The simulation hypothesis
The simulation hypothesis is a modern attempt to use logic and observations about technology to finally answer these questions and prove that were probably living in something like a giant video game. Twenty years ago, a philosopher named Nick Bostrom made such an argument, based on the fact that video games, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence were improving rapidly. That trend has continued, so that today people can jump into immersive virtual reality or talk to seemingly conscious artificial beings.
Bostrom projected these technological trends into the future and imagined a world in which wed be able to realistically simulate trillions of human beings. He also suggested that if someone could create a simulation of you that seemed just like you from the outside, it would feel just like you inside, with all of your thoughts and feelings.
Suppose thats right. Suppose that sometime in, say, the 31st century, humanity will be able to simulate whatever they want. Some of them will probably be fans of the 21st century and will run many different simulations of our world so that they can learn about us, or just be amused.
Heres Bostroms shocking logical argument: If the 21st century planet Earth only ever existed one time, but it will eventually get simulated trillions of times, and if the simulations are so good that the people in the simulation feel just like real people, then youre probably living on one of the trillions of simulations of the Earth, not on the one original Earth.
This argument would be even more convincing if you actually could run powerful simulations today; but as long as you believe that people will run those simulations someday, then you logically should believe that youre probably living in one today.
Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the simulation hypothesis and why he thinks the odds are about 50-50 were part of a virtual reality.
Signs were living in a simulation . . . or not
If we are living in a simulation, does that explain anything? Maybe the simulation has glitches, and thats why your phone wasnt where you were sure you left it, or how you knew something was going to happen before it did, or why that dress on the internet looked so weird.
There are more fundamental ways in which our world resembles a simulation. There is a particular length, much smaller than an atom, beyond which physicists theories about the universe break down. And we cant see anything more than about 50 billion light-years away because the light hasnt had time to reach us since the Big Bang. That sounds suspiciously like a computer game where you cant see anything smaller than a pixel or anything beyond the edge of the screen.
Of course, there are other explanations for all of that stuff. Lets face it: You might have misremembered where you put your phone. But Bostroms argument doesnt require any scientific proof. Its logically true as long as you really believe that many powerful simulations will exist in the future. Thats why famous scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and tech titans like Elon Musk have been convinced of it, though Tyson now puts the odds at 50-50.
Others of us are more skeptical. The technology required to run such large and realistic simulations is so powerful that Bostrom describes such simulators as godlike, and he admits that humanity may never get that good at simulations. Even though it is far from being resolved, the simulation hypothesis is an impressive logical and philosophical argument that has challenged our fundamental notions of reality and captured the imaginations of millions.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question youd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age, and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limitadults, let us know what youre wondering, too. We wont be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Zeb Rocklin is an associate professor of physics at Georgia Institute of Technology.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A few months ago, I walked into the office of one of our customers, a publicly traded vertical software company with tens of thousands of small business customers. I expected to meet a traditional support team with rows of agents on the phones, sitting at computers triaging tickets. Instead, it looked more like a control room.
There were specialists monitoring dashboards, tuning AI behavior, debugging API failures, and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions over chat and email (resetting passwords, explaining features, troubleshooting one-off issues, and escalating bugs) was now writing Python scripts to automate routing. Another was building quality-scoring models for the companys AI agent.
This seemed markedly different from the hyperbole Id been hearing about customer support roles going away in large part due to AI. What I was seeing across our customer base looked more like a shift in how support work is defined.
So I decided to take a closer look. I analyzed 21 customer support job postings across AI-native companies, high-growth startups, and enterprise SaaS. These jobs run the gamut from technical support for complex software products to more transactional, commercial support involving billing and other common issues.
What I found was that customer support is being rebuilt around AI-native workflows and systems-level thinking. Yes, responding to individual tickets is still important, but roles are designing and operating the technical systems that resolve customer issues at scale.
The result is a new kind of support role, one thats part operator, part technologist, part strategist.
AI Skills Are Now Table Stakes
For most of the last two decades, support hiring optimized for communication skills and product familiarity. But that baseline is now gone.
Across the 21 job postings I analyzed, nearly three-quarters explicitly required experience with AI tools, automation platforms, or conversational AI systems.
These roles are about configuring, monitoring, and improving the AI systems over time. They are reviewing conversation logs, auditing AI behavior, and identifying failure modes.
In other words, AI literacy has become the baseline for modern support work. If you dont understand how AI systems behave, you cant support the customers relying on them.
More than half of the roles I analyzed required candidates to debug APIs, analyze logs, write SQL queries, or script automations in Python or Bash. Many expected familiarity with cloud infrastructure, observability tools, or version control systems like Git.
That would have been unthinkable in support job descriptions even five years ago.
But it makes sense. When AI systems fail, they fail at scale. Diagnosing those failures requires technical fluency like understanding how models interact with external systems and when an issue is rooted in configuration versus product logic.
The job has evolved from fixing problems ticket by ticket to preventing the next thousand tickets.
Humans are Needed to Solve Harder Problems
Once AI becomes part of the support workflow, the nature of the work becomes more technical. One support leader I spoke with at a company that now contains more than 80% of its tickets with AI put it plainly: once automation handles the easy questions, the work left behind gets harder. The same frontline agents who used to focus on quick wins are now handling the most frustrated customers and edge cases, and theyve had to scale up their skills accordingly.
In practice, this often looks like a customer trying to complete a critical workflow, like syncing data between systems before running billing. An AI agent starts by working off documentation that a subject matter expert has synthesized from multiple functions across the company. From there, the AI agent can confirm that everything is configured correctly. However, the AI agent may not be integrated to the right underlying system that failed silently hours earlier. The customer follows the guidance, only to discover downstream that data didnt move as expected. When the issue escalates, the subject matter expert has to reconstruct what happened across systems, reason through what the AI agent missed, and help the customer recover without losing trust.
This is the kind of end-to-end work that AI still cant do on its own. It requires both technical fluency to trace failures across disparate systems, in addition to human judgement to decide what can be fixed immediately versus what needs deeper product or engineering intervention. In this way, support has become less about answering questions out of the manual, and more about creating the manual and solving the problems that it doesnt cover.
The Hybrid HumanAI Model Is the Default
Despite widespread fear about AI replacing support jobs, not a single posting I analyzed suggested that support would be 100% automated in the future.
Instead, nearly every role gravitated toward a hybrid model where AI handles routine interactions, while humans oversee quality and continuously improve the system.
This makes sense when you consider the fact that 95% of customer support leaders said they would retain human agents in their operations to help define AIs role when surveyed by Gartner last year.
Titles like AI Support Specialist, AI Quality Analyst, and Support Operations Specialist were almost entirely focused on orchestration, designing escalation logic and defining when humans step in.
This is where the earlier control room image becomes reality. The work of humans changes from simply answering questions to actually shaping systems.
Taken together, these trends point to a single conclusion: customer support is specializing. The repetitive work is going away, but the judgment-heavy, technical work is expanding. That shift is already visible in how companies hire. The question now becomes whether organizations (and workers) are ready to adapt fast enough.
Forget about the big game on Sunday. Two heavyweights have been battling it out this week over a topic thats become all-too-familiar over the years: advertising creep.
Its a tale as old as time, in some respects. Many a CEO have proudly declared that their companys platform or services will remain ad-free, only to later succumb to the lure of all that advertising revenue and embrace it.
And thats creating a new divide among AI platformsone that will play out to the worlds largest TV viewing audience during the Super Bowl.
Among the nearly dozen AI-related ads on Sunday will be two 60-second spots each for OpenAI and Anthropic.
While OpenAI will use its time to tout how its ChatGPT helps people build things with a real-world impact, Anthropic is taking a swipe at its much-larger competitors recent decision to incorporate ads into the platformand its virtuous decision to keep its Claude AI assistant ad-free.
This off-field action has already made for some entertaining viewing. Anthropic dropped four ads this past week set to Dr. Dres 2001 song Whats the Difference, which all conclude with the same warning: Ads are coming to AI. But not Claude.
That elicited a lengthy post on X by Sam Altman, OpenAIs CEO, thats since become the topic of much ridicule.
While Anthropics Black Mirror-esque ads are extremely clever, theyre also strategic, as the company seeks to position itself much like Apple has with its privacy-first messaging, says John Battelle, an entrepreneur and author.
Claudes marketshare may be a tiny fraction of ChatGPTs, but Anthropics swipe at OpenAIs reversal on advertising was well-playedand it makes an important point, according to Battelle.
I applaud what they did,” he tells Fast Company. “This needs to be talked about.”
Pivot to revenue
For Altman, the advertising U-turn took about 15 months. In October 2024, he said that he viewed advertising as a last resort as a business model for OpenAI, only to seemingly reverse course a few weeks ago.
Hes hardly the first to do soand for good reason.
Theres no question that the only business model that you can employ if you want to scale a business is advertising, Battelle says.
Advertising . . . finds a way
Recent decades have seen a well-trod path for companies that transitioned to an advertising-supported business model from one that was originally based on subscriptions or, seemingly, free for users.
Advertising has slowlyand sometimes not so slowlycrept into almost every major platform controlled by a large tech company, whether it’s social networks like Facebook or streaming services like Netflix, to name a few.
But Google perhaps offers the canonical example of a companys founders finding their advertising religion and walking back prior vows to remain ad-free, says Battelle, whose book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” was published 20 years ago by Penguin
In a 1998 white paper laying out their vision for Google, cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page didnt mince words about the potential mixed incentives of a commercial search engine with a business model predicated on advertising.
The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users, wrote the duo, then-PhD students at Stanford University. We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
In 2000, Google began selling advertisements. To say it’s become a big business would be an understatement. Parent company Alphabet reported this past week that Google advertising accounted for more than 72% of its $113.8 billion revenue in the fourth quarter.
A hill to die on
For some founders, advertising has been a hill theyve been willing to die on. Clashes about advertising on WhatsApp were reportedly among a variety of reasons why cofounder Jan Koum ultimately left parent company Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2018, four years after the messaging app was acquired.
Koum had long expressed his disdain for advertising and how it worsened a product.
He vowed to keep advertising out of an app where people communicate with friends and family, and his first-ever tweet was a quote from the movie Fight Club that pulls no punches: Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we dont need.
Last year, WhatsApp debuted ads in the app.
The future of advertising on AI
Like many before them, the founders of AI companies must now determine where their line in the sand is on advertising. And its no surprise that advertising has eventually found its way into AI platforms, as Battelle laid out in a recent blog post.
As Google, Facebook, Uber, and other companies have taught us, advertising creep does gradually change the services we know and love, Battelle says. In some cases, like with Instagram, the product today barely resembles its pre-advertising self.
When you commit to advertising, you commit to the incentives of advertising, he says.
Even if advertising on AI platforms will inevitably evolve with time, Battelle says an imperative question now is what that future will look likeand particularly if social media is the reference point.
Man, things are not going to be pretty if the business model that drove social media also drives generative AI.
Taking the leap from traditional employee to solopreneur involves a number of decisions and considerations that may come as a surprise if youve always been on someone elses payroll. Being numero uno for every part of your solo enterprise can illuminate just how complicated it can be to keep any kind of business running.
Unfortunately, becoming a solopreneur can complicate your personal financial choices as well. Thats because money habits that felt innocuous while you were on a biweekly pay schedule can create financial mayhem on an irregular income.
Whether youre considering becoming a solopreneur or have been rocking the solo business world for a while, make sure you dont carry these common paycheck habits with you into your entrepreneurial venture.
Ignoring your bank balance
Prior to becoming a teacher, I worked a series of low-paying jobs, including several stints where I stitched together multiple part-time positions. During that period of what we might generously describe as my early career, it was my habit to check my bank balance daily.
This was in the early 2000s, when the internet still required a kerosene-powered modem to access Google, so it took some effort on my part to indulge in this habit. But since I was making so little money, I needed to know on an almost daily basis what was happening in my account to make sure I hadnt overlooked anything.
When I started teaching and bringing in the medium bucks, it was a relief to only check my bank balance when I paid my bills rather than every single day.
As a public school teacher, I knew exactly how much money I received in each paycheck, I knew exactly when it would clear my account, and I knew that if my mental accounting was off by a little bit, I didnt have to wait long for the next paycheck. (Ironically, the only time Ive ever overdrawn my account was during the regular-paycheck years of my life.)
Befriend your banking tools
Becoming a solopreneur is a little like going back to your early twentysomething career, at least financially. Keeping a weather eye on your finances is the only way to stay ahead of problems before they blow up. Theres no steady paycheck to smooth over any issues.
The good news is that banking technology has come a long way since I had to keep my modems kerosene tank full just to log onto the internet. These days, virtually every bank and credit union under the sun has an app that will allow you to set up personalized alerts and text notifications, among other tools.
This makes it very easy to set up regular bank balance check-ins, whether you create an alert to notify you when your balance dips below a certain dollar amount, or you have your bank text you the current balance every day at the same time.
Waiting for tax season
Paying taxes is no ones idea of a good timebut at least when youre working for a paycheck, the taxman knocks but once a year.
Whether you use a CPA or do them yourself, taxes are fairly straightforward for those who are traditionally employed. Once you have your W-2 in your hot little hand, you can typically get started sometime in early spring, then patiently wait for your tax refund to arrive . . . and youre done until next year.
But solopreneurs dont get the luxury of treating taxes like a sucky annual holiday. Because small-business owners dont have taxes withheld from their income, they have to pay quarterly estimated taxes, filing each payment with Form 1040-ES. The approximate due dates for each payment are as follows, but they may be pushed back if the 15th falls on a weekend or holiday.
First quarter (January 1-March 31) Due April 15
Second quarter (April 1-May 31) Due June 15 (June 16 in 2026)
Third quarter (June 1-August 31) Due September 15
Fourth quarter (September 1-December 31) Due January 15
Solo business owners also typically have to deal with much more complicated tax reporting if they have multiple clients. That means they are fielding more tax formssuch as 1099-NEC and 1099-K formsthan traditional employees.
Build tax infrastructure into your business
Paying and organizing solo business taxes are overwhelming if you only think about them when theres a due date. But they can be an easy part of your daily routine if you build tax infrastructure into your business plan.
For quarterly estimated taxes, it starts with planning ahead for paying Uncle Sam. You can do that by creating a savings account where you transfer about 20% of each payment you receive. This will ensure that you always have the money you need to pay your estimated taxes each quarter, so youre not scrambling to find the cash every three months. Over time, you can adjust how much you set aside for taxes as needed.
As for organizing your taxes, this can also be a relatively simple and ongoing part of how you conduct your business.
Its important for solopreneurs to have an accurate account of their income, since its always possible a client will make a mistake on the 1099 they issue. An invoicing structure where you record income from specific clients at the same time you mark their invoices as paid can be a small tweak that will make tax organization much easier. This could be as simple as a Google sheet that you keep updated, as long as you are consistent.
Taking no vacation days
When you work a traditional job, it can be easy to forget to take time off. Whether you get a set number of vacation days per year, or your workplace offers unlimited PTO (which really means you get the hairy eyeball if you try to schedule any), its easy to reach the end of December before youve realized you never took a vacation.
This is obviously a serious problem within the American workforce, which is suffering from burnout, lack of work boundaries, and a bad case of the Mondays.
While none of that is good, many workplaces do at least offer regular time off in the form of weekends and federal holidays. Workers who habitually leave their vacation days unused can still count on several long weekends and other breaks throughout the year to give them a needed opportunity to rest.
Block off time for rest
Working for yourself means you dont have to stick to a 9-to-5 schedule, but it also means you might be working at midnight, on weekends, and through Thanksgiving dinner. The habit of working without a vacation can be especially tempting when your success or failure depends on your hustle.
But youre solely responsible for your business now, which includes the well-being of your only employee. You cant rely on the holiday calendar to provide you with time away from your work like you did as a paycheck employee. You have to set the boundariesor deal with the consequences of burnout. Which could mean not being able to work at all.
This is why you need to set the boundaries your previous schedule gave you automatically. You can do this by blocking off time weekly, monthly, and annually for rest. If you need to, imagine that your rest times are legally mandated so that youre not tempted to work through your vacation time anyway.
Building better habits
Working for yourself, by yourself, doesnt just require a change in how you structure your work dayyou may also have to revamp your personal financial habits.
Without the safety net of a steady paycheck, solopreneurs cant afford to ignore their bank balances like they did as an employee. Your banks mobile app and online tools can help you keep track of your finances with automated alerts and notifications.
While paycheck employees get to think of taxes as a single season of the year, solopreneurs have to deal with tax chores year-round. That includes paying quarterly taxes and keeping records organized. Setting aside around 20% of each payment can help solo entrepreneurs have the money they need to pay their estimated taxes every quarter, while recording their income as the invoices are paid can help make tax reporting easier come April.
And though all Americans need to take more time off, those working traditional jobs can often count on weekends and federal holidays, even if they forget to use their PTO. Solopreneurs can get stuck in an endless working cycle unless they specifically block off regular time for restand guard it fiercely.
Days before the Super Bowl, Anthropic dropped a handful of Super Bowl ads taking aim at OpenAIs impending advertising model for ChatGPT. The ads anthropomorphize OpenAI’s platform, imagining how the chatbot might answer everyday questions like What do you think of my business idea? and “Can I get a six-pack quickly?” The answers, delivered by actors in cheerfully sycophantic robot speak, start out sounding like stilted but helpful advice, before veering into promotional marketing speak for a hypothetical advertiser on ChatGPT.
Immediately, the ads sparked a firestorm online. Some called them brilliant. Others called them mean-spirited. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman felt so strongly, he crafted an earnest post on X about why Anthropic’s ads were so misleading.
But wrong move, bro. Anthropic, one of your AI rivals, just handed OpenAIand the entire AI industrya huge gift. Not to mention the ad business.
An ad battle for the AI age
Not since the days of Coke and Pepsi have we seen this kind of ire slung at a category competitor. And I just have to say: I’m here for it.
We are at a pivotal time for AI development and adoption across business and culture, with issues ranging from mass layoffs to people using LLMs for dating advice. But AI is also in its brand infancy, with some platforms building massive name recognition but very little brand image.
There is no better category than AI to start a full-on advertising battle in 2026, and there are no two better companies to wage it than Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic has long framed its Claude platform as a more refined LLM than its OpenAI counterpart. And its Super Bowl ads are delivering an implicit message about the competition: You can’t trust them.
Created by award-winning ad agency Mother, the new Anthropic campaign, A Time and a Place, has four spots in total (two are big-game bound). People want an AI they can trustone thats focused solely on working for them. We want Claude to be that choice, Andrew Stirk, Anthropics head of marketing, said in a statement.
When OpenAI’s Altman opined on X that it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that arent real, perhaps he should turn that into a brief for his growing all-star internal marketing team (imagine a 1984-style ad for 2026). I mean, he even has Brandon McGraw, former head of consumer marketing at Anthropic, on the roster.
Same story with his second attempt at a clapback: More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the U.S., so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. What about an AI Challenge ad set in El Paso or Brownsville where they go full “Get a Mac” and paint Claude as the snooty also-ran to ChatGPT’s bot of the people?
This consumer-facing dichotomy is the perfect setup for an advertising battle. You’ve got two brands offering ostensibly the same thing (at least to the average person), just with different positioning. Butas Coke and Pepsi demonstratedeven though brands involved in street fights like this do get a few ego bruises, historically the creative arms race helps both emerge in a stronger position with their audiences.
First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we wont do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026
Challenger game
The decades-long scrap between Coca-Cola and Pepsi is well-documented, but its dynamics have been replicated in various ways over the years in other product categories like tech, fast food, and telecom.
There’s a typical anatomy to ad wars that cuts across industries. At their most basic, these campaigns always begin with a challenger brand calling out a much bigger rival by name. For Pepsi, which began the cola wars with less than 20% market share, that meant the Pepsi Challengeshowing real people choosing Pepsi over Coke in blind taste tests. This year, it meant hijacking Coke’s familiar polar bear for the Super Bowl.
Apples Get a Mac is widely considered one of the best long-running advertising campaigns of all time. Apple was the challenger (if you can believe that) depicting the dominant PC brands (Microsoft Windows) as dull, cumbersome, and just plain uncool.
Of course, the challenger brand is in the eye of the beholder, and in 2011 it was Samsung mocking iPhone fanboys for lining up to get what it deemed an inferior product.
Over in fast food, Burger King had an award-winning run of work in the late 2010s under then-CMO Fernando Machado, much of which directly involved McDonalds. To promote the nonprofit Peace One Day, Burger King took out ads and built an entire website proposing to McDonalds that the rivals make peace to create the ultimate burgerthe McWhopper. The ad had $220 million in earned media value, and 8.9 billion impressions. In 2018, Burger King created print ads with photos of barbecue grills at former homes of ex-McDonald’s executives to highlight the flame-grilled taste of Whoppers.
That same year, it launched Whopper Detour, a promo campaign that used geofencing to offer a 1-cent Whopper to users who ordered through the Burger King app while within 600 feet of a McDonald’s. It got 1.5 million Burger King app downloads in nine days.
Even Taco Bell took a swing at the golden arches when it launched a breakfast menu in 2014. For its largest marketing campaign ever up to that point, Taco Bell recruited real guys named Ronald McDonald to testify to the tastiness of its Breakfast Crunchwrap.
Whether people were emotionally invested because they loved one of these brands over the other, or they were just there for the LOLs, each of these sparked two things brands crave absolutelyattention and excitement.
Strategic response
A 2025 INSEAD study called The Power of Strategic Rivalry found that a well-managed rivalry can extend the story between competitors, keeping consumers tuned in longer andimportantlybenefiting both sides with ongoing engagement and relevance. People love a good brand fight.
Coca-Cola maintained its lead throughout the cola wars, but Pepsis market share shot up from 20% to a peak of 30%-plus in the 1990s. And their ad war not only helped increase overall soda consumption from 12.4% of American beverage consumption in 1970 to 22.4% in 1985, but each brand more than doubled revenues over the 1980s. And thanks to the sheer intensity and ad frequency during the most heated years of their ad battle, the brands elbowed their way to the center of pop culture. Between 1975 and 1995, Cokes annual ad spending went from about $25 million to $112 million, while Pepsis grew from $18 million to $82 million.
The haymakers from challenger brands are to be expected. But rarely, if ever, do the bigger brands respond with the same level of bite. In fact, the most successful responses have been investing in better creative brand work done more often.
McDonalds didnt use its global domination to swipe down at Burger King. Instead it invested in and celebrated its existing fans in fun and unique ways. Specifically, with the Famous Orders work that began with Travis Scott in 2020 and expanded to collaborators as varied as Mariah Carey, BTS, and Cactus Plant Flea Market, driving record app usage, hundreds of millions in sales, and making new fans of younger customers.
OpenAI appears to be taking a similar tack in its advertising, at least so far. The brand is focusing on how its tools can inspire and enable people to build new things. Its three regional Super Bowl spots are about how three different American small businessesa seed farm, a metal salvage yard, and a family-run tamale shopare utilizing ChatGPT to grow and thrive.
OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch admits the Anthropic spots are funny, but since ads havent landed in ChatGPT yet, its a complete fabrication of what that experience will be like. When I spoke to her this week, she took issue with the spots calling OpenAIs use of advertising to support free access to the tools as a violation, and reiterated Altmans point that ChatGPT has more free monthly users in Texas than Anthropic has globally.
And our perspective is that open, free access to this technology will enable individual people to build things that will benefit them and us all, Rouch told me. It really all comes down to self-empowerment and being able to do things that you either didn’t believe you could do before or you actually couldn’t do before. And that’s the whole game.
This is a more sound strategy, both overall and in light of Anthropics trolling, than last years animated Super Bowl ad that had many people guessing just what the hell it was trying to say.
If this is the dawn of AIs version of the cola warsand I hope it isits an impressive start for both brands.
Anthropics challenger strategy here hits, not just for the cojones to step up to the Super Bowl against a much bigger rival. The key to any challenger swipe that actually works hinges on its creative execution, and these spots steer clear of the slop to serve up a bona fide chefs kiss.
For OpenAI, creatively telling real stories about real people using its tools to solve real problems and build real things looks less like an advertising street fight and more like a turn for the high road toward the brand image promised land.
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When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market that is heating up.
Since the national pandemic housing boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country, that shift has varied.
Generally speaking, local housing markets where active inventory has jumped above pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced softer home price growth (or outright price declines) over the past 36 months.
Conversely, local housing markets where active inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced, relatively speaking, more resilient home price growth over the past 42 months.
Where is national active inventory headed?
National active listings are on the rise on a year-over-year basis (+10% between January 31, 2025, and January 31, 2026). This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. Some seller’s markets have turned into balanced markets, and more balanced markets have turned into buyer’s markets.
Nationally, were still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (-17.8% below January 2019), and some resale markets (in particular, chunks of the Midwest and Northeast) still remain, relatively speaking, tight-ish.
While national active inventory is still up year over year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent months as softening has slowed.
Here are the January inventory/active listings totals, according to Realtor.com:
January 2017 -> 1,154,120
January 2018 -> 1,043,951
January 2019 -> 1,110,636
January 2020 -> 951,675
January 2021 -> 531,775 (Pandemic housing boom overheating)
January 2022 -> 376,970 (Pandemic housing boom overheating)
January 2023 -> 616,865
January 2024 -> 665,569
January 2025 -> 829,376
January 2026 -> 912,696
If we maintain the current year-over-year pace of inventory growth (+83,320 homes for sale), we’d have 996,016 active inventory come January 2027. (Note: Thats not a predictionIm just showing what the math looks like if that pace continued.)
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 continues to decelerate across much of the country.
LEFT: Year-over-year active inventory shift between January 2024 and January 2025
RIGHT: Year-over-year active inventory shift between January 2025 and January 2026
And while active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish (although it’s loosening in those places, too).
As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. Thats where home sellers in the spring are 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 Sun Belt and Mountain West, including metro-area housing markets such as Austin and Punta Gorda, Florida.
Many of these areas saw major price surges during the pandemic housing boom, with home prices getting stretched when compared with 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 Sun Belt. 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 considerd existing homes, are now opting for new homes with more favorable dealswhich then puts some additional upward pressure on resale inventory.
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At the end of January 2026, nine states were above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbiawhich we left out of this table belowis also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels. Softness in D.C. proper predates the current admins job cuts.)
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Big picture: Over the past few years, weve observed a softening across many housing markets as strained affordability tempers the fervor of a market that was unsustainably hot during the pandemic housing boom. While home prices are falling some in pockets of the Sun Belt, a big chunk of Northeast and Midwest markets still eked out a little price appreciation in 2025. Year over year, nationally aggregated home prices were pretty close to flat.
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Below is another version of the table abovebut this one includes every month since January 2017.
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If youd like to further examine the monthly state inventory figures, use the interactive below.
Over the coming months, lets keep an eye on Florida, which has now entered its seasonal window when its active inventory typically begins to rise again. (To better understand softness and weakness across Florida over the past couple years, read this ResiClub PRO report.)
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At the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the iconic cauldron of the Games is putting on a daily show just like its athletes.
This year, for the first time ever, there are two cauldrons lit simultaneously at different locations. Inspired by Leonardo da Vincis geometric drawings, both cauldrons expand and contract, respond to music, and emit their own lightand one will put on hourly performances for viewers throughout the Games.
The tradition of the Olympic flame and cauldron dates back 100 years or more. Historically, the Games are opened with a relay ceremony wherein torch bearers bring the flame to the cauldron, which remains lit until the closing ceremony. And while the cauldrons design remained relatively consistent for the first decades of the Olympics, in recent years it has become a major design moment. This years approach is an encapsulation of the cauldrons transition from a static object to a show in itself.
Spectators gather at Milans Arco della Pace (Arch of Peace) to catch a sneak peek of one of the 2026 Olympic cauldrons on January 30. [Photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images]
In the last editions of the games, more and more of the main focus has been on who is going to light the cauldron, its design, and what it means, says Marco Balich, the creative lead for the Winter Olympics opening ceremony who designed this years cauldrons. To make a long story short, I think over the years you see the history of the cauldron goes from very simple ones to [beautiful statements].
A brief history of Olympic cauldron design
While symbolic fire at the Olympics traces back to at least 1928, the first Olympic torch relay took place in Berlin in 1936. The cauldron that year was a small, bowl-like vessel standing on three legs on a podium. In subsequent Games, like 1948 London, 1952 Helsinki, and 1960 Rome, the cauldron format remained largely the same.
The Olympic Cauldron of the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin survived World War II undamaged; photographed at Berlin Olympic Stadium in 2005. [Photo: Nick Potts/PA/Getty Images]
Starting around 1968, designers began to take a bit more creative liberty with the cauldron. That years Mexico City Games featured a cauldron made by a womana firstshaped like a giant circular chalice. Since then, the cauldron has continuously evolved in shape and scope, from a 6.4-meter-high scroll-shaped one for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics to a multi-shard monument for the 2010 Vancouver Games and a petal-inspired chorus of flames for the London Games in 2012.
The Olympic flame burns above Mexico Citys University Olympic Stadium on opening day of track and field competition at the 1968 Summer Games. [Photo: UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images]
According to Balich, who holds a record 16 event credits for Olympic ceremonies, recent years have seen the cauldron transform from a stationary symbol into a kind of high-stakes performance art. Balich coordinated the opening ceremony for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games that featured a kinetic sun sculpture by artist Anthony Howe; powered by the wind, its tentacles fluttered and reflected the light of the cauldrons flame to spectacular effect.
Mariene de Castro performs in front of the Olympic cauldron during the closing ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics at Maracaa Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. [Photo: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images]
And in Paris 2024, designer Mathieu Lehanneur abandoned almost all of the cauldrons recognizable design tradition in favor of a literal hot-air balloon, which took flight daily during the Games for a ticketed audience and remained in Pariss Tuileries Garden for nightly performances after the Olympics concluded.
Balich says that expansion of the cauldrons role during the Games and beyond inspired this years design. I was very inspired because it confirmed to me that the experience of this object is so relevant, that it was worth it to add this dynamic session that wuld enlarge the experience and be even more emotionally touching, especially for the younger generation, he says.
[Rendering: Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026]
A new cauldron experience
This year, Balich iterated on the idea of the cauldron as an experience by turning it into an hourly show complete with lights, music, and movement.
His concept started with two cauldronsone in Milan and one in Cortinato represent harmony between man and nature. The designs are inspired by a series of geometrical drawings by Da Vinci (who lived in Milan for several years), which used mathematics to imagine various intricate three-dimensional shapes. Balich says he did a quick drawing of his original concept, then called on creative director Lida Castelli and set designer Paolo Fantin to develop the final products.
[Rendering: Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026]
The cauldrons themselves are constructed out of aeronautical aluminum, with a whopping 1,440 components making up their intricate structure. A total of 244 pivot points allows them to smoothly expand and contract from a minimum diameter of 3.1 meters to a maximum of 4.5 meters. LED lights along the surface of these components give the cauldrons an otherworldly glow, while the actual Olympic flame is enclosed inside a glass-and-metal container at their centers. The final product looks like something you might expect to see descending from the heavensor a much less foreboding Eye of Sauron.
[Photo: Emmanuele Ciancaglini/Ciancaphoto Studio/Getty Images]
One cauldron is suspended in Milans Arco della Pace (Arch of Peace), where it will put on a three-to-five-minute show every hour during the Games from 5 to 11 p.m., accompanied by music from Italian composer Roberto Cacciapaglia. The second sits on a podium in Cortina dAmpezzos Piazza Angelo Dibona. And, just as they were lit simultaneously, theyll be extinguished simultaneously when the Games close.
I hope that everybody will gatherfamilies, friends, curious design lovers, design criticsto go there and be immersed in this music and this beautiful show around the arch, Balich says. My goal for that is to add an experience to watching the sacred fire from Olympia, which in a way is one of the most powerful symbols around the world of peace, fraternity, sports, and the values that the Games represent.
The notion of instant on-the-go translation is nothing new for most of us, thanks to the now-ubiquitous Google Translate service.
But a scrappy Google competitor thinks it can do better.
This month, a company called Kagi is officially launching its Kagi Translate app for both Android and iOS.
The app mirrors most of the same features Google Translate offers, with a few interesting new touches and one key point of distinction: It is all about protecting your privacywith no ads, no trackers, and no data being monetized or repurposed in any way.
Ohand its free, too.
Youll need all of two minutes to take it out for a test-drive.
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Instant translationsplus privacy
Once you’ve got the Kagi Translate app on your device, it’s really quite intuitive to use. At its core:
You can type or paste any text into its main translation box to have the text translated from and to any language you like.
You can tap the camera icon in that same box to take a photo of text in the real worldon a document, a menu, a whiteboard, you name itand then have the language auto-detected and translated into your native tongue from there.
A document icon in that same area lets you upload a file from your phone (or any connected cloud storage) for speedy on-the-fly translation.
And a microphone icon lets you speak aloudor have someone else speak aloudfor real-time translations of the words as theyre uttered.
Kagi Translate’s main screen is one simple promptwith plenty of power around it.
Beyond that, Kagi Translate offers some interesting extrasfor instance:
If you tap the three-line settings icon within the main translation box, you can change between a natural and literal translation style, a formal or informal voice (for languages where thats relevant), and also any available gender preference (again, where relevant for a dialect).
In that same area, you can also add your own custom context to help guide the translationtelling the app, in your own words, what type of conversation youre having, and with whom, so it can adjust its approach accordingly.
Poke around, and you’ll find all sorts of ways to customize and control your translation output.
In the apps bottom-of-screen Dictionary tab, you can simply get an on-demand, instantly translated definition of a word or phrase in another language.
The apps Proofread tab will review any text you type or paste into it and offer suggestions to make it work better in your chosen language.
And with any translation the app provides you, you have the ability to play the text out loud or copy it onto your system clipboardas well as request alternate translations for different ways to say the same basic thing.
Kagi Translate can give you different ways to say the same thing, if you aren’t entirely thrilled with its initial translation.
Again, though: Its Kagis commitment to privacy that really sets this app apart. You dont have to sign in or create an account to use it, and nothing you do or say within the app is ever shared or used for any type of ad targeting.
If that sounds familiar, it should: Ive written about Kagi and its similarly privacy-centric approach to regular ol search before, and that same mindset applies to pretty much everything else the company has offeredincluding, too, the excellent Android summarizing app I mentioned in these same quarters a few months ago. Kagi makes its money entirely from user subscriptions, which are required for its core search service but not for the assorted stand-alone apps like Translate and Summarize.
Whether youre using Kagi for any other purposes or not, though, this new tool is an interesting option to keep around and a welcome alternative to Google’s de facto defaultand maybe, just maybe, its exactly the je ne sais quoi youve been waiting for.
Kagi Translate is available for both Android and iOS. There’s also a web version for desktop computer access.
The app is completely free to use, though a paid Kagi membership will allow you to access some additional options.
The app doesn&8217;t have any ads or trackers and doesn’t require any sort of sign-inand even if you do opt to create an account, Kagi’s core promise is that it never shares any of your data with anyone, in any way, or uses it for any profitable purposes.
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