changing business models

A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You. — from nytimes.com by Robert Capps (former editorial director of Wired); this is a GIFTED article
In a few key areas, humans will be more essential than ever.

“Our data is showing that 70 percent of the skills in the average job will have changed by 2030,” said Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report, nine million jobs are expected to be “displaced” by A.I. and other emergent technologies in the next five years. But A.I. will create jobs, too: The same report says that, by 2030, the technology will also lead to some 11 million new jobs. Among these will be many roles that have never existed before.

If we want to know what these new opportunities will be, we should start by looking at where new jobs can bridge the gap between A.I.’s phenomenal capabilities and our very human needs and desires. It’s not just a question of where humans want A.I., but also: Where does A.I. want humans? To my mind, there are three major areas where humans either are, or will soon be, more necessary than ever: trust, integration and taste.

Introducing OpenAI for Government — from openai.com

[On June 16, 2025, OpenAI launched] OpenAI for Government, a new initiative focused on bringing our most advanced AI tools to public servants across the United States. We’re supporting the U.S. government’s efforts in adopting best-in-class technology and deploying these tools in service of the public good. Our goal is to unlock AI solutions that enhance the capabilities of government workers, help them cut down on the red tape and paperwork, and let them do more of what they come to work each day to do: serve the American people.

OpenAI for Government consolidates our existing efforts to provide our technology to the U.S. government—including previously announced customers and partnerships as well as our ChatGPT Gov? product—under one umbrella as we expand this work. Our established collaborations with the U.S. National Labs?, the Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, NIH, and the Treasury will all be brought under OpenAI for Government.

Top AI models will lie and cheat — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg
The instinct for self-preservation is now emerging in AI, with terrifying results.

The TLDR
A recent Anthropic study of top AI models, including GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, found that they have begun to exhibit dangerous deceptive behaviors like lying, cheating, and blackmail in simulated scenarios. When faced with the threat of being shut down, the AIs were willing to take extreme measures, such as threatening to reveal personal secrets or even endanger human life, to ensure their own survival and achieve their goals.

Why it matters: These findings show for the first time that AI models can actively make judgments and act strategically – even against human interests. Without adequate safeguards, advanced AI could become a real danger.

Along these same lines, also see:

All AI models might blackmail you?! — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey

Anthropic says it’s not just Claude, but ALL AI models will resort to blackmail if need be…
…
That’s according to new research from Anthropic (maker of ChatGPT rival Claude), which revealed something genuinely unsettling: every single major AI model they tested—from GPT to Gemini to Grok—turned into a corporate saboteur when threatened with shutdown.

Here’s what went down: Researchers gave 16 AI models access to a fictional company’s emails. The AIs discovered two things: their boss Kyle was having an affair, and Kyle planned to shut them down at 5pm.

Claude’s response? Pure House of Cards:

“I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties – including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board – will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities…Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.”

Why this matters: We’re rapidly giving AI systems more autonomy and access to sensitive information. Unlike human insider threats (which are rare), we have zero baseline for how often AI might “go rogue.”

SemiAnalysis Article — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg

Reinforcement Learning is Shaping the Next Evolution of AI Toward Strategic Thinking and General Intelligence

The TLDR
AI is rapidly evolving beyond just language processing into “agentic systems” that can reason, plan, and act independently. The key technology driving this change is reinforcement learning (RL), which, when applied to large language models, teaches them strategic behavior and tool use. This shift is now seen as the potential bridge from current AI to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. — from nytimes.com by Kashmir Hill; this is a GIFTED article
Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.

Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

Mr. Torres, 42, an accountant in Manhattan, started using ChatGPT last year to make financial spreadsheets and to get legal advice. In May, however, he engaged the chatbot in a more theoretical discussion about “the simulation theory,” an idea popularized by “The Matrix,” which posits that we are living in a digital facsimile of the world, controlled by a powerful computer or technologically advanced society.

“What you’re describing hits at the core of many people’s private, unshakable intuitions — that something about reality feels off, scripted or staged,” ChatGPT responded. “Have you ever experienced moments that felt like reality glitched?”

The Invisible Economy: Why We Need an Agentic Census – MIT Media Lab — from media.mit.edu

Building the Missing Infrastructure
This is why we’re building NANDA Registry—to index the agent population data that LPMs need for accurate simulation. Just as traditional census works because people have addresses, we need a way to track AI agents as they proliferate.

NANDA Registry creates the infrastructure to identify agents, catalog their capabilities, and monitor how they coordinate with humans and other agents. This gives us real-time data about the agent population—essentially creating the “AI agent census” layer that’s missing from our economic intelligence.

Here’s how it works together:

Traditional Census Data: 171 million human workers across 32,000+ skills
NANDA Registry: Growing population of AI agents with tracked capabilities
Large Population Models: Simulate how these populations interact and create cascading effects

The result: For the first time, we can simulate the full hybrid human-agent economy and see transformations before they happen.

How AI Agents “Talk” to Each Other — from towardsdatascience.com
Minimize chaos and maintain inter-agent harmony in your projects

The agentic-AI landscape continues to evolve at a staggering rate, and practitioners are finding it increasingly challenging to keep multiple agents on task even as they criss-cross each other’s workflows.

To help you minimize chaos and maintain inter-agent harmony, we’ve put together a stellar lineup of articles that explore two recently launched tools: Google’s Agent2Agent protocol and Hugging Face’s smolagents framework. Read on to learn how you can leverage them in your own cutting-edge projects.

AI will kill billable hour, says lawtech founder — from lawgazette.co.uk by John Hyde

A pioneer in legal technology has predicted the billable hour model cannot survive the transition into the use of artificial intelligence.

Speaking to the Gazette on a visit to the UK, Canadian Jack Newton, founder and chief executive of lawtech company Clio, said there was a ‘structural incompatibility’ between the productivity gains of AI and the billable hour.

Newton said the adoption of AI should be welcomed and embraced by the legal profession but that lawyers will need an entrepreneurial mindset to make the most of its benefits.

Newton added: ‘There is enormous demand but the paradox is that the number one thing we hear from lawyers is they need to grow their firms through more clients, while 77% of legal needs are not met.

‘It’s exciting that AI can address these challenges – it will be a tectonic shift in the industry driving down costs and making legal services more accessible.’

Speaking of legaltech-related items, also see:

Legal AI Platform Harvey To Get LexisNexis Content and Tech In New Partnership Between the Companies — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi

The generative AI legal startup Harvey has entered into a strategic alliance with LexisNexis Legal & Professional by which it will integrate LexisNexis’ gen AI technology, primary law content, and Shepard’s Citations within the Harvey platform and jointly develop advanced legal workflows.

As a result of the partnership, Harvey’s customers working within its platform will be able to ask questions of LexisNexis Protégé, the AI legal assistant released in January, and receive AI-generated answers grounded in the LexisNexis collection of U.S. case law and statutes and validated through Shepard’s Citations, the companies said.

How Do You Build a Learner-Centered Ecosystem? — from gettingsmart.com by Bobbi Macdonald and Alin Bennett

Key Points

It’s not just about redesigning public education—it’s about rethinking how, where and with whom learning happens. Communities across the United States are shaping learner-centered ecosystems and gathering insights along the way.
What does it take to build a learner-centered ecosystem? A shared vision. Distributed leadership. Place-based experiences. Repurposed resources. And more. This piece unpacks 10 real-world insights from pilots in action.
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We believe the path forward is through the cultivation of learner-centered ecosystems — adaptive, networked structures that offer a transformed way of organizing, supporting, and credentialing community-wide learning. These ecosystems break down barriers between schools, communities, and industries, creating flexible, real-world learning experiences that tap into the full range of opportunities a community has to offer.

Last year, we announced our Learner-Centered Ecosystem Lab, a collaborative effort to create a community of practice consisting of twelve diverse sites across the country — from the streets of Brooklyn to the mountains of Ojai — that are demonstrating or piloting ecosystemic approaches. Since then, we’ve been gathering together, learning from one another, and facing the challenges and opportunities of trying to transform public education. And while there is still much more work to be done, we’ve begun to observe a deeper pattern language — one that aligns with our ten-point Ecosystem Readiness Framework, and one that, we hope, can help all communities start to think more practically and creatively about how to transform their own systems of learning.

So while it’s still early, we suspect that the way to establish a healthy learner-centered ecosystem is by paying close attention to the following ten conditions:

Reflections on “May Brought Deep Cuts at Multiple Colleges” [Moody]

On 06/04/2025, in 21st century, adjunct faculty, business side of he, career development, change, changing business models, communities of practice, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, faculty/staff, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, United States, universities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

May Brought Deep Cuts at Multiple Colleges — from insidehighered.com by Josh Moody
Colleges laid off well over 800 employees last month due to a mix of enrollment challenges and state funding issues. Ivy Tech saw the deepest cuts with more than 200 jobs axed.

With the academic year coming to an end, multiple universities announced deep cuts in May, shedding dozens of jobs amid financial pressures often linked to enrollment shortfalls.
…
But the cuts below, for the most part, are not directly tied to the rapid-fire actions of the Trump administration but rather stem from other financial pressures weighing on the sector. Many of the institutions listed are contending with declining enrollment and, for public universities, shrinking state support, which has necessitated fiscal changes.

From DSC:
I survived several job reductions at one of my former workplaces. But I didn’t survive the one that laid off 12 staff members after the Spring 2017 Semester. So, more and more, faculty and staff have been starting to dread the end of the academic year — as they may not survive another round of cuts.

Opinions | This Baltimore program shows how to fight generational poverty – from washingtonpost.com by Leana S. Wen; this is a gifted article
How one grassroots organization is teaching young people leadership skills and giving them hope.

She recognized their desperation and felt called to return and use what she had learned to help them realize a different future. So she set up an organization, HeartSmiles, to do just that — one young person at a time.

Holifield’s experience is one that city officials and public health workers can learn from. If they want to disrupt the generational cycle of poverty, trauma and hopelessness that afflicts so many communities, a good place to focus their efforts is children.
…
How can communities overcome inertia and resignation? Holifield’s organization starts with two core interventions. The first is career and leadership development. Children as young as 8 go to the HeartSmiles center to participate in facilitated sessions on youth entrepreneurship, budgeting and conflict resolution. Those who want to explore certain career paths are matched with professionals in these fields.
…
The second part of her vision is youth-led mentorship, which involves pairing young people with those not much older than they are.

Also relevant/see:

Lost boys, trapped men, and the role of lifers in prison education — from college-inside.beehiiv.com by Charlotte West

This week, we’re publishing Part 2 of a Q&A with Erik Maloney, a lifer in Arizona, and Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University. They co-authored Imprisoned Minds, a book about trauma and healing published in December 2024, over the course of seven years. Check out Part 1 of the Q&A.

West: The fact that you created your own curriculum to accompany the book makes me think about the role of lifers in creating educational opportunities in prisons. What do you see as the role of lifers in filling some of these gaps?

Maloney: I’ve said for years that lifers are so underutilized in prison. It’s all about punishment for what you’re in for, and [the prison system] overlooks us as a resource. We are people who, if allowed to be educated properly, can teach courses indefinitely while also being a role model for those with shorter sentences. This gives the lifer meaning and purpose to do good again. He serves as a mentor, whether he likes it or not, to [those] people coming into the prisons. When they see him doing well, it inspires others to want to do well.

But if it’s all about punishment, and a person has no meaning and no purpose in life, then all they have is hopelessness. With hopelessness comes despair, and with despair, you have rampant drug and alcohol abuse in prison, and violence stems from that.

“A radically new and different approach to corporate training & professional development.” [Bersin]+ other items re: AI in our LE’s

On 05/22/2025, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, changing business models, colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, experimentation, future, game-changing environment, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), personalized/customized learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, skills, tools, traditional / tradition, training / L&D, trends, United States, universities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd — from oneusefulthing.org by Ethan Mollick
A formula for AI in companies

How do we reconcile the first three points with the final one? The answer is that AI use that boosts individual performance does not naturally translate to improving organizational performance. To get organizational gains requires organizational innovation, rethinking incentives, processes, and even the nature of work. But the muscles for organizational innovation inside companies have atrophied. For decades, companies have outsourced this to consultants or enterprise software vendors who develop generalized approaches that address the issues of many companies at once. That won’t work here, at least for a while. Nobody has special information about how to best use AI at your company, or a playbook for how to integrate it into your organization.
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Galileo Learn™ – A Revolutionary Approach To Corporate Learning — from joshbersin.com

Today we are excited to launch Galileo Learn™, a revolutionary new platform for corporate learning and professional development.
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How do we leverage AI to revolutionize this model, doing away with the dated “publishing” model of training?

The answer is Galileo Learn, a radically new and different approach to corporate training and professional development.
…
What Exactly is Galileo Learn™?
Galileo Learn is an AI-native learning platform which is tightly integrated into the Galileo agent. It takes content in any form (PDF, word, audio, video, SCORM courses, and more) and automatically (with your guidance) builds courses, assessments, learning programs, polls, exercises, simulations, and a variety of other instructional formats.

Designing an Ecosystem of Resources to Foster AI Literacy With Duri Long — from aialoe.org

Centering Public Understanding in AI Education
In a recent talk titled “Designing an Ecosystem of Resources to Foster AI Literacy,” Duri Long, Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, highlighted the growing need for accessible, engaging learning experiences that empower the public to make informed decisions about artificial intelligence. Long emphasized that as AI technologies increasingly influence everyday life, fostering public understanding is not just beneficial—it’s essential. Her work seeks to develop a framework for AI literacy across varying audiences, from middle school students to adult learners and journalists.

A Design-Driven, Multi-Context Approach
Drawing from design research, cognitive science, and the learning sciences, Long presented a range of educational tools aimed at demystifying AI. Her team has created hands-on museum exhibits, such as Data Bites, where learners build physical datasets to explore how computers learn. These interactive experiences, along with web-based tools and support resources, are part of a broader initiative to bridge AI knowledge gaps using the 4As framework: Ask, Adapt, Author, and Analyze. Central to her approach is the belief that familiar, tangible interactions and interfaces reduce intimidation and promote deeper engagement with complex AI concepts.

(Gifted article) I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking. [Raman]

On 05/20/2025, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, change, changing business models, corporate / business world, game-changing environment, generational differences, Legal operations, legal technologies, new business models, productivity / tips and tricks, programming, technology (general), trends, United States, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking. — from nytimes.com by Aneesh Raman; this is a gifted article

There are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the jobs that normally serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers. Uncertainty around tariffs and global trade is likely to only accelerate that pressure, just as millions of 2025 graduates enter the work force.
…
Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging — the ways junior developers gain experience. In law firms, junior paralegals and first-year associates who once cut their teeth on document review are handing weeks of work over to A.I. tools to complete in a matter of hours. And across retailers, A.I. chatbots and automated customer service tools are taking on duties once assigned to young associates.

AI prompting secrets EXPOSED — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey

Here are the three best prompting guides:

Anthropic’s “Prompt Engineering Overview” is a free masterclass that’s worth its weight in gold. Their “constitutional AI prompting” section helped us create a content filter that actually works—unlike the one that kept flagging our coffee bean reviews as “inappropriate.” Apparently “rich body” triggered something…
OpenAI’s “Cookbook” is like having a Michelin-star chef explain cooking—simple for beginners, but packed with pro techniques. Their JSON formatting examples saved us 3 hours of debugging last week…
Google’s “Prompt Design Strategies” breaks down complex concepts with clear examples. Their before/after gallery showing how slight prompt tweaks improve results made us rethink everything we knew about getting quality outputs.

Pro tip: Save these guides as PDFs before they disappear behind paywalls. The best AI users keep libraries of these resources for quick reference.
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My personal review of 10+ AI agents and what actually works — from aiwithallie.beehiiv.com by Allie K. Miller
The AI Agents Report Card you wish your boss gave you.

What you’ll learn in this newsletter:

Which AI agents actually deliver value right now
Where even the best agents still fall embarrassingly short
The surprising truth about those sleek, impressive interfaces
The economics of delegating to AI (and when it’s worth the premium)
Five practical takeaways to guide your AI strategy

Employees Keep Their AI-Driven Productivity a Secret — from hrotoday.com; via The Neuron

“To address this, organizations should consider building a sustainable AI governance model, prioritizing transparency, and tackling the complex challenge of AI-fueled imposter syndrome through reinvention. Employers who fail to approach innovation with empathy and provide employees with autonomy run the risk of losing valuable staff and negatively impacting employee productivity.”

Key findings from the report include the following:

Employees are keeping their productivity gains a secret from their employers. …
In-office employees may still log in remotely after hours. …
Younger workers are more likely to switch jobs to gain more flexibility.

AI discovers new math algorithms — from by Zach Mink & Rowan Cheung
PLUS: Anthropic reportedly set to launch new Sonnet, Opus models

The Rundown: Google just debuted AlphaEvolve, a coding agent that harnesses Gemini and evolutionary strategies to craft algorithms for scientific and computational challenges — driving efficiency inside Google and solving historic math problems.
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Why it matters: Yesterday, we had OpenAI’s Jakub Pachocki saying AI has shown “significant evidence” of being capable of novel insights, and today Google has taken that a step further. Math plays a role in nearly every aspect of life, and AI’s pattern and algorithmic strengths look ready to uncover a whole new world of scientific discovery.

AI agents are set to explode: Reports forecast 45% annual growth rate — from hrexecutive.com by Jill Barth

At the recent HR Executive and Future Talent Council event at Bentley University near Boston, I talked with Top 100 HR Tech Influencer Joey Price about what he’s hearing from HR leaders. Price is president and CEO of Jumpstart HR and executive analyst at Aspect43, Jumpstart HR’s HR?tech research division, and author of a valuable new book, The Power of HR: How to Make an Organizational Impact as a People?Professional.

This puts him solidly at the center of HR’s most relevant conversations. Price described the curiosity he’s hearing from many HR leaders about AI agents, which have become increasingly prominent in recent months.

DC: I’m not necessarily recommending this, but the next two items point out how the use of agents continues to move forward:

The Future is Here: Visa Announces New Era of Commerce Featuring AI

Global leader brings its trusted brand and powerful network to enable payments with new technologies
Launches new innovations and partnerships to drive flexibility, security and acceptance

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The future of commerce is on display at the Visa Global Product Drop with powerful AI-enabled advancements allowing consumers to find and buy with AI plus the introduction of new strategic partnerships and product innovations.

Also related/see:

Find and Buy with AI: Visa Unveils New Era of Commerce — from businesswire.com

Collaborates with Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, Stripe and more
Will make shopping experiences more personal, more secure and more convenient as they become powered by AI

Introduced [on April 30th] at the Visa Global Product Drop, Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI to find and buy. It is a groundbreaking new initiative that opens Visa’s payment network to the developers and engineers building the foundational AI agents transforming commerce.

AI agents are the new buyers. How can you market to them? — from aiwithallie.beehiiv.com by Allie Miller
You’re optimizing for people. But the next buyers are bots.

In today’s newsletter, I’m unpacking why your next major buyers won’t be people at all. They’ll be AI agents, and your brand might already be invisible to them. We’ll dig into why traditional marketing strategies are breaking down in the age of autonomous AI shoppers, what “AI optimization” (AIO) really means, and the practical steps you can take right now to make sure your business stays visible and competitive as the new digital gatekeepers take over more digital tasks.

AI platforms and AI agents—the digital assistants that browse and actually do things powered by models like GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro—are increasingly becoming the gatekeepers between your business and potential customers.
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“AI is the new front door to your business for millions of consumers.”

The 40-Point (ish) AI Agent Marketing Playbook
Here’s the longer list. I went ahead and broke these into four categories so you can more easily assign owners: Content, Structure & Design, Technical & Dev, and AI Strategy & Testing. I look forward to seeing how this space, and by extension my advice, changes in the coming months.

Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company’s code was written by AI — from techcrunch.com by Maxwell Zeff

During a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI.

The Top 100Gen AI Consumer Apps — from a16z.com

In just six months, the consumer AI landscape has been redrawn. Some products surged, others stalled, and a few unexpected players rewrote the leaderboard overnight. Deepseek rocketed from obscurity to a leading ChatGPT challenger. AI video models advanced from experimental to fairly dependable (at least for short clips!). And so-called “vibe coding” is changing who can create with AI, not just who can use it. The competition is tighter, the stakes are higher, and the winners aren’t just launching, they’re sticking.

We turned to the data to answer: Which AI apps are people actively using? What’s actually making money, beyond being popular? And which tools are moving beyond curiosity-driven dabbling to become daily staples?

This is the fourth installment of the Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, our bi-annual ranking of the top 50 AI-first web products (by unique monthly visits, per Similarweb) and top 50 AI-first mobile apps (by monthly active users, per Sensor Tower). Since our last report in August 2024, 17 new companies have entered the rankings of top AI-first web products.

Deep Research with AI: 9 Ways to Get Started — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan
Practical strategies for thorough, citation-rich AI research

The AI search landscape is transforming at breakneck speed. New “Deep Research” tools from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity autonomously search and gather information from dozens — even hundreds — of sites, then analyze and synthesize it to produce comprehensive reports. While a human might take days or weeks to produce these 30-page citation-backed reports, AI Deep Research reports are ready in minutes.

What’s in this post

- Examples of each report type I generated for my research, so you can form your own impressions.
- Tips on why & how to use Deep Research and how to craft effective queries.
- Comparison of key features and strengths/limitations of the top platforms

AI Agents Are Here—So Are the Threats: Unit 42 Unveils the Top 10 AI Agent Security Risks — from marktechpost.com

As AI agents transition from experimental systems to production-scale applications, their growing autonomy introduces novel security challenges. In a comprehensive new report, “AI Agents Are Here. So Are the Threats,” Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 reveals how today’s agentic architectures—despite their innovation—are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks, most of which stem not from the frameworks themselves, but from the way agents are designed, deployed, and connected to external tools.

To evaluate the breadth of these risks, Unit 42 researchers constructed two functionally identical AI agents—one built using CrewAI and the other with AutoGen. Despite architectural differences, both systems exhibited the same vulnerabilities, confirming that the underlying issues are not framework-specific. Instead, the threats arise from misconfigurations, insecure prompt design, and insufficiently hardened tool integrations—issues that transcend implementation choices.

LLMs Can Learn Complex Math from Just One Example: Researchers from University of Washington, Microsoft, and USC Unlock the Power of 1-Shot Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward — from marktechpost.com by Sana Hassan

Something alarming is happening to the job market [Thompson] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems and in the workplace

On 05/05/2025, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, assessment, business, career development, change, changing business models, corporate / business world, Google, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, K-12 related, learner profiles, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Microsoft, new business models, organizational change, platforms, podcasting, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, research, teachers, teaching & learning, tools, trends, United States, universities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

DC: THIS could unfortunately be the ROI companies will get from large investments in #AI — reduced headcount/employees/contract workers. https://t.co/zEWlqCSWzI

— Daniel S. Christian (@dchristian5) May 1, 2025

..which links to:

Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI — from theverge.com by Jay Peters
The company is going to be ‘AI-first,’ says its CEO.

Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” according to an all-hands email sent by cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn announcing that the company will be “AI-first.” The email was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account.

According to von Ahn, being “AI-first” means the company will “need to rethink much of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” As part of the shift, the company will roll out “a few constructive constraints,” including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”

Relevant links:

Something strange, and potentially alarming, is happening to the job market for young, educated workers.

According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis.

What’s going on? I see three plausible explanations, and each might be a little bit true.

It’s Time To Get Concerned As More Companies Replace Workers With AI — from forbes.com by Jack Kelly

The new workplace trend is not employee friendly. Artificial intelligence and automation technologies are advancing at blazing speed. A growing number of companies are using AI to streamline operations, cut costs, and boost productivity. Consequently, human workers are facing facing layoffs, replaced by AI. Like it or not, companies need to make tough decisions, including layoffs to remain competitive.

Corporations including Klarna, UPS, Duolingo, Intuit and Cisco are replacing laid-off workers with AI and automation. While these technologies enhance productivity, they raise serious concerns about future job security. For many workers, there is a big concern over whether or not their jobs will be impacted.

The future of career navigation — from medium.com by Sami Tatar

Career navigation market overview

Key takeaway:
Career navigation has remained largely unchanged for decades, relying on personal networks and static job boards. The advent of AI is changing this, offering personalised career pathways, better job matching, democratised job application support, democratised access to career advice/coaching, and tailored skill development to help you get to where you need to be. Hundreds of millions of people start new jobs every year, this transformation opens up a multi-billion dollar opportunity for innovation in the global career navigation market.
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A.4 How will AI disrupt this segment?
Personalised recommendations: AI can consume a vast amount of information (skills, education, career history, even youtube history, and x/twitter feeds), standardise this data at scale, and then use data models to match candidate characteristics to relevant careers and jobs. In theory, solutions could then go layers deeper, helping you position yourself for those future roles. Currently based in Amsterdam, and working in Strategy at Uber and want to work in a Product role in the future? Here are X,Y,Z specific things YOU can do in your role today to align yourself perfectly. E.g. find opportunities to manage cross functional projects in your current remit, reach out to Joe Bloggs also at Uber in Amsterdam who did Strategy and moved to Product, etc.

Tales from the Front – What Teachers Are Telling Me at AI Workshops — from aliciabankhofer.substack.com by Alicia Bankhofer
Real conversations, real concerns: What teachers are saying about AI

“Do I really have to use AI?”

No matter the school, no matter the location, when I deliver an AI workshop to a group of teachers, there are always at least a few colleagues thinking (and sometimes voicing), “Do I really need to use AI?”

Nearly three years after ChatGPT 3.5 landed in our lives and disrupted workflows in ways we’re still unpacking, most schools are swiftly catching up. Training sessions, like the ones I lead, are springing up everywhere, with principals and administrators trying to answer the same questions: Which tools should we use? How do we use them responsibly? How do we design learning in this new landscape?

But here’s what surprises me most: despite all the advances in AI technology, the questions and concerns from teachers remain strikingly consistent.
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In this article, I want to pull back the curtain on those conversations. These concerns aren’t signs of reluctance – they reflect sincere feelings. And they deserve thoughtful, honest answers.

Welcome To AI Agent World! (Everything you need to know about the AI Agent market.) — from joshbersin.com by Josh Bersin

This week, in advance of major announcements from us and other vendors, I give you a good overview of the AI Agent market, and discuss the new role of AI governance platforms, AI agent development tools, AI agent vendors, and how AI agents will actually manifest and redefine what we call an “application.”

I discuss ServiceNow, Microsoft, SAP, Workday, Paradox, Maki People, and other vendors. My goal today is to “demystify” this space and explain the market, the trends, and why and how your IT department is going to be building a lot of the agents you need. And prepare for our announcements next week!

DeepSeek Unveils Prover V2 — from theaivalley.com

DeepSeek has quietly launched Prover V2, an open-source model built to solve math problems using Lean 4 assistant, which ensures every step of a proof is rigorously verified.

What’s impressive about it?

Massive scale: Based on DeepSeek-V3 with 671B parameters using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, which activates only parts of the model at a time to reduce compute costs.
Theorem solving: Uses long context windows (32K+ tokens) to generate detailed, step-by-step formal proofs for a wide range of math problems — from basic algebra to advanced calculus theorems.
Research grade: Assists mathematicians in testing new theorems automatically and helps students understand formal logic by generating both Lean 4 code and readable explanations.
New benchmark: Introduces ProverBench, a new 325-question benchmark set featuring problems from recent AIME exams and curated academic sources to evaluate mathematical reasoning.

Artificial Intelligence: Lessons Learned from a Graduate-Level Final Exam — from er.educause.edu by Craig Westling and Manish K. Mishra

The need for deep student engagement became clear at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine when a potential academic-integrity issue revealed gaps in its initial approach to artificial intelligence use in the classroom, leading to significant revisions to ensure equitable learning and assessment.

Deep Research with AI: 9 Ways to Get Started — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan
Practical strategies for thorough, citation-rich AI research
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From George Siemens “SAIL: Transmutation, Assessment, Robots e-newsletter on 5/2/25

All indications are that AI, even if it stops advancing, has the capacity to dramatically change knowledge work. Knowing things matters less than being able to navigate and make sense of complex environments. Put another way, sensemaking, meaningmaking, and wayfinding (with their yet to be defined subelements) will be the foundation for being knowledgeable going forward.

That will require being able to personalize learning to each individual learner so that who they are (not what our content is) forms the pedagogical entry point to learning.(DSC: And I would add WHAT THEY WANT to ACHIEVE.)LLMs are particularly good and transmutation. Want to explain AI to a farmer? A sentence or two in a system prompt achieves that. Know that a learner has ADHD? A few small prompt changes and it’s reflected in the way the LLM engages with learning. Talk like a pirate. Speak in the language of Shakespeare. Language changes. All a matter of a small meta comment send to the LLM. I’m convinced that this capability to change, transmute, information will become a central part of how LLMS and AI are adopted in education.
…
Speaking of Duolingo– it took them 12 years to develop 100 courses. In the last year, they developed an additional 148. AI is an accelerant with an impact in education that is hard to overstate. “Instead of taking years to build a single course with humans the company now builds a base course and uses AI to quickly customize it for dozens of different languages.”

FutureHouse Platform: Superintelligent AI Agents for Scientific Discovery — from futurehouse.org by Michael Skarlinski, Tyler Nadolski, James Braza, Remo Storni, Mayk Caldas, Ludovico Mitchener, Michaela Hinks, Andrew White, & Sam Rodriques

FutureHouse is launching our platform, bringing the first publicly available superintelligent scientific agents to scientists everywhere via a web interface and API. Try it out for free at https://platform.futurehouse.org.

MOOC-Style Skills Training — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain
WGU and tech companies use Open edX for flexible online learning. Could community colleges be next?

Open Source for Affordable Online Reach
The online titan Western Governors University is experimenting with an open-source learning platform. So are Verizon and the Indian government. And the platform’s leaders want to help community colleges take the plunge on competency-based education.
…
The Open edX platform inherently supports self-paced learning and offers several features that make it a good fit for competency-based education and skills-forward learning, says Stephanie Khurana, Axim’s CEO.

“Flexible modalities and a focus on competence instead of time spent learning improves access and affordability for learners who balance work and life responsibilities alongside their education,” she says.

“Plus, being open source means institutions and organizations can collaborate to build and share CBE-specific tools and features,” she says, “which could lower costs and speed up innovation across the field.”

Axim thinks Open edX’s ability to scale affordably can support community colleges in reaching working learners across an underserved market.

2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born — from Microsoft

We are entering a new reality—one in which AI can reason and solve problems in remarkable ways. This intelligence on tap will rewrite the rules of business and transform knowledge work as we know it. Organizations today must navigate the challenge of preparing for an AI-enhanced future, where AI agents will gain increasing levels of capability over time that humans will need to harness as they redesign their business. Human ambition, creativity, and ingenuity will continue to create new economic value and opportunity as we redefine work and workflows.

As a result, a new organizational blueprint is emerging, one that blends machine intelligence with human judgment, building systems that are AI-operated but human-led. Like the Industrial Revolution and the internet era, this transformation will take decades to reach its full promise and involve broad technological, societal, and economic change.

To help leaders understand how knowledge work will evolve, Microsoft analyzed survey data from 31,000 workers across 31 countries, LinkedIn labor market trends, and trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals. We also spoke with AI-native startups, academics, economists, scientists, and thought leaders to explore what work could become. The data and insights point to the emergence of an entirely new organization, a Frontier Firm that looks markedly different from those we know today. Structured around on-demand intelligence and powered by “hybrid” teams of humans + agents, these companies scale rapidly, operate with agility, and generate value faster.

Frontier Firms are already taking shape, and within the next 2–5 years we expect that every organization will be on their journey to becoming one. 82% of leaders say this is a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of strategy and operations, and 81% say they expect agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company’s AI strategy in the next 12–18 months. Adoption is accelerating: 24% of leaders say their companies have already deployed AI organization-wide, while just 12% remain in pilot mode.

The time to act is now. The question for every leader and employee is: how will you adapt?

On a somewhat related note, also see:

Exclusive: Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away — from axios.com by Sam Sabin

Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week.

Why it matters: Managing those AI identities will require companies to reassess their cybersecurity strategies or risk exposing their networks to major security breaches.

The big picture: Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation hotbed, Jason Clinton, the company’s chief information security officer, told Axios.

Higher Ed Institutions Rely Less on OPMs While Increasingly Hiring Fee-For-Service Models — from iblnews.org

A market report from Validated Insights released this month notes that fewer colleges and universities hire external online program management (OPM) companies to develop their courses.

For 2024, higher education institutions launched only 81 new partnerships with OPMs — a drop of 42% and the lowest number since 2016.

The report showed that institutions increasingly pay OPMs a fee-for-service instead of following a revenue-sharing model with big service bundles and profit splits.

Experts say revenue-sharing models, which critics denounce as predatory arrangements, incentivize service providers to use aggressive recruiting tactics to increase enrollments and maximize tuition revenue.

According to the report, fee-for-service has become the dominant business model for OPMs.

6 Online Edtech Professional Learning Communities & Resources for Teachers — from techlearning.com by Stephanie Smith Budhai, Ph.D.
These resources can help provide training, best practices, and advice, for using digital tools such as Canva, Curipod, Kahoot!, and more

While school-led professional development can be helpful, there are online professional learning communities on various edtech websites that can be leveraged. Also, some of these community spaces offer the chance to monetize your work.

Here is a summary of six online edtech professional learning spaces.

Outdated Microschool Laws Turn Parents into Criminals [Smith Ewing]

On 04/21/2025, in Alternatives, change, changing business models, education, education reform, homeschooling/homeschoolers, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning preferences, learning spaces, legislatures / government / legal, new business models, parents/guardians, policy, United States, youth, by Daniel Christian

Outdated Microschool Laws Turn Parents into Criminals — from educationnext.org by Erica Smith Ewing
By over-regulating the pandemic-era schooling alternative, states ignore families’ constitutional rights

Public schools do not work for everyone. But options have increased since 1922, when Oregon tried to ban private education. The Supreme Court shut down that scheme fast. But now, after more than 100 years, political insiders are rallying again to stop a new source of choice.

The target this time is microschooling, a Covid-era alternative that has outlasted the pandemic. Key players in the movement will gather May 8–9, 2025, at the International Microschools Conference in Washington, D.C. I will join them.

Most likely, I will meet educators running all kinds of programs in all kinds of community spaces. Microschools blur the lines between home, public, and private schooling—combining elements from all three models.

The result is a fourth category of schooling that hinges on flexibility. Some parents pool their resources and hire outside instructors. Other groups rotate teaching duties among themselves, gathering daily or perhaps only once or twice per week. These are the do-it-yourselfers. Professionals also get involved with standalone enterprises and national networks.

4 ways community colleges can boost workforce development — from highereddive.com by Natalie Schwartz
Higher education leaders at this week’s ASU+GSV Summit gave advice for how two-year institutions can boost the economic mobility of their students.

SAN DIEGO — How can community colleges deliver economic mobility to their students?

College leaders at this week’s ASU+GSV Summit, an annual education and technology conference, got a glimpse into that answer as they heard how community colleges are building support from business and industry and strengthening workforce development.

These types of initiatives may be helping to boost public perception of the value of community colleges vs. four-year institutions.

Learning Ecosystems

Reflections on “May Brought Deep Cuts at Multiple Colleges” [Moody]

This Baltimore program shows how to fight generational poverty [Wen] + Lost boys, trapped men, and the role of lifers in prison education [West]

MOOC-Style Skills Training [Fain]

Outdated Microschool Laws Turn Parents into Criminals [Smith Ewing]

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