Innovation Profs - 7/8/2025

Generative AI tasks use up a lot of energy and environmental resources.

Perplexity's new Max subscription offers unlimited Labs usage, early access to new features and priority support.

Last week, the technology companies Anthropic and Meta each won landmark victories in two separate court cases that examined whether or not the firms had violated copyright when they trained their large language models on copyrighted books without permission. The rulings are the first we’ve seen to come out of copyright cases of this kind. This is a big deal!

While AI may be the catalyst behind the recent wave of data company M&A, the market was ripe for consolidation.

We still don't know whether genAI is making us dumb.

Sycophantic behavior in AI can mean trading accuracy for flattery.

It’s okay to hate AI’s encroachment into work. Learn to use it anyway.

Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon.

In a recent experiment, nearly 300 executives and managers were shown recent stock prices for the chip-maker Nvidia and then asked to predict the stock’s price in a month’s time. Then, half the group was given the opportunity to ask questions of ChatGPT while the other half were allowed to consult with their peers about Nvidia’s stock. The executives who used ChatGPT became significantly more optimistic, confident, and produced worse forecasts than the group who discussed with their peers. This is likely because the authoritative voice of the AI—and the level of detail of it gave in it’s answer—produced a strong sense of assurance, unchecked by the social regulation, emotional responsiveness, and useful skepticism that caused the peer-discussion group to become more conservative in their predictions. In order to harness the benefits of AI, executives need to understand the ways it can bias their own critical thinking.