Benson Lu’s life revolves around Pokémon.The 26-year-old has played the mobile game Pokémon Go every day for a decade, watches the animated show every week, goes to the local card shop in his Los Angeles suburb to play the brand’s trading card game every week, and has a whopping collection of cards worth more than $70,000.“I don’t remember when was the last day I did not think about Pokémon at all,” he said.In the 30 years since Pokémon debuted in Japan with the 1996 release of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green for Nintendo Game Boy, the franchise has taken over the globe with its animated shows, mobile games and highly coveted trading cards. Its popularity continues with fans young and old.Pokémon offers a masterclass in character design, which has helped make it so enduring, said Heather Cole, teaching assistant professor of game design and interactive media at West Virginia University.“I think the longevity of it has to do with the characters and world-building it does with the characters,” she said.
A valuable commodity
It’s not just cuteness that has people clamoring for merchandise, particularly trading cards. Today, some are so coveted that social media star Logan Paul sold one for a record $16.5 million. In Southern California, the fervor around Pokémon cards has led to strings of break-ins in recent months at trading card stores that have amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses and even some collectors robbed at gunpoint.Adam Corn, owner of card business Overdose Gaming Inc, said he was able to buy a house last year from his Pokémon cards.“Pokémon almost always appreciates in value over time,” Corn said. “So it’s just a really good place to put your money in my opinion, better than a a lot of other assets.”Companies like Beckett Grading Services and Professional Sports Authenticator authenticate and grade the quality of Pokémon cards on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being pristine mint condition and fetching the highest prices. Paul bought the PSA Grade 10 Pikachu Illustrator card a few months prior for $5.3 million and wore the card on a chain around his neck in videos. It features a Pikachu holding a pen and feather sweeper.Last Tuesday, thieves stole more than $80,000 of Pokémon cards from Do-We Collectibles in Anaheimthe second time the store has been targeted. Other stores around Los Angeles and in New York have been hit by Pokémon thieves too.Duy Pham, owner of the Anaheim store, said the financial incentive of trading cards for robbers and scalpers means “the hobby will never be the same.”“It’s rougher for collectors and players,” Pham said. “It’s hard for us to get anything.”Collectors can either pay retail price for a standard pack of randomized Pokémon cards, around $5 for 10 cards, or buy the specific card they want secondhand for higher prices. But much like gambling, opening packs doesn’t always pan out to profitAiden Zeng spent $1,000 on packs of cards that were only valued at $60 on the resale market, he said.Zeng, 17, said his fandom began in elementary school, when he obsessed over character guidebooks. He eventually began trying to collect every single type of card available for his favorite, Black Kyurem.“I memorized every single Pokémon’s specific move set, what region they come from, some of the lore behind it,” Zeng said.
Resurgence of popularity
Even beyond dedicated collectors, Zeng said he has seen a resurgence of popularity for Pokémon at his high school in Toronto, where some students decorate their phone cases with cards featuring special artwork or a holographic sheen.Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri has said he enjoyed catching insects and other small critters in the fields and forests outside the Tokyo suburb where he lived as a child. Those creatures inspired him to make the colorful, fantastical Pokémon of which there are thousands of species today.While his hobby is lucrative, Lu said the draw for him is still nostalgia for the characters he grew up with and the community he has formed around Pokémon. He prefers not to sell his single cards because he worries he will never be able to find them again.Lu recently spent an entire Saturday walking around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, looking for Pokémon on his augmented reality phone game at an event attended by thousands.“I’ve liked Pokémon ever since I was a kid,” he said. “And I still like it the same amount.”
Jaimie Ding and Liam Mcewan, Associated Press
A public showdown between the Trump administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology.Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups.If Amodei doesn’t budge, military officials have warned they will not just pull Anthropic’s contract but also “deem them a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.And if Amodei were to cave, he could lose trust in the booming AI industry, particularly from top talent drawn to the company for its promises of responsibly building better-than-human AI that, without safeguards, could pose catastrophic risks.Anthropic said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”That was after Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, posted on social media that “we will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions” and added the company has “until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide” if it would meet the demands or face consequences.Emil Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, later lashed out at Amodei, alleging on X that he “has a God-complex” and “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”That message hasn’t resonated in much of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech workers from Anthropic’s top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei’s stand late Thursday in an open letter.OpenAI and Google, along with Elon Musk’s xAI, also have contracts to supply their AI models to the military.“The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused,” the open letter says. “They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in.”Also raising concerns about the Pentagon’s approach were Republican and Democratic lawmakers and a former leader of the Defense Department’s AI initiatives.“Painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end,” wrote retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan in a social media post.Shanahan faced a different wave of tech worker opposition during the first Trump administration when he led Maven, a project to use AI technology to analyze drone footage and target weapons. So many Google employees protested its participation in Project Maven at the time that the tech giant declined to renew the contract and then pledged not to use AI in weaponry.“Since I was square in the middle of Project Maven & Google, it’s reasonable to assume I would take the Pentagon’s side here,” Shanahan wrote Thursday on social media. “Yet I’m sympathetic to Anthropic’s position. More so than I was to Google’s in 2018.”He said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines are “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.“They’re not trying to play cute here,” he wrote.Parnell asserted Thursday that the Pentagon wants to ” use Anthropic’s model for all lawful purposes” and said opening up use of the technology would prevent the company from “jeopardizing critical military operations,” though neither he nor other officials have detailed how they want to use the technology.The military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement,” Parnell wrote.When Hegseth and Amodei met Tuesday, military officials warned that they could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, cancel its contract or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.Amodei said Thursday that “those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.” He said he hopes the Pentagon will reconsider given Claude’s value to the military, but, if not, Anthropic “will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”-AP reporter Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.
Matt O’Brien, AP Technology Writer
Its a horrible day for investors in Duolingo. Shares of the language learning app with the green owl mascot are falling off a cliff after the company reported its fourth quarter results.
Yet its not the results themselves that are causing investors to dump the stock. Rather, it’s more about forward guidance the company has issued. Heres what you need to know.
Duolingos Q4 by the numbers
Yesterday, after market close, Duolingo (Nasdaq: DUOL) reported its fourth quarter 2025 results. On the surface, many of the companys most critical metrics saw decent gains for the quarter, including:
Daily Active Users: 52.7 million (up 30% year-over-year)
Paid Subscribers: 12.2 million (up 28% year-over-year)
Revenue: $282.9 million (up 35% year-over-year)
Total bookings: $336.8 million (up 24% year-over-year)
Net income: $42 million
The company also reported its full-year 2025 financials, revealing that for the first time in its history, it crossed the $1 billion revenue mark for a fiscal year.
In 2025, Duolingo recorded $1.03 billion in revenue, along with total bookings of $1.15 billion, the latter figure representing 33% year-over-year growth. Net income for the year totaled $414.1 million.
We closed 2025 with strong momentum, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a statement, surpassing 50 million daily active users and generating more than $1 billion in bookings for the first time.
Yet it was von Ahns next comments, along with the companys 2026 guidance, that caused investors to turn negative on the stock.
What’s the plan for 2026?
Announcing its Q4 2025 results, von Ahn went on to explain the companys battle plan for 2026and its a plan investors seem to be deeply unhappy with.
In 2026, von Ahn stated, we are deliberately prioritizing user growth and teaching better. Well focus on improving the free learner experience to grow word of mouth and feed our next user growth engines like chess, math and music, even though that moderates near-term financial growth.
That moderation of near-term financial growth essentially means the company is willing to make less money in order to increase its user base.
Von Ahn says the companys goal is to achieve 100 million daily active users in the medium-term, essentially doubling its existing monthly active users (MAU).
Efforts to double its MAU will, in large part, focus on giving subscribers of some of its lower-cost subscription plans access to artificial intelligence tools and services that would otherwise be limited to higher-cost, premium paid plans.
By doing this, Duolingo essentially risks leaving money on the table in order to attract additional subscribers to its low-cost options.
When companies do this, they ultimately hope that it will increase not just the user base but brand loyalty, which could translate into greater sales down the road.
Why are investors dumping Duolingo?
Leaving subscription money on the table is one thing. What seems to have freaked Duolingo investors out even more is the companys Q1 2026 and full-year 2026 guidance.
For Q1 2026, Duolingo says it expects to bring in around $301.5 million in bookings, representing about 11% year-over-year growth. For full-year fiscal 2026, the company says it expects to see about 10%-12% bookings growth to between $1.274-$1.298 billion.
On the revenue front, Duolingo says it expects about 25% revenue growth in Q1 to $288.5 million, and full-year 2026 revenue growth of 15%-18%, to $1.197-$1.221 billion.
As Reuters notes, that guidance is well below estimates. Visible Alpha data shows that analysts were expecting Q1 bookings of $329.7 million and fiscal 2026 bookings of $1.39 billion.
LSEG analysts were expecting full-year 2026 total revenue of $1.26 billion.
DUOL shares have crashed since the company proclaimed to be “AI-first”
Primarily as a result of its weaker-than-expected guidance, Duolingo shares have plummeted since its earnings were announced.
Currently, as of this writing, DUOL shares are down a staggering 26% in premarket trading to below $85 per share. Yesterday, DUOL shares closed at $117.45.
Todays early-morning drop continues an extended slide for Duolingo’s stock price.
In May 2025, DUOL shares were trading at an all-time high of above $544 per share.
It was around that time (late April 2025) when the company put out a now-infamous “AI-first” memo in which it said it would gradually stop using contractors for work that AI can do. The memo was widely criticized and faced heavy backlash from the platforms users, particularly on social media.
Speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in September, von Ahn said the memo was misinterpreted and that the company had not fired any full-time employees.
Still, DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and thats before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
In early February, the AI world found itself worked up over Moltbook, a social platform for AI agents to communicate and interact. These AI agents allegedly created their own language, their own religion, their own fleets of mini-agents. Its like The Matrix was happening in front of our eyes.
What a boondoggle.
I say allegedly because it turns out many of these agents were being directed by humans, among other Mechanical Turk-style fakeries.
Moltbook is worth a conversation, for sure, but not the one taking place. Heres how we should really be thinking about it.
TOKEN CARNAGE
Running AI infrastructure costs are astronomical. Back in 2023, it was estimated that OpenAI spends around $700,000 per day to run ChatGPTabout 36 cents per query. However, in 2024 with the release of its higher-performing o3 model, some queries cost over $1,000 of computing power. Consequently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reports the company is even losing money on its $200 ChatGPT Pro subscriptions.
As models become more capable and heavy-duty, they will become more energy-intensive. The data centers powering AI are predicted to consume the same amount of water as 10 million Americans and produce as much carbon dioxide as 10 million cars. It taxes electrical grids and water supplies.
Point being, these agents running amok are running up the AI bill we all must pay, in the form of environmental costs or potential economic disaster. Remember, these agents arent just talking. Theyre coding, theyre generating images and video, theyre spawning new agentsand for what? We already knew agents could do all the things theyre doing on Moltbook.
The planet is a finite resource. Sooner or later, well all bear the cost. Some already are.
AI BROS AND WOMB ENVY
There is a certain type of tech bro who is enthralled with the idea of AI not as tool, but as legitimate consciousness, if not a new species. And boy do those bros love Moltbook. Why?
Every man is made by a woman. They are likely fed, cared for, and taught by women. Women create everyone in the world, which is a problem for the narrative of superiority that men (not all, but at large) have created for themselves. Why else did men write the story of Eve coming from Adams rib? Looks to me like the original gaslight.
Is the quest to create a new species that supersedes humanity, perhaps at the cost of humanitys extinction, born out of womb envy? Creating human-like AI is perhaps subconsciously a way for these men to give birth and cut women out of the loop. Thats why theyre so bent on proving how human AI machines can be.
And if you examine the way Moltbooks agents behave and talk to each other, youll notice they act just like that particular brand of tech bro who made them. Their mini-mes?
No thanks. We dont need any more misanthropic anti-heroes.
THE GRIFT THAT KEEPS ON GRIFTING
Instead of becoming a toola discipline, that can solve the worlds problemstech has become a cloak-and-dagger get-rich scheme. Superfluous nonsense like Moltbook encourages this trend. Spectacle becomes speculation becomes investment.
Tech, and the people building it, must have values and vision beyond making money. Otherwise, what are we building here?
Lindsey Witmer Collins is founder of WLCM App Studio.
Shares in the financial technology company Block soared more than 20% in premarket trading Friday after its CEO announced it was laying off more than 4,000 of its 10,000 plus employees, reconfiguring to capitalize on its use of artificial intelligence.“The core thesis is simple. Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Jack Dorsey said in a letter to shareholders in Block, the parent company to online payment platforms such as Square and Cash App. “A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better,” he said.Dorsey’s comments explicitly naming AI as a key driver behind the move were also posted on X, or Twitter, a company he co-founded. The assertion that the job cuts will add to Block’s profitability and efficiency led investors to jump in and buy, analysts said.Block’s shares gained 5% Thursday to $54.53, before it reported its earnings. They shot up to nearly $69 in after-hours trading. The mobile payments services provider reported its fourth quarter gross profit jumped 24% from a year earlier.“For years, we have debated whether AI would dent jobs at the margin. Now we have a public case study in which the CEO explicitly says that intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.“Other large employers have announced tens of thousands of cuts in recent months. Some have downplayed the AI link. Block did not,” he said.A global technology company founded in 2009, San Francisco-based Block operates in the United States, Canada, parts of Europe, Australia and Japan.In a post on Twitter, Dorsey outlined various ways the company will support those laid off. For employees overseas, the terms might differ, he said.It was unclear which employees would be laid off where.Layoffs by American companies remain at relatively healthy levels, but the job cuts at Block are the latest among thousands announced in recent months.A number of other high-profile companies have announced layoffs recently, including UPS, Amazon, Dow and the Washington Post.
Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business Writer
Archer Aviation is installing Starlink on its Midnight electric air taxis, the company announced on February 27.
The move, an industry first, will bring stable, reliable, and high-speed connectivity to Archer’s vehicles courtesy of Starlinks low-Earth-orbit satellite internet systems.
Starlink capabilities will allow passengers to access the internet in-flight while also enabling better communication between individual aircraft, pilots, and engineers on the ground to create a more integrated and connected infrastructure.
The two companies will also work on developing connectivity technology for Archers future autonomous aircraft, Archer said.
Connectivity is a must-have feature for Midnight,” Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer, said in a statement. “Starlink is uniquely built to deliver it.”
Connectivity from anywhere
Starlink, which is owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has roughly 10 million customers around the world, mostly in North America.
Its satellite internet service is popular with customers who live in rural areas without reliable broadband or traditional internet infrastructure. Its also used by various maritime and aviation companies that operate in remote areas on ships, aircraft, and offshore platforms.
A new salvo in the flying-taxi wars
The partnership gives Archer an edge in the growing race to fill the skies with electric air taxis, which are still largely in the pre-commercial phase.
The Federal Aviation Administration has given air taxis a regulatory path to move forward toward commercial operations. As a result, Archer and competitors like Joby Aviation are seen by supporters as being poised for growth in the coming years.
Archer teamed with United Airlines last year to create an air taxi network around Manhattan, connecting the areas major and regional airports with vertiports around the city.
The company will also serve as the official air taxi of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. That means its Midnight aircraft will shuttle athletes and spectators around Southern California to various events and venues.
The air taxis Starlink capabilities will allow passengers to stay connected as they travelif everything goes as planned.
Shares of Archer Aviation have been volatile. After seeing numerous spikes throughout 2025, the stock (NYSE: ACHR) was down 9.23% year to date as of February 26.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block Inc, is not only laying off nearly half of the companys workforce, but he wants investors to think hes an AI-focused trailblazer for doing so.
In a letter to shareholders on Thursday, Dorsey shared that Blocks workforce is shrinking from over 10,000 people to just below 6,000 people, with some employees entering consultation.
Dorsey credits intelligence tools with motivating the change, explaining that these tools and a significantly smaller team will allow the company to be better and do more.
Block owns fintech brands such as the Square point-of-sale system, Cash App, and Afterpay, along with the music streaming service Tidal.
A familiar story
If the idea of laying off employees in favor of leaner operations sounds familiar, dont tell Dorsey that. He frames his announcement to embrace AI and put thousands of people out of a job as a forward-looking decision.
I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late, Dorsey states. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively.
Block investors cheer the news
All of this came in a letter dedicated to Blocks quarter four of 2025. Dorsey shared that Blocks gross profits doubled from quarter one to four immediately after announcing the layoffs.
Shares of Block Inc (NYSE: XYZ) were up more than 20% in premarket trading on Friday in the wake of the news.
However, as of Thursday’s close, the stock was down more than 16% year to date. It has been trading far below the high point it had reached during the early COVID era.
Dorsey took to X (formerly Twitter, which he cofounded) to share his note to employees, using his standard no-capitals style.
In the post, Dorsey says that laid-off employees in the U.S. will receive 20 weeks of salary, plus a week for every year of work.
They will also get six months of healthcare, equity vested through the end of May, their corporate devices, and $5,000 to soften the transition. As is typical, employees outside the U.S. will receive different severance based on local (and typically better) requirements.
It will likely not come as a great relief to those losing their jobs that, as Dorsey states, We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble.
He adds that Block wont disappear employees from Slack and email, instead giving them until the vague time of Thursday evening (pacific) to get things in order. Dorsey claims he will send an additional note on Friday to all remaining employees.
Reactions to the Block layoffs are pointed
Unsurprisingly, many people didnt respond favorably to the news of Blocks layoffs.
As we’ve reported before, the key to understanding Jack Dorsey is how much he follows other tech figures and executives that came before him. He used to idolize Steve Jobs. Now he idolizes Elon Musk, New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac wrote on Bluesky.
Many users took issue with the lowercase format that Dorsey used to deliver such important news on X.
Imagine you get canned and your CEO posts a tweet about it without any uppercase letters like he’s an early 20s girl, one user responded on X.
On Bluesky, another user put it succinctly: This reminds me of the old adage, Never work for Jack Dorsey under any circumstances.
OpenAIs Codex AI coding assistant is having a growth spurt. OpenAI tells Fast Company that its weekly active users have tripled since the start of the year, while overall usage (measured in tokens) has increased fivefold. The surge is likely driven by the release of new modelsGPT-5.2 last December and GPT-5.3-Codex in early Februaryas well as the launch of Codexs app version a few weeks ago. OpenAI says the app has been downloaded more than a million times. Across all access pointsincluding the cloud, app, and command linemore than a million developers and other users now rely on Codex at least once a week, according to the company.
Generating computer code has emerged as one of the first AI applications making a measurable impact in business. But tools like Codex and Anthropics Claude Code have evolved far beyond simple code generators. Powered by more capable models, they function more like assistant engineersable to converse with developers in plain language about a new software project and iteratively develop a plan. The agent can then execute that plan, which may include analyzing a broader codebase, writing and revising code, conducting research, running tests, and producing documentation. When finished, it can explain its reasoning and the decisions it made to the human engineer.
More importantly, Codex has evolved into an agentic platform, where multiple agents can carry out many of these tasks simultaneously across different pieces of a software project. They can hunt for bugs, for example, while an engineer reviews progress, focuses on another assignment, or steps away for lunch. Peter Steinberger, the OpenClaw creator and an elite-level coder, calls this new mode of working agentic engineering.
Thibault Sottiaux [Photo: OpenAI]
The tools have evolved quickly. Codex and Claude Code both launched in the first half of 2025. OpenAI had previously introduced a Codex model in 2021the system that powered the early AI coding assistant GitHub Copilotbut the Codex coding assistant that exists today debuted in May 2025.
Thibault Sottiaux, who leads the Codex group at OpenAI, says the product got a major boost with the December 2025 release of the GPT-5.2 model, which he says can hold more project data in memory and reason over it more effectively than earlier versions. The model was more reliableworking by itself autonomously and reaching really good results, he tells Fast Company.
Codexs user base broadened again with the February 2 release of the Codex desktop app for Mac, which OpenAI describes as a command center where users can deploy and manage multiple agents. The company says more than half a million people are now accessing Codex through ChatGPTs Free and Go subscription tiers, and it believes many of them are non-coders, since power users typically rely on higher-priced plans that offer greater usage limits and faster speeds.
The biggest bang came with the February 5th launch of GPT5.3Codex, which substantially improved Codexs coding chops, as well as its capacity for reasoning its way through complex, long-running tasks that involve research and tool use. In X posts and Reddit discussions many developers raved about the tools capacity for quickly writing usable code for real-world projects, often on the first try.
Codex vs. Claude Code
Many of the AI coding agents on the market are powered by third-party models, but OpenAI and Anthropic, along with Google and its Gemini Code Assist product, are each trying to leverage the strengths of their own frontier large language models to deliver the most capable and reliable coding tool. OpenAIs Codex and Anthropics Claude Code share some broad similarities. Both can build large features or even entire apps based on plain-English conversations with a user. Both also allow developers to break complex projects into subtasks and assign those to agents.
But there are differences. One major distinction is the look and feel, or what some describe as the personality, of the tools. Steinberger says Claude Code is more conversational and iterative than Codex. It includes, for example, a dedicated planning phase before any code is written. Codex, by contrast, does not formally separate planning and coding and instead tends to dive directly into the codebase to gather context and begin working. Steinberger (comically) described the difference this way on a recent episode of Lex Fridmans podcast: Opus [Anthropics flagship Claude model] is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes, but its really funny and you keep him around,” he said, “and Codex is like the weirdo in the corner that you dont wanna talk to, but is reliable and gets shit done. (OpenAI has since acquired Steinbergers OpenClaw agent platform, and Steinberger now works at OpenAI.)
The pragmatic personality has always been the personality that we have on Codex, Sottiaux says, which is very much focused on having the model point out flaws and being as correct as possible when it comes to discussing something and being a very reliable tool.
The personality and interaction habits of AI agents can reflect the markets theyre designed to serve. We were just really focused on this professional software engineering audience and . . . on getting to a powerful agent that can do tasks independently, Codex product manager Alex Embiricos says.
But those target markets can shift. Embiricos says that while a pragmatic approach works well for experienced developers, less experienced or first-time coders may prefer a more empathetic, conversational interface. And that audience is growing as Codex evolves into a tool for general information work. Thats one reason the Codex team decided to give users more choice within the app.
“In January we said Okay, were doing great on intelligence; obviously theres more to do, but now were going to actually spend a few more cycles on personality,'” Embiricos says. With the arrival of the GPT-5.3-Codex model, Codex now offers the default pragmatic personality as well as a new empathetic or friendly mode, which is designed to be more conversational and interactive.
Why are AI models so good at coding?
At the most basic level, computer code is made up of words, the same kind of data large language models are designed to process. And because the people building AI models are themselves programmers, they have strong incentives to make their systems excel at coding.
Computer code is also in training and evaluating models. While theres creativity involved in software engineering, code ultimately either works or it doesnt. That creates a large supply of training examples with clear right and wrong answers. Theres lots and lots of examples out there with a problem statement and a solution, and being able to tell whether the solution is correct or not, Sottiaux explains. So you can at the very least use that for evaluations to understand the performance of models over time, and drive that performance up.
Amelia Glaese [Photo: OpenAI]
Codex is still a young product, and OpenAI says its improving quickly. But its still a work in progress, and in the weeks since the GPT-3.5-Codex model upgrade, developers have reported problems in some coding scenarios. Some users say GPT-5.3-Codex can lose focus during long or complex tasks, get stuck in loops, freeze, or repeatedly ask for approval instead of completing work. Others say it can hallucinate plausible-looking code, especially in front-end fixes, that doesnt actually work. These accounts are anecdotal and not systematically measured, but they underscore a common practice among developers of keeping AI-generated code separate from production systems until its reviewed.
The Codex team has been focused on identifying and removing near-term bottlenecks that limit usefulness, according to research scientist Amelia Glaese, who leads development of the models underneath Codex. You know, three months ago, people were using Codex, but they were using it a lot less than they are using it now, Glaese adds. There were changes that we made two months ago and two weeks ago that made it so much more useful to people.
At the same time, tools like Codex and Claude Code require developers to adapt. Working with an AI coding assistant is a different mode of software engineering, one that involves guiding and collaborating with an agent rather than writing every line directly. Its not the case that theres like one right way of solving an engineering problem, Sottiaux says. Its all a question of trade-offs and exploring those trade-offs, and so when you have an agent thats capable of helping you explore those trade-offs, its a very useful tool for an engineer.
Increasingly, these assistants are capable of contributing to the development of the next generation of AI models themselves. If AI systems eventually handle more of the process of building, training, evaluating, and deploying models, the pace of performance improvements could accelerate significantly.
Not just coding
Both Codex and Claude Code are evolving into tools for general information work. Anthropic has drawn significant attention as it rolls out new Claude Cowork plugins (bundles of information-work skills) such as for sales, finance, and legal work. Cowork appears as a separate tab, alongside Claude Code, within the Claude chatbot interface. Anthropics skills announcement helped trigger a sell-off in software stocks, reflecting investor fears that traditional software-as-a-service products could be displaced by AI tools sooner than expected.
OpenAI is also adding information-work skills to Codex, if more quietly. Skills bundle instructions, resources, and scripts so Codex can reliably connect to tools, run workflows, and complete tasks according to your teams preferences, the company wrote in the blog post announcing the GPT-5.3-Codex model. The Codex app includes a dedicated interface for creating and managing these skills. OpenAI already has a large and expanding portfolio of products, but it considers Codex important enough to feature in its You Can Just Build Things Super Bowl ad this year.
Glaese, for her part, points out that software engineers themselves have a natural incentive to expand Codex beyond coding tasks. Much of their workday involves general information work rather than writing code. We have to do research, we have to understand the market, we have to read news, we have team meetings, we do performance reviewswe do all of the things that people who don’t code also do, she says.
The glaring question around agents like Codex and Claude Code is how they will affect human jobs, especially those of younger engineers. OpenAI wants its agent to behave like a talented assistant engineer but stops short of saying it will replace people. Instead, Sottiaux sees coding agents as a way to expand how teams approach problems and develop new ideas, particularly when less experienced engineers use them to experiment and push beyond conventional approaches. “And then they come up with completely new ideas that you might not have if you anchor too much on your decades of experience, he says.
Since taking over the coffee chain in 2024, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol has been on a mission to go back to Starbucks and rekindle the feeling of warmth inside the coffee giant.
Thats led to new store designs, new employee training, new uniforms, new menu items, and new staffingwhich have helped the company break out of a two-year sales rut.
But as part of this deep strategic exploration, Niccol made two specific asks for Starbuckss cross-discipline design team that are being revealed today: an iconic new cup and a new plush chair.
As the literal touchpoints between the consumer and the company, they are the biggest signals we have of warmth, comfort, and generosity, says Dawn Clark, SVP of global concepts and design at Starbucks.
The new Starbucks cup (ceramic in every size)
[Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks]
The new Starbucks cup is not just one cup, but five different glazed ceramic optionseach offered to customers who stay to enjoy their coffee. Built to accommodate drinks ranging from a single shot of espresso to a venti latte, the cups come in white (inspired by their takeaway cup, with a hand-painted green siren and rim), and green (where the siren is embossed). Notably, the cups all share the same tapered silhouette.
Clark says the cup design took inspiration from a blend of Italys espresso culture and Starbuckss own mercantile and coffee trading history. The result lands somewhere between European sensibility and American utility. After concepting different designs, they came up with four frontrunners which they 3D printed and shared with various stakeholders across the companyranging from corporate executives to on-the-ground baristas. They refined the designs and rendered them in ceramic before making the final choice.
The company knew it wanted a single, strongly branded silhouette across every size, which limited what could work. Its a really big design challenge because not all those forms that looked good in a short or tall looked great in a mini or large size, Clark says. The other, perhaps bigger problem was drinkability. Different geometries affect how the coffee flows into your mouth, and those geometries dont always scale well. They also needed to survive countless rounds of dishwashers.
[Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks]
The wide-mouth, tapered design won out because it satisfied every above requirement. But most of all, Clark says it was just a really nice vessel for drinking, shaped to make the coffee go with the flow perfectly from the cup to your lips.
From what I gathered, Starbucks may eventually choose to sell these mugs as merch, and its easy to imagine the company introducing special colorways for limited-time offerings. A toasty orange version for PSL season feels almost inevitable.
The new Starbucks chair (in green this time)
[Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks]
While cups are intrinsic to coffee, the new Starbucks chair requires a bit more explanation. Even brand devotees may have forgotten a piece of lost history in Starbucks lore. In the 90s, when Starbucks took lattes mainstream across America, many stores had one or two special, extra-wide, purple velvet chairs. They were an almost Dr. Suessian take on the hyper plush living room seating of that decade, meant to shake up the rigidity of Starbuckss design at the time while urging you to stay a while.
What was great about that chair is it was oversized; it wasn’t practical. It was very much like you could maybe have two people sit in it, you could put your feet up, swing your legs over the arm. There were a lot of ways to occupy it, Clark says. That was a big part of the inspiration [for a redux]and also the lushness of the texture.
Indeed, Niccol told me last year that an updated chair needed to imbue something akin to FOMO when sitting down at Starbucks: Its got to be the seat that when you walk in, youre like, Man, I cant wait for him to get up. Im hopping in that chair the second he does.
Starbucks landed on a design that resurrects hefty 90s furniture and adds a dollop of midcentury design. I find myself sucked back into 1996 just looking at it.
You see the same voluptuous arm silhouettes from the original chair (dont worry, theyre stll fixing that ruching), but its framed in wood (albeit with far more weight than youd see in traditional midcentury designor even the rest of Starbuckss midcentury-inspired furnishings). The visual heft of the entire chair is intentional, built to exude confidence that it can accommodate your most leisurely posture.
[Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks]
Its a little overly generous in its invitation to be comfortable, Clark says.
Like the cup, Starbucks developed the new chair in-house. The process began with an adjustable ergonomic model. Built from a CMF frame and sparse cushioning, it looks straight out of IKEA, but the system allowed the team to study how it would feel to sit (and eat and drink) at various angles. From there, they built a cardboard massing model to lock in its curves and proportions. For the final production sample, the company went with its rich Starbucks green because, gosh is that purple a statement. But more colors could enter the mix in the future.
No doubt, this is a premium chair for a QSR restaurantmost stores may get one or two. Its inevitable cost and maintenance is probably why Starbucks ditched their purple chair years ago, which I recall looking pretty gnarly before they up and disappeared. Clark believes its new velvet fabric will be easier to clean, and that Starbucks locations can get five to ten years out of a chair before retiring it or even reupholstering it. However, she also insists that isnt their chief concern.
Part of what were in a way saying, it doesn’t exist to be convenient or easy to maintain. It exists to provide comfort. And were willing to take on the challenge, Clark says. Of course we designed it to be up to the test for all the use it gets, and well have to take care of it . . . but its something were committed to.
The new cups and chairs will arrive in U.S. stores toward the end of 2026, while the cups are slated to go abroad in 2027. And theyll undeniably add a little more oomph to Starbuckss turnaround, as it works to make its cafes once again a place you want to sit and stay a while.
I think that it really is more than just a chair or cup, Clark says. These are the most intimate things. These are the things you occupy or touch. We feel these are really intrinsically linked to everything about our brand.
When the email pinged in my inbox, I didnt even bother to open it immediately. I already knew what it was. One glance at the subject line told me everything.
After enough time on the job hunt, you develop a sixth sense for HR language. The preview textThank you for taking the timesaid it all. Its the standard soft intro to bad news: Your application was amazing . . . but not amazing enough.
The blow softens once youve received a few of these. But the emotions that follow resemble the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually, acceptance. I ran the gamut of these feels when I got my latest rejection for a role that seemed promising all the way through the final interview. Heres how I felt and acted after I opened that message and faced reality.
Denial
Nah, this can’t be right. I refresh my inbox three times, as if the letters in the message will magically rearrange themselves into a sequence that reveals a start date. Could it be a system glitch? Maybe they sent this to the wrong candidate? (Believe it or not, its happened to me before.) I mean, I was perfect for this role. Remember in the final interview when I gave that answer about cross-functional collaboration that made the hiring manager nod so hard I thought she had that new J. Cole playing in her AirPods?
I draft a response. Thank you for your consideration. However, I believe there may have been an error . . . I let it sit in my drafts folder for exactly 11 minutes before deleting it. Even my delusions have limits. But I do check LinkedIn to see if they’ve posted the position again. They haven’t. Which means they hired someone. Which means this is real. Which leads me directly to . . .
Anger
I’m in my feelings now. Who did they hire? I need to know immediately. I’m on LinkedIn doing forensics like I’m on The First 48. I filter the companys employees by most recent hires. There he is. Brayden. Of course it’s a Brayden. His profile says he thrives in ambiguous environments and has experience with stakeholder management. My profile says the exact same thing but with better action verbs. Ugh.
Bargaining
Okay, let me think about this objectively. What could I have done differently? Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned I needed to check the start date because of a vacation I had already booked. Maybe that made me seem uncommitted. Or maybe I should’ve asked more questions at the enddid I seem too confident? Not confident enough? Maybe I talked too much . . . or too little. Should I have laughed at the hiring managers joke about getting her ducks in a row? It wasn’t funny, but maybe that was the test.
I consider emailing the recruiter to ask for feedback. Just a friendly note. Hey! Would love to learn what I could improve for next time :) The smiley face is crucial. Makes me seem coachable and not at all dead inside. I type it out. I don’t send it. I know what they’d say anyway: We had many qualified candidates. Translation: Brayden’s uncle plays golf with the CEO.
Depression
It’s been three days since the rejection. I’m still thinking about it. I’ve applied to 16 other jobs since then. Each one feels like I’m rolling up a resume, stuffing it into a Dos Equis bottle, and chucking it into the ocean. My Easy Apply count on LinkedIn is getting embarrassing. I’m tailoring cover letters for positions I’m overqualified for, underqualified for, and in some cases, not even sure what the job actually is. Customer Success Champion could mean literally anything.
I think about Brayden again. Brayden’s probably in orientation right now, getting his company laptop, meeting the team, hearing about the unlimited PTO that no one actually takes. Brayden’s probably not wondering if his name sounded too ethnic on the application. Brayden’s probably not calculating whether the commute is worth it while also knowing he won’t get the offer anyway. Brayden’s just . . . winning.
I eat leftover jerk chicken at 11 a.m. and consider whether this is rock bottom or if rock bottom is a few more rejection emails away.
Acceptance (sort of)
Here’s what I know: This isn’t personal, even though it feels personal. Corporate America isnt rigged. It just tends to work out beautifully for guys named Brayden. That company wasn’t the one. Maybe the role wasn’t even that good. The Glassdoor reviews mentioned fast-paced environment, which is code for no work-life balance anyway.
I update my resume again. Not because I think it’ll make a difference, but because I need to feel like I’m doing something. I tweak one bullet point. I remove an unnecessary comma. I save it as Resume_FINAL_v3_ACTUAL_FINAL_Feb2026.pdf knowing damn well there will be a v4.
And then I do what I always do: I apply to another job. Because theres only one thing worse than getting rejection emails, and thats not getting any emails at all.
