weekend ai reads for 2025-03-28

The AI tutor was developed with the same pedagogical best practices as the lectures. We find that students learn more than twice as much in less time when using an AI tutor, compared with the active learning class. They also feel more engaged and more motivated. These findings offer empirical evidence for the efficacy of a widely accessible AI-powered pedagogy in significantly enhancing learning outcomes, presenting a compelling case for its broad adoption in learning environments.

At Alpha School in Austin, Texas, students are placed in the classroom for two hours a day with an AI assistant, using the rest of the day to focus on skills like public speaking, financial literacy, and teamwork.

An AI-powered educational system would be radically different from STEM-based learning. It would prioritize skills over degrees, eliminating unnecessary coursework and replacing it with real-world, competency-based learning. AI would serve as both mentor and instructor, dynamically adjusting each student’s educational journey based on their strengths, weaknesses, and career goals.

The aim of the program, Mr. Hastings and school officials said, is to make Bowdoin a mecca for studying the risks and consequences of A.I. The initiative also aims to help prepare students to grapple with emerging technologies that can manufacture humanlike texts and even produce formulas for potential new drug compounds.

When you scale things up by a factor of 10, everything breaks.

I mean, terribly sadly, it’s just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the robots anymore than you can?

But they definitely determined that “prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an A.I. system the authors of the output.”

The big point here is that the models will own the rights to their twin—so when the twin gets paid for appearing in a campaign, the original human does too.

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The news also highlights that generative AI tech, when used to replace or at least recreate human-sourced content, can have massive impact beyond whatever it does to the revenues of the original creator. In future cases where digital clones are used, will photographers and makeup artists and other content team members just miss out on earning real wages?

Most Americans (56%) use AI tools; 31% have never used them. 28% of Americans use AI tools at least weekly.

As you can guess from the name, the tool is designed to do a thorough search on the web for information related to your query, then present a detailed report to your specifications.

According to OpenAI, Deep Research “leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet, pivoting as needed in reaction to information it encounters”.

By opening a root workspace folder in Cursor for your daily non-coding tasks (be it writing, research, project management, or content creation), you're essentially giving an AI assistant direct access to help organize, edit, and enhance your work.

As artificial intelligence is introduced to the boardroom, boards will be able to conduct real-time analysis—whether led by management, advisors, or board members themselves. Alternative or supplemental information that is missing can be searched for and brought in during the discussion. This will increase the cadence of meetings and reduce delays to decision-making, as less time is needed to wait on analysis conducted “between meetings.”

For example, building and maintaining multi-disciplinary teams is, on average, the greatest challenge for both front-runners and companies that are experimenting with AI, while it’s the second-greatest challenge for companies that are progressing with AI and the third greatest for fast-followers. On the other hand, building an end-to-end data foundation with quality data is the greatest challenge for companies that are progressing with AI—and the second-greatest challenge for everyone else.

“Their [Google] typical response is “give it time” and trust us to handle your advertising by leveraging our AI,” said TJ Kropp, head of search at Ramp97. “However, when campaign performance using their AI black box dips, there is no ‘why’. The lack of transparency to reproduce or improve upon campaign results is a significant deterrent. It forces us to focus on ‘traditional’, controllable methods that can drive optimal results.”

Businesses tempted to emulate Salesforce should remember that enterprise-grade code still requires plenty of humans. Vibe coding isn’t the answer to your budgetary problems.

Microsoft’s six security agents will be available in preview next month, and are designed to do things like triage and process phishing and data loss alerts, prioritize critical incidents, and monitor for vulnerabilities.

AI agents are becoming an increasingly popular way for companies like Microsoft to sell businesses on AI tools.

“Tell me your plan first; don’t code.”

Ironically, this is probably my most common AI coding prompt.

The PDF challenge also represents a significant bottleneck in the world of data analysis and machine learning at large. According to several studies, approximately 80–90 percent of the world's organizational data is stored as unstructured data in documents, much of it locked away in formats that resist easy extraction. The problem worsens with two-column layouts, tables, charts, and scanned documents with poor image quality.

With a majority of Perfect Crime’s attendees being tourists visiting New York, roughly 25 to 30 people use the service across eight shows each week, allowing for the theater to sell tickets to those who may not have bought them without the offering, according to Catherine Russell, general manager of the theater who stars in Perfect Crime.

Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler's operators that they’ve been detected.