Te reo Māori has no commercial market to speak of. A broadcaster in the far north of New Zealand has been building speech models for it anyway, under a licence written so the recordings stay with the communities that gave them. Farmers in East Africa point a phone at a cassava leaf and get a diagnosis back with no signal at all, from a model small enough to sit on the handset. In Switzerland, a public consortium trained a national model on public supercomputers and released all of it: weights, data, training code. None of them asked permission, and none of them could have rented this. They own it, and that is the whole idea. Read what follows as a map: where open AI is winning, where some numbers surprised even us, and where it is exposed. A case that hides its weak points is an advertisement. In the six weeks since our first draft, a major US lab returned to open weights and Washington debated a ban and declined it. The map moved while we drew it. We have been here before. Mozilla exists because one company tried to own the front door to the web, and an open community made sure it never could.
Thursday, September 24, 2026
From Search to Strategy: What Student AI Use Means for the Future of Academic Libraries - EDUCAUSE
While many academic librarians worry that artificial intelligence (AI) may reduce student engagement, research suggests a different story: students are integrating AI into their research workflows while continuing to rely on libraries for trusted sources and deeper scholarly inquiry. This interview features: Amy Deschenes, Interim Director of UX and Discovery, Harvard University and Meg McMahon, User Experience Researcher, Harvard University.
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Can AI Help Colleges Reach Struggling Students Earlier? - Joshua Bay, Inside Higher Ed
Austin Community College is using artificial intelligence and real-time data to identify students who need help and connect them with support before problems escalate. Students often leave clues that they’re struggling before they stop attending classes or exit college altogether. But those warning signs can be scattered across different offices and data systems, making it difficult for college staff to see the full picture or intervene before a student reaches a crisis point. As colleges increasingly experiment with artificial intelligence, some are exploring whether the technology can help connect those dots and make student support more proactive. Austin Community College, for one, is testing a new initiative designed to identify student needs earlier.
Classroom practices that encourage intelligent AI behaviours - Nada Kakabadse, University World News
Whatever assessment policies say, the unsupervised take-home essay as a test of unaided student writing is gone. The institutional response has been retreating. The universities of Melbourne and Toronto are phasing out unsupervised take-home essays. The University of Cape Town’s AI working group wants 40% of assessments invigilated by 2027. At Durham University, a professor of philosophy stood down as chair of his board of examiners, citing a marking crisis. But retreat is only one of three institutional responses now visible worldwide, and comparing them is instructive. The second response, arguably the least defensible, is detection-led enforcement: running submissions through AI detectors and prosecuting the flagged. This approach is quietly collapsing.
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
The new bargaining frontier: AI and academic labour - James Yoonil Auh, University World News
What happens when AI begins to perform work that universities have historically employed people to do? At that point, AI ceases to be merely an educational technology and becomes a labour technology.
Once AI enters the employment relationship, questions arise that an information technology office alone cannot resolve. Who decides whether AI may perform work previously assigned to faculty? Can AI change staffing requirements? Who owns academic materials used to develop AI systems? Can algorithmic analysis influence faculty evaluations? If AI makes academic work faster, who benefits from the time saved? If supervising AI creates new work, where does that labour appear in workload calculations? These questions are no longer hypothetical. They are increasingly appearing in collective agreements, memoranda of understanding and union policies.
Anthropic C.E.O. Calls for A.I. Slowdown - Mike Isaac, NY Times
The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too quick a pace for researchers to continue safely. “Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Mr. Amodei said. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Monday, September 21, 2026
USF president shares student successes and plans for AI college during fall address - Emma Brisko, WUSF
USF reached a record-breaking $750 million in research funding in fiscal 2025. Some of that money is being invested in the planned Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing. Limayem shared new renderings of the building, which will be located near the entrance of the Tampa campus, at Leroy Collins Boulevard and USF Alumni Drive. No construction date has been set, but $35 million in state money has been committed to the project. “This is an important piece of USF's future,” Limayem said. “We envision a place designed for students, faculty, research and collaboration in fields that are reshaping nearly every part of our lives – and protecting our digital spaces.”
Are Colleges Ready To Support the AI Workforce? - Grace Alexis, EdTech
For decades, colleges prepared students for a predictable workforce. Students chose a major, learned a defined set of skills and entered a career path that changed slowly over time. Artificial intelligence has ended that arrangement. Every few weeks, another report warns that AI will eliminate jobs. A recent Graduate Management Admission Council survey of more than 600 corporate recruiters found that one-third of employers are already replacing some entry-level roles with AI. In technology, that number rises to 40%. Yet the same survey named proficiency with AI tools the single most valuable skill employers expect to prize five years from now — and one of the skills graduates are least prepared to demonstrate. That gap is an education problem, and it belongs to us.
Sunday, September 20, 2026
Americans Use Artificial Intelligence, but They Don’t Want It in Charge - Rutgers
A survey led by Rutgers researchers finds AI use is surging, but Americans still prefer humans making consequential decisions. Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming part of everyday life in the U.S., but Americans are far less comfortable when it shifts from something they use to something that makes decisions about them, according to a new survey led by Rutgers researchers. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults (72%) have used at least one major AI tool, up from 50% in November 2024, when researchers conducted an earlier survey of 4,767 people. The findings come from the latest report from the National AI Opinion Monitor, a project led by Rutgers researchers that tracks public attitudes toward AI. More than a quarter of Americans (27%) use AI every day, yet fewer than one in 10 would allow it to make the final call without human supervision on hiring, loans, college admission, parole or priority for a medical procedure. Between 45% and 54% say AI shouldn’t be used at all in those decisions.
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/americans-use-artificial-intelligence-they-dont-want-it-charge
University of North Texas to Open College of AI, Analytics - Milla Surjadi, The Dallas Morning News
The University of North Texas will establish a college of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics after receiving a $20 million gift, it announced Tuesday. The philanthropic investment comes from Vikas Sinha, a UNT alumnus and vice president of the mainframe software division at Broadcom, a semiconductor and infrastructure manufacturer, and his wife, Anuradha. As UNT looks to strengthen its artificial intelligence education, the new college will help advance research and better prepare students for a changing workforce, university officials said in a release.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
Productive Friction: What Universities Must Protect in the Age of AI - Vladimir Bratic, Faculty Focus
AI has now become a part of everyday life on college campuses and I have embraced it in all my classes at every level. I now encourage my students to use NotebookLM when the text becomes dense or incomprehensible. I encourage the students to upload assigned text to create timelines, flashcards for studying and video summaries of their reading. Students can now process text faster, research more effectively and edit their work without having to go to the writing center. These gains are substantial and any serious conversation about AI in education must begin with acknowledging the benefits of AI.
Business, government and education leaders try to reinvent college from scratch - Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report
Called the Greenway Institute — “green” as in new — the project will adopt instructional methods proven to work well, such as real-world training under the supervision of faculty mentors, while stripping away the frills, distractions and layers of bureaucracy that make college in America so expensive. “It’s not fancy. It’s a place where you do have a meaningful relationship with your faculty members. But you also take out your own trash,” said Mark Somerville, the founding president. Even more unexpected than the location of this startup is the timing. Other colleges and universities are closing or at risk of closing. In Vermont alone, seven private colleges have shut down in the last 10 years. But Somerville, the former provost of Olin College of Engineering, said this “moment of mass extinction” makes it clearer than ever that “we need new models in higher ed.”
Friday, September 18, 2026
A new Anthropic model seeks to test how AI could impact the U.S. economy. - Scott Horsley, NPR
Will artificial intelligence light a fire under the U.S. economy in the coming years? That's been a big question in the field of economics, and now Anthropic — the company behind the popular Claude AI assistant — is taking a stab at helping people find their own answers. The company has created an interactive tool that lets users test their assumptions about how productive — or disruptive — the AI boom might be. In one scenario, artificial intelligence provides a gentle boost to the economy, lifting growth rates with little effect on workers. At the other extreme, GDP soars, but so does unemployment, with nearly 14% of workers losing their jobs to AI and less than half of them finding new ones.
OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’ - Cade Metz, NY Times
OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights. The announcement is another clear sign that A.I. is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as a pinnacle of human achievement. The change has excited some mathematicians, while stirring concern among others. Over the past year, A.I. systems successfully solved a wide range of problems that have bedeviled mathematicians for decades. But these problems were not as complex, nor as closely watched, as the one that OpenAI’s technology has solved over the past several days. The Millennium Problems are among the most heavily researched in the field.
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