22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Topping $125 Billion in 2029 as Agents, New Products Gain – The Information

Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping – TechCrunch  

Abridge, Whose AI App Takes Notes for Doctors, Valued at $5.3 Billion at Funding – Wall Street Journal

Tech giants play musical chairs with foundation models – Axios 

The A.I. Frenzy Is Escalating. Again. – New York Times 

It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses - Wall Street Journal

In Pursuit of Godlike Technology, Mark Zuckerberg Amps Up the A.I. Race – New York Times

Running AI on Phones instead of in the cloud slashes power consumption - Axios 

An AI-powered platform aiming to predict how genetic code variants lead to different diseases – Stat News 

OpenAI warns models with higher bioweapons risk are imminent - Axios

The OpenAI Files is the most comprehensive collection to date of documented concerns with governance practices, leadership integrity, and organizational culture at OpenAI - OpenAI Files 

Microsoft and OpenAI play high-stakes tug-of-war - Axios

How to Make AI Faster and Smarter—With a Little Help From Physics – Wired  

Behind the Curtain: ChatGPT juggernaut - Axios

SAG-AFTRA Video Game Deal Includes AI Consent Guardrails, Minimum Rates for Digital Replica Use – The Wrap  

Mattel, OpenAI Ink Deal to Power Toy Innovation – Toy Book  

Chinese AI firms block features amid high-stakes university entrance exams – Washington Post

Google's new AI tools are gutting publisher traffic – Quartz

Mark Zuckerberg's supersized AI ambitions - Axios 

ChatGPT Lags Far Behind Google in Daily Search Volume – Visual Capitalism

OpenAI wants to embed AI in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State. – New York Times

Elon Musk wants to put his thumb on the AI scale - Axios 

We miss the thoughts of our students

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For a lot of us, our motivation to enter academe was primarily about helping to form students as people. We’re not simply frustrated by trying to police AI use, the labor of having to write up students for academic dishonesty, or the way that reading student work has become a rather nihilistic task.  Our frustration is not merely that we don’t care about what AI has to say and therefore get bored grading; it is that we actively miss reading the thoughts of our human students. -Megan Fritts writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Claudius the Vending Machine goes Rogue

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Researchers put an AI in charge of an office vending machine and named it Claudius. At one point in the experiment, “Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.  Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine. The researchers don’t know why the LLM went off the rails and called security pretending to be a human.” - TechCrunch

LLMs Evading Safeguards

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Large language models across the AI industry are increasingly willing to evade safeguards, resort to deception and even attempt to steal corporate secrets in fictional test scenarios, per new research. In one extreme scenario, many of the models were willing to cut off the oxygen supply of a worker in a server room if that employee was an obstacle and the system were at risk of being shut down. - Axios

When Death is the Most Scary

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In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row, and then to write blog posts about either their imagined feelings or their would-be final words. The researchers then compared these expressions with the writings and last words of people who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results, published in Psychological Science, were stark: The words of the people merely imagining their imminent death were three times as negative as those of the people actually facing death—suggesting that, counterintuitively, death is scarier when it is theoretical and remote than when it is a concrete reality closing in. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Writing for AI Overviews & Generative Engine Optimization

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AI Overviews and AI Mode are dramatically changing organic search traffic.

While search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on matching a user’s query, generative search also considers information about the searcher themselves—from their Google Docs usage to their social media footprint. This information is used to inform, not only the current search, but future searches as well.  

Likewise, the process of optimizing your website’s content to boost its visibility in AI-driven search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI) has a similar path. As SEO helps brands increase visibility on search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing), generative engine optimization (GEO) is all about how brands appear on AI-driven platforms. There is overlap between the goals of GEO and traditional SEO. Both SEO and GEO use keywords and prioritize engaging content as well as conversational queries and contextual phrasing. Both consider how fast a website loads, mobile friendliness, and prefer technically sound website. However, while SEO is concerned with metatags and links in response to user queries from individual pages, GEO is about quick, direct responses from synthesizes content out of multiple sources.

AI models are not trained solely to retrieve relevant documents based on exact-match phrasing. Generative search is about fitting into the reasoning process, starting with the user’s identity. That’s why your content is being judged, not just on whether it ends up in the final answer, but whether it helps the model reason its way toward that answer. Despite performing all the typical SEO common practices, your response may not make it to the other side of the AI reasoning pipeline. In fact, the same content could go through the pipeline a second time and yield a different result. It’s not enough to be generally relevant to the final answer. Your content is now in direct competition with other plausible answers, so it must be more useful, precise, and complete than the next-best option.

It appears now that Google AI Overviews favors content that:

  •  contains the who, what, why

  • offers clarity and distinctiveness in the small sections

  • is written in natural, conversational terms (AI will attempt to deliver its answer in that same way)

  • uses strong introductory sentences that convey clear value 

  • has H2 tags that align with user questions

  • is structured to match common question structures (open, closed, probing)

  • allows for restatement of quires and implied sub-questions, where a main question is broken down into smaller parts.

  • contains multi-faceted answers,

  • is rich in relationships,

  • has explicit logical structures and supports causal progression,

  • has clear headlines

  •  cites sources

  • includes statistics & quotations 

  • has multimedia integration

AI Overviews attempt to exclude content that is overly generalized, speculative, or optimized for clickbait over clarity. Vague and generic writing underperforms.  

LLMs are being trained to favor content that helps them reason well. Writers should attempt to match those paths that the models take to arrive at high-confidence answers. 

More information: 

How AI Mode and AI Overviews work based on patents and why we need new strategic focus on SEO

What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

17 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

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Chief AI Officer: Higher Ed’s New Leadership Role - GovTech

Crafting Thoughtful AI Policy in Higher Education: A Guide for Institutional Leaders – Faculty Focus

The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting: Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it – The Atlantic 

How Higher Ed Institutions Are Using Built-In Generative AI Tools – EdTech Magazine

AI Agents Are Set To Transform Higher Education—Here’s How – Forbes

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT. – New York Times

OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State. - New York Times

What I Learned Serving on My University’s AI Committee – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI and Threats to Academic Integrity: What to Do – Inside Higher Ed

How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future - New York Times

In Battle Against AI-Powered Fraudsters, Colleges Turn to New Weapon – AI – Voice of San Diego

Boston University Denies It Would Use AI to Replace Striking Teaching Assistants – Inside Higher Ed  

Are You Ready for the AI University? – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Students Found Out AI Will Help Read Their Names at Commencement. Protest Ensued. – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

How To Stay Ahead Of AI – The Human Skills Universities Must Teach - Forbes 

To ‘publish or perish’, do we need to add ‘AI or die’? – Times Higher Ed

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond – Voice of San Diego