Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Welcome, Applied AI Weekly Readers, to the latest issue! I'm honored to once again share with you the most interesting articles on artificial intelligence that I've found this past week.

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Issue Highlights

China’s DeepSeek stuns with low-cost AI gains. Google’s Genie 3 trains robots in virtual worlds. OpenAI and Anthropic release powerful new models. Massive AI data center planned in Wyoming. AI reshapes jobs, appears on smartwatches, enhances end-of-life care, and even drives updates in Java development.

Upcoming Events

Be sure to register for all our extraordinary events coming up on the Applied AI Meetup! Full details are available here
I spoke last. week at the AI on Healthcare Forum on Home Health & Hospice. Details can be found here

A Bit of Thanks

Thank you to everyone who attended my talk at Open Source North! The title of my talk was DeepSeek: The Open-Source AI That Changed the Game
Thank you to everyone who came out and supported me and the panel at the Future of Healthcare Conference at the University of Saint Thomas. Here are some photos of our panel at the event with Minnesota healthcare leaders.
I'm continuing to offer free consultations and workshops with many business leaders on how AI is changing the landscape of how you will run your business today and into the future. Connect today and book a meeting with me.

Now that we have that covered, please enjoy the articles I have spent time finding and curating for you this past week. Can't wait to see you at an upcoming Applied AI event!

Finally, please do reach out if there is anything you feel I might have missed. Enjoy!

News

China's Artificial Intelligence Gains Bewilder Top American Researchers

China’s unexpected advances in artificial intelligence in recent months have top U.S. researchers baffled.

DeepSeek, seen as a cost-effective AI breakthrough for China, was a wake-up call for U.S. industry technologists, but many appear to have hit the snooze button. DeepSeek’s rapid development of a model matching American frontier AI companies’ outputs for seemingly lower costs caught many national security officials and researchers off guard this year.

Google Says Its New ‘World Model’ Could Train AI Robots in Virtual Warehouses

Google has outlined its latest step towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) with a new model that allows AI systems to interact with a convincing simulation of the real world.

The Genie 3 “world model” could be used to train robots and autonomous vehicles as they engage with realistic recreations of environments such as warehouses, according to Google.

Introducing gpt-oss | OpenAI

We’re releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b—two state-of-the-art open-weight language models that deliver strong real-world performance at low cost. Available under the flexible Apache 2.0 license, these models outperform similarly sized open models on reasoning tasks, demonstrate strong tool use capabilities, and are optimized for efficient deployment on consumer hardware. They were trained using a mix of reinforcement learning and techniques informed by OpenAI’s most advanced internal models, including o3 and other frontier systems.

$Claude Opus 4.1 \ Anthropic$

Claude Opus 4.1 \ Anthropic

Today we're releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning. We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.

Opus 4.1 is now available to paid Claude users and in Claude Code. It's also on our API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. Pricing is the same as Opus 4.

Power Usage in Wyoming AI Data Center Could Eclipse Consumption of the State's Human Residents by 5x

Plans are afoot to create a massive new data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that would consume more power than every home in the state combined, a staggering milestone in the ongoing race to meet the excruciating power requirements of AI. The project is expected to kick off with a 1.8 gigawatt facility that would be scalable to 10 gigawatts in the future, as reported by AP.

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI

Given the rapid adoption of generative AI and its potential to impact a wide range of tasks, understanding the effects of AI on the economy is one of society's most important questions. In this work, we take a step toward that goal by analyzing the work activities people do with AI, how successfully and broadly those activities are done, and combining that with data on what occupations do those activities. We analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users and Microsoft Bing Copilot, a publicly available generative AI system.

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Business

AI Is Impacting the Labor Market, Young Tech Worker

Changes to the American labor market brought on by the arrival of generative AI are already showing up in employment data, according to a Goldman Sachs economist.

Most companies have yet to deploy artificial intelligence in production cases, meaning that the overall job market hasn’t yet been significantly impacted by AI, said Joseph Briggs, senior global economist of Goldman’s research division, in a podcast episode shared first with CNBC.

Healthcare

Improving End-of-Life Care through AI-Based Clinical Decision Support

Many patients with serious illness prioritize comfort over the prolongation of life in the final days and weeks prior to death. Goals-of-care discussions (GOCDs) can provide patients with the opportunity to express their preferred end-of-life experience, prevent aggressive and often futile interventions, improve patient satisfaction, and reduce unnecessary costs.

Consumer

We Need to Relearn How to Use AI When It’s on Our Bodies

Gemini has arrived on the wrist. It’s now in the latest Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 series, the Pixel Watch, and rolling out to a handful of other smartwatches. This is big. Huge, even. AI is out here disrupting life as we know it. Now, it’s making the leap from phones and laptops and onto the body. When the Galaxy Watch 8 launched, several product people told me this was going to make everything so much more convenient. Imagine, they said, having all the power of AI on you. Literally.

Development

Java is dead: Long live Java!

Looking ahead and on the topic of artificial intelligence, Jakarta EE is also exploring strategic ways to support AI innovation in enterprise systems. Rather than building AI engines directly into the platform, the focus is on enabling standards for integrating external AI services and improving developer productivity with AI-powered tooling.