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The Big Gulp might have some new competition in the realm of giant beverages from an unlikely dark horse: Dunkin‘. Over the weekend, Dunkin’ customers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts began posting head-turning images of giant coffee buckets on the menu at their local stores. While some commenters doubted the veracity of these reports, a Dunkin’ spokesperson confirmed in an email to Fast Company that the donut chain is indeed testing out a 48-ounce collectible bucket at select stores after noticing buzz around coffee buckets taking off on social media. A coffee bucket is exactly what it sounds like: a giant iced latte served in a plastic container that looks more like a garden tool than a cup. The novelty beverage took off this summer and appears to have been sparked by several different small businesses, including Noctua Coffee in Missouri, Dulce Vida in Oklahoma, and Wicked Southern Coffee in Connecticut, all of which attracted thousands of views on social media. Dunkin’ is no stranger to jumping on a trend, so it makes sense that the brand would arrive at this moment in the social media zeitgeist with a bucket in tow. In the past few years, Dunkin has experimented with wacky concepts like an alcoholic drink line, a donut deodorant, and a horny Halloween donut. Heres what to know about its latest launch: Where can I find the Dunkin bucket? Dunkin’ told Fast Company that the coffee bucket test is taking place at select stores in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but the company did not provide an official list of locations. Internet sleuths and coffee fanatics have uncovered a few stores that reportedly carry the bucket, according to a cursory search of social media. We have requested the full list of participating stores from Dunkin’ and will update this story if we hear back. What comes in the bucket? According to the Dunkin’ spokesperson, guests can fill their coffee buckets with classics like iced coffee, iced lattes, or Dunkin’ refreshers. Also available are three featured drinks: the blueberry cobbler iced latte, caramel coco iced coffee, and strawberry dragonfruit lemonade refresher. (We shudder to imagine the nutritional contents of these creations.) Customers report paying between $7 and $10 for their buckets. How are customers reacting? So far, customers main complaint for this behemoth of a beverage appears to be the impossible prospect of transporting it. One Instagram Reel with almost 85,000 likes from creator Elijah Boivin shows Boivin cradling the bucket above the caption, Me holding my Dunkin bucket because I dont know where to put it because it doesnt fit in the cup holder. A modern conundrum, indeed.
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E-Commerce
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has defended the resource-intensive use of AI by comparing it to all the energyand foodthat humans require, sparking a wave of backlash across social media. That comparison, experts in climate and tech spaces say, is misguided, downplays the climate risks associated with AI, and illustrates the disconnect between tech CEOs and the rest of society. Altmans comments came while speaking to the Indian Express at the India AI Impact summit. The outlet asked him to address some of the common criticisms of AI, including the amount of energy and water the technology requires. One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query, Altman says. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human, he continues. It takes like 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people who have ever lived. When considering the energy needed to train a human, Altman claims in the interview that AI has “probably already caught up to humans in terms of energy efficiency. Misguided comparison But the tech CEO’s blunt comparison is misguided, says Sasha Luccioni, climate lead of the AI platform Hugging Face. On a fundamental level, humans and AI models don’t use energy and natural resources in the same manner, and comparing the two makes no sense, she says in an email to Fast Company. AI models are trained on human data, Luccioni points out, so if comparing the two, you should also take into account the time and resources that went into writing the books and creating the data used to train AI models. To Luccioni, Altmans comments illustrate a “fundamental disconnect” between Big Tech leaders and broader society. These billionaires have built their fortunes on exploiting human knowledge and the earth’s natural resources, and continue taking both for granted while getting richer by the day, she adds. Fast Company reached out to OpenAI for comment. AI’s water and energy use Altmans comparison has drawn particular ire from those in the climate space, including Michael Mann, a climatologist and coauthor, with scientist Peter Hotez, of the 2025 book Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World. Indeed, the CEO’s statements tie into the very themes of the book. According to Mann, the book argues that forces like plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press promote anti-science rhetoric, which then hampers humanity’s ability to tackle everything from pandemics to the climate crisis. Exact calculations about AIs water and energy use vary, but many experts have raised alarms about its enormous power and resource needs. A 2026 report from Global Water Intelligence projects that water demand from the AI-driven New Economy will surge 129% by 2050, putting even more pressure on strained utility systems alongside climate threats. The International Energy Agency has likewise projected that total data center consumption, driven by AI, will double by 2030. Though Altman dismissed concerns over AI’s water use, he did say that energy consumption is a concern, and that because the “world is using so much AI . . . we need to move toward nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.” So far, the AI boom has led to an increase in natural gas power plants, even though it’s cheaper to build and run new clean energy projects. Longtermism and techno-utopianism According to Mann, Altman’s comments reek of controversial and potentially dangerous viewpoints that he says are common among tech executives, like longtermism and techno-utopianism. Longtermism promotes the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral imperative; its a belief that has been linked to the effective altruism movement. Looking long-term would suggest caring about climate change, because the effects of sustained fossil fuel emissions will have disastrous impacts on humans for years to come. But “longtermists” dont tend to regard climate change as an existential risk. Instead, they focus on threats that they say technology can solve. Techno utopianism, similarly, is a belief that technological advances are the way to achieve a perfect future society. As Mann sees it, Altman along with other tech CEOs promote an idea that society should focus on the benefits of AI and other technologies while “implicitly downplaying the risks and threats posed in the immediate term, including the climate crisis.” There is, as I would remind Altman and his ilk, no economy on a dead planet, Mann adds.
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E-Commerce
As AI use continues to grow, so is frustration with the technology. From strange responses that don’t make any sense to learning curves to how its implemented at work, there’s no shortage of AI quirks to get used to. However, how users are responding to those annoyances is vastly different. According to a new report from Adobe Acrobat and Firefly, frustrations are not few. In fact, of the 1,008 AI users survey, 91% said they have abandoned generative AI tasks in favor of non-AI methods over said emotion. Mostly, that’s because writing quality AI prompts is a key strategy in effectively using the tool, but it’s not always totally intuitive. There’s a definite learning curve when it comes to writing prompts that lead to the best output. However, most users have a breaking point. For example, when it comes to using AI tools that generate images, respondents said they expect a quality result after four attempts. By the seventh try, most simply give up. For text tasks, users aren’t quite so patient. When it comes to prompting AI to write emails or social media posts, users want a solid response after two attempts and give up altogether by the fourth. Some users do more than just give up on writing prompts, however. Some users actually take to yelling at the technology. When it comes to responding in anger, the response is fairly gendered: Men are overwhelmingly more likely to scold AI. Per the report, men said they shouted at the technology in all caps 80% more often than women, believing it may somehow help to improve the result. Meanwhile, the trend of being polite to AI is more common in certain industries. Those in finance and banking reported using pleasantries like “please” 43% of the time. Similarly, those who work in education, transportation, and logistics did so 42%. Creative arts and healthcare workers only did so at 38% and 36%, respectively. Interestingly, regardless of the fact that men are more prone to yelling at AI, they also seem oozing with confidence at their ability to use the technology well. Per the report, men were 15% more confident in their prompting abilities than women. However, their confidence did not match their genuine skill level: The prompts were only better 5% of the time.. Confidence aside, per the report, some helpful strategies to keeping frustrations at bay and getting better results include breaking the tasks into steps, saving your strongest prompts to reuse, fact-checking and giving solid examples. Unfortunately, pleasantries won’t help with better output. Likewise, neither will yelling at it. (Sorry, guys.)
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E-Commerce
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