Anthropic wins ruling on AI training in copyright lawsuit but must face trial on pirated books
A very important copyright legal precedent. TL;DR: Training models on legally acquired copyrighted materials is fair use. The model’s creators need to make sure that its output is “quintessentially transformative”.
The illegal acquisition of training data is punishable as before.
Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nevertheless. The augmentation-not-automation effect of AI is despite the fact that AFAICT there is no identified “task” at which human radiologists beat AI. So maybe the “jobs are bundles of tasks” model in labor economics is incomplete. […]
Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about other people’s jobs that we don’t understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don’t appreciate all the nuances.
Nevertheless, my take on this is that while jobs won’t be fully automated, one specialist would be able to do more work, so it all boils down to the classic supply and demand problem. I believe that in most areas the demand will still outweigh the supply, but not in all of them. See Jevons paradox.
Another MCP server vulnerability, this time from Atlassian. It allows for a prompt injection from external support tickets, giving the attacker the opportunity to exfiltrate data and wreak havoc in the internal system.
Agent mode is now generally available with MCP tools support in Visual Studio
GitHub Copilot rolled out Model Context Protocol support for their Agent mode in general availability. The usual security problems with MCP are compounded by the “Always allow” option for the tools usage.
Update to GitHub Copilot consumptive billing experience
It’s the end of unlimited access to the best model from all leading model providers in GitHub Copilot Chat. Now only GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 are unlimited.
It is another step towards the global reevaluation of pricing strategies for AI-based products. The aggressive promotion phase is gone. AI is becoming another kind of utility, and we may expect similar strategies.
https://eugeneyan.com/writing/writing-faq/
This FAQ about blogging kinda resonates with my motivation
AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder
AI is a double-edged sword in education. It helps students cheat on traditional assignments, but also acts as a powerful new tool that can fully engage them. Education has to change, but I believe it will ultimately be for the better.
Academics are kidding themselves about AI
If you want to critique AI, do it the right way :)
How we built our multi-agent research system
A great new read from Anthropic on how they built their Deep Research tool. A lot of practical advice.