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.
.



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.

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.

“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


 

 

..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

  1. 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.

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.

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
.


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

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 — 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.

 

Reflections on “Are You Ready for the AI University? Everything is about to change.” [Latham]

.
Are You Ready for the AI University? Everything is about to change. — from chronicle.com by Scott Latham

Over the course of the next 10 years, AI-powered institutions will rise in the rankings. US News & World Report will factor a college’s AI capabilities into its calculations. Accrediting agencies will assess the degree of AI integration into pedagogy, research, and student life. Corporations will want to partner with universities that have demonstrated AI prowess. In short, we will see the emergence of the AI haves and have-nots.

What’s happening in higher education today has a name: creative destruction. The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term in 1942 to describe how innovation can transform industries. That typically happens when an industry has both a dysfunctional cost structure and a declining value proposition. Both are true of higher education.

Out of the gate, professors will work with technologists to get AI up to speed on specific disciplines and pedagogy. For example, AI could be “fed” course material on Greek history or finance and then, guided by human professors as they sort through the material, help AI understand the structure of the discipline, and then develop lectures, videos, supporting documentation, and assessments.

In the near future, if a student misses class, they will be able watch a recording that an AI bot captured. Or the AI bot will find a similar lecture from another professor at another accredited university. If you need tutoring, an AI bot will be ready to help any time, day or night. Similarly, if you are going on a trip and wish to take an exam on the plane, a student will be able to log on and complete the AI-designed and administered exam. Students will no longer be bound by a rigid class schedule. Instead, they will set the schedule that works for them.

Early and mid-career professors who hope to survive will need to adapt and learn how to work with AI. They will need to immerse themselves in research on AI and pedagogy and understand its effect on the classroom. 

From DSC:
I had a very difficult time deciding which excerpts to include. There were so many more excerpts for us to think about with this solid article. While I don’t agree with several things in it, EVERY professor, president, dean, and administrator working within higher education today needs to read this article and seriously consider what Scott Latham is saying.

Change is already here, but according to Scott, we haven’t seen anything yet. I agree with him and, as a futurist, one has to consider the potential scenarios that Scott lays out for AI’s creative destruction of what higher education may look like. Scott asserts that some significant and upcoming impacts will be experienced by faculty members, doctoral students, and graduate/teaching assistants (and Teaching & Learning Centers and IT Departments, I would add). But he doesn’t stop there. He brings in presidents, deans, and other members of the leadership teams out there.

There are a few places where Scott and I differ.

  • The foremost one is the importance of the human element — i.e., the human faculty member and students’ learning preferences. I think many (most?) students and lifelong learners will want to learn from a human being. IBM abandoned their 5-year, $100M ed push last year and one of the key conclusions was that people want to learn from — and with — other people:

To be sure, AI can do sophisticated things such as generating quizzes from a class reading and editing student writing. But the idea that a machine or a chatbot can actually teach as a human can, he said, represents “a profound misunderstanding of what AI is actually capable of.” 

Nitta, who still holds deep respect for the Watson lab, admits, “We missed something important. At the heart of education, at the heart of any learning, is engagement. And that’s kind of the Holy Grail.”

— Satya Nitta, a longtime computer researcher at
IBM’s Watson
Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY
.

By the way, it isn’t easy for me to write this. As I wanted AI and other related technologies to be able to do just what IBM was hoping that it would be able to do.

  • Also, I would use the term learning preferences where Scott uses the term learning styles.

Scott also mentions:

“In addition, faculty members will need to become technologists as much as scholars. They will need to train AI in how to help them build lectures, assessments, and fine-tune their classroom materials. Further training will be needed when AI first delivers a course.”

It has been my experience from working with faculty members for over 20 years that not all faculty members want to become technologists. They may not have the time, interest, and/or aptitude to become one (and vice versa for technologists who likely won’t become faculty members).

That all said, Scott relays many things that I have reflected upon and relayed for years now via this Learning Ecosystems blog and also via The Learning from the Living [AI-Based Class] Room vision — the use of AI to offer personalized and job-relevant learning, the rising costs of higher education, the development of new learning-related offerings and credentials at far less expensive prices, the need to provide new business models and emerging technologies that are devoted more to lifelong learning, plus several other things.

So this article is definitely worth your time to read, especially if you are working in higher education or are considering a career therein!


Addendum later on 4/10/25:

U-M’s Ross School of Business, Google Public Sector launch virtual teaching assistant pilot program — from news.umich.edu by Jeff Karoub; via Paul Fain

Google Public Sector and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business have launched an advanced Virtual Teaching Assistant pilot program aimed at improving personalized learning and enlightening educators on artificial intelligence in the classroom.

The AI technology, aided by Google’s Gemini chatbot, provides students with all-hours access to support and self-directed learning. The Virtual TA represents the next generation of educational chatbots, serving as a sophisticated AI learning assistant that instructors can use to modify their specific lessons and teaching styles.

The Virtual TA facilitates self-paced learning for students, provides on-demand explanations of complex course concepts, guides them through problem-solving, and acts as a practice partner. It’s designed to foster critical thinking by never giving away answers, ensuring students actively work toward solutions.

 

The 2025 AI Index Report — from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Lab (hai.stanford.edu); item via The Neuron

Top Takeaways

  1. AI performance on demanding benchmarks continues to improve.
  2. AI is increasingly embedded in everyday life.
  3. Business is all in on AI, fueling record investment and usage, as research continues to show strong productivity impacts.
  4. The U.S. still leads in producing top AI models—but China is closing the performance gap.
  5. The responsible AI ecosystem evolves—unevenly.
  6. Global AI optimism is rising—but deep regional divides remain.
  7. …and several more

Also see:

The Neuron’s take on this:

So, what should you do? You really need to start trying out these AI tools. They’re getting cheaper and better, and they can genuinely help save time or make work easier—ignoring them is like ignoring smartphones ten years ago.

Just keep two big things in mind:

  1. Making the next super-smart AI costs a crazy amount of money and uses tons of power (seriously, they’re buying nuclear plants and pushing coal again!).
  2. Companies are still figuring out how to make AI perfectly safe and fair—cause it still makes mistakes.

So, use the tools, find what helps you, but don’t trust them completely.

We’re building this plane mid-flight, and Stanford’s report card is just another confirmation that we desperately need better safety checks before we hit major turbulence.


Addendum on 4/16:

 

The 2025 ABA Techshow Startup Alley Pitch Competition Ended In A Tie – Here Are The Winners — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi

This year, two startups ended up with an equal number of votes for the top spot:

  • Case Crafter, a company from Norway that helps legal professionals build compelling visual timelines based on case files and evidence.
  • Querious, a product that provides attorneys with real-time insights during client conversations into legal issues, relevant content, and suggested questions and follow-ups.
    .


AI academy gives law students a head start on legal tech, says OBA innovator — from canadianlawyermag.com by Branislav Urosevic

The Ontario Bar Association has recently launched a hands-on AI learning platform tailored for lawyers. Called the AI Academy, the initiative is designed to help legal professionals explore, experiment with, and adopt AI tools relevant to their practice.

Colin Lachance, OBA’s innovator-in-residence and the lead designer of the platform, says that although the AI Academy was built for practising lawyers, it is also well-suited for law students.


 

It’s the end of work as we knew it
and I feel…

powerless to fight the technology that we pioneered
nostalgic for a world that moved on without us
after decades of paying our dues
for a payday that never came
…so yeah
not exactly fine.


The Gen X Career Meltdown — from nytimes.com by Steeven Kurutz (DSC: This is a gifted article for you)
Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.

If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.

“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.

Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.

In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5 percent of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.


From DSC:
This article reminds me of how tough it is to navigate change in our lives. For me, it was often due to the fact that I was working with technologies. Being a technologist can be difficult, especially as one gets older and faces age discrimination in a variety of industries. You need to pick the right technologies and the directions that will last (for me it was email, videoconferencing, the Internet, online-based education/training, discovering/implementing instructional technologies, and becoming a futurist).

For you younger folks out there — especially students within K-16 — aim to develop a perspective and a skillset that is all about adapting to change. You will likely need to reinvent yourself and/or pick up new skills over your working years. You are most assuredly required to be a lifelong learner now. That’s why I have been pushing for school systems to be more concerned with providing more choice and control to students — so that students actually like school and enjoy learning about new things.


 

 

The Third Horizon of Learning Shifting beyond the Industrial Model — from gettingsmart.com by Sujata Bhatt & Mason Pashia

Over 24 blog posts, we have sketched a bold vision of what this next horizon of education looks like in action and highlighted the many innovators working to bring it to life. These pioneers are building new models that prioritize human development, relationships, and real-world relevance as most valuable. They are forging partnerships, designing and adopting transformative technologies, developing new assessment methods, and more. These shifts transform the lived experiences of young people and serve the needs of families and communities. In short, they are delivering authentic learning experiences that better address the demands of today’s economy, society, and learners.

We’ve aggregated our findings from this blog series and turned it into an H3 Publication. Inside, you’ll find our key transformation takeaways for school designers and system leaders, as well as a full list of the contributing authors. Thank you to all of the contributors, including LearnerStudio for sponsoring the series and Sujata Bhatt at Incubate Learning for authorship, editing and curation support throughout the entirety of the series and publication.
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Online higher education is projected to pass an impressive if little-noticed milestone this year: For the first time, more American college students will be learning entirely online than will be learning 100 percent in person.


Most college students are taking online classes, but they’re paying just as much as in-person students — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus
Rather than lowering the price, some universities use online courses to subsidize everything else

Online higher education is projected to pass an impressive if little-noticed milestone this year: For the first time, more American college students will be learning entirely online than will be learning 100 percent in person.

Bittner’s confusion about the price is widespread. Eighty percent of Americans think online learning after high school should cost less than in-person programs, according to a 2024 survey of 1,705 adults by New America.


 

 

From DSC:
Look out Google, Amazon, and others! Nvidia is putting the pedal to the metal in terms of being innovative and visionary! They are leaving the likes of Apple in the dust.

The top talent out there is likely to go to Nvidia for a while. Engineers, programmers/software architects, network architects, product designers, data specialists, AI researchers, developers of robotics and autonomous vehicles, R&D specialists, computer vision specialists, natural language processing experts, and many more types of positions will be flocking to Nvidia to work for a company that has already changed the world and will likely continue to do so for years to come. 



NVIDIA’s AI Superbowl — from theneurondaily.com by Noah and Grant
PLUS: Prompt tips to make AI writing more natural

That’s despite a flood of new announcements (here’s a 16 min video recap), which included:

  1. A new architecture for massive AI data centers (now called “AI factories”).
  2. A physics engine for robot training built with Disney and DeepMind.
  3. partnership with GM to develop next-gen vehicles, factories and robots.
  4. A new Blackwell chip with “Dynamo” software that makes AI reasoning 40x faster than previous generations.
  5. A new “Rubin” chip slated for 2026 and a “Feynman” chip set for 2028.

For enterprises, NVIDIA unveiled DGX Spark and DGX Station—Jensen’s vision of AI-era computing, bringing NVIDIA’s powerful Blackwell chip directly to your desk.


Nvidia Bets Big on Synthetic Data — from wired.com by Lauren Goode
Nvidia has acquired synthetic data startup Gretel to bolster the AI training data used by the chip maker’s customers and developers.


Nvidia, xAI to Join BlackRock and Microsoft’s $30 Billion AI Infrastructure Fund — from investopedia.com by Aaron McDade
Nvidia and xAI are joining BlackRock and Microsoft in an AI infrastructure group seeking $30 billion in funding. The group was first announced in September as BlackRock and Microsoft sought to fund new data centers to power AI products.



Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says we’ll soon see 1 million GPU data centers visible from space — from finance.yahoo.com by Daniel Howley
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company is preparing for 1 million GPU data centers.


Nvidia stock stems losses as GTC leaves Wall Street analysts ‘comfortable with long term AI demand’ — from finance.yahoo.com by Laura Bratton
Nvidia stock reversed direction after a two-day slide that saw shares lose 5% as the AI chipmaker’s annual GTC event failed to excite investors amid a broader market downturn.


Microsoft, Google, and Oracle Deepen Nvidia Partnerships. This Stock Got the Biggest GTC Boost. — from barrons.com by Adam Clark and Elsa Ohlen


The 4 Big Surprises from Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI’ GTC Keynote — from barrons.com by Tae Kim; behind a paywall

AI Super Bowl. Hi everyone. This week, 20,000 engineers, scientists, industry executives, and yours truly descended upon San Jose, Calif. for Nvidia’s annual GTC developers’ conference, which has been dubbed the “Super Bowl of AI.”


 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian