Apple today announced new Apple Intelligence features that elevate the user experience across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Apple Intelligence unlocks new ways for users to communicate with features like Live Translation; do more with what’s on their screen with updates to visual intelligence; and express themselves with enhancements to Image Playground and Genmoji.¹ Additionally, Shortcuts can now tap into Apple Intelligence directly, and developers will be able to access the on-device large language model at the core of Apple Intelligence, giving them direct access to intelligence that is powerful, fast, built with privacy, and available even when users are offline. These Apple Intelligence features are available for testing starting today, and will be available to users with supported devices set to a supported language this fall. — Read More

#strategy

The recent successes of generative AI models have convinced some that AGI is imminent. While these models appear to capture the essence of human intelligence, they defy even our most basic intuitions about it. They have emerged not because they are thoughtful solutions to the problem of intelligence, but because they scaled effectively on hardware we already had. Seduced by the fruits of scale, some have come to believe that it provides a clear pathway to AGI. The most emblematic case of this is the multimodal approach, in which massive modular networks are optimized for an array of modalities that, taken together, appear general. However, I argue that this strategy is sure to fail in the near term; it will not lead to human-level AGI that can, e.g., perform sensorimotor reasoning, motion planning, and social coordination. Instead of trying to glue modalities together into a patchwork AGI, we should pursue approaches to intelligence that treat embodiment and interaction with the environment as primary, and see modality-centered processing as emergent phenomena. — Read More

#strategy

Duolingo is “more than doubling” the number of courses it has available, a feat it says was only possible because it used generative AI to help create them in “less than a year.”

The company said today that it’s launching 148 new language courses. …Duolingo says that building one new course historically has taken “years,” but the company was able to build this new suite of courses more quickly “through advances in generative AI, shared content systems, and internal tooling.” The new approach is internally called “shared content,” and the company says it allows employees to make a base course and quickly customize it for “dozens” of different languages. — Read More

The Baltimore Orioles should be good, but they are not good. At 15-24, they are one of the worst teams in all of Major League Baseball this season, an outcome thus far that fans, experts, and the team itself will tell you are either statistically improbable or nearing statistically impossible based on thousands upon thousands of simulations run before the season started. 

Trying to figure out why this is happening is tearing the fanbase apart and has turned a large portion of them against management, which has put a huge amount of its faith, on-field strategy, and player acquisition decision making into predictive AI systems, advanced statistics, probabilistic simulations, expected value positive moves, and new-age baseball thinking in which statistical models and AI systems try to reduce human baseball players into robotic, predictable chess pieces. Teams have more or less tried to “solve” baseball like researchers try to solve games with AI. Technology has changed not just how teams play the game, but how fans like me experience it, too.  — Read More

Two years after partnering with OpenAI to automate marketing and customer service jobs, financial tech startup Klarna says it’s longing for human connection again.

Once gunning to be OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s “favorite guinea pig,” Klarna is now plotting a big recruitment drive after its AI customer service agents couldn’t quite hack it.

The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents. Now, the company says it imagines an “Uber-type of setup” to fill their ranks, with gig workers logging in remotely to argue with customers from the comfort of their own homes. — Read More

Jobs that involve computer programming are a small sector of the modern economy, but an influential one. The past couple of years have seen them changed dramatically by the introduction of AI systems that can assist with—and automate—significant amounts of coding work.

In our previous Economic Index research, we found very disproportionate use of Claude by US workers in computer-related occupations: that is, there were many more conversations with Claude about computer-related tasks than one would predict from the number of people working in relevant jobs. It’s the same in the educational context: Computer Science degrees—which involve large amounts of coding—show highly disproportionate AI use. — Read More

Starbucks, the world’s most efficient coffee vending machine disguised as a lifestyle brand, has opened its first fully 3D-printed outlet in Brownsville, Texas. If you’ve ever marveled at how a Starbucks latte seems to be conjured out of thin air with military precision – and almost no soul – you’ll appreciate just how perfect it is that their latest café was squeezed out of a robotic nozzle like industrial toothpaste. Built by Peri 3D Construction using a Cobod BOD2 printer, this 1,400-square-foot drive-thru and pickup shop isn’t a café you linger in. It’s a caffeine fueling station, printed into existence, then sprinkled with human finishing touches like windows, doors, and a porch to make it look vaguely more inviting than an automated bunker. — Read More

#strategy

Earlier this month, OpenAI announced that it aspires to build “the best-equipped nonprofit the world has ever seen” and was convening a commission to help determine how to use its “potentially historic financial resources.”

But critics view this new commission as a transparent attempt to placate opposition to its controversial plan to restructure fully as a for-profit — one that fails to address the fundamental legal issues at stake. — Read More

tldr: We’re at AI’s halftime.

For decades, AI has largely been about developing new training methods and models. And it worked: from beating world champions at chess and Go, surpassing most humans on the SAT and bar exams, to earning IMO and IOI gold medals. Behind these milestones in the history book — DeepBlue, AlphaGo, GPT-4, and the o-series — are fundamental innovations in AI methods: search, deep RL, scaling, and reasoning. Things just get better over time.

So what’s suddenly different now?

In three words: RL finally works. More precisely: RL finally generalizes. After several major detours and a culmination of milestones, we’ve landed on a working recipe to solve a wide range of RL tasks using language and reasoning. Even a year ago, if you told most AI researchers that a single recipe could tackle software engineering, creative writing, IMO-level math, mouse-and-keyboard manipulation, and long-form question answering — they’d laugh at your hallucinations. Each of these tasks is incredibly difficult and many researchers spend their entire PhDs focused on just one narrow slice. — Read More

Small models get better, regulation moves to the states, and more.

The new AI Index Report shows a maturing field, improvements in AI optimization, and a growing saturation of use – and abuse – of this technology.

The 2025 AI Index Report, published on April 7, 2025, is an independent initiative at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), led by the AI Index Steering Committee, an interdisciplinary group of experts from across academia and industry.

Each year, the report covers the biggest technical advances, new achievements in benchmarking, investment flowing into generative AI, education trends, legislation around this technology, and more.

Read the full report here. — Read More