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Why does uncertainty make us less rational with money? And who should we trust for financial advice online? Vivian Tu, financial educator and CEO of Your Rich BFF, breaks down todays personal finance risks and opportunities, from lifestyle inflation and the most common money mistakes smart people make to how Gen Z is navigating 2026 volatility and a shifting job market. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Today there’s so much uncertaintyin prices, jobs, politics. Do you see that shaping how people behave with their money? Are they less rational in financial decision-making? It’s like, well, if you don’t think you’re going to be able to afford a home or you don’t think you’re going to be able to go on that actual vacation you want, it becomes like the Estée Lauder lipstick index of, “Oh, well, I can’t afford a new TV, so I’m going to go to the drugstore and get myself a little lipstick.” Or, “I’m in a dollar dribble for a little coffee, I’m going to do this.” You’re spending on things that you will not ultimately derive true happiness out of, true pleasure, true joy, just to get a dopamine hit. When you are in a position of uncertainty, it is more important than ever to have a plan, because if you just leave it up to hope, it’s not going to get you there. Lots of folks are using AI tools these days for financial decisions, budgeting, investing, even taxes. But a lot of surveys say that for a lot of these folks, it’s led them to some bad decisions sometimes. Where do you think AI can genuinely help with money? Where should we be more wary? Well, I want to be very clear that none of the AI LLMs, like the ChatGPTs of the world, none of them are financially licensed. Not to be so self-serving, but that is in part why I built out my venture called Ask Dolly. Askdolly.com, check it out. We are actually an SEC-registered RIA, and if you ask Ask Dolly too complex of a question that is not knowledge-based, but rather personal-based, we transfer you to one of our CFPs. I just want to say RIA is registered investment advisor. CFP is certified financial planner, right? Oh, sorry, guys. Yeah. We saw that AI is the next iteration of financial exploration and it really does help people on their financial journeys. They get to ask the embarrassing questions that they’re too ashamed to ask. But I don’t think that AI can operate independently of a little bit of human touch, and frankly, someone who is licensed to provide you financial advice, because it is so personal and there are so many factors to take into account. There are a lot of people online, creators like yourself who offer financial advice. Not all of them are licensed. Reputable. Or registered. How do you know if something you come across on a social platform or online, that it’s reputable, that it’s worthwhile? We get this with health advice, we get with money advice. What I say is, even with my content, if you see something and you’re like, “I wonder if this is true,” you need to be doing your own research. Watch my video and then go online and check, “Can I find three reputable sources that back up what she’s saying?” You’ll always be able to because I actually research my topics. But go look at articles from The Wall Street Journal, from the Financial Times, from Barron’s, from law firms or banks. Compare them. We have unfettered access now, so there is no excuse for falling for a trap. You actually have to do your own research. And you have to understand how the people who you’re engaging with, how they make their money, right? Exactly. Exactly. Are there things you’ve learned as a creator yourself that you think people don’t really understand about how creators make money? Yeah, 100%. You wonder why all of those lifestyle influencers were pushing Stanley Cups and all of the little charms that then go on the Stanley Cup and then all of thethey make an affiliate commission on the backend. She doesn’t love her Stanley Cup, she wants you to buy one so she gets money. I always am very, very honest. When I do brand partnerships, I’m like, “These keep my content free. This is why you don’t have to pay a subscription fee for this. This is why I can do all of this editorial work unpaid: Because I make money.” But at the end of the day, whether or not you get the high-yield savings account I recommend, you should just get one anyway. Are you saying that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck don’t love Dunkin’ Donuts? Is that what you’re saying? I’m saying that I have tasted Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. It’s good, but it’s not the only coffee out there. I’d love to ask you a few rapid fire questions if I can, get your advice on things. Let’s do it. All right. So what’s the biggest money mistake that smart people make? I think it’s just lifestyle inflation, especially for people who start to make more money. You make a little bit more money, you spend a little bit more money, you make a little bit more money, you spend a little bit more money, and at the end of the year you’re like, “How come I don’t have any additional money saved?” All of us fall victim to the comparison trap where we compare our lives with everybody we see on social media, and suddenly you think that if you don’t have X, Y, and Z, you have a bad life. You don’t need to be spending on stuff just to impress other people. All right. Next question. If I could focus on just one thing financially this year, what should it be? Trying to increase your income, because my mentor told me this one line and it’s stuck in my brain forever, she said, “You can only save as much as you earn, but you can always earn more money.” We talk so much like, “Cut out the avocado toast, don’t buy the latte, don’t get the little treat.” Imagine how many little joys in your life you would have to cut out to save $5,000. Now imagine how easy it is to ask for a $5,000 raise. Frankly, people get much larger raises than that. It is so much easier for you to make more money than to try and cut every little thing out. Home ownership. Rent or buy in 2026? How do we decide? This is an insane question because real estate is so geographically focused. I cannot sit here and be like, “You should rent or buy.” I don’t know where you live. And in some cases, the answer is different based on were you live. What I do know is that it is currently cheaper to rent than buy in 70% of all major metros. And frankly, we should all be looking at our own lifestyles and asking ourselves a couple questions. One, do we plan on being here for longer than five to seven years at a minimum? If not, you’re not buying. Are you in a position in your career to potentially have the opportunity to make massive leaps and bounds for a little bit of flexibility? So is there a chance you might be transferred to the Tokyo office? You being able to be flexible might be the reason why you get that position versus somebody else, and having that flex might help you. So renters win. But there is something to be said about building equity. Ask yourself this question. Do you want to build that equity in your primary residence or would it be smarter to maybe just buy an investment property somewhere that is a little cheaper and then continuing to rent your primary residence? If you are planning on building out a family and you really want to paint the walls and you want to have the nursery and you want to do all of these things, maybe renting is not the right move. Maybe you want to buy. Again, we go back to that five to seven years at a minimum, because the fixed costs of buying a home are very expensive. You have mortgage origination fees and youve got to pay some broker fees. Youve got to pay fee-fi-fo-fum. If you’re going to pay all that, youve got to be staying there for at least a little bit.
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Kristin Cabot, the HR exec at the center of last years Coldplay kiss cam scandal, is headlining a crisis communications conference happening later this year. Cabot will be seated on the panel “Taking back the narrative” at the PRWeek Crisis Comms Conference in Washington, D.C., on April 16, where individual tickets start at $875 per person. “While attending a Coldplay concert in July and unwittingly appearing on the kiss-cam for a few seconds, Kristin Cabots life blew up in an instant,” the description of the keynote presentation reads. “From the outside, it was an amusing, if unflattering meme; but for her, everything changed that day. It continues: Cabot experienced firsthand the extremity of public shaming that women have long experienced when in the negative spotlight of the media, one their male counterparts often seem to avoid.” In July last year, Cabot told The New York Times that following the scandal the meme had left her unemployable. She described being called every sexist tropea homewrecker, a slutby keyboard warriors, having her number doxxed and flooded 500 times a day, and her physical appearance scrutinized and torn apart by strangers online. While the other party in the scandal was also dragged online, much of the worst criticism has fallen on Cabot. Cabot will be joined on the 35-minute panel by journalist and communications professional Dini von Mueffling, who Cabot employed as her PR representative in the aftermath of the scandal alongside PRWeek Senior Reporter Jess Ruderman. The panel will unpack “the strategy both immediate and long-term that has helped Cabot take control of her narrative and rewrite her story.” Thrust into the national spotlight last summer (for those who spent those months living under a rock), Cabot is the former head of human relations at the tech company Astronomer. While attending a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts last in July, Cabot was caught in a 16second viral clip embracing the company’s CEO Andy Byron. Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin said as the jumbotron panned on to the pair. At the time Byron was married, while Cabot was separated. Before those details were able to come to light, however, Cabot and Byron had made headlines worldwide, inspiring countless memes and mocked even by their own company. Both Cabot and Byron resigned from Astronomer not long after.Cabot said in the Times interview: “I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you dont have to be threatened to be killed for them.”
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As a consultancy owner, I’ve been experimenting heavily with the headline AI applications for the better part of two years now. Our teams have tested it across dozens of products and use cases. Some experiments worked immediately. Others failed at first but succeeded six months later when the models improved. Some we’re still figuring out. The results keep evolving. A lot of leaders are obsessing over AI strategies right now. Detailed roadmaps, implementation plans, and resource allocation. I get it. Leadership wants clarity, stakeholders want commitments, and everyone wants to know the plan. But here’s the issue. Technology is moving way faster than traditional planning cycles can handle. What seemed impossible in January becomes a commodity by June. GPT-4 launched in March 2023. By year-end, teams were already building multimodal AI and voice interfaces that didn’t exist when they started planning. So, we’ve developed a posture instead of just a strategy. WHAT DOES POSTURE MEAN? A posture is a consistent way of thinking about when, why, and how to experiment as things evolve. It’s the framework you use to make decisions in real-time when conditions keep changing. For us, that starts with a simple filter. Before we experiment with AI on any problem, we ask: Does this fit our criteria? We built a framework called SPARK to help us decide: Scale: High volume or time-intensive tasks Pattern: Repeatable structures or behaviors Ambiguity: Needs perspective or ideation Redundancy: Been done before, will be done again Knots: Bottlenecks that slow people down If a potential concept hits at least two of these markers, we move forward with an experiment. If not, we wait. Screening helps us focus on high-value opportunities instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. WHY THIS COMPOUNDS OVER TIME Here’s what happens when you develop a clear posture: You get faster at recognizing valuable opportunities. You build institutional knowledge about what works in your specific context. You learn when to push forward and when to wait for technology to mature. One team we work with started experimenting with AI for customer support triage in early 2023. The initial results were mixed. AI frequently misrouted tickets and gave generic responses. Six months later, we came back to it. Better models, better prompting techniques, and a better understanding of what the AI could handle. This time it worked. They now process 60% of tier-one support interactions with AI, freeing their human team to focus on complex customer issues. The difference wasn’t a better strategy. It was having a posture that included “when to come back to something we already tested.” DEFINE YOUR OWN POSTURES You don’t need to copy our framework. Build something that fits your business context, risk tolerance, and team’s capabilities. But it may be helpful to think through these questions: What types of problems are we willing to experiment with? What results would make an experiment worth scaling? How do we balance speed with responsibility? What triggers a decision to invest more deeply or move on? How do we capture and share learnings across experiments? Having clear answers matters more than having perfect answers. THE LONG VIEW AI capabilities will only continue to evolve, and new use cases will emerge. Some of today’s cutting-edge applications will become commodities. Others will reach dead ends. I believe that the companies who will thrive will be the ones who can consistently evaluate new opportunities, learn from results, and adjust as conditions change. They’ll have trusted experts who know where to experiment and when to scale. That’s what I mean when I say our AI point of view isn’t a snapshot. It’s a posture. TL;DR The technology keeps moving. Our posture helps us move with it. George Brooks is the CEO and founder of Crema.
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Big Tech is on a spending spree, forecast to drop a staggering $650 billion on artificial intelligence (AI) in 2026 aloneand that’s just for Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. The companies are ramping up their investment in an increasingly competitive, high-stakes arms race, pouring hundreds of billions into massive data centers and semiconductors, in hopes of establishing a long-term strategic advantage in their quest to dominate the future of technology. With all four reporting earnings within the last week, Wall Street’s reaction may be an indication that investors are increasingly worried about the large spend, and relative payoffs, from the AI investments. The spending also coincides with mass layoffs across the tech industry. Those layoffs, which were originally attributed to AI being able to do the jobs of human workers, are now being seen by critics as an excuse for companies to reduce headcounts, so companies can divert spending from workers to building and powering AI data centers, among other things. Here is a look at some at the numbers as we break down Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s AI spend for 2026. Amazon 2026 AI spend Reporting fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday, Amazon said it was pouring $200 billion in capital expenditures into AI this year. News of that, plus the fact it missed first-quarter operating income due to the massive spend, sent shares of the stock down 10% in early morning trading on Friday. At the time of this writing, shares of the cloud giant (AMZN) were down over 6% in afternoon trading. “With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites . . . we anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in the earnings release. Alphabet 2026 AI spend Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said in Wednesday’s earnings report that it estimated AI spending would hit $175 billion to $185 billion this year. Despite its recent performance and positive earnings report, Wall Street reacted with caution, sending shares of Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, GOOG) down nearly 2% at the time of this writing on Friday afternoon. Meta 2026 AI spend By comparison, Meta‘s capital expenditure for AI lags behind, but is significantly higher and more aggressive than just one year ago. The companywhich owns and operates Facebook and Instagram, as well as Threads, Messenger, and WhatsAppsaid it was hiking capital investment for AI development by 73% in 2026, to between $115 billion and $135 billion. For some context, at the beginning of 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said the social technology company planned to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion, showing just how quickly this AI arms race has ramped up. Shares of Meta (META) were trading down less than 2% at the time of this writing on Friday afternoon. Microsoft 2026 AI spend Finally, Microsoft (MSFT)whose shares were up 1% Friday afternoon, bucking the trend of the three other Big Tech stocksis on course for AI capital expenditures of $145 billion by the end of its fiscal year in July, according to Yahoo Finance. The stock is down 41% from its October high.The company recently reported second-quarter 2026 earnings, including $81.3 billion in revenue (up 17% year-over-year), and diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $4.14 (up 24% year-over-year). We are only at the beginning phases of AI diffusion and already Microsoft has built an AI business that is larger than some of our biggest franchises,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. We are pushing the frontier across our entire AI stack to drive new value for our customers and partners.
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On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, a new model that extends its Codex coding agent beyond writing and reviewing code to performing a much wider range of work tasks. The release comes as competition continues to heat up among AI companies vying for market share in the AI-powered coding tools space. OpenAI says GPT-5.3 combines the coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional-knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2, while running 25% faster. This allows GPT-5.3-Codex to handle long-running tasks that involve research, tool use such as web search or database calls, and complex execution and planning across both general work tasks and software development. Codex has reached over 1 million developers, OpenAI claims. And while Anthropics Claude Code has also seen rapid adoption, head-to-head data comparing the two tools remains scarce. SemiAnalysis reports that 4% of GitHub public commits, or new code uploaded to repositories, are currently being authored by Claude Code, and projects that figure could reach 20% or more by the end of 2026. Benchmark one-upsmanship OpenAI says GPT-5.3-Codex now has the best score of any model on SWE-Bench Pro, which evaluates real-world software engineering across four programming languages. Same goes for Terminal-Bench 2.0, which measures the terminal skills coding agents need. Anthropic says its new Claude Opus 4.6 model, also announced Thursday, achieved top scores on several industry benchmarks including Humanity’s Last Exam (complex multidisciplinary reasoning), GDPval-AA (economically valuable knowledge work), and BrowseComp (hard-to-find information search). OpenAI says its new model is capable of taking into account larger bodies of information while working on a task, as well as thinking about those tasks for longer periods without human intervention. In testing, OpenAI says it saw GPT-5.3-Codex autonomously iterate on game development over millions of tokens using generic prompts like “fix the bug” or “improve the game.” Similarly, Anthropic says its new Opus 4.6 model can comprehend larger code bases and make more thoughtful decisions about how to add new code. OpenAI says GPT-5.3-Codex is built to support the full software lifecycle, including debugging, deploying, and monitoring code, as well as writing product requirement documents and conducting research. Beyond coding to knowledge work The same agentic capabilities that expand Codexs coding skill can apply to tasks well outside the realm of software development, OpenAI says, extending to things like creating slide decks, analyzing data in spreadsheets. On GDPval, an OpenAI evaluation measuring performance on well-specified knowledge-work tasks across 44 occupations, GPT-5.3-Codex matches GPT-5.2 while adding stronger coding capabilities. On OSWorld-Verified, which tests computer use in a visual desktop environment, GPT-5.3-Codex achieved 64.7% accuracy compared to 38.2% for its predecessor. Anthropic has taken its Claude Code tool in the same directionto help a wider pool of information workers with a far broader set of business tasks. GPT-5.3-Codex is the first model OpenAI classifies as “High capability” for cybersecurity-related tasks under its Preparedness Framework, and the first the company has directly trained to identify software vulnerabilities. OpenAI is committing $10 million in API credits to accelerate cyber defense, particularly for open source software and critical infrastructure systems. GPT-5.3-Codex is now available to paid ChatGPT subscribers in the Codex app, command line interface, IDE extension, and web. OpenAI says it is working to enable API access (used by enterprise and independent developers) to the model soon.
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