NYTimes: “With endless demands on our time and attention, doing everyday things “intentionally” gives an illusion of control.”
Ethan Mollick: “Generative AI has helped a lot of people do tasks since the original ChatGPT, but the limit was always a human user. AI makes mistakes and errors, so, without a human guiding it on each step, nothing valuable could be accomplished. The dream of autonomous AI agents, which, when given a task, can plan and use tools (coding, web search) to accomplish it, seemed far away. After all, AI makes mistakes, so one failure in the long chain of steps that an agent has to follow to accomplish a task would result in a failure overall. However, that isn’t how things worked out, and another new paper explains why. It turns out most of our assumptions about AI agents were wrong. Even small increases in accuracy (and new models are much less prone to errors) leads to huge increases in the number of tasks an AI can do. And the biggest and latest “thinking” models are actually self-correcting, so they don’t get stopped by errors. All of this means that AI agents can accomplish far more steps than they could before and can use tools (which basically include anything your computer can do) without substantial human intervention.”
WSJ: “Dizzying architecture, bright lights and a cyberpunk vibe have made Chongqing a must-see destination for Chinese and international tourists alike.”
FT: “In years to come, we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through a flattering Instagram filter), to a gaudy backwater of the internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do. Both Meta and OpenAI have recently announced new social platforms that will be filled with AI-generated short-form videos. This assumes a reservoir of untapped demand for the ability to create and binge-watch yet more content, with a promotional video from OpenAI featuring absurd fantastical animations and deepfakes, hinting at some of what may be to come. To use a nutritional analogy, this is ultra-processed content. Dopamine-dense, with at best negligible informational value, at worst corrosively negative.”
Salesforce: “Developers are evolving into “AI artisans” who refine autonomous AI agents for specific business needs, shifting from writing code from scratch to a human-led process of building, iterating, observing, testing, evaluating, and optimizing agents.”
