02.17.25 – 02.21.25 – SUNY New Paltz

Google and Ireland Celebrate Insight AI Scholarship (2 minute read)

Google hosts Irish officials to celebrate the Insight AI Scholarship, supporting students from underrepresented backgrounds in advancing AI and digital skills.

OpenAI Revises ChatGPT Policies to Promote Intellectual Freedom (8 minute read)

OpenAI has updated its AI training policies to reduce content restrictions, emphasizing neutrality, truth-seeking, and offering multiple perspectives on controversial topics.

Anthropic and UK Government Sign AI Collaboration MOU (1 minute read)

Anthropic has partnered with the UK government to explore AI applications in public services, emphasizing responsible deployment, economic growth, and scientific research using its Claude model.

Researchers are training AI to interpret animal emotions (1 minute read)

Several teams around the world are working on AI systems to help humans understand animals. A group at the University of the West of England Bristol and Scotland’s Rural College have developed a system called Intellipig that examines photos of pigs’ faces and notifies farmers if there are signs of pain, sickness, or emotional distress, and a team at the University of Haifa is training AI to identify signs of discomfort in dogs’ faces. These systems still rely on humans to do the initial work of identifying the meanings of different behaviors.

The One AI to Rule Them All (8 minute read)

The next AI model war may be upon us, but this time it will be a smaller one as the gains, while real, have been increasingly expensive and granular. We are seemingly reaching parity among the players. While they all have more specific areas of focus and subfeatures, they are all trying to consolidate their products to simplify them for everyday use. This article ranks current AI offerings from a pure consumer perspective.

AI used to design a multi-step enzyme that can digest some plastics (4 minute read)

AI-driven protein design has enabled the possibility of creating things unlike anything found in nature. Scientists have successfully created an enzyme with the potential to digest plastics. Breaking down ester bonds in plastics requires four steps – getting AI to design a protein with the right configuration to do one of these steps is easy, but having it cycle through all four is much harder. The scientists overcame challenges by adding more AI models and eventually designed an esterase capable of digesting the bonds in PET, a common plastic.

Academic researchers find a way to train an AI reasoning model for less than $50 (3 minute read)

Researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington have trained an AI reasoning model for under $50 using distillation and modifications to an Alibaba AI model.

Grok 3 Overview (18 minute read)

This article provides a comprehensive overview of xAI’s Grok 3.

AI Emojis Generator (Website)

Turn your ideas into emojis with the AI Emoji Generator. You can generate your favorite Slack or Discord emojis with just one click.

YouTube Brings AI Video Creation to Shorts with Google’s Veo 2 (2 minute read)

Google’s Veo 2 is now integrated into YouTube Shorts, enabling AI-generated backgrounds and video clips from text prompts. SynthID watermarks ensure transparency. Veo 2 is available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with global expansion planned. It outperforms competitors but struggles with complex scenes, making it ideal for shorter clips and effects.

Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw are Getting Two New AI Editing Features (2 minute read)

Adobe has introduced several new features for Lightroom and Camera Raw, including Adaptive Profiles, which optimize image adjustments, and Distraction Removal, which eliminates unwanted elements from photos. Lightroom now also includes a Find Duplicates feature, allowing users to declutter their libraries more effectively.

“WTF is happening?” – how AI is reshaping design (5 minute read)

AI is transforming design, with senior designers leveraging it as a tool while juniors feel threatened, highlighting an industry-wide experience gap. Designers are self-teaching AI skills, frustrated with current tools but optimistic about their future, emphasizing the need for education, ethical use, and creative adaptation.

Show, Don’t Tell (5 minute read)

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI app, quickly topped the App Store, rivaling ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost. Its breakthrough feature—displaying chain-of-thought reasoning—creates a “Key Product Moment,” making AI interaction feel intuitive and magical. OpenAI has since introduced a similar feature, highlighting the power of visible innovation.

South Korea Bans DeepSeek (3 minute read)

South Korea has temporarily banned new downloads of China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot due to data protection concerns. The app, which gained over a million users in a week, will remain unavailable until compliance improvements are made.

US’ First Major AI Copyright Ruling (2 minute read)

A U.S. judge ruled that Ross Intelligence infringed on Thomson Reuters’ copyright by using Westlaw headnotes to train its AI. The decision may influence other AI-related copyright lawsuits but remains narrowly focused on non-generative AI applications.

The EU AI Act is Coming to America (9 minute read)

Although federal leadership seems wary of heavy AI regulations, many US states are implementing legislation modeled on Europe’s AI Act. This article outlines how “algorithmic discrimination” laws, inspired by EU rules, could create detailed impact assessments, require compliance paperwork, and impose liability on AI deployments—raising the real prospect of higher operating costs for teams building AI systems.