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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig
@nic221.bsky.social
4.9K followers 400 following 3.8K posts
E-learning dev & AI educator at U of Arizona Libraries. Former head of UX at MIT Libraries. Winner of MIT Excellence Award. nicolehennig.com. Digital nomad from 2013-17, locationflexiblelife.com.
- vegetarian
- car-free
- universal basic income: yes
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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · Nov 13
Generative AI News https://nicolehennig.com/gen-ai-news/ (my free monthly newsletter) #AI #Substack #newsletters
10 Tips for Keeping Up with Generative AI
nic221.bsky.social
Google prepares Gemini Live with screen sharing for web www.testingcatalog.com/google-prepare… #AI #Gemini
Text Shot: Google is preparing to launch Gemini Live support on the desktop web version of Gemini. Until now, Gemini Live has only been accessible on mobile, where users can engage in voice conversations and share either their screen or camera, allowing Gemini to process audio and video in real time.
December 7, 2025 at 4:55 PM
nic221.bsky.social
NotebookLM to get new model selector with Gemini 3 Pro www.testingcatalog.com/notebooklm-to-… #AI #NotebookLM
Text Shot: NotebookLM is set to receive a model selector feature in chat, allowing users to switch between different AI models for the first time. Previously, NotebookLM chat only ran on the default Gemini 2.5 Pro, but the upcoming selector will introduce both a “Fast” and a “Thinking” option. The addition of Gemini 3 Pro marks a substantial update for more advanced reasoning tasks, positioning NotebookLM closer to other Google tools that already offer multi-model support. This move is likely aimed at attracting power users and professionals who need more control over response speed and output quality.
December 7, 2025 at 4:53 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Google plans to integrate Opal Agent builder into Gemini www.testingcatalog.com/google-plans-t… #AI #Google #Opal
Text Shot: If Opal’s functionality becomes a native part of Gemini, users could gain direct access to a much broader set of automation tools without switching platforms, streamlining their productivity. However, it’s still possible the banner serves as an advertisement, redirecting users to Opal’s separate environment, given that Opal is already a fully-featured product. For now, the integration status is unclear.
December 7, 2025 at 4:52 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Exclusive: Google set to launch Gemini Nano Banana 2 Flash www.testingcatalog.com/exclusive-goog… #AI #Google #NanoBanana #images
Exclusive: Google set to launch Gemini Nano Banana 2 Flash
Google is preparing to launch Nano Banana 2 Flash within Gemini, offering similar performance to the Pro model at lower costs for broader accessibility.
www.testingcatalog.com
December 7, 2025 at 4:50 PM
nic221.bsky.social
What's new? Issue #223 🗞️ www.testingcatalog.com/email/a02ccacd… #AI #ComingSoon
Text Shot: A more notable release was Deep Think 3, now available for ultra-subscribers. This model topped the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, marking a significant upgrade. Over the weekend, a completely new company, Poetiq, emerged. They introduced a system that can reportedly self-learn from its previous answers. Poetiq’s architecture combines Gemini 3 and GPT-5.1, achieving a 54% score on ARC-AGI-2 at half the usual cost. This is a major step forward. It shows that mixed-model systems can outperform single-model approaches thanks to their broader data variety. This could open new opportunities for labs that don’t build foundational models themselves, but instead build advanced systems on top of existing models.
December 7, 2025 at 4:48 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Google Announces Latest Android Accessibility Enhancements in new blog post — Curb Cuts www.curbcuts.co/blog/2025-12-4… #AI #accessibility #Android
Text Shot: Google’s post walks through improvements to Expressive Captions, which can now “detect and display the emotional tone of speech,” which notably includes videos uploaded to YouTube after October. There’s also better voice dictation for the TalkBack screen readers, as well as more accessible pairing and setup of hearing aids, and a much more robust, Gemini-powered Guided Frame in the Pixel camera app.
December 7, 2025 at 4:43 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Google Officially Testing Blending AI Mode Into AI Overviews www.seroundtable.com/google-blendin… #AI #Google #AIMode
Text Shot: So the AI Overview loads but then you will be able to do a follow up question that, if triggered, will take you to AI Mode. I am not sure why Google didn't announce it two months ago but now Robby Stein wrote, "Today we’re starting to test a new way to seamlessly go deeper in AI Mode directly from the Search results page on mobile, globally." He then goes on about Google's vision saying, "This brings us closer to our vision for Search: just ask whatever’s on your mind – no matter how long or complex – and find exactly what you need. You shouldn’t have to think about where or how to ask your question." I mean, that sounds to me like Google wants AI Mode to be the default but Google told us no, it does not... Anyway, Stein goes on to write, "This means you’ll continue to get an AI Overview as a helpful starting point, and now you can also ask conversational follow-up questions in AI Mode – right from where you are. It’s one seamless experience: a quick snapshot when you…
December 7, 2025 at 3:59 PM
nic221.bsky.social
What if nomads were never the outliers? globalnatives.substack.com/p/nomad-work-p… (yes. I enjoyed my nomad years: 2013-2018). #DigitalNomads #RemoteWork #flexibility
Nomads looked at this setup and realised the problem wasn't discipline; it was design. If balance was impossible inside the architecture, then the architecture had to change. Rather than treating work as the fixed centre of a life, they treated it as one component among many and rearranged the rest accordingly. They worked in sprints, reclaimed weekday mornings, took long walks between calls, or used downtime to build skills that fed back into their professional world. Days became flexible units, not fixed boxes on a calendar. Their argument wasn't against work; it was against the assumption that work should dictate the shape of everything else. Once work became portable, the rest of life could be rearranged around it.
December 7, 2025 at 2:49 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Orinav: AI-Powered Outdoor Navigation for Blind & Low Vision www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7C9... (5-minute demo from Inclusive Innovations 2025 in Rotterdam—showcasing AI-powered outdoor navigation designed for blind and low-vision users) #AI #accessibility
Orinav: AI-Powered Outdoor Navigation for Blind & Low Vision – Inclusive Innovations 2025
YouTube video by Envision
www.youtube.com
December 6, 2025 at 6:48 PM
nic221.bsky.social
We're not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It's past time to start. - Mike Caulfield mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/its-time-to-… #AI #FactChecking
But I remain convinced that there is no future of verification and contextualization that doesn't involve both better understanding of LLMs and more efficacious use of them. The three simple suggestions here — don't prematurely dismiss errors as hallucinations, do use LLMs to surface the "unknown unknowns" , and do pay for the better models — are all pleas to engage more fully with this tech, and develop better (and more up-to-date) understandings of what they do well and what they do poorly, going beyond whether they fail or succeed to how they fail and how they succeed. This is also what we need to do in education. If we can start from there I'm confident our effort and engagement will be well-rewarded.
December 6, 2025 at 5:38 AM
nic221.bsky.social
Solar’s growth in US almost enough to offset rising energy use arstechnica.com/science/2025/1… #SolarEnergy #growth
Text Shot: Six months have made a big difference. Total electricity demand is rising, but at a far more moderate 2.3 percent, and, depending on how the weather drives heating demand, that number could be even lower by the end of the year. The growth of solar, in contrast, has only tailed off slightly—it’s still up by 36 percent year over year. As such, solar growth was enough to offset over 80 percent of the increased demand. (Though, as we’ll discuss below, solar’s use is probably directly undercutting natural gas.) We’re nearly at the point where solar is growing fast enough to completely offset a notable growth in demand.
December 5, 2025 at 3:06 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Clean electrification is inevitable - Volts podcast www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electr… (excellent podcast episode) #energy #electrification #economics #geopolitics
Energy strategist Kingsmill Bond joins me to explain why the transition to "electrotech" is unstoppable, whether or not politicians care about climate change. It's not the reduced emissions, it's physics (electrotech is more efficient) and economics (it's cheaper). Despite political headwinds in the US, China and emerging economies are racing ahead with electrification and sector after sector is seeing peak fossil fuel consumption. There's no stopping it: electrons will triumph over molecules.
December 5, 2025 at 7:07 AM
nic221.bsky.social
The grid storage industry set a wild goal for 2025 — and then crushed it. www.canarymedia.com/articles/energ… #batteries #energy #success
Text Shot: The U.S. crossed the threshold of 35 gigawatts of battery installations this July and then passed 40 gigawatts in the third quarter, according to data from the American Clean Power Association. The group of vendors, developers, and installers who just eight years ago stood at the margins of the power industry is now second only to solar developers in gigawatts built per year. Storage capacity outnumbers gas power in the queues for future grid additions by a factor of 6.5, according to data compiled by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Storage has become the dominant form of new power addition,” Kathpal said. ​“I think it’s fair to say that batteries are how America does capacity.” Getting from basically no grid batteries to 35 gigawatts
December 5, 2025 at 3:09 AM
nic221.bsky.social
Green Economy Surpasses $5 Trillion: New Report Highlights Path to $7 Trillion by 2030 www.bcg.com/press/2decembe… #GreenEconomy #investments
Text Shot: Despite macroeconomic uncertainties, regulatory bottlenecks, and diverging public sentiment, the green economy continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience and dynamism. The report finds that green investment has surged to record levels, outpacing every major sector except technology, and offering robust growth for companies making bold moves. With momentum across clean energy, sustainable transport, climate-resilient infrastructure, and circularity, green growth is becoming a critical engine of long-term competitiveness.
December 5, 2025 at 2:45 AM
nic221.bsky.social
Sustainability the second-fastest growing sector globally www.semafor.com/article/12/04/… #sustainability #renewables #growth #AI (compares it to AI)
Text Shot: Steeply falling costs for renewables, electric mobility, and other key technologies have made sustainability-related investments increasingly insulated from shifting political winds; more than half of global emissions can now be addressed using technologies that are already cost-competitive, the study found. And as climate impacts worsen, the potential costs companies face through inaction are mounting. Whereas in the past many CEOs of large companies argued that sustainability-related investments were mainly a PR exercise, there’s a rapidly growing sense that “this is not about sacrificing the business, it’s about taking advantage of a growing part of the world economy,” Rich Lesser, BCG’s global chairman, told Semafor. The sustainability economy can be compared to AI, Lesser said: People might quibble about the pace at which it will progress, but “there’s no sense this trend will reverse. This is a long-term trend that is reasonable to bet on and probably risky to bet…
December 5, 2025 at 2:43 AM
nic221.bsky.social
👀 Did OpenAI’s $100 billion path just get narrower? www.exponentialview.co/p/openais-narr… #AI #OpenAI #competition
👀 Did OpenAI’s $100 billion path just get narrower?
Sam Altman’s internal pivot tells us something important about the AI market right now
www.exponentialview.co
December 5, 2025 at 2:39 AM
nic221.bsky.social
Google and Anthropic approach LLMs differently www.understandingai.org/p/google-and-a… #AI #Google #Anthropic
The case for optimism about Anthropic is that LLMs are not going to become commodities any time soon - that people will pay a premium for models with desirable characteristics. And that perhaps the way to instill these characteristics is to think about the problem more like a philosopher than an engineer. If Google is run by engineers and Anthropic is run by philosophers, OpenAI seems to be run by product managers. OpenAI is the best in the world at producing compelling product demos - think, for example, about last year's launch of GPT-4o with its live voice capabilities or this year's release of the Sora app. But these demo-friendly features don't always seem to have staying power. And Sam Altman seems increasingly concerned that OpenAI could get eclipsed by either Google's engineering-centric approach or Anthropic's relentless focus on model quality.
December 5, 2025 at 2:31 AM
nic221.bsky.social
How students are talking about AI- OpenAI edunewsletter.openai.com/p/how-students… #AI #ChatGPT #students
Students found these group discussions so valuable that they raised their hands to bring the Lab experience to their own campuses. We compiled the top 100 chats from the ChatGPT Lab into a resource they could use to help start the conversation.
December 5, 2025 at 2:22 AM
Reposted by Nicole Hennig
volts.wtf
This piece from @tnorris.bsky.social is about the only sensible thing NYT has published on the subject of electricity prices.
Opinion | A Simple Fix to America’s Soaring Electricity Prices
www.nytimes.com
December 3, 2025 at 6:58 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Beyond Infographics: How to Use Nano Banana to *Actually* Support Learning drphilippahardman.substack.com/p/beyond-infog… (good ideas) #AI #infographics #NanoBanana #education
Beyond Infographics: How to Use Nano Banana to *Actually* Support Learning
Six evidence-based use cases to try in Google's latest image-generating AI tool
drphilippahardman.substack.com
December 4, 2025 at 3:23 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Trump’s AI Push May Hinge on Renewable Energy www.bloomberg.com/news/newslette… #AI #renewables #DataCenters
Text Shot: Renewable energy so far remains the fastest and cheapest option to add power to the grid. Nearly 80% of the planned power plant capacity in the pipeline is tied to renewable sources, according to filings with federal regulators and grid operators compiled by Cleanview.co, an energy data company. The number of applications for natural gas and nuclear facilities, the options President Donald Trump is embracing to power the AI surge, is much smaller, making up about 14% of planned capacity. A horizontal bar chart compares cumulative added electricity capacity in the U.S. from 2025 to 2034. Solar dominates each year with the largest growth, followed by rising storage and wind, while new natural-gas capacity remains comparatively small.
December 4, 2025 at 3:06 PM
nic221.bsky.social
If the Oscars had an AI category today, who would win? wonderstudios.substack.com/p/if-the-oscar… #AI #filmmaking #video
If the Oscars had an AI category today, who would win?
Profiling Some of the Rising Stars Defining the Space
wonderstudios.substack.com
December 4, 2025 at 2:59 AM
nic221.bsky.social
Andrew Ng on negative opinions of people in the U.S. about AI info.deeplearning.ai/metas-open-3d-… #AI #fear #hype #opinions
Text Shot: According to Edelman’s survey, in the U.S., 49% of people reject the growing use of AI, and 17% embrace it. In China, 10% reject it and 54% embrace it. Pew’s data also shows many other nations much more enthusiastic than the U.S. about AI adoption.  Positive sentiment toward AI is a huge national advantage. On the other hand, widespread distrust of AI means: Individuals will be slow to adopt it. For example, Edelman’s data shows that, in the U.S., those who rarely use AI cite Trust (70%) more than lack of Motivation and Access (55%) or Intimidation by the technology (12%) as an issue.  Valuable projects that need societal support will be stymied. For example, local protests in Indiana brought down Google’s plan to build a data center there. Hampering construction of data centers will hurt AI’s growth. Communities do have concerns about data centers beyond the general dislike of AI; I will address this in a later letter. Populist anger against AI raises the risk that laws…
December 3, 2025 at 11:42 PM
nic221.bsky.social
The Digital Detective Club: Teaching AI Literacy to Young Students nickpotkalitsky.substack.com/p/the-digital-… #AI #children #education
This isn't about demonizing AI. It's about building discernment. Children who complete this curriculum won't fear AI-generated text, but they won't blindly trust it either. They'll develop what we might call "textual situational awareness": the ability to recognize what they're reading, where it comes from, and how much weight to give it.
December 3, 2025 at 3:42 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Benedict’s Newsletter — Benedict Evans www.ben-evans.com/newsletter (issue 620 on why the U.S. Census business survey on AI use does not show meaningful data) #AI #surveys
Benedict Evans - Benedict's Newsletter: No. 620 Yesterday at 8:00 AM Conversely, the US Census does a bi-weekly business survey (BTOS), and since 2023 it's asked about Al use. Since this is national, authoritative, and frequent, it gets reported a lot, and in the last couple of periods, it's flat-lined. However, the methodology means this data has zero value. The definition of 'Al' in the question is "Examples of AI: machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, voice recognition, etc." which does not distinguish generative AI from systems built 10 or even 20 years ago, and could cover almost anything, while the frequency is also only 'did you use it in producing goods or services?'. ' The definition is so broad and open-ended that it will massively overcount, while limiting to 'producing goods and services' means use for marketing or fraud prevention would be excluded, undercounting on the other side. This is not helpful. LINK
December 3, 2025 at 3:15 PM