JPMorganChase said Wednesday it plans to open more than 160 new bank branches in over three dozen statesand renovate nearly 600 moreas part of a nationwide, multibillion-dollar push for more affordable financial services.
Those branches will include locations in rural and low-to-moderate income (LMI) communities in the Northeast, Southeast, America’s “Heartland” or Midwest, and Southwestincluding in North and South Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Tennessee this year.
JPMorganChase tells Fast Company those will include branch locations in: “Greater Philadelphia, Greater Boston, the Tampa Bay area, MinneapolisSaint Paul metro area, RaleighCary metro area/The Triangle, and the Charlotte metro area.”
According to The Brookings Institution, the affordability crisis has reached every corner of the country, hitting middle-and-lower income earners the hardest, resulting in a 29% cumulative price increase since 2019 for Americans.
Along with opening the branches, Chase plans to invest in local businesses, affordable housing, and job training, help fuel economic growth, and build stronger communities.
Every Chase branch is a reflection of its neighborhood, Jennifer Roberts, CEO of Chase consumer banking said in the release. Each branch represents our promise to stand alongside our customers as partners, helping them navigate and achieve their financial goals.
The expansion is part of Chases 2024 strategy to open more than 500 new branches, renovate 1,700 locations, and hire 3,500 employees nationwide over a three year-period.
JPMorganChase financials
Shares of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) were trading up 1.3% in midday trading on Wednesday at the time of this writing.
The company reported strong fourth-quarter earnings last month with adjusted earnings per share (EPS) coming in at $5.23, exceeding estimates of $4.92, and better-than-expected revenue of $46.77 billion versus, $46.20 billion. At the time of this writing, it had a market capitalization of over $847 billion.
Emerald Fennells Wuthering Heights is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of filmand for the most part, critics are falling in the hate it camp.
The new adaptation of Emily Brontës classic novel is catching flak as critics say it oversimplifies a complex story of generational trauma and racial tension into a straightforward romance laced with Fennells signature shock value (shes also the director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburninfamous bathtub scene and all). But a recent comment from star and producer Margot Robbie takes criticism out of the equation, instead saying that as an artist, critics opinions never cross her mind.
At a recent panel for Vogue Australia, Robbiegiven her dual role as producer and leading actresswas asked how much she thinks about her audience while making a movie, as opposed to immersing herself in the story.
I consider audience always. Ive never, ever been on set and thought, What are the critics going to think of this?’ Robbie replied. Im like, Whats an audience going to feel right now? Whats their emotional response going to be?
“I just believe you should make movies for the people who are going to buy tickets to see the movies,” Robbie added. “Its kind of as simple as that.
Margot Robbie (left) and Emerald Fennell on the set of Wuthering Heights. [Photo: Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.]
Robbie has produced all three of Fennells films, but Wuthering Heights is the first she appears in. I love working with Emerald [Fennell] because she always prioritizes an emotional experience over a heady idea, Robbie said. Shell let a cool idea fall by the wayside to offer the option that is going to be most exciting for an audience.”
Robbies take was immediately divisive online. Some fellow filmmakers, including Cobra Kai writer and director Jon Hurwitz, echoed Robbies sentiment. This is the way. Audience first. Always, Hurwitz wrote in a post on X.
This is the way. Audience first. Always. https://t.co/oX8hRlVH7M— Jon Hurwitz (@jonhurwitz) February 18, 2026
But others took issue with Robbies reading, noting that it frames films more as commercial products than as works of artnot to mention that critics are audience members themselves.
Critic and editor-in-chief of AwardsWatch Erik Anderson pointed out that actors and directors never say this when their films get good reviews in his own response to Robbies statement.
Why do actors and directors never say this when their films get good reviews https://t.co/PLl1LhFHhl— Erik Anderson (@AwardsWatchErik) February 18, 2026
On Rotten Tomatoes, Wuthering Heights is currently labeled rotten, with a critic score of 59%. In his review, The New Yorkers Justin Chang deemed the adaptation extravagantly superficial. For The Guardian, Adrian Horton dubbed it a big movie with a very small mind. And in a take that went viral, Vultures Allison Willmore called the film Fennells dumbest movie, while also praising it as her best to date.
That appeal to the lowest common denominator is working for Wuthering Heights, at least on a commercial level. The film made $83 million globally over the Presidents Day holiday weekend, debuting as the number-one movie in North America. Robbies audience-first philosophy clearly gets butts in seatsbut if every creative ditches their heady ideas in favor of broad appeal, the future of film as an art form doesnt look quite as promising.
Below, Jennifer Reid shares five key insights from her new book, Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations.
Jennifer is a psychiatrist, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and busy mom of two boys. She is also the creator, host, and author of A Mind of Her Own podcast and Substack newsletter.
Whats the big idea?
Women are socialized to feel constant guiltnot because they are doing something wrong, but because they are held to impossible expectations. This guilt can be unlearned by understanding its roots and replacing self-criticism with healthier ways of caring, motivating, and relating.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Jennifer herselfin the Next Big Idea App.
1. Guilt: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Guilt, in certain circumstances, can be a helpful emotion. For centuries, humans have used guilt to help them connect, collaborate, and build community because the ability to feel guilty when weve harmed someone expresses to them that we care enough to feel badly about what has happened. It also motivates us to try to make a repair.
Guilt begins to lose its benefit, though, when we are victims of manipulative guilt, whether from our families, our social networks, or in our cultural experiences. Gosh, I wish you were able to visit us more often, but I guess youre really busy with your big, important job. Manipulative guilt can feel pretty terrible.
The most toxic guilt, however, is the type of guilt so many women feel almost constantly. This generalized, self-critical guilt leads to thoughts like, Why cant I do anything right? and Why dont I ever feel like Im doing enough? Rather than responding to a particular harm weve committed, were feeling guilty for falling short on several sky-high, unreasonable expectations. Importantly, this is not because we are getting something wrong. This is something women have been socialized to experience, often from a very young age, by the people who care for us and the culture during our lives. We are taught to feel guilty, and we are excellent students.
2. The Four Furies of expectations.
Our guilt triggers are incredibly diverse, involving our roles as friends, sisters, daughters, mothers, romantic partners, and employees. But the foundation of all this guilt is based on just two key factors: our expectations and our perceived reality. This is the Guilt Equation, which tells us that our guilt increases when what we believe we should be doing (our expectation) doesnt match what were able to accomplish (our reality). If, for example, we believe a good mother would never forget to pack a bagged lunch on a field trip day, and it slips our mind, here comes the intense guilt.
The often unreasonably high expectations women face tend to fall into four main categories, which I call the Four Furies:
We are expected to be constant caretakers, making sure everyone in our lives has everything they need, even if this means (and it often does) that we put ourselves last.
We must be hyper-accountable, especially for other peoples thoughts and feelings, even though we dont have any actual control over these: Mom seems sad. If I were a good daughter, I would be able to say the right thing to cheer her up.
We are expected to strive for perfection in all things, but especially in our bodies, our minds, and our self-control.
We should be able to have it all, balancing each of our responsibilities effortlessly, even when we feel totally overwhelmed.
3. Guilty can be sneaky.
Before beginning the process of lowering this guilt, its important to recognize another fundamental truth: guilt may be serving us in a variety of ways. We may believe we need this guilt because it provides us with something we really wantmotivation. After all, if we dont feel guilty for skipping a day at the gym or berating ourselves for choosing to sleep in a little instead of getting up with our alarm, then doesnt this mean we will simply give up on ourselves?
Guilt can also become a protective stand-in for emotions we dont feel safe feeling, much less expressing, such as anger or frustration. We tell ourselves, I shouldnt be so upset that my partner didnt do what I asked. Hes been really stressed at work, and I should be more understanding.
These benefits of guilt, however, are costly because they force us to believe we are getting something wrong, relying on harmful self-criticism to push us toward a goal. Or we repeatedly shift these difficult thoughts and feelings inward where they continue to make us miserable, with no relief in sight. Instead of guilt, we can learn to tap into healthier and more beneficial strategies, such as using self-compassion to enhance motivation and allowing ourselves to experience the full range of natural human emotions. We can also focus our all-important attention on the ways we are already showing up, and the many things we are doing well.
Guilt can also become a protective stand-in for emotions we dont feel safe feeling, much less expressing, such as anger or frustration.
In addition, although we cant control the thoughts and feelings of people in our lives, we can shape our interactions with them through crucial communication strategies, including learning to accept disappointment in ourselves and others, being clear and consistent with our boundaries, and practicing the powerful art of delegation, even when were met with an eye roll or other clear expressions of frustration.
4. We can SPEAK up for less guilt.
To learn concrete steps for lowering guilt, Id like to introduce SPEAK:
Showing Up
Paying Attention
Examining the Evidence
Taking Action
Keep Going
By showing up, you are telling yourself that you are important enough to warrant time, attention, and care, which is no small thing. Paying attention involves becoming a curious, non-judgmental observer of your thoughts and feelings throughout the day, which later allows you to examine the evidence for helpful clues about your own unique guilt triggers.
As you gain these crucial insights, you can begin to take action. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach but instead, it allows you to use the strategies you find most helpful. You could challenge unreasonable expectations by learning to limit unhealthy comparisons, especially with strangers on social media. You can rewrite unfair childhood scripts such as being labeled the girl who took care of everybody, by learning about cognitive restructuring, which involves treating your initial guilty or self-critical thoughts as rough drafts, rather than the final product. You can strengthen your sense of self-efficacy by adopting a growth mindset and using tools from positive psychology to reject the idea that you must be perfect to be loved. Finally, and most importantly, you can vow to just keep at it, every single day.
5. Lowering guilt for ourselves and future genrations.
We have been socialized to feel guilty, repeatedly reminded that we should be striving for unreachable levels of caretaking, accountability, perfection, and life balance. This has not occurred on an individual level, however, but rather as a delayed shift of the expectations women continue to face, even as weve fought for and achieved more opportunities to create the families, careers, and lives we most desire.
This can be our legacy: living our best lives with far less guilt.
But this also represents an opportunity for massive change. Much has been written about intergenerational transmission of trauma, a powerful influence on future populations down to the level of their gene expression. What this suggests is the considerable potential for women of this timethrough our refusal to continue living with constant guilt, unfair expectations, and overlooked contributionsto create a cascade of agency and empowerment that affects generations of women to come. This can be our legacy: living our best lives with far less guilt.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
It now takes more than 23 weeks on average for an unemployed person in the US to find a new job. For 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, they are still job hunting six months later.
Long-term unemployment is now at its highest level in three years. Thats not great news for those affected by the layoffs sweeping through companies like Target, Amazon, Nike and Pinterest in the first months of the year.
As of January 2026, there are 386,000 more long-term unemployed Americansthose who have been looking for jobs for more than 27 weeksthan there were in January 2025.
How did we get here?
A low-hire, low-fire environment defined much of 2025 and is now carrying over into 2026. While this has kept the unemployment rate historically low, at just over 4% in December, news of corporate layoffs wereand still arenever far from the headlines.
The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009.
U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, compared to 1.46 million in 2024. Private employers added 22,000 jobs in January, payroll processor ADP reported last week, again far fewer than economists had predicted. Another upshot of a low-hire, low-fire environmentfewer people quitting their jobs, with most opting to sit tight in their roles and ride out a tumultuous economy.
This perfect storm means those in need of a job are having a harder time finding one.
Its simple math: The supply of job seekers is far outpacing demand. Roughly one million more people are seeking work than there were available jobs as of December, according to BLS data analyzed by Indeed.
By now, theyve also exhausted their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits in many cases, which replace less than 40% of a persons previous income on average.
The long-term unemployment issue shows no signs of abating. Instead, faced with a stagnant market and a broken social contract, many are getting creative with solutions.
The unemployed-to-self-employed pipeline has never been stronger. Others are channelling their inner doomsday prepper.
Some, instead of spending their days poring over job listings or firing out résumés, are simply accepting their fate and reframing it as their funemployment era.
Whatever the casea lot of Americans are out of work. And staying that way for a long time.
Gary Vaynerchuk prides himself on being ahead of the curve. As the chairman of communications company VaynerX and the cofounder of Resy, not to mention an angel investor in brands like Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and Venmo, he knows a thing or two about trends in business. And in a new interview with CBS Mornings, he shared what he thinks is to blame for consumer burnout: not advertisers, social media, or even consumers themselvesbut modern parenting.
I think that parenting needs to be called out of the last 40 years, Vaynerchuk said. I believe that the burnout, the insecurity, all the stuff we talk about, I believe the reason we’re buying more stuff is, we’re using it as Band-Aids and glitter because we’re not strong enough to be secure in what we are and who we are and what we have.
What many people blame on an oversaturated market and the omnipresence of social media, Vaynerchuk attributes to overly lax parenting. After all, he says, being inundated with ads is nothing new.
We grew up with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. MTV Cribs had plenty of run, he pointed out. We want to blame technology for a much bigger issue, which is modern parenting misstepped. We don’t hold kids accountable, we don’t ground, we definitely don’t whoop.
Vaynerchuk claimed he receives tens of thousands of DMs from 20-to-30-year-olds every month that often cite frustration with being coddled by parents, from being tracked on apps like Life360 into adulthood, to having their lives bankrolled with no expectation of paying their family back.
We’re sending these kids into the real world, and we’re wondering why they’re depressed,” Vaynerchuk continued. “They’re depressed because they weren’t taught any accountability. Eighth place trophies for everyone.”
We’ve demonized losing, when losing is the teacher,” he added.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by CBS Mornings (@cbsmornings)
Elsewhere in the interview, Vaynerchuk gave his predictions for the next big industry in Americalive shopping, already a half-trillion dollar industry in China, is where social media in 2009 wasas well as for the future of artificial intelligence.
All of it is gonna lead to us having more time for leisure, he said. I think there’s a scenario where we go to a four-day work week because of efficiencies and subsidies from the biggest winners in AI.”
People are worried about losing money,” Vaynerchuk continued. “People are scared of losing their jobs. But the tractor was invented when 80% of us worked on farms 200 years ago, and we found new jobs . . . Instead of, wah, wah, wah, what about, Let me take control of it? What about all the people that might get inspired by this interview, and get a job in three years that pays them three times more that they’re happy about, because they took the AI surfboard instead of putting their head in the sand?
Ikea plans to open even more new stores this year. On Wednesday, the Swedish furniture retailer released its 2025 Annual Summary, which included plans to open four new locations. Ikea previously announced plans to open six new stores, bringing the new total for openings slated in 2026 to 10.
The latest batch of locations includes stores in Chicago, Fort Collins, Los Angeles, and Tulsa. The six previously announced Ikea locations include: Huntsville, Alabama; University Park in Dallas; Phoenix; Rockwall in Dallas; the Chantilly/Dulles area in the Washington region; and Houston-Webster, Texas.
Per the announcement, Ikea had a successful 2025, despite a challenging economic environment. The company reported $5.3 billion in total sales and said it saw foot traffic from more than 61 million people. It opened 14 new locations and its Ikea Family Rewards program reached 25 million membersa 17% increase from the previous year.
FY25 was a year of meaningful connection and growth despite a challenging external environment. We strengthened our ability to serve customers through new store formats, digital innovation and expanded rewards, all while reinforcing our commitment to communities and the environment, said Rob Olson, Interim CEO of Ikea U.S., in the announcement.
Olson continued, Looking ahead to FY26, we will build on this momentum, focusing on continued investment in the U.S. to make Ikea more affordable, accessible and sustainable.
For the state of Oklahoma, the Tulsa location will be its first-ever Ikea. It comes after a campaign called Tulsa Loves Ikea championed the idea. On social media, dozens of Tulsa residents couldn’t contain their excitement when commenting on a post about the opening. One local wrote, “I cant wait to go play house inside ikea!” Another commented, “The way I’m jumping up and down at work right now… so exciting!”
Last year, Ikea’s new CEO Juvencio Maeztu spoke to Fast Company on why the chain is committed to keeping prices low, citing inflation and high costs of living. Maeztu also credited “the need to socialize” as to why Ikea stores still draw customers while other chains are collapsing.
“People still have the need to go out,” Maeztu said. “Thats why its important that we call it a meeting placenot necessarily a shopping centerand when you visit our meeting place its a way to connect with the communities . . . to create traffic with engagement and food and events.”
For the past decade I have volunteered at St. Francis Inn, a soup kitchen in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.
Kensington, for those not from Philly, has long had a reputation for potent but affordable street drugs. Interstate 95 and the Market-Frankford elevated commuter train line provide easy access to the neighborhood for buyers and sellers, and abandoned buildings offer havens for drug use and other illicit activity.
St. Francis Inn Ministries, which was founded by two Franciscan friars in 1979, serves sit-down breakfast and dinner for thousands of people each year, many of whom suffer from poverty, homelessness, and substance use disorder. It also runs Maries Closet, a charity that provides free used clothing and housewares.
These ministries are operated by a core team of nine full-time members, hundreds of volunteers from local high schools and colleges, and an ad hoc team of folks from many walks of life.
In the years Ive been volunteering at St. Francis, significant changes have occurred in Kensington, including gentrification, soaring housing prices and increased police activity. Such changes can make it harder for people who suffer from poverty and homelessness to remain in the neighborhood.
Around 2018, the number of guests visiting St. Francis Inn was already dwindling noticeably. I heard volunteers speculate on whether St. Francis Inn should relocate further north in Philadelphia where there are more people in need. Others wondered whether St. Francis Inn should create a mobile unit that traveled to people in need wherever they may be.
As I listened, I realized that this was a business decision. As a professor of management at St. Josephs University in Philadelphia, I decided to present this decision to the students in my Management Honors Capstone Seminar. In January 2026, I published a business case study titled Dealing with Change in Kensington, Philadelphia: The Case of Saint Francis Inn.
An interesting business case
The capstone seminar I teach is the second of two strategic management courses that honors business students take in their senior year. Using the Harvard case study method, students identify the critical issues embedded in a variety of cases and find the information needed to evaluate those issues using seminal theories in strategic management.
Students then propose a solutiona hypothesis they believe best addresses the situation. They test whether that solution works by building a plan of actioncalled a proofthat provides logic and evidence that their solution would work.
Part of what I believe makes this case study interesting is that it involves some of the most vulnerable people in Philadelphia. I felt it was important to give students the opportunity to consider important issues of social justice when applying their business decision-making skills.
Morally sound recommendations
Among other material, the course covers two different perspectives that students can use to make informed decisions and propose solutions for St. Francis Inn.
The first is the resource-based view. Using this framework, students identify the unique resources and capabilities that a firmin this case, St. Francis Innhas built over the years. Then they determine how to use those resources and capabilities best to carry out the firms mission.
St. Francis Inns mission is to live among and serve the poor, following the example of St. Francis of Assisi. The organization has built decades-long relationships with food companieswhich share leftover meat, vegetables and other products with the innas well as with members of the community in Kensington. In addition, they have developed a network of hundreds of well-trained and motivated volunteer workers throughout Philadelphia and, indeed, the entire country.
The second framework that students are expected to use is formal moral theory, which provides a set of different theories for determining moral rules. It enables us to make ethical decisions that are structured, rational, and logical.
For example, using utilitarianism, students quantify all of the costs and benefits of a decision and choose the option that provides the largest net benefitor utilityto society. Rights theory requires students to make decisions that respect the intrinsic dignity of all persons. Students can use these theories to make morally sound recommendations on how St. Francis Inn can best serve the stakeholders in its community.
Perhaps the most obvious people affected by St. Francis Inn are the people living in the neighborhood who struggle with homelessness and substance use disorder and receive food and other assistance there. Other groups of concern include longtime neighbors who have homes nearby but still live in poverty, new residents moving into the neighborhood, local property developers who generally want to see fewer homeless people in the neighborhood, and city officials who are responsible for various government functions. These include police and emergency medical services, city council members and social services organizations.
Students must answer a two-dimensional question: Given what St. Francis Inn does best, how can it best address the needs of its most important stakeholders?
Since they are business majors, many quickly gravitate to logical business decisions that St. Francis Inn can make, such as continuing its operation where it is, relocating, or creating a mobile service. Without fail, there are students each semester who argue that regardless of whats best for St. Francis Inn, the interests of the various people of concern in the neighborhood must be respected. To be honest, I enjoy watching them grapple with this problem with sincerity and care.
Here, students must balance an organizations core competencies with the moral impact of its decisions, while prioritizing the rights and needs of diverse, nontraditional groups who have a stake in this decision. Thats a valuable skill for any futureor, for that matter, currentbusiness executive.
Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.
Tim Swift is a professor of management at St. Joseph’s University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Nancy Guthrie investigation is now in its third week, which means it was only a matter of time before the case piqued the interest of online armchair detectives.
Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing on Feb. 1. In the weeks since, the street outside her home in Tucson, Arizona, has become a destination for true-crime livestreamers.
Online sleuths have dissected the publicly available details of the ongoing case while spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories. Some have filmed themselves driving through Guthries neighborhood. The hashtag #nancyguthrie currently has more than 16,000 posts on TikTok, where users analyze Ring doorbell footage and excerpts from Savannah Guthries 2024 memoir, capitalizing on public interest in the case and often drawing hundreds of thousands of views.
@thedreydossier its all connected man #investigation #truecrimetok original sound – Drey
These posts across social media platforms have forced law enforcement to repeatedly set the record straight and dispel rampant rumors and misinformation, particularly as it pertains to Guthries family members.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced Monday that Guthries children and their spouses had been fully cleared from the investigation. The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case, Sheriff Chris Nanos said in a statement posted on X.
A statement from Sheriff Chris Nanos on the Nancy Guthrie Investigation: pic.twitter.com/YfhQSPkrFJ— Pima County Sheriff's Department (@PimaSheriff) February 16, 2026
His statement appeared to indirectly address those speculating online and reporting irresponsibly about the case. Influencer content is, by nature, unwieldy, reactionary, and unbeholden to the same standards as traditional news outlets covering ongoing investigations.
Former Los Angeles Sheriffs Department Lt. Gil Carrillo told 13 News that online speculation has the potential to inadvertently hinder investigations. With all of these people that are getting on social media rendering their opinions and their thoughts, investigators have to take time from their investigation and assign people to follow those leads up because they all have to be followed, Carrillo said. Every one of them has to be vetted out.
Members of the true-crime community counter that more eyes on an active case can help, something authorities themselves have acknowledged. As a person involved in the Guthrie investigation told CNN last week: The breakthrough tip could come from anyone, from anywhere.
In 2021, online sleuths credited themselves with helping locate the remains of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old who went missing during a road trip with her boyfriend. As the internet became consumed with the case, sharing images, analyzing Petitos YouTube uploads, and speculating about timelines, YouTubers Jenn and Kyle Bethune spotted Petitos van in their own travel footage. This helped point authorities to the area where Petitos body was ultimately found.
Since then, similar episodes have played out across the hugely popular true-crime corner of the internet. Inspired by those successes, influencers and amateur sleuths are increasingly inserting themselves into both active and cold cases. But even well-meaning intervention can risk doing more harm than good.
The deadline to claim the early-bird rate for Fast Companys Best Workplaces for Innovators is quickly approachingFriday, February 20, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time.
This marks the eighth year Fast Company will be recognizing companies and organizations from around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business.
In addition to ranking the worlds Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will also recognize companies in 19 categories, including a brand new category that focuses on skilled laborcompanies that depend heavily on talented employees with the kinds of increasingly coveted technical expertise acquired through vo-tech training and trade schools.
Other new categories this year include:
Cybersecurity and enterprise software
Industrial and manufacturing
Technology and science
Advertising, marketing, and PR
Biotech, healthcare, and life sciences
Financial services and fintech
What differentiates Best Workplaces for Innovators from existing best-places-to-work lists is that it goes beyond benefits, competitive compensation, and collegiality (mere table stakes in todays competition for talent) to identify which companies are actively creating and sustaining the kinds of innovative cultures that many top employees value as much as or even more than money. Places where they can do the best work of their careers and improve the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people around the world. Every application receives careful review by Fast Company editors. Start your Best Workplaces for Innovators application here. For more information on applying, see the FAQs. The final deadline to apply isnt until March 27, but all applications submitted by Friday, February 20, at 11:59 pm Pacific time receive the preferred rate.To sign up for Best Workplaces for Innovators notifications, register here
In todays AI race, breakthroughs are no longer measured in yearsor even monthsbut in weeks.
The release of Opus 4.6 just over two weeks ago was a major moment for its maker, Anthropic, delivering state-of-the-art performance in a number of fields. But within a week, Chinese competitor Z.ai had released its own Opus-like model, GLM-5. (Theres no suggestion that GLM-5 uses or borrows from Opus in any way.) Many on social media called it a cut-price Opus alternative.
But Z.ais lead didnt last long, either. Just as Anthropic had been undercut by GLM-5s release, GLM-5 was quickly downloaded, compressed, and re-released in a version that could run locally without internet access.
Allegations have flown about the ways AI companies can match, then surpass, the performance of their competitorsparticularly how Chinese AI firms can release models rivaling American ones within days or weeks. Google has long complained about the risks of distillation, where companies pepper models with prompts designed to extract internal reasoning patterns and logic by generating massive response datasets, which are then used to train cheaper clone models. One actor allegedly prompted Googles Gemini AI model more than 100,000 times to try and unlock the secrets of what makes the model work so powerfully.
I do think the moat is shrinking, says Shayne Longpre, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research focuses on AI policy.
The shift is happening both in the speed of releases and the nature of the improvements. Longpre argues that the frontier gap between the best closed models and open-weight alternatives is decreasing drastically. The gap between that and fully open-source or open-weight models is about three to six months, he explains, pointing to research from the nonprofit research organization Epoch AI tracking model development.
The reason for that dwindling gap is that much of the progress now arrives after a model ships. Longpre describes companies doing different reinforcement learning or fine tuning of those systems, or giving them more test time reasoning, or enabling to have longer context windowsall of which make the adaptation period much shorter, rather than having to pre-train a new model from scratch, he says.
Each of those iterative improvements compounds speed advantages. They’re pushing things out every one or two weeks with all these variants, he says. It’s like patches to regular software.
But American AI companies, which tend to pioneer many of these advances, have become increasingly outspoken against the practice. OpenAI has alleged that DeepSeek trained competitive systems by distilling outputs from American models, in a memo to U.S. lawmakers.
Even when nobody is “stealing” in the strict sense, the open-weight ecosystem is getting faster at replicating techniques that prove effective in frontier models.
The definition of what open means in model licenses is partly to blame, says Thibault Schrepel, an associate professor of law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who studies competition in foundation models. Very often we hear that a system is or is not open source, he says. I think it’s very limited as a way to understand what is or what is not open source.
Its important to examine the actual terms of those licenses, Schrepel adds. If you look carefully at the licenses of all the models, they actually very much limit what you can do with what they call open-source, he says. Metas Llama 3 license, for instance, includes a trigger for very large services but not smaller ones. If you deploy it to more than 700 million users, then you have to ask for a license, Schrepel says. That two-tier system can create gray areas where questionable practices can emerge.
To compensate, the market is likely to diverge, MIT’s Longpre says. On one side will be cheap, increasingly capable self-hosted models for everyday tasks; on the other, premium frontier systems for harder, high-stakes work. I think the floor is rising, he adds, predicting more very affordable, self-hosted, self-hosted, general models of increasingly smaller sizes too. But he believes users will still navigate to using OpenAI, Google and Anthropic models for important, skilled work.
Preventing distillation entirely may be impossible, Longpre adds. He believes its inevitable that whenever a new model is released, competitors will try to extract and replicate its best elements. I think its an unavoidable problem at the end of the day, he says.
