Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
Sesame's new AI conversational voice model features uncanny imperfections like stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional. Some users feel emotionally attached to the voice assistant. In one case, a parent recounted how their 4-year-old daughter developed an emotional connection with the AI model, crying after not being allowed to talk to it again. -More at ArsTechnica
AI is being used by the US State department to find foreign students who it perceives to be Hamas supporters. Their visas will be revoked. News reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and Jewish students' lawsuits are being checked for evidence that "foreign nationals allegedly engaged in antisemitic activity." Read more from Axios
OpenAI Announces 'NextGenAI' Higher-Ed Consortium – GovTech
This Scientist Left OpenAI Last Year. His Startup Is Already Worth $30 Billion. – Wall Street Journal
Google AI Overviews Are Secretly Killing Top Pages While Boosting Hidden Ones – Digital Information World
The ‘Spy Sheikh’ Taking the AI World by Storm – Wall Street Journal
Amazon has a ‘slew of AI devices’ coming, hardware chief says - CNN
Microsoft identifies developers it says evaded AI guardrails – Axios
Apple Vows to Build A.I. Servers in Houston and Spend $500 Billion in U.S. – New York Times
X Rolls Out AI-Generated Ads in Push to Win Advertisers Back – AdWeek
Anthropic adds advanced reasoning to latest model - Axios
Why AI Spending Isn’t Slowing Down - Wall Street Journal
Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP – The Verge
AI race's winner might not yet be born – Axios
How DeepSeek’s Lower-Power, Less-Data Model Stacks Up - Wall Street Journal
Guardian signs licensing deal with ChatGPT owner OpenAI – Press Gazette
Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget - http://ewintr.nl
An ambitious effort to track the impact of AI adoption by looking at the data on Claude – Anthropic
Deep Research and Knowledge Value - Stratechery
The hottest new idea in AI? Chatbots that look like they think. – Washington Post
AI designed computer chips so complex that humans can’t understand them – BGR
Ultra-efficient AI won’t solve data centers’ climate problem. This might. - Washington Post
Researchers claim to have created an open rival to OpenAI’s o1 ‘reasoning’ model for under $50 – Tech Crunch
Effective listening takes practice; it’s actually a discipline. It doesn’t come easily or naturally. Listening means more than just hearing what a person says.
A counselor once told me, "Hearing captures the words a person speaks; listening captures the meaning and the feeling beneath those words."
Listening is the mental step by which we become more aware of the other person than we are of ourselves.
The best definition of listening I have ever come across is that given by Norman H. Wright” “Listening is not thinking about what you are going to say when the other person has stopped talking."
Stephen Goforth
A Columbia University student is facing a disciplinary hearing at the college after he used an AI program to help him land internships at Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. He said these interviews often cover topics no one will ever see on the job. So, he wrote a program called Interview Coder to help him and others bypass the process. Read more at Gizmodo
Psychologist Joyce Shaffer tells the story of a man unable to talk or walk following a stroke. Two years later, he was hiking and teaching thanks to intense physical therapy. When the man died a few years later, an autopsy showed a large area of his brain had been destroyed by the stroke. Even so, he had regained the ability to be active and productive.
Schaffer’s explanation: “Moment by moment you create your brain. It is plastic. It can change for better or worse depending on lifestyle choices … Without challenge, your brain retires. With lifestyle choices a person can turn their brain into a "self-fertilizing garden.”
Stephen Goforth
An AI-powered “wellbeing companion” named Sonny is now available to more than 4,500 public middle and high school students in nine districts across the country, many of which are in low-income and rural areas where mental-health services are lacking. - Wall Street Journal
Most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose.
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that even something as simple as a coin toss demonstrates our aversion to loss. In a recent interviews, Mr. Kahneman shared the usual response he gets to his offer of a coin toss:
“In my classes, I say: ‘I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?’
“People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve been doing the same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a coin and losing $10,000 if it’s tails. And they want $20,000 before they’ll take the gamble.”
In other words, we’re willing to leave a lot of money on the table to avoid the possibility of losing.
We see this aversion to loss play out in the lives of real people when we try to make smart money decisions, especially when it’s time to make a change to our investments. It almost doesn’t matter what change we need to make. We hesitate to change from the current situation because it means having an opinion and making a decision. And with a decision comes the very real possibility that we’ll make the wrong one. Sticking with the status quo feels much better even if we know it’s costing us money.
To get past our aversion to loss, I recommend taking the Overnight Test.
Imagine you went to bed, and overnight someone sold your losing stock and replaced it with cash. The next morning, you have a choice: You can buy back the stock for the same price, or you can take that cash and (do something else with it). What would you do?
Most people wouldn’t buy the stock back.
Just by changing your perspective (investing cash versus getting rid of the stock), you can gain clarity and have the emotional space to make the decision you know you need to make.
Sometimes, that’s all it takes. While we’ll probably never embrace loss, it’s good to know that we can find ways to work around our aversion to it when it makes sense.
Carl Richards writing in the New York Times
Symbolic Artificial Intelligence – The dominant area of research for most of AI’s history until artificial neural networks became the center of most of the recent developments in artificial intelligence. Symbolic AI requires programmers to meticulously define the rules that specify the behavior they want from an intelligent system. It works well when the environment is predictable, and the rules are clear-cut. Researchers believed if they programmed enough rules and logic into computers, they could create machines capable of human-like reasoning. Despite the fact that symbolic AI has lost its luster in the last few years, most of the applications we use today are rule-based systems. An alternative approach to AI is machine learning. Some believe the future of AI lies in a hybrid combination of these approaches.
More AI definitions here.
A diagnostic tool that uses DNA sequencing & machine learning to detect multiple diseases from a single blood sample – Inside Precision Medicine
In a showdown of psychotherapists vs. ChatGPT, the latter wins, new study finds – Fortune
Matchmakers in India Now Have Competition: AI – The Walrus
AI invented a new miracle material that's as strong as steel but light as foam – BGR
How regular people are cashing in on AI - ZDnet
A new AI tool allowed me to talk to my 80-year-old self. It’s going to be quite a life. – Wall Street Journal
AI Comes to the Apple Orchard—From Pollinating to Picking - Wall Street Journal
From zero to millions? How regular people are cashing in on AI - ZDnet
Meta’s AI-Powered Ray-Bans Are Life-Enhancing for the Blind - Wall Street Journal
Using AI missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared in 2014 – Economic Times
Google’s X spins out Heritable Agriculture, a startup using AI to improve crop yield – Tech Crunch
A German startup specializing in geospatial data, is using sensing technology in autonomous vehicles to map the seafloor to strengthen underwater military defense – Wall Street Journal
AI designed computer chips so complex that humans can’t understand them – BGR
DeepMind AI crushes tough maths problems on par with top human solvers – Nature
Using A.I., Researchers Peer Inside a 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Charred by Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption – Smithsonian Magazine
Generative AI meets Venn diagrams in a quite unique interface. – SuperRandom
Cancer could be spotted early on thanks to new 'human-defying' AI-powered body scan – Daily Record
"I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before. And we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare. I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human history, A.I. will have been the thing that matters." -Ben Buchanan in The New York Times
Imagine a company that has already spent $50 million on a project. The project is now behind schedule and the forecasts of its ultimate returns are less favorable than at the initial planning stage. An additional investment of $60 million is required to give the project a chance. An alternative proposal is to invest the same amount in a new project that currently looks likely to bring higher returns. What will the company do? All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs drives into the blizzard, throwing good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.
(This) fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. I have often observed young scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one. Fortunately, research suggests that at least in some contexts the fallacy can be overcome. (It) is taught as a mistake in both economics and business courses, apparently to good effect: there is evidence that graduate students in these fields are more willing than others to walk away from a failing project.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Some Los Angeles Times opinion pieces will now be published with an AI-generated rating of their political content, and an AI-generated list of alternative political views on that issue. The AI-generated tool “operates independently” from the paper’s human journalists, and “the AI content is not reviewed by journalists before it is published.” - The Guardian
At the root of our effectiveness is our ability to grasp the world around us and to take the measure of our own performance. We are constantly making judgments about what we know and don't know whether we're capable of handling a task or solving a problem. As we work at something, we keep an eye on ourselves, adjusting our thinking or actions as we progress.
Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition (meta is Greek for "about".) Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time. An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don't know when we've got it. Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.
To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don't know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.
Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
Spiritual friends aren’t looking to get ahead. This friend weeps with you in anxiety, rejoices with you in prosperity, seeks with you in doubts. Nothing is faked; everything is in the open. A relationship that grows into something holy, voluntary, and true is one of life’s greatest pleasures and a reward in itself. It’s a “wondrous consolation” to have someone in whom your spirit can rest, to whom you can simply pour out your soul.
Karen Wright Marsh, Vintage Saints and Sinners
“Hackers have recently ramped up the theft of what are called session cookies, according to the FBI. These are files that are stored by your browser and save you the annoyance of logging in every time you need to read a Gmail or check up on Facebook. Think twice before clicking ‘remember me’ on that check box.” - Wall Street Journal
Excellent performers judge themselves differently than most people do. They're more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or okay.
By contrast, the best performers judge themselves against a standard that's relevant for what they're trying to achieve. Sometimes they compare their performance with their own personal best; sometimes they compare it with the performance of competitors they're facing or expect to face; sometimes they compare it with the best known performance by anyone in the field.
Any of those can make sense; the key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research confirms what common sense tells us, that too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.
Geoff Colvin, Why Talent is Overrated
Humanoid Robots Finally Get Real Jobs – Wall Street Journal
AI humanoid robots inch their way toward the workforce - CIO
Meta plans investments into AI-driven humanoid robots, memo shows – Reuters
AI Comes to the Apple Orchard—From Pollinating to Picking – Wall Street Journal
Figure Plans To Ship 100,000 Humanoid Robots Over Next 4 Years – Forbes
This artist collaborates with AI and robots - MIT Technology Review
How lazy robots could help solve AI’s energy consumption problem - Washington Post
AI Robots Are Entering the Public World—With Mixed Results - Wall Street Journal
In a first, surgical robots learned tasks by watching videos - Washington Post
Proving You Aren’t a Robot Has Never Been Harder. Here’s Why - Wall Street Journal
AI robot helps recover and recycle beverage cans - Axios
MIT researchers develop new approach for training general purpose robots - TechSpot
Robotic pets are bringing some older people real comfort - Washington Post
Painting by A.I.-Powered Robot Sells for $1.1 Million – New York Times
When an international team of researchers asked some 2,300 people in 58 countries to respond to a single question — “How can you tell when people are lying?” — one sign stood out: In two-thirds of responses, people listed gaze aversion. A liar doesn’t look you in the eye. Twenty-eight percent reported that liars seemed nervous, a quarter reported incoherence, and another quarter that liars exhibited certain little giveaway motions.
It just so happens that the common wisdom is false.
Why do we think we know how liars behave? Liars should divert their eyes. They should feel ashamed and guilty and show the signs of discomfort that such feelings engender. And because they should, we think they do.
The desire for the world to be what it ought to be and not what it is permeates experimental psychology as much as writing, though. There’s experimental bias and the problem known in the field as “demand characteristics” — when researchers end up finding what they want to find by cuing participants to act a certain way. It’s also visible when psychologists choose to study one thing rather than another, dismiss evidence that doesn’t mesh with their worldview while embracing that which does.
Maria Konnikova writing in the New York Times
Future You is a new interactive artificial-intelligence platform that allows users to create a virtual older self—a chatbot that looks like an aged version of the person, then personalized with information that the user puts in. The idea is that if people can see and talk to their older selves, they will be able to think about them more concretely, and make changes now that will help them achieve the future they hope for. -Wall Street Journal
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