Essential stories from Fast Company for the week of January 29-February 2

Welcome to Fast Company Digest. Essential stories from tech, design, impact and work life. Narrated by Noah App I'm Fast Company Deputy Editor and host of the new Way We Work podcast, Kathleen Davis. Here are this week's stories. First, could trickle down economics finally live up to its promise? Well, kind of Writer Sam Becker explains the Great Wealth Transfer Some baby boomers are starting to pass their assets to Gen X and Millennials. In all, the transfer comprises some $84 trillion in wealth. Here's how it'll play out.

For Noah. This is Sam Scholl reading from Fast company. We're on the 26th of January 2024. Sam Becker writes We're in the midst of the Great Wealth Transfer how some Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z are Getting Rich could trickle down economics finally be living up to its promise? In a way, yes. Americans are currently in the early stages of the Great wealth transfer, a massive multi generational avalanche of cash and assets sliding down from the silent generation and baby boomers to Gen X, millennials and Gen Z. In all, the transfer comprises some $84 trillion or so in wealth, according to estimates from Cerule associates, with approximately $72.6 trillion headed for heirs and the remaining $12 trillion or so being donated to charity. Baby boomers currently hold 50% of all wealth in the United States, spread across various asset classes, according to Fed data, followed by Gen X, the silent generation, and millennials 8.5%. And as the silent and boomer generations fade out, that wealth is going to end up in the hands of younger people and it could dramatically change the makeup of the economy and the financial futures of millions of households. This isn't all bluster, experts say. The money really is changing hands and the amounts are eye popping. It's happening and it's going to continue to happen, says Hale Bezadeh, North American head of Citi private bank. About 1,000 billionaires are expected to pass more than $5.2 trillion to their children over the next 20 to 30 years, she says about the ultra high net worth cohort of the older generations. But organizations will also benefit. The transfer will happen to charities as well, she adds. A good number of billionaires will be transferring assets to different philanthropies and their own foundations. As a result, Pazati says, we're going to have a lot of wealthier, younger people. The baby boomer generation, perhaps more so than any other generation, has seen its wealth dramatically increase over the decades as the stock market and real estate values have skyrocketed. For instance, a $100 investment in an S&P 500 index fund in 1980 would be worth more than $12,000 today at approximately a 120 times return. Home values have similarly increased by almost 300% during that same time frame. So for older Americans who were able to invest and buy homes in their 20s or 30s, the returns have been massive. But at least some of that capital is going to erode. While billionaires and other high net worth households of older generations will see most of their assets passed down to heirs and others, those who are not from seven, eight or nine figure households are likely to see some of their money eaten up in their golden years by healthcare expenses, among other things, long term care, hospital bills, medication. You'll need to anticipate the costs, says Cameron Rufus, a certified financial planner at Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York City. Rufus adds that taxes are another big consideration for households, though the impact of those taxes can be mitigated to a degree through smart estate planning. To that point, Rufus says he sees many people giving cash now while they're still alive to their children or grandchildren. There's a lot of gifts, literally giving over cash investments or investment properties and even primary homes. They're giving it to their kids outright or through a trust, he says. There's an annual exclusion amount for gifts of $17,000. If the gift is less than that, there's no gift tax associated with it. Aside from that, Rufus says that he works on not only clients who plan to bequeath their wealth to their heirs, but also with the heirs lucky enough to anticipate a potential windfall. He says that many of the younger people who are receiving inheritances are using it to buy homes or put down payments on a home, as well as pay down student loan balances or throw the money into savings or brokerage accounts. But his advice, if possible, pretty much pretend that the money doesn't exist. We typically try to get people to think of an inheritance as bonus money. You don't want to rely on it, he says. So if you have a huge windfall, don't do anything. Take some time to mourn and grieve and think about how the money fits into your broader life and financial plan. He also says that estate planning is critical if families want to preserve as much wealth as possible. Let's say dad wants to give you $2 million, but he has no estate plan. It's going to go through the courts. There'll be court fees and taxes. It's going to get eaten up, rufus explains. In fact, heirs could end up with only a fraction of the original amount, which of course could still be significant. While obviously generations have been passing down fortunes to their heirs for, well, generations. What's important to note about the current Great wealth transfer is that the scale of wealth on the move has never been seen before. Innovation in recent decades has supercharged wealth creation in the U.S. but the magnitude of wealth that people have today, that's a magnitude that's not been known before, bezadi says. And like Rufus, she says that what families fortunate enough to be part of this cohort need to do above all else is to prepare to have wealth to transfer. It starts with the family, she says. Generally, families are concerned with how they prepare their children and grandchildren for the responsibility of wealth, because it is a responsibility. You are listening to Fast Company, where Sam Becker writes, we're in the midst of the Great wealth transfer. How some Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z are getting rich. This article was published on 26 January 2024 and was ready by Sam Scholl.

For NOAA and next AI may be coming to your local TV news weather report. Haystack uses text to speech and an image generator to churn out new forecast videos every hour. The company has plans to expand these AI generated weather reports to more than 100 locations over the next two weeks and aims to be in every US city in the next few months. Here's what to expect.

For NOAA. This is Adrienne Walker reading from Fast Company. We're on the 29th of January 2024. Janko Rutgers writes, AI is coming for your local weather report. Most local TV stations air just a few weather reports a day. A forecast in the morning, perhaps an update in the afternoon, followed by an outlook for the next day at night. But when a winter storm was blanketing much of the US earlier in January, Cleveland residents were able to get hourly updates on the situation on Haystack News, a TV news aggregator that recently began to use AI to produce local weather reports. Haystack built an automated workflow on top of Amazon's AWS that uses LLMs, text to speech, and an image generator to churn out new forecast videos every hour. It has been releasing these AI generated weather updates for 30 cities, including Cleveland, Houston, Cupertino, Kansas City and St. Louis. The company has plans to expand the program to more than 100 locations over the next two weeks and aims to be in every US city within a matter of months. We will try to get it done 100% this quarter, says Haystack News co founder and CEO Daniel Barreto. The use of artificial intelligence by news organizations has been a divisive subject, particularly when the industry finds itself at a moment of turmoil. AI has become a shiny new toy for some companies looking to demonstrate their future readiness, and TV networks around the world have begun to experiment with AI generated news anchors. At the same time, AI has been used by some publishers to generate heaps of cheap, SEO optimized web content, which has often been riddled with errors. Haystack has no plans to replace traditional news coverage with AI. The company is licensing deals with big media companies such as abc, Fox, nexstar, Hearst and Scripps. Thanks to these partnerships, Haystack is able to aggregate local news for 97% of US TV markets in its mobile and smart TV apps. However, Barretto believes that there is a role for AI to augment some news coverage, and especially in non controversial areas. Weather is probably the best use case because it's data, he argues. It's also a subject whose coverage is woefully lacking, at least on local TV news. Take the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, where Haystack News is headquartered. Local broadcasters try to cover the entire region in a single weather report, despite the fact that San Francisco itself is known for widely varying microclimates. Add the surrounding cities and you frequently have temperature differences of 20 degrees or more. When you live in San Jose, the weather is very different than in San Francisco, barreto says. These discrepancies can be even more pronounced in poorer rural areas, which are often disproportionately affected by extreme weather. Data from the Pew Research center shows that 71% of rural residents believe that weather is important to their daily lives. Yet 57% of the same respondents told researchers that the local news doesn't cover the areas where they live, a sentiment that is shared by only 35% of urban residents. Haystack, which was founded in 2013 and received financial backing from European TV maker Vestal and others, began to develop its AI generated weather forecast six months ago. The process involved a lot of trial and error, a lot of internal testing, according to Barreto. Over time, the company zeroed in on a simple formula. Local weather data is being fed into a large language model, which generates a script for a roughly 1 minute forecast. The script is then run through a text to speech engineering, whose output is accompanied by automatically generated infographics. All of Haystack's weather data comes from the National Weather Service and major commercial and professional vendors, reducing the risk of what's known in the AI field as hallucinations, I.e. aI models making up facts. However, early on, the company did have a few instances of AI misinterpreting the data, admits Barretto. We had examples where it was cold and it told you that it's going to be nice outside. The AI simply associated clear and sunny skies with T shirt weather, even when it was actually freezing cold. Making sure that those flubs are far and few between will be important for Haystack, says Ericsson Strategy and Insights analyst Paul Erickson. Getting the weather wrong one time too many could lead to people abandoning the service altogether as they conflate its AI weather reports with the rest of its programming. Haystack doesn't produce its own news, but the consumer may not see it that way, Erikson cautions. Over time, people may lose trust in it. Just as important as teaching the AI model about temperature was to make the process itself scale by keeping computational costs under control. This type of content expires within hours, says Barreto. Unlike other videos, weather reports can't get repurposed and monetized on social media days after the fact. The short lifespan of news video also raises questions about the viability of some other AI ventures in this space. In December, a company called Channel One announced plans to launch an entire news network with AI anchors and synthetic voiceovers and some AI generated imagery. Other news networks, including South Korea's SBS and Taiwan's ftv, have begun to experiment with AI generated anchors. However, these experiments generally still require a lot of manual intervention, which increases production costs. SBS's AI anchor Zane, for instance, has been puppeteered by a live actor with AI simply swapping out the actor's face and voice for that of the synthetic host, an approach that's not easily scalable. Haystack, meanwhile, is already exploring the use of AI for other data heavy topics, including local traffic reports, and Barreto fully expects that we will see the use of AI grow even on air as part of the program of traditional TV broadcasters. In the long term, AI is going to be everywhere, he says.

You.

Are listening to Fast Company or Janko Ruckers writes AI is coming for your local weather report. This article was published on 29 January 2024 and was read by Adrian Walker for Noah.