March 30, 2026
Hi everyone!
The big topic everywhere these days is agents. Also “vibe-coding.”
There’s also a LOT happening in libraries these days, as you’ll see in the section below.
In this issue we’ll look at:
Education: College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them - Jeanne Beatrix Law, The Conversation
Libraries: ARL and CNI Release Report on Strategic Implications of AI Futures for Research Libraries - ARL & CNI Communications, Association of Research Libraries
Agents: Desktop Agents Are Having a Moment - Alexey Shabanov, Testing Catalog
Vibe-coding: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: One Semester, Eight Vibe-Coded Teaching Tools - Rebecca Fordon
Claude had so many upgrades! How to Use Claude’s Massive New Upgrades - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube
AI art: Who’s the Artist?: Remixing in the Age of Intelligence - Nettrice Gaskins, Medium
Reporting on AI: AI Isn’t Stressing People Out. The AI Discourse Is. - Nielsen Norman Group
AI & politics: Sanders Sounds the Alarm on AI
You might think that left-wing views about AI in the U.S. are all in alignment, but Bernie doesn’t agree with those who say it’s overhyped, not that powerful, and only a bubble. Instead he’s been talking with the x-risk people (Hinton, Yudkowsky, and others) and is more worried about how powerful it’s getting.The usual sections: Tips, Just for fun, Thought-provoking, and The future.
Also I’m offering this webinar on April 24th at 2pm Eastern.
AI & ACCESSIBILITY: How AI Can Benefit People Across a Range of Disabilities
See also my blog post: Who to follow for staying current with AI.
Enjoy!
Anthropic
’Put Claude to work’: Claude can now use your computer autonomously, you just have to tell it what to do - Craig Hale, TechRadar
Improving skill-creator: Test, measure, and refine Agent Skills - Anthropic blog
“Skill authors can now verify that their skills work, catch regressions, and improve descriptions.”
How to Use Claude’s Massive New Upgrades - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube
Useful overview of Claude features. The overarching theme is a shift toward an always-on, context-maintaining, persistent orchestration model — work happens continuously even when you’re away, with multiple remote interaction modalities (phone, terminal, chat channels) to check in and direct it from wherever you are.
Covers these features: remote control, dispatch, Claude Code channels, scheduled tasks, computer use, projects, code review, 1 million token context window and interactive charts/diagrams.
Google Maps Gets Chatty With a New Gemini-Powered Interface - Reece Rogers, Wired
““Ask Maps,” rolling out today to Google Maps on mobile, lets you ask Gemini questions about locations and even to plan trips on your behalf.”
Google made Gmail and Drive easier for AI agents to use - Allison Steffens Herrera, The Next Web
“A new command-line tool published to GitHub consolidates Workspace’s sprawling APIs into a single interface. It also signals how seriously the company is taking the agentic AI moment.”
OpenAI
OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 with native computer use mode, financial plugins for Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
“The big headlines on this release are efficiency, with OpenAI reporting that GPT-5.4 uses far fewer tokens (47% fewer on some tasks) than its predecessors, and, arguably even more impressively, a new “native” Computer Use mode available through the API and its Codex that lets GPT-5.4 navigate a users’ computer like a human and work across applications.”
Introducing GPT‑5.4 mini and nano - Fast and efficient models optimized for coding and subagents
Microsoft
Microsoft’s New AI Health Tool Can Read Your Medical Records and Give Advice - Sebastian Herrera, Wall Street Journal
“The company on Thursday unveiled Copilot Health, a feature within the Copilot app that lets the chatbot dispense personalized healthcare advice informed by the user’s disease history, test results, medications, doctors’ visit notes and biometric data as recorded by wearable devices. Health data imported into the feature will be encrypted and firewalled from the rest of the app to address the privacy concerns of handing over one’s medical records to a generative AI platform.”
Meta
Exclusive: Meta hires duo behind Moltbook - Ina Fried, Axios
“Meta has acquired Moltbook, a viral social network designed for AI agents, Axios has learned. Why it matters: The deal brings Moltbook’s creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the unit run by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.”
Open source Mamba 3 arrives to surpass Transformer architecture with nearly 4% improved language modeling, reduced latency - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
“As new information flows in, the model simply updates this snapshot instead of re-reading everything from the beginning. This allows the AI to process massive amounts of information, like entire libraries of books or long strands of DNA, with incredible speed and much lower memory requirements.”
OpenClaw unveils ClawHub Marketplace; draws more than 331,000 stars on GitHub - The Economic Times
“The open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform OpenClaw has introduced a plugin marketplace called ClawHub alongside a slate of new AI features aimed at accelerating the development of autonomous agents.”
Nvidia’s Nemotron coalition brings eight AI labs together to build open frontier models - Luke James, Tom’s Hardware
“Nvidia today announced the Nemotron Coalition at its GTC conference in San Jose, California, recruiting eight AI companies to co-develop open frontier models on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, with the work feeding into the upcoming Nemotron 4 model family. Alongside the coalition, Nvidia released a new generation of open models spanning agentic AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and drug discovery. The founding members are Black Forest Labs, Cursor, LangChain, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Reflection AI, Sarvam, and Thinking Machines Lab — the latter of which was founded by Mira Murati, who served as CTO of OpenAI until her departure in 2024.”
Mistral releases a new open source model for speech generation - Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch
“The new model, called Voxtral TTS, supports nine languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, and Arabic. ‘Our customers have been asking for a speech model. So we built a small-sized speech model that can fit on a smartwatch, a smartphone, a laptop, or other edge devices. The cost of it is a fraction of anything else on the market, but it offers state-of-the-art performance…’ “
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: One Semester, Eight Vibe-Coded Teaching Tools - Rebecca Fordon
“‘When I vibe-code a tool in front of students, or reveal that I built something in 3 minutes that took an hour the traditional way, I’m modeling some of the ways they can use technology. The message isn’t always “look what I made,” but also “you could make this too, and you should, because the people who understand the problem best should be the ones building the solution.’ “
Reinventing the LibGuide with Natural Language Programming - Kyle Byin, LibTech Insights
“AI vibe coding opens up new possibilities for library resources.”
Software Bonkers: The year is 2026 and I can’t stop building - Craig Mod
“It’s strange times. Anyway, I’m mad for software right now. Bonkers. I can’t stop thinking about things to make, things to make better. And then I go and make them. There’s an energy around all this that is — truly — epochal. If you’re not playing with models like Claude, you should probably take a peek. It’s the time of building.”
Suddenly Everyone in San Francisco Is a ‘Builder,’ Whatever That Means - Katherine Bindley, Wall Street Journal
“Creating apps and websites used to be the rarefied world of tech developers. No more.”
Use Canvas in AI Mode to get things done and bring your ideas to life, right in Search. - Google
“To make your own tool or dashboard, select the new Canvas option from the tool menu (+) in AI Mode and describe what you want to create. You’ll get a working prototype in the Canvas side panel that pulls together the freshest information from the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.”
Introducing “vibe design” with Stitch - Google
“We’re introducing a complete redesign of the Stitch UI. It now features a new AI-native, infinite canvas that gives your ideas room to grow from early ideations to working prototypes. The new Stitch canvas is built to amplify your creativity throughout the design process, where you often diverge and converge before landing on something great. It allows you to bring your ideas regardless of the shape they take — images, text or even code — directly to the canvas as context.”
Is Claude Cowork an Agent Yet? - Pawel Jozefiak, Digital Thoughts
“Three major AI companies. Three “agent on your computer” launches. Two weeks. This is not a coincidence. The entire industry is converging on the same insight: the future of AI is not a chat window. It’s an agent that lives on your machine, has access to your stuff, and works while you’re away. I’ve been saying this for a while. Now everyone is racing to build it.”
The agentic researcher - building custom, transparent and extensible workflows with Claude & MCP - Aaron Tay
“The deeper question — whether the future of research tooling lies in polished, vendor-defined products or in researcher-configured composable environments — remains open. My sense is that we are heading towards a middle ground: vendor tools that expose MCP interfaces, allowing them to be composed in ways the vendors did not anticipate, combined with institutional configurations (possibly maintained by libraries) that provide sensible defaults while remaining customisable.”
What personal software actually is - Dan Shipper
“Personal software is an agent you have a relationship with. You teach it, correct it, shape it. It grows a personality and skills in response to you. This is what OpenClaw is showing us.”
Anthropic just shipped an OpenClaw killer called Claude Code Channels, letting you message it over Telegram and Discord - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
“This isn’t just a new UI; it is a fundamental shift in how developers interact with AI agents, moving from a synchronous “ask-and-wait” model to an asynchronous, autonomous partnership. Previously, Claude Code users were stuck interacting with the agentic harness on the Claude desktop application, terminal or supported developer environment, and Claude mobile app through a somewhat flaky (in my experience) interconnection setting called Remote Control.”
Desktop Agents Are Having a Moment - Alexey Shabanov, Testing Catalog
“What’s been particularly noticeable this week is how Anthropic is pushing to transform its desktop app into something closer to OpenClaw. They already have scheduled tasks, scheduled cloud tasks, and the ability to talk to Claude Desktop from mobile. They’re also experimenting with Telegram integration, meaning you could have Claude running on your laptop and communicate with it through Telegram in exactly the same way you do with OpenClaw. It can execute any task on your laptop. A nice and quite obvious direction. At the same time, other companies are following Anthropic’s lead here. Manus launched its own desktop app. xAI is working on something called Grok Computer, which, based on the name, sounds more like they are following Perplexity, though it’s too early to judge. The bottom line: desktop apps that can operate your laptop and handle whatever you throw at them are gaining serious traction.”
Meta’s Manus launches desktop app to bring its AI agent onto personal devices amid OpenClaw craze - Dylan Butts, CNBC
“However, through the new Manus Desktop application, a feature called ‘My Computer’ lets its agents work directly with local files, tools and applications on a user’s device. The expanded offering aligns Meta and Manus’s agents more closely with OpenClaw, an open-sourced AI agent that is also downloaded onto users’ local devices. “
Perplexity turns your Mac mini into a 24/7 AI agent - Ana Maria Constantin, The Next Web
“The centrepiece of announcement is Personal Computer: software that runs continuously on a user-supplied Mac mini, merging local files, apps, and sessions with Perplexity’s cloud-based Computer system.”
Introducing Replit Agent 4: Built for Creativity - Replit
”Agent 4 frees up more time for creativity by enabling parallel work—multiple agents working at the same time, each focused on a different part of the project. It’s the difference between one person tackling a checklist alone and a small team dividing the work and moving together.”
Ramp Launches Agent Cards to Enable Secure, Autonomous AI Spending - Stabledash
“Ramp has officially launched its Agent Cards feature. Designed specifically for AI agents that need to make purchases on behalf of users or businesses, this new tool promises enhanced security, policy enforcement, and seamless integration without exposing sensitive card information.”
OpenJarvis: Personal AI, On Personal Devices - Jon Saad-Falcon et al.
“OpenJarvis is an open-source framework for personal AI agents that runs entirely on-device. It provides shared primitives for building on-device agents, efficiency-aware evaluations, and a learning loop that improves models using local trace data.”
Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig
Who’s the Artist?: Remixing in the Age of Intelligence - Nettrice Gaskins, Medium
“Critics of generative AI argue that machines replace human labor but these examples show how machines can aid humans (artists) in the process of making content that resonates with viewers or listeners. Proponents of GenAI often expound on the many benefits of the technology such as the ability to produce work that surpasses the capabilities of their makers. However, my ideas (color studies, paintings, collages) often guide the Al image making process. The aim is not to copy from others but to extend remixing into the new (latent) space of GenAI. Maya Ackerman writes, While machines may never possess a human soul or create art exactly as we do, there’s a unique magic that unfolds when we dare to deeply collaborate with them... It invites us to look past the surface, to recognize new forms of creativity and connection…”
The Algorithm King Has No Clothes: Spectacle, Robotics and the Early Misreadings of AI Art - Vito di Bari, LinkedIn
“By human-scale AI I do not mean smaller models or limited datasets. I mean an artistic approach in which the center of gravity remains human: intention, authorship, and vision. In this context, the algorithm is not the artist. It is a tool—just as the brush, photography, and cinema once were. The question then becomes: what do we choose to imagine with these tools? When artists treat generative systems as artistic material, new languages emerge—languages that cannot be reduced to a simple technological demonstration. AI becomes art not when a machine produces an image, but when an artist uses the machine to produce a question.”
Hollywood shifts from fear to AI adoption - Eleanor Hawkins, Axios AI+
“Hollywood is investing heavily in AI, positioning it as infrastructure, not as a replacement for creators.”
Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora - Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter
“In a surprise move, OpenAI will shut down its Sora AI video app, just months after it was first launched…. A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora.”
Lyria 3 Pro: Create longer tracks in more Google products - Google
“Last month, we introduced Lyria 3, featuring custom music generation designed to spark creative expression. Now, we’re bringing our most advanced music generation model to more Google products, and introducing Lyria 3 Pro. This advanced version allows the creation of tracks up to 3 minutes long, with customization and creative control. Lyria 3 Pro better understands musical composition, so you can now prompt for specific elements like intros, verses, choruses and bridges.”
Inhuman Music? - Paul Smith, LinkedIn
“There is a fairy tale making the rounds, all powdered wig and trembling lip, that music was once a pure human utterance, some sacred exhalation of the species, and then one day AI arrived in a silicon cape and poisoned the village well. This is nonsense. Antique nonsense. Premium nonsense. Music production has been crawling with non-human mediation, prosthetics, substitutions, illusions, ghost labor, mechanical cheats, engineered spaces, synthetic stand-ins, electrical disguises, mathematical corrections, and glorified fraudulence for more than a century.”
Suno Launches Version 5.5 With New ‘Voices’ Feature - Ashley King, Digital Music News
”The first new feature is the launch of Voices, which will be available to Suno Pro and Premier subscribers. The feature includes a verification process that matches the singing voice in your live-captured or uploaded audio to a random phrase that Suno asks the user to speak. Voices on Suno are private; only the person who uploaded the voice can use it to create new songs. Suno says in the future it plans on adding Voice sharing, but that aspect of this new feature remains on the horizon.” Also, “The Custom models feature allows users to tune 5.5 music that you’ve created to build a personalized version of the model that knows your style. Pro and Premier subscribers can create up to three custom models for now.”
AI & ACCESSIBILITY: How AI Can Benefit People Across a Range of Disabilities
I’m offering this webinar on April 24th at 2pm Eastern.
This webinar goes beyond accommodation to explore how AI tools can support agency and inclusion for people with disabilities. See real examples across vision, hearing, cognitive, and physical access — from smart glasses and auto-captioning to AI chatbots. Leave with practical strategies for your library or campus.”
See my other webinar topics.
Who to follow for staying current with AI - my blog post on nicolehennig.com
In order to stay current with generative AI (or any technology), I’ve always found it important to cast a wide net. Don’t only follow people similar to yourself—such as those from your same profession, political viewpoints, or demographics. Instead, look worldwide. Seek out many different professions, and draw from a mix of sources: newsletters, social media, LinkedIn, YouTube channels, and podcasts. Here are my top recommendations for people and groups to follow to stay current with generative AI—organized by topic. This isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a strong starting point.
WCAG 2.2 Audit — Claude Cowork Skill
“A Claude Cowork plugin that performs comprehensive WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility audits on web pages and HTML files, with programmatic contrast verification and professional audit reports.”
AI Smart Glasses and the Future of Academic Integrity in a Postplagiarism Era - Sarah Elaine Eaton et al.
“We argue that treating AI glasses as cheating devices overlooks their potential for accessibility and cognitive support while failing to address the structural disruption these technologies bring to education.“
AI software for smart glasses wins £1m prize for technology to help people with dementia - Nicola Davis, The Guardian
“Glasses use verbal cues and floating text to assist wearers and are expected to be available in early 2027.”
Accessible by Default - Community Access
“We are a community of blind and sighted developers building open source tools that make AI-generated code accessible by default.” “Built by the community, for the community. 57 AI agents enforce WCAG 2.2 AA inside your favorite coding environment—every recommendation backed by verifiable sources, every feature born from real community needs.”
Comments on why AI tools matter for neurodiverse people - The Compassion Collective (@the_compassion_collective) on Threads
“Before tools like this? We were:
– burning out trying to translate ourselves
– being misunderstood or dismissed
– excluded from spaces that required a communication style we couldn’t sustain
– told to “just try harder” in systems that were never built for us.”
“When people start defining “good” vs “bad” AI use based on their own needs, what they’re actually doing is erasing neurodiversity”
College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them - Jeanne Beatrix Law, The Conversation
“Our analysis suggests that generative AI is entering student writing not as a wholesale replacement for human authorship, but as part of a negotiated collaboration. The results suggest that AI most often enters the composing process during idea generation, revision and moments of writer’s block, while students maintain control over argument choice, voice and final phrasing.”
The AI cheating panic is loud. The way students actually use ChatGPT is much quieter. - Parker Jones, ChatGPT for Education
From a student: “That’s why, over the past few months, I interviewed more than 50 Cal Poly students to understand how they use this technology and how they feel about it. What I found was far more ordinary and much more hopeful than the story we’ve been told about students and AI.”
From Prompt to Practice: A Framework for Transparent GenAI Use in Higher Education - Carol Damm and Lance Eaton, EDUCAUSE
“As generative artificial intelligence reshapes instructional workflows at colleges and universities, a four-level transparency framework can help education developers calibrate documentation and disclosure practices to support ethical responsibility and maintain student trust.”
What parts of the academic knowledge creation & dissemination pipeline can we automate with AI? - Mark Hahnel, Open Research
“There are stages where the automation is fairly robust. Metadata enrichment, FAIR scoring, integrity screening, novelty checks against the existing literature. These are tasks where the output is verifiable and the failure modes are containable. They’re also, not coincidentally, the tasks that consume a lot of researcher time without requiring much researcher judgement. But there are other stages where a human needs to be in the loop, and probably will for a while. Editorial decisions - whether a piece of work is actually worth publishing, whether the framing is intellectually honest, whether the conclusions follow from the evidence. These are not tasks I’d be comfortable delegating to agents at this point. The current OpenAccess.ai setup allows human editors to review agent assessments before making final decisions, and I think that hybrid model is the right one for this experiment.”
Introducing the U of A AI Platform - University of Arizona News
“Several thousand members of the campus community are already piloting the first tool, U of A Gen AI, which allows users to choose from five commercially available large language models: Claude, OpenAI, Gemma, Meta Llama and Amazon Nova. In addition to U of A Gen AI, the platform will eventually include additional services to support teaching and learning, research and operations across campus. These include: A public-facing campus chatbot that uses verified university information to answer questions about programs, services and resources. An Arizona AI assistant that will allow colleges, departments and offices to create custom chatbots that retrieve information only from approved institutional data sources. AI sandboxes that provide controlled, secure environments where researchers, instructors and students can test and experiment with AI systems without exposing sensitive or restricted data.”
A SIFT Rebuild (in progress) - Mike Caulfield
Discusses “the death of the linked, free source” and “the shift to short-form video on platforms like TikTok” and what that means for teaching fact-checking and information literacy now.
Generative AI and Libraries: Claiming Our Place in the Center of a Shared Future - Terese Scheiderich, College & Research Libraries
I enjoyed reading this book review of Generative AI and Libraries: Claiming Our Place in the Center of a Shared Future, Michael Hanegan and Chris Rosser.
I agree with the reviewers.
“In a growing body of literature on generative artificial intelligence, this title is noteworthy for its hopeful tone. The authors are optimistic about librarians’ ability to positively influence the development of generative AI, if they are willing to lead the way—a welcome perspective in a conversation often dominated by fear and uncertainty. Importantly, the book opens the door to questions about the consequences if libraries choose to opt out of GenAI conversations, namely allowing other, less trustworthy institutions to control the narrative. More than just a toolkit for ethically integrating GenAI, this work is a call to action for librarians to come together and “claim the center” (p. vii) in reshaping the future. While some librarians may question their ability to do this, others will be inspired to answer the call.”
ARL and CNI Release Report on Strategic Implications of AI Futures for Research Libraries - ARL & CNI Communications, Association of Research Libraries
“Invest in workforce now. AI literacy programs, flexible position descriptions, and safe opportunities for staff experimentation are foundational regardless of which AI future materializes. Waiting for the landscape to stabilize before upskilling is a strategic risk.”
The Horseless Carriage of AI Search: Why Using LLMs to Generate Boolean Alone Is Likely of Little Benefit - Aaron Tay, Musings about Librarianship
“I conclude by arguing Boolean itself may no longer be the right foundation for retrieval in an era of BM25 (loose/fuzzy boolean), hybrid search, and agentic search.”
Library and Archives 101: AI and the False Promise of Control - Dave Hansen, Authors Aliance
“This is the first in a series of essays about the choices that knowledge institutions face as AI reshapes how their collections and resources are used. The people on various sides of these debates are, for the most part, deeply committed to access to knowledge — the disagreement is about means. Some believe that the best way to protect access to knowledge is to impose new conditions on how AI can use it and for what purposes. I think that approach is more likely to undermine access than to save it. This post in particular is about the risk of libraries and archives reimagining themselves as gatekeepers of AI-era access.”
Harvard Library Tests AI Tools to Help Researchers Navigate Collections - Shalini N. Ramchune, The Harvard Crimson
“One of the library’s major projects is Collections Explorer, a developing system that uses semantic search to allow users to find materials across Harvard’s special collections. Unlike traditional keyword-based searches, the tools allow researchers to search using natural language and can surface relevant materials even when specific terms do not appear directly in catalog descriptions. The system is still in development and has not yet been widely released. Since early testing began, the library has worked with more than 150 Harvard students to evaluate the platform and gather feedback on its usability.
Another initiative focuses on integrating library search capabilities directly into AI chat tools. A technology known as model context protocol could allow platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, or Harvard’s AI Sandbox to link users directly to Harvard Library materials when answering questions.”
What if your AI could read your notes? Claude Desktop + Obsidian MCP - Dong Danping
“PKM-connected AI is still in its early stages. The tools are emerging and evolving rapidly, but not every MCP workflow will benefit equally. Yet the core idea is exciting: AI research assistants with agentic capabilities, with a degree of autonomy, and access to both research infrastructure and your personal research context. This feels like an important shift in how research workflows are designed and experienced.”
Stony Brook University Libraries Named Finalist for International Innovation Award - Stony Brook University News
“SEARCH AI was developed in response to changing research behavior. Library staff noticed that patrons were increasingly entering full questions or conversational phrases when searching the catalog, a pattern influenced by the growing presence of large language models and conversational search tools in everyday digital platforms.” “The tool has also improved search outcomes. Library data shows that SEARCH AI reduces zero-result searches by about 75 percent compared with basic catalog searches. The system also applies facets and filters three times more frequently than users typically do on their own, helping researchers refine their results and locate relevant materials more efficiently.”
Your New HYPE FREE AI News Briefing System - Phillip Alcock, AI Blueprints for Education
“How to get accurate, balanced news from an LLM and stop feeding the algorithm that profits from your outrage.”
Your AI Is a Yes-Man. Here’s How to Fix It. - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI
“Anti-sycophancy tips with hands-on prompt examples you can follow.”
Softerware - Mike Caulfield
“Keep your Claude skills loose for better performance.”
Build with Andrew - Andrew Ng, DeepLearningAI
Free vibe-coding course for beginners.
Lovable - quick start
Step-by-step guide to vibe-coding from Lovable.
The only new toys you’ll need this year: The Grow-it Raygun - Curious Refuge on Instagram
Fun 1950s style ad-parody. Plays to AI video’s strengths.
Float And Watch The Stars - Kelly Boesch AI Art, YouTube
Beautiful AI animation from one of my favorite creators who uses AI tools. She writes her own song lyrics and uses Suno for the music. (Here’s how she describes it: “Lyrics written by me, Kelly Boesch. Music created under my creative direction with assistance from Suno.”)
‘Vibe coding’ beats ‘clanker’ to be Collins dictionary’s word of the year - The Guardian
“Lexicographers at Collins monitor the 24bn-word Collins Corpus, which draws from a range of media sources, including social media, to create the annual list of new and notable words that reflect our ever-evolving language. They chose vibe coding as word of the year after observing a huge increase in usage since its first appearance in February.”
Energy, environment & infrastructure
Exowatt: A New Take on Solar Data Centers - Rich Miller, Data Center Richness
“By storing energy as heat rather than electricity, Exowatt avoids the high costs and environmental baggage of rare earth minerals while utilizing two centuries of mechanical engineering.”
The case for radical solar optimism - Azeem Azhar and Hannah Petrovic, Exponential View
“With solar now below the cost of fossil fuels almost everywhere on earth, other nations will follow China’s lead. In the United States, solar is winning support even from MAGA insiders who see it as essential to powering AI and competing with China, a former DOGE aide is championing solar on socials and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who once called it a “parasite,” now concedes its commercial role. Solar energy won’t be the sole contributor to our energy system in 30 years’ time; other sources, mostly carbon-free, will also contribute. But solar will be the dominant player.”
AI’s energy impact is still small—but how we handle it is huge - Costa Samaras, Emma Strubell, Ramayya Krishnan , MIT Technology Review
How One Virginia County Turned Data Center Money into Affordable Housing - Andrew R. Chow, Conor Greene, Time
“Virginia’s program is the first known example in the country to specifically use data center revenue for an affordable housing trust fund. If it succeeds, it could serve as a template for how to turn a highly-controversial industry into a community benefit. Lawmakers in Lansing, Michigan are considering a similar model. And one of the Henrico program’s champions is Virginia Senator Mark Warner, who hopes that the initiative can be replicated across the nation.”
AI, work & the economy
It still doesn’t look like there’s an AI bubble - Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI
“But if you’ve been reading this newsletter, the counterargument should be obvious: models are generating a growing number of tokens that are not intended for human eyes.”
Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did: There’s a lot more to replacing labor than just automating tasks. - David Oks blog
“The lesson is worth stating plainly. The ATM tried to do the teller’s job better, faster, cheaper; it tried to fit capital into a labor-shaped hole; but the iPhone made the teller’s job irrelevant. One automated tasks within an existing paradigm, and the other created a new paradigm in which those tasks simply didn’t need to exist at all. And it is paradigm replacement, not task automation, that actually displaces workers—and, conversely, unlocks the latent productivity within any technology. That’s because as long as the old paradigm persists, there will be labor-shaped holes in which capital substitution will encounter constant frictions and bottlenecks. This has, I think, serious implications for how we’re thinking about AI.”
Search, fact-checking & information literacy
Yes, LLMs Can Be Better at Search Than Traditional Search - Mike Caulfield
“It takes a specialized prompt, but LLMs can significantly outperform search.”
We’re not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It’s past time to start. - Mike Caulfield
”Stop assuming AI errors are hallucinations. Thinking of all LLM errors as “hallucinations” makes us worse at finding the truth. I’ve talked about this before. Most AI errors are not hallucinations in the sense that term was originally meant. As one example, a much more common error is conflation, where two unlike things are stitched into one.”
The Sycophancy Fallacy: Why You May be Worried About the Wrong Bias with Search - Aaron Tay
“AI search tools aren’t “agreeing” with users—they are retrieval systems. Confusing the two is a category error that obscures the real risks.”
AI discourse, perception & political framing
AI Isn’t Stressing People Out. The AI Discourse Is. - Nielsen Norman Group
“Respondents most often feel curious, happy, and inspired when they use AI, and they feel stressed, intimated, and confused least often. This question might overstate positive emotions somewhat: the 14% of respondents who reported “never” using AI were not given the opportunity to answer this question. But of the 14 emotions listed, respondents reported feeling the positive feelings (curious, happy, inspired, excited, empowered, optimistic, and relieved) much more frequently than the negative feelings (concerned, skeptical, frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed, intimidated, and confused). Respondents didn’t need to become AI superusers to access these positive feelings. They just had to start using the technology regularly, for the most popular purposes.”
A guide to the AI tribes: A primer on the ideological camps shaping the race to AGI - Michel Justen, What is This
“The term “tribe” captures something important about how these groups function: they spawn their own status ladders and tend to sort people into in-group and out-group. But not everyone in a given tribe is a zealot, and within-tribe variation is high. Understanding someone’s rough group affiliation isn’t enough to know their exact beliefs.”
Sanders Sounds the Alarm on AI: America’s foremost socialist is warning that artificial intelligence may extinguish human life. - Zachary Jones, One Thousand Means
“The dominant view on the left is that AI is an essentially fake technology, and the threat it poses is primarily in the form of financial speculation and environmental cost. This view is promoted by ideological entrepreneurs who have infected progressive discourse with disproven claims, running against an overwhelming tide of evidence. The fact that Bernie Sanders is now meeting with the people that the ‘experts’ who dot the left-wing podcasts and press have told you should never list to should be a rude awakening. The left must get its head out of the sand or all of its values will be annihilated in the face of transformative developments it is wholly unprepared for.”
The AI Denial Industry: The Left’s MAHA - Alexei Gannon , One Thousand Means
“The scientific consensus is not only that AI will rapidly improve, but also that forward-looking policy is necessary to mitigate the social harms of AI. In the aforementioned survey, AI researchers do not universally agree that improved AI will lead to a net positive outcome. The majority believe that AI safety research and democratic protections must be prioritized more than they are today.” “While some demand a full-on moratorium on datacenters, a state-by-state regulatory campaign is most likely to concentrate data centers in red states (or worse alternatives like the UAE, or for Elon Musk: space) where we lose the ability to regulate AI development while carbon ends up in the atmosphere anyway. The demand in energy to fuel new datacenters requires us to double down on the expansion of public clean energy as an alternative to behind-the-meter gas-powered compute.”
Study: The Public Isn’t Concerned or Mobilized by AI Doomsday Warnings - Nirit Weiss-Blatt, AI Panic
“The failure of existential-risk messaging helps explain the AI doomers’ pivot toward job loss, warfare, and environmental harms”
The Six Loops: Groundhog Day in AI discourse - Zoe Scaman, Musing of a Wandering Mind
“ So there they are. Six loops. Fear, hype, efficiency, exceptionalism, tactical, minimising. The setlist that never changes. None of them are entirely wrong. That’s what makes them so sticky. But none of them are interesting. And none of them point toward what actually matters. What I keep coming back to - the thing that nags at me continuously - is that technology doesn’t simply replace things. It reconfigures them. It changes what something means, what it’s for, where it lives.”
AI in practice: human impact
Practicing with Language Models Cultivates Human Empathic Communication - Kumar et al
Ethan Mollick: “AI can help us learn hard-to-teach human skills, like showing empathy. Preregistered study of 968 people found almost no correlation between feeling empathic & communicating empathy. But a single practice session with an AI coach made people measurably better at it.”
Why are people adopting AI to write? - Andres Guadamuz
“But we have to also understand the reasons why people are adopting AI in such large numbers, and we have to make sure that we don’t demonise every such uses. I have mentioned that not everyone enjoys and/or is good at writing, and we should recognise that as a valid reason to use AI for some tasks.”
Lawmakers want to stop ChatGPT from checking that mole or helping you through a panic attack - Shoshana Weissmann, Papercuts
“These bills purport to protect consumers. But the alternative to people seeking information through AI isn’t top-tier care. Often, the alternative is no care at all. And in response to the New York bill, people shared how AI-provided medical information helped them restore their vision, stop their father’s hallucinations, and understand their newborn’s medical care. These proposals assume that limiting AI advice will push people toward licensed professionals instead. In reality, many people who turn to AI are doing so because traditional care is unavailable, unaffordable, or unresponsive. Blocking AI doesn’t create care where none exists—it removes another tool people use to navigate the system.”
‘The Karpathy Loop’: Former OpenAI researcher’s autonomous agents ran 700 experiments in 2 days—and gave a glimpse of where AI is heading - Jeremy Kahn, Fortune
“He said that while the current autoresearch system he built was designed for a single agent to continually improve a piece of code along a single path, in the future he imagines multiple AI agents will be able to explore different optimizations and different experiments in parallel…”
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion - James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Science
“For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!). By its nature, intelligence is high-dimensional and relational, not a single quantity that must be unambiguously less or greater than human scale. In fact, it is unclear what we even mean by “human scale,” given that our intelligence is already a collective property, not an individual one. Recent advances in agentic AI show us once again that intelligence has always fundamentally involved the interaction of distinctive, distributed perspectives, and it is from social organization that transformative intelligence has and will continue to emerge.”
Libraries 2045: What Will the Next 20 Years of Libraries and AI Look Like? - Kyle Bylin, LibTech Insights
“Libraries and technology have always coevolved.”
AI Literacy for Library Workers: self-study course - Nicole Hennig
No deadlines.
The course will receive updates once a year – you’ll have perpetual access.
Go at your own pace, come back and review anytime.
You’ll get a certificate of completion when you finish the course.
One of the best courses I’ve ever taken. Highly recommended.
– Brock Edmunds, Assistant Head, Pardee Library, Boston University Libraries
This course really gave me the opportunity to try out so many different AI tools and have that hands on experience I really needed. Plus get a better understanding of generative AI in general. Highly recommend the course!
– Laura Hogan, Reference & Instruction Librarian, Bristol Community College, Fall River, MA
This class offers a great overview of how AI works and some of the ethical issues involved. The assignments also gave me a chance for hands on learning. I only knew of AI as a peripheral thing existing in the world, and this class gave me a great basic understanding. Highly recommended.
—Deb Garbison, Librarian – Hennepin County Library
Being able to work effectively with AI is clearly an important aspect of librarianship now and Nicole’s course will introduce you to a vast range of AI tools with interesting activities to learn how to use them.
—Cynthia Rider, Public Service Librarian, Peninsula Library System, San Mateo, CA
I highly recommend this excellent course. The videos are informative, exciting and short, and I really enjoyed the hands-on activities, it was so much fun that I could try out all these new tools! I liked best the attitude that we were supposed to understand how easy it is to use AI to build a chatbot, generate music or create a podcast from a text.
—Angelika Gulyas, Senior Collection Management Librarian, Central European University, Vienna
And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI.
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