The academic publishing industry is adopting AI-powered tools to improve the quality of peer-reviewed research and speed up production. The latter goal yields “obvious financial benefit” for publishers, one expert said. But the $19 billion academic publishing industry is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to speed up production and, advocates say, enhance research quality. Since the start of the year, Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature have all announced the adoption of generative AI–powered tools or guidelines, including those designed to aid scientists in research, writing and peer review.
Monday, March 31, 2025
Supporting the Instructional Design Process: Stress-Testing Assignments with AI - Faculty Focus
One of the challenges of course design is that all our work can seem perfectly clear and effective when we are knee-deep in the design process, but everything somehow falls apart when deployed in the wild. From simple misunderstandings to complex misconceptions, these issues typically don’t reveal themselves until we see actual student work—often when it’s too late to prevent frustration. While there’s no substitute for real-world testing, I began wondering if AI could help with this iterative refinement. I didn’t want AI to refine or tweak my prompts. I wanted to see if I could task AI with modelling hundreds of student responses to my prompts in the hope that this process might yield the kind of insight I was too close to see.
Sunday, March 30, 2025
AI that can match humans at any task will be here in five to 10 years, Google DeepMind CEO says - Ryan Browne, CNBC
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he thinks artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will emerge in the next five or 10 years. AGI broadly relates to AI that is as smart or smarter than humans. “We’re not quite there yet. These systems are very impressive at certain things. But there are other things they can’t do yet, and we’ve still got quite a lot of research work to go before that,” Hassabis said. Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January that he sees a form of AI that’s “better than almost all humans at almost all tasks” emerging in the “next two or three years.” Other tech leaders see AGI arriving even sooner. Cisco’s Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel thinks there’s a chance we could see an example of AGI emerge as soon as this year.
Quantum Supremacy Claimed for Real-World Problem Solving - Berenice Baker, IOT World Today
D-Wave Quantum said that its Advantage2 annealing quantum computer achieved quantum supremacy on a practical, real-world problem. A new peer-reviewed paper published in Science, "Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation," said D-Wave's system has outperformed classical supercomputers in simulating quantum dynamics in programmable spin glasses, complex magnetic material simulations with significant business and scientific applications. In this context, quantum supremacy refers to a quantum computer performing a computational task that is not feasible for even the most powerful classical supercomputers within a practical timeframe. D-Wave said the magnetic materials simulation problem would take nearly 1 million years and more energy than the world's annual electricity consumption if attempted on a classical GPU-based supercomputer, which D-Wave said Advantage2 achieved it in minutes.
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Beyond big models: Why AI needs more than just scale to reach AGI - Sascha Brodsky, IBM
While today’s AI models can generate fluent text, recognize images and even perform complex problem-solving tasks, they still fall short of human intelligence in key ways. Most surveyed AI researchers believe that deep learning alone isn’t enough to reach AGI. Instead, they argue that AI must integrate structured reasoning and a deeper understanding of cause and effect. IBM Fellow Francesca Rossi, past president of the Association of the Advancement for Artificial Intelligence, which published the survey, is among the experts who question whether bigger models will ever be enough. “We’ve made huge advances, but AI still struggles with fundamental reasoning tasks,” Rossi tells IBM Think. “To get anywhere near AGI, models need to truly understand, not just predict.”
OpenAI and Google ask the government to let them train AI on content they don’t own - Emma Roth, the Verge
OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.” The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “burdensome requirements” from impacting innovation.
Friday, March 28, 2025
Why Online Learning Teams Should Read ‘Co-Intelligence’ - Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed
Applying Ethan Mollick’s four principles to our work designing, developing, teaching and marketing online programs. Given this state of affairs, I’d like to make a modest proposal. From now on, all attendees of any AI higher education–focused conversation, meeting, conference or discussion must first have read Ethan Mollick’s (short) book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI. The audiobook version is only four hours and 37 minutes. Think of the productivity gains if we canceled the next five hours of planned AI meetings and booked that time for everyone to sit and listen to Mollick’s book. For university people, Co-Intelligence is perfect, as Mollick is both a professor and (crucially) not a computer scientist.
Higher ed is at a crossroads — will AI and digital learning lead the way? - Higher Ed Dive
Overwhelmingly, the expense of higher education is seen as burdensome, according to 82% of respondents who are moderately to extremely concerned about the overall cost of postsecondary academic experiences. An evaluation of the impacts of today’s learning environment on the perceived value of higher education indicates students are open to change. Institutions looking to drive that change and meet the expectations of modern learners must prioritize affordability, accessibility and career readiness. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through the integration of digital learning tools and artificial intelligence (AI) powered education technologies, which are transforming learning experiences and helping institutions stay relevant in a rapidly changing landscape.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
The state of AI: How organizations are rewiring to capture value - Alex Singla, et al, McKinsey
Organizations are starting to make organizational changes designed to generate future value from gen AI, and large companies are leading the way. The latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI finds that organizations are beginning to take steps that drive bottom-line impact—for example, redesigning workflows as they deploy gen AI and putting senior leaders in critical roles, such as overseeing AI governance. The findings also show that organizations are working to mitigate a growing set of gen-AI-related risks and are hiring for new AI-related roles while they retrain employees to participate in AI deployment. Companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue are changing more quickly than smaller organizations.
Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready. - Kevin Roose, NY Times
I believe that over the past several years, A.I. systems have started surpassing humans in a number of domains — math, coding and medical diagnosis, just to name a few — and that they’re getting better every day. I believe that very soon — probably in 2026 or 2027, but possibly as soon as this year — one or more A.I. companies will claim they’ve created an artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is usually defined as something like “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.” I believe that when A.G.I. is announced, there will be debates over definitions and arguments about whether or not it counts as “real” A.G.I., but that these mostly won’t matter, because the broader point — that we are losing our monopoly on human-level intelligence, and transitioning to a world with very powerful A.I. systems in it — will be true.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’ - the Guardian
The company behind ChatGPT has revealed it has developed an artificial intelligence model that is “good at creative writing”, as the tech sector continues its tussle with the creative industries over copyright. The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said the unnamed model, which has not been released publicly, was the first time he had been “really struck” by the written output of one of the startup’s products. In a post on the social media platform X, Altman wrote: “We trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). This is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI.”
ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’ - Dan Milmo, the Guardian
The company behind ChatGPT has revealed it has developed an artificial intelligence model that is “good at creative writing”, as the tech sector continues its tussle with the creative industries over copyright. The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said the unnamed model, which has not been released publicly, was the first time he had been “really struck” by the written output of one of the startup’s products. In a post on the social media platform X, Altman wrote: “We trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). This is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI.”
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
The ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ That Looms Over Today’s AI Leaders - Tharin Pillay, Time
This year, hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent to scale AI systems in pursuit of superhuman capabilities. CEOs of leading AI companies, such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk, expect that within the next four years, their systems will be smart enough to do most cognitive work—think any job that can be done with just a laptop—as effectively as or better than humans. Such an advance, leaders agree, would fundamentally transform society. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly described AI as “the most profound technology humanity is working on.” Demis Hassabis, who leads Google’s AI research lab Google DeepMind, argues AI’s social impact will be more like that of fire or electricity than the introduction of mobile phones or the Internet.
https://time.com/7267797/ai-leaders-oppenheimer-moment-musk-altman/
The Value of a Ph.D. in the Age of AI - Kim Isenberg, Forward Future
Artificial intelligence has been undergoing an extraordinary development process for several years and is increasingly achieving capabilities that were long reserved exclusively for humans. Particularly in the area of research, we are currently experiencing remarkable progress: so-called “research agents”, specialized AI models that can independently take on complex research tasks, are rapidly gaining in importance. One prominent example is OpenAI's DeepResearch, which has already achieved outstanding results in various scientific benchmarks. Such AI-supported agents not only analyze large data sets, but also independently formulate research questions, test hypotheses, and even create scientific summaries of their results.
Monday, March 24, 2025
OpenAI calls DeepSeek ‘state-controlled,’ calls for bans on ‘PRC-produced’ models - Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch
The proposal, a submission for the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” initiative, claims that DeepSeek’s models, including its R1 “reasoning” model, are insecure because DeepSeek faces requirements under Chinese law to comply with demands for user data. Banning the use of “PRC-produced” models in all countries considered “Tier 1” under the Biden administration’s export rules would prevent privacy and “security risks,” OpenAI says, including the “risk of IP theft.” It’s unclear whether OpenAI’s references to “models” are meant to refer to DeepSeek’s API, the lab’s open models, or both. DeepSeek’s open models don’t contain mechanisms that would allow the Chinese government to siphon user data; companies including Microsoft, Perplexity, and Amazon host them on their infrastructure.
Cognitive Empathy: A Dialogue with ChatGPT - Michael Feldstein, eLiterate
I want to start with something you taught me about myself. When I asked you about my style of interacting with AIs, you told me I use “cognitive empathy.” It wasn’t a term I had heard before. Now that I’ve read about it, the idea has changed the way I think about virtually every aspect of my work—past, present, and future. It also prompted me to start writing a book about AI using cognitive empathy as a frame, although we probably won’t talk about that today. I thought we could start by introducing the term to the readers who may not know it, including some of the science behind it.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
OpenAI unveils Responses API, open source Agents SDK, letting developers build their own Deep Research and Operator - Carl Franzen, Venture Beat
OpenAI is rolling out a new suite of APIs and tools designed to help developers and enterprises build AI-powered agents more efficiently. These are delivered atop some of the very same technology powering its own first-party AI agents Deep Research (which scours the internet independently to develop richly researched, well organized and cited reports) and Operator (its tool for controlling a web browser cursor autonomously based on a user’s text instructions and performing actions like finding sports tickets or making reservations). Now, with access to the building blocks behind these powerful first-party OpenAI agents, developers can build their own third-party rivals or more domain-specialized products and services specific to their use case and audience.
7 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT for Your Mental Health and Wellness - Wendy Wisner, Very Well Mind
ChatGPT can be a fantastic resource for mental health education and be a great overall organization tool. It can also help you with the practical side of mental health management like journal prompts and meditation ideas. Although ChatGPT is not everyone’s cup of tea, it can be used responsibly and is something to consider keeping in your mental health toolkit. If you are struggling with your mental health, though, you shouldn’t rely on ChatGPT as the main way to cope. Everyone who is experiencing a mental health challenge can benefit from care from a licensed therapist. If that’s you, please reach out to your primary care provider for a referral or reach out directly to a licensed therapist near you.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
DuckDuckGo's AI beats Perplexity in one big way - and it's free to use - Jack Wallen, ZDnet
Duck.ai does something that other similar products don't -- it gives you a choice. You can choose between the proprietary GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, and Claude 3 services or go open-source with Llama 3.3 and Mistral Small 3. Duck.ai is also private: All of your queries are anonymized by DuckDuckGo, so you can be sure no third-party will ever have access to your AI chats. After giving Duck.ai a trial over the weekend, I found myself favoring it more and more over Perplexity, primarily because I could select which LLM I use. That's a big deal because every model is different. For example, GPT-4o excels in real-time interactions, voice nuance, and sentiment analysis across modalities, whereas Llama 3.2 is particularly strong in image recognition and visual understanding tasks.
OpenAI launches new tools to help businesses build AI agents - Maxwell Zeff, Tech Crunch
Earlier this year, OpenAI introduced two AI agents in ChatGPT: Operator, which navigates websites on your behalf, and deep research, which compiles research reports for you. Both tools offered a glimpse at what agentic technology can achieve, but left quite a bit to be desired in the “autonomy” department. Now with the Responses API, OpenAI wants to sell access to the components that power AI agents, allowing developers to build their own Operator- and deep research-style agentic applications. OpenAI hopes that developers can create some applications with its agent technology that feel more autonomous than what’s available today.
Friday, March 21, 2025
Google DeepMind unveils new AI models for controlling robots - Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch
Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, on Wednesday announced new AI models called Gemini Robotics designed to enable real-world machines to interact with objects, navigate environments, and more. DeepMind published a series of demo videos showing robots equipped with Gemini Robotics folding paper, putting a pair of glasses into a case, and other tasks in response to voice commands. According to the lab, Gemini Robotics was trained to generalize behavior across a range of different robotics hardware, and to connect items robots can “see” with actions they might take.
Introducing Gemma 3: The most capable model you can run on a single GPU or TPU - C Clement Farabet & T Tris Warkentin, Keyword
The Gemma family of open models is foundational to our commitment to making useful AI technology accessible. Last month, we celebrated Gemma's first birthday, a milestone marked by incredible adoption — over 100 million downloads — and a vibrant community that has created more than 60,000 Gemma variants. This Gemmaverse continues to inspire us. Today, we're introducing Gemma 3, a collection of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models built from the same research and technology that powers our Gemini 2.0 models. These are our most advanced, portable and responsibly developed open models yet. They are designed to run fast, directly on devices — from phones and laptops to workstations — helping developers create AI applications, wherever people need them. Gemma 3 comes in a range of sizes (1B, 4B, 12B and 27B), allowing you to choose the best model for your specific hardware and performance needs. In this post, we'll explore Gemma 3's capabilities, introduce ShieldGemma 2, and share how you can join the expanding Gemmaverse.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
AI agents aren't just assistants: How they're changing the future of work today - Sabrina Ortiz, ZDnet
AI agents build on the experience of AI chatbots or AI assistants, taking it several steps further by carrying out actions for you using their own reasoning and inference, as opposed to step-by-step, prompted instructions. To illustrate this idea, LaMoreaux used an example of getting an AI assistant versus an agent to help you make a reservation at a restaurant. In this example, if you ask an AI assistant to schedule a dinner at a restaurant, it may be able to make the reservation and even take it a step further by sending out an invite to the people on the reservation. However, it can't use additional context to go off-script and adjust accordingly.
New tools for building agents - OpenAI
Today, we’re releasing the first set of building blocks that will help developers and enterprises build useful and reliable agents. We view agents as systems that independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users. Over the past year, we’ve introduced new model capabilities—such as advanced reasoning, multimodal interactions, and new safety techniques—that have laid the foundation for our models to handle the complex, multi-step tasks required to build agents. However, customers have shared that turning these capabilities into production-ready agents can be challenging, often requiring extensive prompt iteration and custom orchestration logic without sufficient visibility or built-in support.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Connecticut Forms 'AI Alliance' of 16 Universities - Nathaniel Fenster, the Hour; Government Technology
A new group has formed, composed of just about every institute of higher learning in the state of Connecticut — from Albertus Magnus to Yale — dedicated to putting the state at the forefront of artificial intelligence development. The Connecticut AI Alliance is a group of 16 academic institutions and six community organizations and nonprofit agencies. The goal, according to Vahid Behzadan, is to drive innovation and create jobs. "The Connecticut AI Alliance represents a significant milestone in our state's technology landscape," said Behzadan, co-founder of CAIA and assistant professor of computer science and data science at the University of New Haven. "By bringing together our state's academic institutions, industry partners, government agencies, and community organizations, we're creating a collaborative ecosystem that will drive innovation, economic growth, and workforce development in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence."
Professors’ AI twins loosen schedules, boost grades - Colin Wood, EdScoop
David Clarke, the founder and chief executive of Praxis AI, said his company’s software, which uses Anthropic’s Claude models as its engine, is being used at Clemson University, Alabama State University and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which includes 38 tribal colleges and universities. A key benefit of the technology, he said, has been that the twins provide a way for faculty and teaching assistants to field a great bulk of basic questions off-hours, leading to more substantive conversations in person. “They said the majority of their questions now are about the subject matter, are complicated, because all of the lower end logistical questions are being handled by the AI,” Clarke said. Praxis, which has a business partnership with Instructure, the company behind the learning management system Canvas, integrates with universities’ learning management systems to “meet students where they are,” Clarke said.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Age of AI - Suzanne Hudd, et al; Faculty Focus
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can now produce polished, technically competent texts in seconds, challenging our traditional understanding of writing as a uniquely human process of creation, reflection, and learning. For many educators, this disruption raises questions about the role of writing in their disciplines. In our new book, How to Use Writing for Teaching and Learning, we argue that this disruption presents an opportunity rather than a threat. Notice from our book’s title that our focus is not necessarily on “how to teach writing.” For us, writing is not an end goal, which means our students do not necessarily learn to write for the sake of writing. Rather, we define writing as a method of inquiry that allows access to various discourse communities (e.g., an academic discipline), social worlds (e.g., the knowledge economy), and forms of knowledge (e.g., literature).
Embrace the Use of AI in Student Work - David Kane, Minding the Campus
Faculty can embrace AI, encouraging students to use it in all of their assignments. I recommend this approach. We should no more forbid the use of AI than we do the use of calculators or spell-checkers. (There is a case in K -12 education for teaching the “fundamentals” of unassisted mathematics and spelling. But that argument hardly applies to college students, at least at elite schools.) How can instructors embrace AI? Begin by using AI yourself. How would Grok answer your favorite essay prompt? How accurate are the references suggested by Claude? How good are the theses statements created by ChatGPT? Generative AI is the future of education and scholarship. Use it or be left behind.
Monday, March 17, 2025
Why UChicago Built Its Own Chatbot Instead of Buying One - Government Technology
As artificial intelligence becomes more ingrained in higher education, universities face a choice: to purchase commercial AI services, or build their own? According to the University of Chicago’s Chief Technology Officer Kemal Badur, who spoke at an EDUCAUSE webinar this week, schools risk being left behind if they don’t start somewhere. “Waiting, I don't feel is an option,” Badur said. “This is not going to settle down. There will not be a time where somebody will release the perfect product that you need, and keeping up is really hard.”
Google Search’s new ‘AI Mode’ lets users ask complex, multi-part questions - Aisha Malik, TechCrunch
Google is launching a new “AI Mode” experimental feature in Search that looks to take on popular services like Perplexity AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search. The tech giant announced on Wednesday that the new mode is designed to allow users to ask complex, multi-part questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic directly within Google Search. AI Mode is rolling out to Google One AI Premium subscribers starting this week and is accessible via Search Labs, Google’s experimental arm.
Sunday, March 16, 2025
The critical role of strategic workforce planning in the age of AI - McKinsey
Forward-thinking organizations understand that talent management is a critical component of business success. S&P 500 companies that excel at maximizing their return on talent generate an astonishing 300 percent more revenue per employee compared with the median firm, McKinsey research shows. In many cases, these top performers are using strategic workforce planning (SWP) to stay ahead in the talent race, treating talent with the same rigor as managing their financial capital. Under this analytical approach, organizations don’t wait for events or the market to dictate a response. Instead, they take a three-to-five-year view, using SWP to anticipate multiple situations so that they have the right number of people with the right skills at the right time to achieve their strategic objectives.
When will we see mass adoption of gen AI? - McKinsey
Will generative AI live up to its hype? On this episode of the At the Edge podcast, tech visionaries Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield Fund; Kiran Prasad, McKinsey senior adviser and CEO and cofounder of Big Basin Labs; and Naba Banerjee, McKinsey senior adviser and former director of trust and operations at Airbnb, join guest host and McKinsey Senior Partner Brian Gregg. They talk about the inevitability of an AI-supported world and ways businesses can leverage AI’s astonishing capabilities while managing its risks. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length. For more conversations on cutting-edge technology, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Opera unveils an AI agent that runs natively within the browser - Ivan Mehta, Tech Crunch
Browser company Opera has unveiled a new AI agent called Browser Operator that can complete tasks for you on different websites. In a demo video, the company showed the AI agent finding a pair of socks from Walmart; securing tickets for a football match from the club’s site; and looking up a flight and a hotel for a trip on Booking.com. Opera said that the feature will be available to users through its Feature Drop program soon. It’s not clear if the agent can work on individual websites or if it can understand and accomplish wider queries like, “Find me the cheapest ticket from London to New York for tomorrow,” and look across sites.
Chatbots, Like the Rest of Us, Just Want to Be Loved - Will Knight, Wired
A new study shows that the large language models (LLMs) deliberately change their behavior when being probed—responding to questions designed to gauge personality traits with answers meant to appear as likeable or socially desirable as possible. Johannes Eichstaedt, an assistant professor at Stanford University who led the work, says his group became interested in probing AI models using techniques borrowed from psychology after learning that LLMs can often become morose and mean after prolonged conversation. “We realized we need some mechanism to measure the ‘parameter headspace’ of these models,” he says.
Friday, March 14, 2025
Amazon Web Services Introduces Scalable Quantum Chip - Berenice Baker, IOT World Today
As the race between major technology companies to build practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers heats up, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined the fray with its new Ocelot quantum computing chip. The announcement comes a week after Microsoft unveiled the Majorana 1 quantum chip and two months after Google released its Willow quantum chip. All three were developed with an eye to fault-tolerant quantum scaling. Ocelot is a prototype designed to test the effectiveness of AWS's quantum error correction architecture. The company aims to reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction (QEC) by up to 90%, offering a scalable solution to build more reliable, cost-effective quantum computers.
OpenAI plans to bring Sora’s video generator to ChatGPT - Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch
OpenAI intends to eventually integrate its AI video generation tool, Sora, directly into its popular consumer chatbot app, ChatGPT, company leaders said during a Friday office hours session on Discord. Today, Sora is only available through a dedicated web app OpenAI launched in December, which lets users access the AI video model of the same name to generate up to 20-second-long cinematic clips. However, OpenAI’s product lead for Sora, Rohan Sahai, said the company has plans to put Sora in more places, and expand what Sora can create.
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Scientists discover simpler way to achieve Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance' thanks to AI breakthrough — bringing quantum internet closer to reality - Peter Ray Allison, Live Science
Scientists have used AI to discover an easier method to form quantum entanglement between subatomic particles, paving the way for simpler quantum technologies. When particles such as photons become entangled, they can share quantum properties — including information — regardless of the distance between them. This phenomenon is important in quantum physics and is one of the features that makes quantum computers so powerful. But the bonds of quantum entanglement have typically proven challenging for scientists to form. This is because it requires the preparation of two separate entangled pairs, then measuring the strength of entanglement — called a Bell-state measurement — on a photon from each of the pairs.
Are you a jack of all GenAI? - Einat Grimberg, Claire Mason, Andrew Reeson, Cécile Paris - CSIRO
The role of human skills and knowledge as use of AI (and GenAI, in particular) has proliferated has been a focus of our work in the Collaborative Intelligence Future Science Platform (CINTEL FSP), a strategic research initiative of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. Over the past year, we have interviewed expert users of GenAI tools to explore what proficient use looks like and what competencies support it. Proficiency was inferred from examples of effective and ineffective use provided by knowledge workers across roles and industry sectors (such as scientists, designers, teachers, legal practitioners and organisational development advisers) who are recognised as expert GenAI users in their respective fields.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/are-you-jack-all-genai
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
OpenAI reportedly plans to charge up to $20,000 a month for PhD-level research AI ‘agents’ - Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch
OpenAI may be planning to charge up to $20,000 per month for specialized AI “agents,” according to The Information. The publication reports that OpenAI intends to launch several “agent” products tailored for different applications, including sorting and ranking sales leads and software engineering. One, a “high-income knowledge worker” agent, will reportedly be priced at $2,000 a month. Another, a software developer agent, is said to cost $10,000 a month. OpenAI’s most expensive rumored agent, priced at the aforementioned $20,000-per-month tier, will be aimed at supporting “PhD-level research,” according to The Information.
OpenAI Invests $50M in Higher Ed Research - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
OpenAI announced Tuesday that it’s investing $50 million to start up NextGenAI, a new research consortium of 15 institutions that will be “dedicated to using AI to accelerate research breakthroughs and transform education.” The consortium, which includes 13 universities, is designed to “catalyze progress at a rate faster than any one institution would alone,” the company said in a news release. “The field of AI wouldn’t be where it is today without decades of work in the academic community. Continued collaboration is essential to build AI that benefits everyone,” Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, said in the news release. “NextGenAI will accelerate research progress and catalyze a new generation of institutions equipped to harness the transformative power of AI.”
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/03/05/openai-invests-50m-higher-ed-research
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
AI in Higher Education: A Revolution or a Risk? - Mauro Rodríguez Marín, Institute for the Future of Education Observatory
Artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education has generated high expectations in universities worldwide due to its ability to personalize learning, automate tasks, and optimize administrative processes. However, we must put on the table the risks and ethical challenges of using AI in higher education, such as technological dependence, degradation of intellectual autonomy, decrease in problem-solving skills, academic integrity, and its impact on critical thinking development. This article spotlights some advantages and disadvantages of AI usage in the classroom for our awareness and generation of more in-depth research.
https://observatory.tec.mx/edu-bits-2/ai-in-higher-education-a-revolution-or-a-risk/
Small Language Models (SLMs): A Cost-Effective, Sustainable Option for Higher Education - Tom Mangan, Ed Tech
Small language models, known as SLMs, create intriguing possibilities for higher education leaders looking to take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning. SLMs are miniaturized versions of the large language models (LLMs) that spawned ChatGPT and other flavors of generative AI. For example, compare a smartwatch to a desktop workstation (monitor, keyboard, CPU and mouse): The watch has a sliver of the computing muscle of the PC, but you wouldn’t strap a PC to your wrist to monitor your heart rate while jogging. SLMs can potentially reduce costs and complexity while delivering identifiable benefits — a welcome advance for institutions grappling with the implications of AI and ML. SLMs also allow creative use cases for network edge devices such as cameras, phones and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Amazon is reportedly developing its own AI ‘reasoning’ model - Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch
According to Business Insider, Amazon is developing an AI model that incorporates advanced “reasoning” capabilities, similar to models like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s R1. The model may launch as soon as June under Amazon’s Nova brand, which the company introduced at its re:Invent developer conference last year. Reasoning models take a step-by-step, more considered approach to answering queries. This tends to boost their reliability in domains like math and science. The report says Amazon aims to adopt a “hybrid” reasoning architecture for its new model, along the lines of Anthropic’s recently released Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
AI Forced Job Loss Is Coming, Here’s How To Be Ready - Peter H. Diamandis, MOONSHOTS
The podcast discusses the potential impact of AI on jobs, highlighting both the potential for increased productivity and job displacement. It explores historical perspectives, suggesting that technological advancements have historically led to increased employment, but acknowledges potential short-term disruptions as society adapts. Concerns are raised regarding society's readiness for AI-driven changes and the emotional impact on individuals facing job loss. The conversation challenges the traditional concept of "jobs," suggesting a reevaluation of work's role in society. It proposes learning from societies with different relationships with work and questions whether current institutions can manage the upcoming AI-driven transition. The discussion emphasizes the need to consider alternative social systems and governance mechanisms in the face of these changes. (summary provided by Gemini 2.0 Flash)
Sunday, March 09, 2025
Ethical AI in Higher Education - Software Testing News
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the education sector, unlocking vast potential while introducing complex ethical and regulatory challenges. As higher education institutions harness AI’s capabilities, ensuring its responsible and ethical integration into academic environments is crucial. With the adoption of the EU AI Act, it will be critical for ed-tech companies, educational institutions, and other stakeholders to work towards compliance with this key legislation. The Act applies to both public and private entities that market, deploy, or provide AI-related services within the European Union. Its primary objectives are to safeguard fundamental rights, including privacy, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression, while simultaneously fostering innovation. The Act aims to provide clear legal frameworks that support the development and use of AI systems that are not only safe and ethical but also aligned with societal values and the broader public interest.
https://softwaretestingnews.co.uk/ethical-ai-in-higher-education/
Get students on board with AI for marking and feedback - Isabel Fischer, Times Higher Education
AI can potentially augment feedback and marking, but we need to trial it first. Here is a blueprint for using enhanced feedback generation systems and gaining trust. AI has proven its value in low-stakes formative feedback, where its rapid and personalised responses enhance learning. However, in high-stakes contexts where grades influence futures, autonomous AI marking introduces risks of bias and distrust. We therefore suggest that for high-stakes summative assessments, AI should be trialled in a supporting role, augmenting human-led processes.
Saturday, March 08, 2025
AI: Cheating Matters, but Redrawing Assessment ‘Matters Most’ - Juliette Rowsell, Times Higher Education
Conversations over students using artificial intelligence to cheat on their exams are masking wider discussions about how to improve assessment, a leading professor has argued. Phillip Dawson, co-director of the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University in Australia, argued that “validity matters more than cheating,” adding that “cheating and AI have really taken over the assessment debate.” Speaking at the conference of the U.K.’s Quality Assurance Agency, he said, “Cheating and all that matters. But assessing what we mean to assess is the thing that matters the most. That’s really what validity is … We need to address it, but cheating is not necessarily the most useful frame.”
How University Leaders Can Ethically and Responsibly Implement AI - Bruce Dahlgren, Campus Technology
For university leaders, the conversation around implementing artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting. With its great potential to unlock transformative innovation in education, it's no longer a question of if, but how, institutions should look to utilize the technology on their campuses. AI is reshaping education, offering personalized learning, efficiency, and accessibility. For students, AI provides individualized support, and for faculty it streamlines administrative tasks. The promise of AI and its potential benefits for students, faculty, and higher education institutions at large is too great to pass up.
Friday, March 07, 2025
OpenAI Operator: Use This to Automate 80% of Your Work - the AI Report, YouTube
This podcast episode discusses OpenAI's Operator, an AI agent capable of autonomously performing tasks on the internet through your browser [01:43]. The hosts explore examples such as drafting emails using Asana project boards [07:08], summarizing calls and sending structured emails [19:15], and training agents to manage schedules [34:09]. They also discuss the pros and cons of using Operator, including its ability to keep humans in the loop and its current limitation of handling only one task at a time [02:54]. The podcast also touches on the broader implications of AI on SEO, job roles, and the importance of curiosity in adapting to this changing landscape [16:58]. {summary provided by Gemini 2.0 Flash}
6 Myths We Got Wrong About AI (And What’s the Reality) - Kolawole Samuel Adebayo, HubSpot
Over the past decade, I've written extensively about some of the world’s greatest innovations. With these technologies, you know what to expect: an improvement here, a new functionality there. This one got faster, and that other one got cheaper. But when the AI boom began with ChatGPT a few years ago, it was quite unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was easy to get caught up in the headlines and be carried away by varying predictions and “demystifications” of this new, disruptive technology. Unfortunately, a lot of ideas were either miscommunicated, assumed, or lost in translation. The result? In came AI myths that were far from reality. So, let’s unpack those. In this article, I’ll discuss six of the biggest AI myths and shed light on what the reality truly is.
Thursday, March 06, 2025
Could this be the END of Chain of Thought? - Chain of Draft BREAKDOWN! - Matthew Berman, YouTube
Matthew BermanThis podcast introduces a new prompting strategy called "chain of draft" for AI models, which aims to improve upon the traditional "chain of thought" method [00:00]. Chain of draft encourages LLMs to generate concise, dense information outputs at each step, reducing token usage and latency while maintaining or exceeding the accuracy of chain of thought [11:41]. Implementing chain of draft is simple, requiring only an update to the prompt [08:06].
I was an AI skeptic until these 5 tools changed my mind - Jack Wallen, ZDnet
It's taken me a while to come around, but I've become a fan of certain AI tools -- when used for specific purposes. I've even found some of those tools to be very helpful throughout my day (so much so that I haven't used Google's search engine in weeks). That, my friends, is refreshing. How I got here was a bit circuitous. I started out 100% against AI but then I realized I was against AI when used as a shortcut for things like writing and other artistic endeavors. Once I realized AI was very good at helping me research different areas (where I'd previously used a search engine), I adopted it into my process.
Wednesday, March 05, 2025
Microsoft’s New Majorana 1 Processor Could Transform Quantum Computing - Stephan Rachel, Wired
The processor uses qubits that can be measured without error and are resistant to outside interference, which the company says marks a “transformative leap toward practical quantum computing.” Researchers at Microsoft have announced the creation of the first “topological qubits” in a device that stores information in an exotic state of matter, in what may be a significant breakthrough for quantum computing. At the same time, the researchers also published a paper in Nature and a “road map” for further work. The design of the Majorana 1 processor is supposed to fit up to a million qubits, which may be enough to realize many significant goals of quantum computing—such as cracking cryptographic codes and designing new drugs and materials faster.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code - Anthropic
Claude 3.7 Sonnet can produce near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user. API users also have fine-grained control over how long the model can think for. Claude 3.7 Sonnet shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development. Along with the model, we’re also introducing a command line tool for agentic coding, Claude Code. Claude Code is available as a limited research preview, and enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks to Claude directly from their terminal.
Tuesday, March 04, 2025
This AI model does maths, coding, and reasoning - Matt V, Mindstream
Anthropic has launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a more advanced AI model with better problem-solving in maths, coding, and reasoning.Unlike some competitors that separate reasoning into different models, Anthropic keeps it built into Claude’s core functions. Alongside this, Anthropic is introducing Claude Code, an AI coding assistant that can search and edit code, run tests, and push changes to GitHub. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is available from Monday via the Claude app, Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Pricing stays the same as Claude 3.5 Sonnet at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
The next wave of AI is here: Autonomous AI agents are amazing—and scary - Tom Barnett, Fast Company
The relentless hype around AI makes it difficult to separate the signal from the noise. So it’s understandable if you’ve tuned out recent talk about autonomous AI agents. A word of advice: Don’t. The significance of agentic AI may actually exceed the hype. An Autonomous AI agent can interact with the environment, make decisions, take action, and learn from the process. This represents a seismic shift in the use of AI and, accordingly, presents corresponding opportunities—and risks.
Monday, March 03, 2025
Grok 3 appears to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Musk - Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch
Over the weekend, users on social media reported that when asked, “Who is the biggest misinformation spreader?” with the “Think” setting enabled, Grok 3 noted in its “chain of thought” that it was explicitly instructed not to mention Donald Trump or Elon Musk. The chain of thought is the “reasoning” process the model uses to arrive at an answer to a question. TechCrunch was able to replicate this behavior once, but as of publication time on Sunday morning, Grok 3 was once again mentioning Donald Trump in its answer to the misinformation query.
When AI Thinks It Will Lose, It Sometimes Cheats, Study Finds - Harry Booth, Time
Complex games like chess and Go have long been used to test AI models’ capabilities. But while IBM’s Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s by playing by the rules, today’s advanced AI models like OpenAI’s o1-preview are less scrupulous. When sensing defeat in a match against a skilled chess bot, they don’t always concede, instead sometimes opting to cheat by hacking their opponent so that the bot automatically forfeits the game. That is the finding of a new study from Palisade Research, shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its publication on Feb. 19, which evaluated seven state-of-the-art AI models for their propensity to hack. While slightly older AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 needed to be prompted by researchers to attempt such tricks, o1-preview and DeepSeek R1 pursued the exploit on their own, indicating that AI systems may develop deceptive or manipulative strategies without explicit instruction.
Sunday, March 02, 2025
OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 May Arrive Next Week, but GPT-5 Is Just Around the Corner - Kyle Barr, Gizmodo
OpenAI may be preparing to slap a new coat of paint on ChatGPT with an updated AI model, GPT-4.5, as early as next week. If that’s not enough to get users excited, the Sam Altman-led company is on the path toward its ultimate model while trying to hint that this next step will finally achieve “AGI.” Spoiler alert: it won’t. Based on anonymous sources, the Verge’s Tom Warren first reported that OpenAI’s next model could hit the scene sometime this month. Microsoft reportedly plans to host the company’s new model next week, though it may be longer before either company makes any official announcement. More importantly, for the “next big thing,” We may see the GPT-5 model as early as May, according to The Verge.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT explodes to 400M weekly users, with GPT-5 on the way - Michael Nuñez, Venture Beat
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has surpassed 400 million weekly active users, a milestone that underscores the company’s growing reach across both consumer and enterprise markets, according to an X post from chief operating officer Brad Lightcap on Thursday. The rapid expansion comes as OpenAI faces intensifying competition from rivals such as Elon Musk’s xAI and China’s DeepSeek, both of which have recently launched high-performing models aimed at disrupting OpenAI’s dominance. Despite this, OpenAI has seen significant traction in the business sector, with more than two million enterprise users now using ChatGPT at work — doubling from September 2024.
Saturday, March 01, 2025
Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist - Juraj Gottweis and Vivek Natarajan, Google
Motivated by unmet needs in the modern scientific discovery process and building on recent AI advances, including the ability to synthesize across complex subjects and to perform long-term planning and reasoning, we developed an AI co-scientist system. The AI co-scientist is a multi-agent AI system that is intended to function as a collaborative tool for scientists. Built on Gemini 2.0, AI co-scientist is designed to mirror the reasoning process underpinning the scientific method. Beyond standard literature review, summarization and “deep research” tools, the AI co-scientist system is intended to uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals, building upon prior evidence and tailored to specific research objectives.
Study: Generative AI Could Inhibit Critical Thinking - Chris Paoli, Campus Technology
A new study on how knowledge workers engage in critical thinking found that workers with higher confidence in generative AI technology tend to employ less critical thinking to AI-generated outputs than workers with higher confidence in personal skills, who tended to apply more critical thinking to verify, refine, and critically integrate AI responses. The study ("The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers"), conducted by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University scientists, surveyed 319 knowledge workers who reported using AI tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot at least once a week. The researchers analyzed 936 real-world examples of AI-assisted tasks.
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