“AI itself is going to be gone by the time you finish a PhD. Even things like applying AI to robotics will be solved by then,” Jad Tarifi, the founder of Google’s first generative-AI team, told Business Insider. Tarifi himself graduated with a PhD in AI in 2012, when the subject was far less mainstream. But today, the 42-year-old says, time would be better spent studying a more niche topic intertwined with AI, like AI for biology—or maybe not a degree at all. “Higher education as we know it is on the verge of becoming obsolete,” Tarifi said to Fortune. “Thriving in the future will come not from collecting credentials but from cultivating unique perspectives, agency, emotional awareness, and strong human bonds. “I encourage young people to focus on two things: the art of connecting deeply with others, and the inner work of connecting with themselves.”
Thursday, August 28, 2025
We must build AI for people; not to be a person: Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming - Mustafa Suleyman, Mustafa-Suleyman.ai
My life’s mission has been to create safe and beneficial AI that will make the world a better place. Today at Microsoft AI we build AI to empower people, and I’m focused on making products like Copilot responsible technologies that enable people to achieve far more than they ever thought possible, be more creative, and feel more supported. I want to create AI that makes us more human, that deepens our trust and understanding of one another, and that strengthens our connections to the real world. Copilot creates millions of positive, even life-changing, interactions every single day. This involves a lot of careful design choices to ensure it truly delivers an incredible experience. We won’t always get it right, but this humanist frame provides us with a clear north star to keep working towards.
AI in academia: Time to de-learn and re-learn - Open Access Government
Academics’ resistance to change and the lack of effective interventions to promote the adoption of innovative technologies intensify these problems. We polled teachers at Pakistani universities to find out what they knew and thought about common AI technologies so we could draw some conclusions. We gathered responses from 162 higher education faculty members from universities across Pakistan. The results show that universities in Pakistan do not have adequate training or explicit institutional norms on the usage of Gen AI tools.
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
How B-Schools Can Flip Their Thinking On ChatGPT - Marc Ethier, Poets and Quants
But while such concerns are certainly understandable, the idea that AI will unquestionably erode students’ ability to think critically and creatively is shortsighted and ultimately inaccurate. I’ve found in my work as dean and professor of marketing at the Farmer School of business at Miami University that more often it’s not AI itself but higher education’s pedagogical approach to it that’s limiting student development in these areas. AI will not be the end of creativity or critical thinking among our students. We just have to get there at a different point and in a new way through what I call flipped thinking.
At one elite college, over 80% of students now use AI – but it’s not all about outsourcing their work - Germán Reyes, Middlebury, The Conversation
Over 80% of Middlebury College students use generative AI for coursework, according to a recent survey I conducted with my colleague and fellow economist Zara Contractor. This is one of the fastest technology adoption rates on record, far outpacing the 40% adoption rate among U.S. adults, and it happened in less than two years after ChatGPT’s public launch. What we found challenges the panic-driven narrative around AI in higher education and instead suggests that institutional policy should focus on how AI is used, not whether it should be banned.
AI is already displacing these jobs - Madison Mills, Axios
Industries that are considered advanced adopters of AI see the nearest-term labor impact. Over 80% of executives surveyed within tech and media, the only two sectors that showed clear signs of AI disruption, anticipate reduced hiring volumes in the next two years. Still, most companies surveyed are currently backfilling workers with AI, for example, rather than replacing them. By the numbers: For now, companies aren't firing employees but just canceling contracts that involve outsourced labor, a strategy that's leading to financial gains. Back-office automations also have a higher return on investment, with $2 million to $10 million in BPO expenditures eliminated for the firms studied by MIT researchers.
One company studied saved $8 million a year by spending $8,000 on an AI tool.
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Smarter Support: How to Use AI in Online Courses and Teach Your Students to Use It Too - Joel Greene, Faculty Focus
Whether we were ready or not, AI is in the room. And if you’re teaching online, you’ve probably already seen it at work in discussion posts, essays, or that strangely perfect email. Instead of panicking or pretending it’s not happening, we’ve got a better option. We can help students learn how to use AI responsibly, because it’s not going away. Honestly, some of them are relying on it more than we realize (Colvard 2024). If you’re going to teach with AI, you’ve got to know what it can (and can’t) do. I’m talking about tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, QuillBot, or even Microsoft Copilot. Give yourself a little “playtime” with them. Open one up and ask it to write a discussion post. Then see what it gets right and what falls flat.
Forms of synchronous hybrid learning spaces in higher education – A type-building qualitative content analysis - Christina Hümmer, et al; Science Direct
Synchronous hybrid learning spaces are educational environments in higher education, in which students participate synchronously on-campus and online. To foster well-founded design decisions, this paper undertakes a systematisation of forms of synchronous hybrid learning spaces. To this end, interviews with 20 German lecturers from different higher education institutions and disciplines are analysed. Overall, three forms can be identified, which are named after their primary type of interaction and to which specific design requirements can be assigned.
Carol Gilbert: A Different Way to Learn - KQED
Do I think all online learning is bad? Certainly not. Using smart educational software, educators can use student data to develop individualized learning programs that include all of the support that students need to be successful. Future online education is anticipated to evolve in a manner that combines virtual reality, artificial intelligence and global cooperation. These advancements hold great promise, but a teacher with whom you connect will always be needed. With a Perspective, I am Carol Gilbert.
Monday, August 25, 2025
'This stuff is moving so quickly': Utah Tech leaders discuss AI, unveil new cybersecurity degree - Nick Fiala, St. George News / KSL
Utah Tech University spent part of its recent Fall Academic Convocation discussing the evolving use of artificial intelligence in both business and academia and how best to implement it in the future. The university also announced on Wednesday that it will be launching a new program this fall for students to acquire a bachelor of science degree in cybersecurity. The new cybersecurity degree will reportedly offer coursework in areas including ethical hacking, cloud and IoT security, cyber law and infrastructure defense. The university added that the program anticipates enrolling 35 students by its third year. "IoT" refers to "Internet of Things," meaning devices equipped to exchange data over the internet.
Does GenAI provide the opportunity for creativity to take centre stage? - Ioannis Glinavos, Times Higher Education
For centuries, universities have delivered scarce expertise. We stacked programmes like layer cakes: first theory, then practice, finally – if there was time – a sprinkle of creativity. Generative AI flips that order. Because routine skills are on tap, the bottleneck shifts upstream to ideation: spotting problems worth solving and framing them so the machine can help.
How should assessors use AI for marking and feedback?
An insider’s guide to how students use GenAI tools
Three reasons to harness AI for interdisciplinary collaboration
That demands divergent thinking, curiosity and ethical judgement – qualities our assessment regimes often squeeze out. We need to treat creativity as a core literacy, not a decorative extra. Don’t get me wrong, skills are not irrelevant – they just look different. Prompt craft, data stewardship and model critique replace manual citation and calculator drills. But they are means, not ends.
AI’s Rapid Integration into Higher Education Transforming Student Experiences and Faculty Challenges - SSB Crack News
A college senior entering the new academic year has experienced nearly their entire undergraduate journey alongside the rise of generative AI. The landscape shifted dramatically with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, coinciding with this student’s freshman year. Faculty and administration at institutions like Washington University in St. Louis have witnessed this rapid transformation. Fast forward three years, and the reliance on AI tools is startling. Reports indicate that nearly two-thirds of Harvard undergraduates were using generative AI at least once a week as of spring 2024. In a UK survey, 92% of full-time university students acknowledged employing AI in some manner, with a significant portion believing that AI-generated content could earn good grades in their subjects. Alarmingly, about 20% of those surveyed have experimented with AI to complete assignments, a trend expected to grow.
Sunday, August 24, 2025
A scaffolded approach to teaching with GenAI - Rena Beatrice Alcalay, Times Higher Education
As GenAI continues to reshape higher education, this four-phase framework by Rena Beatrice Alcalay offers educators ways to guide students to use these tools critically and ethically, fostering agency, bias awareness and deeper engagement in philosophical writing assignments. This pedagogical stance emphasises agency: students learn to critically assess what to include or exclude from AI-generated suggestions and to distinguish between factual repetition and genuine conceptual development. At the heart of this approach is a commitment to helping students articulate ideas that reflect their values, a central goal in philosophy education.
Internships and Beyond: Strengthening Career Value Across Diverse Models of Work-Based Learning -Nichole Torpey-Saboe, Kevin Grubb, Akua Amankwah-Ayeh; Strada
Colleges and universities recognize that students are looking to them as a launching pad for their future. Eighty percent of freshmen say that “getting a better job” is a very important reason for attending, and 74 percent say “gaining training for a specific career” is very important in their decision to go to college. To better meet the needs and goals of their students, colleges and universities increasingly are focused on strategies that help their students connect their education to career opportunities. One of the most promising strategies for making this connection is giving students the opportunity to participate in off-campus learning experiences that are aligned with their field of study. Unfortunately, these kinds of work-based learning experiences remain too scarce, so only a limited number of students reap the benefits.
The art of 21st-century leadership: From succession planning to building a leadership factory - McKinsey
Complicated times demand great leaders. Here’s an overview of traits and practices required to succeed as a leader today and a look at the factory model that can help aspiring managers ascend. Leading a global organization in today’s fragmented world is difficult—perhaps more difficult than ever. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the acceleration of geopolitical tensions, leadership teams have faced an increasing number of uncertainties and disruptions. These include the sudden emergence of upending technologies, such as generative AI; the energy transition; and a global workforce seeking more autonomy, empowerment, flexibility, and mobility.
Saturday, August 23, 2025
AI Is Designing Bizarre New Physics Experiments That Actually Work - Anil Ananthaswamy, Wired
Although AI has not yet led to new discoveries in physics, it’s becoming a powerful tool across the field. Along with helping researchers to design experiments, it can find nontrivial patterns in complex data. For example, AI algorithms have gleaned symmetries of nature from the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. These symmetries aren’t new—they were key to Einstein’s theories of relativity—but the AI’s finding serves as a proof of principle for what’s to come. Physicists have also used AI to find a new equation for describing the clumping of the universe’s unseen dark matter. “Humans can start learning from these solutions,” Adhikari said.
Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations - Anthropic
We recently gave Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 the ability to end conversations in our consumer chat interfaces. This ability is intended for use in rare, extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions. This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare, though it has broader relevance to model alignment and safeguards. In pre-deployment testing of Claude Opus 4, we included a preliminary model welfare assessment. As part of that assessment, we investigated Claude’s self-reported and behavioral preferences, and found a robust and consistent aversion to harm. This included, for example, requests from users for sexual content involving minors and attempts to solicit information that would enable large-scale violence or acts of terror. Claude Opus 4 showed:
A strong preference against engaging with harmful tasks;
A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content; and
A tendency to end harmful conversations when given the ability to do so in simulated user interactions.
Sam Altman, OpenAI will reportedly back a startup that takes on Musk’s Neuralink - Julie Bort, Tech Crunch
Sam Altman is in the process of co-founding a new brain-to-computer interface startup called Merge Labs and raising funds for it with the capital possibly coming largely from OpenAI’s ventures team, unnamed sources told the Financial Times. The startup is expected to be valued at $850 million. A source familiar with the deal tells TechCrunch that talks are still early and OpenAI has not yet committed to participation, so terms could change. Merge Labs is also reportedly working with Alex Blania, who runs Tools for Humanity (formerly World) — Altman’s eye-scanning digital ID project that “allows anyone to verify their humanness,” as the company describes.
Friday, August 22, 2025
MIT's new AI can teach itself to control robots by watching the world through their eyes — it only needs a single camera News - Tristan Greene, Live Science
Scientists at MIT have developed a novel vision-based artificial intelligence (AI) system that can teach itself how to control virtually any robot without the use of sensors or pretraining. The system gathers data about a given robot’s architecture using cameras, in much the same way that humans use their eyes to learn about themselves as they move. This allows the AI controller to develop a self-learning model for operating any robot — essentially giving machines a humanlike sense of physical self-awareness.
5 Ways Online MBAs Use What They Learned At Work - Jeff Schmitt, Poets & Quants
Use it or lose it. That’s the foundation of education. Just consult the Learning Pyramid: people remember 10% of what they read – but 90% of what they use. Practice makes perfect, you could say. That’s one of the big advantages to earning an online MBA. As undergrads, students listen to lectures, write papers, and take tests on concepts. After finals, the details would get fuzzy. In business school, online students have real jobs with real responsibilities and real problems. They don’t just read and discuss. They’re paired with peers who’ve faced the issues they’re tackling. They explore what matters and what doesn’t. More than that, they’re exposed to practices that worked – and the how’s and why’s behind their classmates’ successes. That’s know-how they can put right to use – and gain an immediate return from their tuition and sacrifice.
Mediating role of online academic emotions between online presence and learning performance in blended learning environments - Xingqiao Li & Yinghua Ye, Nature
Blended learning has been widely used and popularized in recent years. It was originally designed to create a highly engaging learning experience for students; however, in practice, it often falls short. In particular, online learning within blended learning environments suffers from a lack or inadequacy of online presence, which is likely to trigger students’ negative academic emotions during online learning, leading to poor learning outcomes. However, the impact of online academic emotions on learning performance in blended learning has received little attention in empirical studies. This study examines the relationships among online academic emotions, online presence, and learning performance in blended learning.
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