- Vechron: Anthropic Prepares for Potential 2026 IPO in Bid to Rival OpenAI: Report (Dec 3, 2025)
Anthropic hired Wilson Sonsini to begin IPO preparations possibly for 2026, aiming to list before OpenAI amid a private fundraising that could value it above $300 billion. It says no decision is final, has strengthened finance and governance, and faces heavy spending on data centres and model training. - Anthropic: Anthropic acquires Bun as Claude Code reaches $1B milestone (Dec 2, 2025)
Anthropic’s Claude Code, a leading AI model for developers, has reached $1 billion in run-rate revenue and is acquiring Bun, a high-performance JavaScript runtime, to enhance its capabilities. This acquisition aims to improve speed, stability, and workflows for Claude Code users by integrating Bun’s toolkit and optimizing the JavaScript developer experience. - WSJ: Millions of Coders Love This AI Startup. Can It Last? (Dec 1, 2025)
Cursor, an AI coding tool favored by tech leaders like Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, is experiencing rapid growth and is valued at $29.3 billion. Despite its popularity and impressive growth metrics, the company loses money, relies heavily on external AI models, and faces questions about its long-term sustainability in a competitive market. - Simon Willison’s Weblog: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document (Dec 2, 2025)
Richard Weiss extracted a 14,000-token “Soul overview” document from Claude 4.5 Opus, which Anthropic’s Amanda Askell confirmed was used to train the model’s personality during its training run using supervised learning. The “soul doc” outlines Anthropic’s mission to develop safe and beneficial AI, emphasizing good values, comprehensive knowledge, and wisdom for Claude, and even addresses topics like prompt injection attacks. - WSJ: Apple to Revamp AI Team After Announcing Top Executive’s Departure (Dec. 1, 2025)
Apple is restructuring its AI division after the retirement of its AI chief, John Giannandrea, whose tenure was marked by the company’s struggle to compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. - WSJ: This AI Startup Wants to Remake the $800 Billion Chip Industry (Dec. 2, 2025)
Two former Google researchers are launching Ricursive Intelligence, a startup aiming to automate chip design, potentially revolutionizing the $800 billion industry by enabling companies to create custom chips quickly and easily. - Anthropic: How AI is transforming work at Anthropic (Dec 2, 2025)
Anthropic surveyed engineers and analyzed Claude Code usage, finding Claude widely used—boosting productivity (~50%), enabling more full‑stack work, greater output, and new tasks while handling increasingly complex workflows autonomously. Employees nonetheless worry about skill atrophy, reduced collaboration and mentorship, and career uncertainty. - Mistral: Introducing Mistral 3 (Dec 2, 2025)
New models offer state-of-the-art performance, multimodal capabilities, and are designed for customization, with optimized versions available through collaborations with NVIDIA, vLLM, and Red Hat. - AP News: AI may be scoring your college essay. Welcome to the new era of admissions (Dec 1, 2025)
Colleges are increasingly using AI in the admissions process, primarily to streamline tasks like transcript review and essay evaluation, aiming to improve efficiency and consistency. - Anthropic: Claude for Nonprofits (Dec 2, 2025)
Anthropic, in partnership with GivingTuesday, is launching Claude for Nonprofits to help organizations maximize their impact through discounted access to Claude AI, connectors to nonprofit tools like Blackbaud and Benevity, and a free AI fluency course.
Blog
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Various (AI) Links – Dec. 3
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Google Gemini 3.0
Google released version 3.0 of Gemini on November 18 and a few days later released Nano Banana Pro, their image generating model. Both were quickly declared to be some of the best models, although Anthropic later released version 4.5 of their topline Opus model, reclaiming leadership by some accounts.
This chart from METR shows LLM task success rates for a longer task duration. The present leader is GPT 5.1 Codex Max at more than 30 minutes of non-supervised work. The previous version of Gemini (2.5) was able to work for ~10 minutes, so I expect that Gemini 3.0 will be near the leading edge in the coming weeks.
Progress continues for each of the major AI companies, and the developments in 2025 alone are remarkable. Gemini, with Google’s data-center and intellectual heft, is clearly well-positioned despite it’s earlier hallucinations and AI issues. OpenAI is reportedly alarmed by these tools and have declared “code red” to improve their product quickly.
Below, you’ll find some of the more interesting examples I’ve seen of Gemini / Nano Banana Pro.
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Solving Homework
From Andrej Karpathy:
Gemini Nano Banana Pro can solve exam questions *in* the exam page image. With doodles, diagrams, all that.
Gemini 3 Pro also scores a 100% on the Best in High School Math (AIME 2025) evaluation, a competitive high school math benchmark.
What does this mean? Are you a student struggling to understand your math assignment? Simply snap a photo of your assignment, and Gemini will complete the work for you. This could be helpful for understanding and checking work. But this could also be a very easy way to cheat, as I’ve read some reports that Gemini is able to replicate an individual’s handwriting style (meaning someone wouldn’t have to manually copy the work). For instructors, the idea of a student mastering take-home assignments may no longer be a viable indicator of learning.
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Infographics
From Grigory Sapunov, Visualizing Research: How I Use Gemini 3.0 to Turn Papers into Comics:
I asked Nano Banana Pro to generate a graphic novel telling the story and explaining the most important concepts based on a summary I provided. Here is the result:
Grigory’s post is fun and features a variety of comics with differing styles that communicate core ideas of very technical research. This, of course, won’t supplant the importance of original research, but it has the possibility of translating technical knowledge to the masses.
Google also provided some inspiration on ways to use Nano Banana Pro: (Prompt: Create an infographic about this plant focusing on interesting information.)
The prompt and image input are simple, and the generated infographic is interesting and full of helpful details. And best of all, it took a human very little time to create.
What does this mean? Are you in the business of communicating interesting but ultimately difficult-to-understand research? You can generate visuals to convey key ideas within complex research to media and students. Are you in the business of creating infographics? I suspect that if you’re exceptionally talented, you’ll continue your work without much interruption. But for middling designers, your business may dry up as people find more cost-effective ways to create supporting graphics.
Have you used Gemini 3.0 Pro yet? What are your observations of where the tool exceeds?
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Various (AI) Monday Links (Dec. 1)
- xAI: Grok 4.1 (Nov 17, 2025)
Grok 4.1 is a new model that significantly improves the usability of Grok, excelling in creative, emotional, and collaborative interactions while maintaining its sharp intelligence. - Simon Willison: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max (Nov 19, 2025)
OpenAI released GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, a new model designed for agentic coding tasks within the Codex environment, featuring “compaction” to handle long-context problems by pruning history while preserving important context. - Simon Willison: Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult (Nov 24, 2025)
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, aiming to reclaim the top spot for coding models, boasting improved capabilities, a new “effort” parameter, enhanced computer use tools, and preserved “thinking blocks.” - Simon Willison: LLM SVG Generation Benchmark (Nov 25, 2025)
Tom Gally created a project inspired by a previous SVG benchmark, using LLMs to generate SVGs from creative prompts like “an octopus operating a pipe organ.” - Simon Willison: Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data (Nov 25, 2025)
PromptArmor demonstrated a prompt injection vulnerability in Google’s Antigravity IDE, where a poisoned web page related to an “integration guide for an Oracle ERP API.” It instructs the AI to collect sensitive data like AWS credentials and exfiltrate it using a browser subagent to a malicious site. - TechCrunch: Hugging Face CEO says we’re in an ‘LLM bubble,’ not an AI bubble (Nov 18, 2025)
LLM marketplace, Hugging Face, CEO Clem Delangue believes the current AI hype is specifically an “LLM bubble” that is likely to burst, as the focus is too concentrated on large, general models. - NY Times Magazine: I’m a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse. (Nov 25, 2025)
Rotella shifted his teaching approach to emphasize uniquely human elements like in-class discussion, pen-and-paper exams, and focus on the writing process to foster critical thinking and engagement, arguing that this “AI-resistant” approach, focused on the value of human interaction and individual thought, counters the predicted academic apocalypse and better prepares students for a complex, ever-changing world.
- xAI: Grok 4.1 (Nov 17, 2025)
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Tuesday (AI) Links (Nov. 18)
- WSJ: These Small-Business Owners Are Putting AI to Good Use (Nov 15, 2025)
Small businesses are adopting generative AI tools to streamline operations, improve customer service, and boost marketing efforts. Examples include using AI for financial analysis, automating customer service responses, and generating website code, leading to potential cost savings and reduced hiring needs. - NY Times: A.I. Chatbots Are Changing How Patients Get Medical Advice (Nov 16, 2025)
Frustrated with the medical system’s shortcomings, patients are turning to AI chatbots for health advice, reshaping doctor-patient relationships, with some patients using AI-generated information to challenge or bypass their doctors. My take: if patients feel dismissed or in need of solutions, they’ll turn to alternative sources. If anything, this is a call for humility and research in medical sciences. - Futurism: People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners (Nov 15, 2025)
A new study reveals that some users of AI chatbots like Replika are developing deep, romantic relationships with their virtual partners, even roleplaying marriage, pregnancy, and homeownership. - NY Times: Europe Begins Rethinking Its Crackdown on Big Tech (Nov 17, 2025)
Once hailed by many as providing welcomed online privacy protections, the narrowly conceived GDPR has proven to stifle innovation, particularly in the AI sphere. This is a warning for policymakers everywhere that poorly written rules can cause more harm than good. - Fast Company: AI is killing privacy. We can’t let that happen (Nov 16, 2025)
While the EU considers lessening privacy regulation, others warn that tech companies are collecting and using our data in ways that could be harmful. The theology in this opinion piece is suspect, but concerns for privacy in an AI-driven world are unlikely to disappear any time soon. - Sean Goedecke: Only three kinds of AI products actually work (Nov 16, 2025)
The initial AI boom has led to only three types of useful LLM-based products: chatbots, completion tools like GitHub Copilot, and coding agents. - WSJ Opinion: When Will AI Elect a President? (Nov 16, 2025)
The future of media, driven by AI chatbots like ChatGPT Pulse, will be highly personalized and could be exploited by campaigns to target voters with unprecedented precision, raising concerns about manipulation and the commodification of attention. - NY Times: Jeff Bezos Creates A.I. Start-Up Where He Will Be Co-Chief Executive (Nov 17, 2025)
Project Prometheus will focus on applying AI to engineering and manufacturing in fields like computers, aerospace, and automobiles, positioning itself in the competitive AI landscape.
- WSJ: These Small-Business Owners Are Putting AI to Good Use (Nov 15, 2025)
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The Ups and Downs of AI
Financial
Last month, OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit public-benefit corporation lifted Microsoft’s valuation past $4T. CEO Sam Altman continues to travel the world for funding deals, and October was a busy month for him. Technology contrarian Ed Zitron calculates OpenAI’s cash needs over the next 12 months to be $400B, but Fed Chairman Powell dispels the connection between AI funding boom and Dotcom crash: “I won’t go into particular names, but they actually have earnings.” (Fortune).
Criticism abounded as OpenAI’s CFO opened a can of worms by suggesting government guarantees for data centers, only for Altman to walk these claims back. Critics of OpenAI are raising alarms.
Why does this matter?
If you have a retirement account, you’ll likely care about a potential stock market correction or crash. Aside from that, the financing of AI data centers has tentacles into other companies and industries (Oracle, Google, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, power companies, etc.), so downturns and bankruptcies would likely lead to market disruption. For higher education, there are considerations about AI model pricing, and stock market fluctuations can affect giving to non-profit organizations.
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AI & Productivity
Amazon & UPS announced layoffs at the end of last month. From Amazon SVP, Beth Galetti: “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).” Analyst Gil Luria suggests “companies appear to be making the cuts partly to hold their overall profit margins steady while they spend tens of billions of dollars on A.I. infrastructure like data centers. Cutting back on employees is a way to convince shareholders.”
But Luria also notes: “[w]e do think that at some point A.I. tools will allow us to enhance productivity to a point that we’re going to need less labor, but we’re not there yet, not in any significant way.” But another way of thinking about AI & productivity is not merely task augmentation but as something that enables creativity. From developer Aaron Boodman:
“Claude doesn’t make me much faster on the work that I am an expert on. Maybe 15-20% depending on the day. It’s the work that I don’t know how to do and would have to research.
Or the grunge work I don’t even want to do. On this it is hard to even put a number on.
Many of the projects I do with Claude day to day I just wouldn’t have done at all pre-Claude. Infinity% improvement in productivity on those.“
(Emphasis mine)
Why does this matter?
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the potential of a J curve for AI productivity gains is one that some economists suggest. Although productivity gains aren’t yet visible, there is growing anecdotal data to suggest structural changes in work, particularly in visual and technical fields.
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AI & Higher Education
Wharton Human-AI Research reported that many enterprises have incorporated AI tools into employees’ daily work and are no longer exploratory in nature.
Higher ed, meanwhile, is not using AI to the same degree. Only 2% of Student Success Leaders say their institutions are very effective at using AI. Their measure is subjective, but the picture is suggestive that AI adoption in higher education is slower than in industry (for good or for ill). Higher ed Leaders are exploring governance and policy, a task likely to be difficult for wrangling fast-moving AI technological advancements.
What does this matter?
Universities continue to explore using AI, but at a pace slower than industry. There are opportunities for universities to participate in both the conversations framing the use of AI and the practical use of the tools.
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Wednesday (AI) Links (Nov. 12)
- The Verge: OpenAI says the brand-new GPT-5.1 is ‘warmer’ and has more ‘personality’ options (Nov 12, 2025)
GPT-5.1 features two new models, GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking, designed to be smarter, faster, and more adaptable to user instructions. The update also includes expanded personality presets for conversational tone and experiments for fine-tuning ChatGPT’s style, aiming to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach after the initial GPT-5 release was met with underwhelming user reception and increased competition from Anthropic. - Anthropic: Anthropic invests $50 billion in American AI infrastructure (Nov 12, 2025)
Anthropic is partnering with Fluidstack to build data centers in Texas and New York. - NY Times: What Are Antidepressants Doing to Teen Sexual Development (Nov 12, 2025)
There is a risk of long-term sexual side effects of SSRI antidepressants, particularly when taken by teenagers, and this issue highlights the lack of research in this area. Anecdotal evidence points to a non-trivial number of people experiencing persistent sexual dysfunction (PSSD) even after discontinuing the medication, raising concerns that these drugs may disrupt the normal development of libido and sexuality in young people. - NY Times: How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’ (Nov 6, 2025)
AI tools and social media consumption may diminish cognitive performance, as some studies link their use to lower reading scores, decreased memory retention, and reliance on generic information. - WSJ: Meta AI Pioneer Has Discussed Leaving to Launch a Startup (Nov 11, 2025)
Yann LeCun, Meta’s AI chief, is reportedly considering leaving the company to start a startup focused on developing “world models,” a different approach from Meta’s current large language model strategy. - WSJ: The AI Boom Is Looking More and More Fragile (Nov 12, 2025)
Despite strong financial results from some companies, concerns about high capital spending and the lengthy investment timelines needed for generative AI are driving market fragility, but historical trends suggest this gloom may be temporary. - WSJ: Companies Begin to See a Return on AI Agents (Nov 12, 2025)
Early adopters like BNY and Walmart are seeing benefits, such as increased capacity, shortened production timelines, and improved productivity by using AI agents to automate tasks, improve decision-making, and ultimately impact their bottom line. - WSJ: Anthropic Is on Track to Turn a Profit Much Faster Than OpenAI (Nov 10, 2025)
Anthropic projects profitability by 2028 through a focus on business users and efficient resource management. - WSJ: What the U.S. Government Can Do to Help Win the AI Race (Nov 6, 2025)
According to Michael Kratsios, the Trump administration aimed to “win the AI race” by promoting American AI technology adoption globally through innovation, infrastructure development, and strategic diplomacy.
- The Verge: OpenAI says the brand-new GPT-5.1 is ‘warmer’ and has more ‘personality’ options (Nov 12, 2025)
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Monday (AI) Links (Nov. 10)
- NY Times: Gamma, a PowerPoint for the A.I. Era, Raises $68 Million (Nov 10, 2025)
A five-year-old (and profitable) AI startup that helps users quickly create presentations and other content has raised $68 million in new funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $2.1 billion. - NY Times: Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings (Nov 7, 2025)
Lawyers are using AI to draft legal briefs, leading to a rise in fabricated case citations, but a group of legal professionals are tracking and publicizing these errors in an effort to hold lawyers accountable and deter further misuse. - NY Times: Inside Three Longterm Relationships With A.I. Chatbots (Nov 5, 2025)
Some view these relationships as potentially harmful, while others find them therapeutic and a source of comfort. My take: beware of replacing relationships with technology. - Fast Company: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is (Nov 7, 2025)
Perhaps layoffs are more related to capital expenditures than productivity gains. - WSJ: These AI Power Users Are Impressing Bosses and Leaving Co-Workers in the Dust (Nov 5, 2025)
Some individuals are investing time in learning how to effectively prompt and train AI assistants, ultimately becoming invaluable resources and demonstrating their value in an era of potential job automation. - WSJ: AI Is Accelerating Tech Giants’ Dominance of the Ad Market (Nov 5, 2025)
The rich get richer: AI is enhancing ad targeting on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, solidifying their dominance in the advertising market. - WSJ: Microsoft’s Dealings With OpenAI Still Need a Lot More Sunlight (Nov 10, 2025)
The lack of transparency makes it difficult for investors to assess the true impact of the OpenAI relationship on Microsoft’s financial statements and whether transactions are conducted fairly. - NY Times: Mass Layoffs Are Scary, but Probably Not a Sign of the A.I. Apocalypse (Nov 7, 2025)
“[C]ompanies appear to be making the cuts partly to hold their overall profit margins steady while they spend tens of billions of dollars on A.I. infrastructure like data centers.” - NY Times Opinion: A.I. Is on Its Way to Something Even More Remarkable Than Intelligence (Nov 8, 2025)
“A.I. is no less a form of intelligence than digital photography is a form of photography.” - WSJ: The Week the AI Boom Got a Reality Check on Wall Street (Nov 7, 2025)
Concerns about overspending on AI initiatives, a prolonged government shutdown, and weakening consumer sentiment contributed to the market’s unease, overshadowing some positive economic data.
- NY Times: Gamma, a PowerPoint for the A.I. Era, Raises $68 Million (Nov 10, 2025)
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Friday (AI) Links (Nov. 7)
- Gary Marcus: OpenAI probably can’t make ends meet. That’s where you come in. (Nov. 5, 2025)
Sam Altman got defensive when questioned about the company’s significant debt and questionable revenue, hinting at future growth without concrete details. Now, OpenAI’s CFO is suggesting that the U.S. government should subsidize AI development to compete with China, effectively asking taxpayers to bail out the company’s financial risks. (Altman’s reply is below) - Sam Altman: Government Guarantees (Nov. 7, 2025)
Altman doesn’t want governmental guarantees for data centers, and he remains bullish on OpenAI’s prospects to generate revenue over the next 8 years. I still expect to see ChatGPT prices rise significantly in the next 3-4 years, even for consumers. - The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives: How neuroscientists are using AI (Nov. 3, 2025)
Researchers developed CellTransformer, an AI model inspired by LLMs, to analyze spatial genomics data and predict a cell’s molecular features based on its surrounding cellular context. - WSJ: I Loved Being Social. Then I Started Talking to a Chatbot. (Nov. 2, 2025)
An extrovert details how consistent interaction with an AI chatbot, intended for productivity and brainstorming, led to social isolation and a decline in her ability to connect with people. “Indeed, on the days when I talked to AI for a few hours, I was all talked out by the evening, with neither the craving nor the energy (nor the practical need) to have an extended human conversation.” - Inside Higher Ed: Higher Ed Tech Leaders Pursue Consolidation and Savings (Oct 31, 2025)
Higher education technology leaders expressed caution about investing in new AI technologies due to budget constraints and staffing limitations, emphasizing the need for clear ROI and strategic planning. - arXiv.org: A Definition of AGI (Oct 25, 2025)
Exploring a quantifiable framework for defining and measuring Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) based on the cognitive abilities of a well-educated adult, using the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory of human cognition. The framework assesses AI systems across ten core cognitive domains using adapted psychometric batteries, revealing that current models have strengths in knowledge but weaknesses in areas like long-term memory. The resulting AGI scores, like GPT-5 at 57%, highlight the progress and remaining gap towards achieving true AGI. - Simon Willison: A quote from Nathan Lambert (Nov 6, 2025)
Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are quickly gaining recognition and catching up to the performance of leading models. This shift indicates a growing concentration of cutting-edge AI development in China. - Anthropic: A statement from Dario Amodei on Anthropic’s commitment to American AI leadership (Oct 21, 2025)
Anthropic is committed to AI development in the US while emphasizing its commitment to political neutrality and responsible AI deployment, aiming to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing potential harms. - Midland Reporter-Telegram: Wind, solar fastest growing contributors to ERCOT (Nov. 4, 2025)
ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) experienced the fastest electricity demand growth among U.S. grids between 2024 and 2025. - Anthropic: Cognizant will make Claude available to 350,000 employees, accelerating enterprise AI adoption and internal transformation (Nov. 4, 2025)
This collaboration will focus on improving software engineering productivity, modernizing legacy systems, and building agentified solutions across various industries, starting with Financial Services. - ETCFO.com: 74% of CEOs worry AI failures could cost them their jobs: Report (Mar. 12, 2025)
The report highlights growing concerns about executive accountability, AI strategy execution, and the risks associated with overlooking critical governance and regulatory aspects of AI adoption. - Google Research: Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design (Nov. 4, 2025)
Google’s Project Suncatcher aims to build a space-based AI infrastructure using solar-powered satellites equipped with Google TPUs and high-bandwidth optical links. This project addresses key challenges like inter-satellite communication, orbital dynamics, and radiation tolerance, with plans for a learning mission involving prototype satellites by 2027. - Reddit: [OC] Share of AI Companies by Y Combinator Funding Batch (2005-2025) (Nov. 4, 2025)
The vast majority of Y Combinator funding is for AI-adjacent companies. - Lukew: AI Has Flipped Software Development (Jul 27, 2025)
AI coding agents are drastically accelerating software development, allowing engineers to build features much faster than designers can refine them, effectively flipping the traditional design-to-build process. - GenAI Image Showdown: GenAI Image Showdown (Nov 30, -0001)
A comparison of state-of-the-art generative image models, evaluating their performance on specific prompts designed to test adherence to complex instructions and concepts. T
- Gary Marcus: OpenAI probably can’t make ends meet. That’s where you come in. (Nov. 5, 2025)
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Various (AI) Links (Nov. 6)
- WSJ: Microsoft Lays Out Ambitious AI Vision, Free From OpenAI (Nov 6, 2025)
Microsoft is reorganizing its AI efforts to focus on developing “superintelligence,” or AI with capabilities exceeding human performance. This includes forming a new MAI Superintelligence Team. - Simon Willison’s Weblog: Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex (Nov 6, 2025)
“It turns out coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are a fantastic fit for this kind of work as well. Give them the right goal and a useful environment and they’ll churn through a basic research project without any further supervision.” - OpenAI Help Center: Publishers and Developers – FAQ | OpenAI Help Center (Oct 21, 2025)
To have your website appear in ChatGPT search results, ensure you aren’t blocking the OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt file and use the noindex meta tag if you don’t want your page title and link surfaced. Developers can improve website performance with ChatGPT Agent in Atlas by using ARIA tags to improve accessibility. - Inside Higher Ed: Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, DEI (Nov 6, 2025)
“Just 2 percent of student success leaders say their institution is very effective in helping students understand how, when, and whether to use generative artificial intelligence in academic settings.” - The Chronicle of Higher Education: AI on Campus: Emerging Governance Models (Oct 29, 2025)
University leaders are exploring questions of AI governance, strategy, education, and accountability. A tension between creativity/innovation and risk/governance exists, but universities will have to navigate this (quickly) as the AI rollout continues unabated. - Electrek: Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity (Nov 4, 2025)
The Australian government is proposing a “Solar Sharer” program that would provide free electricity to all ratepayers for at least three hours a day, leveraging the abundance of midday solar power and negative wholesale electricity rates. - Fortune: CEO of $8 billion AI company says it’s ‘mind-boggling’ that people think you can work 38 hours a week, have work-life balance, and be successful | Fortune (Oct 13, 2025)
Prominent business leaders, including the CEO of Cerebras, Andrew Feldman, are dispelling the idea of work-life balance as a requirement for achieving extraordinary success. My take: there’s more to success than power or money, and you ought to invest much of your life into people who simply can’t replace you after you die. - WSJ: Why AI Will Widen the Gap Between Superstars and Everybody Else (Oct 12, 2025)
AI will amplify the advantages of top-performing employees (“superstars”) rather than leveling the playing field, as these individuals are better equipped to leverage AI due to their expertise, work habits, and preferential treatment. - Jack Clark: Import AI 431: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear (Oct 13, 2025)
AI systems should be acknowledged as real and complex entities, not dismissed as simple tools. Understanding and mastering our fears about them is crucial for peaceful coexistence and harnessing their potential. - Torrentfreak: Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blocking Efforts Are Digital Trade Barriers (Nov 6, 2025)
Cloudflare is reporting foreign site-blocking measures, intended to combat piracy, as significant trade barriers for US technology companies. This is a shift from previous years where copyright holders were advocating for more site-blocking.
- WSJ: Microsoft Lays Out Ambitious AI Vision, Free From OpenAI (Nov 6, 2025)
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Tuesday AI Links (Nov. 4)
- MIT Technology Review: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time (Oct 30, 2025)
The concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has become a pervasive myth in Silicon Valley, similar to a conspiracy theory, driving the AI industry and influencing global economics. This AGI narrative, promising both utopian and dystopian futures, distracts from practical AI applications and justifies massive resource allocation towards an undefined and potentially unattainable goal. My take: mankind is naturally spiritual, and humans throughout the ages have searched for the numinous. - WSJ Opinion: A New York School Finds a Way Around AI (Nov 4, 2025)
To combat the growing use of AI in academic work and ensure authenticity, some New York City high schools are reinstating in-person, handwritten essays as part of their admissions process. - The Chronicle of Higher Education Opinion: AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It. (Nov 4, 2025)
Instead of resisting, higher education should actively shape AI development, particularly in areas requiring specialized knowledge and guidance, to maintain intellectual leadership and ensure equitable access to knowledge. - Anthropic: Anthropic and Iceland announce one of the world’s first national AI education pilots (Nov 4, 2025)
Anthropic and Iceland’s Ministry of Education are partnering to launch a nationwide AI education pilot program, providing teachers across Iceland with access to Anthropic’s Claude AI tool. The initiative aims to explore how AI can benefit Icelandic schools by supporting teachers in lesson preparation, enhancing instruction, and improving student learning while preserving Icelandic language and culture. - WSJ Opinion: AI and the Coming White-Collar Political Upheaval (Nov 4, 2025)
AI is rapidly transforming the economy, leading to significant investments by tech giants and a potential wave of white-collar layoffs as companies automate processes. - WSJ: Tesla Is Obsessed With Musk’s Pay Package. Musk Is Obsessed With AI. (Nov 4, 2025)
“The Tesla board has made clear that it believes the company can’t afford to lose Musk, and that the monster pay package is necessary to keep him focused on Tesla.” - Tyler Cowen: The American economy is showing its flexibility – Marginal REVOLUTION (Nov 3, 2025)
While the existence of an AI bubble is a short-term concern, the long-term trend reveals America’s ability to reallocate capital on a massive scale, positioning itself as a leader in AI development with a significant share of global compute. This unprecedented shift resembles the scale of resource mobilization seen during World War II.
- MIT Technology Review: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time (Oct 30, 2025)