ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. DeepSeek: the battle to be my AI work assistant – WSJ
As I embark on my AI book adventure, I’ve hired a human research assistant. But Claude has already handled about 85% of the grunt work using its Projects feature. I uploaded all my book-related documents (the pitch, outlines, scattered notes) into a project, basically a little data container. Now Claude can work with them whenever I need something. At one point, I needed a master spreadsheet of all the companies and people mentioned across my documents, with fields to track my progress. Claude pulled the names and compiled them into a nicely formatted sheet. Now, I open the project and ask Claude what I should be working on next.
A young man used AI to build a nuclear fusor and now I must weep – Core Memory
I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe than I was. If the previous generation were digital natives, HudZah was an AI native. … It’s not that I don’t use these things. I do. It’s more that I was watching HudZah navigate his laptop with an AI fluency that felt alarming to me. He was using his computer in a much, much different way than I’d seen someone use their computer before, and it made me feel old and alarmed by the number of new tools at our disposal and how HudZah intuitively knew how to tame them.
The Big Listen returned a clear message from parents, carers and professionals that the overall effectiveness grade should go, and that inspection reports should provide a more nuanced view of a provider’s strengths and areas for improvement. But there were different views on how to do that. Parents and carers favoured a clear assessment of a wider set of categories, while most professionals wanted narrative descriptions of performance. Today’s proposals aim to bring both preferences together.
Ofsted offers first look at new report cards for schools – BBC News
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the plans would generate a “new league table based on the sum of Ofsted judgements across at least 40 points of comparison”. It would be “bewildering for teachers and leaders, never mind the parents whose choices these reports are supposedly intended to guide”, he added. Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the plans would “do little to reduce the enormous pressure school leaders are under”. Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said the five-point grading scale “maintains the current blunt, reductive approach that cannot capture the complexity of school life nor provide more meaningful information to parents”.
Improving the way Ofsted inspects education: consultation document – GOV.UK
The independent research we commissioned as part of the Big Listen polled other ways we could report on providers. Parents ranked ‘separate judgements for each inspection area’ highest (76% in favour). Professionals ranked this as the third highest (53% in favour). The highest rated options for professionals were ‘bullet point summaries of our findings’ (65% in favour) and ‘narrative descriptions’ (59% in favour). Taking this feedback into account, we propose using a 5-point scale to grade different areas of a provider’s work, such as ‘curriculum’ and ‘leadership’. Alongside grades, we will have short descriptions summarising our findings. These evaluations will make up our new education inspection report cards. There will be no overall effectiveness grade for early years, state-funded schools, non-association independent schools, FE and skills or ITE inspections.
Ofqual to fine Pearson £250k over exams rules breaches – GOV.UK
The breaches, which occurred in 2023, included failing to identify conflicts of interest among GCSE, A level and BTEC examiners, who were also employed by Pearson as tutors at schools where students sat the exams. Pearson also failed to follow its own policies designed to ensure the confidentiality of exam papers.
Chatbot software begins to face fundamental limitations – Quanta Magazine
Einstein’s riddle requires composing a larger solution from solutions to subproblems, which researchers call a compositional task. Dziri’s team showed that LLMs that have only been trained to predict the next word in a sequence — which is most of them — are fundamentally limited(opens a new tab) in their ability to solve compositional reasoning tasks. Other researchers have shown that transformers, the neural network architecture used by most LLMs, have hard mathematical bounds when it comes to solving such problems. Scientists have had some successes pushing transformers past these limits, but those increasingly look like short-term fixes. If so, it means there are fundamental computational caps on the abilities of these forms of artificial intelligence — which may mean it’s time to consider other approaches.
Video Game History Foundation Library
The VGHF Library is operated by the Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to the history of video games. This is the home for our collections of video game development materials, magazines, artwork, ephemera, and more.
OpenAI furious DeepSeek might have stolen all the data OpenAI stole from us – 404 Media
I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha. It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.
The future is too easy – Defector
There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it. The air is all wrong, there’s simultaneously too much in it and not enough of it. Everyone I spoke to about the Consumer Electronics Show before I went to it earlier this month kept describing it in terms that involved wetness in some way. I took this as a warning, which I believe was the spirit in which it was intended, but I felt prepared for it. Your classically damp commercial experiences have a sort of terroir to them, a signature that marks a confluence of circumstances and time- and place-specific appetites; I have carried with me for decades the peculiar smell, less that of cigarette smoke than cigarette smoke in hair, that I remember from a baseball card show at a Ramada Inn that I attended as a kid. Only that particular strain of that particular kind of commerce, at that moment, gave off that specific distress signal. It was the smell of a living thing, and the dampness in the (again, quite damp) room was in part because that thing was breathing, heavily.
Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety – Reuters
Egami’s study found that owning a game console and increased gameplay reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction among participants. The study found that spending just one extra hour each day playing video games was associated with an increase in mental health and life satisfaction.
Other studies also point to a shift in perceptions of gaming. “As more research has emerged related to video games, we’re beginning to recognize that they can actually offer a lot of benefits,” said Michael Wong, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at McMaster University and former professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
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