The best Social Network for Success is Often Overlooked

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Several years ago sociologist Brian Uzzi did a study of why certain Broadway musicals made between 1945 and 1989 were successful and others flopped. The explanation he arrived at had to do with the people behind the productions. For failed productions, one of two extremes was common. The first was a collaboration between creative artists and producers who tended to all know one another. When there were mostly strong ties, the production lacked the fresh, creative insights that come from diverse experience. The other type of failed production was one in which none of the artists had experience working together. When the group was made up of mostly weak ties, teamwork and group cohesion suffered.

In contrast, the social networks of the people behind successful productions had a healthy balance: There were some strong ties, some weak ties. There was some established trust, but also enough new blood in the system to generate new ideas. Think of your network of relationships in the same way: The best professional network is both narrow/deep (allies with whom you collaborate regularly) and wide/ shallow (weak-tie acquaintances who offer fresh information and ideas). 

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Startup of You

14 Surprising Things AI Can Do Now

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The Impact of AI on Computer Science Degrees

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Computer science has consistently been one of the top majors in the United States for the last decade. But with the ability to task A.I. to code, startups and tech giants alike are hiring fewer and fewer entry-level computer scientists. Reports suggest that at major A.I. companies, the hiring rate for software engineering jobs has fallen over the course of 2024 from a high of about 3,000 per month to near zero. If enrollments in computer science degrees dry up as jobs disappear, the whole pipeline from education to employment could crash.  It’s not so surprising that chatbots might threaten technical jobs before writing ones. -Leif Weatherby, director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University, writing in the New York Times

18 Articles about how Businesses are using AI

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Why Companies Are Already All-In on AI After Arriving Late to Everything Else - Wall Street Journal

Amazon CEO tells employees that AI will shrink its workforce - Washington Post

AI layoffs start hitting a wide swath of Corporate America - Quartz

601 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations – Google Cloud 

Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages – The Verge  

No AI, no job. These companies are requiring workers to use the tech. – Washington Post

The Future Of Leadership In The Age Of AI – Forbes  

Americans to business: Take AI slow and do it right - Axios 

Google offers AI certification for business leaders now - free trainings included – ZDnet

Microsoft helped kick off the AI boom. It needs humans more than ever, its CEO says - Semafor

Wake-up call: Leadership in the AI age - Axios

How ‘causal’ AI can improve your decision-making - IMD

Walmart Is Preparing to Welcome Its Next Customer: The AI Shopping Agent – Wall Street Journal

AI agents bring big risks and rewards for daring early adopters - ZDnet 

AI-first: did Duolingo make a fatal mistake? - UX Collective  

Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened - Futurism 

Google AI Overviews leads to dramatic reduction in clickthroughs for Mail Online – Press Gazette 

An AI Analyst Made 30 Years of Stock Picks — and Blew Human Investors Away - Stanford Graduate School of Business

How AI can help you finally demolish your business's mounting technical debt - ZDnet 

Fast, Frictionless, and “Good Enough”

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The Industrial Revolution replaced artisanal craftsmanship with mechanized production, enabling goods to be replicated and manufactured on a mass scale.  Shoes, cars, and crops could be produced efficiently and uniformly. But products also became more bland, predictable, and stripped of individuality. Craftsmanship retreated to the margins, as a luxury or a form of resistance.  Today, there’s a similar risk with the automation of thought. Generative AI tempts users to conflate speed with quality, productivity with originality.  The danger is not that AI will fail us, but that people will accept the mediocrity of its outputs as the norm. When everything is fast, frictionless, and “good enough,” there’s the risk of losing the depth, nuance, and intellectual richness that define exceptional human work. -Fast Company

19 Recent Articles about Using AI

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Tips for brainstorming with ChatGPT and other AI bots - The Washington Post

How to use ChatGPT to write code - and my top trick for debugging what it generates - ZDnet 

How to better brainstorm with ChatGPT in five steps – Washington Post

2 Ways I'm Using ChatGPT Advanced Voice to Improve My Life - CNET

How to use Google's AI-powered NotebookLM — 5 tips to get started – Tom’s Guide

Research: Gen AI Makes People More Productive—and Less Motivated – Harvard Business Review  

Google’s NotebookLM just got a huge upgrade — here’s why it beats ChatGPT for team projects – Tom’s Guide

5 AI bots took our tough reading test. One was smartest — and it wasn’t ChatGPT. – Washington Post

You Can Get a Google AI Certification for $99. Or Just Do the Training for Free - CNET

New Google app lets you download and run AI models on your phone without the internet – ZDnet

What is AI Mode, Google's new artificial intelligence search technology? – CBS News 

Google offers AI certification for business leaders now - free trainings included – ZDnet

How ‘causal’ AI can improve your decision-making - IMD

5 Expert Tips for Excelling with NotebookLM – KD Nuggets

This quiet AI upgrade actually changed my life – ZDnet

AI Learning Resources & Guides - Anthropic

NotebookLM Is My All-Time Favorite AI Tool and Its New Features Make It Even Better - CNET 

Three “excellent practical generative AI courses” to get started building AI agents & fine-tune reasoning models – KD Nuggets

Boost Your Workflow with AI: Productivity Tips and Strategies - Duke University (webinar)

Measuring Intelligence

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People have been measuring what they believe is intelligence without having a really firm understanding of what it is that they are measuring. Many theorists in psychology believe that conventional tests of intelligence measures only a relatively narrow aspect of intelligence. The result is that what we may take as a difference between two people in their levels of intelligence may reflect only a difference in a fairly small portions of their levels of intelligence.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

19 Articles about AI & Politics

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AI Definition: RAGs

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Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – RAGs (retrieval augmented generation) combine a retriever (used to collect relevant information from a document) and a generator (which compares the query vector to other known vectors, selecting the most similar ones), and then generates an answer to the user’s query. Rather than generating answers from a set of parameters, the RAG collects relevant information from the document. In effect, this coding technique instructs the bot to cross-check its answer with what is published elsewhere, essentially helping the AI to self-fact-check. RAG lets companies “ground” AI models in their own data, ensuring that results come from documents within the company, minimizing hallucinations.

More AI definitions here

The Best AI Bot to Use

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"In a head-to-head test of AI bots, 'An AI tool’s capability in one field didn’t necessarily translate to another. ChatGPT, for example, might have been tops in politics and literature but ranked near the bottom in law. I’d also recommend running your document through at least two AI tools, so you can compare the results. And for anything that’s actually important in your life, it’s definitely worth taking the time to read it yourself.” - Geoffrey A. Fowler writing in the Washington Post 

AI Definitions: Agentic AI

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Agentic AI – Able to operate more independently than AI Agents, agentic AI adjusts its strategy and continuously “learns” as it encounters different situations. Agentic AI systems aren't passive tools waiting for input or mere automation. They can update plans based on intermediate findings without needing continuous human supervision. It’s not just following the rules as agents do, agentic AI is supposed to be a colleague that can analyze a problem, propose a plan, and take action. It might call out to additional models or external systems, such as a search engine or querying a database to complete a task. This can be particularly effective in data-heavy fields such as biology, chemistry, and drug discovery. On a personal level, instead of simply helping you find a hotel room to book, agentic AI can plan the trip if it is given access to programs with your schedule and preferences. Despite its capabilities, AI agents struggle in open-ended or unpredictable environments, especially when tasks lack clear structure or context. It will likely take years to for most agentic AI systems to be tailored to specific industries or problems.

More AI definitions here

Encouraging Critical Thinking in Children

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If we want our children or students or employees to express themselves creatively, then we have to give them the opportunity to do so. It doesn’t matter much if we tell them that we value their creative thinking, and then criticize or forestall every idea they propose.

From time to time, I do workshops for teachers, parents, and businesses that are eager to encourage open-ended, exploratory, creative thinking. One unfavorable sign is when someone asks me exactly what they should do to encourage creativity. They want me to tell them step by step, blow by blow. Their desire is an unfavorable sign because if they want a recipe for creativity, the won’t find it. Moreover, someone who wants to be told exactly what to do is not likely to model a creative style, no matter how much they may wish to do so.

Ultimately, you must encourage creative thinking by modeling it. It is hard to encourage creative thinking if you do not model it.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

"I use ChatGPT for Comedy"

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"I use ChatGPT for comedy. It's not going to give me a finished joke, but it's going to start the conversation. I find it useful when I'm writing the setup for a joke. With a parody, it's not one-to-one. You're taking things that are different and exaggerating them. I was writing a roast speech for a guy at a coding conference. I asked ChatGPT to delve into the inside jokes of coding communities. What's amazing to me is I do not have writer's block anymore — like truly. I think writer's block is the feeling of solipsism and it is the feeling of being totally alone. And I don't feel alone anymore because of this tool." - Sarah Rose Siskind, comedian

21 Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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 Trouble with AI 'hallucinations' spreads to big law firms – Reuters

Alabama paid a law firm millions to defend its prisons. It used AI and turned in fake citations – The Guardian  

New Arizona law prevents AI from making health insurance denials – AZ Family 

Australian authors say no to AI using their work – even if money is on the table – The Conversation  

AI firms say they can’t respect copyright. These researchers tried. – Washington Post

Artificial Intelligence is now an A+ law student, study finds - Reuters

Arizona Supreme Court unveils AI avatars to announce rulings - Arizona PBS

In lawsuit over teen’s death, judge rejects arguments that AI chatbots have free speech rights – Associated Press  

Law&Crime Recreates Scenes From Diddy Trial With AI and Official Transcripts – Mediaite 

ChatGPT Turned Into a Studio Ghibli Machine. How Is That Legal? – The Atlantic

Deepfakes on trial: How judges are navigating AI evidence authentication -Reuters

Former school athletic director gets 4 months in jail in racist AI deepfake case – Associated Press

AI copyright report sparks new fight - Axios

White House fires head of Copyright Office amid Library of Congress shakeup – Washington Post

An AI-created video of a murdered man is used to deliver a victim's statement at a killer's sentencing – BBC

This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops – 404 Media

AI Can Assist Human Judges, But It Can’t Replace Them (Yet) – David Lat Blog

Lawyers face sanctions for citing fake cases with AI, warns UK judge – Reuters

White House fires Copyright Office leaders as controversial AI report surfaces – Mashable

Anthropic's lawyers take blame for AI 'hallucination' in music publishers' lawsuit – Reuters

Disney and Universal Sue A.I. Firm for Copyright Infringement – New York Times