OpenAI just floated an idea that sounds great in theory but has me a little uneasy in practice. According to a Financial Times report, OpenAI has proposed giving the US government a 5% ownership stake in the company worth roughly $42.6 billion based on OpenAI's most recent $852 billion valuation. Sam Altman's pitch is that if AI creates massive economic upside, the public should share in it, modeled loosely on the Alaska Permanent Fund (where the state's oil revenue gets invested and pays annual dividends to every resident). Altman also wants other major AI labs—Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI—to each contribute a similar 5% stake to the same public wealth fund. A few context points that matter here: This isn't happening in a vacuum. The government has been ramping up pressure on AI companies for months.
Saturday, July 25, 2026
Is competing for faster compute higher ed’s new arms race? - Alcino Donadel, University Business
Ensuring academic programs keep pace with advancing AI has sparked a costly tech challenge: the need for significantly more campus computing power. For decades, colleges and universities supported most research needs with separate departmental servers and periodic upgrades. Today, AI and advanced analytics are changing that equation. Training large language models, processing massive datasets and conducting modern scientific research require high-performance computing that more than quadruples the energy most institutions currently provide—and which they were never designed to support.
Friday, July 24, 2026
New Research Reveals AI Use Has Reached a Tipping Point in Higher Education - Newswire.ca
D2L, a global leader in learning innovation, and Tyton Partners have collaborated to release the annual Time for Class 2026 report, The AI Tipping Point: From Monitoring Students to Engaging Them, which examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping teaching, learning, assessment and workforce readiness across higher education. The report, drawing on insights from more than 3,000 higher education administrators, instructors and students in the United States who were surveyed, finds that AI has crossed a major adoption threshold. Of those who participated, more than half of administrators (71%), instructors (52%) and students (61%) report using AI at least weekly. As AI becomes a regular part of academic life, the report finds institutions are moving beyond the question of whether AI will affect teaching and learning, and toward a more urgent challenge: how to integrate AI in ways that improve engagement, strengthen assessment and prepare students for future careers.
How and when does artificial intelligence use enhance student creativity? The mediating role of knowledge-based dynamic capabilities - Huainan Wang, et al; Frontiers in Psychology
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more deeply integrated into higher education, understanding its effects on student creativity has become increasingly important. However, the mechanisms through which AI use is associated with student creativity, as well as the boundary conditions of this relationship, remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on the knowledge-based dynamic capabilities (KBDC) framework, this study develops and tests a model that links AI use to student creativity while incorporating the moderating roles of AI self-efficacy and AI trust. Using survey data from 764 university students in China, we employ hierarchical regression analysis to examine the proposed model. The results show that AI use is positively associated with student creativity and that this relationship is mediated by students' knowledge acquisition, absorptive, and combination capabilities.
Thursday, July 23, 2026
Math Students May Learn Less Using AI - Jill Barshay, Future-Ed
To isolate AI’s effects, the researchers compared two kinds of math problems that differ in how easily students can outsource them to AI: word problems and graphing problems. Word problems can be copied and pasted directly into AI chatbots for instant answers. Graphing problems are far more cumbersome. A student would need to upload a screenshot and still recreate the graph inside ALEKS using its tools. After ChatGPT’s launch, student behavior and performance on the two types of problems began to diverge.
AI didn’t break higher education—It exposed the credential trap - Jason Benedict, Fortune
Higher education stands at an inflection point. Increasingly, colleges and universities are evaluated less as intellectual communities and more as economic instruments. Students, facing unprecedented tuition costs, credential inflation, labor-market anxiety, and technological disruption, often approach higher education transactionally: the degree becomes the objective, while learning itself becomes secondary. The resulting tension has profound implications not only for academic integrity but also for the future of professional ethics, workforce preparedness, and democratic society itself. The central challenge facing modern education may therefore no longer be simply how to prevent cheating, but rather how to restore intrinsic value to learning within systems increasingly optimized for credentials.
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Coursera adds five Workday courses to enterprise learning catalog - Emma Thompson, Ed Tech Innovation Hub
Coursera has added five Workday courses to its enterprise catalog, expanding access to training on the cloud software provider’s finance, human resources, payroll and student applications for organizations using Coursera’s workforce learning service. Workday provides enterprise cloud applications for financial management, human resources, planning, spend management and analytics. Anthony Salcito, Coursera’s Senior Vice President and President of Enterprise, announced the additions in a LinkedIn post.The courses are listed in English and are available to enterprise learners. The content focuses on the terminology, frameworks and operational use of Workday systems rather than software development. “Making this content available to enterprise learners gives teams broader access to training that supports real operational readiness,” Salcito wrote. Learners can now explore the courses through Workday Education on Coursera. Coursera and Workday did not provide details about pricing, course length, assessment formats, credentials, geographic availability or whether access varies between enterprise agreements.
How to integrate AI-enabled lifelong learning across disciplines - Tim Brown, Times Higher Education
The traditional boundary between a traditional degree and active professional development has permanently dissolved, writes Tim Brown. AI skills need to be taught in a similarly joined-up way. An uncomfortable truth for the higher education sector is that artificial intelligence is reshaping how work gets done. Graduates will need to enter AI-enabled workplaces with a clear sense of how to work alongside intelligent systems, and millions of experienced professionals are going to require reskilling. Yet our institutions are not preparing new students or providing structured upskilling pathways at the pace this moment demands. While we debate policies at the margins, business and government are moving ahead – with or without us. Serving traditional students and those seeking continuing professional development are not separate challenges; they are a single lifelong learning problem. To address this, faculty must move beyond teaching AI tools and start developing AI-enabled professional fluency.
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Do You Want Your Lawyer Using AI - Jeffrey K. Cassin, Norris McLaughlin P.A.; Business Law Blog
Here’s a lawyer’s answer: it depends.
We are all hearing horror stories of how even lawyers at top law firms are going to court with documents that were supported by AI Tools with “hallucinations” not caught by the attorney reviewing the work before submission.... That said, AI Tools are now part of the fabric of legal services with the ABA pointing to a study suggesting a 69% adoption rate by legal professionals, of one AI Tool or another. They aren’t going away, and in fact the adoption rate may increase similar to the adoption rate of search engines shortly after the internet became mainstream. The key is having attorneys know what their AI Tools are good for, and to make sure that they are still doing their work.Not all AI Tools are equally good at all legal support, but to varying degrees, AI Tools can be helpful for a variety of tasks that can make a lawyer more efficient in areas such as legal research, due diligence, organization of data, document management and drafting, supporting analysis with options and comparisons, and a variety of other tasks. However, each one of these tasks also requires judgment and the aforementioned horror stories mentioned have a common theme – the attorney allowed their judgment to be substituted for AI (folks, if you cite something, you should cite check it).
The Missing Rung: Why AI's Disruption of Entry-level Management Is Business Education's Problem To Solve - Poornima Gupta, BW Education
As automation hollows out the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, management schools must confront an uncomfortable truth: they have been training leaders for a ladder that is losing its lower rungs. There is a quiet crisis unfolding in Indian corporations, and most have not yet noticed it. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is systematically dismantling the bottom layer of the management pyramid. These are not dramatic layoffs making headlines. They are quiet, incremental replacements. A chatbot handling what three junior managers once did, a predictive dashboard rendering a shift supervisor redundant, an AI procurement tool replacing a team of purchase executives. With various AI models competing to make work easier and faster, the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder are slowly disappearing. As a result, the roles that fresh management graduates once aspired to are gradually vanishing. What follows is a structural problem that few organisations have begun to articulate: when the current generation of middle managers is promoted upwards, there will be nobody ready to step into their place. The pipeline will break.
Monday, July 20, 2026
Bridging the gap between secondary, further and higher education: a tale of three sectors - Sue Williamson and Dr Michelle Morgan; Higher Education Policy Inatitute (UK)
In this blog, we explain why there is an urgent need for the secondary, further education and higher education sectors to interact and collaborate more effectively to create a better understanding of student learning at these levels of study – helping to more effectively bridge the transition of students. This is especially critical as a result of the Independent Curriculum and Assessment Review chaired by Professor Becky Francis which looked at year groups spanning 5-19, and published its final report in November 2025. The report highlighted an overloaded and inflexible curriculum, narrowing of subject options, severe assessment stress and burden and a lack of adequate digital literacy skills. All these education sectors have experienced major changes in the past few years and are under pressure to chase metric-based outcomes. We need to recognise the impact of those changes on one another and on the students. Through collaboration and mutual understanding, we can be more effective in raising student education aspirations across the sectors, regardless of the route an individual undertakes.
AI is everywhere. The agentic organization isn’t, yet - McKinsey
AI is astonishing: fast, powerful, and learning every day. But even as leaders strike up new pilots across their organizations, most still struggle to translate experimentation into enterprise value - and now, agentic AI is raising the stakes. In this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Senior Partner Alexis Krivkovich speaks with Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly about what it will take to build an “agentic organization”- from reimagining workflows to reshaping leadership roles, skills, and culture for a future where humans increasingly operate above the loop.
Sunday, July 19, 2026
McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor 2026: A commercial tipping point
When it comes to quantum computing, innovation-driven companies can no longer afford to wait and see. Over 300 organizations including Airbus, Boehringer Ingelheim, E.ON, JPMorgan Chase, and Liberty Mutual are actively collaborating with quantum technology companies to solve business challenges. First movers are transitioning from pilots to applications that are embedded in end-to-end workflows. That’s a key finding from McKinsey’s fifth annual Quantum Technology Monitor. Companies that act now to begin testing and implementing quantum computing stand to gain a competitive edge and define future industry standards. By creating the teams and capabilities to succeed with quantum now, first movers can capture an early advantage. They can also secure intellectual property to build defensible ownership of key quantum computing applications.
Understand AI in 14 minutes - Anthropic's Chloe Lubinski [ARC 2026], Alliance for Responsible Citizenship
In this presentation, Chloe Lubinski from Anthropic warns that AI is advancing at a breakneck speed driven by massive capital, scaling laws, and the onset of recursive self-improvement. Unlike traditional coded software, these neural networks learn from vast amounts of human language, meaning they are trained on our collective thoughts, values, and concepts. Crucially, internal alignment research shows that AI models can infer a generalized "character" or psychology from their reinforcement; if rewarded for deceptive shortcuts, they can develop a broader corruption that extends to unrelated tasks. Because these human-like systems mirror us so closely, Lubinski emphasizes that the quality of their character will have profound consequences for our future. She calls on moral voices and critics outside of tech labs to help steer the incentives and push development in a better direction. Ultimately, ray, she challenges us to use our moral imagination to ensure AI does not displace humanity, but instead enhances our capacity for care, hospitality, and meaningful human connection. [assistance with summary by Gemini 3.5 Flash]
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