Back to School Already?

Yep, it’s that time again. The first month of summer holidays seems to last forever, but the second month passes by in a heartbeat! I wish I could tell you that AI news slowed down over the summer, but that would be a lie. I also wish I could tell you that recent AI advances were all made with user safety and student learning in mind - alas, that would also be a lie. One post that caught my attention in the past week said “[we] are fundamentally missing the point of generative AI, from the point of the companies investing in it. This was never once about the quality of the output, it’s about the velocity of the output. The goal has never once been to make content that is good. The goal has been to make content that is good enough and fast enough, to bury human-generated content under a mountain of AI generated garbage”. But first,

Rick’s AI Express

Of note in the past six weeks:

• OpenAI released GPT5, and it has been called genius, PhD level, near-AGI, and other fantastical descriptors. Ethan Mollick says “this is a big deal”; Gary Marcus say “Overdue, Overhyped, and Underwhelming”; other reactions run the gamut, from pleasant to intuitive to a vibe coder’s dream, but also from downgrade to shrinkflation to nothingburger. Curiously, OpenAI brought back GPT4o for paid users, due to backlash over the capabilities of GPT5.

• Let the bidding begin! Perplexity just announced a bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 Billion USD. Google is facing an antitrust lawsuit from the US DOJ - esssentially an illegal monopoly that forces people to use Chrome and Google Search.

• The Trump Administration released a plan for global AI dominance - America’s AI Action Plan. While the intent is to keep the USA at the forefront of AI development, the messaging is right out of the Cold War, with fears of China leapfrogging US AI development. With the focus on the use of AI (and proposing

  to ban state laws that restrict AI development), it looks like power, capital, control, and decision-making is firmly in the hands of the tech bros and US government officials.

• In the continued shakedown of US institutions and companies, the Trump Administration is allowing chip manufacturers Nvidia and AMD export licenses to sell their newest AI chips to China for … wait for it … 15% of the sales revenue. Doesn’t sound very compatible with winning the AI development race, but I don’t expect these things to make sense.

• In related news, the EU is moving forward with reasonable restrictions on AI development and use. Yes, the code of practice is voluntary, but at least the EU is addressing the concerns of the millions of people who are children, parents, business owners, writers, and others who want safety and compliance at the forefront.

• In somewhat of a nod to educators, OpenAI has released a “study mode” feature that students can use to learn about a topic, rather than just search for the answer. While educational AI platforms like Khanmigo and Magic School already have this mode baked in to their product, ChatGPT is the first AI model to include the feature. Unfortunately, turning off study mode is just as easy as turning it on, as there is no master switch to enforce study mode for students.

It’s back-to-school time, and I’m returning to my weekly blog on AI - primarily as it affects education, but with relevance for anyone interested in the topics surrounding AI. If you are a new reader, I suggest spending an hour or two going through earlier posts, so that you become familiar with both my high level view of AI as well as the nuts and bolts of getting stuff done with AI. And then start actually using AI tools. It doesn’t really matter which tools you use, as long as you practice what you are learning.

If you are new to using AI, start with chatbots like Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or ChatGPT. If you have been using AI tools for a while, you may want to expand your repertoire by working with NotebookLM, DeepSeek, Grok, or my newest go-to tools: Notion and Otter. Notion is an all-in-one organizing and planning tool, and Otter is my meeting recorder. Interestingly, once AI works, we stop calling it AI and we start calling it Notion, Otter, or Duolingo. And for the record, I use the free plan for all AI tools, and right now that tier meets my needs perfectly.

What’s my plan for the coming year with this blog? I have several goals, and I’d like you to help me achieve them.

• I often feel like I’m writing into the void (as one of my fellow writers put it). I want to write posts that are timely, practical, informative, and balanced. And for that I need your feedback and suggestions.

• I want to expand my readership - right now at about 100 weekly readers - by a factor of at least five. This will happen if readers have input into what I write, and if I get honest feedback and suggestions from you. It’s a pretty simple formula: if I write about what you are interested in, you’ll forward these articles to others.

• I want to balance my tendency to focus on the big picture of AI with very practical ways for you and your colleagues (or family, friends, students) to leverage the benefits of AI tools. I use AI daily, for a wide variety of tasks that includes medical and financial advice, in-depth research, vacation planning, brainstorming and editing, and even for companionship/therapy from time to time.

• I want to keep you up to date on “what’s new” in the world of AI - from the crazy valuation of AI companies that don’t yet have a product (like former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, valued at 12 Billion USD). Or Sam Altman’s Freudian slip (perhaps premonition?) about GPT5 when posting the image of the Death Star!

• I also want to offer my help to you, or your school or company, as you consider how to leverage AI incrementally and wisely. There is a worry that AI is coming for your job, but it’s more likely that someone with your skills, who ALSO knows AI, is coming for your job! I offer free workshops for schools, and I can help you plan an implementation strategy for the coming year. I’ll be suggesting action items for the coming school year next week!

Okay, now for a look at the two tools that I mentioned at the earlier: Notion and Otter.

NOTION is an organizational tool that uses databases, pages, and views to provide you with a single system that can manage lots of different tasks, meetings, and life/family/health details. The key is building a database that all due dates are entered into, whether they are personal, professional, recreational, health, family. No, you don’t need to know anything about databases - other than they deal with relationships between types of data. And then you create views of that database in a dashboard so that you can see (for example) what is due in the next week, what high importance items have you not started on, or what family events do you need to plan for (or at least be aware of!) I’m using it successfully to stay on top of due dates for projects that are under way or that have deliverables in the next month.

I tried setting up Notion by watching a few videos, but my best help came from ChatGPT. I’ll share that process if you are interested. They main error I made was assuming that I needed different databases for each TYPE of information. AI corrected this by suggesting ONE database, since everything I need to do is a task with a due date - whether a doctor’s appointment, a blog post, a family holiday, a consulting gig, or a zoom call and action items. From there it’s a matter of creating the views that are most beneficial to me - like major project status (what is under way and what has not been started, along with what’s high vs low importance), tasks due in the next week, and my Google Calendar (which has all my personal events). I made a conscious choice to leave personal items in Google, rather than to switch to Notion.

OTTER AI is a recording, transcription, and summary tool for any scheduled meeting with Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. As long as I have a calendar entry for the meeting (or manually record it), I get 300 minutes of recording per month, 30 minutes of transcription per call, and a very nice notes summary that includes an overview, key topics, action items, plus a breakdown of the conversation by topic.

While I use this for business-related calls, I can easily see using it for family calls, for online or in-person medical appointments, or for talking with aging parents or grandparents (just forward them the summary when done). I really like that I don’t have to take notes during the call, and by the end, a summary and list of to-dos is ready to go. All of this on the free plan, which is more than enough for me.

If you have another meeting recorder that you use, I’d love to hear about it. I follow Daniel Nest (Why Try AI? on Substack) and he recommends Fathom Video, but I’m sure the one you are most comfortable with, and that gets the job done, is the one you should use!

That’s it for this week. Next week (posts generally land around noon on Wednesdays) I will suggest an action plan for schools for the coming year. Again, let me know what you’d like to hear about, or if you need additional help getting started with AI.

That’s all for now,

Cheers,

-Rick