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After years of living on the street and crashing on friends’ couches, Quantavia Smith was given the keys to a studio apartment in Los Angeles that came with an important perkeasy access to public transit. The 38-year-old feels like she went from a life where no one cares to one where she has a safe place to begin rebuilding her life. And the metro station the apartment complex was literally built upon is a lifeline as she searches for work without a car. It is more a sense of relief, a sense of independence,” said Smith, who moved in July. She receives some government assistance and pays 30% of her income for rent just $19 a month for an efficiency with a full-market value of $2,000. Having your own space, you feel like you can do anything.” Metro areas from Los Angeles to Boston have taken the lead in tying new housing developments to their proximity to public transit, often teaming up with developers to streamline the permitting process and passing policies that promote developments that include a greater number of units. City officials argue building housing near public transit helps energize neglected neighborhoods and provide affordable housing, while ensuring a steady stream of riders for transit systems and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the number of cars on the road. Transit-oriented development should be one of, if not the biggest solution that were looking at for housing development, said Yonah Freemark, research director at the Urban Institutes Land Use Lab, who has written extensively on the topic. It takes advantage of all of this money weve spent on transportation infrastructure. If you build the projects and dont build anything around the areas near them, then its kind of like money thrown down the drain, Freemark said. Transit housing projects from DC to LA The Santa Monica and Vermont Apartments where Smith lives is part of an ambitious plan by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority to build 10,000 housing units near transit sites by 2031offering developers land discounts in exchange for affordable housing development and other community benefits. In Washington D.C., the transit authority has completed eight projects since 2022 that provided nearly 1,500 apartments and a million square feet of office space. About half were in partnership with Amazon, which committed $3.6 billion in low-cost loans and grants for affordable housing projects in Washington, as well as Nashville, Tennessee, and the Puget Sound area in Washington state. Almost all are within a half-mile of public transit. Big cities face the greatest challenges when it comes to traffic congestion and high housing costs, Freemark said. Building new homes near transit helps address both problems by encouraging people to take transit while increasing housing supply. Among projects Boston has built, the Pok Oi Residents in Chinatown is a 10-minute walk to the subway and a half-dozen bus stops. That’s a draw for Bernie Hernandez, who moved his family there from a Connecticut suburb after his daughter got into a Boston university. The big difference is commuting. You dont need a car, said Hernandez, who said he can walk to the grocery story and pharmacy. His 17-year-old daughter takes the subway to school. Now, his car mostly sits idle, saving him money on gas and time spent in traffic. You get to go to different places very quickly. Everything is convenient,” Hernandez said. States take aim at zoning regulations States from Massachusetts to California are passing laws targeting restrictive zoning regulations that for decades prohibited building multifamily developments and contributed to housing shortages. Last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a state law allowing taller apartment buildings on land owned by transit agencies and near bus, train, and subway lines. Building more homes in our most sustainable locations is the key to tackling the affordability crisis and locking in Californias success for many years to come, said State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who authored the bill. California joins Colorado, which requires cities to allow an average of 40 housing units per acre within a quarter-mile of transit, and Utah, which mandates about 50 units per acre. In Washington, the governor signed a bill this year allowing taller housing developments in mixed-use commercial zones near transit. We want to ensure that there are mixed-income, walkable, vibrant homes all around those transit investments and that people have the option of using cars less to improve the environmental health of our communities, said Democratic Rep. Julia Reed, who authored the Washington bill. Its about giving people the opportunity to drive less and live more.” Housing takes center stage in Massachusetts Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey has made housing a priority. Among her most potent tools is a 2021 law that requires 177 towns or communities nearby to create zoning districts allowing multi-family housing. The state provided nearly $8 million to more than 150 communities to help create these zones, while threatening to cut funding for those that don’t. More than 6,000 housing units are in development as a result. You put housing nearby public transit” Healey said. “Its great for people. They can literally get up, leave their home, walk to a commuter rail and get to work. Among the first to comply was Lexington, which has approved 10 projects, including a $115 million complex with 187 housing units and retail space. Walking past earth-moving equipment and dump trucks at the construction site earlier this year, project manager Quinlan Locke said: This is a landscape yard. Its commercial. Its meant for trucking. But, he added, in two years from now, its going to be meant for people who live here, work here and play here. This is going to become someones home. Opposition to zoning changes Some advocates argue the lofty goals of transit housing are falling short due to fierce local resistance and lack of funding and support at the federal and state levels. Higher mortgage interest rates, more government red tape, rising construction costs, and lack of investment at transit stations also have contributed to a troubling trendnine times more housing units built far from public transit versus near it in the past two decades, according to a 2023 Urban Institute study. In Massachusetts, 19 communities still haven’t created new zones. Some unsuccessfully sued the state to halt the law, while residents rejected new zones in others. Lexington eventually shrank its zone from 227 acres to 90 acres after residents complained. If we allow the state to come in and dictate how we zone, what else are they going to come in and dictate? said Anthony Renzoni, a selectman from the ton of Holden, which sued the state and is drawing up a new zoning map after residents rejected the first one. New housing, a new life In Los Angeles, the six-story complex where Smith lives in East Hollywood is home to 300 new residents since opening in February. It’s revitalizing the area around the metro site, with a Filipino grocery, medical clinic and farmers market opening early next year. Half the 187 units are reserved for formerly homeless residents like Smith, who had been living in a rundown motel paid for with a voucher and before that on the street. She’s been assigned a case worker and is getting help with basic life skills, budgeting, and finding work. Equally important: Smith, who can’t afford a car, doesn’t need one. Im very, very fortunate to be somewhere where the transit takes me where I want to go, she said. Where I want to go is not that far. Michael Casey, Associated Press
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on what AI pioneer Yann LeCuns new company will likely build after he departs from Meta. I also look at Marc Andreessens jab at the Pope on X, and at Fei-Fei Lis view of the AI world since 2012. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. Yann LeCuns departure from Meta, and what hell likely do next Yann LeCun, the AI pioneer who has led Metas Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division since 2013, will reportedly leave that post to start his own AI research lab. LeCun plans to depart in the coming months, and has begun early fundraising discussions to support his new venture, the reports say. The new startup will focus on building world models, or AI systems that learn from images, video, and spatial data instead of relying solely on text and large language models. After developing open-source Llama models that fell behind other LLMs, Meta has gone on a very lavish recruiting spree to hire world-class researchers for a new effort to build state-of-the-art models. Metas newest models, sources say, are likely to be closed-source, and are expected to follow the same general architecture and training methods used by rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. In other words, they will continue relying on the same transformer architecture invented at Google in 2017 (which kicked off the generative AI boom) while continually using more training data and computing power to achieve intelligence gains. LeCun has been critical of that approach, and doubts that it has produced AI that truly reasons, rather than just detects patterns and predicts the next word or pixel in a sequence. LeCun has called for more foundational research on alternate paths that could more quickly lead to AI models that can match or exceed human intelligence. His recent research has focused on world modelingdeveloping AI systems capable of quickly learning about the physical world as human babies do. So expect LeCuns new company to build new kinds of models, or systems of models, that learn and represent aspects of the real world, including physics, in new ways. Its likely that these models will be trained through watching thousands of hours of video, instead of relying on text or still images. They will also likely be able to capture more nuances of the real world, such as state changes and transitions (how environments shift and evolve), than current models. Success might mean the creation of AI systems or robots with a far more advanced understanding of the world and how to take action in it, and that are far better at continually learning from and remodeling the world as we humans do. Marc Andreessen goes for a cheap shot on the Pope, faces backlash Marc Andreessen, of the storied VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, is an AI accelerationist who might Twitter-block anyone even suggesting the industry should devote more time to safety and alignment. Now hes facing backlash for taking a shot at the Pope on X last weekend when the Holy See called for morality in technology. The Pope tweeted that the builders of our AI future should develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life. (See the whole tweet here.) That was enough to trigger Andreessen, a committed MAGA cheerleader and close adviser to President Trump on tech issues. Andreessen didnt offer an argument, but posted a meme meant to convey a derisive and dismissive response to the Popes message. The meme was a still photo of GQs Katherine Stoeffel pointing a What the fuck are you talking about? expression at actress Sydney Sweeney during a recent interview. Andreessen deleted the tweet, but not before many on the tech side of Twitter saw it. Some objected to a billionaire VC responding so blithely to the literal Pope. Others noted the irony of Twitter doing unto Andreessen as Andreessen has done unto others. Pretty funny/surreal to see @pmarca dodge the woke cancellation mobs for the last decade, only to have his closest brush with cancel-death come at the hands of the very religious denomination who invented cancel culture in the 15th century, VC Lee Edwards noted. Still others took issue with the idea Andreessen seemed to convey, which is that VCs should invest in technologies that demonstrate value and make money, without regard for whether or not the technology will make the world a better or worse place or, perhaps, a safer or more dangerous one. One of those was the widely followed tech commentator @growing_daniel on X. If youre going to dedicate your life to building something…what Im saying is that you should reflect morally, Daniel said on the TBPN videocast after Andreessens Pope tweet. The Popes entire point was that you should think about that and try to do good things. Daniel acknowledged that Andreessen and a16z have invested a lot of money in software as a service companies that have made businesses run better. But he also cites a16zs $15 million investment in Cluely, a startup that originally billed its app as a tool to cheat on everything (meaning job interviews, exams, or sales calls). How Fei-Fei Li describes the history of AI since ImageNet Fei-Fei Li played a huge role in kicking off the current AI revolution when, back in 2012, she invented the ImageNet image training data set that taught AI models how to classify images. On November 12, her new company, World Labs, released its first model, Marble, a world model that has an understanding of the makeup of 3D environments (as humans do) and can imagine and generate them based on text, images, or video uploaded by the user. These environments could be used in anything from game development to VFX design to digital twins, she believes. From ImageNet to world models, Li has come a long way. When I spoke to her I asked her to describe her view of the AI revolution as its happened so far. Heres what she said. I think the world model is a fairly natural but significant continuation of the generative AI era. The generative AI era is the latest of the . . . deep learning revolution. In 2012 we started the deep learning revolution by squarely establishing the three forces of AI: the neural network, data, and computing chips or GPUs. Every progress weve made in AI so far continues to bank on the power of these three fundamental elements of modern AI. And one of the most important milestones was the transformer model. The sequence-to-sequence modeling for language really unlocked a fairly powerful scaling law that gave rise to large models that can be trained by a large amount of data [to] become very powerful and generalizable. First out of the gate were large language models. And the derivative of large language models are these multimodel large language models (which understand not just words, but audio, video, images, and code). They are still built on the backbone of large language models. But I think the large world model is really a significant step towards unlocking AIs capability. Interestingly, Li suggests that as the AI industry pushes toward models that are generally as intelligent as humans, then generally far more intelligent, researchers may need to rely on more than just the transformer model architecture that ignited the industry in 2017 and led to things like ChatGPT. (The GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer.) She explains: I would say this goes beyond the transformer. Its still early. So the model architecture is still subject to research. But you know the recent progress in transformer models [and] diffusion models and beyond are part of the exploration but I wouldnt call it solidly owing to transformers. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Anthropic and Microsoft announce new AI data center projects in Texas, New York, and Georgia Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey are getting AI voice clones with ElevenLabs Fei-Fei Lis World Labs unveils its world-generating AI model Agentic AI isnt always the answer Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Last June, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky took on a second job. Microsoft, the social network for business professionals owner since 2016, expanded his responsibilities to include Microsoft 365the suite still better known by its former name, Microsoft Officeand its Copilot AI assistant. The role charges him with making AI useful in a productivity context, a goal thats still very much a work in progress.But Roslansky also remains in charge of LinkedIn, a place whose entire reason for being springs from the network effect of its billion-plus members. Their unique connections, learnings, and willingness to help other people cant be fed into an LLM and reprocessed into the kind of generic advice a chatbot can spout. In a world of increasingly commodified information, Roslansky argues that LinkedIns essential humanity is more essential than ever.Trusted, contextual, expert-driven knowledgethe type of stuff that comes from having a lived experience or doing a specific job or having a deep insight or knowing people that have actually done the jobin my view, thats becoming much more valuable, not less, he says. I think the question moving forward from professionals isn’t just going to be something like, What’s the answer?, but Who can I trust to guide me? And that’s where we come in.Still, once you venture beyond your core LinkedIn contacts, its never been all that easy to tap into the power of your network. We’ve always had, what I’ll call decent, keyword-based lexical people search that allows you to type someone’s name if you know them, says Roslansky. We did a decent job at name-plus-company. But even if you were seeking a particular kind of advice or favor that a friend of a friend (or a friend of a friend of a friend) might have been happy to dispense, there was no guarantee youd be able to track them down with keywords and filters.Now LinkedIn is taking a major step to address that. A new feature called AI-powered people search uses generative AI to break past the limitations of conventional search. It understands requests such as investors with FDA experience for a biotech startup, Northwestern alumni who work in entertainment marketing, teachers turned industrial designers, and who can help me raise money for a nonprofit? The results it returns include relevant profiles regardless of the exact words you used to phrase the search.[Animation: Courtesy of LinkedIn]AI-powered people search is rolling out first to members who pay for LinkedIn Premium accounts, but the company says it will eventually be available to all users. It follows the AI-powered job search feature introduced earlier this year, which Rolansky notes can understand open-ended asks such as I want to help bring humanity to Mars or I want to work on AI products with my finance skills.Using technology thats very 2025, these features deliver on the promise of the nearly 23-year-old sites original vision thatas an early tagline put itrelationships matter. Members who have managed to rack up hundreds of connections over the years might find new value in visiting the site more regularly and diving deeper.The company was founded on the idea that if we were able to build a valuable community, that any professional can become more productive and successful through other people in their network, says Roslansky. When you can leverage AI to reason over that network of people, it opens up a whole new world.[Animation: Courtesy of LinkedIn]As for how LinkedIns ongoing evolution fits into Roslanskys new role at Microsoft, he points out several advantages to his twin responsibilities.For one, the ability to sit in on meetings with people like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, CTO Kevin Scott, and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman give him a view into where the bleeding edge of where AI and technology are going. But expanding his purview is also about aspects of LinkedIns mission that remain unfulfilled even nine years after the two companies became one.Recruiters, we make productive and successful, Roslansky explains. Salespeople. Marketers. But general professionals are still something that we are decent at, not what we’ve thrived on. It turns out the greatest set of tools in the world to make professionals more productive is the suite of office tools that I have the amazing honor to be working on right now.Until now, LinkedIn has felt like a most distant relative of Microsoftian stalwarts such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As AI provides opportunities to rethink all these productswith well over a century of combined history behind them Roslansky says hes thinking about them holistically. That alone is a new approach. And its upshot could shape the future of some of the worlds most-used business tools.
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