Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Welcome, Applied AI Weekly Readers, to the latest issue!

I’m honored and grateful to have been sharing the most interesting articles, events, and ideas on artificial intelligence with you for nearly four years. Hitting 200 issues is no small feat, and it’s only possible because of your continued interest, feedback, and participation in this community. Thank you for being part of this journey!

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, videos, newsletters (such as this one!), or conferences. Contact me for more details.

Upcoming Events

Be sure to register for all our extraordinary events coming up on the Applied AI Meetup! Full details are available here
Look for me at upcoming AI events! I'll be speaking at ClubE in January on AI in Business: Hype or Real Value?, I hope you can join us!

A Bit of Thanks

Thank you to everyone who attended some of my recent talks. I would be happy to share slides and insights!

Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) meeting on how AI is changing the commercial real estate market.
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!
Open Source North! The title of my talk was DeepSeek: The Open-Source AI That Changed the Game

Finally, 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 community event.

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

News

What Do People Actually Use ChatGPT For? OpenAI Provides Some Numbers

As someone who writes about the AI industry relatively frequently for this site, there is one question that I find myself constantly asking and being asked in turn, in some form or another: What do you actually use large language models for?

Here's the direct link to the paper.

OpenAI's Economic Research Team made significant progress in answering that question on a population level by releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing how people use ChatGPT over time and across tasks.

Pupils Fear AI Is Eroding Their Ability to Study, Research Finds

One in four students say AI "makes it too easy" for them to find answers. Pupils fear that using artificial intelligence is eroding their ability to study, with many complaining it makes schoolwork “too easy” and others saying it limits their creativity and stops them from learning new skills, according to new research.

The report on the use of AI in UK schools, commissioned by Oxford University Press (OUP), found that just 2% of students aged between 13 and 18 said they did not use AI for their schoolwork, while 80% said they regularly used it.

Findings by AI 2027

AI 2027 sketches a near-term future where agentic AIs rapidly improve themselves, triggering an international race. By 2027, they will surpass human researchers, reshape industries, and fuel U.S.–China tensions. The scenario highlights both the promise of acceleration and the dangers of misalignment and security risks.

ChatGPT Will Soon Allow Erotica for Verified Adults, OpenAI Boss Says

OpenAI plans to allow a wider range of content, including erotica, on its popular chatbot ChatGPT as part of its push to "treat adult users like adults", says its boss Sam Altman. In a post on X on Tuesday, Mr Altman said upcoming versions of the popular chatbot would enable it to behave in a more human-like way - "but only if you want it, not because we are usage maxxing".

Introducing Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the best coding model in the world. It's the strongest model for building complex agents. It’s the best model at using computers. And it shows substantial gains in reasoning and math.

Code is everywhere. It runs every application, spreadsheet, and software tool you use. Being able to use those tools and reason through hard problems is how modern work gets done.

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

Meet the AI Chatbots Replacing India's Call-Center Workers

Cheap labor and English proficiency helped make India the world's back office — sometimes at the expense of workers elsewhere. Now, AI-powered systems are subsuming jobs done by headset-wearing graduates in technical support, customer care and data management, sparking a scramble to adapt, a Reuters examination found.

Gemini Is Beating My Portfolio Advisor

Once Gemini had a clear view of the data, the next step was actually to start making sense of it. To kick things off, the author started asking it to analyze the holdings. It summarized their allocation between equity, debt, and hybrid and pointed out the risks of concentrating investments in a specific type.

Kids Coming out of College ... Are Having a Hard Time

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has sounded the alarm on what many recent graduates already know—getting a job right out of college is really hard right now. Speaking at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Powell called it "an interesting labor market."

Consumer

Google Meet Launches an AI-Powered Makeup Feature

Google Meet offers 12 different makeup options to choose from, which can be found in the “Appearance” section under “Portrait touch-up,” which is a feature that has been available since 2023 to provide users with options like complexion smoothing, under-eye lightening, and eye whitening.

AI Beats Goalkeepers: The Future of Predicting Penalty Kicks in Soccer

Recent studies reported by New Scientist highlight how AI can predict the direction of a penalty shot with an accuracy of 64%. This is achieved by analyzing a vast dataset of penalty kicks, taking into account details such as player positioning, historical tendencies, and even subtle body language cues.

Video

This Humanoid Robot Is Playing Ping Pong Better Than Most Amateur Players I've Seen

What's so visually impressive about it, at least to my eyes, is how it keeps balance and makes quick decisions and very human-like arm and leg movements. In particular, as someone who used to play a lot of table tennis and who wasn't awful at it, I was genuinely impressed by how HITTER returns smashes, and also with the return at 0:28 right off the edge of the table.

Development

NVIDIA DGX Spark Arrives for World’s AI Developers

As a new class of computer, DGX Spark delivers a petaflop of AI performance and 128GB of unified memory in a compact desktop form factor, giving developers the power to run inference on AI models with up to 200 billion parameters and fine-tune models of up to 70 billion parameters locally. In addition, DGX Spark lets developers create AI agents and run advanced software stacks locally.

Paired NotebookLM With vs Code for My Coding Classes

When the author wanted to revise all their code, instead of opening each file individually, they opened the Mind Map view in NotebookLM and instantly saw how everything was connected. The sorting algorithms were grouped together, showing their similarities and differences; the search algorithm branched off where it shared logic with some of the sorting functions, and the string parsing code appeared as a separate node.