Thursday, February 20, 2025

Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants

New BBC research published today provides a warning around the use of AI assistants to answer questions about news, with factual errors and the misrepresentation of source material affecting AI assistants.

The findings are concerning, and show:

51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form
19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates
13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article.

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A new operating model for people management: More personal, more tech, more human - McKinsey

The way organizations manage their most important assets—their people—is ready for a fundamental transformation. New technologies, hybrid working practices, multigenerational workforces, heightened geopolitical risks, and other major disruptions are prompting leaders to rethink their methods for attracting, developing, and retaining employees. In the past year alone, for instance, we have seen more and more companies adopt, innovate, and invest in technology—particularly in gen AI—in ways that have spurred more changes to people operations than we have observed in the past decade.

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Colleges rebrand humanities majors as job-friendly - Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report

The number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities at the University of Arizona has increased 76 percent since 2018, when it introduced a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities that connects the humanities with programs in business, engineering, medicine and other fields. It also hired a humanities recruitment director and marketing team and started training faculty members to enlist students in the major with the promise that an education in the humanities leads to jobs. That’s an uncharacteristic role for humanities professors, who have tended to resist suggestions that it’s their role to ready students for the workforce. But it’s become an existential one.

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Thinking Out Loud With AI - Ray Schroeder Inside Higher Ed

I had the pleasure recently to participate in a lifelong learning session with a group of mostly current or retired educators at my nearby Lincoln Land Community College. The topic was AI in education. It became clear to me that many in our field are challenged to keep up with the rapidly emerging developments in AI. While OpenAI's latest version of Deep Research is not available to the general public at this time, online demonstrations show that this very powerful tool conducts both reasoning and far-reaching analysis. It puts us on the cusp of artificial general intelligence. In addition, with the advent of new competitors both here and abroad, we are seeing new options for open-source models and alternative approaches. As these become more efficient and reliable, prices are headed lower while features continue to expand. The vision of AGI seems only months, not years, away. How are these highly advanced tools going to  be used by your university to enhance teaching, learning, research and other mission-centric tasks? 

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Sam Altman says AI is progressing faster than Moore’s law as he predicts AGI is ‘coming into view’, and it's leaving me worried about the future - Graham Barlow, Tech Radar

Altman’s point is that the falling cost of using AI is another indicator that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is “coming into view”. AGI is an artificial intelligence that is on a par with, or smarter than, human intelligence, and developing it is the whole reason that companies like OpenAI exist because the benefits of AGI could be truly world-changing, despite the dangers that we keep getting warned about. It’s worth reading the whole of Sam Altman's blog post because it very much reads like a warning that the future is coming sooner than we think and that we really start to need to prepare for how the world is going to change. 

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An Insider's Guide to How Students Use GenAI - Miriam Wun & Nah Yong En, Times Higher Ed

Last year, we talked to students across a range of disciplines, on what they thought of using GenAI tools in their studies. Some of the ways they were using the tools, we discovered, were pretty useful. But some students felt that they were getting too reliant on technology. We asked them about how they crafted prompts, navigated assignments, tackled research and, yes, occasionally misused these tools. Here, we’ll outline our findings – and identify how educators can make the most of GenAI.

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Driver vehicle crashes and mental health challenges among commuter college students - Louis A. Merlin, Journal of Transport and Health

We examine the relationship between commuter college students’ mental health and their driver vehicle crashes. Poor mental health, depression, insomnia, and constrained activity are positively correlated with being in a crash while driving. Caring for an adult at home was also associated with being in a crash, while higher GPA was negatively associated. Colleges may find that providing accessible mental health services could reduce student crash risk. On-campus housing and transit passes should be prioritized for disadvantaged commuter student populations.

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‘Self-inflicted wound’: Widespread alarm as Trump administration slashes NIH funding - Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive

A coalition of 22 attorneys general filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday seeking to block the National Institutes of Health’s newly announced research funding cuts. NIH announced Friday it would cut roughly $4 billion a year worth of funding for indirect research costs such as administration and facilities — by capping reimbursement for these expenses at 15% for current and new grants. Research institutions have previously negotiated individual indirect cost rates, with an average of 27% to 28%, NIH said. Organizations, universities and researchers quickly raised alarms about the cuts, warning they could hurt important medical research and the economy.

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Does OpenAI's Deep Research signal the end of human-only scholarship? - Andrew Maynard, The Future of Being Human

This past Sunday, OpenAI launched Deep Research — an extension of its growing platform of AI tools, and one which the company claims is an “agent that can do work for you independently … at the level of a research analyst.” I got access to the new tool first thing yesterday morning, and immediately put it to work on a project I’ve been meaning to explore for some time: writing a comprehensive framing paper on navigating advanced technology transitions. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but I didn’t anticipate being impressed as much as I was. I’m well aware of the debates and discussions around whether current advances in AI are substantial, or merely smoke and mirrors hype. But even given the questions and limitations here, I find myself beginning to question the value of human-only scholarship in the emerging age of AI. And my experiences with Deep Research have only enhanced this.

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Monday, February 17, 2025

‘Shortsighted’ and ‘Dangerous’: Colleges Warn of Budget Cuts After NIH Slashes Medical Research Funding - Katherine Knott and Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed

The National Institutes of Health’s plan to cut funding for colleges’ “indirect costs” of conducting medical research, which includes hazardous waste disposal, utilities and patient safety, could cost institutions billions. Advocates and researchers also warned that the cuts would undermine key research life-saving medical advancements. “While this retrenchment may seem like a good deal for taxpayers, the truth is that without a federal partner to share some of the costs of innovation, ground-breaking research, and life-changing medical advances, these costs will fall directly and indirectly on current students or bring this vital work to a halt,” Kara Freeman, president of National Association of College and University Business Officers, said in a statement.

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GPT-5 Will Be Smarter Than Me: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman - Office Chai

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that GPT-5 — the company’s upcoming large language model — will be smarter than he is. “How many people feel they are smarter than GPT 4? ” he asked the audience at an event, and several hands went up. “Okay, how many of you think you’re still going to be smarter than GPT 5?” he asked, and slightly fewer hands went up. “I don’t think I’m going to be smarter than GPT 5,” Altman declared.

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Tennessee State University could run out of cash this spring without help - Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive

Tennessee State University is looking for help from state lawmakers as it tries both to stay afloat and to revamp its operations and finances for the long term. The public historically Black institution is on pace to run out of cash by April or May, Interim President Dwayne Tucker said Tuesday at a meeting hosted by Black Caucus members in the state Legislature. TSU intends to present a five-year turnaround plan to the Legislature. Operations through the first year of the plan could be financed by removing restrictions on roughly $150 million out of $250 million the state previously set aside for university infrastructure, Tucker noted.

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Sunday, February 16, 2025

Interns Impacted by Hiring Freeze Left ‘In Limbo’ - Johanna Alonso, Inside Higher Ed

The hiring freeze appears to have forced federal agencies to cancel numerous internships; most prominently, thousands of legal internships and entry-level positions within the Department of Justice and beyond have been impacted, according to reports on social media and in news outlet like Reuters and Law360. “We’ve most definitely seen impacts of the federal hiring freeze and subsequent actions related to college recruiting and internships. We’re hearing from colleges that there have been internships that have been canceled and we have heard that federal agencies have pulled out of going onto campuses to recruit,” said Shawn VanDerziel, executive director of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, an advocacy group for campus career centers and the businesses that work with them. “I would hope once the dust settles over the coming weeks and months that we will have many more answers and that the trajectory will be more positive.”

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Google Rolls Back AI Promises and DEI Measures as Staff Ask, ‘Are We the Bad Guys Now?’ - Kit Eaton, Inc.

Google used to have an ethical promise baked into its AI guidelines that forbade the technology giant from using AI to build weapons, surveillance systems, or things that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” It was a comforting notion to Google’s staff and the general public, given the billions the company spends on cutting-edge research and development. It even smacked of some famous science-fiction safety mantras like Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics, which forbid smart tech injuring human beings. But Google just refreshed its rules and deleted these clauses. As Business Insider reports, this has upset some Googlers, who have taken to internal discussion boards to vent their concerns. As Google also moves to unwind some long-held U.S. workforce diversity and equality policies, the question arises: How will Google’s workers react to big cultural shifts that may change the feel of working for the company?

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OpenAI now reveals more of its o3-mini model’s thought process - Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch

In response to pressure from rivals including Chinese AI company DeepSeek, OpenAI is changing the way its newest AI model, o3-mini, communicates its step-by-step “thought” process. On Thursday, OpenAI announced that free and paid users of ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform, will see an updated “chain of thought” that shows more of the model’s “reasoning” steps and how it arrived at answers to questions. Subscribers to premium ChatGPT plans who use o3-mini in the “high reasoning” configuration will also see this updated readout, according to OpenAI.


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Saturday, February 15, 2025

Poll Finds Abolishing the Education Department ‘Wildly Unpopular’ - Sara Weissman, Inside Higher Ed

The majority of likely voters oppose abolishing the U.S. Department of Education by executive order, according to a new poll conducted by the progressive think tank Data for Progress, on behalf of the Student Borrower Protection Center and Groundwork Collaborative, a left-wing advocacy group. The poll found 61 percent of all survey respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed the idea of eliminating the department, compared to 64 percent of likely voters under the age of 45 and 59 percent above age 45. Among likely voters who attended college, 70 percent opposed the plan, compared to 57 percent who didn’t attend college.

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College Presidents’ Survey Finds Alarm Over Trump - Josh Moody, Inside Higher Ed

The majority of college presidents surveyed by Inside Higher Ed believe the Trump administration will have a negative impact on the sector. Many are still optimistic. Even before President Donald Trump unleashed a flurry of executive orders involving higher education, college and university presidents expressed serious concerns about his possible impact on the sector and on their own institutions. That’s according to findings released today from Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents with Hanover Research. More than half of presidents surveyed in December and early January—51 percent—at that point believed Trump’s second administration would have a somewhat or significant negative impact on the regulatory environment for higher education.

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Amazon reportedly gears up to release next-gen Alexa - Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch

Per a Reuters report, Amazon plans to preview an upgraded version of Alexa, the company’s smart home assistant that runs on a number of first- and third-party devices, at an event on February 26. The revamped Alexa is said to be able to respond to multiple commands in sequence, in contrast with the current iteration, which generally handles only a single request at a time. 'The new Alexa will initially be available for a limited number of users for free, Reuters reports, although Amazon has been considering a $5 to $10 monthly fee. The company will reportedly continue to offer what it’s calling “Classic Alexa,” the version of Alexa widely available today, in either case.

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Friday, February 14, 2025

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns: AI will match ‘country of geniuses’ by 2026 - Michael Nuñez, Venture Beat

AI will match the collective intelligence of “a country of geniuses” within two years, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned in a sharp critique of this week’s AI Action Summit in Paris. His timeline — targeting 2026 or 2027 — marks one of the most specific predictions yet from a major AI leader about the technology’s advancement toward superintelligence. Amodei labeled the Paris summit a “missed opportunity,” challenging the international community’s leisurely pace toward AI governance. His warning arrives at a pivotal moment, as democratic and authoritarian nations compete for dominance in AI development.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-warns-ai-will-match-country-of-geniuses-by-2026/

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ChatGPT Search is now free for everyone, no OpenAI account required – is it time to ditch Google? - John-Anthony Disotto, Tech Radar

ChatGPT Search no longer requires an OpenAI account. You can access the AI search engine for free without logging in. ChatGPT Search lets you browse the web directly from within the world's most popular chatbot. ChatGPT Search is now available to everyone, regardless of whether you're signed into an OpenAI account or not. OpenAI announced the major update on X, bringing ChatGPT Search to the masses, without creating an account or giving any personal information to the world leaders in AI.

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Google opens its most powerful AI models to everyone, the next stage in its virtual agent push - Hayden Field & Jennifer Elias, CNBC

Google on Wednesday released the Gemini 2.0 artificial intelligence model suite to everyone. The continued releases are part of a broader strategy for Google of investing heavily into “AI agents” as the AI arms race heats up among tech giants and startups alike. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic have also expressed their goal of building agentic AI, or models that can complete complex multistep tasks on a user’s behalf.


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