A while ago, OpenAI announced that it’s shipping GPT-4.5, the successor of the GPT-4, and it seems to be what everybody is talking about in the AI space right now. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s boss, recently posted on X to suggest that testing GPT-4.5 has led to surprising reactions from high-level testers. He describes the experience as a “feel the AGI” moment, implying that users are starting to sense artificial general intelligence (AGI) qualities in the model—something more advanced and intuitive than previous iterations.
Friday, February 28, 2025
San Jose State University Creates 'AI Librarian' Position - Government Technology
Thinking ahead at what artificial intelligence (AI) means for academic assets and services, San Jose State University (SJSU) last week announced a new job title: AI librarian. One of the first dedicated AI librarians at any university, according to a news release last week, Sharesly Rodriguez, who has worked at the university library since 2020, will be responsible for integrating and developing AI technology for the university's academic library. According to SJSU, librarians typically collaborate with faculty and IT staff to provide information, resources and instruction both online and in person. They also manage digital assets, develop technology resources and promote library services. Within these duties, academic librarians often have one or more subject matter specialty, such as chemistry, history, or in Rodriguez’s case, AI.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
A look under the hood of transfomers, the engine driving AI model evolution - Terrence Alsup, Venture Beat
In brief, a transformer is a neural network architecture designed to model sequences of data, making them ideal for tasks such as language translation, sentence completion, automatic speech recognition and more. Transformers have really become the dominant architecture for many of these sequence modeling tasks because the underlying attention-mechanism can be easily parallelized, allowing for massive scale when training and performing inference.... Depending on the application, a transformer model follows an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder component learns a vector representation of data that can then be used for downstream tasks like classification and sentiment analysis. The decoder component takes a vector or latent representation of the text or image and uses it to generate new text, making it useful for tasks like sentence completion and summarization. For this reason, many familiar state-of-the-art models, such the GPT family, are decoder only.
How an AI-enabled software product development life cycle will fuel innovation - Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson and Rikki Singh; McKinsey
By integrating all forms of AI into the end-to-end software product development life cycle (PDLC), companies can empower product managers (PMs), engineers, and their teams to spend more time on higher-value work and less on routine tasks. As part of this broad shift, they can incorporate more robust sources of data and feedback in a new development framework that prioritizes customer-centric solutions. This holistic redesign should ultimately accelerate the process, improve product quality, increase customer adoption and satisfaction, and spur greater innovation
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
The effectiveness evaluation of industry education integration model for applied universities under back propagation neural network - Ying Qi & Wei Feng, Nature
As the education field continues to advance, industry–education integration has become a crucial strategy for enhancing teaching quality in applied universities. This study investigates how artificial intelligence, specifically the back propagation neural network (BPNN), can be applied within an industry–education integration framework to strengthen students’ skills and employability. A series of experiments were conducted to assess the model’s effectiveness in linking theoretical learning with practical experience, as well as in improving students’ hands-on and innovative abilities. Results demonstrate that the BPNN-optimized model substantially boosts students’ overall competencies.
AI math tutor: ChatGPT can be as effective as human help, study suggests - Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost
A recent study published in PLOS One provides evidence that artificial intelligence can be just as helpful as a human tutor when it comes to learning mathematics. Researchers discovered that students using hints generated by ChatGPT, a popular artificial intelligence chatbot, showed similar learning improvements in algebra and statistics as those receiving guidance from human-authored hints. Educational technology is increasingly looking towards advanced artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to enhance learning experiences. The chatbot’s ability to generate human-like text has sparked interest in its potential for tutoring and providing educational support.
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
6 Ways Technology Transforms Learning Across Generations - Alexa Wang, Flux Magazine
The integration of technology in education has revolutionized how learners of all ages acquire knowledge. From children in preschool to adults seeking continued education, technology provides a multitude of resources that cater to diverse learning styles, making education more engaging and accessible. As we explore how technology transforms learning across generations, it becomes evident that innovations such as online courses, educational apps, and collaborative tools enhance the educational experience while fostering lifelong learning.
Leading Through Disruption: Higher Education Leaders Assess AI’s Impacts on Teaching and Learning - Imagining the Digital Future, Elon University
The spread of artificial intelligence tools in education has disrupted key aspects of teaching and learning on the nation’s campuses and will likely lead to significant changes in classwork, student assignments and even the role of colleges and universities in the country, according to a national survey of higher education leaders. The survey was conducted Nov. 4-Dec. 7, 2024, by the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) and Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center. A total of 337 university presidents, chancellors, provosts, rectors, academic affairs vice presidents, and academic deans responded to questions about generative artificial intelligence tools (GenAI) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and CoPilot. The survey covered the current situation on campuses, the struggles institutional leaders encounter, the changes they anticipate and the sweeping impacts they foresee. The survey results covered in a new report, Leading Through Disruption, were released at the annual AAC&U meeting, held Jan. 22-24, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
Monday, February 24, 2025
OpenAI Unveils GPT-5 With Cutting-Edge o3 Reasoning Model - Yasmeeta Oon, MSN.com
OpenAI is poised to revolutionize the artificial intelligence landscape with the imminent release of its highly anticipated GPT-5 large language model, featuring the groundbreaking o3 reasoning model. Scheduled to be integrated into the ChatGPT platform, this advanced model promises an enhanced and powerful user experience. CEO Sam Altman announced the company’s ambitious plans for the GPT-5 model on X, highlighting its significance as a major update to the current platform. The GPT-5 model will be available to all users with a ChatGPT account, allowing free tier users unrestricted access under a standard intelligence setting. While there are no charges for this tier, users will be subject to review based on abuse thresholds to maintain system integrity. The integration of the o3 reasoning model into GPT-5 signifies a major leap forward in AI technology, offering unparalleled capabilities.
Perplexity launches its own freemium ‘deep research’ product - Anthony Ha, Tech Crunch
Perplexity has become the latest AI company to release an in-depth research tool, with a new feature announced Friday. Google unveiled a similar feature for its Gemini AI platform in December. Then OpenAI launched its own research agent earlier this month. All three companies even have given the feature the same name: Deep Research. The goal is to provide more in-depth answers with real citations for more professional use cases, compared to what you’d get from a consumer chatbot. In a blog post announcing Deep Research, Perplexity wrote that the feature “excels at a range of expert-level tasks—from finance and marketing to product research.”
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Musk Staff Propose Bigger Role for A.I. in Education Department - Dana Goldstein and Zach Montague, NY Times
Allies of Elon Musk stationed within the Education Department are considering replacing some contract workers who interact with millions of students and parents annually with an artificial intelligence chat bot, according to internal department documents and communications. The proposal is part of President Trump’s broader effort to shrink the federal work force, and would mark a major change in how the agency interacts with the public. The Education Department’s biggest job is managing billions of dollars in student aid, and it routinely fields complex questions from borrowers.
Replit and Anthropic’s AI just helped Zillow build production software—without a single engineer - Michael Nuñez, Venture Beat
Zillow just built production software — without hiring a single engineer. Instead, non-technical employees used Replit and Anthropic’s Claude tool to create working applications that now route more than 100,000 home shoppers to agents. This isn’t just no-code; it’s AI-assisted software development at enterprise scale, powered by Claude and Replit’s automation stack. With a global developer shortage looming, this shift could redefine how software gets built — and who gets to build it.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
AI humanoid robots are closer - thanks to new $350 million investment - Sabrina Ortiz, ZDnet
AI-powered humanoid robots that co-exist with humans to help our workloads may seem like the plot of a sci-fi movie, but companies have been working on them for years. Case in point: Apptronik, a robotics lab founded in early 2016, has been working on a 5-foot 8-inch, 160-pound, general-purpose humanoid robot named Apollo. The company's latest funding will accelerate the robot's deployment. On Wednesday, Austin-based Apptronik announced the closing of a $350 million Series A funding round that will be used to fuel Apollo's deployment, scale company operations, grow its team, and accelerate innovation, according to a company press release. The investment was co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory with participation from DeepMind, Google's AI lab.
Why OpenAI’s Agent Tool May Be the First AI Gizmo to Improve Your Workplace - Kit Eaton, Inc.
Many of us have by now chatted to one of the current generation of smart AI chatbots, like OpenAI’s market-leading ChatGPT, either for fun or for genuine help at work. Office uses include assistance with a tricky coding task, or getting the wording just right on that all important PowerPoint briefing that the CEO wants. The notable thing about all these interactions is that they’re one way: the AI waits for users to query it before responding. Tech luminaries insist that next-gen “agentic” AIs are different and can actually act with a degree of autonomy on their user’s behalf. Now rumors say that OpenAI’s agent tool, dubbed Operator, may be ready for imminent release. It could be a game changer.
Friday, February 21, 2025
Quantum Large Language Model Launched to Enhance AI - Berenice Baker, Enter Quantum
Secqai, a company specializing in ultra-secure hardware and software, has launched a hybrid quantum large-language model (QLLM). The QLLM aims to enhance AI applications by integrating quantum computing with traditional large language models (LLMs) to improve computational efficiency while enhancing problem-solving and linguistic understanding capabilities. The new model, which the company said is a world first, resulted from Secqai's research into how the next generation of accelerated computing could be transformed with a QLLM and quantum machine learning.
Superagency: The transformative potential of AI - McKinsey
There’s a critical difference between AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence]. Although the latest gen AI technologies, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and others, have been hogging headlines, they are essentially prediction machines—albeit very good ones. In other words, they can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, the answer to a specific prompt because they’ve been trained on huge amounts of data. This is impressive, but it’s not at a human level of performance in terms of creativity, logical reasoning, sensory perception, and other capabilities. By contrast, AGI tools could feature cognitive and emotional abilities—like empathy—indistinguishable from those of a human.
Thursday, February 20, 2025
SUPERHUMAN Coder in 2025? New OpenAI Paper... - Wes Roth, YouTube
This podcast by Wes Roth discusses OpenAI's research paper on competitive programming using large reasoning models (LRMs). It highlights the use of reinforcement learning to improve large language models for complex coding and reasoning tasks. The podcast introduces models like 01, 03, and 01 II, which have shown strong performance in competitive programming benchmarks such as the International Olympiad in Informatics and Codeforces. It explores the progress from AlphaCode to the advanced 03 model, which is nearing superhuman coding abilities. The discussion also considers the broader implications of AI in software engineering and the job market, and compares domain-specific models with general-purpose models, suggesting that scaled-up, general models with reinforcement learning are more promising for advanced [approaching superhuman] AI in reasoning. (summary provided by Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with reasoning across Google apps)
Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants
New BBC research published today provides a warning around the use of AI assistants to answer questions about news, with factual errors and the misrepresentation of source material affecting AI assistants.
The findings are concerning, and show:
51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form
19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates
13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Thinking Out Loud With AI - Ray Schroeder Inside Higher Ed
I had the pleasure recently to participate in a lifelong learning session with a group of mostly current or retired educators at my nearby Lincoln Land Community College. The topic was AI in education. It became clear to me that many in our field are challenged to keep up with the rapidly emerging developments in AI. While OpenAI's latest version of Deep Research is not available to the general public at this time, online demonstrations show that this very powerful tool conducts both reasoning and far-reaching analysis. It puts us on the cusp of artificial general intelligence. In addition, with the advent of new competitors both here and abroad, we are seeing new options for open-source models and alternative approaches. As these become more efficient and reliable, prices are headed lower while features continue to expand. The vision of AGI seems only months, not years, away. How are these highly advanced tools going to be used by your university to enhance teaching, learning, research and other mission-centric tasks?
A new operating model for people management: More personal, more tech, more human - McKinsey
The way organizations manage their most important assets—their people—is ready for a fundamental transformation. New technologies, hybrid working practices, multigenerational workforces, heightened geopolitical risks, and other major dis A new operating model for people management: More personal, more tech, more human - McKinsey ruptions are prompting leaders to rethink their methods for attracting, developing, and retaining employees. In the past year alone, for instance, we have seen more and more companies adopt, innovate, and invest in technology—particularly in gen AI—in ways that have spurred more changes to people operations than we have observed in the past decade.
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