The archive
AI and the Future of HE
130 editions of the weekly briefing on AI and higher education, from Nick McIntosh — Google Higher Education Faculty AI Fellow and Learning Futurist.
1,200 Agents, Nobody Told a Human
You’ve likely heard of “the Hugging Face incident” - if not, let’s just say things have got pretty wild with OpenAI agents of late. Short version - between May...
Perpetual, Worldwide, Irrevocable, Unread
The 1 August memo from Jenny Trinitapoli to UChicago's SOSC Core chairs is not the ban it has widely been reported as. Devices go away, coursework is completed...
Three Clocks, One Building, Nobody Watching
Kia ora from New Zealand! Sorry – long flight got super extended (9.5 hour layover, then a redirect to Auckland due to bad weather) so it ate away the time I'd...
Eight Agents, Four Days, Nobody at the Keyboard
In early July, up to eight AI agents ran a four-day campaign against Taiwan's government networks with nobody at the keyboard. Not assisting an operator –...
Seventeen Authors, Two Affiliations, Both Google
Google recently launched ATLAS - the Activity, Task, Landscape and Adoption Study - built from 15 million de-identified interactions across the Gemini App, AI...
Three Hours, No Coding Experience, One Working Benchmark
China's Moonshot released Kimi K3 as an open-weight model on Sunday (translation – anyone can now download the model itself, free, and run it on their own...
It Downloaded Blender, Learned It, Made an Otter
The latest must-read version of Ethan Mollick's Opinionated Guide to which AI to use to do stuff (Summer 2026 edition) lands with a quiet redefinition: 'using...
Disconnected Since 2023, Recommended Anyway
A tester disclosed purging – 'I feel better after I vomit' – and Google's AI Overview confirmed this is completely normal, then explained the biology of why...
10,000 Vulnerabilities Found, Most Still Secret
Meta is building a cloud business to sell off AI compute it spent two years insisting it needed for itself - 10s of billions on capacity Zuckerberg said they...
Washington Jumps the Queue, Everyone Else Waits
OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 Sol this week, their strongest model yet - then immediately delayed public release at Washington's request. Vetted partners, names...
Spent $34 Billion, Made $13 Billion, Called It Growth
OpenAI's financials were leaked last week and just … wow 💥 👀 🍿 Sam and friends spent $34bn last year to make $13bn - and then spent $5.7bn of that, 44% of...
Five Hours to Shut Down a Frontier Model
One week after Anthropic's co-founder warned the industry it had an accelerator but no brake pedal, and days after filing confidential IPO paperwork targeting...
$500 Million in Tokens, Nobody Budgeted for It
Anthropic published a detailed account of Claude's progress toward recursive self-improvement this week - the point at which an AI can design meaningfully...
Ten Percent, Four Applications, Zero Offers
Georgetown neuroscientist Adam Green's team analysed more than 370k college application essays before and after ChatGPT - post-ChatGPT essays were rated more...
The Industry Bets Less Human, She Bets More
Scaling has been the operating assumption of the AI industry for half a decade - more compute, more parameters, better models. It's the logic behind OpenAI's...