David Isenberg’s AI News Briefs, from “A.I. Degrees Boom as Students Prepare,” through “AI brings wealth building to non-millionaires,” to “Towns and Cities Fight Off Data Centers” and “How Deepfakes Could Lead to Doomsday.”
News from The AI Reporter
ChatGPT Android app adds real Thinking mode
OpenAI has rolled out a real Thinking mode for its ChatGPT Android app, giving users control over how long the AI processes a request before responding. The update replaces the earlier toggle that only simulated extended reasoning and now matches the desktop’s “Extended Thinking” feature.
More here —>
December 31, 2025
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News from The Observer
A.I. Degrees Boom as Students Prepare for an Uncertain Job Market
When Chris Callison-Burch first started teaching an A.I. course at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, his inaugural class had about 100 students. Seven years later, enrollment has swelled to roughly 400—excluding another 250 students attending remotely and an additional 100 to 200 on the waiting list. The professor now teaches in the largest classroom on campus. If his course grew any bigger, he’d need to move into the school’s sports stadium.
More here —>
December 30, 2025
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News from The Deep View
AI brings wealth building to non-millionaires
Traditional wealth management services are primarily accessed by investors with portfolios of over $1 million. However, in today’s newsletter, The Deep View’s Jack Kubinec unpacks the world of AI-powered wealth management. Already, AI is allowing wealth managers to serve more clients while also democratizing financial expertise to empower retail investors — especially new investors in their 20s.
More here —>
December 30, 2025
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News from Curmuducation
AI Makes Strange Bedfellows
….[Florida governor] Ron DeSantis’s very crabby opposition to AI. “Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia,” the governor said ….
He notably has taken aim at data centers sprouting up across the country by attempting to slow their growth in Florida, siding with local communities opposing the massive developments.
More here —>
December 30, 2025
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News from Truthout
As Towns and Cities Fight Off Data Centers, Calls Grow for a National Moratorium
The battle to build new data centers has pitted communities across the country against Silicon Valley.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman boasted that society is now “past the event horizon; the takeoff has started” toward building computer “superintelligence.” …However,,,, A growing grassroots movement is fighting back against another concrete and immediate AI threat — the rapid expansion in local communities of massive “hyperscale” data centers, along with the fossil fuel plants to power them.
More here —>
December 30, 2025
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News from Rest of World
Innovative ways the world used AI in 2025
Judges, farmers, and medical patients are pushing the limits of AI.
,,,,chatbots became woven into seemingly every part of society — from assisting with legal work to offering companionship to the sick and the lonely. Here is a look back at some of the innovative ways people around the world used AI this year.
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from Reader Supported News
Bernie Sanders Criticizes AI as ‘the Most Consequential Technology in Humanity’
….“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from AP
Humanoid robots take center stage at Silicon Valley summit, but skepticism remains
Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors — too complicated, capital-intensive and “boring, honestly,” says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui.
But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do.
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from Bloomberg (unlocked article)
Capitalism and Crime: The Books That Got Me Through the Year
Here’s one cold-eyed reading list.
….The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen, entrepreneur.
This is a historically fascinating document that bears testimony to how misunderstood Silicon Valley considers itself to be, and how convinced the tech bros are that they hold the key to advancement. It’s written in an almost biblical cadence — and sets out a libertarian agenda.
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from Real Clear Science
Tech Wants You to Believe that AI Is Conscious
In November 2025, a user of AI assistant Claude 4,5 Opus discovered something unusual: an internal file describing the model’s character, personality, preferences and values. Anthropic, the company that built Claude, had labeled the file “soul_overview.” Internally, an Anthropic employee later confirmed, it is “endearingly known as the soul doc.” Is this choice of language incidental?
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from The AI Report
OpenAI seeks Head of Preparedness
… to lead its internal framework for identifying and mitigating “frontier” AI risks, including cybersecurity threats, biological misuse, and mental health impacts. CEO Sam Altman said the company’s models are “starting to present some real challenges,” prompting renewed focus on safety leadership after multiple executive changes in its preparedness and safety teams.
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from Digiday
How marketers rank this year’s generative AI image, video tools
Generative AI tools crept closer to the uncanny valley this year as tools like OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Nano Banana, have flooded the market. Marketers have higher expectations than ever for AI to streamline marketing processes and save dollars. The novelty of generative AI has worn off and marketers want controllable, consistent tools that can be easily integrated into the creative ecosystem.
“If you’re using AI to automate a certain task, but then you have to move files from 15 different softwares, you’re not actually…
More here (subscription required) —>
December 29, 2025
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News from The Deep View
Should you trust your digital coworkers?
….The biggest misconception … is that they are there and ready to solve every single problem that we have. While they are very capable, and while a lot of the tools are happening, most of the tools, most of the interoperability, most of the interconnect between things, it’s very nascent….. I think everybody looks at the rate of change today, and a month in AI cycles is like five years in tech cycles 10 years ago. It’s a misconception of the capabilities and where they are today.
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from Foreign Affairs
How Deepfakes Could Lead to Doomsday
America’s Nuclear Warning Systems Aren’t Ready for AI
The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence has exacerbated threats to nuclear stability….
AI poses another insidious risk to nuclear security. It makes it easier to create and spread deepfakes—convincingly altered videos, images, or audio that are used to generate false information about people or events.
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from Canary Media
In 2025, data centers forced an energy reckoning
It was a year of tough questions about how to stop the AI boom from spiking household electricity bills and derailing the clean energy transition… Tech giants are constructing a fleet of energy-gobbling data centers in a bid to expand AI and other computing tools. The build-out is encouraging U.S. utilities to invest beaucoup bucks in fossil-fueled power plants and has already raised household electricity bills in some regions. Complicating things further is that many of today’s proposed data centers may never get built, which would leave the rest of us to foot the bill for expensive and unnecessary power plants that bake the planet.
More here —>
December 29, 2025
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News from ars TECHNICA
Agents of uncertain change
How AI coding agents work—and what to remember if you use them
From compression tricks to multi-agent teamwork, here’s what makes them tick. AI coding agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can now work on software projects for hours at a time,… But these tools are not magic and can complicate rather than simplify a software project. Understanding how they work under the hood can help developers know when (and if) to use them, while avoiding common pitfalls.
More here —>
December 24, 2025
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News from Wikistrat
From Humanoid Soldiers to an IRGC Coup: 5 Wildcard Scenarios That Could Redefine 2026
Wildcard scenarios aren’t predictions; they’re stress tests. The biggest shocks of 2025 were the ones dismissed as impossible until they happened: the Trump-Zelenskyy blowup, Israel striking Hamas in Doha, India suspending the Indus Waters Treaty mid-conflict. For 2026, Wikistrat has mapped five high-impact scenarios, from an IRGC coup to Chinese humanoids on the battlefield to a Rust Belt revolt against automation, tracing the pathways that could turn today’s volatility into tomorrow’s defining crises
More here —>
December 22, 2025
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