The SI Round-up? Nah. Still the AIRU.

The AI Round-up: Year 4, Issue 31

“This ain’t a movie, dog.”

Jay-Z; Public Service Announcement

It’s starting to feel like it though.

How else should we feel when you hear AI companies are going through a war game designed to answer the question ‘what happens the day after?’

Oh, the day after? That’s referring to ‘the day after’ a catastrophic AI event.

Who’s watching the watchmen?

Let’s get to it.

Ethan Mollick’s The Dot and the Swarm introduces us to The Bitter Lesson

Trying to understand agents? The true future impact of AI? This is the one to watch and show your boss.

Guys, if you read/watch one thing in here…make it this.

LinkedIn: It’s (STILL) a mess.

Guys, if you read two things in here, make it the last one and this one.

Last we met this LinkedIn and AI was a big story. And guess what is this week, thanks to Christopher Penn? Yep, the AI/Li love story.

Penn has released a new AI for LinkedIn guide, available on Trust Insights page. There is a free version and a $20 version. I’d highly recommend grabbing this!

Guess what? Christopher will be at MAICON (next week!!) so…seems like a good year to attend MAICON, no?

How can I save on MAICON registration?

Click the link, enter promo code BENTHINKING200 for a $200 savings.

So, did AI cost 600+ HubSpot folks their jobs? No. Yes? Maybe.

This post from Conor Grennan is twofold – first, it offers up some support for those HubSpot folks who were impacted. But second, he digs into what their CEO said and what it means for AI’s impact on ALL jobs. (Hint: it’s…complicated.)

HR and AI: What does HR think is going to happen to the future of business?

The Workplace Intelligence Newsletter is a must read. It's weekly and it is packed full of valuable HR business insights. This week they tapped into some of their HR experts to really break down the impact of AI. You can read the whole thing in their newsletter, however, it's long...so to ensure you see some of the major takeaways, I used Claude to summarize for you. Here are 7 key takeaways.

This is an AI newsletter, folks.

At least he didn’t try to rename it American Intelligence.

Anthropic AI model submitted a false tip to Philly police about an unsolved mystery.

And this is why we can’t call it super intelligence.

Gartner says the bottom rungs are going away.

Well, if Gartner says it…

But for real, at what point do we step back and address this as a real future of work issue? I am advising people I talk with to rethink the entry level. Don’t classify yourself as that. What can you bring into an organization and do at any level? What impact can you have providing skills that maybe that company or department doesn’t have or needs?

If the bottom rung is cut off…maybe we need another way to scale the wall.

42.

OpenAI solved a lot of math problems really fast. One problem? No one knows if they’re right. And they definitely didn’t show their work (trust me, AI, your teachers want to see your work).

Let me know if you get the headline reference.

So you’re still not being nice to Claude, eh?

Well, now you don’t have a choice. Bad behavior and abusive language towards Claude is BANNED!

Some Nopes.

1. OpenAI (OpenSI?) has announced that it fired three safety researchers. Because who needs those? (The Verge)
2. Your website is vulnerable to AI agent swarms. Again, not a movie dog.
3. Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things. Yep, that was definitely my problem in high school.

Thanks for reading and supporting!

Live life, love life,

Ben

As a reminder, this is a round-up of the biggest stories, often hitting multiple newsletters I receive/review. The sources are many … which I’m happy to read on your behalf. Let me know if there’s one you’d like me to track or have questions about a topic you’re not seeing here.