“A new L&D operating system for the AI Era?” [Hardman] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

From 70/20/10 to 90/10 — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
A new L&D operating system for the AI Era?

This week I want to share a hypothesis I’m increasingly convinced of: that we are entering an age of the 90/10 model of L&D.

90/10 is a model where roughly 90% of “training” is delivered by AI coaches as daily performance support, and 10% of training is dedicated to developing complex and critical skills via high-touch, human-led learning experiences.

Proponents of 90/10 argue that the model isn’t about learning less, but about learning smarter by defining all jobs to be done as one of the following:

  • Delegate (the dead skills): Tasks that can be offloaded to AI.
  • Co-Create (the 90%): Tasks which well-defined AI agents can augment and help humans to perform optimally.
  • Facilitate (the 10%): Tasks which require high-touch, human-led learning to develop.

So if AI at work is now both real and material, the natural question for L&D is: how do we design for it? The short answer is to stop treating learning as an event and start treating it as a system.



My daughter’s generation expects to learn with AI, not pretend it doesn’t exist, because they know employers expect AI fluency and because AI will be ever-present in their adult lives.

— Jenny Maxell

The above quote was taken from this posting.


Unlocking Young Minds: How Gamified AI Learning Tools Inspire Fun, Personalized, and Powerful Education for Children in 2025 — from techgenyz.com by Sreyashi Bhattacharya

Table of Contents

Highlight

  • Gamified AI Learning Tools personalize education by adapting the difficulty and content to each child’s pace, fostering confidence and mastery.
  • Engaging & Fun: Gamified elements like quests, badges, and stories keep children motivated and enthusiastic.
  • Safe & Inclusive: Attention to equity, privacy, and cultural context ensures responsible and accessible learning.

How to test GenAI’s impact on learning — from timeshighereducation.com by Thibault Schrepel
Rather than speculate on GenAI’s promise or peril, Thibault Schrepel suggests simple teaching experiments to uncover its actual effects

Generative AI in higher education is a source of both fear and hype. Some predict the end of memory, others a revolution in personalised learning. My two-year classroom experiment points to a more modest reality: Artificial intelligence (AI) changes some skills, leaves others untouched and forces us to rethink the balance.

This indicates that the way forward is to test, not speculate. My results may not match yours, and that is precisely the point. Here are simple activities any teacher can use to see what AI really does in their own classroom.

4. Turn AI into a Socratic partner
Instead of being the sole interrogator, let AI play the role of tutor, client or judge. Have students use AI to question them, simulate cross-examination or push back on weak arguments. New “study modes” now built into several foundation models make this kind of tutoring easy to set up. Professors with more technical skills can go further, design their own GPTs or fine-tuned models trained on course content and let students interact directly with them. The point is the practice it creates. Students learn that questioning a machine is part of learning to think like a professional.


Assessment tasks that support human skills — from timeshighereducation.com by Amir Ghapanchi and Afrooz Purarjomandlangrudi
Assignments that focus on exploration, analysis and authenticity offer a road map for university assessment that incorporates AI while retaining its rigour and human elements

Rethinking traditional formats

1. From essay to exploration 
When ChatGPT can generate competent academic essays in seconds, the traditional format’s dominance looks less secure as an assessment task. The future lies in moving from essays as knowledge reproduction to assessments that emphasise exploration and curation. Instead of asking students to write about a topic, challenge them to use artificial intelligence to explore multiple perspectives, compare outputs and critically evaluate what emerges.

Example: A management student asks an AI tool to generate several risk plans, then critiques the AI’s assumptions and identifies missing risks.


What your students are thinking about artificial intelligence — from timeshighereducation.com by Florencia Moore and Agostina Arbia
GenAI has been quickly adopted by students, but the consequences of using it as a shortcut could be grave. A study into how students think about and use GenAI offers insights into how teaching might adapt

However, when asked how AI negatively impacts their academic development, 29 per cent noted a “weakening or deterioration of intellectual abilities due to AI overuse”. The main concern cited was the loss of “mental exercise” and soft skills such as writing, creativity and reasoning.

The boundary between the human and the artificial does not seem so easy to draw, but as the poet Antonio Machado once said: “Traveller, there is no path; the path is made by walking.”


Jelly Beans for Grapes: How AI Can Erode Students’ Creativity — from edsurge.com by Thomas David Moore

There is nothing new about students trying to get one over on their teachers — there are probably cuneiform tablets about it — but when students use AI to generate what Shannon Vallor, philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, calls a “truth-shaped word collage,” they are not only gaslighting the people trying to teach them, they are gaslighting themselves. In the words of Tulane professor Stan Oklobdzija, asking a computer to write an essay for you is the equivalent of “going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.”


Deloitte will make Claude available to 470,000 people across its global network — from anthropic.com

As part of the collaboration, Deloitte will establish a Claude Center of Excellence with trained specialists who will develop implementation frameworks, share leading practices across deployments, and provide ongoing technical support to create the systems needed to move AI pilots to production at scale. The collaboration represents Anthropic’s largest enterprise AI deployment to date, available to more than 470,000 Deloitte people.

Deloitte and Anthropic are co-creating a formal certification program to train and certify 15,000 of its professionals on Claude. These practitioners will help support Claude implementations across Deloitte’s network and Deloitte’s internal AI transformation efforts.


How AI Agents are finally delivering on the promise of Everboarding: driving retention when it counts most — from premierconstructionnews.com

Everboarding flips this model. Rather than ending after orientation, everboarding provides ongoing, role-specific training and support throughout the employee journey. It adapts to evolving responsibilities, reinforces standards, and helps workers grow into new roles. For high-turnover, high-pressure environments like retail, it’s a practical solution to a persistent challenge.

AI agents will be instrumental in the success of everboarding initiatives; they can provide a much more tailored training and development process for each individual employee, keeping track of which training modules may need to be completed, or where staff members need or want to develop further. This personalisation helps staff to feel not only more satisfied with their current role, but also guides them on the right path to progress in their individual careers.

Digital frontline apps are also ideal for everboarding. They offer bite-sized training that staff can complete anytime, whether during quiet moments on shift or in real time on the job, all accessible from their mobile devices.


TeachLM: insights from a new LLM fine-tuned for teaching & learning — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Six key takeaways, including what the research tells us about how well AI performs as an instructional designer

As I and many others have pointed out in recent months, LLMs are great assistants but very ineffective teachers. Despite the rise of “educational LLMs” with specialised modes (e.g. Anthropic’s Learning Mode, OpenAI’s Study Mode, Google’s Guided Learning) AI typically eliminates the productive struggle, open exploration and natural dialogue that are fundamental to learning.

This week, Polygence, in collaboration with Stanford University researcher Prof Dora Demszky. published a first-of-its-kind research on a new model — TeachLM — built to address this gap.

In this week’s blog post, I deep dive what the research found and share the six key findings — including reflections on how well TeachLM performs on instructional design.


The Dangers of using AI to Grade — from marcwatkins.substack.com by Marc Watkins
Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

AI as an assessment tool represents an existential threat to education because no matter how you try and establish guardrails or best practices around how it is employed, using the technology in place of an educator ultimately cedes human judgment to a machine-based process. It also devalues the entire enterprise of education and creates a situation where the only way universities can add value to education is by further eliminating costly human labor.

For me, the purpose of higher education is about human development, critical thinking, and the transformative experience of having your ideas taken seriously by another human being. That’s not something we should be in a rush to outsource to a machine.

 

Sam Altman kicks off DevDay 2025 with a keynote to explore ideas that will challenge how you think about building. Join us for announcements, live demos, and a vision of how developers are reshaping the future with AI.

Commentary from The Rundown AI:

Why it matters: OpenAI is turning ChatGPT into a do-it-all platform that might eventually act like a browser in itself, with users simply calling on the website/app they need and interacting directly within a conversation instead of navigating manually. The AgentKit will also compete and disrupt competitors like Zapier, n8n, Lindy, and others.


AMD and OpenAI announce strategic partnership to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs — from openai.com

  • OpenAI to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs based on a multi-year, multi-generation agreement
  • Initial 1 gigawatt OpenAI deployment of AMD Instinct™ MI450 Series GPUs starting in 2H 2026

Thoughts from OpenAI DevDay — from bensbites.com by Ben Tossell
When everyone becomes a developer

The event itself was phenomenal, great organisation. In terms of releases, there were two big themes:

  1. Add your apps to ChatGPT
  2. Add ChatGPT to your apps

Everything OpenAI announced at DevDay 2025 — from theaivalley.com by Barsee
PLUS: OpenAI has signed $1T in compute deals

Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:

  • Everything OpenAI announced at DevDay 2025
  • OpenAI has signed $1T in compute deals
  • Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Also relevant/see:



 

AI agents: Where are they now? From proof of concept to success stories — from hrexecutive.com by Jill Barth

The 4 Rs framework
Salesforce has developed what Holt Ware calls the “4 Rs for AI agent success.” They are:

  1. Redesign by combining AI and human capabilities. This requires treating agents like new hires that need proper onboarding and management.
  2. Reskilling should focus on learning future skills. “We think we know what they are,” Holt Ware notes, “but they will continue to change.”
  3. Redeploy highly skilled people to determine how roles will change. When Salesforce launched an AI coding assistant, Holt Ware recalls, “We woke up the next day and said, ‘What do we do with these people now that they have more capacity?’ ” Their answer was to create an entirely new role: Forward-Deployed Engineers. This role has since played a growing part in driving customer success.
  4. Rebalance workforce planning. Holt Ware references a CHRO who “famously said that this will be the last year we ever do workforce planning and it’s only people; next year, every team will be supplemented with agents.”

Synthetic Reality Unleashed: AI’s powerful Impact on the Future of Journalism — from techgenyz.com by Sreyashi Bhattacharya

Table of Contents

  • Highlights
  • What is “synthetic news”?
  • Examples in action
  • Why are newsrooms experimenting with synthetic tools
  • Challenges and Risks
  • What does the research say
    • Transparency seems to matter. —What is next: trends & future
  • Conclusion

The latest video generation tool from OpenAI –> Sora 2

Sora 2 is here — from openai.com

Our latest video generation model is more physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable than prior systems. It also features synchronized dialogue and sound effects. Create with it in the new Sora app.

And a video on this out at YouTube:

Per The Rundown AI:

The Rundown: OpenAI just released Sora 2, its latest video model that now includes synchronized audio and dialogue, alongside a new social app where users can create, remix, and insert themselves into AI videos through a “Cameos” feature.
…
Why it matters: Model-wise, Sora 2 looks incredible — pushing us even further into the uncanny valley and creating tons of new storytelling capabilities. Cameos feels like a new viral memetic tool, but time will tell whether the AI social app can overcome the slop-factor and have staying power past the initial novelty.


OpenAI Just Dropped Sora 2 (And a Whole New Social App) — from heneuron.ai by Grant Harvey
OpenAI launched Sora 2 with a new iOS app that lets you insert yourself into AI-generated videos with realistic physics and sound, betting that giving users algorithm control and turning everyone into active creators will build a better social network than today’s addictive scroll machines.

What Sora 2 can do

  • Generate Olympic-level gymnastics routines, backflips on paddleboards (with accurate buoyancy!), and triple axels.
  • Follow intricate multi-shot instructions while maintaining world state across scenes.
  • Create realistic background soundscapes, dialogue, and sound effects automatically.
  • Insert YOU into any video after a quick one-time recording (they call this “cameos”).

The best video to show what it can do is probably this one, from OpenAI researcher Gabriel Peters, that depicts the behind the scenes of Sora 2 launch day…


Sora 2: AI Video Goes Social — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg
OpenAI’s latest AI video model is now an iOS app, letting users generate, remix, and even insert themselves into cinematic clips

Technically, Sora 2 is a major leap. It syncs audio with visuals, respects physics (a basketball bounces instead of teleporting), and follows multi-shot instructions with consistency. That makes outputs both more controllable and more believable. But the app format changes the game: it transforms world simulation from a research milestone into a social, co-creative experience where entertainment, creativity, and community intersect.


Also along the lines of creating digital video, see:

What used to take hours in After Effects now takes just one text prompt. Tools like Google’s Nano Banana, Seedream 4, Runway’s Aleph, and others are pioneering instruction-based editing, a breakthrough that collapses complex, multi-step VFX workflows into a single, implicit direction.

The history of VFX is filled with innovations that removed friction, but collapsing an entire multi-step workflow into a single prompt represents a new kind of leap.

For creators, this means the skill ceiling is no longer defined by technical know-how, it’s defined by imagination. If you can describe it, you can create it. For the industry, it points toward a near future where small teams and solo creators compete with the scale and polish of large studios.

Bilawal Sidhu


OpenAI DevDay 2025: everything you need to know — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg
Apps Inside ChatGPT, a New Era Unfolds

Something big shifted this week. OpenAI just turned ChatGPT into a platform – not just a product. With apps now running inside ChatGPT and a no-code Agent Builder for creating full AI workflows, the line between “using AI” and “building with AI” is fading fast. Developers suddenly have a new playground, and for the first time, anyone can assemble their own intelligent system without touching code. The question isn’t what AI can do anymore – it’s what you’ll make it do.

 

OpenAI and NVIDIA announce strategic partnership to deploy 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems — from openai.com

  • Strategic partnership enables OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters with NVIDIA systems representing millions of GPUs for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure.
  • To support the partnership, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed.
  • The first gigawatt of NVIDIA systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026 on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform.

Also on Nvidia’s site here.

The Neuron Daily comments on this partnership here and also see their thoughts here:

Why this matters: The partnership kicks off in the second half of 2026 with NVIDIA’s new Vera Rubin platform. OpenAI will use this massive compute power to train models beyond what we’ve seen with GPT-5 and likely also power what’s called inference (when you ask a question to chatGPT, and it gives you an answer). And NVIDIA gets a guaranteed customer for their most advanced chips. Infinite money glitch go brrr am I right? Though to be fair, this kinda deal is as old as the AI industry itself.

This isn’t just about bigger models, mind you: it’s about infrastructure for what both companies see as the future economy. As Sam Altman put it, “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future.”
…
Our take: We think this news is actually super interesting when you pair it with the other big headline from today: Commonwealth Fusion Systems signed a commercial deal worth more than $1B with Italian energy company Eni to purchase fusion power from their 400 MW ARC plant in Virginia. Here’s what that means for AI…

…and while you’re on that posting from The Neuron Daily, also see this piece:

AI filmmaker Dinda Prasetyo just released “Skyland,” a fantasy short film about a guy named Aeryn and his “loyal flying fish”, and honestly, the action sequences look like they belong in an actual film…

What’s wild is that Dinda used a cocktail of AI tools (Adobe Firefly, MidJourney, the newly launched Luma Ray 3, and ElevenLabs) to create something that would’ve required a full production crew just two years ago.


The Era of Prompts Is Over. Here’s What Comes Next. — from builtin.com by Ankush Rastogi
If you’re still prompting your AI, you’re behind the curve. Here’s how to prepare for the coming wave of AI agents.

Summary: Autonomous AI agents are emerging as systems that handle goals, break down tasks and integrate with tools without constant prompting. Early uses include call centers, healthcare, fraud detection and research, but concerns remain over errors, compliance risks and unchecked decisions.

The next shift is already peeking around the corner, and it’s going to make prompts look primitive. Before long, we won’t be typing carefully crafted requests at all. We’ll be leaning on autonomous AI agents, systems that don’t just spit out answers but actually chase goals, make choices and do the boring middle steps without us guiding them. And honestly, this jump might end up dwarfing the so-called “prompt revolution.”


Chrome: The browser you love, reimagined with AI — from blog.google by Parisa Tabriz

A new way to get things done with your AI browsing assistant
Imagine you’re a student researching a topic for a paper, and you have dozens of tabs open. Instead of spending hours jumping between sources and trying to connect the dots, your new AI browsing assistant — Gemini in Chrome 1 — can do it for you. Gemini can answer questions about articles, find references within YouTube videos, and will soon be able to help you find pages you’ve visited so you can pick up exactly where you left off.

Rolling out to Mac and Windows users in the U.S. with their language set to English, Gemini in Chrome can understand the context of what you’re doing across multiple tabs, answer questions and integrate with other popular Google services, like Google Docs and Calendar. And it’ll be available on both Android and iOS soon, letting you ask questions and summarize pages while you’re on the go.

We’re also developing more advanced agentic capabilities for Gemini in Chrome that can perform multi-step tasks for you from start to finish, like ordering groceries. You’ll remain in control as Chrome handles the tedious work, turning 30-minute chores into 3-click user journeys.


 

GRCC students to use AI to help businesses solve ‘real world’ challenges in new course — from www-mlive-com.cdn.ampproject.org by Brian McVicar; via Patrick Bailey on LinkedIn

GRAND RAPIDS, MI — A new course at Grand Rapids Community College aims to help students learn about artificial intelligence by using the technology to solve real-world business problems.
…
In a release, the college said its grant application was supported by 20 local businesses, including Gentex, TwistThink and the Grand Rapids Public Museum. The businesses have pledged to work with students who will use business data to develop an AI project such as a chatbot that interacts with customers, or a program that automates social media posts or summarizes customer data.

“This rapidly emerging technology can transform the way businesses process data and information,” Kristi Haik, dean of GRCC’s School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, said in a statement. “We want to help our local business partners understand and apply the technology. We also want to create real experiences for our students so they enter the workforce with demonstrated competence in AI applications.”

As Patrick Bailey said on LinkedIn about this article:

Nice to see a pedagogy that’s setting a forward movement rather than focusing on what could go wrong with AI in a curriculum.


Forecast for Learning and Earning in 2025-2026 report — from pages.asugsvsummit.com by Jennifer Lee and Claire Zau

In this look ahead at the future of learning and work, we aim to define:

  • Major thematic observations
  • What makes this moment an inflection point
  • Key predictions (and their precedent)
  • Short- and long-term projected impacts


The LMS at 30: From Course Management to Learning Management (At Last) — from onedtech.philhillaa.com; a guest post from Matthew Pittinsky, Ph.D.

As a 30 year observer and participant, it seems to me that previous technology platform shifts like SaaS and mobile did not fundamentally change the LMS. AI is different. We’re standing at the precipice of LMS 2.0, where the branding change from Course Management System to Learning Management System will finally live up to its name. Unlike SaaS or mobile, AI represents a technology platform shift that will transform the way participants interact with learning systems – and with it, the nature of the LMS itself.

Given the transformational potential of AI, it is useful to set the context and think about how we got here, especially on this 30th anniversary of the LMS.

LMS at 30 Part 2: Learning Management in the AI Era — from onedtech.philhillaa.com; a guest post from Matthew Pittinsky, Ph.D.

Where AI is disruptive is in its ability to introduce a whole new set of capabilities that are best described as personalized learning services. AI offers a new value proposition to the LMS, roughly the set of capabilities currently being developed in the AI Tutor / agentic TA segment. These new capabilities are so valuable given their impact on learning that I predict they will become the services with greatest engagement within a school or university’s “enterprise” instructional platform.

In this way, by LMS paradigm shift, I specifically mean a shift from buyers valuing the product on its course-centric and course management capabilities, to valuing it on its learner-centric and personalized learning capabilities.


AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions — from unesdoc.unesco.org

This anthology reveals how the integration of AI in education poses profound philosophical, pedagogical, ethical and political questions. As this global AI ecosystem evolves and becomes increasingly ubiquitous, UNESCO and its partners have a shared responsibility to lead the global discourse towards an equity- and justice-centred agenda. The volume highlights three areas in which UNESCO will continue to convene and lead a global commons for dialog and action particularly in areas on AI futures, policy and practice innovation, and experimentation.

  1. As guardian of ethical, equitable human-centred AI in education.
  2. As thought leader in reimagining curriculum and pedagogy
  3. As a platform for engaging pluralistic and contested dialogues

AI, copyright and the classroom: what higher education needs to know — from timeshighereducation.com by Cayce Myers
As artificial intelligence reshapes teaching and research, one legal principle remains at the heart of our work: copyright. Understanding its implications isn’t just about compliance – it’s about protecting academic integrity, intellectual property and the future of knowledge creation. Cayce Myers explains


The School Year We Finally Notice “The Change” — from americanstogether.substack.com by Jason Palmer

Why It Matters
A decade from now, we won’t say “AI changed schools.” We’ll say: this was the year schools began to change what it means to be human, augmented by AI.

This transformation isn’t about efficiency alone. It’s about dignity, creativity, and discovery, and connecting education more directly to human flourishing. The industrial age gave us schools to produce cookie-cutter workers. The digital age gave us knowledge anywhere, anytime. The AI age—beginning now—gives us back what matters most: the chance for every learner to become infinitely capable.

This fall may look like any other—bells ringing, rows of desks—but beneath the surface, education has begun its greatest transformation since the one-room schoolhouse.


How should universities teach leadership now that teams include humans and autonomous AI agents? — from timeshighereducation.com by Alex Zarifis
Trust and leadership style are emerging as key aspects of teambuilding in the age of AI. Here are ways to integrate these considerations with technology in teaching

Transactional and transformational leaderships’ combined impact on AI and trust
Given the volatile times we live in, a leader may find themselves in a situation where they know how they will use AI, but they are not entirely clear on the goals and journey. In a teaching context, students can be given scenarios where they must lead a team, including autonomous AI agents, to achieve goals. They can then analyse the situations and decide what leadership styles to apply and how to build trust in their human team members. Educators can illustrate this decision-making process using a table (see above).

They may need to combine transactional leadership with transformational leadership, for example. Transactional leadership focuses on planning, communicating tasks clearly and an exchange of value. This works well with both humans and automated AI agents.

 
 

Introducing the 2025 State of the L&D Industry Report — from community.elearningacademy.io

What’s changing is not the foundation—it’s the ecosystem. Teams are looking to create more flexible, scalable, and diverse learning experiences that meet people where they are.

What Did We Explore?
Everyone seems to have a take on what’s happening in L&D these days. From bold claims about six-figure roles to debates over whether portfolios or degrees matter more, everyone seems to have a take. So, we wanted to get to the heart of it by exploring five of the biggest, most debated areas shaping our work today:

  • Salaries: Are compensation trends really keeping pace with the value we deliver?
  • Hiring: What skills are managers actually looking for—and are those ATS horror stories true?
  • Portfolios: Are portfolios helping candidates stand out, and what are hiring managers actually looking for?
  • Tools & Modalities: What types of training are teams building, and what tools are they using to build it?
  • Artificial Intelligence: Who’s using it, how, and what concerns still exist?

These five areas are shaping the future of instructional design—not just for job seekers, but for team leaders, hiring managers, and the entire ecosystem of L&D professionals.

The takeaway? A portfolio is more than a collection of projects—it’s a storytelling tool. The ones that stand out highlight process, decision-making, and results—not just pretty screens.

 

 

CrashCourse on YouTube — via Matt Tower’s The EdSheet Vol. 18

Description:
At Crash Course, we believe that high-quality educational videos should be available to everyone for free! Subscribe for weekly videos from our current courses! The Crash Course team has produced more than 50 courses on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the humanities to sciences and so much more! We also recently teamed up with Arizona State University to bring you more courses on the Study Hall channel.

And as Matt stated:


From DSC:
I wasn’t familiar with this “channel” — but I like their mission to help people learn…very inexpensively! Along these lines,  I, too, pray for the world’s learning ecosystems — especially those belonging to children.


 

The Top 100 [Gen AI] Consumer Apps 5th edition — from a16z.com


And in an interesting move by Microsoft and Samsung:

A smarter way to talk to your TV: Microsoft Copilot launches on Samsung TVs and monitors — from microsoft.com

Voice-powered AI meets a visual companion for entertainment, everyday help, and everything in between. 

Redmond, Wash., August 27—Today, we’re announcing the launch of Copilot on select Samsung TVs and monitors, transforming the biggest screen in your home into your most personal and helpful companion—and it’s free to use.

Copilot makes your TV easier and more fun to use with its voice-powered interface, friendly on-screen character, and simple visual cards. Now you can quickly find what you’re looking for and discover new favorites right from your living room.

Because it lives on the biggest screen in the home, Copilot is a social experience—something you can use together with family and friends to spark conversations, help groups decide what to watch, and turn the TV into a shared space for curiosity and connection.

 

Firefly adds new video capabilities, industry leading AI models, and Generate Sound Effects feature — from blog.adobe.com

Today, we’re introducing powerful enhancements to our Firefly Video Model, including improved motion fidelity and advanced video controls that will accelerate your workflows and provide the precision and style you need to elevate your storytelling. We are also adding new generative AI partner models within Generate Video on Firefly, giving you the power to choose which model works best for your creative needs across image, video and sound.

Plus, our new workflow tools put you in control of your video’s composition and style. You can now layer in custom-generated sound effects right inside the Firefly web app — and start experimenting with AI-powered avatar-led videos.
…
Generate Sound Effects (beta)
Sound is a powerful storytelling tool that adds emotion and depth to your videos. Generate Sound Effects (beta) makes it easy to create custom sounds, like a lion’s roar or ambient nature sounds, that enhance your visuals. And like our other Firefly generative AI models, Generate Sound Effects (beta) is commercially safe, so you can create with confidence.

Just type a simple text prompt to generate the sound effect you need. Want even more control? Use your voice to guide the timing and intensity of the sound. Firefly listens to the energy and rhythm of your voice to place sound effects precisely where they belong — matching the action in your video with cinematic timing.

 
 

 

“Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide” [Molnick] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

Thoughts on thinking — from dcurt.is by Dustin Curtis

Intellectual rigor comes from the journey: the dead ends, the uncertainty, and the internal debate. Skip that, and you might still get the insight–but you’ll have lost the infrastructure for meaningful understanding. Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself.

The irony is that I now know more than I ever would have before AI. But I feel slightly dumber. A bit more dull. LLMs give me finished thoughts, polished and convincing, but none of the intellectual growth that comes from developing them myself. 


Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide — from oneusefulthing.org by Ethan Mollick
Which AIs to use, and how to use them

Every few months I put together a guide on which AI system to use. Since I last wrote my guide, however, there has been a subtle but important shift in how the major AI products work. Increasingly, it isn’t about the best model, it is about the best overall system for most people. The good news is that picking an AI is easier than ever and you have three excellent choices. The challenge is that these systems are getting really complex to understand. I am going to try and help a bit with both.

First, the easy stuff.

Which AI to Use
For most people who want to use AI seriously, you should pick one of three systems: Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Also see:


Student Voice, Socratic AI, and the Art of Weaving a Quote — from elmartinsen.substack.com by Eric Lars Martinsen
How a custom bot helps students turn source quotes into personal insight—and share it with others

This summer, I tried something new in my fully online, asynchronous college writing course. These classes have no Zoom sessions. No in-person check-ins. Just students, Canvas, and a lot of thoughtful design behind the scenes.

One activity I created was called QuoteWeaver—a PlayLab bot that helps students do more than just insert a quote into their writing.

Try it here

It’s a structured, reflective activity that mimics something closer to an in-person 1:1 conference or a small group quote workshop—but in an asynchronous format, available anytime. In other words, it’s using AI not to speed students up, but to slow them down.
…
The bot begins with a single quote that the student has found through their own research. From there, it acts like a patient writing coach, asking open-ended, Socratic questions such as:

What made this quote stand out to you?
How would you explain it in your own words?
What assumptions or values does the author seem to hold?
How does this quote deepen your understanding of your topic?
It doesn’t move on too quickly. In fact, it often rephrases and repeats, nudging the student to go a layer deeper.


The Disappearance of the Unclear Question — from jeppestricker.substack.com Jeppe Klitgaard Stricker
New Piece for UNESCO Education Futures

On [6/13/25], UNESCO published a piece I co-authored with Victoria Livingstone at Johns Hopkins University Press. It’s called The Disappearance of the Unclear Question, and it’s part of the ongoing UNESCO Education Futures series – an initiative I appreciate for its thoughtfulness and depth on questions of generative AI and the future of learning.

Our piece raises a small but important red flag. Generative AI is changing how students approach academic questions, and one unexpected side effect is that unclear questions – for centuries a trademark of deep thinking – may be beginning to disappear. Not because they lack value, but because they don’t always work well with generative AI. Quietly and unintentionally, students (and teachers) may find themselves gradually avoiding them altogether.

Of course, that would be a mistake.

We’re not arguing against using generative AI in education. Quite the opposite. But we do propose that higher education needs a two-phase mindset when working with this technology: one that recognizes what AI is good at, and one that insists on preserving the ambiguity and friction that learning actually requires to be successful.




Leveraging GenAI to Transform a Traditional Instructional Video into Engaging Short Video Lectures — from er.educause.edu by Hua Zheng

By leveraging generative artificial intelligence to convert lengthy instructional videos into micro-lectures, educators can enhance efficiency while delivering more engaging and personalized learning experiences.


This AI Model Never Stops Learning — from link.wired.com by Will Knight

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now devised a way for LLMs to keep improving by tweaking their own parameters in response to useful new information.

The work is a step toward building artificial intelligence models that learn continually—a long-standing goal of the field and something that will be crucial if machines are to ever more faithfully mimic human intelligence. In the meantime, it could give us chatbots and other AI tools that are better able to incorporate new information including a user’s interests and preferences.

The MIT scheme, called Self Adapting Language Models (SEAL), involves having an LLM learn to generate its own synthetic training data and update procedure based on the input it receives.


Edu-Snippets — from scienceoflearning.substack.com by Nidhi Sachdeva and Jim Hewitt
Why knowledge matters in the age of AI; What happens to learners’ neural activity with prolonged use of LLMs for writing

Highlights:

  • Offloading knowledge to Artificial Intelligence (AI) weakens memory, disrupts memory formation, and erodes the deep thinking our brains need to learn.
  • Prolonged use of ChatGPT in writing lowers neural engagement, impairs memory recall, and accumulates cognitive debt that isn’t easily reversed.
 

Google I/O 2025: From research to reality — from blog.google
Here’s how we’re making AI more helpful with Gemini.


Google I/O 2025 LIVE — all the details about Android XR smart glasses, AI Mode, Veo 3, Gemini, Google Beam and more — from tomsguide.com by Philip Michaels
Google’s annual conference goes all in on AI

With a running time of 2 hours, Google I/O 2025 leaned heavily into Gemini and new models that make the assistant work in more places than ever before. Despite focusing the majority of the keynote around Gemini, Google saved its most ambitious and anticipated announcement towards the end with its big Android XR smart glasses reveal.

Shockingly, very little was spent around Android 16. Most of its Android 16 related news, like the redesigned Material 3 Expressive interface, was announced during the Android Show live stream last week — which explains why Google I/O 2025 was such an AI heavy showcase.

That’s because Google carved out most of the keynote to dive deeper into Gemini, its new models, and integrations with other Google services. There’s clearly a lot to unpack, so here’s all the biggest Google I/O 2025 announcements.


Our vision for building a universal AI assistant— from blog.google
We’re extending Gemini to become a world model that can make plans and imagine new experiences by simulating aspects of the world.

Making Gemini a world model is a critical step in developing a new, more general and more useful kind of AI — a universal AI assistant. This is an AI that’s intelligent, understands the context you are in, and that can plan and take action on your behalf, across any device.

By applying LearnLM capabilities, and directly incorporating feedback from experts across the industry, Gemini adheres to the principles of learning science to go beyond just giving you the answer. Instead, Gemini can explain how you get there, helping you untangle even the most complex questions and topics so you can learn more effectively. Our new prompting guide provides sample instructions to see this in action.


Learn in newer, deeper ways with Gemini — from blog.google.com by Ben Gomes
We’re infusing LearnLM directly into Gemini 2.5 — plus more learning news from I/O.

At I/O 2025, we announced that we’re infusing LearnLM directly into Gemini 2.5, which is now the world’s leading model for learning. As detailed in our latest report, Gemini 2.5 Pro outperformed competitors on every category of learning science principles. Educators and pedagogy experts preferred Gemini 2.5 Pro over other offerings across a range of learning scenarios, both for supporting a user’s learning goals and on key principles of good pedagogy.


Gemini gets more personal, proactive and powerful — from blog.google.com by Josh Woodward
It’s your turn to create, learn and explore with an AI assistant that’s starting to understand your world and anticipate your needs.

Here’s what we announced at Google IO:

  • Gemini Live with camera and screen sharing, is now free on Android and iOS for everyone, so you can point your phone at anything and talk it through.
  • Imagen 4, our new image generation model, comes built in and is known for its image quality, better text rendering and speed.
  • Veo 3, our new, state-of-the-art video generation model, comes built in and is the first in the world to have native support for sound effects, background noises and dialogue between characters.
  • Deep Research and Canvas are getting their biggest updates yet, unlocking new ways to analyze information, create podcasts and vibe code websites and apps.
  • Gemini is coming to Chrome, so you can ask questions while browsing the web.
  • Students around the world can easily make interactive quizzes, and college students in the U.S., Brazil, Indonesia, Japan and the UK are eligible for a free school year of the Google AI Pro plan.
  • Google AI Ultra, a new premium plan, is for the pioneers who want the highest rate limits and early access to new features in the Gemini app.
  • 2.5 Flash has become our new default model, and it blends incredible quality with lightning fast response times.

Fuel your creativity with new generative media models and tools — from by Eli Collins
Introducing Veo 3 and Imagen 4, and a new tool for filmmaking called Flow.


AI in Search: Going beyond information to intelligence
We’re introducing new AI features to make it easier to ask any question in Search.

AI in Search is making it easier to ask Google anything and get a helpful response, with links to the web. That’s why AI Overviews is one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade. As people use AI Overviews, we see they’re happier with their results, and they search more often. In our biggest markets like the U.S. and India, AI Overviews is driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews.

This means that once people use AI Overviews, they’re coming to do more of these types of queries, and what’s particularly exciting is how this growth increases over time. And we’re delivering this at the speed people expect of Google Search — AI Overviews delivers the fastest AI responses in the industry.

In this story:

  • AI Mode in Search
  • Deep Search
  • Live capabilities
  • Agentic capabilities
  • Shopping
  • Personal context
  • Custom charts

 

 

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian