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!

IMPORTANT NEWS

The Applied AI 2025 Fall Conference is back! Check out the details and be sure to

Register Today! This conference will once again sell out!
Support Applied AI as a Sponsor! You can support Applied AI at our meetups, podcasts, newsletters, or conferences. Contact me for more details.

Issue Highlights

In this week’s Applied AI Weekly, I share updates on our upcoming Fall Conference, my recent talks at OSN and Healthcare.MN, and highlight articles on AI’s impact across work, business, and culture. From Hollywood and education to GitHub Copilot and LangGraph, the issue is packed with insights on how AI is shaping the world around us.

Upcoming Events

Be sure to register for all our extraordinary events coming up on the Applied AI Meetup! Full details are available here
I'll be speaking on Sept 23rd at the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) on how AI is changing the commerical landscape market.

A Bit of Thanks

Thank you to everyone who attended my talk at the Applied AI & Healthcare.MN event on Home Healthcare & Hospice is Human - Let's Keep it That Way. Would love to connect and share my slides and more if you are interested!
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
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

We Must Build AI for People; Not to Be a Person

I write, to think. More than anything this essay is an attempt to think through a bunch of hard, highly speculative ideas about how AI might unfold in the next few years. A lot is being written about the impending arrival of superintelligence; what it means for alignment, containment, jobs, and so on. Those are all important topics.

AI That Works for Workers: Survey Results

AI is at least four different transformations happening simultaneously - in how we work, how we invest, how we power our world, and how nations compete. We're trying to integrate an unpredictable technology into systems that weren't designed for it. What’s happening in this messy middle?

AI Isn’t Coming for Hollywood. It's Already Arrived

An early winner in the generative AI wars was near collapse—then bet everything on a star-studded comeback. Can Stability AI beat the competition?

Sponsor

Applied AI 2025 Fall Conference

Join us for a full day of conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and their applications to our world. Together, we will explore all aspects of Artificial Intelligence and its applications in areas such as Healthcare, Retail, Marketing, the Internet of Things, Agriculture, and all aspects from developer tools to applications with ChatGPT, Computer Vision, NLP, and Voice with chatbots. Everyone and all skills and interests are welcome!

Business

How the AI Boom Is Leaving Consultants Behind

Consulting firms over the past three years have wagered billions on the hope they would play an essential role in the AI boom, helping the world’s largest corporations transform themselves with the new technology.

Done right, it could prove to be a boon for an industry already hurting from macroeconomic pressures and layoffs.

CEO Boasts That He Laid Off 80 Percent of His Staff Because They Didn't Love AI Enough, Threatens to Do It Again

When it comes to AI, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more groveling cheerleader than the humble CEO. As hype around the software grows, business execs have become astonishingly comfortable sharing their hopes that AI will soon make human labor a thing of the past.

Microsoft AI Chief Says It's 'Dangerous' to Study AI Consciousness

AI models can respond to text, audio, and video in ways that sometimes fool people into thinking a human is behind the keyboard, but that doesn’t exactly make them conscious. It’s not like ChatGPT experiences sadness doing my tax return … right?

Consumer

I Paired NotebookLM With Perplexity’s New Browser, and It's the Ultimate Productivity Combo

I never thought a day would arrive when it would be possible to pair a productivity tool with a literal web browser, but it's 2025. I should have probably seen it coming. Though it really started with companies integrating AI into every app and device imaginable, entire browsers that are now AI-powered seem to be the next hot thing.

NotebookLM to Pull Sources From Web via Deep Research Soon

Google has begun integrating Deep Research capabilities into NotebookLM, as seen by the addition of a new option within the sources tab. This interface includes a search box, a selector to switch between web and Google Drive sources, and a Deep Research toggle. This development effectively brings the Deep Research experience, previously seen in Gemini, into NotebookLM, allowing users to streamline the process of finding sources and bringing relevant research content directly into their notebooks.

Video

New Contract for St. Paul Educators Addresses Artificial Intelligence

The St. Paul Federation of Educators is in the process of ratifying its new contract, and it’s one of the first groups of teachers in the state to have language addressing the role of artificial intelligence.

A memorandum of understanding says St. Paul Public Schools “is committed to continuing to rely on professional educators, rather than artificial intelligence, to be the primary mode of delivering instruction in our schools.”

Design

This New Framework Lets LLM Agents Learn From Experience, No Fine-Tuning Required

A new learning paradigm developed by University College London (UCL) and Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab enables large language model (LLM) agents to dynamically adapt to their environment without fine-tuning the underlying language model. The method allows agents to continuously improve their performance by using a structured memory system that updates itself as the agent gathers experience.

Development

Agents Panel: Launch Copilot Coding Agent Tasks Anywhere on GitHub

You can start a new Copilot task from the new agents panel with a simple prompt. Just open the panel from any page on GitHub, describe your goal in natural language, and select the relevant repository. Copilot will then take it from there and start creating a plan, drafting changes, running tests, and then preparing a pull request.

Building LangGraph: Designing an Agent Runtime from first principles

The developers of LangGraph thought deeply about what is different about building with LLMs and what it takes for your agent to run in production. These ideas led them to develop and iterate. LangGraph focuses on control and durability, so you have the best chance of your agent doing what you intended. Check this out and learn how and why!

How To Integrate a Local LLM Into VS Code

Well, you might want to make use of AI to enhance your workflow, help debug your code or even learn a new programming language. For whatever reason you have, integrating VS Code with a local LLM like Ollama (my go-to AI) is not nearly as hard as you might think it would be. The end result is a powerful tool you can leverage for whatever coding or coding-adjacent need you have.

The Hidden Costs of Coding With Generative AI

Generative AI is growing explosively across knowledge work, particularly in software development. OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 focuses heavily on enhancing coding capabilities and is a step toward full automation. Organizations adopting these tools are anticipating major gains. And early research supports their optimism: GitHub has reported that programmers using Copilot are up to 55% more productive, and McKinsey has found that developers can complete tasks up to twice as fast with generative AI assistance.