I’ve been thinking about this quote recently “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.” It resonates with me and some of the challenges I see in integrating AI into the #FutureOfWork. It also feels right in-line with how #LearningAndDevelopment is facing the challenge of moving up the value chain as AI automates more and more activities. Anyway, as a recovering academic, I need a citation. I need to know if Deming actually said or wrote this and if so, where. Thoughts?
The Accidental Tech Boom — What AI's Gaming Origins Can Teach Entrepreneurs About Business Breakthroughs: This is why I like this article, because I believe in this dynamic > > “The most transformative innovations often emerge as byproducts of solving unrelated problems.”
OpenAI launches $50M NextGenAI consortium to fund AI-based research and education: This feels nice and right, but I want to see what happens with access to the research > > “OpenAI recently announced NextGenAI, a new consortium aimed at advancing research and education through AI-driven innovation. The company is committing $50 million from its growing financial reserves to fund leading academic institutions and equip researchers with AI tools to accelerate their workloads. Notably, participants will be encouraged to utilize OpenAI's own products and API technologies.”
The Labor Theory of AI by Ben Tarnoff: Seems like a timely read > > “Artificial intelligence may be the first attempt to automate and discipline human labor that even its creators don’t fully comprehend.”
DuckDuckGo just brought tons of popular AI chatbots to its private browser: This is important for the same reason that a lot of browser stories are important, the browser is still our main interface to the online world and the successful features in smaller browsers may well get re-built into larger, more corporate acceptable ones.
The Plight of Migrants Is Deeply Misunderstood. Can a Video Game Help?: I love the power of games to move messages through experiences. I also wonder what other messages we could use games to impart - what can we build as powerful learning moments? > > “Take Us North—a narrative-driven, adventure-survival game about migrants traveling through the Sonoran desert—is attempting to both foster empathy and raise awareness about “issues that are unfortunately often reduced in mainstream media to statistics or divisive rhetoric,” Reyes says. Many migrants do not want to leave their homes, but are forced to, whether it’s because of violence, persecution, or extreme poverty.”
OpenAI reportedly plans to charge up to $20,000 a month for specialized AI ‘agents’: This is another one of those developments that is both technical and business model related. The research aspect is interesting but needs testing, a lot of it. The cost model will require or should require orgs to think through the cost/benefit analysis and the impacts on headcount size and composition. > > “OpenAI’s most expensive rumored agent, priced at the aforementioned $20,000-per-month tier, will be aimed at supporting “PhD-level research,” according to The Information.”
Infinite Realms turns fantasy books into living, breathing game worlds with help of AI: This is a signal….for something…what that is, I just haven’t figured that out yet but anything that makes me both interested and troubled > > “Infinite Realms is a backend AI-driven engine that can intake book manuscripts and turn them into living, breathing worlds that you can play,” Pereira said. “We’ll be able to license out these intellectual properties to any game studio for them to make their own games based on these IPs. It’s essentially a AI-driven licensing engine for IPs.” Then I add in this: Welevel raises $5.7M to revolutionize procedural game development.
People are using Google’s new AI model to remove watermarks from images: Well of course they are.
Another useful Gemini Advanced feature is now available for free: OK so this is important for the following reason - AI usage in the enterprise DEMANDS experimentation…at ALL levels. That means you too sr leadership. This is another free tool that can used to create and conduct experiments so that orgs can make data-driven decisions on what functions are important for them. Yes, I’m telling you to go play > > “Google introduced a new Gemini feature dubbed Gems in August last year, allowing users to create custom versions of the chatbot tuned for specific use cases. Gemini Gems are essentially AI experts that can help you with a predefined topic. Google offers a couple of premade Gems, like a Chess champ, brainstormer, career guide, and coding partner, that you can use to get a feel of the feature before setting up your own. You can even customize the premade Gems to align with your goals.”
No one knows what the hell an AI agent is: This is the part that I love - its so true > > “But marketing is also to blame in large part, according to Andrew Ng, the founder of AI learning platform DeepLearning.ai. “The concepts of AI ‘agents’ and ‘agentic’ workflows used to have a technical meaning,” Ng said in a recent interview, “but about a year ago, marketers and a few big companies got a hold of them.”
AI coding assistant Cursor reportedly tells a ‘vibe coder’ to write his own damn code: What’s the Tyrell motto from Bladerunner? More Human Than Human? Here we are > > “Cursor reportedly told a user going by the name “janswist” that he should write the code himself instead of relying on Cursor to do it for him. “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work … you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly,” janswist said Cursor told him after he spent an hour “vibe” coding with the tool.”
Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model: Look, I don’t know if this particular flavor of AI is what your org needs but I share this article for this phrase “The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text and audio inputs, according to Sesame’s description on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. RVQ refers to “residual vector quantization,” a technique for encoding audio into discrete tokens called codes. RVQ is used in a number of recent AI audio technologies, including Google’s SoundStream and Meta’s Encodec.” > > When I tell you that deploying AI in the enterprise will require more technically and technologically literate people at all levels in the org and that creating this higher standard is a great place for L&D to lead - I’M NOT KIDDING. Here’s another one - would you know to look for “chain of draft” vs “chain of thought”? > > Less is more: How ‘chain of draft’ could cut AI costs by 90% while improving performance. Oh, what about asking a vendor what their MASK score is? This new AI benchmark measures how much models lie.
The future of AI isn’t the model—it’s the system: I know where the article is headed but I think its going to end up being a bit of both > > “The real magic of Manus isn’t in the models themselves—the team is just using Anthropic and Qwen via APIs available to anyone. What’s powerful is the system’s architecture: a network of coordinated agents capable of sourcing information and collaborating dynamically. Manus may well be an early glimpse of where things are headed.” See also: The Hottest AI Companies Right Now Are ‘Apps’.
Nunu.ai raises $6M for AI agents dubbed ‘unembodied minds’ for game testing: Can’t decide if that phrase “unembodied minds” is more Gibson-esque or Stephenson-esque, maybe even Asimov-esque > > Do you remember where NVidia began? Gaming. Would be kinda logical to see something like this come out of gaming - its a demanding marketspace with lots of dollars, insanely powerful and sophisticated systems and it is a rich field in which to look for upstream signals > > “Nunu.ai has raised $6 million and unveiled Unembodied Minds, or AI agents designed for game testing and to control any given body and perform a task in any environment. These AI agents will be versatile enough to test hundreds of game levels and do other tasks as well. But it will raise the question whether the automation of game testing will cost more human game tester jobs. The company said its vision extends beyond video games. As games become increasingly realistic, game engines are evolving into advanced physics engines capable of simulating real-world conditions. Since Nunu.ai’s AI agents can act and navigate in any virtual environment, the company believes its platform will naturally progress into real-world applications.” See also: Sony is experimenting with AI-powered PlayStation characters.
Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts: Bet your VC money on the first company that can reliably and accurately, extract all the data from PDFs in such a way that it can be ingested into LLMs as clean, high quality data.
Major AI market share shift revealed: DALL-E plummets 80% as Black Forest Labs dominates 2025 data: There’s a lot of good data in here but this bit caught my eye > > “Poe’s data reveals a concerning trend for AI companies investing heavily in maintaining older models: “As frontier labs release more capable models, usage of the new flagship model in a provider’s offering quickly cannibalizes the older versions.” > > To me, that reads like if you are signing any kind of contract with an AI provider, you need to be sure and look at update/upgrade timing, testing, and costs.
Designing Products for Resilience & Graceful Failure: Love this thinking. > > “One model for thinking about design resilience is graceful failure, a feature that incorporates a backup to foreseeable mishaps— or even offers an alternative that’s delightful. A canonical example here is the standard escalator: During power outages, the escalator doesn’t stop “working”, instead, it becomes stairs.”
Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Winner of a 2025 Academy Award: “The film “tells the story of Lara, a music producer who spirals into an existential crisis after repeatedly failing a CAPTCHA test—leading her to question whether she might actually be a robot. Through a dark comedic lens, [the film] explores themes of identity, self-determination, love, and technology in a world where the line between humanity and artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly blurred.”