Three years ago, in the wake of ChatGPT’s debut, we launched our initial study to push past the headlines —asking business leaders how they were actually using Gen AI and soliciting their expectations around thetechnology’s future applications in their businesses.
As Gen AI fast-tracks into budgets, processes, and training, executives need benchmarks, not anecdotes. Our unique, year-over-year, repeated cross-sectional lens now shows where the common use cases are, where returns are emerging, and which people-and-process levers could convert mainstream use into durable ROI. We will track these shifts each year in this ongoing research initiative. — Read More
Monthly Archives: November 2025
Thinking Machines challenges OpenAI’s AI scaling strategy: ‘First superintelligence will be a superhuman learner’
While the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies race to build ever-larger models, betting billions that scale alone will unlock artificial general intelligence, a researcher at one of the industry’s most secretive and valuable startups delivered a pointed challenge to that orthodoxy this week: The path forward isn’t about training bigger — it’s about learning better.
“I believe that the first superintelligence will be a superhuman learner,” Rafael Rafailov, a reinforcement learning researcher at Thinking Machines Lab, told an audience at TED AI San Francisco on Tuesday. “It will be able to very efficiently figure out and adapt, propose its own theories, propose experiments, use the environment to verify that, get information, and iterate that process.” — Read More
The Faustian bargain of AI
Christopher Marlowe, the author of Doctor Faustus, never lived to see his play published or performed. He was murdered after a dispute over a bill spiraled out of control, ending in a fatal stab to the eye. He would never see how Doctor Faustus would live on for centuries. In a modern sense, we too may never fully grasp the long-term consequences of today’s technologies—AI included, for better or worse.
This social contract we are signing between artificial intelligence and the human race is changing life rapidly. And while we can guess where it takes us, we aren’t entirely sure. Instead, we can look to the past to find truth.
Take the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. As rumors of shutdowns began to swirl, I found myself reaching for Albert Camus’ The Plague. Long before we knew what was coming, Camus had already offered a striking portrait of the very world we were about to enter: lockdowns, political division, and uncertain governments.
Just as Camus captured the psychological toll of unseen forces, Marlowe explores the cost of human ambition when we seek control over the uncontrollable. Why did Faustus give up his soul? Why did he cling to his pact, even as doubt crept in? And what did he gain, briefly, in exchange for something eternal?
In Marlowe’s tragedy, we find a reflection of our own choices as we navigate the promises and perils of AI. — Read More
The 7 Secret Knobs That Control Every AI Response
Every time you hit “send” to ChatGPT, Claude, or any LLM, seven invisible parameters are silently shaping the response. Change one number, and you go from genius insights to nonsensical rambling.
Most people never touch these settings. They stick with defaults and wonder why AI sometimes feels “dumb.” Master these 7 parameters, and you’ll get better outputs than 99% of users. — Read More
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