🏫Alpha, Agents, Architecture

Hey human,

The summer break has finally arrived! For those that are new, that means I experiment a little more over the next 5 weeks with the newsletter with a mixture of longer and shorter form content. As ever, let me know what resonates and you enjoy reading.

📚 AI+education news

• Alpha School Expansion: I have talked about Alpha School before. They are the school that only gives two hours a day for more formalised learning using AI platforms and the rest of the time pupils are undertake practical and soft skills with support from an adult ‘guide’. Recently they had some pretty successful test results and they are no expanding to many other cities across the US.

• Study Mode, Activating: Not fully available to all (yet), this feature seems to enable a mode that that more ‘leaning-focused’ and will be available from selecting it from the tools menu. I will be sure to try it out once I can and delivery my thoughts. Until then, Donald Clark has had access and shared a screenshot.

  The biggest issue for me is that pupils will still need to be motivated to click on this mode to reap any potential benefits. It would certainly be interesting if there was a way to force this mode onto profiles of pupils while at a certain location or for a set amount of time before they could access the other feature set of ChatGPT.

  

  Image Credit: Tibor Blaho

🌍 Wider AI updates

• New AI Architecture: A new AI architecture called Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) has been developed that can outperform large language models on complex reasoning tasks. HRM is inspired by the human brain's hierarchical reasoning process and can achieve impressive results with significantly less data and computational resources.

• AI Browsing: Edge has been updated with some a new Copilot mode that tries to blur the lines between using a browser and an AI chatbot. Effectively, a single user interface will be able to determine if you were trying to search the internet or start a chat with Copilot. There are also agentic properties built in as it can compare and take actions across multiple tabs. It is free to try for a limited time.

• Your Next Top Model: There was some controversy for Vogue as a an advertisement for Guess contained a model who was completely AI generated. While this was the first time an AI-generated person has featured in a magazine, people are wondering about the impact of this on beauty standards and the wider-industry.

🎯Tip

• No prompt this week, but hopefully a very useful tip, especially as we enter the summer holidays. Turns out ChatGPT does an okay job at finding discount codes for websites. Now I need to caveat that this does not work 100% of the time, but when it has worked, it has more than made up for the time that it does not and if it saves just a bit of money for people, then I think that is worth it. To get it to work do the following steps:

1. Get the link to the website and copy it onto your clipboard.

2. Go to ChatGPT and paste in the website link into the context window.

3. Ask for any potential discount codes for your geographic area.

4. Wait for the response and try them out and see if they work.

Again, there is no guarantee, but I have definitely had some that I could not just find online, so I feel it is worth a shot. Let me know what sites it works for you.

Till next week.

Mr A 🦾