weekend ai reads for 2025-04-18

But it turns out that AI may also be better, under some conditions, at providing the most human parts of doctoring — compassion and empathy. This revelation, supported by a growing body of research, is reshaping what patients expect of their doctors and, increasingly, how doctors interact with people they care for.

Participants’ walking distance and navigation time improved by 25% compared with using a cane when completing a 25-metre-long indoor maze.

Briscoe used to go to therapy weekly. After being briefly laid off for about a month in late February, she decided to turn to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot for mini therapy sessions. She now uses it several times a day, bumping up against the 10-free-message limit. “Therapy is expensive,” she says. “No one has an extra $200 to spend to talk to someone.”

Compare the feeling of doomscrolling to kneading dough, playing an instrument, sketching... these take effort, but they're also deeply satisfying. When you strip away too much friction, meaning and satisfaction go with it.

And when you have the mind virus, you become committed to your human baby. But it’s much more important to be committed to the AI of the future. And so to have human babies is fundamentally unethical.

Nate said its app’s users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, thanks to AI. In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ’s Southern District of New York alleges.

“AI-generated content continues to flood streaming platforms like Deezer and we see no sign of it slowing down,” said Aurelien Herault, the company’s innovation chief.

Herault added that a detection tool launched in January was helping the company filter fully AI-generated tracks from the algorithmic recommendations for its 9.7 million subscribers.

Furthermore, Meta says, that while the company “has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in LLM development,” they see no market in paying authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.” (An argument essential to fair use, but that also sounds like a scaled up version of a scenario in which the New York Philharmonic board argues against paying individual members of the orchestra because the organization spent a lot of money on the upkeep of David Geffen Hall, and also, a solo bassoon cannot play every part in “The Rite of Spring.”)

Gemini Gems are custom versions of Google Gemini that you can program with specific instructions and knowledge files for it to consult every time it responds.

RAG equips LLMs with real-time, external data retrieval, reducing retraining costs

Fine-tuning optimizes LLMs by training on specialized datasets, improving accuracy for domain-specific tasks

RAG is best for fast-changing data environments like finance, legal updates, and customer support

Fine-tuning is ideal for brand-specific AI, compliance-heavy industries, and sentiment analysis

If you are building conversational AI applications, 800ms voice-to-voice latency is a good target to aim for. Here's a breakdown of a voice-to-voice round trip from a user’s microphone, to the cloud, and back.

The appointments come as companies look to move beyond experimenting with AI, and find ways to actually realize the business efficiencies they hope it can deliver – it’s become tablestakes. They’re finding they need a driving personality to get those changes off the deck and into motion.

"If your mission is to make customers' lives better and easier every day, and you believe every customer experience will be reinvented by AI, you're going to invest deeply and broadly in AI," Jassy wrote in his letter to shareholders, an annual rite of passage for the top boss at the Seattle retailer.

The company removed all references to "diversity, equity and inclusion" in its proxy statement, which had numbered 21 in last year's report.

Educators can select a Google Drive file or manually input text, select which skills they want students to demonstrate, then generate questions to assess grade-specific comprehension and critical reasoning skills of students. Once generated, educators can then export the questions to a Google Form or Google Doc to assign to students.

While some bots simply don’t submit classwork and hope they can skate by, they also frequently use AI programs to generate classwork that they then submit. Determining whether a student is a bot can be a confusing task.

One of the most interesting trends we have observed is how the introduction of AI tools and the uncertainty they bring can sometimes test the limits of instructors’ stated dedication to co-creation, leading to the structure we call faux-creation. In the AI faux-created class, instructors enact many components of co-creation. They may give students opportunities to share input on course content, develop personalized learning outcomes or objectives, and design different ways for them to express their learning through flexible assignment structures. … However, they limit student co-creation around AI.

We have developed a four-stage pathway of improving engagement that involves increasing levels of trust and responsibility in students concerning AI in the learning environment: 1. Entering; 2. Exploring; 3. Evaluating; and 4. Integrating.

1. AI is going to be meaningfully better at exploratory data analysis than any BI tool.
2. If you take away EDA (ed: “exploratory data analysis”) from BI, the ‘conveyor belt’ model breaks down. And the conveyor belt model is the primary reason you use your current BI tool.
3. It is not yet clear how the BI ecosystem will adapt to this new reality.

That’s it. That’s my entire argument. Let’s see if it holds up.

As coding itself becomes commoditized, developer roles connect more directly to business strategy.

“Developers are taking supervisory roles, guiding agents doing work on their behalf,” Govindarajan explained. “But they remain responsible for what gets deployed. The buck still stops with them.”

This elevation places developers closer to decision-makers and further from implementation details—a promotion rather than an elimination.

Larson said that there are many reasons a developer might attempt to install a package that doesn’t exist, including mistyping the package name, incorrectly installing internal packages without checking to see whether those names already exist in a public index (dependency confusion), differences in the package name and the module name, and so on.

And they believed that if those who worked on AI were meat-eaters, that super-intelligent AI would use the meat industry as a blueprint for how society worked: enslaving and torturing humanity for all eternity in factory farms spread across the galaxy. To prevent this, they would have to work to turn everyone, and especially those who worked on AI, vegan.

Users on X quickly discovered that o3, in particular, is quite good at deducing cities, landmarks, and even restaurants and bars from subtle visual clues.

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels.