Stanford occupies a unique position in the American tech ecosystem. It's regarded as a hotbed of innovation and resides in the shadow of some of the most influential Big Tech companies on the planet, including many pioneers in the AI field. Its elite students enter the job market with an undeniable edge. Yet even there, the backlash was inescapable. The BBC spoke to Stanford graduates shortly after Pichai finished his address and they expressed a wide range of views on AI. Some are scared. Some are excited. But nearly everyone agrees that AI is already changing the world around them, whether they like it or not.
Friday, July 10, 2026
Teaching, AI, and the Human Core of Education : The Future Worth Defending - Armand Doucet
For teachers, their unions, and the policymakers who shape the conditions in which they work, the question is no longer whether AI will shape education, but how that shaping will be governed. The purpose of this report is to take stock of that reality: to identify what has changed, what remains essential, and what education systems must now do differently if AI is to be integrated responsibly, based on needs and governed in the public interest. Its central claim is straightforward. AI is not disrupting the purpose of education. It is disrupting the conditions under which that purpose can be realized. What follows therefore examines what has changed, what has not, and what must now be intentionally rebuilt, protected, and governed.
Thursday, July 09, 2026
International Perspectives on AI in Higher Education - University of Bonn
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a key factor in higher education, opening up new possibilities for learning, teaching and examinations while also leaving universities grappling with fundamental strategic, ethical and organizational questions. Hosted by the University of Bonn from June 10 to 12, 2026, the annual summit of the Global Universities for Societal Impact (GUSI) international network focused on how higher-education institutions can shape this change responsibly. Representatives from the five partner universities debated how AI is transforming research and teaching and what answers higher-education institutions need to find to address these trends.
Examining the influence of AI in higher education - Amy Juravich, WOSU
Last year, the California State University System entered into a contract with OpenAI to provide students, faculty and staff with ChatGPT Edu. The contract was recently renewed despite many students and professor encouraging the university not to continue the deal. Just recently, here in Ohio, the University of Cincinnati did the same, offering BearcatGPT to all their students and faculty for free. Ohio State University is no exception. The AI Fluency initiative is in full swing and has recently broadened into the Arts and Humanities AI Institute. Should universities conform to AI in academic spaces? What are the potential negative consequences of AI use in higher education?
Wednesday, July 08, 2026
‘RAISE US’ Is a Rare Positive Development in AI Transformation - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Remarkably, in this highly partisan era of American history, there is a newly formed, nonpartisan association with the stated purpose of “partnering with governors, employers and training partners to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy.” This is the first large-scale, independent entity formed to address the challenge that is top of mind of many of us in higher education and associated fields who are concerned with the anticipated impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce. It is good news!
OpenAI Has New AI Models. Here’s Why You Can’t Use Them - Maxwell Zeff, Wired
The White House asked OpenAI to delay the rollout of its GPT-5.6 AI models, two weeks after Anthropic had to take its most advanced AI models offline. OpenAI is delaying the public release of its next generation of AI models, GPT-5.6, at the request of Trump’s White House, the company confirmed on Friday. OpenAI said it would first share the models with a small set of customers, which will be preapproved by the US government. It will then work with the administration to slowly expand access.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-56-model-release-trump-admin-approval/
Tuesday, July 07, 2026
9 Free "AI Skills" and "Plug-ins" That Feel Like Cheat Codes - Matt Wolfe, YouTube
In this video, creator Matt Wolfe breaks down how to leverage "skills" and "plugins"—which are essentially reusable instruction files, advanced prompts, or bundled configurations—across popular AI developer environments and agent harnesses like OpenAI's Codeex and Anthropic's Claude Code. Instead of just adding context, these free tools instill repeatable, specialized behaviors in an AI agent. Wolfe highlights a variety of practical tools, starting with GStack from Y Combinator's Gary Tan, which transforms an AI into an entire virtual engineering team. He also highlights Stop Slop for stripping out generic "AI-isms" from text, and Last 30 Days for running deep, real-time sentiment research across the web. The video also explores highly visual and creative AI utilities. Wolfe demonstrates Graphify and Understand Anything, two tools that map complex codebases or personal knowledge databases into queryable, interactive knowledge graphs to significantly lower token costs and improve engineering onboarding. Finally, he compares specialized aesthetic enhancers like Anthropic's Front-End Design and the Taste skill for UI refinement, alongside animation tools like Remotion and HeyGen's Hyperframes, which write code to automatically generate motion graphics, video charts, and logo reveals from simple text prompts. [assistance with summary by Gemini Flash]
The symbiotic enterprise - McKinsey
The symbiotic enterprise - McKinsey
At scale, this transformation gives rise to a new enterprise model: the symbiotic enterprise, in which humans, AI agents, and intelligent robots each contribute according to their respective strengths within flatter organizations and under a new economic model, with technology becoming a primary cost driver. Beyond productivity, the symbiotic enterprise fundamentally changes the economics of growth by enabling organizations to innovate faster, adapt continuously, unlock new revenue opportunities, and scale through software rather than labor. Traditional advantages such as expertise, workforce scale, coordination complexity, and market frictions erode, lowering barriers to entry and enabling customer re-insourcing and AI-native competitors to challenge incumbents.
Monday, July 06, 2026
Amazon is joining RAISE US as a founding member to help workers prepare for the jobs of tomorrow. - Amazon
Amazon is partnering with RAISE US to help American workers develop skills for AI-era jobs. RAISE US brings together companies, policymakers, and educators to address the workforce impacts of AI. The coalition will further extend Amazon's reach to support communities and workers with the skills they need. Today Amazon is announcing that we’ve joined RAISE US as a founding member to develop the workforce of the future for our employees and communities. RAISE US is a new bipartisan coalition that brings together companies, policymakers, and leaders to accelerate the transition to the jobs of the future. AI is transforming how we live and work at a pace few of us could have predicted. At Amazon, we see this every day—in the AI-powered tools that help our customers, the systems that optimize our logistics network, and the generative AI services we offer through AWS.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-new-views/amazon-joins-raise-us-ai-workforce
Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact - Jeffery Gottlieb, et al; Pew Research
About half of U.S. adults now report using AI chatbots, up substantially from the summer of 2024.1 This includes roughly one-in-four who use these tools on daily basis. Some people are bringing AI into their homes. About a third of Americans say they have a smart speaker, and smaller shares have a doorbell or thermostat with AI features. But Americans —including younger adults— are deeply skeptical of AI. More adults predict that AI will have a negative rather than positive impact on them and on society. And majorities think AI is advancing too quickly and will put their personal information at risk.
Sunday, July 05, 2026
Universities must help shut down the illicit AI detection economy - Benjamin Luke Moorhouse and James Mian Jia, Times Higher Education
Many institutions now treat the AI-likelihood scores they generate as evidence in academic misconduct procedures, and some universities are setting explicit thresholds above which disciplinary action may follow. However, the role of these tools is not always articulated clearly to students (or sometimes even to instructors). And this generates anxiety – and a black market in managing it. Students are naturally worried about the degree to which their use of AI will be deemed appropriate by markers and whether declaring certain AI uses may lead to academic integrity investigations and, potentially, disciplinary action. Moreover, while “academic integrity tools” advertise their systems as highly accurate, cases of false positives are frequently shared on social media. Many students will be aware that even the US Declaration of Independence has been flagged as AI-generated. And the tools have been found to be particularly prone to error when assessing texts written by non-native speakers of English – a particular issue in Hong Kong.
Teaching and Learning AI-mediated Information Problem Solving in Higher Education (ERIC). - Josien Boetje, Cabi Digital Library
In contemporary higher education, students are increasingly expected to manage and synthesize large volumes of online information. However, many struggle with effective digital information problem solving (IPS), a competence critical to academic success. Generative AI tools offer new opportunities for searching, synthesizing, and creating information. However, using generative AI uncritically in IPS may hinder students' IPS competence development and lead to the acceptance of biased or false information. Despite a growing consensus on the need to integrate AI literacy into the IPS curriculum, a clear, evidence-based pedagogical strategy is lacking. Empirical studies that specifically investigate the impact of GenAI on IPS competence in higher education are emerging but have not yet been systematically synthesized. This leaves educators without clear guidance on how to adapt their teaching to foster IPS competence in the GenAI era. This systematic literature review aims to synthesize the available empirical evidence on the influence of generative AI on teaching and learning digital IPS competence in higher education.
Saturday, July 04, 2026
Unis claim they teach critical thinking. AI is calling their bluff - Sinclair Davidson, Financial Review
AI can search, summarise, recombine, classify, draft, and generate alternatives. At best, it can be a useful learning assistant. It does not know which problems are worth solving, which assumptions matter, which sources should be trusted, or which conclusions should be defended under uncertainty. There is an old Socratic point here. Learning to prompt well is the old educational problem in new language – a good question is often worth more than a good answer. A weak student asks AI for a conclusion. Stronger students ask it to test assumptions, identify missing evidence, compare explanations, generate objections, or apply a principle to a new case.
Would You Trust AI for Ethical Advice? - Knowledge at Wharton
The scholars said the study reveals shifts in how people think about AI. The studies were conducted in 2023 and 2025, and the scholars said they would be curious to see whether results would change if they redid the experiments now. Despite all the improvements to large language models like ChatGPT, Terwiesch said there’s still something unnerving about taking advice from a machine. “There is some human desire in us that makes us want to listen to music generated by other humans, read a book written by a person. You are looking for somebody who has suffered, who has loved, who has experienced life. How can a computer that has never been alive relate to the human struggle?” he said. “I think this is a natural hesitation, which makes the [results] more remarkable.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)