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Submission + - OpenAI Named Lead Partner of 'Hour of AI' for K-12 Schoolkids Across the Globe

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you thought the announced AI moratoriums by the nation's two largest K-12 school districts (New York City & Los Angeles) might prompt the tech-backed nonprofit CodeAI to ease up on the K-12 AI accelerator, think again. On Monday, CodeAI unveiled a revamped website for December's Hour of AI, with OpenAI named as the Lead Partner for the event and Microsoft named as one of two 'Supporters' (the other being the aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman). In August, as it launched ChatGPT for Teens, OpenAI announced a signature partnership with Code.org to 'prepare the first AI generation', adding that 'through the Hour of AI, OpenAI and CodeAI will introduce millions of students to the basics of using AI thoughtfully and responsibly.'

At a Microsoft AI event in August 2025, Microsoft President Brad Smith called on Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi to "switch hats" from coding to AI, setting the stage for Partovi's announcement that the nonprofit would rename the Hour of Code — formerly the premier event for K-12 schoolchildren during CS Education Week since 2013 — to the Hour of AI in 2025 (a month earlier, Microsoft and OpenAI teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers to hatch a plan to 'bring AI into the classroom'). Later in 2025, Microsoft secured a 27% stake in OpenAI's new for-profit entity, which Reuters reported is now eyeing a $1.4 trillion valuation. In mid-2026, Code.org rebranded itself as CodeAI just ahead of the growing pushback against AI in K-12 schools.

The inside story of how Big Tech is applying the same playbook it used to scale coding lessons nationwide to now mainstream their AI tools in schools is at the heart of the new book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools.

Submission + - The University of Washington at Microsoft

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GeekWire reports that the University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange {GIX) program to Microsoft’s campus in a rent-free deal (UW News release). GIX, an institute supporting tech leaders that offers an MS in Technology Innovation, is the first UW program to set up full-time operations at Microsoft, whose headquarters are just across Lake Washington from the university’s main campus. Microsoft provided a $42 million in-kind donation to establish the embedded facility; the UW is leasing the new 48,500-square-foot GIX space in Microsoft’s Building 92 rent-free. GIX debuted in 2015 as a partnership of the UW and China's Tsinghua University and received $70 million in Microsoft support at the now-abandoned GIX location in Bellevue (the Steve Ballmer Building), although indications are that a long-term arrangement did not come together as intended.

In a Thursday LinkedIn post, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote: "Last night we opened a door unlike any other. At the heart of Microsoft’s campus, step into the new home of the UW's Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) and you cross from Microsoft into the University of Washington. No one has ever put a great research university and a leading technology company under the same roof quite like this. As far as I know, no one has even tried. The timing matters. Artificial intelligence is advancing fast. The question is whether the people building it understand the world it’s changing. This calls for a new style of education and leadership. We need leaders who understand the technology deeply and see things through other people’s eyes. Leaders who learn by collaborating on real projects with people from different countries and disciplines. That’s what GIX is built for. Students will learn from faculty across the UW, take classes taught by Microsoft employees, and be mentored by people from across our industry here in the Pacific Northwest."

Interestingly, Smith's contention that UW GIX students will benefit from a 'new style' of Microsoft and industry-influenced education sounds a lot like Smith's contention that K-12 school children are better off thanks to a new style of Microsoft and industry-influenced education. In an interview last month, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools author Natasha Singer told NPR (podcast, transcript), "For my book, I spoke to Brad Smith, who's the president of Microsoft, and he has been one of the leaders in the tech industry pushing for [K-12] computer science [and now AI literacy] in schools. [...] And Brad Smith said, philanthropy in the private sector is doing this work because public schools have failed to do what they were supposed to do. And his view is that public schools should be teaching modern subjects like computer science, and they were not equipped to do it fast enough and the tech industry stepped in to help. And is it better than if schools were able to do this themselves? He said, no, but it's certainly better than nothing. And he said to me, you know, think about where we would be on computer science if the tech industry hadn't stepped up. [...] Well, I've been having this conversation with him for 10 years, and when we started having it 10 years ago, I said to him, I get that, but when big tech companies put their finger on the scale, it tips education in certain ways that not only favor the tech industry but can obscure equally or more important things."

So, is 'The University of Washington at Microsoft' a good or bad idea?

Submission + - Trump hosts AI CEOs about safety standards and renames AI "super-intelligence"

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Trump hosted the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia and other tech companies at the White House. They agreed to voluntary AI-safety standards, including independent audits and safeguards against AI systems accessing or hacking technical systems in unintended ways. Trump also strongly backed continued rapid expansion of AI data centers, despite concerns over their electricity use and impact on local communities. He said he may create a 10-member board to oversee AI safety and plans to appoint a new White House AI-policy official.

The meeting comes amid growing concerns about AI agents behaving unpredictably and public pressure for stronger safeguards. A Reuters/Ipsos poll cited by Reuters found 73% of Americans felt AI companies had not done enough to prevent serious harm.
During the meeting, Trump also said he prefers to call AI “super-intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence.

Submission + - Too Big to Fail? What Happens if the AI Bubble Bursts

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Financial journalist Bethany McLean ponders What Happens if the A.I. Bubble Bursts (NYT, alt. source) in a NY Times op-ed. McLean, whose earlier reporting on Enron (YouTube) led to the downfall of the company and its auditor Arthur Andersen, begins:

It was about a year ago that Sarah Friar, the chief financial officer of OpenAI, said one way the company might sustain its current financial high-wire act was with a “backstop” or “guarantee” — as in, a government guarantee — “that allows the financing to happen.” Almost at the same time, Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, said, “Given the magnitude of what I expect A.I.’s economic impact to look like,” the government should serve the role of “insurer of last resort.” They qualified those comments, but still, the gist seemed to be that the industry The Wall Street Journal calls “the biggest economic bet in U.S. history” is so important to the nation that if it needs more funding, taxpayers should be on the hook. Another way to put it is that the government should regard artificial intelligence the same way it regarded the banks in the 2008 financial crisis: too big to fail.

It’s hard to reconcile that suggestion with the other message blaring out of leading A.I. companies these days: that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” as the former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently warned, and must therefore be restrained. A.I. is so important that we can’t let it fail, but so risky that we shouldn’t let it go forward? Now add the conventional wisdom that the United States has to beat China at all costs (or as President Trump put it, “Whoever wins A.I. wins!”), and the arguments can start to reinforce one another. The more the race to dominate becomes existential, the more we have to spend on it; the more we spend on the industry, the more economically and geopolitically consequential it becomes; the more consequential it becomes, the greater the need to speed ahead, safety concerns be damned; the more we race ahead heedless, the more risk there is. All in all, it raises an even scarier possibility: What if rather than being too big to fail, A.I. is too big to stop?

She concludes:

This technology may be critical to the future of the United States, but preserving it doesn’t mean we have to bail out the private entities that are leading the field at this particular moment, nor does it mean we have to protect the fortunes of their investors and executives. The solution to the whole ever-expanding A.I. terror starts with remembering the lessons of the 2008 crisis: No company should be too big to fail.

Submission + - Put Multiple Values in One Cell with Lists and Arrays in Excel 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Folks in Finance and other power Excel users were no doubt all atwitter over Microsoft's Thursday announcement of support for in-cell lists and arrays in Excel, including four new functions — FLATTEN, HAS, HASANY, HASALL — to manipulate them. From the home office in Redmond:

"Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels. Many workbooks already try to pack multiple values into one cell. A project might list 'Carlos, Henrietta, Jacob' as three owners, or a Forms survey might return '2:00 PM; 2:30 PM; 3:00 PM' as one response. With lists, you can keep those values in one cell, while also keeping them separate for filtering, calculation and more."

If you haven't been keeping abreast of What's New in Excel, Microsoft has added a number of new features over the past years that enable Excel users to do things one might formerly have turned to programming languages and other computing environments to accomplish, including support for regular expressions, the LET and LAMDA functions, Python in Excel, and, of course, the obligatory AI support.

Which raises an interesting question: Is an Excel formula worth a thousand lines of AI-generated Python code? (especially if the latter is run in an overengineered infrastructure, such as an AI-generated complex CI/CD pipeline combined with cloud pipeline execution!)

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