weekend ai reads for 2025-05-23

📰 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 – survey — More than half of those using AI said it had helped to ‘inspire’ them and 51% said it helped to cut through ‘online noise’. / The Independent (5 minute read)

Report: Spring 2025 AI Model Usage Trends / Poe blog (5 minute read)

One of the most unexpected findings of Wondercraft’s report was that only 41.8 percent of respondents under the age of 25 said that they used AI throughout their workflow — significantly lower than respondents in older age groups, according to Serrander.

Even when users interacted with the AIO, they didn’t go far. While 88 percent tapped “Show more,” 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 third—similar to how people treat traditional snippets in search.

 

đŸ“» QUOTES OF THE WEEK

People who don’t 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 what’s 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.

“Shani” (source)

 

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.

Sam Altman (source)

 

đŸ‘„ FOR EVERYONE

Windows is getting support for the ‘USB-C of AI apps’ — 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. “Agents 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,” says Davuluri. MCP servers will be able to access things like the Windows File System, windowing, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

  • if this isn’t quickly taken back to the drawing board once it hits the “real world”, we’d 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, isn’t nearly as compelling as it should be.

AI doesn't know ‘no’ – and that's a huge problem for medical bots — Many AI models fail to recognise negation words such as “no” and “not”, which means they can’t 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. What’s different here is that lies are being baked into foundational technologies, with no other perspectives available.

 

📚 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 “A.i. software” 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)

 

🚀 FOR LEADERS

Rather than testing one idea at a time, like a traditional company might, Daydream typically tests 15 to 20 ideas in parallel. “These AI tools are phenomenal at helping you find out if you're wrong faster, and helping you get to right faster,” he said.

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 AI’s potential in the workplace, do one thing — Focus on people. / Fast Company (6 minute read)

1. AI training

2. Employee-driven innovation

3. AI and human collaboration

 

🎓 FOR EDUCATORS

How Students Are Fending Off Accusations That They Used A.I. to Cheat — 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

 

📊 FOR TECHNOLOGISTS

Now that I’ve changed my approach, I’m not frustrated with LLMs anymore. I have once again very low expectations, so when they do something well it’s a nice surprise. I’m trying to be smart about how I use them, they're such a great tool for learning for example.

Jules — An Asynchronous Coding Agent

It’s important to note that if I didn't have an understanding of the underlying code, I wouldn’t have instructed Jules about this, and the code would not work. You can’t “vibe code” 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: they’re 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 doesn’t just expose raw content, but explains how to use a system correctly.

 

🎉 FOR FUN

  • an em-dash that “proves” A.i. didn’t write your copy

Peek — Peek auto-tracks your money, runs vibe checks, and builds your todos — 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

Google’s Gemini AI is coming to Chrome — Google’s 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.: “Imagine everything you had three years ago, only much worse.”

 

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

Just use HTML (12 minute read)

It’s been the backbone of the web since Al Gore flipped the switch, and it’ll still be here long after your trendy framework is rotting in a GitHub graveyard. So take your smartass logic and shove it. HTML’s king, and you're just a peasant with a keyboard.

  • lots of swearing; funny and apropos with or without

 

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