weekend ai reads for 2025-04-25

At the same time, the risk is immediate and present with agents. When models are not just contained boxes but can take actions in the world, when they have end-effectors that let them manipulate the world, I think it really becomes much more of a problem.

Law enforcement agencies have taken steps to prevent specifics about what Massive Blue is and how it works from becoming public. At public appropriations hearings in Pinal County about the Massive Blue contract, the sheriff’s office refused to tell county council members about what the product even is.

“Hey! We have no such policy,” wrote a Cursor representative in a Reddit reply three hours later. “You’re of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot.”

A reminder to myself that taking up space, even imperfectly, is still worth doing.

While AI cannot exercise emotions, its perceived human-like nature in these interactions instinctively makes us blurt out courtesies like “Thank You” and “Please.”

Sam Altman acknowledges this and reports that ChatGPT costs the company tens of millions of dollars just generating responses to these prompts.

South Korean actor Simon Lee’s AI likeness was similarly used to spook naïve Internet users but in a potentially more harmful way. He told the AFP that he was “stunned” to find his AI avatar promoting “questionable health cures on TikTok and Instagram,” feeling ashamed to have his face linked to obvious scams.

One of the maps shows the flow of data and knowledge out of 39 African nations to subcontractors, mostly located in the United Arab Emirates, North America, and Europe, with four outsourcing firms in Africa. From there, it goes on to clients such as Meta, OpenAI, and Samsung.

But we totally should fight for the right to live, think, and create without any new trending technology, including AI. We should fight for AI safety, for control over our data, for improved energy effectiveness. We should fight against AI being imposed on us as the default mode of human-computer interaction. We should fight to ban AI-powered weapons worldwide. We should demand climate action from AI profiteers.

Artificial intelligence guru Andrej Karpathy has produced one of the best tech videos I’ve ever watched. It's not for the faint of heart, but in 3.5 hours, he leads anyone with a basic understanding of neural networks to a similar knowledge of how modern LLMs, “chat-based” LLMs, and “reasoning” LLMs are constructed

But what if you don’t stick to zero? Let’s say you crank it just a bit - up to 0.2.

Suddenly, the conversation changes. It’s as if you're interrupting this expert coding wizard just as he’s about to confidently hand you his top solution, saying:

“Hang on a sec - before you give me your absolute #1 solution, could you instead jot down your top two or three best ideas, toss them into a hat, shake ‘em around, and then randomly draw one? Yeah, let’s just roll with whatever comes out.”

Timely data access ensures relevance and adaptability, while data quality directly impacts output excellence. Robust data governance practices address ethical concerns, like privacy and bias. Prioritizing these aspects in product development lays the foundation for a Gen AI solution that excels in performance while upholding ethical standards and user trust.

As agents increasingly join the workforce, we’ll see the rise of the agent boss: someone who builds, delegates to, and manages agents to amplify their impact—working smarter, scaling faster, and taking control of their career in the age of AI. From the boardroom to the front line, every worker will need to think like the CEO of an agent-powered startup, directing teams of agents with specialized skills like research and data analysis.

Not all design disciplines are equally affected by AI. Those who work with material, scale, and space—book designers, muralists, sign painters, mosaicists—continue to operate through tacit knowledge and touch. Their work still resists automation because it’s rooted in place and presence—it has “aura.”

But, from my conversations, I also learned that for every student misusing AI to avoid hard thinking, there’s another embracing it to learn more deeply. Some use it to check their math homework. Others ask AI to explain calculus to them, because their parents certainly can’t. Some create practice tests to prepare for their exams. And, perhaps most powerfully of all, others turn to AI to ask honest, "dumb" questions they genuinely want answers to, igniting curiosity in topics their classrooms might overlook.

When we compared the model predictions to actual outcomes, distinct patterns emerged across racial groups. First, Black and Hispanic students were more likely to be incorrectly predicted to fail when they actually graduated (known as false negatives).

Meanwhile, white and Asian students were more likely to be incorrectly predicted to succeed (known as false positives). Among “failing” students who did not attain a bachelor’s degree within eight years, the predicted probability of success varied significantly by racial group (see right panel). Estimates of success were overly optimistic for white and Asian students (61% and 68% estimated probability of success, respectively). Conversely, the model estimates only a 32% probability of success for Hispanic students and 39% for Black students in similar circumstances.

Despite the impressive advances in Generative AI over recent years, the outputs of these systems are neither oriented towards the truth nor connected to action in such a way as to have conceptual content. Employing AIs as teachers would undermine the authority of all teachers and of the body of established knowledge that they aim to impart to students. Moreover, students must learn how in order to learn that, be exposed to the personal examples of their teachers in order to understand what it means to be committed to a discipline, and interact with other students and staff in order to realize themselves as moral agents and citizens.

This post outlines general patterns that have proven effective, both for Anthropic's internal teams and for external engineers using Claude Code across various codebases, languages, and environments. Nothing in this list is set in stone nor universally applicable; consider these suggestions as starting points. We encourage you to experiment and find what works best for you!

Similar to exposing sensitive data but much more nuanced, companies who are hooking up a lot of internal data to AI-power agents, search, and MCPs (i.e. Glean customers) are going to soon discover that “AI + all the data an employee already had access to” can occasionally lead to unintended consequences. It’s counterintuitive but I’ll claim that even if the data access of an employee’s agent+tools is a strict subset of that user’s own privileges, there’s a potential for this to still provide the employee with data they should not have access to.

Keep tongue on roof of mouth as you open your mouth wide. Once you open wide enough that your tongue don't touch, keep opening but keep it center as you do it.

This tool will help you determine to what extent your creative process uses artificial intelligence. Inspired by the Creative Commons model, our badge offers transparency on the genesis of your work.

Google updated its “Results About You” tool, and using it has been an eye-opening experience.

It uncovered my home address, phone number and email on so-called people-search websites, along with my birth date and grandma’s name—even though I requested removal from some databases years ago. It regularly sends emails alerting me to more exposed data.