AI Watch

‘Nature’ Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education– www.404media.co

pgnewser May 5, 2026 0

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Nature has retracted a paper that claimed AI had a positive impact on student learning.

The original paper, titled “The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis,” was originally published in May of last year by Jin Wang and Wenxiang Fan of the Hangzhou Normal University in China. It is a meta-analysis, meaning it combines data from 51 research studies published between November 2022 and February 2025 on the effectiveness of ChatGPT in education. The paper claimed it found that ChatGPT had a large or moderately positive impact on “students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking.”

A blueprint for using AI to strengthen democracy– www.technologyreview.com

pgnewser May 5, 2026 0

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Start with what might be called the epistemic layer—how we come to know things. People are increasingly relying on AI to know what is true, what is happening, and whom to trust. Search is already substantially AI-mediated. The next generation of AI assistants will synthesize information, frame it, and present it with authority. For a growing number of people, asking an AI will become the default way to form views on a candidate, a policy, or a public figure. Whoever controls what these models say therefore has increasing influence over what people believe.

Technology has always shaped the way citizens interact with information. But a new problem will soon arise in the form of personal AI agents, which can change not only how people receive information but how they act on it. These systems will conduct research, draft communications, highlight causes, and lobby on a user’s behalf. They will inform decisions such as how to vote on a ballot measure, which organizations are worth supporting, or how to respond to a government notice. They will, in a meaningful sense, begin to mediate the relationship between individuals and the institutions that govern them.

The United States Is Repeating Its Silicon Mistake with Gallium Nitride– warontherocks.com

pgnewser April 21, 2026 0

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China controls 99 percent of the world’s primary gallium, a critical mineral and semiconductor crucial for building the microchips of the future. In 2023, it placed export controls on gallium to retaliate against American restrictions on the export of advanced chips to China. In December 2024, China escalated to an outright ban on gallium exports to the United States. The U.S. National Defense Stockpile had zero gallium reserves when that ban landed.

The United States has been here before. The United States pioneered and scaled modern silicon semiconductor infrastructure. A significant reliance on international manufacturing and the loss of domestic silicon dominance reflect a failure to recognize the importance of industrial capacity to national security. With silicon, the intellectual property was American, but the chips were “Made in Taiwan.” If similar blind spots persist, the United States risks repeating this failure with gallium nitride, a wide-bandgap semiconductor that outperforms silicon at high voltage, high frequency, and extreme temperatures. It’s the beating heart of every modern radar and electronic warfare system.

AI Competition with China Continues to Heat Up | American Enterprise Institute– www.aei.org

pgnewser April 21, 2026 0

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As major artificial intelligence breakthroughs arrive on what seems to be a near-weekly basis, the race between the US and China continues to intensify. In this post and the next, we will examine the good and bad news for the prospects of American triumph in the battle for AI superiority, a skirmish that could well determine the future of global innovation.

Let’s start with the bad news.

Last week, I attended a hearing of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party entitled “China’s Campaign to Steal America’s AI Edge.” Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) opened the proceedings by asserting that “China’s smuggling of advanced AI chips is a pervasive threat facing law enforcement” and observing that “just last month, the Department of Justice announced a $2.5 billion chip smuggling case, which would be the largest export control violation in US history.”

Moolenaar then asked, “Why is China so desperate to acquire US-designed chips? The reason is obvious. AI is a truly transformative technology. It’s already changing how we fight wars, run our government, and operate companies.” Critically, the chairman contended, “it is essential for the United States to maintain a decisive lead in the AI race. We cannot afford a future where Beijing dominates this technology.”

At the hearing, Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, echoed Moolenaar, arguing that “we are in a race, and the stakes could not be higher. Artificial intelligence will transform every industry, every battlefield, and every government.” Critically, Alperovitch asserted, “whoever fields the best models running on the best infrastructure will likely win not just the AI race itself but the 21st century. The single most important input to winning is compute—the processing power used to train and run AI models.”

Feds Sound Alarm Over Warning That Anthropic ‘Mythos’ AI Can Hack ‘Every Major Operating System’– slaynews.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Federal officials are scrambling after a powerful new artificial intelligence (AI) model demonstrated the ability to hack virtually every major operating system and web browser, triggering urgent warnings from top government and financial leaders.

AI giant Anthropic’s new system, known as “Mythos,” is being kept under tight restrictions.

However, insiders say the threat is already serious enough that the U.S. government is racing to understand it before it’s too late.

Treasury Rushes to Access High-Risk AI

According to reports, the U.S. Treasury Department is urgently seeking access to Anthropic’s restricted model

The US backs a South Africa project to extract rare earths despite a diplomatic clash– abcnews.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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PHALABORWA, South Africa — Two enormous sandlike dunes at an old chemical processing plant in South Africa are at the center of an exploratory U.S.-backed project to extract highly sought-after rare earth elements from industrial mining waste.

The Phalaborwa Rare Earths Project has U.S. support through a $50 million equity investment by the government’s International Development Finance Corporation and is part of accelerated U.S. efforts to reduce reliance on economic rival China for the minerals crucial for making electronic devices, robotics, defense systems, electric vehicles and other high-tech products.

Countries have identified dozens of minerals, including copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel, as critical because they are essential for new technologies. The 17 rare earth elements are a subset of them.

President Donald Trump has made expanding U.S. access to critical minerals, including rare earth elements, a central policy to counter China. The Trump administration said this year it will deploy nearly $12 billion to create its own strategic reserve.

AI makes granular pricing easier, but consumer psychology may make it less profitable– phys.org

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Big data, artificial intelligence and advanced pricing algorithms make it easier than ever for companies to fine-tune prices for individual products to closely reflect their unique value and cost. The conventional wisdom is straightforward: better data, better algorithms and sharper segmentation should produce better profits. But new research suggests that the most profitable answer isn’t always more fine-grained pricing across a product line. In fact, it is fewer, better-chosen price points.

Stanford’s AI Index for 2026 Shows the State of AI– spectrum.ieee.org

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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The capabilities of leading AI models continue to accelerate, and the largest AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are hurtling toward IPOs later this year. Yet resentment toward AI continues to simmer, and in some cases has boiled over, especially in the United States, where local governments are beginning to embrace restrictions or outright bans on new data center development.

It’s a lot to keep track of, but the 2026 edition of the AI Index from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center pulls it off. The report, which comes in at over 400 pages, includes dozens of data points and graphs that approach the topic from multiple angles, from benchmark scores to investment and public perception.

As in prior years (see our coverage from 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), we’ve read the report and identified the trends that encapsulate the state of AI in 2026.

Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles–and pushing back– www.technologyreview.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Internet users have found humor in the idea behind the tool, joking about automating their coworkers before themselves. However, Colleague Skill’s virality has sparked a lot of debate about workers’ dignity and individuality in the age of AI.

After seeing Colleague Skill on social media, Amber Li, 27, a tech worker in Shanghai, used it to recreate a former coworker as a personal experiment. Within minutes, the tool created a file detailing how that person did their job. “It is surprisingly good,” Li says. “It even captures the person’s little quirks, like how they react and their punctuation habits.” With this skill, Li can use an AI agent as a new “coworker” that helps debug her code and replies instantly. It felt uncanny and uncomfortable, Li says.

Even so,  replacing coworkers with agents could become a norm. Since OpenClaw became a national craze, bosses in China have been pushing tech workers to experiment with agents.

Google AI Releases Auto-Diagnose: An Large Language Model LLM-Based System to Diagnose Integration Test Failures at Scale– www.marktechpost.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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If you have ever stared at thousands of lines of integration test logs wondering which of the sixteen log files actually contains your bug, you are not alone — and Google now has data to prove it.

A team of Google researchers introduced Auto-Diagnose, an LLM-powered tool that automatically reads the failure logs from a broken integration test, finds the root cause, and posts a concise diagnosis directly into the code review where the failure showed up. On a manual evaluation of 71 real-world failures spanning 39 distinct teams, the tool correctly identified the root cause 90.14% of the time. It has run on 52,635 distinct failing tests across 224,782 executions on 91,130 code changes authored by 22,962 distinct developers, with a ‘Not helpful’ rate of just 5.8% on the feedback received.