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Submission + - It's On: OpenAI ChatGPT for Teens and Google Gemini Vie for K-12 Schoolchildren

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "We’re introducing ChatGPT for Teens, announced OpenAI on Tuesday, "an experience designed to help teens learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence. It provides stronger built-in safety protections for teens, including features to promote healthy use and additional controls for parents." The partnership, OpenAI explains, "also builds on our ChatGPT for Teachers work to empower teachers and districts to guide AI use and our ongoing work with the American Federation of Teachers to build AI skills.

OpenAI added that it's also "partnering with [tech-backed nonprofit] CodeAI to prepare the first AI generation", announcing a 'signature partnership' to give students and educators access to tools and resources that will help them learn how to use and benefit from AI [...] helping teens understand how AI works, direct it, question it, and create with it—with teachers playing a meaningful role in shaping how AI enters the classroom." Separately, CodeAI provided a few details on how they'll work with OpenAI, including "helping students build foundational AI literacy" via the Hour of AI, through which it said "OpenAI and CodeAI will introduce millions of students to the basics of using AI thoughtfully and responsibly." With funding and encouragement from Microsoft, which is partnering with OpenAI on the $22.5 million AFT AI skill building and has a stake in OpenAI valued as high as $228 billion, CodeAI — formerly known as Code.org before rebranding in June — replaced its signature 'Hour of Code' event last December with the new 'Hour of AI' in a pivot from coding to AI literacy.

Interestingly, OpenAI's K-12 AI announcement comes less than a week after Google turned on Gemini AI for K-12 students using its Google Classroom, a learning management system for posting assignments and turning in schoolwork that's used by 150+ million students and teachers worldwide. At last September's White House AI Education Taskforce meeting, Google CEO Sundar Pichai briefed First Lady Melania Trump on the tech giant's efforts to get Gemini for Education in 'every high school in America', which he noted "includes $3 million to Code.org [now CodeAI] to transform its [K-12] curriculum and integrate new AI features." And in December, VP and Global Head of Google.org Maggie Johnson — who joined Code.org's Board together with Microsoft President Brad Smith back in 2013 as founding members — kicked off the 'Hour of AI' by announcing "over $5 million in new Google.org funding to bolster computer science teaching in the age of AI."

So, who do you think will win the AI custody battle over the nation's K-12 schoolchildren and their teachers? Is Google vs. OpenAI/Microsoft shaping up to be 2026's Kramer vs. Kramer?

Submission + - Google Turns On Gemini AI for K-12 Students Using Its Classroom App

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The NY Times reports: "Google turned on its Gemini chatbot this week for some elementary through high school students using its popular Classroom app for schools, escalating a race among U.S. tech giants to train students on their artificial intelligence tools. Google Classroom, a learning management system for posting assignments and turning in schoolwork, is used by more than 150 million students and teachers worldwide. Until this week, Google automatically enabled Gemini in Classroom only for students 18 or older. Now, a new Gemini tab within Classroom will allow students of all ages to seek A.I. help on math problems and writing assignments. They can also generate course aids like study guides, quizzes and flashcards, as well as produce images."

"Google’s drive to increase student access to its A.I. tools ramps up a longstanding battle among tech giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft to capture classrooms and secure students as long-term customers. Newcomers to the school tech market, like the A.I. start-ups Anthropic and OpenAI, have recently started programs for K-12 teachers. But so far OpenAI and Anthropic have not made their ChatGPT and Claude chatbots available for student use in U.S. public schools. The industry is pushing for classroom chatbots as parents’ groups in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere are pressing schools to temporarily halt rollouts of student A.I. products. These groups say A.I. chatbots can pose risks to children’s safety, privacy and critical thinking. Some warn that using chatbots to generate study aids like flashcards and text summaries may hinder students’ learning."

At last September's White House AI Education Taskforce meeting, Google CEO Sundar Pichai briefed First Lady Melania Trump on the tech giant's efforts to get Gemini for Education in 'every high school in America', which he noted "includes $3 million to [tech-backed nonprofit] code.org to transform its [K-12] curriculum and integrate new AI features." The NY Times article coincidentally appeared as Code.org, which the Chronicle of Philanthropy recently noted has since rebranded itself as CodeAI in a pivot that aligns itself well with its bet-the-bank-on-AI tech donors, was wrapping up "our first-ever AI Education Hackathon" (thanking co-founding sponsors Google, Microsoft, and Amazon on LinkedIn for making it possible), "bringing engineers and builders with a background in AI and education to Boston for ... two days of building in the open toward a shared goal: preparing every student for a world reshaped by AI."

Comment Re:If the platform and apps are there... very litt (Score 1) 66

Do you use a single standard keyboard for the platforms that frees you from worrying about some of the different choices of keys and key mappings by the vendors? Or are you just really adept at context switching between the different muscle memory and OS/UI/app conventions for each of the platforms? I find using a Windows Citrix session from a MacBook using the same keyboard can be pretty taxing with all the different meanings depending on context!

Submission + - Costs of Switching Schoolchildren Between Windows, Chrome, Mac?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").

So, how much additional time is allocated for these kinds of switches? Ironically, it's often zero or even less than zero. Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it's 'more productive', a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their 'gut' feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their own 'light-user experience' for universal experience and believe all platforms are fungible. And while it's one thing for a business to delay their delivery dates and increase costs of by introducing a switch in computing environments that's of unquantified and possibly dubious value, how about when a switch in computing environments is made that affects schoolchildren's ability to learn for a period of time?

While a MacBook Neo is indeed cute, what might be the possible consequences of a decision to move 25k students off Windows and onto MacBook Neo on students' learning? Or even the impact on a single kid who moves from a MacBook school to a Windows or Chrome school (or whose home computing environment isn't aligned with their school'). Or students whose teachers decide learning in their classrooms should now additionally require an understanding of the Minecraft computing platform/UI (used in "more than 40,000 school systems"). Learning Management Systems (LMS) and now various AI Edtech tools used by schoolkids are also subject to change. Finally, even if students and schools eventually benefit from a new platform, one wonders how much learning is lost during the switch and what the financial and educational ROI and payback period look like.

Submission + - Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project to Wall Street and His 20M Followers

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: During Microsoft's 2026Q4 earnings call, CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ('Magnificent 7' companies) massive capital expenditures on AI (to which Nadella later added a 'not financial advice' disclaimer)

"It would be fun for you, Adam. I think one of your colleagues put out an ROIC [Return on Invested Capital] document. I took that document to Copilot, which is a PDF, and I said, 'Build me a new Power BI dashboard, essentially.' But here is the thing. It built a rich semantic model that went into my Fabric with OneLake that brought all the data in from the external sources. In fact, it was current with all the SEC filings of all the MAG7. And then on top of that, the repo itself is in GitHub, but the artifact is sitting in my Copilot as a site. That, to me, is a classic example of an enterprise-wide workflow. I, as a knowledge worker, could go create a dashboard. The data engineer can go to Fabric and find the artifact. The professional developer can go to the repo and find it in GitHub. And by the way, it’s all registered with Agent 365. That’s a little bit of what Amy is describing as the coming together of a new way to work, even while at the same time, bringing IT, security and manageability of it."

After Nadella's show-and-tell drew an underwhelming response during the call ("That’s very helpful. Thank you." said the Morgan Stanley analyst whose team's work Nadella scraped with AI), Nadella turned to social media with posts on LinkedIn (12M followers) and Twitter/X (8M followers) to make the case for why his DIY project was such a brilliant demonstration of how AI enables governance, controls, security, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, data analysis/modeling, visualization, usability, and value.

"Some more detail on the ROIC Intelligence App I built yesterday and mentioned on today's earnings call," Nadella wrote on LinkedIn. "I took the PDF that Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley put together for Hyperscale ROIC this week and used Copilot code (coming in our new superapp) with a single prompt + skill (/drill-me) to create the plan, then used autopilot in auto to create the full app (with history, lookups, scenarios, what-ifs, etc). And /rubber-duck to test. And the best part is that all the artifacts are in my enterprise environment. My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric. And everything is under Agent 365 IT/Sec/FinOps control! So this is not about Tokenmaxxing or vibe coding. Every step of the way the rails are engineered to create value, making everything a long-term reusable asset, with governance/security, and cost controls. This is the full system to drive business value. Disclosures: This is all pulled from public sources, and for illustrative purposes only...not financial advice! :) Here is the app and architecture..."

Not unexpectedly, the accompanying screenshot of a splash page for the BI app and a buzzword-laden complicated architecture diagram drew universal praise from LinkedIn fans, but also a few barbs from less-than-impressed commenters on Nadella's Twitter/X post, some of whom suggested Nadella's project might even represent a jump-the-shark moment for AI mania. "That he doesnt see whats wrong with saying 'My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric' is exactly why MS is failing at AI'," replied @PassingPixels on X/Twitter. "Dude is having to run 5 different systems to emulate babies first vibe code." @zigmund_ignatov added, "Why do we call glorified slide show an app?" @Mathupiriyan quipped, "Looks like Copilot just turned a PDF into a profit crystal ball." Unimpressed, @Markusndnb remarked, "So you created a web page using tons of proprietary MS tools." And @FishyAccounting called on Nadella to show-his-work, saying "Post the prompt or it didn’t happen." (btw, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly declined to provide the prompt for his own self-described amazing AI DIY reporting project that he touted at Microsoft's Shareholder Meeting last December).

So, does Nadella's self-promoted AI reworking of someone else's PDF research report strike you as an amazing example of everything that's good about AI, or does it conjure up memories of The Emperor's New Clothes?

Submission + - How Many AI Tech Companies Does it Take to Write a Threatening Letter? Fifty! 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "You’ve got a nice little healthy AI economy here. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it." That's the gist of Open Weights and American AI Leadership, a don't-mess-with-AI-if-you-know-what's-good-for-you letter crafted and distributed on Friday by fifty leading AI tech organizations and circulated on social media by their CEOs.

"Open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem," argued Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on X/Twitter and LinkedIn. "Together with others across our industry, we are outlining a path for open-weight models to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity, while protecting national security." Echoing Nadella's messaging, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang tweeted: "For my first post, I’m sharing a letter signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." Retweeting Nadella's message, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg added: "Open source is a positive and important force for both empowering people and preventing centralization. Proud to support this."

The 50 signatories to the letter — hey, so much for AI enabling everyone to be a writer! — were: AI21, AMD, American Innovators Network, AMP, Andreessen Horowitz, Arcee AI, Arena, Baseten, Black Forest Labs, Block, Box, Cisco, Cloudflare, Cohere, CrowdStrike, Dell Technologies, DoorDash, Emergence Capital, Fireworks AI, Genspark, GitHub, Google, Hugging Face, IBM, Inferact, Interconnects AI, The Linux Foundation, Mariana Minerals, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Morph, Mozilla, Nebius, Nous Research, NVIDIA, Ollama, OpenAI, OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Periodic Labs, Perplexity, Prime Intellect, Reflection, Replit, ServiceNow, Telnyx, Trajectory, Y Combinator (conspicuous by their absence are Anthropic and Amazon/AWS).

Interestingly, when asked to compare the 7/24 letter signed by the 50 AI companies to a 7/3 FORTUNE op-ed penned by David Siegel, ChatGPT had this to say: "They are remarkably similar in their core narrative, to the point that they appear to be drawing from the same intellectual and policy framework. The July 24 open-weight letter can almost be read as a shorter, more policy-oriented version of the argument David Siegel made three weeks earlier. [...] Siegel is actually more demanding than the July 24 coalition. A major section of his essay argues that many so-called 'open' AI models are not really open because they release only model weights while withholding training data and training code. He wants visibility into how systems were built, not merely the ability to run them. By contrast, the Microsoft-led letter specifically defends open-weight models, which are a narrower concept. Open-weight models allow access to model parameters but typically do not release training datasets or complete training pipelines. In that sense, Siegel's position is arguably more radical and more aligned with traditional free-software principles than the coalition's."

Submission + - WSJ: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Companies across the country are coming around to a radical idea with the potential to upend the industry powering the global economy," reports the WSJ. "They don’t have to blow their budgets on AI. Fed up with ballooning costs, companies big and small are starting to use lower-priced models, including some built in China. In many cases, they are adding the new, cheaper models alongside OpenAI and Anthropic’s products, shopping a la carte for their artificial intelligence."

"Being economical—or tokenomical—is a dramatic reversal in mindset. Just a few months ago, it was a badge of honor to be using AI so much that you spent a lot on tokens. Companies rewarded employees for tokenmaxxing, flashing leaderboards that showed who had spent the most. Now they are thrift-maxxing."

"Strategies to lower AI costs include limiting access to top models for new hires and using the most advanced AI systems to plan how tasks will be completed before turning to cheaper models for the execution, Cursor’s [Mike] Saeks says. Cursor recently ran an experiment to evaluate the cost of building a web browser from scratch. Doing the entire task on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 cost a little more than $10,000. Using Cursor’s Composer coding model in combination with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, cost $1,339."

Correction: The costs cited by the WSJ were evidently to recreate SQLite functionality, not to build a web browser from scratch, an earlier experiment that Cursor explained involved running coding agents autonomously for weeks and burning trillions of tokens to build software that Cursor's CEO boasted "*kind of* works", prompting The Register to credit Cursor for "proving AI can write shoddy code at scale".

Submission + - You gotta fight / For your right / To AI

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Recalling his initial resistance to free and open software, billionaire computer scientist David Siegel argues vigorously in FORTUNE that the stakes are too high to let AI become increasingly closed. "In the 1980s, I had the chance to spend several years arguing about free and open software, what we now call open source, with the founder of the movement, Richard Stallman. My office at the MIT AI Lab was next door to his. Stallman’s position was that the source code to software should be free for everyone to use, learn from, and improve. Software encapsulates knowledge, he argued, and no one should lock something so fundamental away. To hide software inside a company was to hide knowledge itself. At first I took the conventional view of the time. Software would only advance, I insisted, if companies kept proprietary control over their code. We agreed on the bigger picture—that computers would become a central accelerator of human progress—but disagreed sharply on how to get there. What I missed was that software was not just a commercial asset; it was a body of knowledge, and bodies of knowledge grow stronger when they are shared. After about two years of on-and-off debate, Stallman convinced me I was wrong."

"Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger," advises Siegel. "AI is software, and AI is increasingly closed. The frontier models—the most advanced, cutting-edge AI systems— are closed completely and the trend is accelerating. Viable open alternatives are few and far between."

So, what to do? "The path forward is not complicated," Siegel explains, "though it isn’t free. Yes, frontier models keep getting bigger and more expensive — that arms race may well stay with the giants. But open source AI does not have to match their scale to be useful. Much of what the world needs probably does not require the absolute frontier. And where keeping a credible open option does demand serious compute, that is precisely the kind of public good worth paying for. What’s missing is not a path but will. The government, the private sector, and nonprofits should invest heavily in free and open source AI —the way they once invested in open software: public compute grants for open research, corporate and philanthropic support for universities and nonprofits doing the work, and a simple rule that AI built with public money is open by default. We have run this experiment before. We know how it turns out. Let’s not unlearn it."

Submission + - Satya O'Nadella? Microsoft Defends its $47B Irish Pot of Gold and Low Tax Rates

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The NY Times reports on a new required EU country-by-country compliance report released by Microsoft this week, which provided a rare look into how tech giants shift profits out of the countries where they have many employees and significant sales and into low-tax havens that help them cut their tax bills by billions of dollars. Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones.

Among the sometimes absurd results, Microsoft said it had generated almost 40% of its pretax income in tax-friendly Ireland, where it employed about 3% of its global work force. In higher-tax Germany, the largest economy in Europe, Microsoft earned barely half of 1% of its global profits, it said. Excluding Ireland, the company said, it generated less than 2% of its worldwide pretax earnings in Europe. For its 2025 fiscal year, Microsoft reported profit margins of 24% in Ireland, where it paid taxes at a rate of just over 14%, and $47+ billion in pretax profit on revenues of $196 billion (the entire population of Ireland is about 7 million). Microsoft employs roughly 6,600 in Ireland. In Luxembourg, Microsoft claimed profit margins of 142% and a tax rate of just 3%. The company said it had $283 million in pretax income and only 34 employees in the tiny country. But in several of Microsoft’s biggest markets — where tax rates exceed 25% — it reported tiny profit margins. In Germany, France and Italy, the company claimed single-digit profit margins, sometimes barely 5%.

The report still gave only a partial picture, because it lumped in the U.S. with other countries. Microsoft said in a blog post accompanying the report that it followed all the laws in every jurisdiction where it operated, and that the reporting standards created some inconsistencies among countries. “Microsoft is committed to a tax structure that reflects where our people work, where we invest, and where functions, assets, and risks occur,” wrote Jeff Bullwinkel, Microsoft’s top lawyer in Europe. Bullwinkel said Microsoft’s capital expenditures in data centers, its corporate work forces and its work through local partners were also key investments in local economies. “Tax is one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one,” he wrote. The IRS is challenging profit-shifting transactions used by Microsoft, and is seeking back taxes of nearly $29 billion. The company has said it disagrees with the IRS and said in a securities filing that it “will vigorously contest” the proposed tax bills.

Hey, say what you will about former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but at least he didn't try to blow smoke up the public's butt about why Ireland held such a special place in Microsoft's heart. "Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," Ballmer told journalists in 2005 while in Dublin on a tour of the company’s Irish operations. "It would be disingenuous to say otherwise."

Submission + - AP CS Exam Participation Fell in 2026 as AP Statistics Continued to Grow

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a series of Twitter/X posts, the College Board provided a high-level look at this year's AP exam participation and test scores by the nation's high school students. Both AP CS courses saw declines this year in participation to below their 2023 levels, with the Java-based AP Computer Science A exam taken by ~81,500 students in 2026 (with a 66% pass rate) — down from a peak of 98,136 in 2024 — and the 'more approachable', language-agnostic AP Computer Science Principles exam taken by 163,000 students (with a 63% pass rate) — down from a peak of 175,261 in 2024. Meanwhile, the 2026 AP Statistics exam saw an increase in test takers to a record 281,000 students (with a 62% pass rate), up from 266,791 in 2025 and 242,929 in 2023.

One wonders if some of the AP CS participation decline may represent a reaction to AI-driven job displacement fears and visible tech-sector layoffs, factors which have been blamed for depressed college-level CS enrollment. The College Board is already reacting to how AI is changing the K-12 CS narrative, announcing an AI-focused AP CS Principles Course 'modernization' effort in June, just days after tech-backed nonprofit Code.org — a College Board-endorsed AP CSP curriculum provider that bills itself as "the leading provider of K-12 AI and CS education curriculum across the globe" — announced it was rebranding itself as CodeAI, a pivot hailed by The College Board. It's probably worth mentioning that AP exam participation can be lower than AP course enrollment, since students can and do opt out of testing (e.g., students unable to pay for exams or who don't want to pay for exams they think they will fail); The College Board does not publish data on AP course-to-exam gaps.

Interestingly, the College Board identified certain exam questions that AP CS A students struggled to use Java to answer, ironically some of which a non-CS student equipped with Excel could likely easily solve. One of the Free-Response Questions (FRQ) the College Board noted students wrestled with in particular was the following: "Given a username that may contain hyphens [...] return a version with each hyphen and the character immediately preceding it removed, so that 'Amy-Marie-Lin' becomes 'AmMariLin'." Students receiving AP CS A exam scores of 1, the College Board explained, were 'typically unable' to earn any points for their attempts to solve this problem with Java (sample FRQ solutions). Meanwhile, a student who skipped AP CS A could open Excel and use a simple formula — REGEXREPLACE(A1,".-","") — to solve the problem that vexed their Java coding peers after a year-long college level CS course. Perhaps this helps explain why the UK is moving back towards a model that promotes digital literacy for all students and away from the narrow 'rigorous' CS path that the tech giants convinced the UK to adopt more than a decade ago.

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