In an era where headlines about artificial intelligence swing between utopian promises and dystopian warnings, we're missing perhaps the most profound opportunity of all: using AI to help us become better humans. This isn't about outsourcing our humanity. It's about leveraging technology to amplify our uniquely human capacities for care, support, learning, engagement, and love. As AI systems grow more capable, our ability to be deeply, authentically human becomes not just valuable; it becomes imperative.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
SUPERAGENCY: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future" - Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, Superagency
Superagency, by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, presents an optimistic view of AI's future, focusing on its potential to amplify human capabilities and improve society. Rather than dwelling on dystopian scenarios, the book explores how AI can enhance individual agency, enabling people to achieve more in areas like education, healthcare, and problem-solving. It advocates for an inclusive and adaptive approach to AI, emphasizing its role as a tool for positive change and encouraging readers to actively participate in shaping a future where human ingenuity and AI work in synergy. (summary by Gemini 2.0 Flash)
The rise of the AI manager - Tigran Sloyan, Fast Company
There’s a growing fear that artificial intelligence will soon replace human talent. While it’s undeniable that AI will impact the labor market, as with any disruptive technology, a closer look reveals a different—and far more empowering—future. Rather than displacing highly skilled professionals, AI is setting the stage for knowledge workers to transition from individual contributors into high-leverage managers, directing teams of AI agents that can execute tasks with breathtaking efficiency. Rather than consign the expertise and creativity of humans into irrelevance, AI will make it all the more essential, as humans direct and guide AI agents toward the ideal outcome.
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Innovation and Collaboration in Higher Education During Challenging Times - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
The field of higher education is notoriously slow to change. Yet, when faced with the extraordinary challenges of today, our associations are quick to foster support, collaboration and unity. I just returned from the UPCEA annual conference held in Denver. A record attendance of some 1,300 administrators, faculty and staff from member institutions gathered to share policies, practices, innovations and knowledge in advancing the mission of higher education in 2025. It was a thriving and exciting environment of energy and enthusiasm in seeking solutions to challenges that confront us today and into the future. A number of the sessions addressed innovations with cost savings, efficiencies and effectiveness gains that can be realized by thoughtfully introducing artificial intelligence into supporting many aspects of the higher education mission.
Anthropic just gave Claude a superpower: real-time web search. Here’s why it changes everything - Michael Nuñez, Venture Beat
Anthropic announced today that its AI assistant Claude can now search and process information from the internet in real-time, addressing one of users’ most requested features and closing a critical competitive gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The new web search capability, available immediately for paid Claude users in the United States, transforms the AI assistant from a tool limited by its training data cutoff to one that can access and synthesize the latest information across the web. “With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data,” Anthropic said in its announcement. The company emphasized that Claude will provide direct citations to sources, allowing users to fact-check information— a direct response to growing concerns about AI hallucinations and misinformation.
New ways to collaborate and get creative with Gemini - the Keyword, Google
Explore Gemini's latest features: Canvas, a new interactive space for refining your documents and code and Audio Overview, which transform your files into engaging podcast-style discussions. Gemini can already help you brainstorm ideas, do deep research and generate content for whatever project you’re working on. And starting today, Gemini can offer even more help, whether it’s editing a document with you in real time or taking your idea and coding a real prototype. Canvas is a new interactive space within Gemini designed to make creating, refining and sharing your work easy. Simply select ‘Canvas’ in your prompt bar and you can write and edit documents or code, with changes appearing in real-time.
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Human Augmentation: The Core Promise of AI - Lee Ott,Tech Crunch
At the heart of AI is the goal of elevating human potential. When technology manages mundane or repetitive tasks, we are free to focus on creativity, collaboration, and decision-making. By offloading routine tasks to AI, workflows that once took days can be completed in hours, enabling people to think bigger and move faster. This shift from purely transactional tools to truly human-centric experiences underscores a core truth: One of technology’s most powerful purposes is to empower individuals, and by extension enterprises, while ensuring ethical, secure, and responsible innovation. AI’s real value lies in its ability to unlock new levels of productivity, spark innovation and drive responsible, human-centered progress.
More than 7 in 10 College Students and Administrators Seek AI Agents to Close Support Gaps, Ease Burnout - Salesforce
“AI agents offer an incredible opportunity for institutions to scale student support and engagement in a way that will enable them to increase enrollment and retention. Deeply knowledgeable, contextually aware AI agents that are grounded in an institution’s unique data are able to provide students with 24/7 personalized support from the moment they first engage with an institution. AI agents will also assist faculty and staff, helping to take on administrative burdens, so they can focus on what matters most – creating meaningful student experiences and driving lasting impact.” – Margo Martinez, VP & GM of Education, Salesforce.
Group co-led by Fei-Fei Li suggests that AI safety laws should anticipate future risks - Maxwell Zeff, Tech Crunch
In a new report, a California-based policy group co-led by Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer, suggests that lawmakers should consider AI risks that “have not yet been observed in the world” when crafting AI regulatory policies. The 41-page interim report released on Tuesday comes from the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, an effort organized by Governor Gavin Newsom following his veto of California’s controversial AI safety bill, SB 1047. While Newsom found that SB 1047 missed the mark, he acknowledged last year the need for a more extensive assessment of AI risks to inform legislators.
Monday, March 31, 2025
AI's Moore's Law: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under five years, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.
Adobe previews AI generated PowerPoints from raw customer data with ‘Project Slide Wow’ - Carl Franzen, Venture Beat
For businesses that rely on data-driven decision-making, Project Slide Wow could be a major step forward in simplifying the process of building presentations. If the tool gains traction, it may soon be available as an official Adobe product—potentially transforming how companies use customer data to inform strategy. Until then, CTOs, CIOs, team leads, and analysts should stay tuned for Adobe’s Sneaks announcements to see whether Project Slide Wow makes the leap from experimental demo to real-world enterprise solution.
Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education: Transforming Learning and Practice - Aadhitya Sriram, et al; Cureus
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping medical education by enhancing learning strategies, improving training efficiency, and offering personalized educational experiences. Traditional teaching methods, such as classroom lectures and clinical apprenticeships, face numerous challenges, including information overload, teaching quality variability, and standardisation difficulties. AI presents innovative, data-driven, and adaptive solutions to overcome these limitations, making medical training more effective and engaging. This study explores how AI can be applied in the field of medical education, also focusing on personalized learning, virtual simulations, assessment methods, and curriculum development.
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Leading Through Complexity: How Online Leaders Can Drive Digital Institutional Transformation - Bethany Simunich, Campus Technology
As colleges and universities navigate an era of enrollment declines and financial uncertainty, many are betting big on online education as their path to long-term growth and sustainability. Yet, as nearly 70% of online learning leaders report that their institution is prioritizing the development of online courses for on-campus programs, the path forward is far from simple. The rapid transition to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous challenges, from ensuring quality instruction to maintaining student engagement. And while more institutions are turning to online programs to expand access, outcomes remain mixed — fewer than half of students at major nonprofit online institutions graduate within eight years, according to a recent Inside Higher Ed analysis.
Let’s look at AI as a reasoning partner, not a shortcut - Xiangen Hu, Times Higher Ed
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving from a simple memory retrieval tool into a sophisticated agent, capable of nuanced reasoning. We can see this in advanced models such as DeepSeek’s R1, OpenAI’s Deep Research and xAI’s Grok. These systems no longer act merely as extensions of search engines but serve as interactive partners that can help break down complex problems and encourage inquiry. For higher education, this shift offers a powerful opportunity to strengthen the critical thinking skills of our students, which will be essential for the workforce of the future.
OpenAI cancels standalone o3 AI model in favour of a ‘unified’ next-gen release - MSN
OpenAI has effectively cancelled the release of o3, which was to be its next major standalone AI model, in favour of a “simplified” product offering, CEO Sam Altman announced on Wednesday. “We will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3,” he said in a post on X. Altman stated that the company’s primary focus is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by "creating systems" that can utilise all of their tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and "generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks." One particular user asked, “Any ETA for GPT 4.5 / GPT 5 @sama? Weeks? Months?”, to which he replied, “weeks / months.”
Saturday, March 29, 2025
AI Ethics in Higher Education: How Schools Are Proceeding - Adam Stone, EdTech
Higher education is uniquely positioned to deal with AI’s ethical considerations, partly because AI adoption is already prevalent in academia. At Miami University in Ohio, “there are courses about AI, and there are courses that use AI,” says Vice President for IT Services and CIO David Seidl. As AI use widens, colleges and universities need to give students “an ethical foundation, a conceptual foundation to prepare them for the future,” he says. Many schools have the institutional expertise on campus needed to lay that foundation. “We have people who are very thoughtful, who bring subject matter expertise from a lot of lenses, so that you can have well-informed conversations about the ethics of AI,” says Tom Andriola, University of California, Irvine’s vice chancellor for IT and data.
Mujo Releases Groundbreaking Textbook on Artificial Intelligence in Marketing for Higher Education - CBS4
Mujo, an independent publisher of AI, business & digital marketing curriculum, is proud to announce the release of its latest textbook, Artificial Intelligence Marketing, designed specifically for higher education. This is the first textbook in our Applied AI for Business series. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform the marketing landscape, Artificial Intelligence Marketing provides students and educators with a comprehensive guide to understanding and leveraging AI technologies in modern marketing strategies. The textbook covers key topics such as machine learning, predictive analytics
Making AI work for workers - McKinsey Quarterly
Employees are ready for AI. How can their leaders help them unleash new levels of creativity and productivity? Workers are already on board with gen AI, but many leaders aren’t keeping pace. Business leaders who can build on this momentum face a significant opportunity. But not all employees are embracing gen AI equally. Identifying four archetypes of employee sentiment can help companies understand where encouragement might be needed.
Friday, March 28, 2025
Publishers Embrace AI as Research Integrity Tool - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
The academic publishing industry is adopting AI-powered tools to improve the quality of peer-reviewed research and speed up production. The latter goal yields “obvious financial benefit” for publishers, one expert said. But the $19 billion academic publishing industry is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to speed up production and, advocates say, enhance research quality. Since the start of the year, Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature have all announced the adoption of generative AI–powered tools or guidelines, including those designed to aid scientists in research, writing and peer review.
Most college students are taking online classes, but they’re paying just as much as in-person students - Jon Marcus, Hechninger Report
Among the surprising answers is that colleges and universities are charging more for online education to subsidize everything else they do, online managers say. Huge sums are also going into marketing and advertising for it, documents show. Universities and colleges “see online higher education as an opportunity to make money and use it for whatever they want to make money for,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at the left-leaning think tank New America. 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.
AI that can match humans at any task will be here in five to 10 years, Google DeepMind CEO says - Ryan Browne, CNBC
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he thinks artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will emerge in the next five or 10 years. AGI broadly relates to AI that is as smart or smarter than humans. “We’re not quite there yet. These systems are very impressive at certain things. But there are other things they can’t do yet, and we’ve still got quite a lot of research work to go before that,” Hassabis said. Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January that he sees a form of AI that’s “better than almost all humans at almost all tasks” emerging in the “next two or three years.” Other tech leaders see AGI arriving even sooner. Cisco’s Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel thinks there’s a chance we could see an example of AGI emerge as soon as this year.
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