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- weekend ai reads for 2025-05-23
weekend ai reads for 2025-05-23
đ° ABOVE THE FOLD: USER BEHAVIORS
How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025 / Harvard Business Review (13 minute read)
More than third of UK consumers now use AI to shop â survey â More than half of those using AI said it had helped to âinspireâ them and 51% said it helped to cut through âonline noiseâ. / The Independent (5 minute read)
related, Walmart prepares for a future where AI agents do the shopping â Retailers are racing to adapt as AI changes shopping habits / Tech Spot (4 minute read)
Report: Spring 2025 AI Model Usage Trends / Poe blog (5 minute read)
80 percent of content creators are using AI in their workflow in 2025 / Digiday (7 minute read)
One of the most unexpected findings of Wondercraftâs report was that only 41.8 percent of respondents under the age of 25 said that they used AI throughout their workflow â significantly lower than respondents in older age groups, according to Serrander.
Google's AI answers are changing user behavior by sharply reducing clicks to websites / The Decoder (7 minute read)
Even when users interacted with the AIO, they didnât go far. While 88 percent tapped âShow more,â the median scroll depth was just 30 percent. Most (86 percent) only skimmed the content, and very few reached the bottom of the answer. Trust and visibility were concentrated in the top thirdâsimilar to how people treat traditional snippets in search.
đ» QUOTES OF THE WEEK
People who donât pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waiting for the other person to be done so they can say whatâs rattling around inside. The body is slower, needs more time, and then words bubble up organically, one after another, without planning. People who exist more in their body are generally better at connecting emotionally with others.
Gross oversimplification, but older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement. Maybe people in their 20s and 30s use it as like a life advisor or something. And then people in college use it as an operating system.
đ„ FOR EVERYONE
Windows is getting support for the âUSB-C of AI appsâ â Microsoft is embracing Model Context Protocol as part of a push to reshape Windows in a world of AI agents. / The Verge (8 minute read)
An MCP registry on Windows will act as the secure, trustworthy source for all MCP servers that AI agents will be able to access. âAgents can discover the installed MCP servers on client devices via the MCP registry for Windows, leverage their expertise, and offer meaningful value to end users,â says Davuluri. MCP servers will be able to access things like the Windows File System, windowing, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
if this isnât quickly taken back to the drawing board once it hits the âreal worldâ, weâd be surprised
related, The Agentic Web and Original Sin / Ben Thompson, Stratechery (22 minute read)
No, the real neglect and missed opportunity in terms of payments is happening right now: Microsoft is on to the right idea with its adoption of MCP and introduction of NLWeb, but its proposal, by virtue of not including native payments, isnât nearly as compelling as it should be.
One in 10 Gen Zers want their boss to be replaced by AIâthey say that bots are more âhumanâ / Fortune (7 minute read)
possibly related, Study looking at AI chatbots in 7,000 workplaces finds âno significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupationâ / Fortune (9 minute read)
based on a study in Denmark
the paper, Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects / National Bureau of Economic Research
AI doesn't know ânoâ â and that's a huge problem for medical bots â Many AI models fail to recognise negation words such as ânoâ and ânotâ, which means they canât easily distinguish between medical images labelled as showing a disease and images labelled as not showing the disease / New Scientist (7 minute read)
Why the Chinese Government Taught AI to Lie / Pete Warden's blog (9 minute read)
All information retrieval systems, going back to analog libraries and forward to search engines, have biases. Whatâs different here is that lies are being baked into foundational technologies, with no other perspectives available.
đ FOUNDATIONS
The AI founders Playbook / Guillermo Flor, Product Market Fit, Substack archive (9 minute read)
Most agents fail due to feature incompleteness and weak integration. They may complete a first task but fail on follow-ups due to limited API access. Companies like Ramp solve this by giving agents full UI access, enabling them to operate the product like a human.
list of mostly-truisms when thinking about the âA.i. softwareâ space
LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation / Microsoft Research & Salesforce Research, arxiv (123 minute read)
Our experiments confirm that all the top open- and closed-weight LLMs we test exhibit significantly lower performance in multi-turn conversations than single-turn, with an average drop of 39% across six generation tasks. Analysis of 200,000+ simulated conversations decomposes the performance degradation into two components: a minor loss in aptitude and a significant increase in unreliability. We find that LLMs often make assumptions in early turns and prematurely attempt to generate final solutions, on which they overly rely. In simpler terms, we discover that when LLMs take a wrong turn in a conversation, they get lost and do not recover.
shorter chats are better, even if you have to prompt with more information or supporting documents
How I Learned Complex Topics 10x Faster with NotebookLM / AI Maker, Substack archive (9 minute read)
đ FOR LEADERS
Org Charts of AI Startups Are Built to Stay Small, Flexible / Bloomberg (7 minute read)
Rather than testing one idea at a time, like a traditional company might, Daydream typically tests 15 to 20 ideas in parallel. âThese AI tools are phenomenal at helping you find out if you're wrong faster, and helping you get to right faster,â he said.
Who wants to be a chief AI officer? A new career path emerges / Zdnet (5 minute read)
Along with skills, data is also an issue -- and AI leaders have their work cut out. Over the past year, their organizations ran an average of 45 experiments with generative AI. However, only an average of 20 experiments (44%) are expected to go into production.
Talent shortages and the need for clean data are potential roadblocks.
To realize AIâs potential in the workplace, do one thing â Focus on people. / Fast Company (6 minute read)
1. AI training
2. Employee-driven innovation
3. AI and human collaboration
đ FOR EDUCATORS
Duolingo CEO says AI teaches better than humansâbut schools will exist âbecause you still need childcareâ / Fortune (7 minute read)
possibly related, Duolingo wipes TikTok and Instagram amid âAI-firstâ backlash / Ad Age archive (6 minute read)
LinkedIn cofounder says students should expect tests to get harder to cheat on with ChatGPT â and to involve an AI examiner / Business Insider (7 minute read)
How Students Are Fending Off Accusations That They Used A.I. to Cheat â Students are resorting to extreme measures to fend off accusations of cheating, including hourslong screen recordings of their homework sessions. / New York Times (9 minute read)
this really is the dumbest timeline
đ FOR TECHNOLOGISTS
After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain / Alberto Fortin (10 minute read)
Now that Iâve changed my approach, Iâm not frustrated with LLMs anymore. I have once again very low expectations, so when they do something well itâs a nice surprise. Iâm trying to be smart about how I use them, they're such a great tool for learning for example.
Securing Amazon Bedrock Agents: A guide to safeguarding against indirect prompt injections / AWS Machine Learning Blog (15 minute read)
Jules â An Asynchronous Coding Agent
from Google
free (for now)
related, I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instant / Zdnet (16 minute read)
Itâs important to note that if I didn't have an understanding of the underlying code, I wouldnât have instructed Jules about this, and the code would not work. You canât âvibe codeâ something like this without knowing the underlying code.
Emerging Developer Patterns for the AI Era / Andreessen Horowitz blog (19 minute read)
This changes the purpose of docs: theyâre no longer just for human readers, but also for agent consumers. In this new dynamic, the documentation interface becomes something like instructions for AI agents. It doesnât just expose raw content, but explains how to use a system correctly.
đ FOR FUN
an em-dash that âprovesâ A.i. didnât write your copy
Peek â Peek auto-tracks your money, runs vibe checks, and builds your todos â AI-powered, anxiety-free.
Veo 3 sample / arikuschnir, Instagram (2 minute video)
AI can Talk! I spent 2 hours playing with Veo 3 @googledeepmind and it blew my mind now that it can do sound! This is all Generative AI text to video out of the box... it comes with dialogue, sound design and music
related (1), Googleâs Veo 3 Is Already Deepfaking All of YouTubeâs Most Smooth-Brained Content / Gizmodo (6 minute read)
related (2), Flow TV | Short Films / Google Labs
Googleâs Gemini AI is coming to Chrome â Googleâs AI assistant will be able to help you while you browse. / The Verge (5 minute read)
to paraphrase chris on the impacts of A.i.: âImagine everything you had three years ago, only much worse.â
đ§ż AI-ADJACENT
Just use HTML (12 minute read)
Itâs been the backbone of the web since Al Gore flipped the switch, and itâll still be here long after your trendy framework is rotting in a GitHub graveyard. So take your smartass logic and shove it. HTMLâs king, and you're just a peasant with a keyboard.
lots of swearing; funny and apropos with or without
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